Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)
2022; Wiley; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/criq.12651
ISSN1467-8705
Autores Tópico(s)Modernist Literature and Criticism
ResumoThe six tributes included here were first delivered at the memorial event ‘Laura Marcus and Twentieth-Century Literary Studies’, a special meeting of Oxford’s Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Seminar which took place online on 20 October 2021. We have kept the tributes as they were originally delivered to retain the rhythm of that gathering. Before the event had even begun, we had reached our maximum number of attendees on Zoom (an upper limit which we had no idea existed, having never come close to it in previous events we had held online since the pandemic struck). That technical mishap was at least a powerful testament to Laura’s remarkable gifts for friendship and community, the array of people whose work she had mentored, supported, inspired or shaped, as well as the sheer reach of her influence on the discipline more broadly (it was also something that, as a self-avowed technophobe, she may have found in some way comically fitting; indeed, only last year, while trying to submit an article to the Cambridge Quarterly, she managed to upload it onto the server of the current journal instead). As the evening wore on and more and more people shared their memories, one fact became clear: a lot of academics are deeply admired and respected, but few were as deeply loved as Laura. In Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (2018), Laura begins her chapter on ‘Autobiography and Psychoanalysis’ by quoting W.H. Auden’s description of Sigmund Freud: ‘a whole climate of opinion / under which we conduct our different lives’. For many in our generation, Laura provided that ‘climate of opinion’ under which we conducted our research into the different lives of twentieth-century literature and culture, energised by conversations with her or emboldened by her writing on an array of subjects – from life-writing, on which she worked throughout her career, to early twentieth-century women writers, particularly Virginia Woolf, to her work on cinema, modernism and psychoanalysis. Having largely completed Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern, which will be published later this year, she was embarking on another substantial project provisionally titled ‘Autobiography in the Age of Witness’ – a study of autobiographical and related writings, as shaped by conditions of exile, from the early to mid-twentieth century. Laura’s works include Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) – which won the MLA’s prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize – and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). In addition to the books she authored, she edited numerous essay collections which have shaped the field over recent decades. These include Modernity, Culture and ‘The Jew’ (1998), which she co-edited with Bryan Cheyette, The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (1998) with Lynda Nead, and The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2005) with Peter Nicholls. More recent collaborations include A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature and Culture (2014) with Ankhi Mukherjee, as well as Late Victorian into Modern with Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, and Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity with David Bradshaw and Rebecca Roach, both of which appeared in 2016. While she leaves behind a magisterial body of scholarship which will inform and influence future generations of modernist scholars, Laura was so much more than an academic or a scholar: she was a wonderfully humane person with a talent for connection. Whoever came in contact with her, however briefly – in conferences, seminars, dinners or social events – would immediately be struck by her loveliness, a rare blend of razor-sharp intelligence, kindness, empathy and irreverent wit. Even the most casual encounter would have a sense of intimacy and meaningfulness. The modernist scholar Doug Mao recalled meeting her for the first time at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Tokyo and going for a stroll: ‘I understood more or less at once how Laura Marcus the person was Laura Marcus the internationally famous scholar. We talked about things that were ordinary, not momentously intellectual – Laura’s plans for further travel in Asia; our students; family; friendship. But everything Laura said was fringed or suffused with insight, with a kind of non-strenuous but continuous perspicacity.’ Throughout the memorial, friends, colleagues and students kept returning to her combination of intellectual generosity and emotional warmth – memories of her loveliness became the rhythm of our mourning. At the same time, she was an academic par excellence, an abiding presence in conferences, seminars, inaugurals and book-launches on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether she was giving keynotes, chairing sessions, commenting on books or introducing people, Laura was a terrific interlocutor. Encouraging younger scholars was at the heart of her pedagogy. As of 2020, she had examined some seventy PhD dissertations and had mentored, as a colleague mentioned in an email, ‘zillions of postgrads’ during her years in Southampton, Birkbeck, Sussex, Edinburgh and finally at Oxford. Yet, everyone who had been mentored and occasionally even been mothered by her (and the list is long) felt a special connection: she was always there for them. One of her greatest qualities as a mentor was a unique mixture of humour and humility. She could disarm any anxieties you might have been going through with a self-deprecating anecdote from her own career. If you told her about the disappointing turnout at a talk you’d just given, for instance, she would immediately share with you the mortifying experience of arriving to deliver a lecture only to find that just one student had shown up, and then having to speak for an hour to her singular audience. It was a kind of self-deprecating wit which masked her sense of security and own scholarly brilliance but which reassured you that all academics went through similar difficulties and doubts. As the literature and music delegate for Oxford University Press for nearly a decade, Laura actively shaped their list: she would have read several hundred proposals and overseen the publication of scores of books. Recently, when one of us was organising an MSA conference panel and asked Laura if she might be interested in chairing it, it was no surprise that she instantly agreed to do so but it was pleasantly surprising to find out that she had in fact examined the PhD thesis of one of the panellists and served as the manuscript reader for the other’s book. Last month, when we decided to do a session on Woolf in her honour, we invited Emily Kopley, the author of Virginia Woolf and Poetry (2021), who promptly wrote back saying that it was Laura who had encouraged her to approach OUP with her book manuscript. When speaking to Laura about work in progress, you were always struck by both the range of her knowledge and the instinctive sense she had for whose research interests might chime with your own. Or what you might read. And, as Steve Connor notes in the Guardian obituary, ‘No draft chapter or book manuscript passed under Laura’s eyes without being improved, in a gentle manner that allowed writers to believe they had done it on their own.’ We used to co-convene the Modern and Contemporary Literature Research seminars at Oxford with Laura. She brought to the seminars many of the qualities that marked her scholarship – curiosity, erudition, astuteness, sympathy, but also an extraordinary ability to hear, respond to and engage with others. She had a compendious knowledge of the kinds of work being done by modernist scholars across the world and by graduate students in Oxford and an instinct for what would be the best match. She was a brilliant chair. But what she infused the seminars with is something far more difficult to convey – the word that returns is ‘loveliness’ – a certain generosity and acuteness that was as much emotional as it was intellectual. She was also tremendous fun: both funny and fun-loving, she knew how to let her hair down, and many of our finest moments with Laura came at conference drinks, raucous dinners or the pub afterwards. ‘If no one turns up in the seminars’, she told us before our first session together, ‘we would just have a good gossip’; more recently, during the pandemic, she reflected that ‘the hard work remains but all the loveliness has gone’. The figure who Laura returned to most frequently throughout her scholarship was Virginia Woolf, chapters about whom appear in Auto/biographical Discourses, The Tenth Muse, Dreams of Modernity and elsewhere, and whose work Laura transformed for generations of readers. Her criticism shed new light on Woolf’s work in relation to life-writing, film, feminist thought and psychoanalysis, among many other perspectives. This is without even mentioning Laura’s volume on Woolf for the ‘Writers and their Work’ series, which is one of the finest overviews of Woolf’s oeuvre and a model for how introductory studies should be written, of immense value to the first-year undergraduate and the academic reader alike. It felt especially fitting, therefore, that for Laura’s memorial event in October we should play a recording of her reading Woolf, from the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse; she had made the recording for New College in 2020 (and it can still be found on the college’s YouTube page).11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_jE6cxRm8E. In the middle section of To the Lighthouse, ‘Time Passes’, we see Woolf exploring the possibilities of a future or potential cinema, as imagined in ‘The Cinema’, using visual images to express emotions and to animate objects into non-human life. Sound is incorporated or ‘folded’ into silence (the silence of the cinema), while the unfolding of Mrs Ramsay’s shawl (a highly cinematic image, as the fold of the shawl swings to and fro) becomes an image of historical rupture. Mrs Ramsay, whose medium is light, appears after her death as in a film or slide-projection on a wall, and Woolf explores the play of light, the concept of memory as projection, and the corrosive effects of time on matter. The ten-year passage of time in the central section of To the Lighthouse is also the passing of one night, between the days of ‘The Window’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, from the midnight hour when the lights are extinguished to the breaking of dawn and of the veil on the sleeper’s eyes. During this interlude, the narrative oscillates between absolute stillness and the eruptions of nightmare, in which the world tosses and turns. Time is thus radically condensed (as the ten-year passage was itself a condensation of the period between the Victorian childhood of the 1880s and early 1890s and the return to the house after the end of World War I) or, in cinematic terms, speeded up. ‘Time Passes’ is also a dream-space, drawing upon the profound conceptual connections between dreams and cinema, and echoing Woolf’s reference in ‘The Cinema’ to the ‘dream architecture’ of a future film, in which the ‘cascades falling and fountains rising, which sometimes visits us in sleep or shapes itself in half-darkened rooms, could be realized before our waking eyes’. As in Vernon Lee’s discussions of motion, including her repeated returns in her study The Beautiful to the terms of the mountain rising, always rising, the appropriate tense, or mode, of movement and, in Woolf’s writings, of cinema, would appear to be the gerundive – ‘falling’ and ‘rising’, ‘falling’ and ‘rocking’. Woolf’s account of damaged and lost beauty in ‘Time Passes’ takes this form – ‘It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling, the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always’. The image is closely echoed in the variant version of ‘The Cinema’: ‘the curtain parts and we behold, far off, some unknown and unexpected beauty’.22 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 146–7. I’m honoured and moved to be asked to open this seminar, which is a wonderful thing for the faculty to be doing. And I’m not at all surprised by the number of participants and attendees. It strikes me that Laura continues to do, after her death, what she was renowned for doing during her life: bringing scholars together, making connections for us all. In Laura’s 2018 book on Autobiography for the OUP Very Short Introductions series, part of her life’s work on this subject, she gives a lucid and historically illuminating account of different kinds of autobiography, from confession to autofiction, and shows us with wonderful nuance and clarity the genre’s shifting, complex open-endedness, its ‘capacity to recreate itself’. She was planning to continue with that work on autobiography in another book, and I deeply wish I had had a chance to talk to her about those plans. In the VSI, she describes one historical phase of autobiography as the telling of ‘a unique, or important, or exemplary life’. The phrase rings home to me now as a way of talking about Laura herself. A unique, important, and exemplary life. That book on autobiography, which I greatly admire, means a lot to me, because it connects to the way our particular paths crossed, as Woolfians, as Goldsmiths’ Chairs, as authors of VSIs on life-writing, and as literature delegates to OUP. When Laura arrived in Oxford in 2010, she immediately, with the kind of generosity and openness that we all knew in her, agreed to join in the faculty’s undergraduate and graduate courses in life-writing, which we taught together for a while. I learnt an enormous amount from her in those classes; she changed my understanding about autobiography in relation to psychoanalysis and to film and photography. She also gave huge and unstinting support to the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, where she was especially enthusiastic about the principle of mixing up scholars and practitioners. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations we had about life-writing, the exam papers we marked together, the students we taught, and the DPhils we were involved with. Those working links between us are just a tiny sample of the connections and commitments Laura forged across the world with so many people and in so many institutions, where she was always utterly professional but never institutional. In all these areas of academic life, there was the same mixture of forensic rigour and humane sympathy, and the same grand level of integrity, warmth, responsibility, dedication – and fun. If you were her friend and colleague, you couldn’t resist her laughter and you would trust her with your life. Dear Charlotte – Possible texts for inclusion – Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (as well as his Camera Lucida); writings by W.G. Sebald (The Rings of Saturn would be a good starting point) which use photographs in extremely interesting ways. There is a useful chapter by Ian Christie on film and biography in the William St. Clair and Peter France collection Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. There is interesting feminist material on visual representations and memory/autobiography by Annette Kuhn (Locating Memory: Photographic Acts is one, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination another) and by Jo Spence – visual artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sophie Calle and Chila Kumari Burman have also put forms of autobiography and the performances of the self at the heart of their work. Many autobiographies will begin with, or include, explorations of photographs and their role in constructing memories and giving an image of the ‘past’ self or selves, even if this is only part of their strategy. So you could focus on this dimension of autobiography. The disintegration recorded or relayed in the final part of the pageant could well be read as a reflection of Woolf’s broader sense of dissolution and destruction – of a culture, a history, a land … Woolf, in fact, leaves us with fragments which sound out something other than annihilation – but ambiguously, ambivalently. The final syllabled sounds of the gramophone, which has ticked like a clock throughout the performance, try to spell this out: ‘Dispersed are we’, ‘Harmony’, ‘Unity-Dispersity’, ‘Un … dis … And ceased’. If we hear this as ‘undeceased’, we are left with a negation that cancels out death, a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No’: ‘“Yes, Isa answered. “No”, she added. It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no, no, it contracted. The old boot appeared on the shingle.’ This is the rhythm of the waves, which does not cease. [12/6/2009] Thank you so much for your kind message. I am really very pleased and excited about the Chair, and very much looking forward to starting in January. I will be sad to leave Edinburgh, but I think this post will offer wonderful opportunities, not least the one you outline in your email. I would be delighted to work with you on the life-writing option, and to think about developing this field further at Oxford. I think it's a great idea to bring practitioners in, and having just read a very large number of biographies for the JTB prize this year, have some thoughts about further invitees. [2/7/2009] The course looks excellent. I'm happy to do two slots, and to be flexible about the areas. One suggestion for a slot: psychoanalysis and auto/biography, to take in 1) psychoanalysis as founded in autobiographical reflection (Freud's self-analysis), using extracts from Freud's An Autobiographical Study and The Interpretation of Dreams; Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections 2) psychobiography as genre (Edel's James could come in here, as well as Wollheim's Germs and Woolf's Sketch, so there would already be a basis in students' broader reading for this topic.) The second slot might supplement the question of ‘autobiography and the biographer’, and look at the ways in which the autobiographies of writers relate to their other works, and the ways in which they construct an image of ‘the writing life/self’ (Rousseau, Mill, James, Gosse, Woolf, Sartre, Beauvoir, Barthes etc. etc.) The option runs from weeks 1–6 and will be held in the English Faculty on Wednesdays from 11–12.30. It looks at the writing of biography and autobiography from a historical, theoretical and thematic perspective, looking closely at some important examples, and raising such topics as the evolution of biography, the theory of autobiography, the use of source materials, witness and testimony, the writing of women’s lives, the writing of group lives, the status of biographical subjects, shifts in approaches to biography and autobiography in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the relation between biography and literary criticism, how biography relates to the subject’s self-presentation in autobiography, biography’s role in the construction of iconic figures, the use of memoirs, letters and diaries, and autobiographical and biographical tactics, practices and ethics. All students will be asked to give one short, informal presentation during the course of the seminars, and will be required to hand in two 2,000 word essays, in Week 2 and Week 5. The first essay will be a short auto/biographical exercise and the second essay will be a topic of your choice. As well as the classes, there will be short individual consultations in Weeks 3 and 6 to return and discuss the essays. Seminar presentations and topics for the first essay will be discussed at the first seminar. The course will be examined by one 5,000–6,000 word essay [to be submitted by Tuesday of 9th Week, Hilary Term] for which you will choose your topics by Week 4 of Hilary Term. You will have the opportunity to discuss what topic/s you might want to develop for your assessed essay during the course of the term. The essay can, but need not, draw on specific case-studies used during the classes. A limited number of graduate students may attend the classes but will not be giving presentations or writing essays. As part of the course there will also be a number of visiting lectures on ‘Portraiture and Life-writing’, given by Martin Gayford, Paula Byrne, Ludmilla Jordanova and Stella Tillyard, which will take place on Tuesdays at 5.30 in Wolfson College, Haldane Room, weeks 2–6. These are public events and form part of the activities of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, but are meant primarily for the benefit of the students taking this course, who will have the opportunity to ask questions of the speakers. Please see the website of the OCLW for details on these events. [http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing] Students should have read at least one major biography and some of the texts on auto/biography in the reading-list which follows. You are also advised to read some of the recommended reading for each class before the start of term. When Laura arrived at Southampton, her first academic job, in the early 1980s, a very slight woman with huge brown eyes, you could see immediately how innately, formidably learned she was. She was only in her early twenties but she just knew things no one else did. One wondered how she could know so much and be so modest about it. Whether it was a class on working-class life-writing, a course on narratology (Propp, Bakhtin), Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, psychoanalysis, feminism, the learning and the freshness of the learning was always there. She was a wonderful teacher, with that modesty and seriousness and imagination whose integrity brings a sort of glamour to teaching. These qualities shone in whatever context she worked in. A long-term member of the editorial board of Women. A Cultural Review, she invariably found readers for articles needing peer review when the rest of us were stumped. Her great gift was for friendship. The intuitive empathy of her friendship was intellectually life-changing. She had a warmth and generosity that changed a room when she was in it. A gift of attentiveness that made every relationship a special relationship. A gift of friendship that gave meaning to life. And giving is the central word here. She had a way of listening and then handing back one’s thoughts in a form that was enriched and enhanced and deepened, even when there was a stringent element of criticism in her response. The art of friendship and the art of wit and storytelling went together. She once said to me as I ploughed through the end of a book, ‘You have to love a book enough to begin it and hate it enough to finish it’. One of the stories I shall not forget is the fax and telephone machine story. She inadvertently had disabled their machine by spilling coffee over it. Frantic efforts to make it work involving much banging of keys randomly were of no avail and she and her disgruntled husband gave up. They recovered their equilibrium and had settled down when, some little time later, there was a ring at the door. It was the police. In their attempts to make the machine work they had inadvertently hit 999. We rejoice that her prodigious work on rhythm, The Measure of the Modern, though unfinished, is complete enough to be published by OUP. It is an astonishingly comprehensive book, ranging from nineteenth-century science to eurythmics, from the Bloomsbury group to indigenous American accounts of rhythm and ‘western’ cultural readings of it. It is a work that will be comparable in depth and imagination with her book on cinema, The Tenth Muse. She was also planning to return to life-writing in a dazzling new form. Working on key modern critics such as Benjamin, she was exploring the way they used criticism as a form of autobiography and vice versa. I was lucky enough to be Laura’s friend for nearly forty years. I am not alone in finding that her tragic death is as if a huge piece of life has broken away and fallen into the sea – like those images of melting glaciers where we see great segments of ice falling away. Deepest thanks for organising this memorial for Laura, for making it possible for us to come together to grieve, and to celebrate Laura collectively. This is such a precious and important opportunity to express our love and loss. It is a huge privilege to be asked to speak at this memorial, but this is one of the hardest and most painful briefs I have ever undertaken. I cannot be expansive, and summarise Laura’s incredible academic achievements and international standing in the field of literary studies, because that feels like offering a retrospective, and I am too full of her loss to be able to talk, or think, in terms of a retrospective right now. I hope you will forgive the deeply personal tone of what I have to say. I hope it is OK instead to offer some moments, some memories, that are at the forefront of my mind. I think they represent something of Laura’s incredible intellectual reach, as well as the sheer joy of being in her presence as a scholar, but also as a friend. I first met Laura in the summer of 1991, after Isobel Armstrong (then Head of Department) generously responded to my youthfully exuberant enquiries about whether the Department of English at Birkbeck had any scholars working on female modernism, and specifically the then little-known figure of Dorothy Richardson. I owe Isobel my eternal gratitude for the chance of an interview for a PhD place. On a sunny Bloomsbury morning, I was interviewed by Laura and Carol Watts – a supervisory dream-team if ever there was one – and I was both overwhelmed and awestruck. What amazing role-models of how to be a young female academic. I remember some tough questions about modernism, and about why anyone would write a PhD on Dorothy Richardson (posed, it must be said, with Laura’s signature twinkle in the eye). I also remember a lot of laughter in that first meeting. So that was the start of an incredible thirty-year conversation about ideas, books, culture, politics, art, but also about feelings, care, children, illness, love and friendship. Laura was so alive and absorbed by ideas. We will all have conference stories about Laura – Laura loved travel and academic conferences – here are three memories. Laura and I playing hooky on an unseasonably warm October afternoon to go off on our own private architecture tour. Wandering along North Michigan Avenue for hours, with me taking photos for Laura of architectural details she wanted to write about, and her teaching me how to really look at buildings closely. We were like proverbial children in a sweetshop, swooning over the next beautiful building, and the next – modernist fan-girls. All the time, though, Laura putting this stunning American modernist urban landscape into the wider context of modernist architecture. The first thing to say about Laura in Sydney was her immense and very vocal pride at having survived the flight – Laura absolutely hated flying and never thought she’d manage the Australian trip. When I arrived, she had already been in Sydney a week, had got over jet-lag and was thoroughly enthused about the light and the food (both of which, as those of us who have ever been there will know, are very special in Sydney). This was my first Sound Studies conference, a thrilling new intellectual field to me. Laura was completely at ease in the field, thoroughly engaged and generative in all the sessions. She gave her stunning Keynote ‘The Rhythm of the Rails: Sound and Locomotion’ (which then appeared as a chapter in Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), which taught us how to recognise ‘implied sound’ in silent film, and explained the centrality of rhythm as a concept in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. High-octane field-defining intellectual insights, alongside laughter and gossip in the campus bar, before one of the best Thai meals any of us had ever eaten. Two women sit at a table, one comforting the other, putting a hand on her shoulder. The distressed woman, whose face we see, looks to be in deep emotional pain. A single table lamp illuminates the emotional scene of friendship. It is so poignant to look at the painting now, in the face of shattering loss. Laura went ahead of me, after we’d looked at Zrzavy’s work, into a new room and then returned excitedly to tell me she had found a painting I absolutely had to use in my medical humanities work. She pulled me into the room to show me Max Oppenheimer’s ‘Surgery’ (1912). It is a stunning piece of work, a fascinating mixture of Cubist and Futurist techniques brought to bear in the representation of the surgical scene. It was a brilliant find. I have used it many times since when I work with clinicians to think about how to conceptualise the body outside the clinical lexicon. That was Laura’s generosity, to be as excited about your research and its ideas as her own, her energy and curiosity just as vivid when it came to your work. Thinking across those memories, those three conferences (and there are so many other stories, so many other places and times), the arc from architecture, through sound, to the visual arts, is just a tiny snapshot of Laura’s magnificent intellectual reach. So, utterly brilliant and gifted, always curious, always exploring, making connections, huge-hearted, generous with her time, her energy, her deep love and her kindness, funny – often hilarious actually, and very often irreverent – Beloved Laura. I was not ready, none of us were ready, for the conversation to end. I am going to miss you more than I have the words to express. My love, all our love, goes with you. It is the great privilege
Referência(s)