The deceptively familiar | Mrs Dalloway, Part 3
I found returning to Mrs Dalloway uncomfortable this week.
The following schedule has page numbers taken from the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Mrs Dalloway. That edition has 166 pages. What I’ve done is roughly divide the book into 4 parts; if your edition has a different number of pages, you can make your own rough division, and we should be in a similar place in the text.
October 7: Discussion of pages 1-42
October 14: Discussion of pages 42-84
October 21: Discussion of pages 84-126
October 27: Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern
October 28: Discussion of pages 126-166
Note that the Zoom call was rescheduled for next Sunday; I lost my voice yesterday.
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I found returning to Mrs Dalloway uncomfortable this week. I read these 40 pages or so in a single go, and to read 40 pages of Woolf without coming up for air can be a bit much. The previous two weeks, however, were not nearly so unsettling. I think it has to do with so many perspectives converging in one place, which combines with Woolf’s choice to switch rapidly between perspectives to make for a disorienting read.
It made me think of Hegel, actually. I have been reading Phenomenology of Spirit, and as I plodded through the introduction, I came across this line:
Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.
For Hegel, this is a call for a deep analysis, especially of key ideas such as, say, Notion, Spirit, Nature, God, and so on. Yet when I read Woolf, I wondered how much Hegel’s thoughts on, let’s call it, the deceptively familiar could apply to the social realm and, ultimately, to knowledge of ourselves.
Sir William Bradshaw, one of Septimus’ doctors, thinks he has medicine figured out, and thus he is unable to attend to the deep needs of Septimus. Septimus is a man who vacillates between suicidal enlightenment and utter despair. Bradshaw attributes this psychological condition to a lack of proportion; his emphasis on proportion is brought up several times; he seems to be able to attribute nearly every ill to a lack of proportion on someone’s part. Bradshaw is trapped in ideological thinking, where a way of viewing the world so thoroughly colors one’s perception that the world becomes monochromatic. Everything can be explained in terms of proportionality; it is just that easy. So, today I’m wondering if the fundamental flaw is that Bradshaw no longer sees his practice (and his patients) as new and unfamiliar; they have been rendered familiar, and thus he cannot truly understand them.
As our characters begin to meet in various configurations, we see a group of people who seem to have each other all figured out — they know exactly what the others are doing, what is wrong with them, how they measure up to one another. Mrs Dalloway is playing on the novels of social niceties, but there is an ironic undertone, at least how I read it. Does anyone really understand each other? Or have they become too familiar, and thus they cannot fathom the psychological complexity of others? And what of themselves?
It is making me rethink some of my earlier assessment’s of Clarissa. I called her, for example, an empty vessel, one who is filled with the thoughts of others. And maybe that is so — but that is not essential to her. Maybe she has become too familiar with herself, not letting herself see herself in her real complexity and depth. At one point, Clarissa worries that she has become known only as Mrs Richard Dalloway; maybe part of the problem is that she has come to see herself as Mrs Richard Dalloway. In this week’s reading, Clarissa goes deeper, however — ‘beneath what people said (and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now.’ She thinks about life and what it means.
Richard, too, has perhaps rendered her too familiar; he realizes, as he goes out to buy a present for Clarissa (flowers, in this instance), that he rarely says he loves his wife; ‘it was difficult to think of her’, he muses, ‘except in starts, as at luncheon, when he saw her quite distinctly.’ Clarissa momentarily becomes unfamiliar and, thus, clear to him. ‘Happiness is this, he thought.’
Then, tragically, he does not say he loves her; he could not bring himself to do it.
I too have read the second half in larger spells than in the first. In part, I think this is because I wanted to get through the individual sections of various characters, but I also think this may be something driven by Virginia Woolf's writing. You are on the edge of your seat hoping the characters will break out of the stories of their own creation and clearly talk with one another so you read on. When Richard can't seem to bring himself to utter out-loud how he feels, I found myself saying, "Good god man, just say it. Say it!" Clarissa, of all the characters, seems to have a better understanding of everyone's limitations, but she doesn't express her thoughts openly either. When I read this book published nearly 100 years ago, I think we haven't progressed very far at all. So many of us have an internal dialogue without ever engaging the person(s) with which it's focused.
In an essay called "Modern Fiction," Woolf argues for the invention of a new method of story-telling that can "look within" and examine life as it really is. There is one passage in this essay I find extremely enlightening. I want to share it here with everyone.
"Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance are not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it."
Keeping in mind Woolf's admonition, I believe we must be careful not to analyze or interpret her novels by relying too much on traditional or conventional categories.