My Strawberry Plants: On Marcottage

"Recently, I read Virginia Woolf’s first published novel, The Voyage Out, for the first time. There, I made a discovery: it features a character named Clarissa Dalloway. This encounter initially provoked delight, surprise combined with double take, like bumping into someone I thought I knew well in a setting I never expected to find them, causing a brief mutual repositioning, physically, imaginatively. ... Then I remembered why I’d had that 'caught out,' 'I should have known this' feeling: this same technique of novel-growth was also of great interest to Roland Barthes. In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in the late seventies, he named it marcottage. It’s a horticultural term...."

The Paris Review  

W - Strawberry

Alphonse du Breuil, Marcottage en serpenteaux, 1846. 


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