‘Can Flush Count?’ The short answer is ‘Yes – But, in more ways than one!’ This essay counts some of the ways. The historical, lived dog Flush (c.1840– 54), companion of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, given to her by Mary Russell Mitford and the subject of Virginia Woolf’s novel Flush: A Biography (1933), was apparently taught to count. But this parlour game with a poet is possibly the least interesting aspect of any investigation into numbers and animality in Woolf’s bestselling but least critically scrutinised novel. Canine counting and Woolf’s own recorded suspicion of measuring – ‘Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?’ (Woolf 1929: 73) – is here considered in relation to Catullus’s famous love lyric against counting and Derrida’s dictum ‘Counting is a bad procedure’, to argue that Flush: A Biography, Woolf’s much neglected ground-breaking work on animality, really does count.

COUNTING THE FLUSHES

‘Can Flush count?’ supplements a previous question I asked elsewhere: ‘Can Flush read?’. In attempting to respond to the latter I explored Woolf’s canine novel in relation to Derrida’s animal turn (Goldman 2016). I concluded with the short answer: yes, Flush can read (Goldman 2016: 172)! Flush can read image; he can read humans; he can read human writing. But which ‘Flush’ can read these things? For Flush is legion. Flush, too, is verb, noun and adjective. Flush is text, and more importantly, intertext. How might we collate him? How do we go about counting the number of Flushes that could come running when we call that name? Flush: A Biography undermines our faith in a singular, originary Flush.

Nor is Flush simply polysemic; rather, Flush is disseminated. Dissemination, according to Derrida, in ‘diverging from polysemy, comprising both more and less than the latter […] interrupts the circulation that transforms into an origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning’ (Derrida 1981: 21).

What better place to start than midway, in extracts from letters exchanged before and after a cross-Channel expedition?

As an experiment this journey interests me enormously. (Woolf 1975–80, vol. 3: 531)

Modernist Channel crossings may sometimes become narrow straits, a sort of critical shorthand for experimental exchanges between London and Paris. And traffic may in some received opinion likewise be considered preponderantly one way, particularly in view of Paris's postwar status in 1919 as the locus for the Peace Conference, and therefore for a while capital city of the political world, as well as the capital city of the international, transnational, cultural avant-gardes. But, recalling a nauseating and hungover Channel crossing, rough in many senses (see Virginia Woolf's hilarious cross-Channel mistranslation of this word cited in our Introduction [Woolf 1975–80, vol. 4: 197]) and made while he was working on ‘a big, clean-looking freighter’ on a regular run between Rotterdam and New York (1993: 139), Langston Hughes reminds us, in an aqueous autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), that it is possible to cross through the English Channel in many other directions too, and not only to other European destinations besides France and Belgium, the amorphous ‘Flanders’, metonym for all the Great War battlefields. For the English Channel/French ‘la Manche’ in fact mediates in the east with the North Sea (also the site of huge naval conflict), which incidentally was known until the Great War as the German Ocean on British and German maps alike (see Scully 2009), and hence east to Scandinavia and Russia, and in the west with the Celtic and Irish seas and the Atlantic Ocean.

This chapter is the fruit of my own cross-Channel scholarly activities, beginning with a lecture in June 2010 to the conference titled ‘“No Hawkers: No Models”: The Vicissitudes of the Modernist Muse’, held at the University of Westminster, London. I developed this work in April 2015 for presentation to the ‘Cross-Channel Modernisms Symposium’ at Reid Hall in Paris (the University of Kent's Paris Campus). The latter version was in fact delivered twice within the space of a few days, first on the University of Kent's home campus and then in Paris. Shuttling between England and France via the Channel tunnel, I was already reworking my text on a remarkable modernist cross-Channel figure who had shuttled a little less speedily but with greater sartorial panache by boat-train a century earlier.

Laughing Torso (1932), the ‘reminiscences’ of Nina Hamnett (1890–1956), recounts her notorious cross-Channel vicissitudes as a struggling artist in the 1910s and 1920s in bohemian London and Paris. It opens up all kinds of interdisciplinary modernist crossings and channels. Hamnett's was an astonishing career not only as a visual artist (whose reputation has only recently been recovered) and as a muse, model and self-fashioning bohemian (whose excesses in the bars of Fitzrovia, Soho and Montparnasse, for many of her critics, eclipsed her other talents), but also as a writer. Reappraisal of Hamnett opens fascinating conduits to numerous modernist circles and to many pressing as well as entrenched critical and theoretical questions on modernism, including its international, transnational and geopolitical, trans-temporal and interdisciplinary, and its (trans-)performative, lived and embodied, and cross-gender framings. Hamnett, in her cross-Channel person as well as in her art and writing, may be productively considered in response to Virginia Woolf's question ‘who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?’ (Woolf 1929: 73) .

Critics tend to focus either on Hamnett's early identification with the acclaimed modernist marble Torso (1914), the sculpture made by the French artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in response to a segment of her supple body as a fragment of classical statuary, or on her reputation as ‘Queen of Bohemia’ in both Soho and Montparnasse over many decades in the company of luminary modernist artists, writers and critics.

I will put my cards on the table—I never wanted to edit a Companion—to Virginia Woolf or any other writer. In fact, companions scare me. They create the appearance of coverage or the definitive word on any particular topic or subject. The very notion of a “companion” presumes familiarity, comradery, or friendship—or at least the prospect of these relations. Handbooks, even at their most perspicacious, invite us to think the topic can be made ready “to hand,” and often must find ways to make that possible—excising the unfamiliar, the far flown, or the foreign. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, admittedly, a 1999 volume updated more than five years ago, barely ventures outside Anglo-American writing, except by reference to Picasso, Freud, Marx, et al., and rarely moves outside of the period between the last decade of the 19th century and WWII. I wonder, what happens to a writer like Gustave Flaubert in these models— or that painter of modern life, Charles Baudelaire? What happens to the writers in the colonies, whose lack of access to cultural and economic power often means they don't “do” modernism or modernity until the second half of the century? In an effort to make these volumes less about traditional categories of coverage, Cambridge has begun to issue companions that look more like conventional essay collections, such as The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, or a recent one I've contributed to: The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. This is a good impulse, but it is hard to know why these should still be called “companions,” when those are, by their own definition, “a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.” Not to pick on Cambridge—Wiley Blackwell has also started to make more topical and less generic companions, like the Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, now in its second edition. This looks like a terrific book, with a whole section on “Race and Colonialism,” and another on “Performing Sexuality.” But I fear that companions are crowding out other work in the field, making it harder to publish groundbreaking monographs or other adventurous work that doesn't purport to provide a general overview.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary Arnold Bennett, no less, the famed pantomime rival of Bloomsbury, is the earliest source in Britain of queer's modern “chiefly derogatory” usage. He uses it in a diary entry of 26 March 1915 (published in 1932)—although it is difficult to assess how derogatory, if at all, this instance is: “An immense reunion of art students, painters, and queer people. Girls in fancy male costume, queer dancing, etc.” (OED; Bennett 550).

Turning to the source, we discover that the evening in question was a thoroughly Bloomsbury affair, involving a visit to an exhibition of radical art by the London Group (“some nice things but all imitative”), and thence to dinner with Lady Ottoline Morrell where Bennett finds “Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, Whitehouse. All these very much upset by the war, convinced that the war and government both wrong, etc.” (Bennett 127). Having witnessed the Bloomsbury related art and pacifism that inform many of the contributions to Queer Bloomsbury, Bennett's account of his evening with the Morrells concludes with a glimpse of Bloomsbury masquerade, orientalism and queer sexualities too:

The “queer people” on this occasion did not include Virginia Woolf whose debut novel, The Voyage Out, was published the day after this party (i.e. 26 March 1915) and who was convalescing in a nursing home following a bout of mental illness, but it seems likely that her sister and other Bloomsbury members were present. Her novel, which incidentally Vanessa Bell on its publication described as “a queer business” (Spalding VB 137), “appeared amid a season of unparalleled gaiety,” according to Frances Spalding, when “[a]s if in defiance of the war, Lady Ottoline Morrell was holding parties every Thursday” (Spalding VB 137).

The Queen had come.

These four words surely comprise the most direct sentence of Orlando: A Biography, the novel that taught Woolf ‘how to write a direct sentence’ (D3 203). Vulgar, bawdy, openly celebrating female autoeroticism, orgasmic pleasure, they nevertheless remain coded, cryptic, somehow hidden in plain sight. These plainest of words simply report, in base language of information, the historic arrival of Queen Elizabeth I at Knole in 1573 – if indeed the fictitious Orlando's ‘own great house’ (O 21) is the house that would not be inherited, because of male primogeniture, by the novel's real-life dedicatee, Vita Sackville-West. VSW's book Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) does not mention that visit, but clearly states that Knole was ‘granted to Thomas Sackville by Queen Elizabeth’ thirteen years later in 1586. In context and out, this sentence refuses to oblige any such innocent or literal reading. It is equally a direct, open report of a woman's having achieved orgasm: ‘The Queen had come’. With orgasm comes sovereign power too: ‘The Queen had come’. The pluperfect is the coup de grace: it was and still is no use arguing or worrying after the fact. An orgasmic feminist Sapphic coup had (has) already happened, so let us face the fact: ‘The Queen had come’.

‘To come’ for centuries has meant to ‘experience sexual orgasm’, its earliest recorded usage in a song, ‘Walking in Meadow Green’ (1650): ‘Then off he came, & blusht for shame soe soone that he had endit’. See too the notorious Earl of Rochester's pornographic collection Cabinet of Love (1714): ‘Just as we came, I cried, “I faint! I die!”’. An instance of female erotic urgency occurs in the anonymous Victorian memoir My Secret Life (c. 1890): ‘“Shove on”, said she, “I was just coming”’. Woolf would have read in Joyce's Ulysses (1922) two further lewd examples of coming: ‘Suppose you … came too quick with your best girl’; ‘yet I never came properly till I was what 22’. In 1928, the year of Orlando's publication, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), immediately banned for obscenity, furnished two more examples: ‘“We came off together that time”, he said’; ‘when I’d come and really finished, then she’d start on her own account’.

What Woolf has Archer do unto Jacob in the opening pages of Jacob's Room— “Ja—cob! Ja—cob!”—I propose doing unto that most unWoolfian word: “Her—it—age!” Now we have three words that truly do open up Woolfian portals, obsessed as her writing is by gendered pronouns and the passing of time. Is this trisyllabic utterance now a form of urgent shorthand, telegraphing the message: “She has become an object over time”? I can certainly see that message as fundamental to the concept of “heritage.” For “Heritage” speaks the sustained historical period of eugenically entitled patriarchal subjectivity that we still endure. Heritage is a toxic political and social convention— reifying, commodifying, subordinating, gendering and ranking all that it encounters.

Syllabling “Her—it—age!” also opens up the word's fantastic capacity for mondegreen, which did tempt me to write a paper on “Woolf 's Hairy Stage,” an argument predicated on the aesthetics of coiffure in the works written in that era of Woolf 's conventional long, loose locks and her badly bundled chignon— before she got herself that smart shingled bob in 1927! Or predicated on the gender and canine stakes at that formative moment when the hirsute family pet mongrel Shag (male), and Gurth the equally hairy (and male) sheepdog whom she shared with her sister Vanessa, were superseded in her affections in 1906 by the intermediary shorthaired and misnamed bitch Hans, the epicene boxer dog (the end of another Woolfian hairy stage).

My current work, Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog, tracks the shifting canine tropes underpinning Woolf's writings in numerous genres on multiple disciplines. Woolf's mercurial dog figure is a sliding signifier representing the historic, unequal struggles between men and women over artistic subjectivity, authority, and voice in verbal, visual, musical, and theatrical arts. For example, in the finale to the multidisciplinary pageant, in Between the Acts, the megaphonic voice urges the audience, fragmentarily mirrored back to themselves, to “Consider the dogs [who] do openly what we do slyly” (BTA 134). Woolf's signifying dogs intervene at the intersection between art and life, between artists and their subjects, between art and audience, between art and criticism, and between the arts themselves. What might be at stake, artistically, politically, and ethically, in the tricks performed by this evolving troupe of interdisciplinary dogs? One thing at stake I suggest is the as such of dasein where, according to Heidegger and others, the caesura falls between animal and man, the site of violence and creativity in all its multiplicities.

The “ironic apparatus” of the “anthropological machine,” according to Giorgio Agamben, installs a shifting caesura in the narrative of the historical “passage from animal to man” where or when an animal-not-yet-human births a human-animal, and where the acquisition of language is a key indicator of that passage from animality to humanity (Agamben 37). In patriarchy, we might add, the “passage from animal to man,” where or when an animal-not-yet-human births a human-animal, occurs every time a mother whelps a son!

The verb “whelp” serves my dogged interests here precisely because of its canine provenance. As the OED shows whelp is both noun and verb, the noun applicable to “the young of various animals” and humans, but distinctively canine in pedigree and often derogatory. The transitive verb, “whelp,” means of a bitch dog “To bring forth” or to give birth to “(a whelp or whelps)”; it may also serve intransitively meaning to “bring forth whelps” and again slides toward the derogatory. It has an “uncertain” etymology. Is it perhaps related to that other rare transitive birth verb “to world”?