When Sylvère Lotringer died in 2021, the obituaries recalled a writer, teacher, publisher, and provocateur of astonishing range, diverse commitments, and compelling personality. He had not, as people liked to say, brought French theory to America—tell that to the Francophiles at Yale in the 1960s—but he’d assuredly played a part in taking theory out of the academy (he was a professor at Columbia) and into—what? Not exactly the mainstream, but certainly a sort of hip media visibility that later helped his publishing house Semiotext(e) to pass from the scholarly theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s into the artistic and political landscape of the new millennium. (The pivot for this movement was surely the renewed interest in Chris Kraus’s 1997 autobiographical novel I Love Dick, in which Lotringer, then Kraus’s husband, also appears.) A surprise among the recollections after Lotringer’s passing: before his championing of Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Virilio, before he convened legendary counter-cultural symposia in the 1970s, long before he made experimental films with Kraus, he had begun his intellectual life as a scholar of Virginia Woolf, and even interviewed some of those closest to her.
On Virginia Woolf is made up of four short conversations with intimates of the author, plus some fascinating correspondence around the origins and legacy of this material. Lotringer was an undergraduate at the Sorbonne in 1961, when he spent a year as an exchange student in Edinburgh. He was also a correspondent for Les lettres françaises, a literary journal funded by the French Communist Party and edited by Louis Aragon, who encouraged Lotringer to interview notable Anglophone writers of the day. There was a trip to Dublin in January 1961 to meet Brendan Behan, garrulous but hungover and unhelpful. Later in the year, the Bloomsbury alumni were more polite but in some ways just as evasive. The writer and publisher David Garnett, who was the lover of painter Duncan Grant, and later married Woolf’s niece, reads to his visitor “a little piece” in which he says Woolf’s chief advantage as a writer was that she was a woman and thus interested in many things at once. At the offices of Faber and Faber (where he was an editor and director) T. S. Eliot gives Lotringer a scant half hour, and describes Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell as “emancipated late Victorians” rather than thoroughly modern artists.
More forthcoming, and more engaging on the page, are Woolf’s husband Leonard and her friend and sometime lover Vita Sackville-West. Unsurprisingly for the time, the latter makes no mention of their true relationship, but she does recall a night in Vézelay, France, when Woolf was spooked by a thunderstorm: “She took refuge with me, and talked about her ideas on life and immortality for the entire night. It was a true revelation of who she was.” This is the sort of episodic insight into character that Lotringer keeps trying to elicit from his interviewees, but rarely gets. And sometimes he doesn’t quite grasp what’s being said, as in Sackville-West’s sketch of Woolf’s sharp sense of humor: “She frightened—in fact, terrified— the young people who came to show their respects.” Lotringer: “I don’t really understand.” Inevitably, he also asks about her suicide in 1941, whether anybody saw it coming and whether the war added to her despair. Leonard Woolf, like the others, is vague on the subject, as if unsure the full weight of a suicide in middle age, after decades of mental illness, can quite be conveyed to the eager young Frenchman in front of him. (The two stayed in touch, and letters at the end of the book recount Lotringer’s part in brokering key French translations and editions of Woolf’s works later in the decade.)
What exactly was Lotringer hoping for when he set out around England on his moped, with a tape recorder strapped to his back? He’d been introduced to Woolf’s writing by Nathalie Sarraute, and by the mid-1960s he was working on a doctorate about it, supervised by Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes (who famously hadn’t read much at all in English). In 1961 his concerns are quite undergraduate: he wants to know about Woolf’s death, about her religious beliefs (none), and her bouts of madness. But most of all he wants to fit her to a version of interwar modernism whose main pole is James Joyce, with satellites such as the stream-of-consciousness pioneer Édouard Dujardin. For the most part, his interlocutors are having none of it, variously claiming that Woolf had not read Joyce when she wrote key experimental works, that she did not care for his work, or had simply hit on similar techniques because they were in the air. One has the feeling they are all trying to downplay Woolf’s radicalism and claim her for a more localized and discreet English version of modernism.
In her brief introduction to On Virginia Woolf, Jeanne Graff recalls that Lotringer would say: “Her books are so important, have you read The Waves?” It makes sense that he would name Woolf’s most extreme experiment, the novel whose composition made her write to Sackville-West in confusion, wondering what the difference if any was between prose and poetry. The Waves, with its competing dramatic monologues and its mysterious, elemental interludes in italics, is the work of Woolf’s that comes closest to the kind of derangement of rationality that Lotringer discovered and promoted in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. And perhaps also to the habit of drift and adventure that we find in his own career: the sense of a life perilously poised even when seemingly secured somewhere—a university, for instance. In 1961, Lotringer still treats the novelist as if she is part of something called “Bloomsbury,” from which in fact Woolf needed to be redeemed. (Elizabeth Hardwick in 1973: “it wearies as an idea, a design, a gathering, and one would like to have each speckled specimen alone, singular.”) But some part of him is speeding ahead of the Bloomsbury-ites, towards a wilder understanding of what writing and thought may be.
On Virginia Woolf: Sylvère Lotringer's Interviews with Members of the Bloomsbury Group, 1961 is edited and introduced by Jeanne Graff.
