In keeping with today’s first ever
Dalloway Day, honouring Virginia Woolf and her work, I offer a short text
below. This is adapted from a section of my article “On Not Knowing Text”:
Towards Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,”
originally published in Left Out: Texts
and Ur-Texts (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2009). Extensive thanks to the IDEA Editorial Board and the Reading Committee for all their help. They are named here https://idea-udl.org/recent-books-by-idea-members-ouvrages-recentes-didea/ and also here https://jsbak.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/lo-front_matter.pdf
Happy Dalloway Day!
Happy Dalloway Day!
Mrs Dalloway
has often been considered to be a parody of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both books have lead protagonists that, like Odysseus,
travel in single-day time frames.* As Ralph Freedman noted, Mrs Dalloway is “an ‘anti-novel’ in the
true sense of the term because its portrayal of the act of knowledge subverts the conventionally accepted qualities
of the novel which are focused on the intercourse between men [sic] and
worlds.”**
We find, for example, Einstein and
Mendelian theory named early in the novel (page 24)*** in conjunction with an
airplane being watched by a crowd of people—“a symbol” the novel tells us “of
man’s (sic) soul.”
Woolf’s use of allusions and
quotations in Mrs Dalloway (Modernism
loved intertextuality) is already well developed in her short story collection Monday or Tuesday (1919). And she refers
to the development of her experimental techniques in a 1920 diary entry:
“Conceive,” the Diary invites its
implied readers, “Mark on the Wall,
K[ew] G[ardens] and Unwritten Novel
(sic) taking hands and dancing in unity.” And later in the same entry Woolf
notes: “I must still grope and experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of
light” (Diary II, 14).
Woolf is apparently referring here
to the use of parody or intertextuality, clearly seeking some novelistic gain
in depth or texture. In “Kew
Gardens” for example we
find an emphasis on the microcosm/macrocosm duality as fragments from the
conversations of different characters are presented while the external narrative
voice of the story ekphrastically registers changes in the intensity of the
natural daylight, sometimes through the imagined perception of a snail.
Woolf’s modern attitudes toward
science and nature were influenced not only by people like Roger Fry and Bertrand Russell
but also by such publications as The
Athenaeum and The Times Literary
Supplement, as Michael Whitworth has noted.**** The other two stories
mentioned above similarly play with perception/cognition. And while it is true
that none of the devices used in these avant-textes
is new, Woolf’s handling of them demonstrates an extremely high technical
ability.
As this ability grew, similar
invocations of scientific understandings of luminance and color perception like
that found in “Kew
Gardens” would continue
to be used. Both Mrs Dalloway and
pre-textual “Kew Gardens” mark major literary turning
points.
*See Molly Hoff, “The Pseudo-Homeric
World of Mrs Dalloway,” Twentieth Century
Literature 45:2, Summer 1999.
**Freedman, R. The Lyrical Novel… Princeton UP,
1971.
***Woolf, V. Mrs Dalloway. London,
Penguin, 1969.
****Whitworth, M.H. In The Cambridge Companion to
Virginia Woolf, 2000, 146-63.