Can anybody tell how do you actually deciepher such passage ?????
Virginia Woolf made an original contribution to the form of the novel, but was also a distinguished essayist, a critic for The Times Literary Supplement, and a central figure of the Bloomsbury group. Dialogic in style and continually questioning what may be the reader‘s opinion (her rejection of an authoritative voice links her to the tradition of Montaigne), her critical essays, when examined carefully, reveal a thematic and technical complexity that rivals her novels.
Some of her most rigorous essays suggest that the personality of the author can be fixed if sufficient evidence can be amassed and if its logical implications are followed. In ―The Novels of Turgenev,‖ Woolf pursues the problem of interpretation on the part of the reader by providing a detailed report of her own response to Turgenev. She does this in order to make possible the question that leaps the gap between reader and text. That question—―what principles guided Turgenev?‖—focuses on the fictional strategies that must have been in operation in order to have produced Woolf's experience. Thus Woolf accounts for this by reconstructing Turgenev‘s method. But she pushes farther insofar as she asserts that the method must be a sign of a deeper informing power, the mind of Turgenev itself. This distance can be traversed by interpretation, Woolf argues, because writers like Turgenev achieve a level of personality beneath the surface distinctions among individuals. Her greatest examples of this impersonal power in the English language are Jane Austen and Shakespeare. According to Woolf, these authors write with a ―clarity of heart and spirit‖ that allows their potential for genius to express itself ―whole an entire.‖ Unencumbered by impediments that would be erected by such feelings on their part as fear, hatred, or dependency, we are allowed by their art to make contact with what is most deeply personal, and therefore most widely human, in them.
But one of the riches of Woolf‘s essays is that they critique this very same possibility of closing the gap that exists between author and audience. This is evinced in Woolf‘s awareness of the contemporary artist‘s self-consciousness: the enemy of human contact and knowing. There seem to be so many barriers on the road to the deepest level of self that the journey there is impossible, but it is this level of self through which the gap must be closed. In fact, Woolf asserts that the journey is impossible for the modern writer. In ―How It Strikes a Contemporary,‖ Woolf contrasts writers of the past—Chaucer is her most powerful example—who believed wholeheartedly in an atemporal order verified by the entire culture, with modern writers who have lost this advantage. Woolf suggests that, if, for writer and reader, no way to a shared, universal level of experience is available, the very ground of the interpretive enterprise is removed.