mrs dalloway (virginia woolf)

The other day we walked through Bloomsbury and saw a sign for a Dalloway court, or some other confection made up to honour Woolf’s protagonist. Even though Mrs Dalloway doesn’t live in Bloomsbury, she lives in Westminster, and she never goes there. This seems to reflect the way that Dalloway (and perhaps Woolf herself) have become signifiers which might not have that much to do with their original essence. It’s not clear to what extent the author even likes her protagonist, a woman who has chosen an easy metropolitan life above any bohemian  instinct she might once have had. Who has rejected the more dangerous Peter Walsh and married Richard, a minor member of parliament, someone who couldn’t be more establishment if he tried. The Prime Minister comes to her party. She’s a far cry from the ideal of Bloomsbury independence and self-publishing. The emotional heartbeat of the book, surely influenced by Joyce, is the tragic returning soldier and his Italian wife. The soldier suffers from shellshock, or PTSD in today’s terms, and his delirium is at odds with the addled comfort of Dalloway’s life. When news of his death infiltrates her party, she feels resentment. A resentment at the realities of politics and history intervening on her idyllic set-up. Which in reality is far from idyllic, as she has lost touch with Walsh and her friend Sara Seyton, the two real conduits for any kind of emotional or artistic life she might have lead. Dalloway has been mirrored onto Woolf, but she feels like a vacuous copy. The sort of lady who lunches that would now be found in Notting Hill and environs rather than Westminster.

This mirrors the way that Woolf has been appropriated as an exemplar of a certain kind of studied, pseudo-aristo, pseudo-bohemian Englishwoman. An image that lurks at the edges of brands like Marks and Spencers and Laura Ashley. She has been appropriated by the marketeers of this type of ghoulish loveliness, to be consumed by the Mrs Dalloways of her day. Walsh, whose underwhelming career has played out in India, as part of the great colonial project, feels an extreme ambivalence about this England to which he has just returned. “Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage!"

At the same time, Woolf’s prose contains the lyricism of poetry. The most vivid moments are reserved for Septimus, the shellshocked soldier, and it’s via his shellshocked voice that the writer achieves an Eliot-esque song: “Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.”

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“It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

paris qui dort (d. rené clair)

Clair’s astonishing silent film was accompanied in Cinemateca by three musicians, Juan Chao, Ignacio Echeverría y Luna Roura. Their pulsating score contributed to the delirious spectacle of a film which feels like a precursor of the zombie movie. Seeing Clair’s deserted 1925 Paris triggered thoughts of Boyle’s 28 Days Later. The flip-side of urban modernity, all that teeming life, is the living dead, which is what happens to the city’s citizens when Clair’s mad professor flips the switch, meaning the whole city is frozen. Only those who exist in the skies retain consciousness. At first it seems the only person to escape the spell is the warden of the Eiffel Tower, who lives on its third floor, just before the tower tapers, high enough to escape the impact of the professor’s forcefield. Later that same morning, the warden comes across a group whose plane had been above the city, coming in to land just before the professor struck. The Eiffel Tower becomes a place of retreat for the warden and the collection of odd souls who landed at Paris airport. It is the other star of the show, a place from which the beauty of the city can be mapped, but also one of peril, as the survivors go slowly mad and fight one another. The tower is a symbol of modernity which contains within it the seeds of its own emptiness. For all the lightheartedness of Clair’s vision, and there are plenty of laughs, there is also something disconcertingly haunting about this vision from a century ago of the materialist and technological instincts which fuel the city’s constant, restless movement and expansion. 

the great gatsby (f scott fitzgerald)

Did I appreciate the quality of the writing when I first read Gatsby? When did I first read Gatsby? Who knows. A readily digestible classic, no doubt it is read by many who are, as I was, too young and gauche to really appreciate what the writer is up to. We sense that authorial brilliance, without in any way processing it, caught up as we are in images of shirts, parties and an apparently neo-romantic narrative which isn’t actually very romantic at all. 

The danger of creating myths is that the myths out-run the authorial intention. Of course, storytellers are in the business of creating myths. Myths convey immortality, on the characters and their parent, the author. Some writers write for money, but others write in order to join the pantheon of myth makers, their eye on the aftermath, rather than today’s battle. It’s the curious nature of the art of writing that it’s greatest rewards are to be found in a post-materialist state, also known as death. Perhaps the same might be said of saints and terrorists, but posthumous vocations are few and far between, and the exhaustive, passive process of writing has none of the temporal heroism enjoyed by the saint or the terrorist. 

Fitzgerald succeeded in joining this pantheon, above all with his creation of Gatsby, a riddle enshrined in an enigma discovered on the sole of Nick Carraway’s shoe. Gatsby is a bootlegger, a fake, a loser. He is also, briefly, incredibly wealthy, and a man whose dubious taste is redeemed by his indifference, and the fact his bad taste is, in the true American style, a bigger, brasher bad taste than anyone else’s. Under the cloak of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose, the dubious taste of his character morphs into a kind of apogee of everything the world ever aspired to, even though the author himself makes it abundantly clear that Gatsby’s aspiration is the only thing of any real value. The achievement of fame, fortune and a truckload of monogrammed shirts proves meaningless and empty. He even has Gatsby himself recognise this, with the unwitting playboy turning his back on his riches, which were only a means to woo the woman he fell for, a means to keep an unsustainable dream alive. 

All of which means that in the end, Gatsby is a paradoxical novel, famous for celebrating the things it is questioning. Those things being the cult of the individual, the rampant march of capital, the joys of conspicuous consumption. The cult of Gatsby is the cult of a myth, a man whose funeral no-one attends, a man whose reputation is trashed even as his coffin is being lowered into the grave. A soul who is trashed in the contemporary world of the novel, only to be redeemed, posthumously, by the sublime craft of his creator.