Attention or Interpretation: Pierre Bonnard, Virginia Woolf, and the Proverbial Table of Philosophy

Abstract The essay points to a profound affinity between Pierre Bonnard and Virginia Woolf, suggesting that these two modernists, while working in different media and probably unaware of each other, shared a similar perception of the dynamics of subjectivity and a common position on the relation of art and life. Woolf's immersion in and familiarity with contemporary visual arts has been well documented and extensively discussed, primarily in biographical contexts. The argument advanced by this essay, however, relates to Woolf's poetics, particularly as evidenced in To the Lighthouse, a text which—much like Bonnard's visual renderings of the everyday in his late interiors—is permeated by a self-conscious polarity between “attention” and “interpretation.” Drawing on the psychoanalytic conceptualization of Wilfred Bion, the discussion engages with the way these two “slow” modernists invite and insist on a mode of attention, that is, the way we read, view art, or listen to others, that precedes and at times undermines the workings of interpretation.