566
PARTISAN REVIEW
Cambridge, his abonive love affairs, his travel in Greece, his work, and
finally to his death in World War
1.
But of course the story, such as it is, does
not absorb Woolf's energies any more than it does ours. The interest of the
novel lies in the way Woolf presents the story ofJacob , in her efforts to find
a form that would adequately express her vision of reality without falling
prey to what she considers the deadness and waste of the realist method.
Although strictly chronological, moving from childhood to death, the
chronology
ofJacob's Room
has nothing to do with the linear chronology,
for example, of
The Old Wives' Tale.
For rather than giving us a story mov–
ing smoothly and continuously through time, Woolf presents us with a
series of discrete moments, one following another, with little concern for the
links between them. The chapters, though proceeding in a chronological
way to record Jacob's development, exist primarily as separate entities, each
focusing on specific events in Jacob's life or in the life of his friends. And
what is true of the succession of the chapters is true also of the organization
within the chapters themselves. Transitions are generally suppressed as the
narrator jumps from character to character and from incident to incident
without hesitation. The basic unit of organization is the isolated moment,
and each chapter consists of a number of these, dealing with Jacob, or his
acquaintances, or even passing strangers who make one brief appearance and
then leave the novel entirely. Time moves fotward in this novel, bur in an
extremely discontinuous, jerky manner.
The jaggedness of the narrative is deliberate, not a thwarted effort to
write a smoothly flowing lyric novel.
It
represents Woolf's first attempt at
creating a form which would in itself reflect the nature of life as she under–
stood it. The form of
Jacob's Room
is clearly designed to parallel the
"form" of living: a fragmented, discontinuous world demands a frag–
mented, discontinuous novel. A world in which people experience time as a
succession of distinct moments strung together must be embodied in a
fictional world similarly constructed. Such a notion of form is, of course,
painfully rudimentary; just how rudimentary can be seen by considering the
kinds of rich, complex forms Woolf goes on to evoke in
The Waves
and
Be–
tween the Acts
to deal with essentially the same kind of world
Jacob 's Room
is treating. Although managing for the most part to avoid the realist dead
end Woolf abhorred
,Jacob 's Room
nevenheless fails to achieve an aestheti–
cally satisfying shape. Discontinuity is not in itself a particularly useful
structural principle for a novel, and the different techniques Woolf borrows
from her experimental short pieces are not able to provide an extended fic–
tion with the compelling form necessary to her successful work. The novel's
episodic organization does not add up to a structure that can find in the dis–
continuities significant patterns that imprint themselves on the imagination.
