Mundane though it may be I couldn’t help thinking throughout this little gem of a book that I’m being reacquainted, this time in stunning English prosMundane though it may be I couldn’t help thinking throughout this little gem of a book that I’m being reacquainted, this time in stunning English prose, with a thought that had been drilled into me ever since I became aware of the real world. The thought had been communicated in practical every day language, not the least bit literary but urgent to be heard nevertheless. It was this: money, the luxury of owing it and the capacity to earn it in order to support one’s self, is indispensable to freedom, self-expression and self-preservation.
Both my grandmothers, born a decade or two later than Woolf, had neither rooms nor money of their own and when they were her age at the time she wrote this (40) the idea that such commodities were achievable was out of reach for them here in the European South. My mother, on the other hand, was among the few of her social environment to manage having both, however modest. Her rural family couldn’t provide her with a dowry other than a state-funded practical education that secured her an urban job and a freedom that must have seemed exotic to her fellow village girls. My own middle-class upbringing gave me the privilege of choice between academia or a respectably-paying job. And my daughters are luckily living lives that enable them to act and think in ways their great-grandmothers wouldn’t have dreamed of.
One of those grandmothers was illiterate, the other was allowed to complete grammar school, they probably wouldn’t have known what to make of this book’s inspired train of thought had it miraculously found its way to them. My mother can’t read the English original but she has earned the right to read and know what to make of her readings. I’m going to find a nice Greek translation and I’m sure she’ll feel the meaning of the text to her bones. Myself, I’m fortunate enough to have the room, time, knowledge and empathy to properly appreciate both the beauty of Woolf’s language and the brilliance of her arguments. My girls have all the above but perhaps lack the empathy, having grown up in a society where what Woolf describes as women’s burning desires are taken for granted – at least in some parts of this world. I can only wish that it will be curiosity and not a sense of having joined the club that will one day lead them to it; the English text of course – this goes without saying for their generation.
Now all this says next to nothing about the book itself (but maybe not). It says something about where Woolf’s sisters were, are and hopefully will be; I’d like to think she would have smiled at the thought of just that. ...more
Delightful! I can think of no other word to describe this book. It had me smiling on every other page and marveling at Nabokov’s wit. But of course thDelightful! I can think of no other word to describe this book. It had me smiling on every other page and marveling at Nabokov’s wit. But of course the humor only thinly veils the underlying sadness. Pnin is one of the most moving characters I’ve come across; infinitely amusing,stubborn, generous and poignantly insistent on protecting his own private universe. Nabokov’s subtle satire of campus life is exquisite, as is his depiction of Russian émigré life. I read that he wrote Pnin simultaneously with Lolita, during the same road trip with his wife across America and that makes it all the more awe-inspiring. I particularly loved how the narrator sneaks in somewhere in the first half of the book, only to acquire a fully substantial presence by the end. A Grand Master, indeed......more
“And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her gray hair. She wore ear-rings, and a si “And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her gray hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element.”
[image] Portrait of Mrs Allan Bott, 1930 - Tamara de Lempicka
There, on page 174 of my edition, Virginia Woolf exquisitely sums it all up and presents her heroine in all her glory as a society lady. It’s the same heroine that opened up the brilliant novel, on page 1, with the well-known declaration of her intention to buy the flowers herself for the party she was to give, at her London house that night in June of 1922. It took Woolf 174 pages to bestow on this creature of her imagination the well-deserved recognition of her ability and determination to live in the Here and Now, to acknowledge the reality of the present as the “supreme mystery” that leaves her wondering if love or religion are able to solve.
“And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?”
It won’t take me half as long to give this breathtakingly beautiful piece of work my admiration and gratitude for having stirred up my deepest emotions. And that is perhaps the most important thing of all, as another female character in the book attests on behalf of Woolf, as she explains her approach to life: “For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt”
[image] The Blue Scarf, 1930 - Tamara de Lempicka
It is maybe unfair that the author reserves this approach for a girlfriend of Clarissa and not for Mrs Dalloway herself. It would have supplied her heroine with the key to the mystery of how to live early on. But if Clarissa had possessed that answer, or any answer, we the readers would have been deprived of her agonizing musings. Her mind quests, together with those of an extraordinarily-depicted parade of people that have a place in her life, past and present, make for one of the most existential novels of all time. And one perfect sample of modernist literature prose. We have in this book a tapestry of characters, places, times, moods and realities that are as individual as each one of the characters and their ideas of what reality is. For it seems that there is no such thing as objective reality. Or, there is, but it is one that leaves room for as many subjective ones as the people on the face of this earth.
“Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms, his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought – making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was and quite true; all this one could never share – it smashed to atoms.”
“What a lark! What a plunge!” that our author has set herself on, in trying to paint this vast canvas of subjectivity! I’m using the word “canvas” but as I was making my way through the book, the word “cinematic” kept coming to mind. Woolf moves as a camera would, from one place to the next in the vividly sketched scenery of London in the 20s, having one character cross ways (literally) with the next, thus smoothly changing the scene as in the finest montage, using the ticking of clocks, the invisible threads of spiders, the change of light as the one and only day in the life of Mrs Dalloway plays out. If I were a film director I would do this in a single- shot, having the actors ready to move at my signal, amid carefully constructed settings and hundreds of extras that would recreate the atmosphere of post-war London, capital still of an Empire. I realize I wouldn’t be able to dive into the past, that way. And the past is as much present into the novel as the present is. In fact, Time seems to be another key-character.
[image] So yes, there are limitations in this approach. Which makes Woolf’s achievement all the more astonishing; for I don’t have to see the film that was in fact made of this book 20 years ago. I have formed my own images and they are now indelibly imprinted on my mind, as I suppose they had been imprinted on Woolf’s, together with all the ruminations on Life and Death and Love and Choices and Youth and Aging and How To Live and How To Die. I can see her sitting in “a room of her own” years ago, writing her novel, words pouring out of her brilliant and tormented mind, in the (original at the time) style of “stream of consciousness” writing. What magic, what gift to be able to transform images into words, to transmit them across Time to countless readers who, in turn, will, each one of us, turn them into our own unique images, forever to be treasured in our mind’s private gallery. If that’s not another key, another way to transcend the finite nature of our existence that so tortured this writer, I don’t know what is.
P.S. I can’t resist offering Woolf’s description of the sea and its effect on one’s state of mind. Having lived all my summers near the sea, in this Mediterranean country of mine, I bow to the words of this fellow-islander, however in the north she may have lived.
“So on a summer’s day waves collect, 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, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all 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.”