“Blue & Green”: One of Virginia Woolf’s “Short Things”

“Blue & Green” is a short piece included in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, edited by Susan Dick. First published in 1921 in Monday or Tuesday, it was only reprinted in 1985. It is difficult to identify its literary identity and the piece has even been considered as a prose poem by a number of critics. As befitted modernism, Woolf has constantly tried to find forms adapted to her kind of reverie. Here, under the shape of two paragraphs in the manner of pictorial “pendants,” she conjures up colours much like those Signac used in his neo-impressionist paintings. Woolf seeks to find a condensed poetic form rivalling with colour—from which she draws inspiration for those descriptive lines. From image to text and from image to the reader’s mind, this short short story, is striving to rival with “the sister art” by producing an instantaneous visual effect escaping time. Its form triggers the advent of the “pictorial third” I suggested to illustrate the cognitive workings of intermedial reception.