mandarine

Let’s face the bare truth: I did not enjoy reading Mrs Dalloway as much as I had hoped I would. It was my third attempt at reading something by Virginia Woolf, after two miserable failures with Jacob’s Room and Night and Day. This time, I had sworn to myself I’d finish the book, all the more so as it was recommended by Dorothy, Litlove, Kate and Bloglily.

Once again, I immediately felt drawn by Woolf’s prose: it feels like one of those crystal-clad chandeliers that send sparks and rainbows in all directions. But once again, the structure of the writing was too much for me.

First, there is the exposition

It took me about 50 pages to make sure I had not missed a previous episode or that there were no pages torn off my e-book, what with a myriad allusions to things that seemed obvious to Clarissa or other protagonists save me. I know a lot of writers just love to do as if the reader has just got on a narrative train and avoid lengthy exposition; and I do appreciate it when they manage to introduce the context piecewise. In all three books by Virginia Woolf I have tried to read, it was as if some sort of big bang had shattered the necessary premises into whatzillion fragments that had been scattered all over the place, with a majority of the pieces not even falling back anywhere in the novel, as far as I could tell. I spend so much time making things crystal-clear to my readers in whatever writing I do (especially at work), that I have difficulties with novels that take it for granted that I am willing to summon more neurons to piece things together than what I would use to keep up with the latest research on interplanetary navigation or accurate geostationary orbit determination. Maybe it is because I was born long after the era when iconoclastic writing had come as a fresh breeze after centuries of classicism; and as I have never followed academic courses in literature after high-school, I did not have to be brainwashed into worshipping the iconoclasts by teachers who had been borne into literature by said fresh breeze. Or maybe I am being plain old-fashionedly grumpy.

Then, there is the narration

I love Woolf’s prose. If proses could be compared, let alone proses in different languages, I’d say I appreciated her language-chiseling skills at least as much as Proust’s. As it is not so miserly in the use of periods, Woolf’s prose would even be more readable than Proust’s, were it not for an overwhelming tendency to do viewpoint-hopping. At least we know whose thoughts and memories we are supposed to be following throughout the Search of Lost Time. With Mrs Dalloway, I was constantly taken off-balance by a sudden change in viewpoints: it took tremendous concentration to determine who was uttering the words I was reading; to determine whether these words were dialog, soliloquy, or inner thoughts. Speech changed into thoughts in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes the text seemed to jump between the semi-conscious thoughts of several characters, and it left me with a very clear impression of a butterfly flying from lily to buttercup, making a go at one dandelion, but changing its mind halfway, then going back to the previous buttercup, then making a sudden dash in another direction just to come zigzagging backwards to a bunch of daisies the next second. And me panting behind, wondering if the butterfly would just sit still for a minute if I stopped chasing it.

Finally, there is the plot

After those 50 pages, when I had accepted that [Virginia Woolf] would never answer any of my questions, I also started to understand that she would not tell me more than that famous day starting with the flowers and ending with the party. Somehow, that came as a relief: at least there was a boundary somewhere, some kind of box in which the butterfly would have to remain. But I was amazed at the number of unclosed doors Mrs Woolf managed to open in this seemingly little box of a classical unity of time: the story branched off in all directions with no apparent purpose, leaving gaping holes in the plot and cold drafts whirling between the open doors.

I like novel plots woven tight. The plots I like best are like a Gordian knot, a 5000-psi Kevlar helium tank, or a 3D jigsaw puzzle. There are no loose strands, everything has a purpose.

In Mrs Dalloway, plot fuzziness is an art in itself: there is hardly any plot, and the loose strands are the very material the whole book is made of. All in all, I found it an angora novel with some sort of literary allergen that made my eyes water.

Epilogue

Reading Mrs Dalloway had put on hold my steady pace with one page of Proust a day. This will resume momentarily.

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