The Waves

The Waves (Harcourt, 2006)
by Virginia Woolf
England, 1931

While one or two of the Woolf fanatics in my blogging inner circle will hopefully be chuffed to learn that Virginia and I are back on speaking terms once again after the disastrous blind date that was Orlando, I'm afraid that they may well be unchuffed/not chuffed/dischuffed/less than chuffed (blimey, somebody help me out with this British English already!) to hear that The Waves didn't exactly do it for me either.  Not that I thought it completely sucked or anything.  On the plus side, I admired Woolf's willingness to experiment with narrative structure--the central conceit here being a novel that unfolds without dialogue in a series of soliloquies by six characters speaking in turn.  I also enjoyed her ability to handle a variety of traditional downer themes--death, loss, our looming mortality--in a way that felt fresh and true to the spirit of the distinct characters involved (both those with speaking roles and those like Percival who only come alive through the refracted memories of the others).  It should go without saying that there were any number of quotable passages and truly poetic images bobbing among the 220 pages of text.  On the minus side, though, I found The Waves to be much more ambitious than exhilarating in terms of the reading experience delivered.  The writing's incredibly mannered and artificial, and reading it often reminded me of when I had to sit through church as a little kid when I would have rather been watching football or playing outside or doing almost anything else instead.  It didn't help that the italicized interludes that help frame the soliloquy segments were so dull, but they were.  I suspect that I would have been at least somewhat more receptive to The Waves' cerebral charms if I had read it with more time in between it and the atrocious Orlando, but I'm certain that all that overly "stagey," Greek chorus-like heavyhanded theatricality of the prose would have bothered me at any point in time regardless.  Meh.  (http://www.harcourtbooks.com/)

Thanks to Woolfies Sarah, Frances, Emily, and today's discussion host Claire for throwing the Woolf in Winter party and to those of you who visited here during the different pub crawls (below) along the way.

Mrs. Dalloway

To the Lighthouse

Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography (Harcourt, 2006)
by Virginia Woolf
England, 1928

I'm sure that people who liked Orlando will have all sorts of interesting things to say about its playfulness, its liberating send-up of gender roles, and the way Woolf thumbed her nose at genre conventions in creating a novel that pairs the literature of the fantastic with feminist pseudobiography in such a creative way.  For my part, I haven't taken such a visceral disliking to a book since the second installment of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy a few months back.  How could a tale about a 16th-century character who ages over three hundred years and undergoes a gender change in the course of the story be such a complete bore?  While I'm not entirely sure, I think a huge part of it for me has to do with Woolf's smug contempt for the non-white/non-aristocratic "others" in her fictional fantasy land.  If you can imagine a gentle Calvino fable as rewritten by unsavory pro-Empire types like Margaret Thatcher or Bush Republicans, you'll be well on your way to understanding why all the freewheeling references to "blackamoors," barbarous gypsies, and "niggers" in Orlando sometimes make it tough to enjoy some of the more exotic elements in its otherwise frothy, fabulistic mix.  Lest any readers of this post rightly point out that it's not really fair to judge Woolf's apparent racism by the standards of a later generation, I should note that I also didn't connect with her stylistic elements this time out either.  For all the heady fast-forwarding in time that takes place in the narrative (for me, practically the novel's only saving grace), I felt virtually bored into submission by the overkill I'm-so-clever-watch-me-make-fun-of-the-biographer's-role asides from the narrator, the silly stories about dropping toads down potential suitors' shirts, and the "whimsical" use of an invented language for entertainment purposes ("Rattigan Glumphoboo," described as a substitute for "a very complicated spiritual state" on pages 208-209, might have been the low point EVER for humor lost in translation).  With any luck, Woolf will be depressed and/or cynical again when I get around to reading The Waves in a couple of weeks since this "fun" side of hers definitely rubbed me the wrong way.  A total disappointment.  (http://www.harcourtbooks.com/)

Woolf

Thanks to Frances for hosting the Orlando: A Biography round of Woolf in Winter.  See you on or around the 26th for a discussion of Woolf's The Waves being organized by Claire of kiss a cloud.  In the meantime, I await your petulant comments and/or e-mails.

To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse (Harcourt, no publication date)
by Virginia Woolf
England, 1927

While longtime Woolf fanatics like Emily and Frances will have to weigh in on whether my reaction is at all typical, I'm beginning to suspect that there's an ever widening gap developing between my enthusiasm for Woolf's narrative gifts and my enthusiasm for her characters.  To the Lighthouse, for example, has a full cast of marvelously-drawn, psychologically-distinct personalities--none of whom I'd care to hang out with in real life.  Perhaps that's the point.  Given that so much of the novel dwells on the small successes and the myriad failures of marriage and "family life" as seen from the perspectives of one particular family and their friends a decade apart in time, there's no need for Woolf to people it with "appealing" characters to highlight the gap between our aspirations and our disillusions or to demonstrate how men and women can feel boxed in by adhering to traditional social roles.  Then again,  perhaps success is Woolf's failure.  She's so adept at revealing the organic ebb and flow of multiple characters' thought processes that their inevitable human flaws--the pettiness, the extreme emotional neediness, the class bias, the pride--seem magnified under the x-ray vision of her prose.  Ah, the prose!  For whatever my issues with not being able to relate to Woolf's characters on some more primal level, I remain firmly under the spell of her dizzying style.  I love both the poetic phrases that pop up out of nowhere ("The pulp had gone out of their friendship," on page 21, and "A question like Nancy's--What does one send to the Lighthouse?--opened doors in one's mind that went banging and swinging to and fro," on page 146, are two favorite images from this time out) and how the characters confront their own mortality with a very particular sort of cynicism (Mr. Ramsay: "The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare" [35].).  Although I've yet to figure out exactly what Woolf intended to communicate by disparagingly dwelling on the description of one female character's "Chinese eyes," used almost like a Homeric epithet several times in the novel (see pages 17, 26, 91, 104, and 156 in the Harcourt edition), I do admire how Lily Briscoe's painting functions on so many different symbolic levels within the confines of the work: as an attempt to capture a moment, an attempt to capture a personality, an artist's attempt to "contain" reality, a search for clarity in a painting in a text devoted to much the same thing, etc.  Most of all, I'm continually mesmerized by Woolf's jump cut editing approach to storytelling and the novel way in which the technique (the first part's chapter XV in its entirety: "'Yes,' said Prue, in her considering way, answering her mother's question, 'I think Nancy did go with them'" [79]) allows her to seem to suspend time while dexterously juggling simultaneous narrative threads ("Time Passes," the second of To the Lighthouse's three parts, is another testament to the success of the author's manipulation of same).  Having probably first fallen in love with the jump cut style in the later works of Roberto Bolaño, a modern master of that brand of authorial sleight of hand, I have to say that it's quite a trip to see Woolf's experiments with it some 75 years earlier.  Pretty damn cool.  (http://www.harcourtbooks.com/)

  Woolf

Thanks to Emily of Evening All Afternoon for hosting discussion of today's Woolf in Winter read!  Also, see you all on or around February 12th with a post on Woolf's Orlando (next discussion epicenter: Frances' Nonsuch Book).

Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt, 2005)
by Virginia Woolf
England, 1925

With so many mainstream classics really only representing the literary equivalent of elevator music, I'm relieved to report that Mrs. Dalloway is every bit as edgy and ambitious as I'd been led to believe.  Although I went into this, my first encounter with Woolf, not really knowing what to expect, I was pretty much wowed from the start by her narrative audacity and the immediacy of her imagery.  The plot, as many of you will no doubt know, pivots around the interlocking stories of aristocratic party hostess Clarissa Dalloway and shellshocked war hero Septimus Smith.  Although the fact that one of these two characters is about to end up as a suicide lends an extra measure of gravitas to the fiction considering Woolf's own life story, perhaps what's most chilling here is the insinuation that taking one's life could be a natural response to the meaninglessness of the modern age itself.  Fuck love.  Fuck poetry.  Fuck all tomorrow's parties.  What makes this bleak point of view engaging from the reader's perspective, of course, is that it's just one of many possible vantage points in terms of the characters involved.  For in telling us about what Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith and Peter Walsh all have in common, Woolf is positively brilliant at putting us into the minds of the characters themselves.  What they think.  How they feel.  What they might have gained and lost since the innocence of their youth. Both the style (compelling interior monologues that feel real, organic narratorial changes that take place in the blink of an eye) and the language (the observational detail, the ability to capture a fleeting moment in a passing comment) are bracing, in fact--quite a feat, wouldn't you agree, for a novel confronting mental illness, postwar malaise, and, possibly most depressing of all, the inability of love to heal certain wounds, with such profound and arresting intimacy?  (http://www.harcourtbooks.com/)
*
La señora Dalloway
por Virginia Woolf
Inglaterra, 1925

Con tantos clásicos del canon sólo siendo los equivalentes de la música cursi al estilo Céline Dion, es un verdadero placer decir que La señora Dalloway sea tan arriesgada y ambiciosa como su reputación.  Aunque éste fue mi primer encuentro con Woolf y por eso no lo sabía qué me esperaba, casi inmediatemente la novelista me hizo una impresión bastante buena con su audacia narrativa y la inmediatez de sus imágenes.  El argumento, como muchos de ustedes sabrán, gira sobre las historias entrelazadas de Clarissa Dalloway, la anfitriona aristócrata de una fiesta, y Septimus Smith, un héroe de la Primera Guerra Mundial que padece neurosis de guerra.  Aunque el hecho de que uno de estos dos personajes va a suicidarse dentro de poco la da a la ficción una medida extra de gravitas a causa de la trayectoría personal de Woolf, quizá el asunto lo más escalofriante acá sea la sugerencia que el acto de despedirse a la vida es una respuesta natural a la insensatez de la época moderna.  ¿El amor?  ¡Andate a la mierda!  ¿La poesía?  ¡Andate a la mierda!  ¿Todas las fiestas de mañana?  ¡Andate a la mierda!  Con respecto a esta perspectiva nada halagüeña, lo interesante acerca de la novela es que es sólo un punto de vista entre muchos otros.  Porque, al decirnos todo lo que la señora Dalloway y Septimus Smith y Peter Walsh tienen en común, Woolf es realmente maravillosa al ponernos al corriente en cuanto al mundo de sus personajes desde los puntos de vista de los personajes mismos.  Lo que piensan.  Cómo se sientan.  Lo que han perdido durante la marcha de los años desde la inocencia de su juventud.  De hecho, ambos el estilo (los monólogos interiores, la rapidez con cual se nota el cambio de narradores) y el lenguaje (los cuidadosos detalles de observación,  la capacidad de capturar un momento con un comentario hecho de paso) son vigorizantes--una proeza, ¿no?, en una novela que trata de la salud mental, el malestar de postguerra, y quizá lo más deprimente de todo, el fracaso del amor para curar nos dolores, de manera tan profunda e íntima por parte de la autora.

Virginia Woolf

"Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy's business of the intoxication of language--Antony and Cleopatra--had shrivelled utterly.  How Shakespeare loathed humanity--the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly!  This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words.  The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.  Dante the same.  Aeschylus (translated) the same.  There Rezia sat at the table trimming hats.  She trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer's friends; she trimmed hats by the hour.  She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water, he thought.

'The English are so serious,' she would say, putting her arms round Septimus, her cheek against his."  (Mrs. Dalloway, pp. 86-87)

P.S. Thanks to Sarah of what we have here is a failure to communicate for hosting the Mrs. Dalloway portion of Woolf in Winter.