Back to Burton.
"There is no playhouse forcing him to embody his meditations" (page 601).
"We are at a remove from the thing being treated. We are enjoying the spectacle of melancholy, not sharing its anguish" (page 601).
No doubt Virginia Woolf has experienced the anguish of melancholy, at least as early as her experience of bereavement after her mother's death when she was 13.
No doubt the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) experienced melancholy and expressed his experiences in certain sonnets that literary critics refer to as the "terrible sonnets" because he shares the anguish of his melancholy in them.
For a perceptive discussion of Hopkins' so-called "terrible sonnets," see Ong's book HOPKINS, THE SELF, AND GOD (1986), the published version of his 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
"It is here than that we develop faculties that the play left dormant. Now the reader is completely in being. He can pause; he can draw back from the page and see behind it a man sitting alone in the centre of the labyrinth of words in a college room thinking of suicide. He can gratify many different moods. He can read directly what is on the page, or, drawing aside, can read what is not written. There is a long drawn continuity in the book that the play has not. It gives a different pace to the mind. We are in a world where nothing is concluded" (page 601).
Even so, this is where the draft of "The Reader" breaks off.
Virginia Woolf's suicide fills me with sadness.
Unlike Virginia Woolf, George Orwell was not a pacifist. He lived long enough to see President Harry Truman drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. George Orwell vividly expressed the enormity of those atomic bombs in his dystopian novel NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1948).
Long before those atomic bombs were dropped, the enormity of World War II registered deeply on Virginia Woolf.
In Virginia Woolf's two feminist manifestoes, A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929) and THREE GUINEAS (1938), she criticizes certain aspects of what Ong describes as male agonistic tendencies.
In his book THE PRESENCE OF THE WORD: SOME PROLEGOMENA FOR CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS HISTORY (1967), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Ong discusses polemic structures (pages 192-286). (The Greek word "polemos" means war, struggle.)
However, he subsequently switched his terminology and expressed a preferences for discussing agonistic structures in his book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. (The Greek word "agon" means contest, struggle.)
No doubt we in Western culture today are still living in the shadow of World War I and World War II and the Cold War.
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