"But now what do I feel about my writing? - this book, that is, The Hours, if thats its name? One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? No I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense - ..." Virginia Woolf from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two 1920-1924
I have always found it odd that Woolf described the novel that was to become Mrs. Dalloway as a work perhaps not written from deep feeling or emotion. As Woolf and her title character are both about contained emotion, my suspicion is that she wanted to deflect attention from her own interior monologue, her own war wounds, in order to focus on this profusion of ideas to which she refers above, in order to craft a modernist work that emerged from her hands in an unselfconsciously new form.
Re-visiting the diaries while re-reading Mrs. Dalloway is in itself an education about the emergence of the modernist novel. Woolf seems wary of the Joyce she is reading around the same time as she is writing Mrs. Dalloway. Perhaps she found his forays into experimental form lacking in subtlety. Perhaps his humor was over the top for her. Perhaps she was uncomfortable with what she perceived as a neediness about his writing. Where Woolf's work came in under the radar, there was something about Joyce's work that screamed "Love me!" to the grande dame of Bloomsbury.Now where am I going with all of this? Woolf and Joyce were my introductions to stream-of-consciousness. Their works read at roughly the same time in college. And I always felt that the streamed interior monologue from Joyce, focused primarily in single characters was roughly equivalent to being under water - floating through one world but the realities of most apparent when you looked up and saw the sun shining through into the water, when you saw the shapes of others passing above this self-contained world. But with Woolf, with Mrs. Dalloway, I feel sucked under the waves with one character only to come up for breath for a moment before being drawn back down by the voice of another character. My unease at what such a physical experience such as that would be mirrors the unease of characters in the postwar world of the novel.
None of this would have ever crossed my mind probably if it were not for the water imagery in Mrs. Dalloway (in many Woolf books really). The references to plunging in to swim that pepper the book. And many other things as well.
"...like the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave."
" ... on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved."
"She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."
" ... on the ebb and flow of things."
" ... from the blue to the green of a hollow wave."
" ... but she had no patience with women who were afraid of water."
"It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together."
"So on a summer's day waves colect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all our sorrows, and renews, begins, collects. lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking."
" ... only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his."
" ... the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured its treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more."
All reflect the fluidity of the novel that moves from point to point in these waves of doubt, indifference or suffering all atop this beautiful, elegant structure of a novel that Woolf created. Now what I write here is all a bit sketchy today, maybe critically lazy, but I am just celebrating this old friend of a book in a personal way I suppose. Odd to feel such happiness, contentment over a read that holds such little joy?
Thank you so much to our host today, Sarah. Please visit her for more of the conversation. Also consider joining Emily on January 29 for To the Lighthouse, me on February 12 for Orlando and Claire on February 26 for The Waves. Woolf in Winter - it seems just the right time for this.
