The Trojan Sofa: Ideology is a luminous halo
‘Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad [of] impressions – trivial, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant show of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday...[but] life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’ Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction (1919)
In her critical writings, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an ardent advocate of literature as an expression of inner experience, an experience that draws from the minutiae of everyday events to create something meaningful to us. When discussing his collection of short stories, Matters of Life & Death (Vintage, 2007), Bernard MacLaverty (1942-) suggested that the very act of writing is a …show more content…
It is not that he recognises it as an evil or a ‘bad smell’ but that there is much to be remembered and remembering is forever, ‘it won’t go away’. Niall mouth breathes and the dust gets stuck there, dries inside his mouth failing to reach the bloodstream in the same way the dust to the lungs would have done. Mouth breathing is quieter; it allows him to dream, not to sleep, but to dream. For Niall even dreaming is in the darkness, and that is where ‘they’ want to keep him (p.24) but still he dreams there. Dreaming is an active pursuit and sleeping one that is passive. There is still rebellion in dreaming. But dreaming is disorienting, he doesn’t know where he is when he wakes from his dream, but he returns to dreaming easily enough. But his dreaming leads to sleeping, a passive act, and so to snoring, which gives him away to the ‘Major’. Niall escapes from the sofa but the ‘Major’ confronts him with a
‘Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad [of] impressions – trivial, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant show of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday...[but] life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’ Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction (1919)
In her critical writings, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an ardent advocate of literature as an expression of inner experience, an experience that draws from the minutiae of everyday events to create something meaningful to us. When discussing his collection of short stories, Matters of Life & Death (Vintage, 2007), Bernard MacLaverty (1942-) suggested that the very act of writing is a …show more content…
It is not that he recognises it as an evil or a ‘bad smell’ but that there is much to be remembered and remembering is forever, ‘it won’t go away’. Niall mouth breathes and the dust gets stuck there, dries inside his mouth failing to reach the bloodstream in the same way the dust to the lungs would have done. Mouth breathing is quieter; it allows him to dream, not to sleep, but to dream. For Niall even dreaming is in the darkness, and that is where ‘they’ want to keep him (p.24) but still he dreams there. Dreaming is an active pursuit and sleeping one that is passive. There is still rebellion in dreaming. But dreaming is disorienting, he doesn’t know where he is when he wakes from his dream, but he returns to dreaming easily enough. But his dreaming leads to sleeping, a passive act, and so to snoring, which gives him away to the ‘Major’. Niall escapes from the sofa but the ‘Major’ confronts him with a