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MRS. DALLOWAY

INVISIBLE PRESENCES

Several devices of writing are enlisted to figure the narrator of Woolf!s novel, among themthe Homeric technique of the rhapsode, carefully stitching fragments of song together just

as Clarissa sews her dress; these devices emerge in Mrs. Dalloway when traditionalsettings such as the walled garden become narrative devices in description and whendialogue is absorbed into free independent discourse. Also, in scene-switches the urbanenarrator employs a character such as Peter Walsh to lead the discourse from Clarissa!sdrawing room to Regent!s Park where Septimus Smith is seated. The reader!s eye is ledthen, from Septimus Smith back to Peter watching him. Even thoughts about characterslead from one to the next, as between Clarissa and Miss Kilman, then on to the Army andNavy Stores, in a kind of extra-sensory dialogue. The segue between Richard Dallowayand Clarissa in her drawing-room is made by the sound of Big Ben that he hears and thatsimultaneously floods Clarissa!s room. Sometimes a door that is opened by one characteris later closed by another. When we have a dead body in one episode, an ambulancearrives in the next. Labyrinthine symmetry demands that when someone ascends thestairs, someone else must descend. Plato is present in many styles of poetic expression.The labyrinthine structure in the dialogues, constructed as playlets, a structure that wealso see in the Odyssey, is continued in the textual labyrinths of Virgil The Aeneid, OvidThe Metamorphoses, Dante The Inferno, Proust A la recherche du temps perdu, JoyceUlysses, and in Mrs. Dalloway. The use of such devices means knowing that only pertinent aspects of Mrs.Dallowayare revealed in the narrative; since they wag the dog somewhat, readers mustbe cautious about preconceptions and identifying the whole too easily with the part whilesearching for depth beneath the banal surface of the story. It is unwise to become

enamored of seductive metaphors for reality and then to marry the broker. The titlecharacter herself is a written woman in a virtual reality of literary discourse. Devices thatproduce by writing the illusion of flesh and blood are sillfully deployed by conventions oftenfrom centuries past; yet words never approach the famous verisimilitude of the Greekpainter Apelles. Thus, the novel often seems more concerned with its literary style than thequotidian components of its plot. The impression of sincerity, which is a literary conventionitself, vanishes when spontaneous emoting is revealed as merely a bit of preformedlanguage that composes the portrait.

Clarissa is sourse, instigator, and subject of this portrait which, as she says, isherself. Her inner life is completely subordinate to the articulation of the text. Conventions(i.e. poetic performances) from the body of the novel, and what is true for such secular

scripture is true for all scripture, yet, according to Northrop Frye it is still not generallyunderstood either that #reality! in literature cannot be presented at all except within theconventions of literary structure. As he informs us, those conventions must beunderstood first. The fallacy of poetic projection must not be allowed to intimate (sugerir)that such conventions accord with facts of life. Such a level of literacy in which thediscourse shapes the reality evokes the reader!s precarious tightrope (tight-rope) dancewhere one slip means death; it swarms with problems of equilibrium that requires anexquisite sense of balance to accomplish the performance at all.

Woolf!s stated object of criticising (i.e. making a perceptive analysis and judgmentof) the social system (Diary2) is often lost in the study of this novel. Also lost is the fact

that such social criticism, satire attacking the accepted customs of the day, a subversiveactivity, is an isntrument of aggression, here softened by using derisive laughter and theartistic insult rather than real abuse, both as a mask for the wise and armor for the critic. InDryden!s terms, Woolf!s beheadings are accomplished with the fineness of a stroke that

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leaves the body standing in its place. As an example of the genre invented by theRomans, this satire numbers Horace and Juvenal among its notable contributors. Beyondthis, much in the novel remains obscure. Virginia Woolf, in the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dallowayin1928, offers a clue to the basic fantasy, the relationship between Clarissa Dalloway andthe socially obscure Septimus Smith as mystical doubles of one another, related

somewhat like Heathcliff and Catherine. (Harvena Richter has noted that Clarissa is aGemini). This introduces the fact of unreality; nothing in nature really duplicates itself. Thedouble is a metaphysical fiction, a fantasy that emphasizes the fictionality. Remove thefantasy from Mrs. Dalloway, however and there will be nothing left at all. Yet we are neverled by hand through the reticulate maze. Mrs Dalloway instead plays to the landscape ofthe imagination where literary values will always trump realism. In satire, the literature ofexperience is a better term. Duplication reveals itself as an unrealistic feature of somemagnitude that should dismantle feelings of straightforward confidence in what passes forface value.

The playfulness of doubles, the commedia dell!arte trick of duplicating groups ofcharacters, is often seen also in intertextuality where it truly abides (tolerar; permanecer,seguir). There are many ways for duplication to manifest itself however, not the least beingthe double application of assertions, one derived from the original and its imitation hiddenin discourse. The famed ambiguity in words that have more than one meaning (thelinguistic ambagesof labyrinthine trickery and deceit, mental confusion and uncertainty,intricacy and fluctuations) and words that do double duty within a prevailing pattern ofrepetition must also be disambiguated by sophisticated readers. The more common theword, the more associations we may have with it. Duplicate versions of structural entities,symmetries in which the second half duplicates the first half dominate the text. Words thatdouble for social and economic terms also serve ambiguously as aesthetic and eroticterms. The duplicity of hostess, and abbess, and euphemisms such as pilfer, (robar)

spend and going to bed is also valid; and the occasional double entendre, moretroubling for the squeamish, ought not be overlooked. Circularity, having one!s life overagain, resembles the fate of Sisyphus in the Underworld repeatedly rolling his stone up thehill, each event a duplicate of the las (Homer Odyssey 11.593-598). For the most part,however, the two sections, beginning and ending, are designed to make some kind ofwhole in an ornate and intricate work of art.

Structurally speaking, the novel resembles a Platonic dialogue framed as stratifiedand nested layers, motifs within motifs, plots and subplots, secrets and mysteries; but itfurnishes only the verbatum half of the dialogue while the reader, serving as a kind ofsemblable, must compose the other half. A major burden for readers involves recognizingthe great quantity of performed language (borrowed or pirated from pre-existing literature

such as requires annotation) which appears first in the shape of indented lines formCymbeline(without attribution), lines photographically reproduced as they would be seenon a page in Hatchard!s window; it also appears occasionally as punctuated verbatimquotes from, say, Othello, fully attributed. It also lurks in the obscure form of parodies andparaphrases linked to past utterances that mock the meat they feed on, and the delicatespoor of many more that have been stolen from various sources and contexts in severallanguages, living and dead. As invisible presences, like celestial Dark Matter, they quiz thereader!s literacy, as a kind of initiation ordeal. For the critic, even in their silence, theyinvite annotation; they serve not as aloof commentary but as complex references, forkingpaths that concurrently, synchronically, inform the narrator!s rhetoric if only to cut thesweetness, the sentimental seductiveness of the text. The transmigrations of preformedlanguage in anamorphic forms that demand an oblique perspective are an essentialcomponent of the narrator!s repertory and are integral to her bravado. Yet the merevirtuality is often mistaken for reality.

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The hide-and-seek of literary allusions, invisible presences in the narrative,preponderates according to the Hellenistic style that favors the laudatory interpellations ofdead poets, sometimes with a polemical function, to demonstrate the poet!s models, todefine its affiliation, and to show its situation within the literary tradition. Anna Quindlen hassaid, If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then wholesale theft is genuflection. Thebent knee of allusion, now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, supplies the

gravitasthat balances the tribia of this comedy of manners that exploits, like the plays ofAristophanes, the rejuvenating ritual structure of ancient Greek cult. Recognizableallusions with their overlapping suggestions of literary richness often serve as locators toprovide context where it seems lacking. As Weldon Thornton comments, the purpose ofallusion is the development and revelation of character, structure, and theme, and whenskillfully used, it does all of these simultaneously. However, according to Hebel, It is nolonger the... fidelity to its original wording that distinguis(es) it as a quotations proper.Determining whether speech is figural or literal usually requires recognizing a pattern thatbelongs to another independent text and which may undermine the default category, aliteral reading of the plot. Such quotations that simultaneously activate two texts serve in aperformance (theatrical) dimension on the part of the speaker; this involves a semanticapproach that questions sincerity in that its meaning or truth value can be variouslyinterpreted. Incongruity between source and contextual paraphrase often prevails.

Furthermore, preformed language serves as raw material for illusions, utterancesthat are not what they seem to be. Intertextuality supplies the mere appearance of realityby way of fragments that in their first life have been used to designate reality. In Mrs.Dalloway, events appear in diction that only seems to refer to a presently existing realworld. Like the Readymades of Cubist art, they apply not only to absent texts but haveconsorted with an infinite regression of other contexts. The level of literary allusion iscomparable only to that in the metatheatrical comedies of Aristophanes in their maculateabundance that contributes a high degree of sophistication even when freely burlesqueing

Greek religious concepts; in his Frogsplayful quotations from Greek tragedy play off theurbane Euripides against the turgid Aeschylus jus as Mrs. Dallowayquotes from the Iliadand from King Lear. Borrowed phrases transgress the borders of genuine speech-acts;often transgressing the borders of gender boundaries as well, they are neither one thingnor the other. Poetic fragments wrested from their original context now ring hollow, theiroriginal performativeity deactivated. There is no internal life in the already said. Theoriginal speech-act has long passed. The act of speech now becomes the manneristproperty of the narrator whose observations range from the facetious to the malicious. Theprevailing poetics of intertextuality as a dominant fixture thus ambiguates whichever issueis at hand, and sometimes several issues at once. In its Cubist context, Mrs Dallowaydebunks the authority of a priori knowledge and the reality which conventions are

assumed to reveal.The discourse moves simultaneously on two levels -the foregrounded (primer

plano) action, and the allusive level of preformed language and labyrinthine intertextuality.Such words and phrases, seeming to suggest two different interpretations -even playingon the double meaning in a single word, an intratextual syllepsis- offer different readingsambiguously concerning genre, style, or even theory of poetic composition. Havingdiscerned the intertextual presence of preformed language (whether from poetry or prose)we are asked to decide whether it is to be understood as the novel is presumablyunderstood, or as the original text is seen in its own context, or both. Weldon Thorntonclaims that allusion offers the greater complexity its context necessarily brings with it.The banal or surface meaning often achieves an important dimension derived as aperformance of the quote that has been inserted into this new discourse, beyond theusual cognitive illusion of reality. This playful rhetoric of preformed language suggests,minimally, a multitemporal literary moment with, according to Thornton an inexhaustible

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number of points of comparison. Margaret Paston!s metaphor for it is apt -cutting largethongs out of other men!s leather. The implications of plagiarism and the contest for who isin control of the discourse is fully intentional. Nevertheless, when one!s mouth is stuffedwith preformed language, how much room is left for one!s own? Furthermore, what seems natural, often a bit of intertextual playfulness, is notheingmore than a construct that scrambles the message in a metatheatrical performance. Such

language is a performance, scripted rather than freely spoken. What seems to be ideal ismerely what is left over when the less than ideal is disregarded. Perception in literatureshould mean recognizing it as a matter of artifice. The trick is to decide how much, if any,is to be taken literally. So too with rhetoric. Figures of speech in abundance here drawattention to the arts of expression as much as to what is expressed; and rhetoricalopulence, like ceremonial robes for the ritual in progress, attracts as much attention as theossified clichs that often foreground paradoxes. The alternations between the narrator!splain style and her ornate style demand that we see that each is style that must beacknowledged as such. Additionally, Mrs. Dallowayis composed of figures of thought, structural devices thatform paragraphs whose opening themes anticipate their repetition at the end of eachparagraph. Key concepts often are enclosed by rings like islands at the center of eachsystem of hypoctatic syntax. The shapeliness of ring composition follows the artificialorder that shapes the mazy narrative interlace, self-consciously using local style to imitateglobal structure. Each ring then connects with each succesive ring, as Socrates explains,so that a long chain is formed (Plato Ion). Usually such annular systems contain one ormore inner rings that first introduce themes that, when a central point has been reached,are then echoed in reverse order to the end, forming a self-contained package in adeliberately applied manner. Each part is the double of the other, a doing and an undoing,each turning back on itself with neither a beginning nor an end. Stated otherwise,openning themes are proleptic with regard to their final apperance. The last occurence,

then, is analeptic regarding the opening. These structures tend to recur, like persons whorise from the dead. The model of prolepsis/analepsis extends throughout the course of thenarrative and makes for organic unity of parts that relate to the whole design. The circulartendency is revealed when viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. This is a controllingstyle, historically considered an elegant feature, a pleasing pattern of ordering thatsubordinates its constituent parts, in proportion, to the whole. Circular structures andmultiple framing devices characterize the entire design as a magic circle drawn around thediscourse. As the center and the circumference of this circle, Mrs. Dalloway is a wonderlandcontaining intertexts re-inscribed, given new life, as parodies, paraphrases, near quotes,and literary echoes. Among them several overlapping devices are evident: the medical

analogy, the cookery theme, as well as a well-developed motif of clothing with assortedfabrics, all of which suggest textuality by way of an anatomic metaphor which refers bothto clothing the body and to its care and feeding as well. Text and intertext cooperate as thewarp and woof of the narrative, drawing active readers into working with its fabric torecognize and test one literaty tradition against another. As Peter Walsh comments(suggesting such conventional topoi), these are pegs where many people have hung theirhats. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people!s noses. Self-conscious allusions to books contained in a book like Mrs. Dallowaythat holdsother books are suggested by various satchels, collecting boxes, and leather bagscontaining books and pamphlets. These exegetic moments, these self-reflexive parts ofthe novel itself indicate its own curious nature as rhetorical play. Further, self-reference tothe bogus quality of borrowed language or writer burgling one another, frauds hidden inplain view, is implied by both the paste jewels in the shop windows and the thievingpractices of assorted pirates and buccaneers. We are being told things about which, in

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fact, we are not being told. Such metaphors are double-coded (said to be the allmark ofthe posmodern condition) -illusionist and anti-illusionist; they are both literal and figural.Self-reference creates what is known as a strange loop; something in the novel steps outand comments on the novel that contains it. Output returns as input even while remainingoutput, referential and at the same time self-referential. The implication is paradoxical: artcreating art, similarly suggested by M.C. Escher!s Drawing Hands. Moreover, the reality

is shaped according to the conventions for the alleged reality that serves as its container.The epistolary motif (writing), long a staple in the poetics of the social system, is aprominent example. Such deconstructive occasions tend to debunk instances of pathos.These incongruencies often imply a kind of Mad Hatter !s tea party that owes much to thenarrator!s Cubist perspective.

Narrative in the double perspective of free indirect discourse reveals the novelforming the narrator!s grumbling satire as subtle social criticism, a metatheatrical display ofindirect discourse in which the words of the narrator as talking head represent thefocalizations of the character which cautions against overestimating sincerity. All thecharacters are mediated by free indirect discourse; it leans heavily on irony in the form ofexpressing two equally coherent yet simultaneously incompatible readings; the narratorexpects the fictive audience to be attentive to the comic nuances. Often the discrepancybetween magnitude of the event and the style that describes it is, clearly, ironic. Such ironyoften composed of preformed language, requires active, not passive readers.