Virginia Woolf
I read some Wolf trying to puzzle out why Deleuze
liked her so much. He cites her work as an example
of a haecceity in ATP
-- the dog running along the road at 5 o'clock.
Like the pedant I am, I searched a lot of Woolf's
work electronically with the search term 'dog' and
found no such actual quote.There is a lot about
dogs though. I think the dog running along the
road distracted by different smells in The
Waves is the closest. There is also the
adventures of Flash, E Barratt Browning's
dog and its life story,including its freedom when
it roams the streets of Naples. But it is a
made-up quote, with the 5 o'clock bit added in
tribute to Lorca's poem Lament
for Ignacio Sanchez Mejia which also
gets a mention in the bit on haecceity
Deleuze
also says Mrs Dalloway's walk will never be
repeated, so off I went like a klutz to read it
Mrs Dalloway
My first impression was that this is like a
bourgeois English Joyce. Woolf admires Joyce in
her Essays. She also talks of the emphasis
on character as the crucial difference between her
generation,misleadingly called the Georgians (as
in George V) to distinguish them from the
Edwardians: the former style was much more
descriptive, and almost sociological. She almost
anticipates autoethnography by saying we should
not explain character by reference to anything
external.
Mrs D's walk occupies the early part of the book
(not divided into chapters) as she walks around
Westminster and the West End buying flowers for
the party: she notices all sorts of divers
happenings on the pavements and in the streets,
including the prostitutes in Haymarket. Mrs D's
character is developed throughout the novel until
she finally emerges as a bit of a poser running
her posh party for the nobs (including the Prime
Minister), part of her duties towards her husband
who is an middle-ranking MP. The poor woman
hires extra servants to cope! Can you imagine! We
learn a lot about her past, her childhood in a
country house and her early acquaintances, and her
main love interest, the rather hopeless Peter
Walsh who let her go, moved to India to seek his
fortune, didn't do so and now returns to London,
ostensibly to sort out a divorce for his new lady
love in India. He may never go back, he realizes.
It's Joycean in that it interweaves Mrs D's walk
to get ready for her party and her
subsequent story into the lives of strangers
who happen to be in the same streets or are doing
something at the same time (more haecceities?).
[Mrs Dalloway is in
the crowd waiting for a royal to pass by]
'The Prince [Edward VIII] lived at St James's ;
but he might come along in the morning to visit
his mother. [Paragraph]. So Sarah
Bletchley [the name of a woman in the crowd,
like all of the ones in this section not central
to the novel] said with her baby in her arms,
tipping her foot up and down as though she were
by her own fender in Pimlico, but keeping her
eyes on the Mall, while Emily Coates ranged over
the palace windows and thought of the
housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the
bedrooms, the innumerable bedrooms. Joined
by an elderly gentleman with an Aberdeen
terrier, by men without occupation, the crowd
increased. Little Mr Bowley, who had rooms
in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the
deeper sources of life, but could be unsealed
suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentality, by
this sort of thing – poor women waiting to see
the Queen [widow of Edward VII] go past—poor
women, nice little children, orphans, widows,
the War—tut, tut—actually had tears in his eyes
(19)… [An aircraft appears sign-writing in
the sky]… Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by her
husband's side on a seat in Regent's Park in the
Broad Walk, looked up. [Paragraph]…
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are
signaling to me. Not indeed in actual
words; that is he could not read the language
yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this
exquiste beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he
looked at the smoke words languishing and
melting in the sky and bestowing upon him, in
the inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness,
one shape after another of unimaginable beauty,
and signaling their intention to provide him,
for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with
beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his
cheeks.' (21).
Septimus Smith is a returned war hero with PTSD
and an Italian wife. He gets hallucinations, many
of them more disturbing than the ones above,
and eventually kills himself, rather than be
institutionalized, just as Clarissa D is
greeting the early arrivals [without knowing,of
course -- they are separate stories] --
Walsh, at the party hears the ambulance bell
and thinks of civilization in England:
'... he had
found life like an unknown garden, full of turns
and corners, surprising, yes; really it took
one's breath away, these moments; there coming
to him by the pillar box opposite the British
Museum one of them, a moment, in which things
came together; this ambulance; and life and
death. It was as if he were sucked up to
some very high roof by that rush of emotion, and
the rest of him, like a white shell-sprinkled
beach left bare. It had been his undoing
in Anglo-Indian society—this susceptibility'
(135)
The Waves
Widely regarded as one of the most experimental
pieces, it details the perceptions and thoughts of
six characters for as they grow up go through
school and college and end up in various kinds of
careers. There's also a seventh character
that we never see, Percival, who plays a major
part in their lives as a kind of hero who meets an
early death. After their initial childhood
encounters where they merge into each other, they
gradually separate, and when they meet again for
the last time, they realize that they are quite
different: Susan, for example, has gone back to
her childhood home and married a farmer, while
Louis has become an important city figure.
Bernard is the one who gets to say the last words,
and he talks of quiet despair at the way in which
routine colonizes a life, at the way he has wasted
his life trying to capture complexity in an number
of phrases, and how it is all futile in the
end. Although it is Rhoda who actually
commits suicide, after a period of travel designed
to bring color back to her life, Bernard is the
most likely to kill himself, and it is easy to see
him as standing for Woolf herself. The other
characters are more lightly sketched I thought:
Jinny is a flirt and good time girl, Neville
barely emerges from the page at all, although we
learn he is an academic, and Percival is
thoroughly idealized throughout, as a kind of
sporting hero, dead manly, unafraid to go to
India. The conversations, and meditations
which soon take over from them are usually written
in the present tense, and they are punctuated by
poetic descriptions of the sea and the waves at
various seasons of the year
The introduction, by D. Parsons, says that Woolf
thought of this not as a novel but as a piece of
music, with rhythm rather than plot, and a
'poplyphonic, dialectical relationship between
interludes and episodes, natural and aesthetic
creation, universal and individual'(i). It
is normally seen as high modernism, both poetic
and descriptive. She found it hard to write
it, and the characters often regret the incapacity
of language to capture complexity: Woolf talks of
a desperate attempt to capture deep meaning with
languager, like flinging and net to try to capture
a pearl. She described the book as a series
of 'dramatic soliloquies', organized by the rhythm
of the waves. This implies a fluid sense of
selfhood but with some underlying permanence,
claim to be some dramatic truth. The style
is also romantic, with lyrical descriptions of
colors, sounds and visions of nature, plants,
individual plants, the turn of the season's and
the rest. There are apparently connections
with actual people that Woolf knew, and of Woolf
herself, as both Jinny and Rhoda. Percival
is Woolf's brother who died an early death.
Woolf also writes this as a fictional
autobiography, describing her own the 'various
"selves"', in deliberate opposition to the
'"damned egotistical self"'(ix) of writers like
Joyce. She is interested in collective
aspects of identity and how to break down the
boundaries of identity, 'of self and world, and of
self and other' (x), so that the six characters
can be seen as offering one larger and more
complex identity, as she confided in a
letter. She found it hard to maintain her
own identity, realizing that the reflections back
from others were also important: Bernard describes
this phenomenon best. This leads her to also
critique the 'inadequacy of the conventional
narrative of the coherent, individual subject
following a linear passage through time', echoing
her remark in the essay is that life is not a
series of lamps symmetrically arranged, but rather
'"a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from
the beginning of consciousness to the end"'.
Parsons says there's a connection with Bergson and
duration, especially on the role of memory as
condensing time.
Overall, the characters have
'symphonic'identity, and there idiosyncratic
voices end in harmony and mutual connection when
they meet [I was looking for this, but must say it
was not prominent for me], especially at the
farewell to Percival and at the final meeting at
Hampton Court [but that meeting ends up with
couples wandering off in different directions, I
recall]. Only Percival is the conventional
literary hero with a unified selfhood, and he
attracts the others, leaving them in a sense of
lack: he unifies them and connects them, making
their differences seem less important. This
shows the nostalgia for such characters in
modernism [the annoyingly recurrent metaphor of
squares and oblongs is explained in this way, with
Percival's personality as the square that obscures
most of the oblong].
The book was a great success apparently and
invited comparison with Joyce or Proust [or
Dorothy Richardson, whom I do not know]. It
was praised for its fluidity, the inconsequent and
half realized, the unfinished. Others saw it
as a vain attempt to capture every detail in
experience, eloquent description, with that as the
only role for the characters [I can see
that]. The prosaic is entirely disregarded,
and the feminism and Marxism diminished, although
it is now possible to see it as a kind of cultural
politics, with Percival displayed ironically, for
example. Woolf herself looking back saw it
as a step to ward developing her own philosophy '"
that the whole world is a work of art; that we are
parts of the work of art… We are the words;
we are the music; we are the thing itself"'(xv)
[I'm sure I read this in Deleuze too]. This
can be seen as a theme in The Waves, 'the pattern
of connections that run submerged beneath the
surface impressions'. [There is an example
of a haecceity picked out by Parsons: 'a
continuity created from "broken dreams, nursery
rhymes, street crimes, hall finished sentences and
sights—elm trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping
women writing"'(144).]
I picked out a few bits too:
'But when we sit together, close,' said Bernard,
'we melt into each other with phrases. We
are edged with mist. We make an
unsubstantial territory.'(8)
[Bernard says] 'I cannot sit down to my book, like
Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open
the little trapdoor and let out these linked
phrases in which I run together whatever happens,
so that instead of incoherence there is a
wandering thread, lightly joining one thing
to another'(26).
[Neville says] 'Yesterday, passing the open door
leading into the private garden, I saw Fenwick
with his mallet raised. The steam from the
tea urn rose in the middle of the law. There
were banks of blue flowers. Then suddenly
descended upon me the obscure, the mystic sense of
adoration, of completeness that triumphed over
chaos. Nobody saw my poised and intent
figure as I stood at the open door. Nobody
guessed the need I had to offer my being to one
god; and perish, and disappear. His mallet
descended; the vision broke' (28).
[Bernard speaks] 'Every hour something new is
unburied in the great bran pie. What am
I? I ask. This? No I am
that. Especially now than I have left a room
and people talking, and the stone flags ring out
with mysolitary footsteps, and I behold the Moon
rising, sublimely, indifferently over the ancient
chapel—then it becomes clear that I'm not one and
simple, but complex and many. Bernard in
public, bubbles; in private, is secretive' (42).
[Susan says] 'But who am I… I'm not a woman,
but the light that falls on this date, on this
ground. I am the seasons' (54) [but she says
that going to school has left something hard
inside her].
[Bernard says, at the meeting with Percival]:
'shall we say "love of Percival"… [As the
thing that draws them together]… There is a
red carnation in that vase. A single flower
as we sat here waiting, but now a seven sided
flower, many petalled, red, puce, purple
shaded… A whole flower to which every eye
brings its own contribution' (70).
'Let us hold it for one moment,' said Jinny;
'love, hatred, by whatever name we call it, this
globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth
and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us
that we shall perhaps never make this moment out
of one man again.'[Paragraph] 'Forests and
farcountries on the other side of the world,'said
Rhoda, 'are in it; seas and jungles; howlings of
jackals and moonlight falling upon some high peak
with the eagle soars.'[Paragraph] 'Happiness is in
it,' said Neville, 'and the quiet of ordinary
things. A table, a chair, a book with a
paper knife stuck between the pages. And the
petal falling from the rose, and the light
flickering as we sit silent, or perhaps, be
thinking us of some trifle, suddenly
speak.'[Paragraph] 'Week days are in it,'said
Susan, 'Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; the horses
going up to the fields, and the horses returning;
the rocks rising and falling, and catching the elm
trees in their net, whether it is April, whether
it is November.'(80-81).
[Jinny says] 'I see what is before me… This
scarf, these wine colored spots. This
glass. This mustard pot. This
flower. I like what one touches, what one
tastes. I like the rain when it has turned
to snow and become palpable… My imagination
is the body's. It's visions are not finespun
and white with purity like Louis's. I do not
like your lean cats and your blistered chimney
pots [the view from his office window]… Men
and women, in uniforms, wigs and gowns, bowler
hats and tennis shirts, beautifully open at the
neck, the infinite variety of women's dresses (I
note all clothes always) delight me… This
man lifts the hoof of the horse... I am
never alone. I am attended by a regiment of
my fellows… I am like a little dog that
trots down the road after the regimental band, but
stops to snuff a tree trunk, to sniff some browned
stain, and suddenly careers across the street
after some mongrel cur and then holds one paw up
while it sniffs an entrancing whiff of meat from
the butcher shop'(125) [this could be that
Deleuzian phrase? If so, it is not that the
dog becomes the road, but rather that Jinny
becomes the dog].
'Unreasonably, ridiculously,'said Neville [at
Hampton Court], 'as we walk, time comes
back. A dog does it, prancing. The
machine works. Age makes hoary that
gateway. 300 years now seem more than a
moment vanished against that dog. King
William mounts his horse wearing a wig, and the
court ladies sweep the turf with their embroidered
panniers… Yes; I declare, as we pass through
this gateway, it is the present moment; I am
become a subject of King George'(119).
[Bernard, summing up] 'I begin to long for some
little language such as lovers use, broken words,
inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on
the pavement'(135) [compare with stuttering].
[As an illustration of his thought processes] 'I
leap, here, at this point, and alight now upon
some perfectly commonplace object—say the poker
and tongs, as I saw them sometime later [and then
goes on to recall an earlier relationship].
[As an example of his depressive tendencies] 'To
see things without detachment, from the at side,
and to realize their beauty in itself… And
then the sense that a burden has been removed;
pretense and make believe an unreality are
gone… This freedom this immunity seemed then
a conquest and sturdy and me such exultation that
I sometimes go there, even now, to bring back
exultation and Percival. But it did not
last. What torments one is the horrible
activity of the mind's eye—how he fell, how he
looked, where they carried him, men in loin
cloths, pulling ropes; the bandages and the
mud. Then comes the terrible pounce of
memory, not to be foretold, not to be warded
off—than I did not go with him to Hampton Court
[on one occasion in the past]. That claw
scratched; that fang tore' (149).
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