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Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith
Thanking David Garnett on 8 October 1933 for his positive review of Flush, Woolf amends her earlier statements, specifying that the "joke with Lytton" referred only to "the last paragraph as originally written"--a parody of Strachey's imaginative recreation of the death of Queen Victoria, which Woolf cut before publication (Letters 23 1-32). Far from originating with Lee, the practice of selective quotation from the diaries and letters has become traditional in justifying the exclusion of Flush from the canon. Yet a similar justification could as easily be invoked to dismiss any book in Woolf's oeuvre.
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Against Woolf's deprecatory private references to Flush must be set her unguarded response to a reader who grasped her serious intentions in writing the book. Replying to Sibyl Colefax on 22 October 1933, Woolf gives little indication that she considered this work to be a joke:
I'm so glad you liked Flush. I think it shows great discrimination in you because it was all a matter of hints and shades, and practically no one has seen what I was after, and I was elated to heaven to think that you among the faithful firmly stood--or whatever Milton said. (Letters 236)
It is true that a good joke may be exhilarating, and it is gratifying when others catch the point of our jokes, especially when they are made professionally. But Woolf's exultant language in expressing her joy at being understood suggests a more serious artistic purpose in Flush--one that, her language in this letter implies, perhaps eluded Leonard Woolf, John Lehmann, and Ottoline Morrell. Her resort to Milton cannot but suggest a lofty design, even as her casual misquotation prevents the reference from becoming pompous. Woolf appears to conclude here that, in the response of a sensitive reader such as Lady Colefax, Flush is not "too serious" for its subject after all; nor, in its "hints and shades," is it too slight.
Almost universally excluded from the canon of Woolf's major works, Flush has not been critically evaluated as what it declares itself to be: the biography of a dog. Such scant academic attention as it has received attempts to redefine it as allegorized autobiography, an approach that only confirms the book's position as a marginal commentary on, recuperation from, or preparation for Woolf's "serious" fiction. About even these reclamations there persists a faint odor of professional embarrassment regarding Woolf's project. It is as if, in writing about a dog, Woolf were doing something not merely atypical but unworthy of a great writer--one, moreover, whose reputation bears the burden of proving that it is possible for a woman to be a great writer within the configuration of high modernism. Yet a sympathetic reading of Flush, taken on its own terms--as an intuitive, clear-eyed attempt to represent a nonhuman subject--reveals it to be one of Woolf's most original and forward-looking achievements.
In a note in Flush on Carlyle's dog Nero, Woolf called for a "treatise on canine psychology," one that might establish "whether it is possible to call one dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian" (184). While denying that she had the space to undertake such a project, Woolf actually succeeded in making a substantial gesture toward crossing the gulf of understanding between human and nonhuman subjects, and toward understanding the relationship between the two.
