Striking out in a New Direction: Elegy and the Sustaining Cross-out

Here, I propose that the cross-out (like so), in its simultaneous attempt to erase and preserve a word, models a form of elegy that does justice to the traumatic past while enabling narrative progression. It is a mode of repair rather than despair. Virginia Woolf, with her penchant for the cross-out, sets an example for two contemporary elegists: poet-essayist Anne Carson and novelist-critic Namwali Serpell. All three look to the cross-out as an alternative to conventionally male forms of elegy, which prize victory over the past through erasure.

Woolf famously labeled her novel To the Lighthouse an “elegy,” writing, “Until I was in the forties—I could settle the date by seeing when I wrote To the Lighthouse . . . the presence of my mother obsessed me.”[1] She continues, “I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. . . . I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest” (Woolf, Moments of Being, 81). Yet the maternal presence resurfaced in Woolf’s work, despite her stated wish to bury it. According to Hannah Sullivan, “Despite the strong aspectual claims to closure made in To the Lighthouse . . . [her memoir]‘A Sketch [of the Past]’ shows that the process was incomplete.”[2] So too with characters like Clarissa Dalloway, who anxiously declares “it was over” in light of the continual eruption of the past and reappearance of the dead.[3]

Woolf is particularly alive to the incessancy of grief in To the Lighthouse. Lily Briscoe, the painter-elegist of that novel, revisits her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James. “The Lighthouse” culminates in a seemingly final, definitive brushstroke: “[S]he drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished” (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 209). Lily’s gesture recalls the strikethrough, the humble proofreader’s mark with which Woolf was intimately familiar as cofounder of the Hogarth Press. She puts a tree in the center of the painting, striking a line through the mother-son delta, thereby transitioning from a figural to an abstract mode. Hannah Sullivan “read[s] Lily Briscoe’s last brush stroke as an allegory of not revising. . . . a projection of Woolf’s own desire to be rid of the troubling, traumatic material of her childhood” (Sullivan, The Work of Revision, 197). In her telling, To the Lighthouse is about putting down the pen; I see Lily’s strikethrough instead as a last-minute revision made in the proofing stage. Although she feels her painting is “finished,” she might equally “stet” this strikethrough (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 209). Her elegiac revision is reversible, nowhere near as conclusive as the book’s final line, “I have had my vision,” might suggest (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 209).

A cross-out is a way of eliminating a word, but also letting it remain. The fundamental metaphysical problem of Woolf’s work—how to describe something that is first there, and then not—is crystallized in this figure. For Woolf, rewriting traumatic events (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse) and rewriting history (“A Room of One’s Own”, Orlando) are close akin. Woolf envisaged elegy as a way of enfranchising those characters and persons assigned no place in the canon, such as the fictitious “Judith Shakespeare,” elegized in “A Room of One’s Own”, and “Mrs. Brown,” elegized in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” As Gillian Beer notes, “Re-writing sustains and disperses, dispels, restores, and interrupts.”[4]

A growing body of genetic criticism locates this phenomenon within Woolf’s composition process. “Woolf as a reviser,” writes Julia Briggs, was adamant in her “refusal to provide a definitive or final version.”[5] Her manuscripts are pocked with cross-outs. Take the famous double exclamation of Mrs. Dalloway: “What a lark! What a plunge!” (Woolf, 3). In manuscript we see for “lark” first “ecstasy” and second “miracle,” both crossed out (fig. 1). The final page of the Mrs. Dalloway manuscript includes a number of crossed-out lines and false starts. “[Woolf] rewrites copiously,” according to Hans Walter Gabler, and “develops a tendency even to overwrite‘herself’—to create auto-palimpsests.”[6]

Subsequent authors like Serpell and Carson carry forward Woolf’s struggle to depict the past—to cross it out without erasing it, to preserve it without letting it consume the present. To take just one example cited by Gabler, Woolf changed the symbol for her earliest memory from a “stem” to a “bowl” with a “base” in the manuscript of “A Sketch of the Past.” Gabler also looks at Woolf’s heavily worked over passage about her father’s temper tantrums over the family ledger book. “Phrases and sentences are repeatedly crossed out, and the margin is replete with comments and additions yet to find their place in the narrative flow,” writes Gabler (“Auto-Palimpsests,” 280). These changes dramatically reshape the scene—it is the irate Leslie Stephen whose fingers tremble, rather than the young Virginia. For Woolf, cross-outs were essential to the process of working through traumatic childhood memories. Woolf relied on them in advancing her writing from draft to proof, layering multiple perspectives and temporalities through additions, deletions and revisions.

In her “Appendix to Ordinary Time,” an elegy to her mother, Carson takes solace in the Woolfian cross-out. Like Beer, she sees in it a sustaining practice that enables continuation:

“Crossouts are something you rarely see in published texts. They are like death: by a simple stroke—all is lost, yet still there. For death although utterly unlike life shares a skin with it. Death lines every moment of ordinary time. Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped and had no grasp of. Death is a fact. No more or less strange than that celebrated fact given by the very last sentence of her diaries (March 24, 1941):

L. is doing the rhododendrons.

Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times. It may be a stage of grieving that will pass. It may be I’ll never again think of sentences unshadowed in this way. It has changed me. Now I too am someone who knows marks.

Here is an epitaph for my mother I found on p. 19 of the Fitzwilliam Manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s Women and Fiction:

such                                                                 Obviously it is impossible, I thought,

abandon                                                                                  looking into                  

ment                                                                            those foaming waters, to        

such                                                                 compare the living with the dead      

rapture                                                                        make any comparison”[7]

Along with Woolf, Carson views elegy as a way of retaining, while striking through, the past. She seeks to preserve both versions of the text she finds in manuscript. Struck through on the right is a meditation on drowning, Woolf’s idée fixe, and on the breach between the past and the present, the living and the dead, a version of which appears in “A Room of One’s Own”. Yet on the left is the ecstatic text, “such abandonment such rapture,” enjambed, by a happy accident of the manuscript, for the latter-day poet. In juxtaposing the two, Carson, by way of Woolf, models a daughterly form of elegy that, in contrast to the male elegiac tradition, neither erases nor defeats a predecessor.

Elegy, in the English tradition, is a way of bidding farewell to the past while consolidating one’s poetic authority in the present (e.g., “Lycidas”, Adonais). For Woolf and Carson, cross-outs mediate the power imbalances implicit in the genre. Their mode is more collaborative, enabling forms of repair unafforded by traditional elegy. The phrase “strike out” is illuminating: these elegists strike out a word, phrase, or image, as well as striking out in a new direction. For them, the strikeout is not fundamentally about erasure. Rather, it is about adding on, accretively, to the ineliminable original word.

Consequently, Carson eulogizes her mother in the present tense, much like Woolf in “A Sketch of the Past”: “It grows dark as I write now . . . I see my mother, as she would have been at this hour alone in her house, gazing out on the cold lawns and turned earth of evening, high bleak grass going down to the lake. Or moving room by room through the house and the silverblue darkness filling around her, pooling, silencing” (“Appendix to Ordinary Time,” 165). Her use of the present tense and of participles shows not just the difficulty of achieving closure by means of elegy, but also the deceptive promise of “closure” made by male elegists, who attempt to put paid to the past by definitively burying the dead.

Similarly, Carson’s elegy for her brother, Nox, includes several pages of text that are rubbed or crossed out so as to be illegible. In Nox, which takes the form of an accordion-fold book, the same exact paragraph repeats four times in a row.

“2.2. My brother ran away in 1978, rather than go to jail. He wandered in Europe and India, seeking something, and sent us postcards or a Christmas gift, no return address. He was travelling on a false passport and living under other people’s names. This isn’t hard to arrange. It is irremediable. I don’t know how he made his decisions in those days. The postcards were laconic. He wrote only one letter, to my mother, that winter the girl died.”[8]

As an elegist, Carson enters the lull of repetition, reinscribing a series of events in order to contain her grief, but the habit of reinscription only takes her so far. In the final iteration, the words are cut off by the next crease in the accordion-fold. The form of the unbound book literally forces continuation where the elegist might otherwise dwell in repetition. By means of book(un)binding, the text is struck through, so that the elegy can come to a close.

Namwali Serpell, too, depicts sisterly elegy as a mode of “sustaining and dispersing” (Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, 94). Serpell has said that her 2022 novel The Furrows: An Elegy, was influenced by To the Lighthouse. “Virginia Woolf considered the same subtitle for To the Lighthouse, a key subtext for my novel,” Serpell commented in an interview.[9] “I like to think we had the same idea about rhythm and feeling, or that maybe I caught the idea just from rereading To the Lighthouse” (McDonald, “An alternative to acceptance”). Elegy unites the two novels, whose authors strive to perform a kind of grief work through them. As Serpell puts it, “Like [To the Lighthouse], The Furrows is structured with the meter and rhyme of an elegy” (“An alternative to acceptance”). And like To the Lighthouse, The Furrows, which centers on the traumatic death of the narrator Cee’s younger brother, compares male and female forms of mourning. Serpell shares with Woolf and Carson a concern that erasure is unjust, but she also points to the limitations of therapeutic modes of redescription. Her book thus tests the capacities of elegy as a reparative mode.

The central event of The Furrows is the drowning of Cee’s brother Wayne while they are at the beach. The artistic problem of the novel—how to fill in the absence of grief with words—attests to Serpell’s deep kinship with Woolf.[10] Cee begins the novel with a line repeated throughout: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.”[11] Yet to do so she relies on the reports of others to make sense of the event.

“Later, [my father] said I told him what had happened. It must have been incoherent, inconsistent, perhaps self-contradictory. I have since pieced together, for example, that in the early days, I didn’t always mention the bent thing I saw being pulled into the water, and what I said about the windbreaker man varied enough with each telling to rouse suspicion. I don’t even remember that fist telling” (Serpell, The Furrows, 9).

Serpell shows how each recollection, and each secondhand account of her recollections, is overlaid onto the original experience, making it difficult to distinguish retelling from event, something like Woolf’s “lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.”[12] As Cee gets further from the event itself, the likelihood of finding Wayne, whose body is never recovered, fades from view.

Therapy proves conducive to Cee’s habit of rewriting. After being put in therapy, she becomes an expert at changing the plot. Varying accounts of Wayne’s death punctuate the novel:

“When I was twelve, my little brother drowned. He was seven. I was with him” (Serpell, The Furrows, 3).

“When I was twelve, my little brother got hit by a car. He was seven. We were crossing a road together, just the two of us” (44).

“My little brother died when I was twelve. He was seven. We were at the park, just the two of us. This was allowed” (87).

Like their daughter, Cee’s parents dwell on counterfactual versions of the event in which Wayne does not perish. Their counterfactual thinking becomes its own kind of repetition compulsion:

“[I]n our family, there was a story, there was this lore, but it split in two where Wayne had left it. It split, then circled around the empty space where he should have been, and joined back together at the point when I walked into the house without him. The lore was a loop at the end of a rope, a lasso endlessly tossed, catching nothing” (29).

Wayne’s missing body generates an endless array of possible stories, since it is literally impossible to lay him to rest.

Cee’s family fights over the right way to mourn. After his drowning, the family begin to find Wayne’s drawings on the walls of the house. Cee resists her father’s attempt to erase them. “He had taken to painting over each one the moment we found it. . . . But he didn’t ever paint over the first one they’d found, behind my dresser. I didn’t let him. It felt important to the balance of the situation that it stay there” (33). Later, Cee catches her mother recreating Wayne’s drawings on the walls of the study. Cee’s mother reproduces her son’s scribblings in facsimile in order to preserve his presence; her father’s attempt at erasure is counteracted by the maternal impulse to reinscribe (34). Even Cee’s mother begins to harbor doubts about the therapeutic possibilities of rewriting, however. In one scene, she confronts her daughter after she finds Wayne’s name all over a telephone book in her daughter’s handwriting; Cee has absently written his name over and over, with “no memory of writing it” (77). That she writes his name in the telephone book, rather than on a blank sheet of paper, is telling—she is overwriting a preexisting text, however mundane. It is her own “auto-palimpsest.”

Rewriting risks compromising one of the chief functions of elegy: to lay the traumatic past to rest. The Furrows slows down, as the narrator repeatedly reencounters Wayne during hallucinatory sequences. Gaps in the text mark these breaks with reality, like the bracketed asides of the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, and the novel switches voices halfway through. This attempt at moving on points to the limitations of rewriting. Where Woolf finds catharsis, which she likens to psychoanalysis, Serpell’s novel emphasizes the futility of contemporary therapeutic modalities in processing grief.

The Furrows shows how elegiac rewriting can tip into a repetition compulsion, how therapy can impede narrative progression by keeping the bereaved in thrall to the same loop of remembered events. Of Freud’s repetition compulsion Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis write, “[I]t is difficult either to lay down its strict meaning or to define its own particular problematic: the concept reflects all the hesitations, the dead ends and even the contradictions of Freud’s speculative hypotheses.”[13] Freud’s difficulty lay in the apparent incompatibility of the repetition compulsion, which plunges the patient into a state of renewed distress, with the pleasure principle (Sullivan, The Work of Revision, 194). As Serpell makes clear, rewriting offers an illusory pleasure principle of its own: the possibility of establishing narrative mastery over the past, which comes at the risk of reliving it.

The analogy of mourning to an ongoing process of revision and reinscription unites these three authors, who repudiate older topoi of erasure and burial that characterize male elegy. After all, Lily Briscoe does not simply destroy her painting in order to begin anew—she puts a line through it. Carson does not erase an old text, but rubs it out, creases it, and strikes it through. And, although Serpell does not directly point to the strike-through, she does point to the false promises of erasure. Perhaps the best way for Cee’s family to grieve would be not to recreate or erase Wayne’s drawings, but to draw over them.

Erasure implies a certain paternalism, which interferes with daughterly and sisterly habits of mourning; pure reinscription, meanwhile, poses the threat of endless lamentation. These three elegists therefore look to the cross-out, and analogous formal devices (the fold, the crease, the palimpsest), to move forward. The cross-out offers an imperfect strategy for mediating the competing urges to reinscribe and to erase, for binding the past to the present without quite “laying it to rest” (Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past, 81).