1. CW Art Presenting War Wednesday, 19 September 2018
Learning Outcomes
To be able to evaluate the significance of Art in the novel “Toby’ Room”

2. The People behind the Characters
Fictional Character
Actual Artist
Paul Tarrant
(loosely based on) Paul Nash
Kit Neville
(loosely based on) Christopher Nevinson
Elinor Brookes
(loosely based on) Dora Carrington
Henry Tonks
Actual Surgeon
Sir Harold Gillies

3. Toby’s Room
From the title onward, the book is an investigation into literary and artistic history, specifically the movement known as modernism. Literary modernism, or modernist literature, has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction.

4. Characteristics of Modernism
Modernist literature was a predominantly English genre of fiction writing, popular from roughly the 1910s into the 1960s. Modernist literature came into its own due to increasing industrialization and globalization. New technology and the horrifying events of both World Wars (but specifically World War I) made many people question the future of humanity: What was becoming of the world? Writers reacted to this question by turning toward Modernist sentiments. Gone was the Romantic period that focused on nature and being. Modernist fiction spoke of the inner self and consciousness. Instead of progress, the Modernist writer saw a decline of civilization. Instead of new technology, the Modernist writer saw cold machinery and increased capitalism, which alienated the individual and led to loneliness.

5. Characteristics of Modernism
To achieve the emotions described above, most Modernist fiction was cast in first person. Whereas earlier, most literature had a clear beginning, middle, and end (or introduction, conflict, and resolution), the Modernist story was often more of a stream of consciousness. Irony, satire, and comparisons were often employed to point out society's ills. For the first-time Modernist reader, this can all add up to feel like the story is going nowhere. A short list of some of famous Modernist writers includes Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Gertrude Stein.

6. Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
“Jacob’s Room” is one of the most unconventional modernist novels. It is in part an elegy for her beloved older brother, Thoby, who died in 1906 from typhoid contracted on holiday in Greece. But it also memorializes all the young men killed during the war. Jacob’s last name is Flanders and the novel ends with an allusion to his death in its fields. The novel’s most striking feature is its barely present so-called protagonist. Jacob appears in many of its scenes, but always indirectly. We seldom see him do anything, and even more rarely know what he is thinking. The novel challenges our ideas of what literary characters ought to do or be like. How minimal can characters be before we cease to identify with them? It similarly challenges our understanding of narrative progression and even of syntax.

7. The Bloomsbury Group
For Barker, modernism is exemplified by the Bloomsbury group, the set of writers, artists, and intellectuals centred in the neighbourhood around the British Museum, to which Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, later Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, first moved in 1905 after the death of their father. There they mixed with the friends Thoby had made in Cambridge in After Thoby’s death, the friends became ever closer, living and working together, even marrying, as in the case of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia and her upstairs lodger, a poor Jew recently returned from Ceylon named Leonard Woolf. In a sense, then, Bloomsbury itself could be called “Thoby’s room.”

8. Barker’s references to the Bloomsbury Group
In ‘Toby’s Room’, Bloomsbury is invoked through repeated references to Woolf’s work. A single page, only ten pages into the book, alludes to three of her works.
Elinor, spending a stifling weekend at the family home, goes to bed early where she sits in the dark so as to keep out the moths that terrify her sister. Moths feature regularly in her work, not least in her essay “The Death of a Moth” and in The Waves, the working title of which was The Moths. In ‘Jacob’s Room’ the young Jacob goes hunting for moths, including one that the definitive field guide misidentifies.
Later on the page and in the evening, Elinor listens to the noises of the house, which culminate: “Then silence, gradually deepening, until at last the old house curled up around the sleepers, and slept too,” a direct reference to the famous “Time Passes” section of ‘To the Lighthouse’.
A few lines later, Elinor herself settles down to sleep, hearing only silence, not the usual night noise of “a susurration of leaves, sounding so like the sea that sometimes she drifted off to sleep pretending she was lying on a beach.” The lines allude to the well-known beginning of Woolf’s autobiographical fragment “A Sketch of the Past,” where she describes falling asleep in her nursery in Cornwall to the sound of the sea.

9. Barker’s Attitudes towards the Bloomsbury Group
These allusions to the Bloomsbury Group are not intended admiringly. Bloomsbury is addressed critically, and not just through individual characters. When Kit says that only “a few nancy boys in bloody Bloomsbury” would understand Toby’s death, he speaks for his historical model, Nevinson, who reacted violently against Bloomsbury’s ideas of art. But he also taps into the novel’s broader anti-modernism.

10. Barker’s Attitudes towards the Bloomsbury Group
Resistance to modernism is typically expressed in characters’ reactions to the war. Particularly important here is Elinor’s growing distaste for the pacifism and conscientious objection of Bloomsbury, made evident through walk-on appearances by Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whom she meets while volunteering at Charleston, Bell’s country place in Sussex. Elinor writes bitterly in her diary that she suspects Bell and her set are talking about her abortive relationship with Paul; she feels herself “gossiped about, fingered, passed round, pawed at, the way the Bloomsbury crowd always do.” Bloomsbury acts here as a synonym for ineffectualness bordering on cowardice.

11. Further Research
Barker’s views on Virginia Woolf and The Bloomsbury Group
GROUP RESEARCH TASK
GROUP ONE:
Prepare a seminar on the war artist Paul Nash, including biographical details and details about his art work.
GROUP TWO:
Prepare a seminar on the war artist Christopher Nevinson, including biographical details and details about his art work.

12. How should an artist respond to injury, suffering and death?

13. Context AO3
During the First World War the British government developed a variety of art schemes to record and document all aspects of the conflict from the violence of the fighting fronts to the social and industrial change at home.
Art was seen as:
The means to convey the righteousness of Britain’s cause;
to bear witness to the experience of war;
to remember the fallen;
To provide effective propaganda.
The images which were produced continue to shape our interpretations of the First World War.

14. Over the Top by John Nash

15. Some early artistic responses to the war were unconvincing; some showed unrealistic scenes of hand-to-hand combat and cavalry charges in a style more associated with the Napoleonic or Crimean Wars of the 19th century. Others used out-dated religious and jingoistic imagery. Charles Ernest Butler’s narrative painting “Blood and Iron” depicts Christ comforting Belgium while the German Kaiser glances coldly on with the angel of death on his shoulder.

16. Blood and Iron by Charles Ernest Butler
Christ comforting Belgium while the German Kaiser glances coldly on with the angel of death on his shoulder.
Blood and Iron by
Charles Ernest Butler

17. Many artists and critics felt traditional methods of painting war could no longer provide an adequate or “truthful” representation of the conflict.
The unfamiliar and highly industrialised nature of modern warfare led to new and experimental artistic responses.
Percy Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist painting of a British artillery battery being shelled depicts a strange scene where soldiers appear dehumanised and insect-like.
A Battery Shelled by Percy Wyndham Lewis

18. The Doctor by C R W Nevinson
Artists who had witnessed the front line were seen as uniquely placed to deliver an authentic portrayal of the war. CRW Nevinson’s initial support of the war was challenged by his experiences as a medical orderly and ambulance driver in France. In this painting he portrays a doctor tending an injured soldier in a makeshift casualty centre outside Dunkirk. The awkwardly bent pose of the figure in the background and use of red throughout the painting stresses the terrible human cost of the conflict and its un-heroic nature.
The Doctor by C R W Nevinson

19. The painting on the next slide was one of the first based on first-hand experience of the conflict seen by the British public. It received huge public acclaim and generated much sympathy for the British soldiers on the Western Front. The image shows Eric Kennington's regiment, known as ‘The Kensingtons’, halting for rest at the French village of Laventie after leaving their frontline trenches.

20. The Kensingtons at Laventie by Eric Kennington
To emphasize his presence at the scene, Kennington included a portrait of himself, background left, wearing a black balaclava.
The Kensingtons at Laventie by Eric Kennington

21. Mines and the Bapaume Road, La Boiselle
Depicting the landscape of the Western Front was problematic for many artists. Long range artillery fire and the system of trench warfare meant that these spaces were rendered featureless. Nevertheless, there was a unique character to the landscape of the Western Front. William Orpen’s painting focuses on chalky soil of the Somme area of France. Churned up by shell-fine and mines and baked white in the spring sun of 1917, it generated an unworldly scene like a lunar landscape.
Mines and the Bapaume Road, La Boiselle
by William Orpen

22. The battered and scarred landscape of the Western Front had a profound effect on many artists. For Paul Nash the shelled woods, dismembered trees and traumatised fields became a metaphor for the wider destruction and suffering of the war. Depicting nature in this way became a means of understanding the war and modernising landscape painting.
The Field of Passchendaele by Paul Nash

23. Get students to each research one of the artists…
dpress.com/2013/01/08/art- war-and-regeneration-tobys- room-and-the-wolfsonian-book- club/
Paul Nash and World War One: ‘I am no longer an artist, I am a messenger to those who want the war to go on for ever… and may it burn their lousy souls’

24. Kit Neville, horribly injured and always outspoken, asks Paul Tarrant how he plans to paint about the War: “It’s all fairly straightforward. No bodies. You can show the wounded, but only if they’re receiving treatment. I think in practice that means bandages.” “So no wounds, either?” Paul shrugged. “I don’t know. It hardly applies to me.” “Well, I intend to push it as far as I can.” “Why, what’s the point? If you push it too far they won’t let you show it. Besides, you can get round it…” “You can. Your landscapes are bodies.” “Yes, I know. Don’t worry, it’s intended. I know what I’m doing. It’s the Fisher King. The wound in his thigh?” “Balls.” Paul looked surprised. Even by Neville’s standards that was forceful. “That’s where the wound is. Idiot. He was castrated.” “Oh, all right, then, balls. The point is, the wound and the wasteland are the same thing. They aren’t metaphors for each other, it’s closer than that.”

25. “Were they portraits, or were they medical illustrations
“Were they portraits, or were they medical illustrations? Portraits celebrate the identity of the sitter. Everything—the clothes they’ve chosen to wear, the background, the objects on a table by the chair— leads the eye back to the face And the face is the person. Here, in these portraits, the wound was central.” The present tense of the verb “celebrate” suggests not the submerged voice of the character but rather the heavy-handed explanation of the author.

26. How does Barker present the debate of the seemliness of making art in wartime?

27. Rounding up Context on ‘Toby’s Room’
Writing nearly 100 years post Armistice, Barker has more freedom in terms of being honest and open about the war and the suffering. E.g. Toby’s homosexuality.
It’s hard to shock a modern audience with regard to the “truth” of the soldier’s experience in WW1. Barker does this by choosing to expose the disturbing reality of the facially disfigured and their treatment at the hands of pioneering surgeon Gillies – a subject little known about.
Barker provides some historical status for the novel by choosing to represent two leading medical figures at the time: Dr Gillies and Henry Tonks. She also loosely bases some of the characters on war time artists who studied at Slade.
The work of Henry Tonks
The overlap of Art and surgery/anatomy
Links to the Bloomsbury group and Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room”