This immaterial, evanescent climate that the characters inhabit gives the reader of Mrs Dalloway the impression of being faced with a totally strange world, despite the fact that what happens in the novel could not be more trivial or anodyne. Many years after the book was published, a French writer, Nathalie Sarraute, attempted to describe in a series of fictions what she called human ‘tropisms’, those pulses or instinctive movements that precede action and thought itself and establish a slender umbilical cord between rational beings, animals and plants. Her novels, which were interesting, but which were never more than audacious experiments, had the virtue, for me, of enriching retrospectively my reading of this novel of Virginia Woolf. Now that I have reread it, I am quite clear that in Mrs Dalloway she managed to describe this mysterious and recondite first stirring of life, the ‘tropisms’ that Nathalie Sarraute, with less success, would seek to explore some decades later.
This withdrawal into the subjective is one characteristic of the narrator; another is the ability to disappear into the consciousnesses of the characters, to become one with them. This is an exceptionally discreet and figurative narrator, who avoids being noticed and who often jumps — but always taking the utmost care not to reveal herself — from one interior consciousness to another. When it exists, the distance between the narrator and the character is minimal, and constantly disappears as the narrator disappears and is replaced by the character: the narration then becomes a monologue. These changes occur constantly, sometimes on several occasions in one page, and despite this, we hardly notice them, such is the skill with which the narrator carries out these transformations, disappearances and reappearances.
The beautifully fashioned narrative employs both an indirect libre style and interior monologue. The indirect libre style, invented by Flaubert, consists of narrating through an impersonal and omniscient narrator — from a grammatical third person — who is placed very close to the character, so close that on occasion the narrator seems to become confused with the character, abolished by the character. The interior monologue, perfected by Joyce, is the narration through a narrator-character — who narrates from the first person. The person who tells the story of Mrs Dalloway is at times an impersonal narrator, very close to the characters, who recounts to us their thoughts, actions and perceptions, imitating their voice, their accent, their reserve, taking on their sympathies and phobias, and at times it is the characters themselves, whose monologues cast out the omniscient narrator from the narration.
These ‘changes’ of narrator occur innumerable times in the novel, but are only noticeable on a few occasions. On many other occasions it is impossible to determine whether the narrator is the omniscient narrator or the characters themselves, since the narration seems to take place in a liminal space between the two, or seems to be both at once, an impossible point of view in which the first and third persons would not be contradictory but would form a single grammatical person. This formal flourish is particularly effective in the episodes relating to young Septimus Warren Smith, whose mental disintegration we witness from very close up, or we share from within the unfathomable depths of his insecurity and panic.
Septimus Warren Smith is a dramatic person in a novel where all the other characters have conventional and predictable lives, so decrepit and boring that only the revitalising, transforming power of the prose of Virginia Woolf can fill them with enchantment and mystery. The presence of this poor boy who went as a volunteer to the war and returned decorated and apparently unharmed, though wounded in spirit, is disquieting as well as piteous. Because it allows us to glimpse the fact that, despite the many pages that seek to bedeck it in beauty and loftiness, not everything is attractive, agreeable, easy or civilised in the world of Clarissa Dalloway and her friends. There also exists, albeit far from them, cruelty, grief, incomprehension and stupidity, without which the madness and suicide of Septimus would be inconceivable. All this is kept at a distance through rituals and good breeding, through money and good fortune, but at times it tracks them, on the other side of the walls they have erected to remain blind and happy, with its keen sense of smell. Clarissa has premonitions of it. For that reason she shudders in the presence of the imposing figure of Sir William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, for she sees him, she does not know why, as a danger. She is not wrong: the story makes it very clear that if young Warren Smith was unhinged by war, it is the science of psychiatrists that makes him hurl himself into the abyss.
I read somewhere that a celebrated Japanese calligrapher was in the habit of staining his writing with a blob of ink. ‘Without this contrast, the perfection of my work would not be given its due,’ he explained. Without this small trace of raw reality that is the story of Septimus Warren Smith, the world into which Clarissa Dalloway was born, and which she helped so much to create, would not seem so unpolluted and spiritual, so golden and so artistic.
Fuengirola, 13 July 1989
Nadja
Nadja as Fiction
Surrealism, and André Breton in particular, had a very low opinion of the noveclass="underline" it was a pedestrian, bourgeois genre, too subordinate to the real world, society, history, rationality and common sense for it be able to express, like poetry — the preferred genre of the movement — the everyday-marvellous, to laugh at logical order or to delve into the mysterious recesses of dream and the world of the subconscious. In the Surrealist Manifesto, description — which is inseparable from narrative — is ridiculed as an impossible aspiration and a vulgar pursuit. No Surrealist worthy of the name could have written a text beginning, as novels are wont to begin, with sentences as banal as the one detested by Valéry: ‘La marquise sortit à cinq heures’.21
The novels that Breton tolerated and even praised were those hermaphrodite books which fell between story and poetry, between real reality and a visionary, fantastic order, like Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia, Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, or the novels of Julien Gracq. His sympathy for the English Gothic novel or for Henry Miller’s Tropics always underlined the eccentric, unconsciously rebellious or unruly nature of these works, and their marginality with respect to the form and content of what is usually considered to be the terrain of the novel.
However, the passage of time has altered the strict ideas that still separated the different genres when the Surrealists exploded on to the scene in the 1920s, and today, more than a century after Breton’s birth, anyone trying to establish a border between poetry and the novel would find themselves in some difficulty. After Roland Barthes has proclaimed the death of the author, Foucault has discovered that man does not exist and Derrida and the deconstructionists have established that not even life exists, at least in literature, for literature, this dizzying torrent of words, is an autonomous and formal reality, in which texts refer to other texts and overlap with, replace, modify and clarify or obscure each other without any relation to life as lived and to flesh-and-blood bipeds — who, in these circumstances, would dare to keep poetry and the novel as two sovereign entities as André Breton and his friends once did?