Genre, Motifs, and the Failure of Hellenism in <i>Jacob’s Room</i>

‘Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens.’1 –Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses DIVISIONS BETWEEN GENRES are porous, and a work of literature may be other than it seems. Many critics blame Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) for not being a successful prose-fiction novel. But maybe it is something else. On the principle that literature most richly rewards interpretation that responds to what it is, I will demonstrate that Jacob’s Room is poetry. It has long been considered a poetic novel. In 1965, Josephine Schaefer wrote that, in it, ‘Woolf begins to break down the distinction between poetry and prose’ and ‘uses images the way a poet might’.2 At the very least, it might be considered a hybrid work, a poem-novel or novel-poem. But its operation, its way of being, is chiefly that of poetry, in particular modernist poetry, for which, when Woolf was writing Jacob’s Room, there was no lengthy or even mid-length precedent. Hesitation to call it a poem may reflect habituation to the short lyric or the conventional equation of poetry with verse. But epic-length poems we have always had with us, from The Iliad through The Divine Comedy, Piers Plowman, Paradise Lost, The Prelude, and the long poems and poetic sequences by Byron, Tennyson, and Browning. All of these are in verse, but that is not what makes them poetry. Verse is merely writing in lines that ‘turn’ (the Indo-European root meaning of ‘verse’) before reaching the page margin. Regardless of length of line or of the work, poetry is language used to maximum potential. Jacob’s Room is poetry in its richly lyrical language but also in what I would call its deep form, which consists of images that repeat with variation in symbolically expressive motifs.3

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