Conclusions About Elsewheres

The modernists in this study often end their narratives with gestures that encourage readers to roam in metaphysical elsewheres that they decline to describe in particulars. Woolf concludes The Years with a scene of quiet epiphany and a heavily loaded final word, “peace,” but what happens to North Pargiter’s violent imaginings of war in the beautiful London sunrise? In Jacob’s Room, what does Betty Flanders finally do with Jacob’s shoes? A novelist has the luxury of leaving such conclusions to their reader. In her commentary on reading practice in essays like “How Should One Read a Book?” (1926), Woolf emphasizes the importance of individual judgments, of “realizing our own impression as acutely as possible,” and states that “new impressions are always completing or cancelling the old.” Her spatial method turns London into a symbolic city where feminist pacifist outrage swirls through like weather but her hatred of propaganda means that her oeuvre as a whole is more like a lumber room of ideas and impressions instead of a perfectly airtight house. Eliot strains to lead readers to correct conclusions about modern life and the role of faith but his discipline as a poet demands avoiding declarative statements that he more freely made in nonfiction essays. His plays depict “mouldering” humans trapped in modern living rooms that are the only available stage world while his saints exit the drudgery of conventional life offstage. Once more we notice a writerly hesitation about conclusions as if too much description might restrict the places where Harry, Celia, or the others take their audiences. Drafty Houses is an extended discussion of the elsewheres that readers such as myself may imagine differently.