8—
"Does Anybody Know Mr. Flanders?":
Bipolar Cognition and Syncretistic Vision in Jacob's Room

Woolf conceived the form of Jacob's Room before the story:

Suppose one thing should open out of another. . . . For I figure the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen. . . . [T]he theme is a blank to me; but I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less by chance 2 weeks ago. I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce & [Dorothy] Richardson to my mind: is one pliant & rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming as in Joyce & Richardson, narrowing & restricting? (Diary 2: 13–14)

The unusual form of this novel both attracts and repels readers. Without an omniscient narrator, cohesive plot, or detailed characterization, the novel tells a story that falls apart. We know more about Jacob's room than we do about Jacob, who remains a ghost whose touch is felt but not identifiable.

Like The Voyage Out, this story is simple: a young person grows up only to die pointlessly. But whereas Rachel "gallantly. . . takes her fences" (Diary 2: 17) against the odds, Jacob is in no way uplifted by a journey that is trivialized by his aimlessness, his wasted destiny—a superficiality emphasized by the narration's disconcertingly comic tone. That tone leads one writer to conclude that Jacob's Room is not a serious bildungsroman at all, but a parody of one.^[1] Jacob is presented to us not for our love or pity but as a figure that escapes us whether alive or dead. The omniscient narrator of The Voyage Out confides to us Rachel's thoughts, but we are given little insight into Jacob's mind. He teasingly escapes even his "biographer," who self-consciously ruminates on her limited knowledge. Jacob's Room questions its own validity as a biography.

Woolf's quest for a fictional order without "scaffolding" was tied to her desire to avoid the "egotistical self," that surface function of an author's psyche that subdues plot and limits psychological insight to the coherent, the demonstrable, the visible—to itself, in other words, the perfectly configured mask of the omniscient author masterfully governing his created

world and falsifying the reader's experience. Ego creates meaning out of its own coherent structure, and so Woolf views its literary productions as merely self-serving illusions, proving not that reality has been grasped but that it can be replaced by an intellectualization. Fiction, she realized, can suffer by attempting to be too complete, by pretending that its wholesale surrender to the ego's need for certainty and artifice has not obscured the truth. Three years before she began Jacob's Room, Woolf considered critically the illusion of omniscience and power that her manic expansions created:

Ever since I was a child. . . I've had the habit of getting full of some biography, & wanting to build up my imaginary figure of the person with every scrap of news I could find about him. During the passion, the name of Cowper or Byron or whoever it might be, seemed to start up in the most unlikely pages. And then, suddenly, the figure becomes distant & merely one of the usual dead. (Diary 1: 180)

It was from this rhythmical movement between believing in imaginary fullness and discovering later only deflated fact that Woolf learned to both appreciate and suspect the biographer's wish to capture a life. Once the elated mood was past, Cowper and Byron receded from her because she had never really touched them.

Jacob's Room moves beyond the carefully balanced paradoxes of The Voyage Out to a more daring experiment in fiction: a self-conscious expression, in both content and form, of the bipolar subject-object relations of reading fiction, transactions which go awry in manic-depressive episodes. Woolf realized that representing Jacob's soul in its totality would dangerously aggrandize the narrator's authority and make the novel as selfserving as Leslie's Mausoleum Book; she was as concerned with protecting her narrator from egotism as she was with depicting Jacob's tragic fall into it. Jacob and his narrator are counterparts, and an analysis of his story and her method will show how Woolf proposed to construct a fictional order that does not restrict a novel's meaning or her readers' ability to create meaning for themselves.

To encourage our self-examination during the reading process, Woolf makes discontinuity more than a fact of life; it is a fact of text. "As frequent as street corners in Holborn," her narrator reminds us, "are these chasms in the continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on" (96). Readers typically cover over gaps in meaning with the more consistent narrative of intention. But what is Woolf's intention here? comic? tragic? critical?

elegiac? Evidence exists to support any one of these unifying themes. Critics readily acknowledge that Jacob's Room's dreamlike, spasmodic incoherenceits rapid transitions, shifting perspective, and disconnectedness—evidences Woolf's modernity, but then they resort to hunting in the few specific details in Jacob's life for clues that would help to plug up the very large holes in the text with what is supposed to be Jacob's "real" story, a more coherent story. Meaning is equated with completeness, and so even a modern novel must be patched up before it can be declared finished. Perhaps by its very nature, literary criticism is conservative: it opposes both the subversive goals and methods of modernism and Woolf's own feeling that even living characters are "splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes" (Diary 2: 314).

If we let the gaps stand, the underemphasis of plot in Jacob's Room shifts the burden of storytelling to the development of imagery, which readily invites readers' subjective responses; indeed, it is in our arbitrary interpretations that Woolf is primarily interested. Perhaps this is why the novel abounds with images of order and chaos, foregrounding the question of order and disorder in fiction and in critical response. Instead of reading symbols for their latent content, I will extend Virginia Blain's insight that "Jacob's Room relies on connecting the apparently disparate by setting up subtle trains of imagery which shift and modulate like a mirror of the narrative voice, creating a chain of perception wherein each new image reflects and contains the preceding one."^[2] I will consider how these images function as representations of the novel's structure, as self-reflexive pieces of metafiction embodying components of manic-depressive object-relations.

Opposed images of order and chaos occur throughout Jacob's Room: uniformity/irregularity, rigidity/fluidity, mechanical lifelessness/primitive energy, destructive rationality/vital emotions, psychic fragmentation/psychic wholeness. Woolf realizes her theory of having one thing opening out to another by clustering these images of structure around characters who read their internal, psychological states in the form of external, spatial relationships—embodiments of the mood-distorted psychological patterns of Woolf's family and her illness. Some characters want to surrender, like Julia Stephen, to life's elemental disorder—a dissolution that comes as relief, a wished-for sinking into oblivion and unconsciousness. For others, following Leslie Stephen, oblivion and uncertainty elicit a defensive fear that throws up barriers between self and object, hoarding and starving the ego imprisoned in a joyless, tidy world. A third type, like Anne Thackeray Ritchie, tolerates the insecurity of chaos, ambiguity, and dissolution

without sinking into isolation and nothingness, but whether a vision of life's meaning that is not merely self-serving is achieved depends on how well manic projection and depressive introjection are integrated.

The novel begins with an immediate opposition between agitated control and a healthy adventurism. Jacob's mother, Betty Flanders, after two years still unable to accept her husband's death, mourns the loss of structure in marriage, which is compared to "a fortress" while "widows stray solitary in the open fields" (8). She feels her vulnerability keenly and reacts with horror to Jacob's sheep's skull, with revulsion toward nature in general:

The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive. . . . Betty, pulling [her children] along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth displayed so luridly. . . . [T]his astonishing agitation and vitality of colour. . . stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger. (11)

Betty projects her own uneasiness onto the landscape and its "lurid" display. She associates safety with order and constructs a "scaffolding" in her personal narrative,^[3] embodied in a bare front room where an oil lamp sprays its harsh artificial light in straight, regular lines across the lawn. Inside she and her servant can conduct the sterilizing duties of householding: "they were conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles" (13). Outside a storm lashes the house with a wild, intense energy that lacks any recognizable plot or order; it is "nothing but muddle and confusion." This strict division, spatialized as inner and outer, between meaning and unmeaning, conformity and innovation, schematizes the agitated depressive's subject-object relations. Jacob's crab circling endlessly within a bucket aptly represents the boy's life under his mother's rule. He was, as Betty complained, "the only one other sons who never obeyed her" (23), but his wild nature, at home on the moors, is bounded by rigid circumstance shaped by her.

Similar oppositions surround the Flanders family. Betty's unofficial, married suitor, Captain Barfoot, is passionless, "military" (26), "rigid" (28), and as "regular as clockwork" (15) in his weekly calls, inspiring a sense of safety ("Here is law. Here is order" [28]). He is the perfect antidote to Betty's worries about her late husband's fate: "Had he, then, been nothing?. . . At first, part of herself; now one of a company, he had merged in the grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand white stones, some slanting, others upright, the decayed wreaths" (16). Betty fears nothingness inside as well as outside; the prospect of loss haunts her like the shadows

of chaos lurking behind images of order. This dichotomy is especially well portrayed by the mechanical regularity of the town of Scarborough itself: the band plays in a Moorish kiosk, a structure mathematically precise in its decorated patterns; the music is categorized by number; the dancers have no real vitality or animality in the repetitive movements of a waltz—"all wore the same blurred, drugged expression." Yet "through the chinks in the planks at their feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably, swaying round the iron pillars of the pier" (18).

Mrs. Flanders admires civilization's order and camouflage. She likes to climb Dock Hill and watch what appears to be, in repeated images of constriction and control, a subdued landscape: trousers are aligned in rows; flower beds are neatly laid out by the Corporation; the golden sea is "hoarded" up by a black pier; men in white coats wheel "triangular hoardings" that advertise a seaman's capture of a "monster shark" (17–18). When her eldest son, John, slaps down grass and dead leaves haphazardly into her lap, Betty "arranged them methodically but absent-mindedly. . . [thinking] the church clock was ten or thirteen minutes fast" (19). The measuring of time is a depressive denial of chaos. Three pages later, Betty reminds herself that Topaz the cat will soon have to be killed because he is so old. As she does so, she also decides not to marry Mr. Floyd (who had given Topaz to Jacob), although his proposal moves her emotionally. A husband, like an unexpected death, would introduce an uncontrollable element into her life, and so Woolf combines thoughts of the red-haired Mr. Floyd and Topaz's castration and extermination in one sentence: " 'Poor old Topaz,"' said Mrs. Flanders, as he stretched himself out in the sun, and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how she did not like red hair in men" (22–23). Mr. Floyd cannot be gelded and must be dismissed from thought.

Mrs. Jarvis, on the other hand, wants to surrender completely. She wanders out on the moors at night, desperately yearning to sink into oblivion. Though a vicar's wife, she would exchange security and salvation for unhappiness, divorce, and loneliness—if only she could be swept away by the "universal that is." But "she does not know what she wants to give, nor who could give it to her" (27). Feeling dead inside, she finds it "difficult" even "to think of herself" as existing (132), just as Julia Duckworth, wanting the one thing life could not give back to her, felt hollow and "deadened," desiring only "to think as little" of herself as possible.^[4] Attributing an exaggerated value to the unobtainable universe and underrating herself, Mrs. Jarvis hopes that losing self-consciousness

will dissolve her troubling doubts and fears. She finds the tombstone epitaphs reassuring, for the dead are one with the moor, which "seems to hoard these little treasures, like a nurse. . . . [The] skeletons are in safe keeping" (134). But this apparent peace is the nullity of despair and depression:

"I never pity the dead. . . ."

"They are at rest," said Mrs. Jarvis. "And we spend our days doing foolish unnecessary things without knowing why." (131)

A true moment of being is impossible for an individual who, feeling foolish and unnecessary, wants to dissolve into nothingness. Mrs. Jarvis cannot imagine what she wants to receive or what she can give because she does not have a sturdy enough sense of self to make such a fusion productive.

Mrs. Flanders and Mrs. Jarvis represent cognitive components of two different types of depression. Mrs. Jarvis, the anhedonic depressive who feels empty, isolated, and impotent, would willingly surrender to dissolution regardless of cost; Mrs. Flanders, the unmergeable, agitated depressive self, defensively protects her isolation against the void outside. Depression, it seems, must have a void, but its location is variable. Neither character recognizes how mood colors perception of self and object, and so they confuse the two realms of subject and object. Betty externalizes the internal, denying fear by projecting it outside onto the landscape, whereas Mrs. Jarvis internalizes the external, desiring to bring the landscape inside to fill her emptiness.

These two women sketch out the parameters of how self relates to its own perceptions of the world within which Jacob moves. When he is out on the moor, his inner and outer worlds coincide without imposition or surrender, much the way Rachel Vinrace feels one with her music. But Jacob's cognitive growth is stunted by attending Cambridge, which, like Betty's house, is represented by harshly mechanical, orderly images the narrator pits against Jacob's Byronic moors:

Insolent he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which the elderly of the race have built upon the skyline showed like brick suburbs, barracks, and places of discipline against a red and yellow flame. . . .

. . . the world of the elderly—thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable—"I am what I am, and intend to be it," for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. (36)

Making a "form in the world" is difficult, because Cambridge will not tolerate disorder. Dogs and women are forbidden in King's College Chapel as disruptive elements, and even light itself seems laundered and pressed:

An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each window, purple and yellow even in its most diffused dust. . . . Neither snow nor greenery, winter nor summer, has power over the old stained glass. As the sides of the lantern protect the flame so that it burns steady even in the wildest night. . . so inside the Chapel all was orderly. . . all very orderly.

In contrast to the "civilizing" of light into geometrical, spectral, and immutable patterns, the narrator pictures a lantern set in Jacob's forest:

If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless inspires them. (32)

The lantern can be viewed in either of two ways: as an example of defensive control, or as an irrational surrender. Perspective is everything; the object remains the same. More important for Jacob, orderliness is associated with prosaic thoughts and egotism, whereas chaos is allied with senseless inspiration and animal vitality. Jacob's destiny is not Rachel's. He is not to die in the dreamy mystery of exotic fever but in a ritualized, mechanized, meaningless sacrifice fostered by his society's need for uniformity of view, which strangles originality, tolerance of ambiguity, and the radial openness of modernism.

Woolf populates Cambridge with pedantic teachers whose qualities are antithetical to Jacob's childhood subject-object fusions. Old Sopwith, methodical in habit and thought, suffering from a "strange paralysis and constriction" of human feeling, analyzes and refines all experience as if he were minting coins, bringing order and "value" to chaos:

Sopwith went on talking. Talking, talking, talking—as if everything could be talked—the soul itself slipped through the lips in thin, silver disks. . . .

. . . Sopwith went on talking, twining stiff fibres of awkward speech—things young men blurted out—plaiting them round his own smooth garland, making the bright side show. (40–41)

The "bright side" filters out whatever inchoate meaning "awkward speech" may contain. Only Sopwith's "own smooth garland" benefits. The coin of experience bears his likeness rudely stamped upon it.

Jacob is most strongly repulsed by George Plumer, whose sixpenny weeklies reflect "the weekly creak and screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry" (35). Jacob's disgust should be reassuring, but the narrator warns us that Jacob has no language of his own to replace the conventional, uniform discourse that cannot see beyond one or two views of a lantern. "What can you do with a brain so competent that nothing resists it—because after all, it attempts only solid things—histories, and triumphant little text books[?]" Woolf asked once in a letter about Oxford dons (Letters 1: 319–20). With only the dead language of immobilization, how can Jacob find a "form in the world" open and fluid enough to allow the creative disorder of cognitive growth? Thus, "the extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog" (35–36).

As a member of the disfranchised sex, Woolf was saved from Jacob's fate by being excluded from indoctrination into the "triumphant" and "competent" tradition of the British male intellectual. Because manicdepressive illness is a radial experience, not a linear one, she was free to find her own discourse, her own form, to resist stasis. This mood disorder does not illuminate or justify a sane point of view. Rather, it periodically deconstructs the validity and self-righteousness of "normal" interpretations. Many manic-depressives want to be well (for the sake of their families, their jobs, peace and quiet), but they cannot deny that, when ill, they perceive in profoundly different and sometimes fascinating ways that are denied them when well. They have experiences they find difficult to express or explain directly, without turning them into refined theories, metaphors, or symptoms. The change from mad discourse to nonmad discourse is not a transformation but a replacement—and a dispiriting one. As a result, manic-depressives often feel as if they lived in a different world from nonmanic-depressives. It is not surprising, then, that Woolf chose to narrate this story as an outsider looking in, attempting neither solidity nor triumph.

Surrounded by the ego-aggrandizing, self-congratulatory, patriarchal machinery of civilized behavior, Jacob's rebellions become more trivial. He loses his natural amiability, becomes "overbearing," and strikes Bonamy in an academic disagreement over abstract terms—good, absolute, justice, and punishment (102). When he accompanies the Durrants to the Opera House, he surrenders himself to a seat:

Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one

has to choose. . . . Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile. (68–69)

Jacob's choice is tragic because it shows how classification and order mold us in seemingly insignificant ways, subtly seducing us to agree that disorder is impractical or undesirable. Theater seating is emblematic of analytical thinking, which structures his object-relations in other areas of his life, even that of perception itself. It is much harder to feel the romance of senseless forest insects butting their heads against a lantern when one accepts the value of protecting a steady flame from the wild night winds.

Jacob cooperates with society's penchant for order and prosaic judgment even as he ridicules it. He must therefore develop a social self that disguises and protects what he considers his essential self. But the mask is composed of the same humbug manners Woolf had diagnosed two years before, in her essay "Cleverness and Youth," as evidence of deep self-destruction: inauthentic emotion, nonbeing, and psychic death (Contemporary Writers 149–51). Thus, although he is not proficient in Greek, Jacob idealizes the ancients, touting the Cambridge line. He abandons a desire to write home of his initial excitement when visiting Greece by cynically rationalizing, "I daresay this sort of thing wears off" (149). He rehearses in his mind Victorian platitudes, such as "the ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime reflections" (136), intending to impress Bonamy with his sensibility to scene. He notes his favorite lines in Donne's poems, piecing together profundities by breaking them out of context, as if one can accumulate experience like coins with a marked value: Donne's words, like Sopwith's, become experience melted down and rudely stamped with an authoritative meaning.

Jacob's constriction of the spirit is manifested by his bifurcated relationships with women. Just as his mother dissociates herself from nature, Jacob dissociates himself from deep sexual involvement with women. Of all women he is said to "honour" most deeply the incorporeal Clara Durrant, whom he prefers to think of sentimentally as a "virgin chained to a rock" (123).^[5] His sexual partners are clearly associated with primitive energy, chaos, mystery, and animality—as if they were sexual moors he intended to visit only on holiday. Florinda is "wild and frail and beautiful" (78), though as "ignorant as an owl" (79); her handwriting is chaotic, as if made by "a butterfly, gnat, or other winged insect, attached to a twig which, clogged with mud . . . rolls across a page" (94). Jacob meets her on Guy

Fawkes Day, in a incoherently structured scene, a dreamscape contrasting starkly with the precise, harshly lit world of Cambridge. Eerily lit by a wood fire, Florinda floats in a "dark vacuum," as if she were a ghost. She hurls a purple globe at a young man's head, but it magically and harmlessly crushes to powder. In the hotel dining room, inanimate objects acquire the power of life: a table "ran, as if on invisible legs [,] " across the room (75). Causal connections have broken down. In Florinda's presence Jacob feels "free, venturesome, [and] high-spirited," and he marvels at her freedom from propriety:"she had called him Jacob without asking his leave" (76). She is "entirely at the beck and call of life," whereas he is preoccupied with classifying her on the grounds of her virginity (79). He has generalized the lesson of seating in the Opera House by acting the prig here; his passion, dictated by abstractions, never precedes his categorizations. Passion has seated itself and died in exile.

Consequently, Jacob's escape to Greece is no real escape. He pursues Mrs. Wentworth, who is also a sham, a caricature of himself. She is the romantic Englishwoman seeking a controlled abandon by seducing young men while maintaining order and security in her life in the form of an imperturbable husband. They put on the appearance of profound emotion while withholding their authentic selves from each other. Soon afterward, Jacob virtually disappears as a figure in the narrative; his death is reported indirectly, at a distance. Invulnerable on the moors, he dies in the First World War, a nightmare of prosaic judgment and mechanized death.

What Jacob's death may mean is connected in the last two chapters to his friend Bonamy, who undergoes a conversion. Like the young Leslie Stephen at Cambridge, Bonamy had been "all for the definite, the concrete, and the rational" (146). Jacob had hated Bonamy's methodical, constrictive turn of mind: "I like words to be hard—such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning" (140). But after Jacob's death, Bonamy experiences a sudden revulsion for order and reason: he "got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisingly geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most senseless way in the world" (152). Bonamy is thrown into chaotic emotionalism (just as Leslie abandoned his faith and took up agnosticism), an overwhelming feeling of being "tossed like a cork on the waves; of having no steady insight into character; of being unsupported by reason, and of drawing no comfort whatever from the works of the classics" (164)—strangely, just the reaction most readers feel reading this book.

Here is Woolf's repudiation of the war, framed not only as a political statement but in terms of subject-object relations. War is evil because it unleashes onto a real landscape what should be kept in check in the mind: the self-destructive tendency of Logos to dissect, regiment, and rationalize until feeling is dead, fossilized and meaningless. The falsifying fiction of a "just war" imposes the depressive's delusion that hell is inescapable, perhaps even desirable, that the cognitive rules one must live by require a hell. War is a mental object as well as a physical one, and Bonamy's former objectivism is as much a violation, an act of war, as is Jacob's death. Both young men are casualties of the lopsided object-relations that make possible civilization's blunders and mass deceptions. Jacob's Room is not merely Woolf's paean to her dead brother, Thoby, but to all "dead" people, the citizens of nonbeing, paralyzed by convention, hoarded egotism, and disillusionment—to the world of depressive cognition in all its many forms. This narrative of Jacob's failed subject-object relations is paralleled by the story of his biographer's own tribulations. We read, not a "triumphant" biography of self-congratulatory "solidity" (such as Cambridge dons would write), but the subjective account of an "outsider" who confesses she is unable—and unwilling—to present life objectively. Perceptions are unreliable, she reminds us, people are mere Platonic shadows, and the real Jacob is unreachable by either writer or reader. Only our most incoherent impressions of Jacob are vivid, but their "truth" is so subjective as to be almost incommunicable:

[L] ife is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love. (72)

We desire more than our seeing will bear. If the depressive tries in vain to tack life down, and the manic desires more than life can grant, then mood swings imply that loss teaches a valuable lesson: the "manner of our seeing" is at odds with "the conditions of our love." We cannot know Jacob (or Virginia know Thoby) so well that losing him must be a fatal loss of self. Though self habitually feels its fate is intertwined with objects, it lives in its own subjective world and need not fear dissolution if an object is suddenly torn away. Manic-depressives must repeatedly learn to resist morbid storylines if they are to survive suicidal thoughts.

Since her Platonic attitude discounts the substance of perceptual evidence, the narrator cannot take very seriously her work as a historian. Jacob is unknowable, and books written about him must be unreadable; objectivity fails, and "what remains is mostly a matter of guesswork" (73). To overcome the lack of direct evidence, the self-conscious narrator resorts to speculation and imagination, filling in the gaps, not with Jacob, but with products of her own personality which she carefully foregrounds as hers.^[6] She accepts the dichotomy of objective and subjective knowledge as irreducible but freely mixes the two in the hope that the reader will discern some truth incorporating both—the same ambiguous prescription Woolf gives us in "A Sketch of the Past." Just as the moor encompasses all things—the shadows we call Tom Gage or Bertha Ruck, or Mrs. Flanders's cheap brooch—the narrator and the reader must embrace fact and fancy, seeing and love.

By undercutting our interpretative strategies, Jacob's Room invites us to struggle with provisionality: the retentive grasp on objective, orderly data (Leslie's agitated depression), the submissive surrender of reading to chaos (Julia's anhedonic depression), and the dreamy embrace of disorder by a dilated self (Anny's hypomania). Woolf's narrator encourages us to become self-conscious as we read. What are we looking for in a fictional biography? she continually asks by implication. Would we really be satisfied if she pretended to omniscience? If we doubt ourselves, the narrator reminds us that:

Nobody sees any one as he is. . . . They see a whole—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves. . . .

. . . One must do the best one can. . . . It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done. (30–31)

If what we see in others originates in us, what knowledge have we gained? Why do we accept without question the narrator's omniscient judgments of minor characters? To urge our self-examination, she stops short at the one character we want to know most; she refuses to pin down Jacob. Standing outside his Cambridge rooms, she draws attention to her position (and ours) as an outsider, as a reader who cannot quite see the text:

The laughter died in the air. The sound of it could scarcely have reached any one standing by the Chapel, which stretched along the opposite side of the court. The laughter died out, and only gestures of arms, movements of bodies, could be seen shaping something in the room.

Was it an argument? A bet on the boat races? Was it nothing of the sort? What was shaped by the arms and bodies in the twilight room? (44)

The reader who accepts omniscient confidences about minor characters is disconcerted by the narrator's doubts and winks when it comes to Jacob.

Perhaps Woolf teases us because the Edwardian reader expected to be told everything; he was confident that he could have complete knowledge of a character, and a narrator's voice seemed more real to him if it confidently constructed a totalizing portrait. For this reason Arnold Bennett criticized Jacob as inadequately developed. Woolf's response accepted his logic but refuted his assumptions:

its only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now: the old post-Dostoevsky argument. I daresay its true, however, that I haven't that "reality" gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? (Diary 2: 248)

Woolf aimed for a reading beyond the objective and demonstrable (cheap reality), aware that at the other extreme she risked the self-indulgent solipsism of egotism or mania ("essays about myself").

Like Bennett, other readers find the tactic a strain. Mitchell Leaska, for instance, is alarmed by the slipperiness of Jacob's Room:

If, as some serious readers maintain, Virginia Woolf meant us to supply at least as much as she suggests in Jacob's Room, then the serious critic is in serious trouble. For the implication is that the text becomes a different novel for each reader; and that from personal reservoirs of memory, experience, and feeling, a reader may furnish the otherwise lifeless page with whatever he pleases; that the book becomes a massive Rorschach test, a series of stimuli with no response controls. If one reading of a book is as valid as any other reading, then all literary criticism is futile.

Concerned that art cannot exist unless it controls reader response, Leaska argues that reliable ("valid") cause-and-effect holds the novel together. Woolf, he reasons, has merely reversed this order, presenting the effect before giving us the cause. His conclusion, that the subtext of Jacob's Room chronicles the fatal progress of Jacob's repressed homosexuality, fastens on gaps or lapses in the text (how else would a neurotic lesbian express herself but in avoidances?) and overlooks much of the novel's deliberate reticence. Leaska simply cannot believe Woolf means what she says:

For surely, Mrs. Woolf, so delicate an analyst of human relations, would not have written a novel of one hundred and seventy pages merely to prove her point that "it is no use trying to sum up people."^[7]

Validity is Leaska's God (just as proportion will be Dr. Bradshaw's in Mrs. Dalloway), and so for him a novel that discounts all truth must be trying to repress an ugly truth. For Leaska, Woolf's sexual preference is that repressed truth missing from the text, and so he "returns" it to a position of prominence—in effect, rewriting her novel. Perhaps this is why Leaska repeatedly refers to her as Mrs. Woolf throughout his book: to underscore her marital status and imply unconscious sexual conflict.

Non-Freudians also react badly to a novel that does not impose its own resolution. Joan Bennett dismisses it as immature because it

falls apart. The reader is left with the impression of a series of episodes. . . . But the successive moments build up no whole that can be held in the mind. . . . [The reader's] attention is dissipated and diffused. Too many disassociated, or only tenuously related, demands have been made upon it.^[8]

What is at issue here is the process of reading. Bennett, like the character Bonamy, wants to hold a unified idea of the novel in her mind. She is not content to let her experience exist in that "semi-transparent envelope" Woolf calls creative perception when it can convey/elicit objective and subjective knowledge simultaneously (Common Reader 154), because Bennett assumes that reading is largely a receptive activity: it moves from author, who supplies ideas, to reader, who holds them. Like Professor Sopwith, Bennett regards reading as an extraction of an essential ore, a purification of complexity. Such assumptions lead another critic to conclude that a fictional order should not be lifelike:

In a world which does not offer any simple connections, human understanding can only be achieved with great diligence. Order, if it is to exist at all, must be man-made, and the need to create one's own order, which the very form of the novel makes imperative, is insisted upon throughout Jacob's Room . . . . Jacob's Room is filled with people struggling to formulate coherent perceptions to sustain them through the welter of impressions and experiences constantly assailing them. The wide variety of human testimony we have concerning Jacob's appearance and behavior not only suggests the difficulty of knowing him but also the urgency of such a task.^[9]

The "urgency" of the need to "formulate coherent perceptions" lies, not in the narrative form itself, but in the reader who imitates Betty Flanders, the Cambridge professors, and young Bonamy. Even James Hafley, who momentarily considers a provocative question ("Are there not two interpretations of experience" in this novel?), seeks closure by concluding that Jacob's Room is not "a completely accomplished work of art" because its potential for meaning exists neither in Jacob nor in the narrator.^[10]

If we consider Jacob's Room to be a complete and deliberate work, then we must ask again, are there two interpretations of experience operating here, so that even a neutral object like a lantern set in the forest supports mutually exclusive views, is both a beacon of order and a spur to incomprehensible frenzy? In her essay "Phases of Fiction," Woolf theorizes that authors in the past beheld life as one and entire, but that modern life contains such discord and incongruity that authors can now offer only a divided response (Granite and Rainbow ). She rates Daniel Defoe the chief of "the great truth-tellers," because he "assures us that things are precisely as [he says] they are." For Defoe's reader,

to believe seems the greatest of all pleasures. . . . [E]mphasis is laid upon the very facts that most reassure us of stability in real life, upon money, furniture, food, until we seem wedged among solid objects in a solid universe.

. . . Defoe presided over his universe with the omnipotence of a God, so that his world is perfectly in scale. (Granite and Rainbow 95–96)

Woolf argues that Defoe's readers wanted, not a record of consciousness as it was—insecure, unstable, inconclusive—but an illusory fabrication of life as it should be—predictable, ordered, and profitable—according to the capitalistic cultural values of the eighteenth century. For the modern age, however, mind and reality are no longer unities:

Feelings which used to come single and separate do so no longer. . . . Emotions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken up on the threshold. . . . In the modern mind beauty is accompanied not by its shadow but by its opposite. (Granite and Rainbow 16)

We cannot reduce the multiplicity of experience (which is "infinitely beautiful yet repulsive" [12]) into a single vision, because "it is as if the modern mind, wishing always to verify its emotions, had lost the power of accepting anything simply for what it is" (16–17). Omniscience is too

unreal to be acceptable in a novel that seeks to record truthfully the "shower of innumerable atoms," the "myriad impressions" (Common Reader 154) that constitute consciousness of modern life. Since meaning itself is "provisional" and since modern novelists doubt any form of belief, they now "are forcing the form they use to contain a meaning which is strange to it" (Granite and Rainbow 11), a meaning so disordered that it literally cannot be stated.

Jinny Carslake is the only character in Jacob's Room who achieves such a "modern" perspective. She occupies a reading space that lies between Mrs. Flanders's aggressive solipsism and Mrs. Jarvis's passive receptivity, between the critics' insistence on order and the narrator's relinquishing of authority. Jinny cherishes "a little jeweller's box containing ordinary pebbles picked off the road" and arranged in an apparently meaningless pattern: "But if you look at them steadily, she says, multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life" (Jacob's Room 131). The passage is terse and ambiguous, but, whatever Jinny thinks she sees, her method is suggestive because it ties together the novel's imagery, its narrative reticence, and modes of manic-depressive perception. Viewed objectively, Jinny's stones have no order, no unity, no meaning. Viewed subjectively, the stones uncannily invite her contributions, and any meaning is possible. Indeed, meaning itself is unimportant here. Woolf focuses on the relationship between Jinny and the stones through which some kind, any kind, of meaning is gained. Readers of Jacob's Room face the same problem when they move from subjective approaches (intuiting the essence of Jacob from our emotional reactions to him) to objective (deducing Jacob's character from such factual evidence as his love of Donne's poems): each perspective presents its own Jacob Flanders. Jinny has gone beyond this dilemma by recognizing an order that does exist, not in the stones exclusively, nor in herself exclusively, but between the two. A "hidden order," it cannot be spelled out, because it has more than one origin and more than one kind of cognitive structure. It is not the enforced unity of the depressed ego's mechanical analysis, or the uninvited disorder of pure mania, or the sole property of the stones. Its integration of all three without prejudice is the secret of life for a manic-depressive.

To begin integration we must accept chaos wholly, syncretistically. It is only then that we can create/discover a satisfying order in what we have perceived. To gain this paradoxical sense of order's origin, primary and secondary-process thinking must be coordinated, but in a way that defies classical psychoanalysis. Anton Ehrenzweig provides us with a useful

construct by defining syncretistic vision as a global, unanalytical view attained through an unconscious scanning that does not differentiate detail (as the authoritative ego acting alone would). Traditional Freudian thought viewed the unconscious as lacking structure because it "does not distinguish between opposites, fails to articulate space and time as we know it, and allows all firm boundaries to melt in a free chaotic mingling of forms."^[11] Since fiction is usually regarded as the embodiment of rigorous organization (since "everything is there not by chance, but by choice, " as Leaska says),^[12] we have traditionally assumed that a novel is primarily shaped by the conscious mind extracting bits and pieces from the boiling cauldron of unconscious thoughts (even if the ego represses latent meaning). For Ehrenzweig, however, primary-process thinking only appears chaotic. The artist and his audience must rely on unconscious scanning to provide the "hidden order" that conscious analysis cannot:

The chaos of the unconscious is as deceptive as the chaos of outer reality. . . . [C]reative work succeeds in coordinating the results of unconscious undifferentiation and conscious differentiation and so reveals the hidden order in the unconscious. . . . The artist, too, has to face chaos in his work before unconscious scanning brings about the integration of his work as well as of his own personality. . . . [U]nconscious scanning makes use of undifferentiated modes of vision that to normal awareness would seem chaotic."^[13]

Ehrenzweig redefines the notion of repression: some images, too personal to be shared with anybody, have been withdrawn from consciousness because of the superego's censorship of "certain offensive contents," but others, so impersonal they are shared by all, become inaccessible because of their "undifferentiated structure alone":^[14]

What appears ambiguous, multi-evocative or open-ended on a conscious level becomes a single serial structure with quite firm boundaries on an unconscious level. Because of its wider sweep low-level [syncretistic] vision can serve as the precision instrument for scanning far-flung structures offering a great number of choices. Such structures recur regularly in any creative search.^[15]

The artist discovers the hidden order of a seemingly chaotic reality by associating it with unconscious, seemingly chaotic fantasy material; when the connections are made, order is perceived and meaning is gained because perception has been personalized. Self and object are now related in a deeply personal way, which, as Jinny says, "is somehow the secret of life."

The advantage of Ehrenzweig's theory lies in his redefinition of artistic unity in concord with Woolf's experience of bipolar cognitive styles. Conscious perception tries, as Leslie's agitated depressive rationalism did, to smooth over the gaps, imperfections, or incoherence of open material; the ego's need for clarity rounds off discontinuous structures by a narrow focus on a limited number of details. Syncretistic vision, like Anne's hypomania, scans without focus and allows us to grasp widely scattered deviations without premature ordering.^[16] John Custance followed roughly the same procedure when he facilitated his all-inclusive manic visions through "a sort of relaxation of the focusing of my eyes" and of his analytical powers, which allowed his energized imagination to scan visual images and bring unconscious associations to the surface:

In periods of acute mania [visions] can appear almost like a continuous cinema performance, particularly if there are any complicated and variable light-patterns with which my optical mechanism can play the necessary tricks. These visions generally appear on the walls of my room, if these are shiny enough to reflect light. They are infinitely varied, and bear a close relation to the processes of thought passing in my mind at the time. They are obvious products of the Unconscious, which in this state is of course largely in control of my mind.^[17]

Neither Woolf nor Custance locates meaning either strictly or metaphorically in the specific ideas brought up from the unconscious. They are more interested in form than in latent content, in how to integrate manic dedifferentiation (that is, global, uncritical perception of divergent detail) and depressive analysis without specifying a restrictive formula.

The modernist goal of expressing this sense of multiplicity is likewise "incompatible with [the] design and order" of the novel (Granite and Rainbow 143). To avoid becoming merely theory-ridden or a Rorschach test gone wild, fiction must give the reader room to experience a problematical reading that is to some extent uncorrected and uncontrolled by the author's ego. Jacob's Room provides that space in which a reader can experience discontinuity, uncertainty, ambiguity, without either feeling wedged, like Defoe's audience, by objective knowledge, or lapsing into wild projection. A subjective-objective view is possible if the author refuses to verify the reader's response on a conscious level.

How the artist can tolerate order and disorder has been described by Ehrenzweig as "the three phases of creativity." He relates these phases to Melanie Klein's manic and depressive modes of early perception as the child tries to heal the fragmentation of self and world during weaning:

[T]he dual rhythm of projection and introjection can be conceived as an alternation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as described by Melanie Klein. . . . The creative process can thus be divided into three stages: an initial ("schizoid") stage of projecting fragmented parts of the self into the work; unacknowledged split-off elements will then easily appear accidental, fragmented, unwanted and persecutory. The second ("manic") phase initiates unconscious scanning that integrates art's substructure. . . . Then creative dedifferentiation tends towards a "manic" oceanic limit where all differentiation ceases. The inside and outside world begin to merge. . . . In the third stage of re-introjection part of the work's hidden substructure is taken back into the artist's ego on a higher mental level. Because the undifferentiated substructure necessarily appears chaotic to conscious analysis, the third stage too is beset with often severe anxiety. But if all goes well, anxiety is no longer persecutory (paranoid-schizoid) as it was in the first stage of fragmented projection. It tends to be depressive.^[18]

By itself, mood cannot integrate self and object, but it does provide the alterations of view needed to gather the material for creative work. It is precisely this rhythmical movement through various levels of our mental organization, each level informed by or responding to another, that is lacking in psychotic thinking. In psychosis, undifferentiated impulses erupt explosively from the unconscious, dismembering self-structure, or else the conscious mind becomes so "split off" from the unconscious that the individual seems to have lost emotional and ideational depth. What psychosis and creativity share is

a partial dissolution of the ego. The important difference between the two phenomena, on the other hand, is the fact that creative artists are obviously able to alternate between contrary modes of perception. Thus, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, their egos must be extremely strong, and in this they differ from psychotics, the weakness of whose egos makes it almost impossible for them to exercise voluntary control over the alternation between opposed kinds of thinking."^[19]

These two "opposed kinds of thinking" have been defined simply in terms of Freud's introspectively based distinction between conscious and unconscious. Research in neuroscience, however, offers us a complication that may enrich our understanding of why art is so multi-layered and compelling: different styles of thinking may also be divided between left and right hemispheres of the brain. In the split-brain study, surgeons cut the two hundred million nerve fibers in the corpus callosum, the interface between the two hemispheres. When each hemisphere is tested separately,

distinct cognitive styles become apparent. To what extent these differences are significant is still controversial, and my summary is necessarily oversimplified, but it will show how important and exciting future research may be for establishing connections between brain function and literary theory. In general, the dominant hemisphere (usually the left) has superior analytic and verbal skills because of its talent for sequential processing; the nondominant hemisphere (usually the right) is adept at processing imagery, visuosparial, musical, and holistic data and plays a major role in responding to emotional stimuli.^[20] Left hemisphere skill lies in processing with a substitutive semantic code—words—whereas right hemisphere cognition is syncretistic and analogical. Right hemisphere talents are useful in detecting novel or unexpected events, identifying patterns that are illegible or obscured by random interference, and extrapolating from incomplete information^[21] —very like Ehrenzweig's structural unconscious. Because of its talent for a nonlinear mode of association rather than syllogistic logic, the right hemisphere arrives at solutions to problems based on multiple converging determinants rather than on a single causal chain; it produces metaphors, puns, and "word-pictures."^[22] One psychiatrist discusses this intriguing connection between hemispheric style and global-versus-analytic cognitive styles in terms reminiscent of Leslie and Anny's temperaments:

In the obsessive-compulsive personality, whose rigid intellectualization and penchant for detail suggest a left-hemisphere cognitive style, we find a restricted affective [mood] life with something of a negative tone. Is this a characterization of an exaggerated left hemisphere in personality? In the hysteric personality, on the other hand, whose global and undifferentiated cognitive style suggests a relatively greater right-hemisphere contribution, we find affective lability, a tendency to deny problems, and Pollyannish optimism. Are these the affective characteristics that emerge when the right hemisphere makes the major contribution to personality organization?^[23]

It would seem likely, then, that the alterations in cognitive style we see in manic-depressive illness involve a disintegration of left hemisphere and right hemisphere cooperation.^[24] A review of neuropsychological studies of interhemispheric activity in patients with affective illness shows a "surprising degree of consistency" in reports that people with depressive and manic-depressive illness, as a group, "typically demonstrate deficits in right hemisphere or nondominant hemisphere functioning."^[25] Depression seems especially to correlate with right hemisphere impairment, which is associated with an inability to integrate thoughts or relate elements in a

complex pattern. Mania, on the other hand, is associated with left hemisphere impairment more than depression is.^[26] The right hemisphere sensitivity to context may be important for the experience of emotion; without benefit of the right-hemisphere attentional powers, the left hemisphere may produce either flights of confused fancy and loosened logic in mania or impoverished imagination and isolated judgment in depression.

Intriguingly, some researchers have found that they can induce manic or depressive states by injecting sodium amytal into the blood vessels leading to the hemispheres. Anesthetizing the right hemisphere produces euphoria, giddiness, or a manic state; anesthetizing the left hemisphere produces depressive symptoms. Although other studies have not consistently replicated these results, these findings have spurred experiments which underscore the importance of interhemispheric activity in mood states: electroconvulsive therapy more often produces depression when applied unilaterally to the left hemisphere and euphoric responses when applied to the right hemisphere.^[27] Could the rhythmical alternation between mania and depression be related to a switching of dominance patterns between left hemisphere and right hemisphere? Could we eventually explain "mixed" states, which combine features of mania and depression, as a simultaneous dysfunction in both hemispheres? If both hemispheres participate in the depressive syndrome, then perhaps the right hemisphere dysfunction produces the mood component, the left hemisphere dysfunction the cognitive and anxiety components. Dividing responsibility for the production of mood disorders between the hemispheres might explain, first, why manic-depressives fail to introspect the cause of a mood shift (and so arrive at specious explanations), for the word-fluent, model-building left hemisphere cannot gain privileged access to all right hemisphere activities; second, why those who suffer mixed mood states, such as agitated depression, exhibit symptoms of both mania and depression simultaneously (for the hemispheric dysfunctions combine); and, third, why, although depressives derive some benefit from cognitive therapy, it cannot cure their mood swings; for word-based strategies may help the linguistically adept left hemisphere reorganize some of its functions but give little aid to the language-deficient right hemisphere.

To complicate matters even further, it is possible that the hemispheres themselves may be divided into sections (brain quadrants), each of which may affect the operation of the others.^[28] For instance, in a study of trauma-induced brain damage to the right hemisphere, it was found that the closer the injury to the frontal pole, the more severe the depression, a fact which

has led to the theory that the manic-depressive syndrome reflects largely right hemisphere frontotemporal dysfunction. The two hemispheres may be involved in a reciprocal relationship whose functioning depends on the specific emotion being regulated:

The right and left controlling systems are themselves under active reciprocal interaction through transcallosal [interhemispheric] neural inhibition. In this manner, anger, euphoria, paranoid mood is evoked when the nondominant [usually the right] hemisphere no longer controls the dominant [usually the left-hemisphere] systems, together with verbal-motor disinhibition. When on the other hand the nondominant regions are no longer under dominant control, the emotional-catastrophic reaction, dysphoric emotions of anxiety or sadness are released. When the cerebral disorganization is principally restricted to the nondominant hemisphere, the depressive phase of the manic-depressive syndrome supervenes. At a certain threshold the dominant hemisphere becomes activated, triggering the manic phase.^[29]

The brain's responses are complex: the two hemispheres share a variety of neurotransmitters, and metabolic activity is altered in multiple areas in both hemispheres during episodes of mood disorder. Thus, to build a comprehensive explanatory model for manic-depressive illness, researchers will have take into consideration not only metabolic and neurohormonal changes but both interhemispheric and intrahemispheric mechanisms. The outcome of future research along these lines may well have profound significance for an integrative mind/brain model, and that in turn will surely affect how literary critics think about authors and texts in the future.

But one step at a time. For now, I argue that Ehrenzweig's three stages of creativity (and Jinny's "secret" resolution of subjective-objective perception) describe a successful interhemispheric integration of bipolar cognitive styles. The rhythmic alternation between analysis and undifferentiated perception, between depressive ordering and manic expansiveness in artistic composition (or between the "analytical ego" and the "ill" ego during a psychoanalytic session),^[30] may be due to a complex job-sharing program between the two hemispheres, each responding and contributing to the other's method of coping with a perceptual problem. Thus, Ehrenzweig's structural unconscious—a region beyond awareness that represses, not because of conflicted content, but because the material is structurally incompatible with rationalistic consciousness—may not be a part of Freud's unconscious; it may actually be a co-conscious module that is not readily available to the ego. In Freudian terms, each hemisphere may have its own

ego, the left hemisphere ego with a talent for organizing a word-based account of analyzed perceptions, the right hemisphere ego sensitive to data that defy closure, stasis, and theory. The successful integration of the two (and inclusion of other unconscious material, if required and/or related) deepens, enriches, and personalizes experience, which may explain why humankind has always found art endlessly suggestive and yet satisfying on a level often beyond words.

If the right hemisphere is co-conscious, why would its scanning be perceived as "unconscious"? When the two hemispheres are surgically separated, the left hemisphere is convinced it knows what stimuli or information was presented by experimenters to only the right hemisphere, although it can only be making a guess. If, for instance, the right hemisphere is told to rub the left hemisphere-controlled right elbow, the left hemisphere perceives the action and may assert, with a surprising degree of certainty, that it was responsible for the action and offer a reasonable explanation ("I was only scratching an itch," or "I guess I'm nervous"). The word-fluent left hemisphere implicitly and habitually denies that another conscious (but often word-deficient) center exists.^[31] Connected hemispheres, of course, do share information, but this operation is seamlessly integrated: the left hemisphere is not aware that some of its data may be coming from and processed by another, well-organized conscious entity, for whom it is speaking. One of the most prominent features of left hemisphere consciousness is that it uses all data—whatever its origin and shape—as material for the fiction that a unitary experience has been reported by a unified self. Typically, the patient reports verbally that he regards his left hemisphere-controlled, right-hand actions as his actions, carried out by his ego; if left-hand behaviors defy explanation (e.g., the left hand pulls down pants the right hand is trying to pull up), they are viewed as "alien," as "not mine." This has led some researchers to conclude that the subjectively experienced self in these patients lies in the dominant, linguistically skilled hemisphere.^[32] Thus, in creative individuals, the officially designated left hemisphere ego, though not privy to the details of dissociated activities operating in the nondominant hemisphere, nevertheless finds itself inexplicably benefiting from them if it can engage in the tricky business of self-relating while object-relating.

Perhaps, then, the "unthought but known" countertransference material (see p. 83, above) is "unthought" by the left hemisphere but "known" by the right hemisphere; making it intelligible to the left hemisphere (and therefore to the speaking patient) would resemble the process of

classical psychoanalysis, but it would require a more sophisticated and flexible approach, for the search would be for material that might be (1) unconscious because forbidden, (2) unconscious because structurally incompatible with analytical thought, (3) co-conscious but not represented because filtered, or (4) co-conscious but not represented linguistically. In a clinical setting, items 1 and 3 would require the traditional Freudian deciphering of symbols to discover why the repressed material is not available, but 2 and 4 would be distorted by a Freudian reading imposed by left hemisphere cognitive style upon right hemisphere material. We may even find that the activity of the "alien subject," who reads the same text we do but experiences (beyond our awareness) a different response, also involves co-conscious interhemispheric activity.^[33] At the very least, we may surmise that Woolf's rhythmical shuffling between manic and depressive cognitive styles permitted her to experience various left hemisphere and right hemisphere operations, giving her a sensitivity to the cognitive components of artistic creativity that went far beyond the Freudian formulations of repression and displacement so popular in her day.

In sum, the creative artist constructs a projective/introjective, conscious/ unconscious, left-hemisphere analytical/right-hemisphere syncretistic view just as manic-depressives must construct an inclusive core self out of their several moody selves. Readers must do the same; they must accept Jacob as he is presented to us—a fragment, a figment of our imagination, what you will, and yet real, because we have felt him, though we cannot fully articulate why and how. Jacob's Room leaves us in a transitional space where we have suspended analysis but have not yet perceived the hidden order that comes when analysis and global empathy find each other. The Jacob we seek exists somewhere between the text and the reader—and between the left hemisphere and the right. That neither Jacob nor the reader achieves a moment of being does not make this an unsuccessful novel. It is, rather, an appropriate precursor to Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, both of which also create this space between objectivity and subjectivity but, in addition, fill the void.

Jacob's Room seems to be aimed primarily at reeducating the reader to abandon assumptions about the novel as a form. In "Phases in Fiction," Woolf contends that psychological novels should free us from premature belief:

Besides this fineness and sweetness we get another pleasure which comes when the mind is freed from the perpetual demand of the [traditional] novelist that we shall feel with his characters. By cutting off the responses which are called out in actual life, the novelist frees

us to take delight, as we do when ill or travelling, in things in themselves. We can see the strangeness of them only when habit has ceased to immerse us in them, and we stand outside watching what has no power over us one way or the other. Then we see the mind at work. (Granite and Rainbow 122; my italics)

Woolf frustrates our efforts to categorize this novel as one or another kind of perceptual experience or to feel confident that Jacob is real enough for us to empathize with him. We finish our reading in that semi-transparent envelope, awaiting an interhemispheric fusion that may never come. If we feel abandoned, it is because we have been freed to discover/create our own experience of the novel. If we feel a blank where Jacob should have been, it is because we have not yet joined Woolf in her creation. We have only been invited into Jacob's room; we stand where a creative reading can take place.