Sunday Morning! Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Seemingly, anything written on the topic of literary modernism (including this post!) will include, somewhere near the start, Ezra Pound’s dictum to “Make it new.” The usual reading being that literature had grown stale and stodgy by the turn of the century, or at least by the time of the Great War, and needed to be recreated for a new generation who had no use for their elders’ cant; all of  Hemingway’s abstract “words you could not stand to hear.”

And there’s quite a lot of truth to this, but it runs into one significant problem: quite a bit of modernist writing is harder to comprehend than what came before it! Pound’s own Cantos are few people’s idea of easily-accessible reading; many readers find Ulysses fairly hard going and Finnegans Wake wholly putdownable; Zukofsky’s 800 page poem A is too daunting for most; allegedly, nobody ever finishes Proust; Djuna Barnes is either thrilling or inscrutable, depending on your mood; and many an undergrad has struggled to meet up with T.S. Eliot in the wasteland. You get the idea.

And yet… let’s not bury Modernism either because that list of titles really does stand out as significantly different from, say, Ivanhoe; and, to be blunt, I’d rather read nearly everything on it. Modernism wriggles and squirms and struggles to get out of your grasp before you can get it on your mental hook; but it’s also more alive than a great deal of literature that came before, and afterwards for that matter. Sally Rooney’s much-hyped prose, for instance, is as easily-readable as a diner menu, and I find it nearly as memorable.

But, when I read To the Lighthouse for the first time, it cut to the core of me and, reader, it left me shook. This was two weeks ago; the book was written in 1927; so there has to be something in the prose that transcends time and place and takes hold of some inner corner of the imagination and says, simply, Yes, me too. I’ve felt that as well.

Mrs. Dalloway was written 96 years ago, and I’ve read it this week for the first time. I was not quite as shaken by this novel, but it still seemed like a sort of telepathy was taking place between the reader and characters, which is something remarkable on the rare occasions when it happens. Most characters in novels are a bit like strangers passing on the street: we observe them, maybe make a few inferences about the type of person they are, and perhaps take sufficient interest in the situations in which they find themselves to follow them for a few blocks to see what happens, and then we move on. Afterwards, we usually recall more about the situations than the people.

On the face of it, what happens to Woolf’s characters is not particularly eventful: Mrs. Dalloway, an upper-class woman in middle-age, is shopping to prepare for a party she’s throwing in the evening. She has just been paid a visit by Peter Walsh, a former flame who has just returned from India, and who, we imagine, is the man she should have married, rather than the more stolid and reliable husband she chose. She sees off her daughter, Elizabeth, who also goes shopping with her history teacher, Miss Kilman, who seemingly loves her. In the street, their path nearly crosses that of a wounded war veteran and his wife, who are both struggling to hold together the frayed scraps of his sanity. At some point in the day, the veteran will be committed to pyschiatric care and throw himself from a window in order to avoid being locked up. At the party, Mrs. Dalloway will hear of the suicide and feel intuitively the stranger has made the right choice. And that’s the facts, folks.

But, as we saw in Proust, a dinner party can occupy hundreds of pages of prose- because it’s not the events that matter as much as the effect they have on the inner world of the characters. Woolf’s prose is vibrant, poetic, tuned to a higher pitch than the droning blather in most of our heads; it is always transluscent and often achieves radiance. Take this random passage, for example:

He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld. He lay resting, waiting, before he again interpreted, with effort, with agony, to mankind. He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging by the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music should be visible was a discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy’s piping (That’s an old man playing a penny-whistle by the public house, he muttered) which, as the boy stood still, came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint while the traffic passed beneath.

Okay, so the dude sat in a chair and heard some noises in the street below, most of us would have written. Stephen King has said that literary fiction is about extraordinary characters in ordinary situations. Yet these are all fairly ordinary characters; who hasn’t known a woman who married the more reliable mate who didn’t quite thrill her heart? Or a husband who loved his wife mightily, while aware she loved him just slightly less? How many young men have come back from wars scarred and unable to function in society? In the care of a lesser writer, this could be the stuff of melodrama, but nearly everyone remains calm here- externally. What we have, instead, is an extraordinary writer whose X-Ray scans a cross-section of her society and reveals what is going on below the chatter of psychic life.

Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell, c. 1912.

As a thought experiment, let’s consider Virginia Woolf to be a horror writer; at bottom, all of her characters are going to die. Naturally, this is true of all characters, aside from vampires, and all writers; and, sorry to say it, all readers. (Spoiler alert!) Death is the great et cetera for all of us. For the most part, we would rather not think of this. Sometimes, however, it will strike a person all at once that were they to pass from the earth at that very moment, there would remain no trace of them, any more than if they had walked through a train station without leaving a stain or scratch. And it is like that for all of us! Millions of generations have no more than wafted over the face of this earth and their meaning as individuals was wholly contextual and thus ephemeral. It’s an eerie thought, although it’s also strangely relaxing. Get married, get a PhD, perfect the atom bomb; in the end, the worms wait for you.

What’s uncanny about Mrs. Dalloway is all of Woolf’s characters know they’re going to die and are accutely aware of the implications for their living. (It is hard to read the novel and not think of Woolf’s own self-chosen death 16 years later.) They don’t carry on and have duels and scream and fight and make grand pronouncements about it; even the suicide is so understated as to be parenthetical. Instead, they do what we do: agonize and ruminate and run themselves ragged in their own heads.

And, in the end, it really doesn’t matter who Mrs. Dalloway married because, at least to her mind, there is no God; so, while her life would have been different, this is true of every branch of the river she did not take. Most of us, and her too, float with the current. The veteran’s suicide affected her because it was a decisive and selfish choice- something she has never made herself. And yet, if one choice is the same as another, we alone bear responsibility for the things we have done. Human beings are, it seems, obsessed with our own freedom; yet, any alien watching us from afar would have to assume that freedom is something we don’t particularly care for. We act as if we are not free because, in the end, we are very completely, and horribly, free.

And so, my friends, what are YOU pondering, reading, playing, watching, or otherwise wrestling with this weekend?