Georg-Johann, random pixels, colored by Polyominoe, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0.
“Let us try then to recapture some actual experience, which seems to have a connection with the experience of reading these old books; to spring from poetry; to be interfused with the same emotion,” Virginia Woolf writes in one of many fragmentary drafts of her final book, a history of English literature whose working titles included “Reading at Random.” It was to be nothing less than her own philosophy of reading. More than mere absorption of the written word, reading, for Woolf, was an active expression of the mind and a mode of “actual experience.”
At the time of her death in March 1941, Woolf had begun work on only two chapters of the book, titled “Anon” and “The Reader.” The New York Public Library’s Berg Collection holds the full archive of “Reading at Random,” including multiple manuscript and typescript drafts of each chapter, as well as Woolf’s initial reading notes. The project is little-known and hardly legible, composed as it is of disintegrating notebooks and unbound pages, the letters jumbled, the margins mottled with penciled and penned notes, the versos soiled, the edges crinkled, the handwriting spidery. To make any sense of the matter, the reader must squint her eyes and relax her mind and allow the words to occasionally, here and there, flower into meaning.
“Reading at Random” begins with a voice. It is the voice of Anon, the anonymous bard at the back door of the aristocratic great house, whom Woolf imagines as the origin point of the English literary project. While the phrase literary history suggests a straightforward chronology, Woolf suggests that its beginnings were disorganized, deviant; Anon’s was “a voice that stumbles, that repeats, that loses the thread of its argument …” It was also a voice that sometimes included a broader audience, or riffed on one. “He was a simple singer,” Woolf writes of Anon, “lifting a song or a story from other people’s lips, and letting the audience join in the chorus.”
Across the text’s two extant chapters, Woolf traces the development of English literature through the lens of its consumers. At first an itinerant singer living on the fringes of society, Anon gains renown with the advent of the Elizabethan playhouse and its raucous audience, followed by the growing primacy of the printing press, which in turn births the single, solitary figure of the reader. This is the story of a collective experience whittled down to an individual consciousness—her own. Woolf’s underlying quest is to discover how we can again connect reading to the book’s primeval, communal, and experiential origins: how to travel “the roads now faded in the mind,” uncover “the source of the sunk impulse … the hidden spring, the gush of water deep beneath the mud,” tunnel our way back to what she calls “the song beneath” the book.
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