Michael Cunningham, author of "The Hours," a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book built upon Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway" (itself named "The Hours" in draft form), has an essay in the Dec. 27, 2020, New York Times Book Review section entitled "How Virginia Woolf Revolutionized the Novel."
One of the points he makes is that "Mrs. Dalloway," published in 1925, is set in a single day. So was "Ulysses," published in 1922.
Another point he makes is that "a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly very ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life."
That should come as no surprise.
In 1919, Woolf wrote an essay entitled "Modern Fiction" that was published in 1921. Within it, she says: "Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on a ordinary day. ... Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought of as big than what is commonly thought of as small."
The emphasis is mine and in part because such sentiments underlie my own first work of fiction, "Manhattan Morning," which is related to Woolf in another respect -- to her essay "Street Haunting" even though I didn't know of that work until after I had published my novella.
Well, "Ulysses," too, traces the day of a very ordinary person, Leopold Bloom, on a arguably more ordinary day than that of Clarissa in one respect -- he's not hosting a party at which the Prime Minister is going to appear -- but less ordinary in another. Whereas Bloom knows his wife Molly is going to commit adultery that day, the closest Clarissa comes to that is feeling abandoned when her husband, Richard, an inconsequential member of Parliament, accepts a luncheon engagement with an elderly woman seeking advice on how to get a political letter published in The Times of London and then, feeling guilty about it, comes rushing home with flowers for his wife.
My only point: by the time "Mrs. Dalloway" appeared, the notion that a very significant novel could be written about an ordinary person on an ordinary day was not revolutionary. Indeed, some have argued Woolf was influenced in that respect by James Joyce's story, but I think her 1919 essay suggests otherwise.
Woolf praises Joyce, about whom she initially had mixed feelings, in "Modern Fiction," as a spiritual writer as opposed to what she viewed as the more materialist approaches of writers such as the hugely popular James Galsworthy.
And there are indeed some significantly spiritual aspects to "Mrs. Dalloway" that go unmentioned by Cunningham in his NYT essay. This is too big a subject to pursue here, but chief among the spiritual aspects of the book is just why Clarissa is giving her now famous party. It is not, as might easily be assumed, to help her husband's political career.
One good point Cummingham makes is that "Mrs. Dalloway" is a book about choices, or, to put it another way, about life's Y-junctions: should one take the right branch or the left? Would Clarissa's life have been better if she had married Peter Walsh, who has never been able to get her out of his mind, or pursued a same-sex relationship with Sally Seton? Both turn up at her party -- uninvited in the case of Sally, now a mother of five boys and married to a wealthy industrialist.
I suspect many of us in what are sometimes called our sunset years look back at our own Y-junctions and wonder what might have happened if we had gone left instead of right. Interestingly, Woolf in no way concludes her heroine's decisions in such respects were incorrect.
Cunningham goes on to say that the book's "most singular innovation" (not all that convincing in my humble opinion) is the manner in which it alternates the stories of Clarissa and a mentally disturbed World War I veteran named Septimus Smith. While they never meet in person, Smith in effect arrives at her party in the form of a doctor who saw him earlier in the day only to have Smith then commit suicide rather than accept what the doctor has prescribed. Clarissa is horrified by the news and is briefly dramatically impacted, but emerges apparently unchanged. That, at any rate, is as far as we know because Woolf doesn't take the story any further than Clarissa seeing her guests out in very much the same fashion as she always has.
"Though seldom discussed as such, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is one of the great novels of World War I," Cunningham says,
Well, yes and no. This is another big topic, but based on the available evidence, one can conclude that Woolf brought the war into the book only reluctantly. For instance, when she first wrote of the mentally disturbed Smith, in an unfinished short story, he wasn't a war veteran. Rather, he represented one side of her own bifurcated personality -- a powerful intellectual on one hand, and an episodically mentally and/or emotionally unbalanced person on the other. At one point, she very briefly depicted "Mrs. Dalloway" as an attempt to address that state of affairs.
Although Woolf lived through the war, she had no personal experience with its horrors. But she was mindful of a need to be relevant and especially after her second novel, "Night and Day," was criticized on that score. Her third novel, "Jacob's Room," can, and has, also been interpreted as being about WWI, but the evidence there is slim and indirect. It can also be interpreted as being about, or influenced by, the fate of her beloved brother, Thoby, who died of disease in 1906, or well before the war broke out.
Nonetheless, a work of art, once launched, becomes whatever the public thinks it is, a phenomenon that explains, in a closely related sense, how T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" came to be viewed as a great poem about World War I even if there is little evidence that was what Eliot intended, and indeed, some evidence he intended something very different.
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