Mrs. Dalloway

I first ran across Virginia Woolf's writing in high school, when we read To The Lighthouse, a novel I very much disliked. At the time, I resolved never to read anything more by Woolf -- in fact, I'm not even sure if I finished Lighthouse, all those years ago.

However, it struck me recently that critics constantly link Woolf to Joyce. They are both modernists pioneering stream-of-consciousness writing, avoiding the more traditional plot structures of the Romantics. Since I love Joyce, I thought I should give Woolf another try, and settled on Mrs. Dalloway, which always arouses comparisons to Ulysses, since it focuses on one day in the life of one character. (I almost wrote "an average day," but I'm not so sure that's true, and I think each book loses some resonance when you assume that).

In the end, though, I think Mrs. Dalloway is least successful when it is most Ulysses-like, and most successful when it's least Joycean. As an example of the former, both Joyce and Woolf attempt to circumvent the restrictions of writing about one day by referring to events gone by (Bloom thinks about his daughter, Steven thinks about his mother's death, and, in Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway has long reminiscences to before she married).

But Joyce breaks up these reminiscences into only a few sentences at a time -- it's only after reading a signifcant portion of the book that they start to fall together into a semi-coherent timeline. In Woolf, on the other hand, each flashback can almost stand on its own -- we get a vivid image of people in the novel as the were when they were young. Woolf's approach is certainly easier on the reader, but I feel like Joyce's approach more accurately mirrors our experience of flashbacks -- we often only think in flashes about the past (x reminds us of y briefly) -- and Woolf somewhat takes the easy way out here.

On the other hand, Woolf has what seems to me an almost cinematic technique (I know this is an odd term, because in her day there wasn't a cinema as such. But that's the word that springs to mind...) It's almost like there's a camera panning across. We might start with Mrs. Dalloway thinking about her party, then the flowers she's going to have, then she notices some flowers she's passing in the road. Then, it's almost like the narrator is a camera, and pans over to describe the flowers, then keeps going to, say, a passerby looking at the same flowers, and what he thinks of them. From there, his thoughts might jump to what he's having for dinner tonight, and off we go following him for a while.

This is a technique that Joyce never really used, and I really enjoyed reading it -- it's a great way to jump around, giving us a sort of mosaic of what people are thinking, but at the same time it maintains the unity of the scene. Very rarely do the jumps feel startling or artificial; it feels more like we readers are a sort of disembodied sprit folllowing first this person, then that.