The Army of the Upright

Woolf wrote the essay about illness that English did not have, complained inside it that English could not hold one, and then went back four years later and quietly made her own sentences stranger. This sheet mounts the text as she left it in 1930.

Illness has no place in literature

The essay opens with a list of what a temperature does to a person — the undiscovered countries, the wastes and deserts of the soul, the ancient and obdurate oaks uprooted by a bout of flu — and then lands on a complaint about the shelf:

Novels devoted to influenza, she says; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to tooth-ache. It is a joke and it is not a joke. Love and battle and jealousy are the themes that got the canon, and every one of them is something a body does while upright and in motion. The condition that stops the body is the one the shelf has no room for.

This is a claim about literature, and it is also a claim about who gets to be a subject. A century of Disabled and chronically ill writers have made the second claim directly. Woolf makes the first, in 1926, and leaves the second sitting underneath it.

The language runs dry

Her explanation for the gap is not squeamishness. It is vocabulary.

It has all grown one way. A language is a record of what its speakers were required to be able to say. Hamlet got four centuries of vocabulary; the shiver got none. So the person in the bed is left, in Woolf's account, with nothing ready made — forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other… so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

She then does it herself. Chloral hydrate, the sedative she reaches for, arrives in the essay as that mighty Prince with the moths' eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral — a mythological figure invented on the spot because the pharmacological name will not carry what the drug means at four in the morning.

Where we take this next is ours and not hers. Coining words for what the language has no room for is exactly what Autistic and Disabled communities have spent decades doing — monotropism, neuroqueer, bodymind, spoons. Woolf is describing one sufferer, one headache, and one doctor in the nineteen-twenties. She is not anticipating a lexicon that people would build a hundred years later out of their own lives. Reading her sentence forward to meet it is our move. The observation that the language grew one way is hers.

Deserters

Then comes the sentence this sheet is named for. Woolf has been describing the effort health demands — the genial pretence, the endless obligation to communicate and share and work together — and the moment it stops:

Normativity, named as a posture. Not a belief, not an attitude — a way of holding the body that the rest of it is conscripted into. The army of the upright. Vertical, mobile, productive, on time. An inch of foot above the floor is enough to break the enlistment.

What makes the sentence hold is that Woolf does not treat desertion as defeat. The deserter is the one who can finally look round, to look up—to look, for example, at the sky. The upright never see it: their sky is mutilated by chimneys and churches and serves as a background for man. Lying down is what gives it back.

An essay that had only complained about being ill would not be on this site. This one says the position everyone is arranged into is a position, and that leaving it lets you see.

The body intervenes

Underneath both arguments is a third, and it is the one that has aged least:

The creature within, she writes, can only gaze through the pane — smudged or rosy — and cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant. That is a refusal of the mind–body split, written plainly, decades before the word bodymind was available to say it in one breath. Again: the word is not hers, and we are not putting it in her mouth. The refusal is.

What this sheet will not tidy

The same essay is snobbish about the people doing the caring, and it reaches for empire when it wants a figure for effort.

Sympathy, Woolf writes, is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part… who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions. She then names three of them by their initials, with real affection — the friend who builds up the nursery fender by the sickroom fire, the one who would ransack London for a giant tortoise to solace you. They are the reason the essay exists. They are also, in her sentence, the ones who lost.

And the labour of staying upright is to communicate, to civilise, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work together by day and by night to sport. The desert and the native are doing figurative work in a list about going to the office. That is the imperial imagination supplying a metaphor without being asked, in 1926, in a sentence about being tired.

Neither of these is a reason to put the essay down, and neither gets softened here. An essay can see the arrangement of the upright with total clarity from inside the bed and still not see the arrangement of the sickroom it is lying in — who is paid, who is unpaid, who is a woman, who dropped out of a race she was never going to be allowed to win. Woolf is describing care work as the occupation of people with nothing better to do, while being kept alive by it. The sharpest reading of normativity in the essay is the one it does not turn on itself.

She revised her own sentence

One more thing, and it is the reason this sheet names its edition on the label.

On Being Ill exists in two states Woolf authorised. It appeared in The New Criterion in January 1926, and she revised it for the Hogarth Press edition of 1930 — two hundred and fifty signed copies, the type set by her. The revisions are not corrections. In the first paragraph alone:

Look at the last two. In 1926 those are lists, punctuated the way a list is supposed to be punctuated. In 1930 the commas open out into and…and…and, and the sentences stop being tidy. Love and battle and jealousy arrive one after another with no rest between them. Null, and negligible and non-existent piles up instead of resolving.

It is the same move the essay is about. A writer who has just argued that the language grew one way went back into her own prose and un-grew it a little — in the direction of the breath, and away from the rule. She did it four years later, in type she set with her own hands, on a page she owned outright because the press was hers.

So the edition is not a footnote here. Quote the 1926 commas and you are quoting Woolf. Quote the 1930 and…and…and and you are also quoting Woolf. Quote one and date it to the other and you have made a claim about her that is not true. This sheet reads 1930 because the revision is part of what it is reading. The 1926 text is scanned and online, and it is worth putting beside this one.

In their indifference

The essay ends up among flowers, because the deserter, flat on her back, has time to look at them properly. Woolf watches the sky first and finds it divinely beautiful… also divinely heartless — immeasurable resources spent on something with nothing to do with human profit. Then she looks down at the rose, which has been standing still and steady in the earth all afternoon while nobody watched.

Not that the flowers care. That they do not, and are therefore not asking anything of you. Nothing in that garden requires you to be upright, on time, or getting better. It is the one relation in the essay with no demand in it — and Woolf finds it, characteristically, at the exact moment she has stopped being able to stand up.