Monday 24 March 2014

Sharing the Crocus

or Virginia’s Conceit

Virginia Woolf’s "The Patron and the Crocus" revolves around a central conceit. Woolf has one strong idea, that of the first crocus seen growing in Kensington Gardens and the proliferation of the experience of seeing that crocus. The essay in The Common Reader (a volume full of wonderful, neat and insightful essays by Woolf) uses the metaphorical conceit of the crocus to expand ideas concerning readership and guardianship of writing. She creates the character of an ideal patron to whom one writes of the crocus and its first emergence. By patron, she means someone to whom your writing is directed, as well as someone partially influencing the process.
     Woolf talks about the different types of patron sharing the crocus. I ought to explain that for Woolf the crocus is imperfect until shared. At this point, the crocus becomes art. That artifice can be applied simply by turning the experience into collective personal myth. 
      The first potential patron she introduces is the newspaper man. He’ll offer you money and fame – maybe he’s wearing spats or maybe he’s reclining in a big leather chair at a big mahogany desk smoking an even bigger cigar. He’s flash and generous but Woolf’s not convinced. She asks whether there is enough crocus to grace “every breakfast table from John o’Groats to the Land’s End” and we feel sure that he’s not our man when faced with her prediction of the frivolously obscure fate of “journalism”. 
     Woolf states “to know who to write for is to know how to write”. Right, we’d better find this chap then, Ginny! Ah, he’s illusive, changing “from age to age”. Typical. One might recognise him only by the twinkle in his eye, the crocus in his buttonhole or his saffron-stained fingers.
     Woolf is introducing us to the reader as patron of the arts. Of course, we’re familiar with the death of the author, birth of the reader concept. It’s first year undergraduate material but at the time of writing it was still breaking ground. Thus Woolf’s common reader is born. A person, such as Woolf perhaps, who is interested in good, long-lasting writing that will improve, inspire and please her. The crocus must be transposed rather than bunched into a posy. The latter is sure to wither whereas the former might thrive if the soil is warm and the roots are strong. 
     I like a good extended metaphor and Woolf is excellent at them. It feels pleasingly versatile, stretched like vellum holding the five pages of content together. For me, the answer to what is good writing can be fluidly argued through the idea of the crocus and it ties in with another of Woolf’s essays in the same volume, “The Modern Essay”, in which she argues that one of the best qualities of fiction and essay writing is that we should be able to return to the text and relive it the uncountable number of times our perspective and situation changes, just as a bulb renews itself so do we as readers.

 As an aside, I think this essay is a really good example of the high standards of writing that Woolf requests in “The Modern Essay”; a slick, intimate voicing of opinion on a timeless question.





First emerging buds. A tree peony uncovered in the border.

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