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MRS.

DALLOWAY
INVISIBLE PRESENCES
Several devices of writing are enlisted to gure the narrator of Woolf!s novel, among them
the Homeric technique of the rhapsode, carefully stitching fragments of song together just
as Clarissa sews her dress; these devices emerge in Mrs. Dalloway when traditional
settings such as the walled garden become narrative devices in description and when
dialogue is absorbed into free independent discourse. Also, in scene-switches the urbane
narrator employs a character such as Peter Walsh to lead the discourse from Clarissa!s
drawing room to Regent!s Park where Septimus Smith is seated. The reader!s eye is led
then, from Septimus Smith back to Peter watching him. Even thoughts about characters
lead from one to the next, as between Clarissa and Miss Kilman, then on to the Army and
Navy Stores, in a kind of extra-sensory dialogue. The segue between Richard Dalloway
and Clarissa in her drawing-room is made by the sound of Big Ben that he hears and that
simultaneously oods Clarissa!s room. Sometimes a door that is opened by one character
is later closed by another. When we have a dead body in one episode, an ambulance
arrives in the next. Labyrinthine symmetry demands that when someone ascends the
stairs, 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 we
also see in the Odyssey, is continued in the textual labyrinths of Virgil The Aeneid, Ovid
The Metamorphoses, Dante The Inferno, Proust A la recherche du temps perdu, Joyce
Ulysses, and in Mrs. Dalloway.
The use of such devices means knowing that only pertinent aspects of Mrs.
Dalloway are revealed in the narrative; since they wag the dog somewhat, readers must
be cautious about preconceptions and identifying the whole too easily with the part while
searching 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 title
character herself is a written woman in a virtual reality of literary discourse. Devices that
produce by writing the illusion of esh and blood are sillfully deployed by conventions often
from centuries past; yet words never approach the famous verisimilitude of the Greek
painter Apelles. Thus, the novel often seems more concerned with its literary style than the
quotidian components of its plot. The impression of sincerity, which is a literary convention
itself, vanishes when spontaneous emoting is revealed as merely a bit of preformed
language that composes the portrait.
Clarissa is sourse, instigator, and subject of this portrait which, as she says, is
herself. 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 generally
understood either that #reality! in literature cannot be presented at all except within the
conventions of literary structure. As he informs us, those conventions must be
understood rst. 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 the
discourse shapes the reality evokes the reader!s precarious tightrope (tight-rope) dance
where one slip means death; it swarms with problems of equilibrium that requires an
exquisite sense of balance to accomplish the performance at all.
Woolf!s stated object of criticising (i.e. making a perceptive analysis and judgment
of) the social system (Diary 2) 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 subversive
activity, is an isntrument of aggression, here softened by using derisive laughter and the
artistic insult rather than real abuse, both as a mask for the wise and armor for the critic. In
Dryden!s terms, Woolf!s beheadings are accomplished with the neness of a stroke that
leaves the body standing in its place. As an example of the genre invented by the
Romans, this satire numbers Horace and Juvenal among its notable contributors. Beyond
this, much in the novel remains obscure.
Virginia Woolf, in the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway in
1928, offers a clue to the basic fantasy, the relationship between Clarissa Dalloway and
the socially obscure Septimus Smith as mystical doubles of one another, related
somewhat like Heathcliff and Catherine. (Harvena Richter has noted that Clarissa is a
Gemini). This introduces the fact of unreality; nothing in nature really duplicates itself. The
double is a metaphysical ction, a fantasy that emphasizes the ctionality. Remove the
fantasy from Mrs. Dalloway, however and there will be nothing left at all. Yet we are never
led by hand through the reticulate maze. Mrs Dalloway instead plays to the landscape of
the imagination where literary values will always trump realism. In satire, the literature of
experience is a better term. Duplication reveals itself as an unrealistic feature of some
magnitude that should dismantle feelings of straightforward condence in what passes for
face value.
The playfulness of doubles, the commedia dell! arte trick of duplicating groups of
characters, 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 being
the double application of assertions, one derived from the original and its imitation hidden
in discourse. The famed ambiguity in words that have more than one meaning (the
linguistic ambages of labyrinthine trickery and deceit, mental confusion and uncertainty,
intricacy and uctuations) and words that do double duty within a prevailing pattern of
repetition must also be disambiguated by sophisticated readers. The more common the
word, the more associations we may have with it. Duplicate versions of structural entities,
symmetries in which the second half duplicates the rst half dominate the text. Words that
double for social and economic terms also serve ambiguously as aesthetic and erotic
terms. 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, more
troubling for the squeamish, ought not be overlooked. Circularity, having one!s life over
again, resembles the fate of Sisyphus in the Underworld repeatedly rolling his stone up the
hill, 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 of
whole in an ornate and intricate work of art.
Structurally speaking, the novel resembles a Platonic dialogue framed as stratied
and nested layers, motifs within motifs, plots and subplots, secrets and mysteries; but it
furnishes only the verbatum half of the dialogue while the reader, serving as a kind of
semblable, must compose the other half. A major burden for readers involves recognizing
the great quantity of performed language (borrowed or pirated from pre-existing literature
such as requires annotation) which appears rst in the shape of indented lines form
Cymbeline (without attribution), lines photographically reproduced as they would be seen
on a page in Hatchard!s window; it also appears occasionally as punctuated verbatim
quotes from, say, Othello, fully attributed. It also lurks in the obscure form of parodies and
paraphrases linked to past utterances that mock the meat they feed on, and the delicate
spoor of many more that have been stolen from various sources and contexts in several
languages, living and dead. As invisible presences, like celestial Dark Matter, they quiz the
reader!s literacy, as a kind of initiation ordeal. For the critic, even in their silence, they
invite annotation; they serve not as aloof commentary but as complex references, forking
paths that concurrently, synchronically, inform the narrator!s rhetoric if only to cut the
sweetness, the sentimental seductiveness of the text. The transmigrations of preformed
language in anamorphic forms that demand an oblique perspective are an essential
component of the narrator!s repertory and are integral to her bravado. Yet the mere
virtuality is often mistaken for reality.
The hide-and-seek of literary allusions, invisible presences in the narrative,
preponderates according to the Hellenistic style that favors the laudatory interpellations of
dead poets, sometimes with a polemical function, to demonstrate the poet!s models, to
dene its afliation, and to show its situation within the literary tradition. Anna Quindlen has
said, If imitation is the sincerest form of attery, then wholesale theft is genuection. The
bent knee of allusion, now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, supplies the
gravitas that balances the tribia of this comedy of manners that exploits, like the plays of
Aristophanes, the rejuvenating ritual structure of ancient Greek cult. Recognizable
allusions with their overlapping suggestions of literary richness often serve as locators to
provide context where it seems lacking. As Weldon Thornton comments, the purpose of
allusion is the development and revelation of character, structure, and theme, and when
skillfully used, it does all of these simultaneously. However, according to Hebel, It is no
longer the... delity to its original wording that distinguis(es) it as a quotations proper.
Determining whether speech is gural or literal usually requires recognizing a pattern that
belongs to another independent text and which may undermine the default category, a
literal reading of the plot. Such quotations that simultaneously activate two texts serve in a
performance (theatrical) dimension on the part of the speaker; this involves a semantic
approach that questions sincerity in that its meaning or truth value can be variously
interpreted. Incongruity between source and contextual paraphrase often prevails.
Furthermore, preformed language serves as raw material for illusions, utterances
that are not what they seem to be. Intertextuality supplies the mere appearance of reality
by way of fragments that in their rst life have been used to designate reality. In Mrs.
Dalloway, events appear in diction that only seems to refer to a presently existing real
world. Like the Readymades of Cubist art, they apply not only to absent texts but have
consorted with an innite regression of other contexts. The level of literary allusion is
comparable only to that in the metatheatrical comedies of Aristophanes in their maculate
abundance that contributes a high degree of sophistication even when freely burlesqueing
Greek religious concepts; in his Frogs playful quotations from Greek tragedy play off the
urbane Euripides against the turgid Aeschylus jus as Mrs. Dalloway quotes from the Iliad
and 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 thing
nor the other. Poetic fragments wrested from their original context now ring hollow, their
original performativeity deactivated. There is no internal life in the already said. The
original speech-act has long passed. The act of speech now becomes the mannerist
property of the narrator whose observations range from the facetious to the malicious. The
prevailing poetics of intertextuality as a dominant xture thus ambiguates whichever issue
is at hand, and sometimes several issues at once. In its Cubist context, Mrs Dalloway
debunks 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 playing
on the double meaning in a single word, an intratextual syllepsis- offer different readings
ambiguously concerning genre, style, or even theory of poetic composition. Having
discerned 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 presumably
understood, or as the original text is seen in its own context, or both. Weldon Thornton
claims that allusion offers the greater complexity its context necessarily brings with it.
The banal or surface meaning often achieves an important dimension derived as a
performance of the quote that has been inserted into this new discourse, beyond the
usual cognitive illusion of reality. This playful rhetoric of preformed language suggests,
minimally, a multitemporal literary moment with, according to Thornton an inexhaustible
number of points of comparison. Margaret Paston!s metaphor for it is apt -cutting large
thongs out of other men!s leather. The implications of plagiarism and the contest for who is
in control of the discourse is fully intentional. Nevertheless, when one!s mouth is stuffed
with preformed language, how much room is left for one!s own?
Furthermore, what seems natural, often a bit of intertextual playfulness, is notheing
more 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 is
merely what is left over when the less than ideal is disregarded. Perception in literature
should mean recognizing it as a matter of artice. The trick is to decide how much, if any,
is to be taken literally. So too with rhetoric. Figures of speech in abundance here draw
attention to the arts of expression as much as to what is expressed; and rhetorical
opulence, like ceremonial robes for the ritual in progress, attracts as much attention as the
ossied clichs that often foreground paradoxes. The alternations between the narrator!s
plain style and her ornate style demand that we see that each is style that must be
acknowledged as such.
Additionally, Mrs. Dalloway is composed of gures of thought, structural devices that
form paragraphs whose opening themes anticipate their repetition at the end of each
paragraph. Key concepts often are enclosed by rings like islands at the center of each
system of hypoctatic syntax. The shapeliness of ring composition follows the articial
order that shapes the mazy narrative interlace, self-consciously using local style to imitate
global 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 or
more inner rings that rst 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 a
deliberately 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 nal apperance. The last occurence,
then, is analeptic regarding the opening. These structures tend to recur, like persons who
rise from the dead. The model of prolepsis/analepsis extends throughout the course of the
narrative and makes for organic unity of parts that relate to the whole design. The circular
tendency is revealed when viewed from a sufciently lofty pinnacle. This is a controlling
style, historically considered an elegant feature, a pleasing pattern of ordering that
subordinates its constituent parts, in proportion, to the whole. Circular structures and
multiple framing devices characterize the entire design as a magic circle drawn around the
discourse.
As the center and the circumference of this circle, Mrs. Dalloway is a wonderland
containing 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 assorted
fabrics, all of which suggest textuality by way of an anatomic metaphor which refers both
to clothing the body and to its care and feeding as well. Text and intertext cooperate as the
warp and woof of the narrative, drawing active readers into working with its fabric to
recognize and test one literaty tradition against another. As Peter Walsh comments
(suggesting such conventional topoi), these are pegs where many people have hung their
hats. Even the ies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people!s noses.
Self-conscious allusions to books contained in a book like Mrs. Dalloway that holds
other books are suggested by various satchels, collecting boxes, and leather bags
containing books and pamphlets. These exegetic moments, these self-reexive parts of
the novel itself indicate its own curious nature as rhetorical play. Further, self-reference to
the bogus quality of borrowed language or writer burgling one another, frauds hidden in
plain view, is implied by both the paste jewels in the shop windows and the thieving
practices of assorted pirates and buccaneers. We are being told things about which, in
fact, we are not being told. Such metaphors are double-coded (said to be the allmark of
the posmodern condition) -illusionist and anti-illusionist; they are both literal and gural.
Self-reference creates what is known as a strange loop; something in the novel steps out
and comments on the novel that contains it. Output returns as input even while remaining
output, referential and at the same time self-referential. The implication is paradoxical: art
creating 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 a
prominent 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 the
narrator!s Cubist perspective.
Narrative in the double perspective of free indirect discourse reveals the novel
forming the narrator!s grumbling satire as subtle social criticism, a metatheatrical display of
indirect discourse in which the words of the narrator as talking head represent the
focalizations of the character which cautions against overestimating sincerity. All the
characters are mediated by free indirect discourse; it leans heavily on irony in the form of
expressing two equally coherent yet simultaneously incompatible readings; the narrator
expects the ctive audience to be attentive to the comic nuances. Often the discrepancy
between magnitude of the event and the style that describes it is, clearly, ironic. Such irony
often composed of preformed language, requires active, not passive readers.

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