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Jared Griffin – I would like to pick up my paper at CSUSB. Thank you 
English 385
Professor Henry
May 11, 2009
Can’t Leave Out Kant: Sifting Through the Sublime, and Determining the Artfulness of
Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”
Although there are hundreds of people who visit art galleries everyday, ambiguity
exists in determining who actually understands true art. Many people walk through art
galleries, observe a seemingly simple painting, and think, “This painting is not art! It
looks like a second-grade child painted this. I should have just painted this myself, sold it,
and made a few thousand dollars.” This person obviously does not understand art because
they are most likely not educated in the history, theory, and tremendous thought that goes
into determining the exact definition of great art. Due to this widespread phenomenon of
art-illiteracy, one theorist, by the name of Immanuel Kant, spends time and effort
exploring his thoughts and definitions of art in an essay titled “Critique of Judgment.”
Within his essay, Kant focuses particular attention on the concept of sublimity as a
deciding factor of what is and what is not art. In the eyes of Kant, “nothing that can be an
object of the senses is to be called sublime” (522). Therefore, according to Kant, art must
represent something which humans can only perceive with their intellect rather than their
sensory receptors. With this base of Kant’s argument in mind, Virginia Woolf’s short
story titled “Kew Gardens” will serve as a great test subject in determining whether it
holds up to true artfulness. Therefore, the third-person omniscient narrator and the
seemingly mentally disturbed old man walking through the garden in the story, both serve
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as attributes of Woolf’s story that connects to Kant’s concepts of sublime art, due to the
stories ability to examine qualities of life that are beyond human sensory receptors, such
as the spirit world and the exploration of the perspective of a snail in a garden.
Kant’s notion of the sublime seems irregular at first because most people believe
that the inability to perceive something through their senses must mean that particular
item or concept does not exist. However, most people only think they do not participate
in the action of enjoying the sublime. People celebrate and participate in the concept of
love, even though perceiving it through human senses proves impossible. Therefore, in
examining the old man in “Kew Gardens” as he talks of spirits and has conversations
with flowers, one must not simply dismiss him as a lunatic, but as a symbol used by
Woolf to contemplate sublimity. In Kant’s essay, he puts forth the concept that art must
have “purposiveness without purpose” (501). Kant means that art should do nothing else
but be art. A mass-produced window sticker on a car cannot be art because it serves
multiple purposes as an aesthetic object, or a way to make a personal or political
statement. However, art only serves one purpose. In light of this, Woolf seems to use the
description of the old man’s body and gestures to trigger the reader’s attention to the fact
that she uses him as a symbol of the sublime:
The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his
hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an
impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these
gestures were irresolute and pointless. (Paragraph 10)
The man’s pointless gestures only serve one purpose, to cause the reader to ask the
question, “What is he doing?” Woolf almost immediately answers this question by
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explaining to the reader that the man talks incessantly, and mainly about spirits of dead
people. Even though this man is unable to perceive the spirit world with any of his five
senses, his communication with spirits sublimely and artily places his character as an
extension of the entire story into the realm of true art.
One other aspect of Woolf’s story that catapults it into the sphere of art in the eyes
of Kant with respect to the sublime is the omniscient third-person narrator with the added
ability to look through the perspective of a nonhuman character such as a snail. Since a
snail is very small compared to a human, looking through its perspective forces the reader
to view the universe as an even larger entity than its already immense size. For the snail,
Key Gardens is massive and has:
Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved
from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumbled surfaces of a thin
crackling texture – all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one
stalk and another to his goal. (Paragraph 9)
The snail attempts merely to cross a sidewalk which humans do in a single step. Little
blades of grass are large trees for this snail. Woolf’s ability to portray the perspective of a
snail so well aligns with Kant’s idea of the sublime when he states, “We call sublime
what is absolutely large” that is, “What is large beyond all comparison” (521). Kant and
Woolf understand that even though humans are immensely larger than snails, in
comparison to the size of the entire universe, the difference is insignificant. Humans are
but a speck of dust on a huge planet just like snails. Therefore, Woolf’s ability to
contemplate the comparativeness of objects in the universe, demonstrates sublime
attributes.
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In continuation of comparing snails to humans, Woolf brings to light the sublime
concept that in the midst of the lives of humans, the life of a snail is uniquely important
as well. The reader gains the most knowledge through the perspective of the snail within
the story. Although looking through the perspective of a snail is truly impossible, it is
possible to imagine what a snail may perceive. This act of imagination does not pertain to
humans’ fives sense but yet readers understand what Woolf does and therefore causes
sublimity and in Kant’s view, “our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while
our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so [the imagination, and] our
power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that
idea” (522). Even though humans’ ability to perceive the world is inadequate, it does not
mean we cannot comprehend its magnitude.
Even though the sublime attributes of art are not the only deciding factors of
determining great art, in Kant’s essay, he convincingly confirms his argument that art is
more than what tastes, looks, feels, sounds, or smells good. Art is something humans
contemplate as if they had a glimpse into another realm. Virginia Woolf does this in
“Kew Gardens” and invites the reader to ponder the vastness of the universe by
examining the smallness of a snail. This irony serves a wonderful purpose of giving the
reader an almost god perspective of the sublime universe. In understanding the sublime,
one learns to appreciate art more through studying its multiple levels of meaning and
striving to understand where its sublime attributes come into play in discovering more
about life. Therefore, the next time anyone visits an art gallery, reads fiction, or listens to
music, one must hold off personal biases, give the art a chance, and search for the
sublime attributes of all art.