Mrs. Dalloway is the tale of one warm day in June, 1923. Clarissa Dalloway is giving a grand party, and spends the day running errands in preparation. Her friends and acquaintances criss-cross London, connected to Clarissa by invisible emotional threads. We look back into Clarissa's past, we meet everyone close to her, and some who just pass by - including Septimus Warren Smith, her dark doppelgänger, haunted by the trauma of WWI.
Virginia Woolf took this tale in an aeroplane, dropped it from a great height, and smashed it into a thousand pieces. Then she put all the pieces back together, in entirely the wrong order, with some turned inside-out. When she was finished, Virginia Woolf had reinvented the novel. She also spread her own stylistic wings, and found a larger and more personal peace of mind.
Oblique Storytelling in Mrs. Dalloway
If you want to taste some of this work, here is the full text of Mrs. Dalloway.
Traditionally, a story unreels like a comic strip: the main characters are introduced; time flows forwards; the plot advances through several scenes, complications and resolutions; finally the whole story has been told, and our big picture has transformed into a definite new shape.
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is far less linear and straightforward: it whirls like a kaleidoscope. As you turn the pages, you pass through dozens of minds and personalities; colors and shapes glide over each other, then leap through time or space into brand new patterns. Virginia Woolf parades hundreds of disparate elements before us: shards of character, scenery, imagery, insight, poetry - from the everyday to the alien; all the soft, the sharp, the shining shapes she can cram in her kaleidoscope.
So this is a weird book. The storytelling is fragmented, elliptical, slippery; the language is literary, sometimes visionary, sometimes obscure. But if you have the patience to follow her without demanding instant clarity, Woolf will feed you rich slices of life, and leave you in the end with a pretty clear view of her tale: Clarissa Dalloway's history, friends, and spirit.
Mrs. Dalloway is a brave, visionary departure from the traditional novel. I've only read it once, and I can't yet grasp all Woolf has achieved here. But three things already strike me as genius: the startling poetry of Woolf's images and language; her breadth, empathy and precision, in exploring human nature; most of all, her radical reshaping of the novel. Woolf takes so many splinters of awareness, and invents an alien architecture, which shapes them all into a surprisingly coherent whole.
I can't explain Woolf's style in Mrs. Dalloway, but it reminds me of three authors. It looks most like James Joyce's experiments in Ulysses. The streams-of-consciousness, the epiphanies, and the play with language all point that way. But Woolf said she wasn't borrowing from Joyce. She was intensely absorbing Proust while writing Mrs. Dalloway, which partly accounts for the "Joycean" features I mentioned, and also her preoccupation with time and memory. Thirdly, there is much musicality in Mrs. Dalloway, in both the accents and the architecture: characters have different tones, and leitmotifs; and there is something symphonic in the construction, with Big Ben tolling out the movements. These same musical elements appear in E. M. Forster's books. Writing at the dawn of modernism, Woolf was in tune with the literary ferment around her, but she drew in these elements and created a form which belongs uniquely to her.
"Perhaps her masterpiece . . . exquisite and superbly constructed . . . Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can." - E. M. Forster
"Virginia Woolf is one of the few writers who changed life for all of us. Her combination of intellectual courage and painful emotional sensitivity created a new way of perceiving and living in the world." -Margaret Drabble
Clarissa Dalloway appeared in Virginia Woolf's first novel,
The Voyage Out (1915), and popped up in five short stories as well. The idea of the novel occurred in October 1922, and spent two more years growing to fruition.
[In the following I borrow several quotes, and some insights, from the Introduction to the Everyman's Library Mrs. Dalloway]
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Personality, Madness and Original Style
After her second novel, Jacob's Room, Woolf wrote "There is no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice . . . At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain". But many critics and friends were worried that Woolf had written herself into a dead end with Jacob's Room; she knew she had to reach further, for a larger style, more clearly her own.
When Virginia Woolf threw Mrs. Dalloway from her aeroplane, and spent years putting the pieces back together, she developed a style and form to express her own strange voice and way of seeing. Mrs. Dalloway was an artistic catharsis for Woolf, a place to integrate her troubled mind.
Virginia Woolf poured a lot of herself into Mrs. Dalloway. In the introduction to the 1928 American edition, she wrote that a novel comes to the writer just as flowers and fruit come to a tree "which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life, of our first experience." Writers do some of this self-mining with each novel they write. But Mrs. Dalloway struck deeper for Virginia, and revealed more of her inward richness. She also poured more of her own madness into this book: like Septimus, Virginia heard birds singing to her in Greek, and tried to throw herself out of a window.
Woolf's diaries chart her explorations: "It is a general sense of the poetry of existence that overcomes me. Often it is connected with the sea . . . I have the sense of the flight of time . . . And as usual I want - I want - But what do I want?" A year later: "It is poetry I want now . . . I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing - have no time to waste anymore on prose". Six months later: "I think writing must be formal. If one lets the mind run loose it becomes egoistic, personal, which I detest."
Woolf knew she was reaching beyond herself, and understood the work she had to do. She developed the themes and characters of Mrs. Dalloway, and wrote towards it for years; then she dedicated herself to the book from March 1924 until October. "In this book I practise writing, I do my scales"; she writes of her "tunnelling process" and "digging out caves" behind her characters. Woolf sketched, and pushed, and shaped until she had built a formal structure which could encompass "the poetry of existence that overcomes me", without drifting away into airy pretentiousness.
Virginia Woolf took all her shards of awareness, all her beautiful splashes of color, and fashioned a marvelous stained-glass window. She crafted with such care and precision that, in defiance of gravity, the window stuck in mid-air. When she had realized her vision she wrote in her diary, "This is the most satisfactory of my novels . . . As I think I have said before it seems to have plunged deep in the richer strata of my mind. I can write and write now: the happiest feeling in the world."
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Books that Teach their Readers & Improve on Rereading
I have not gone very far into the thing itself. It is a deep and peculiar book, and I have only glimpsed it once - I do not comprehend it yet. Mrs. Dalloway looks like one of those rare books, of such depth and strangeness, that you can see more of them on a second reading.
I'd compare it with Ulysses and Infinite Jest - two other books where the authors really spread their wings, and found highly original styles of their own. David Foster Wallace had madness in him, and I think James Joyce did too - he just had such powerful reason, that he was able to regulate all that inner wildness, and turn it to creative ends. There was that famous occasion when Jung had a session with Joyce's daughter, and came out to tell Joyce his daughter was schizophrenic. Joyce asked how that could be, when he and his daughter played with words in such similar ways? Jung replied that they were heading to the bottom of the same river, but James was diving, while Lucia was drowning.
A writer who is halfway to madness is liable to have very original visions to share, but it will take them talent, determination, and long hard work to forge a style of their own, to express the odd tangents they see, so that others can appreciate them too. The other side of this work is, they need brave readers, who are willing to look in unorthodox angles, at truths that may take a lot of untangling to discern. So, as poco wrote a couple of weeks ago, there are some books that have to teach you how to read them. A book can expand your consciousness. It requires work of the reader, and it can be disorienting - so few people will stretch themselves to appreciate an artist's weirdest tangents, unless they put the tangents in books which reward with interesting scenes, fresh insights, and deep humanity - like Mrs. Dalloway.
I will come back to this book, in a much later diary, and dig a little deeper, for the structure and themes: madness, time, water, love, feminism . . .
I'm sorry I didn't publish this Friday evening, as scheduled. I'm writing from the Rio Grande Valley. Winter hit last night, in the form of a storm. I had written this essay, and was typing it in. When I finished, I found the internet had gone out, and I lost half my work. But I'm glad you found this diary - thanks for being here.
There won't be a Books Go Boom! next week. I'm going to switch to a fortnightly schedule for several months. My hope is to get back to weekly Books Go Boom!, some time next summer.
Have you read Mrs. Dalloway, or anything by Virginia Woolf?
Is a little madness necessary for originality; or can an artist be absolutely normal, and just have colorful dreams?
What books have you found, that were better the second time you read them?