I do not think that they will sing to me.

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In this episode of the Free and Direct Podcast, we are joined by repeat guest Brian Heston and our very own Associate Poetry Editor Alexandra Romero, to break down T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Alex and Brian lead us through a close reading of Prufrock, among the most significant poems of the 20th century, and a cornerstone of Modernist literature. We also get into Eliot’s life and times, along with a consideration of his legacy—and that of Prufrock—into contemporary poetry.

At Indirect Books we’ve recently opened our first poetry contest, the 2026 J. Alfred Prufrock Prize, which occasioned this episode. Alex talks about what she finds in Eliot’s work that inspires this contest, and what we’re looking for in submissions. At one point Brian discusses the myth of “the existential peasant.” It’s a great episode.

I hope you enjoy this meeting of the Cordelivres Criticism Club, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

Welcome to this week’s episode of Cordelivres club! Today, we are joined by recurring guest Diane Josefowicz and Indirect Books’ new Publicist, Millie Oliver!

We discuss Diane’s new book, Guardians and Saints, and the way she explores character, time, and place. We had Diane on an early episode to talk about her novel L’Air du Temps (1985), and in today’s show we get into the ways she has traced her protagonist across multiple books. We also hit on how childhood connections influence storytelling and arrangements evolve into short stories and the vagaries of language.

Millie will be reviewing Diane’s novel for L’Esprit, and that made for a great discussion on the show. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

Nothing was more natural than that these things

should be the other things they absolutely were not.

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In this episode of Cordelivres Criticism Club, we are joined by Eliza Marley, a second-year PhD student, fiction writer, and folklorist, who takes us through her Paranormal studies and stories. While reflecting on her Chicago-based research on belief in ghosts, we chat about shows, books, and ideas that constitute reality.

We then speak with Eliza about her analysis of the controversially-liked novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and the connection to folklore-centric literary tradition. With concepts such as the movement of fantasy into reality, this episode deep dives into how language enhances the sinister feeling of being consumed by a ghost story.

I hope you enjoy this conversation, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

In this episode of Cordelivres Club, we are joined by Rebecca Ruth Gould, a UK-Based Translator and Writer, to discuss her relationship with translation, global perspectives, and immersion across borders.

Rebecca is a special guest of ours because she was our first translated submission, where her translated novel extract from Night of Terror is featured in Issue Two of L’Esprit Literary Review. She has won awards with her full book translation, and has a short story collection called Strangers that came out at the end of 2025. In this week’s podcast, we talk about the impact of translation in her personal and creative life, and how the world of her characters involves a multilingual approach. Through upholding emotion through language changes and abandoning the idea of perfectionism, Rebecca explores how moving away from mastery allows for freedom to feel the impact of a story.

I hope you enjoy this conversation, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

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Our Mrs Dalloway series rolls on into 2026 with critic extraordinaire Nicole Gantz joining the show to bring her expertise and lens to the novel. This is Part Two of our discussion with Nicole, looking at the book’s linguistic surface and the various ways in which Woolf structures her architecture to offer an insightful look at what’s happening compositionally.

Check out Part One from a couple of weeks ago, and we have Part Three planned, featuring another special guest, in the coming weeks. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

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Our Mrs Dalloway series rolls on into 2026 with critic extraordinaire Nicole Gantz joining the show to bring her expertise and lens to the novel. Nicole focuses on the book’s linguistic surface and the various ways in which Woolf structures her architecture to offer an insightful look at what’s happening compositionally.

This post is Part One of our conversation, which abruptly ends upon my making an excellent Hatchards joke. Part Two will be out next week, picking up right where we left off, and we’ve a Part Three planned with another special guest in the coming weeks. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

And it comes over her in a rush, the memory of what it used to feel like, being alive.

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This episode is our first look at a novel by Rachel Cusk, my favorite writer (or co-favorite, with Woolf), and, à mon avis, the most important novelist of the 21st century. We talk about The Bradshaw Variations, from 2009, looking at how Cusk’s narration and its interest in philosophical depth power the book.

We talk about how her use of free indirect style—one more attuned to an “observational mirroring” rather than the messier, more associative syntactic refraction of, say, Woolf—enables her to cover an entire year in the lives of several perspective characters while still getting us close to them. We read out a few passages and talk about the ways that art—what it is and why it matters—gets into this novel. I would definitely encourage everyone to check it out; it’s a great first Cusk book if you’ve never read her. Some really incredible lines and passages all over this one.

Stay tuned for the Substack post with complete show notes in a few days, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

Subscribe now

We get into the novel and break down its use of homodiegetic narration, and nearly make it out of the first chapter in the process. It’s an incredible novel and the first in our (possible?) series Indirect After Dark, which may or may not continue! In any event, it was a very fun conversation, and I hope you all enjoy it. In the meantime, check out Devyn’s website and, of course, stay critical!

Let’s get into it!

Bloomsbury Club Deep Dive

We start with a bit of a general intro to our deep dive episodes of the Cordelivres Criticism Club, for the Bloomsbury Club (we played around with the name a bit). Whatever we call them, these episodes will focus on in-depth analyses of specific texts or aspects of texts that warrant closer examination. These episodes sometimes might be looking at specific elements of novels we also cover in more general conversations, and sometimes a focus on novels that, as we say, seem like they require a deep dive—Parade is one of them, for sure.

We’re also be continually evolving all aspects of the show, so on verra !

Boundary-Pushing Novels in Literature

We started off the substantive conversation with my concept of novels that define or demarcate the boundaries of the novel form, using the (tortured? warped? unstable?) analogy of a cricket oval. As far as anyone can possibly know, the sport of cricket involves an oval. There’s also, we’re pretty sure, a rule that allows the ball to be hit in any direction. This is not a cricket podcast.

Nonetheless, we try and make sense of our cricket oval analogy to describe the boundaries of the novel form. We might uses this image to explain how certain books, like Parade, define or push the limits of what constitutes a novel. In this analogy:

• The cricket field represents the entire scope of the novel form

• The central area represents conventional novels

• The boundary line represents innovative works that test the limits of the form

• Different directions on the oval represent different aspects of innovation (e.g. narrative style, structure, philosophical content)

Among others, Parade redraws this boundary, particularly in its use of the novel as a philosophical text while still maintaining compelling narrative elements. The idea, as we get into with some detail, is that certain novels—we mention Finnegans Wake and Ducks, Newburyport, alongside Parade—push the boundaries of the novel form in different directions, redrawing the demarcation line of the oval: that is to say, what is in bounds. We could look at this idea for any art form, I think; how do these “cricket novels” push the boundary of the form for us, here, novels? More importantly, perhaps, there’s also a question of how good (or “good”) these novels are; I’m not convinced there’s always a 1-to-1 overlap, there. But it’s a fruitful way to think about form, and something that we’ll certainly come back to on the show in the future. Parade, though, is examples of a book that’s an intriguing formal novel and a successful novel-novel, so to speak.

Parade On The Cricket Pitch

About twenty minutes in, I get ot my thesis on Parade, which I think (and say), is one of the most important and interesting novels of the century. On the show, we get into the novel’s formal innovations and narrational techniques, positioning it as a super significant work that sits right at the boundary of the form. We talk a little about Cusk's exceptional skill in managing different narrative modes; putting her in conversation with Joyce and Woolf in that area might be a good idea for a future episode.

We got into a bit of context by looking at the arc of her career, particularly her evolution from (somewhat) conventional early works to more experimental later novels, with Arlington Park as something of an apotheosis (there’s a fun word). We covered the Outline trilogy and Cusk’s more recent, subject-oriented work, and how her career lines up with Woolf’s; a compelling parallel, I think.

The Last Philosopher

I mentioned my coverage of the book; which you can check out in full as well. My review-essay for 3:AM was tilted “The Last Philosopher: Rachel Cusk and the Transgressions of Art.” Parade is, by far, her most avant-garde novel, however we want to define that term—it’s also her most pointedly feminist work. I think this book is super, just, cool (there’s some high-end analysis) as a philosophical exploration of art, language, meaning, and truth. It really is a remarkable book, managing to grapple with some seriously heavy-hitting philosophical concepts while maintaining its novelistic shape, momentum, and engagement.

These concepts range across the board, too: there’s a critique of gendered spaces and what it means for a woman to create; the intersection of the domestic and the creative; the price and meaning of art; and other, classical Cuskian thematics such as marriage, motherhood, family, selfhood, and, of course, language. Ultimately Parade seems invested in interrogating the philosophical potential of art, and answering that inquiry via its own artistic method and aesthetic truth.

Cusk is so good at wrangling a complex, abstract idea into a (sharp, often lyric, figurative) sentence—that’s really her superpower. We’ve talked about this on other episodes covering her work, and we get into it some again today; it’s the technique that gives her work that particular quality of sentence-level readability mixed with conceptual density, something that people often miss and are often thrown by, not least my students.

I’ve said this before, but Cusk’s novels seem like they should be really easy to read—her senesces don't look like Woolf, or Joyce, or Faulkner, or even contemporary writers like Shelia Heti (a favorite of Cusk’s) or Eimear McBride in Strange Hotel—but the are very much not, because of that depth and density of ideas they achieve. On the show I call this quality in Parade “frustratingly propulsive” and I like this formulation; you can read Cusk for days, but thinking your way through her books is a lot harder.

Art, (In)Sanity, and the Self

The central core here, I think, is the balance between art and madness. We get some of those great Cuskian linguistic moments in exploring these ideas.

The feeling of everything seeming right yet being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully recognised: it was her condition, the condition of her sex. The paintings made her unhappy, or rather they led her to acknowledge the existence of an unhappiness that seemed always to have been inside her. G made a painting she particularly loved, of slender birch trees in sunlight, and the demented calmness and innocence of these upside-down trees seemed to suggest the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter. How had he understood this nameless female unhappiness inside her that made madness such a temptation? Unlike other artists they knew, G could not have been accused of exploitation: he didn’t suffer from blind male self-im-portance, and nor had he ever taken any kind of liberty that the public value of his gaze might have seemed to legitimise. [emphasis added]

The two questions I wrote down in my notebook, preparing for the show, were: What does it mean to create art? What are the costs? In the discussion we looked at the book’s narrational structure, particularly how it explores art's relationship to human experience through shifting narrational modes. We see all sorts of methods—first-person plural, singular, and third-person viewpoints—and spent a bit of time on how Cusk moves between these modes, which are so abrupt that it seems the entire narrational coherence is bound up in this all being created by one first-person narrator. Cosmopoiesis, indeed.

Here’s that first break, which we read on the show:

So she thought that what he was really saying was that women could not be artists if men were going to be artists. Once, she was in his studio for the visit of a female novelist, who was struck as though by lightning by the upside-down paintings, much as G’s wife had been herself. I want to write upside down, the woman exclaimed, with considerable emotion. No doubt G found this a preposterous thing to say, but G’s wife was quietly satisfied, because she herself felt that this reality G had so brilliantly elucidated, identical to its companion reality in every particular but for the complete inversion of its moral force, was the closest thing she knew to the mystery and tragedy of her own sex. There had been a plaintive note - of injustice, perhaps - in the novelist’s tone, as though she had just realised something had been appropriated from her. was not the first man to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.

A great Cusk line at the end of that first, third-person, section too.

Her idea of the “stuntman” is another great concept, one that was excerpted as a standalone New Yorker story last year. This idea—that the first-person, woman narrator (who I take as the creator of the entire fictive world) has a double, the stuntman, who absorbs her female experiences so that, essentially, she herself might live. This is a super compelling idea, I think, and does a lot of work in allowing the book to accelerate its philosophical claims through its own composition, which gives it a lot of depth.

Basically, it seems to be saying that art is madness, or that madness is a waypoint along the way to art:

It was as though a violence underlying female identity had risen up and stuck. This was the domain of the stuntman, this attack on me that had originated within myself, but now the stuntman seemed to have taken an actual human form and been externalised. In the exhibition I found different reflections of this notion, there in the vague and exalted light of those lofty silent rooms, which opened one upon another, so that one felt drawn deeper and deeper into G’s secret being, where the making of art bore a relationship at once childlike and savage to the living of life. Here, sanity and insanity were not opposites but rather were the two faces of animate matter, the point at which the existence of consciousness can get no further in breaking down the existence of substance, of the body. Art, rooted in insanity, transforms itself through process into sanity: it is matter, the body, that is insane. [emphasis added]

Or, as it the narrator puts in in an earlier quote that we read, “the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter.”

So then all of it—Parade’s challenging linear narrative coherence, the disparate narrational modes, the fractured approach to characterization—are ways in which its formal qualities reflecting its themes, or, more potently, how the book's structure itself serves as an artistic statement about the human condition.

Through its very formal properties, the novel demonstrates that art can transform from madness to sanity through its creative process, serving as both a narrative (rather, narrational) and a philosophical statement about the nature of selfhood and art. This structure is a tightly constructed work that embodies those thematics, illustrating its exploration of art's connection to madness, loneliness, and the transition towards self-being.

On the cricket oval, the book marks the place where a novel can be an art-object and a work of philosophy. Parade wants to—and, I’d say, is—be, not give, an account of art’s status as an ongoing human activity. This statement is accelerated through its own artistic method, which makes it such a tight, coherent, and compelling work both of art and philosophy. And, for my money, one of the most fascinating novels of the last several decades.

Thanks so much for listening and hope everyone enjoyed the talk.

À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.

And there are a couple of photos of my edition down below.

Let’s get into it!

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Rachel Cusk and the 21st Century Novel

We started off the show with a bit of a general discussion on Cusk and her career; anyone who got a chance to listen to the first episode we did about her work, on The Last Supper, knows that I think her writing is the most significant of the last twenty or thirty years. We talk a little about why I think that, and the scope of her oeuvre. We’ll have more episodes on her work in the future, both in the main feed and for the Bloomsbury Club.

On the show today, though, we’re talking (eventually!) about The Bradshaw Variations, her seventh novel, from 2009. This book—our second instance of third-person present tense on the show—follows the extended Bradshaw family over the course of a single year. The “conceit” here is that the husband, Thomas, has decided to quit his academic job and spend the year learning the piano and looking after Alexa, his daughter, while his wife, Tonie, goes back to work after having been at home the last several years. So, there we go re: plot. We also take a look at the marketing pitch on the back cover, just for fun—it really has nothing to do with the novel itself!

The novel is interested in art, in a word, as we get from the opening sentence: What is art? The really interesting thing about the book’s composition is how Cusk uses her own approach to free-indirect style (broadly speaking) to answer that very question in its own design. Cusk's use of perspective remains consistent, offering a broad view of the characters that’s also quite intimate at times; we’re able to move quickly while still being very invested in these people and their lives. That’s driven by her use of F-ID, which is actually quite unusual and intriguing in The Bradshaw Variations.

Free-Indirect Style as an Observational Quality

As we say in the show, what Cusk does really well here is the way in which her narrating entity observes things based on whose perspective we’re in. We talk about how, in some writers—Woolf would be an example—free-indirect can be quite messy, mechanically; the syntax has a lot of those pyrotechnics that we see on the page, plunging immediately into a character’s mind-style with extreme fidelity.

Cusk does that too, especially in her more recent work, but she’s also innovated this type of “observational” F-ID that we can see really well in The Bradshaw Variations. We talk in the show about how, essentially, the narration looks where the perspective character looks, rather than “bending” the language and style around their mind. So where Woolf, in MRSD, refracts her mechanics around Clarissa in a line like “For Lucy had her work cut out for her,” Cusk here does say, this:

What is art? Thomas Bradshaw asks himself this question frequently. He does not yet know the answer. He used to believe art was a kind of pretending, but he doesn't think that anymore. He uses the word authenticity to describe what he thinks now. Some things are artificial, and some are authentic. It is easy to tell when something is artificial. The other is harder.

In the mornings, he listens to music, to Bach or Schubert. He stands in the kitchen in his dressing gown. He waits for his wife and daughter to come downstairs. He is forty-one, the age when a life comes out of its own past like something out of a mould; and either it is solid, all of a piece, or it fails to hold its shape and disintegrates. The disintegration is not difficult to imagine. It is the solidity, the concrete form, that is mystifying. Disintegration does not involve questions of authenticity, but of a solid form; the questions must be asked.

The warping, or manipulation, of the prose here is less syntactically—less about the words, the grammar, or even the sentences—so much as it is the concept, the that-which-is-being-observed, the parts and facts of the (fictive) world that are called to account in the narrative, and, thereby, the narration. For Thomas, these questions of authenticity and artificiality—which in turn have to do with art—ultimately cash out in life; in the way in which it is lived and “made solid.” It’s the noticing, done by the narrating entity in his perspective chapters, which makes this focus manifest, rather than something “telling” those ideas to us.

For his wife, Tonie, who “On the train thinks about sex” before deciding (or nothing) that the “world is pure self, present tense, neither bad nor good,” there’s a greater ambiguity to life, which, in turn, is borne out by the narrative arc. (I avoid spoilers in the episode because I assume this is a book not everyone will have read, and people should really go and check this one out!)

This observational approach to F-ID, where the narration shows what characters observe rather than mimicking their thought patterns, also sees it maintain a (mostly) consistent syntax across different character perspectives while changing what is noticed; i.e., the POV stays, more or less, the same.

Conceptual Expression—“The Stone in the Pool”

One way Cusk can make this approach work—in The Bradshaw Variations and elsewhere in her career, both fiction and nonfiction—is her acuity in distilling abstract concepts and expressing them in these killer sentences that hit the reader full-on. In the show, we came up with a positively brilliant metaphor for this, discussing how Cusk eschews any scaffolding around these complex philosophical notions—not worrying about “introducing” them to the text or the reader—and simply dropping them into the novel like a stone in a pool.

We looked at a few selections to illustrate this, which she does all the time in the novel. A really strong example comes in a chapter about Claudia, the wife of Thomas’ brother Howard. I think it’s strong enough to carry without much setup:

Claudia has noticed the way a childless woman will defend the man. She will side against the mother, for her sympathies haven't yet been transformed. Claudia remembers, when Lottie was born, the prospect of self-sacrifice coming into view like a landscape seen from an approaching train; she remembers the steady unfolding of it, a place she had never seen before in her life, and herself inescapably bound for it; and then after a while the realisation, pieced together from numerous clues, that this was where her mother had lived all along.

A super strong moment; this was where her mother had lived all along. We spend some time with this on the episode, highlighting how Cusk, ultimately, is interested in (finding the boundaries of) using language to convey ideas and observations about the world. I think this is, in many ways, Cusk’s superpower (or one of them); the way in which she can wrangle these massive ideas—here, the domestic, filial relations between mother and daughter, roles in the home, and all the existential -feminist implications thereof—and force them down into a single image, one that retains the perspective character’s idiomatic slant to it while also being a really nice piece of writing that lends the passage a compelling poetic feel. Formidable!

The Bradshaw Variations is a great novel, fun, deep, and original; it has both narrative movement and philosophical depth, uncovering the meaning and role of art in domestic life. I really enjoyed this episode, and I hope you do as well; definitely give the book a read and let us know what you think! What is art?

Thanks so much for listening, and hope everyone enjoyed the talk.

À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.

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…seemed to suggest the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter.

In the episode of Les Cordelivres Criticism Club, we dive deep into Rachel Cusk's 2024 novel Parade as an example of a work that pushes the boundaries of the novel form. We discuss how the book arguably represents a new frontier in utilizing the novel as a philosophical text while still maintaining compelling narrative elements. We also use a super cool cricket-oval analogy to get there!

We get into Cusk's attempt to enact, rather than describe, the process and costs of artistic creation. The novel's fragmented structure, shifting perspectives, and blurring of fiction and reality are viewed as mirroring the messy, non-linear nature of art-making and selfhood. This allows Parade to encompass themes such as the relationship between art and life, gender and creativity, and the possibility of madness as both a danger and a shelter for artists. In many ways, Parade is a culmination of Cusk's career-long exploration of these ideas, praising its philosophical depth and formal innovation while remaining an endlessly engaging read.

Stay tuned for the Substack post with complete show notes in a few days, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

If you’d like to join the Bloomsbury Group and support fearless writing located beyond convention, simply follow the link below.

This rare two-book episode covers Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, through the lens of their status as Mrs Dalloway interiority-texts.

And there are a couple of photos of my edition down below.

Let’s get into it!

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A Playful Seriousness

In Part Two of this conversation, we continue the discussion on Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. One thing that’s interesting about these two episodes, being about two books, is that they have a different focus than previous ones we’ve done so far, emphasizing a broader compositional scope and, of course, the intertextual connections.

In this second half, we talked about the various ways in which Lippincott and Cunningham “win”—by which we simply mean how they seek to execute the plans/goals of their work and, ultimately, achieve an emotional resonance.

Mr. Dalloway is a much more playful book; we got into this a little last time, and talk about it here, too. We ended up saying that while both novels have a certain core of seriousness to them, Lippincott’s is much less self-serious than is Cunningham’s; this probably has to do with how much more of a MRSD re-telling Mr. Dalloway is; it wouldn’t work, I don’t think, if it couldn’t have a little fun with it’s own concept, in that way. Both of these books are super compelling, though, and stand alone as strong novels in their own right.

A few elements we looked at vis-à-vis this playfulness vs self-seriousness idea:

Lippincott's "Mr. Dalloway" is considered more playful than Cunningham's "The Hours" for several reasons:

• Tonally, as well as in the plot, Lippincott is much more obviously having fun with it, while Cunningham is clearly aiming to write a Serious And Grave Novel (which, to be fair, he does).

• Lippincott’s long endgame—as an unexpected party scenario where everyone is riding on a train to a mysterious destination—allows readers to interact with virtually every character from Woolf's original novel (save, of course, Septimus), in a fun setting that is obviously smitten with the fact of itself (in a good way!). Cunningham doesn’t do anything like this; the sections with Woolf are deathly serious (literally), and otherwise he’s, essentially, trying to construct a fairly conventional late-20th-century literary fiction novel.

• While they both have Virginia Woolf as a character in a scene (an entire timeline in The Hours), for Lippincott, this moment reads almost as an in-joke. This is an outgrowth of a key difference between the two novels: in the fictive world of Mr. Dalloway, there is no such novel as “Mrs. Dalloway,” because we remain within that novel. The Hours’ fictive landscape is the exact opposite; the historical fact of MRSD as a book is central to all three timelines. I think this distinction has a lot to do with why one of them is about as famous as a contemporary novel gets, and the other is, well, not that. The general reader probably encounters The Hours as a much more serious work. One that is “not just Dalloway fan fiction,” or something.

• The opening of The Hours is a remarkably effective rendering of Woolf’s suicide; the opening of Mr. Dalloway is “Mr. Dalloway said he would buy the flowers himself.” That more or less sums it up, tonally.

Perspective vs. Point of View in Dalloway Intertextualities

We then segued into the distinction between perspective and point of view in fiction, defining perspective as the character whose interior life is accessible to the reader, while point of view refers to the technical method used to render that perspective. We’ve talked about this before, but there’s a clarity into this dichotomy offered by these texts that makes it worthwhile to investigate. We emphasize (yet again) that these terms should not be used interchangeably, as they represent separate concepts: perspective is about whose inner world is being shown, while point of view is about how that is shown. Whatever terms we want to use, they’re different ideas; that’s the key point.

Mrs Dalloway itself, of course, uses a roving, close third-person perspective that consistently presents thoughts and actions from multiple characters' viewpoints. We highlighted the novel's use of parenthetical expressions to mark shifts in perspective (sometimes) and continually change speeds and texture in composition. Both Lippincott and Cunningham adopt this method, albeit in a somewhat more accessible manner that lacks the complexity of Woolf.

As we said, Lippincott's strongest stylistic skill is moving between characters' perspectives while maintaining a single point of view, which makes the novel engaging and fun for readers familiar with MRSD itself: that last, long scene on the train is a wild ride. One of the photos we have up here is of a page in that passage where the narrating entity is moving us between perspectives nearly line-to-line—again, all while maintaining the same point-of-view.

The Hours is a little more straightforward in this way—Cunningham is counting on the weight of his language and situations to carry the reader. The three timelines are, internally, fairly uniform; for the most part, the novel establishes a single fixed third person and carries it throughout.

We spent most of the discussion looking at a passage from the “main” storyline, about Clarissa Vaughn and Richard Brown, lifelong friends / one-time lovers in their mid-fifties who live in Manhattan. We read from a section where Clarissa, on her way home from buying flowers for a party given for Richard, stops at a street corner and recalls a moment when they were 19, involving an unresolved kiss and an argument about what happened between them over the summer, which led to the end of their brief romantic involvement. This section really brings into light Cunningham's approach to the “basket-weave” narrational device, bringing together the past and the present while hitting on the central themes of unfulfilled potential, nostalgia, love, regret, death, aging, and the complexities of friendship.

We didn’t have a chance to get into it in the show, but there’s a really interesting connection between the tension that Laura Brown—in the “middle” timeline of The Hours—feels between the generic and the individual form—which comes out of her anxiety around the birthday cake, and which the narrating entity refracts as “platonic”—and the intertextual work writ large of which, of course the novel itself is a prime example. Laura lives at a crossroads between a world of ideas and a notion of herself that inevitably come into conflict. The invocation of Plato is an especially ripe trigger for that, of course, which Cunningham sort of simply dashes off and could probably have been deepened a bit in the novel.

We drew a quick (mad?) parallel between Cunningham's narrative style and Proust's "Madeleine" moment, emphasizing the balance between scenic immediacy and interiority that, in many ways, comes to the novel from Woolf. There’s so much more to say about these books—including an entire Hamlet progression in Mr. Dalloway that we didn’t have time to cover—and they’re both definitely worth the reader. We closed with their concluding maneuvers.

Endgames

Somehow (and this is not intentional!), The Great Gatsby came up once more on the show. We looked at how, ultimately, The Hours and Mr. Dalloway both construct endgames starting from narrative rather than narration—meaning that the emotional punch, or the “why” is gotten to via the plot structures rather than, broadly, the composition. Woolf, conversely, builds her novel’s resonance around the access granted into her characters' minds and interiority; their personal worlds. The artistic beauty of MRSD comes from its limitless capacity to render ordinary events with profound depth; the novels under discussion today—like Gatsby—ultimately rely on something “extra-ordinary” to occur, using set-piece actions within plot-driven narratives.

That’s not to say that both The Hours and Mr. Dalloway fail to achieve stretches of compelling writing or narrational ingenuity—they do. But they’re constructed in a fundamentally different manner than the novel to which they respond, which I think is perhaps the best manner in which we can at once comprehend the lasting legacy of Mrs Dalloway alongside the singularity of Woolf’s most significant work.

Thanks so much for listening, and I hope everyone enjoyed the talk.

À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.

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She could probably return in time to destroy the notes.

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Happy New Year! This episode is the second half of our conversation on Mrs Dalloway intertextualities, looking at Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Robert Lippincott's Mr. Dalloway. We dove right back into composition, looking at how both novels look to make their readerly impact through plot-based narrative developments rather than through narration itself, which differs from Woolf's approach in MRSD.

We also covered the books’ status as queer literature, their meta-textual elements, and a look at how POV functions in each. In this second part, we focused a lot on the various ways in which Lippincott and Cunningham “win”—by which we simply mean how they seek to execute the plans and goals of their work and, ultimately, achieve an emotional resonance.

Stay tuned for the Substack post with complete show notes in a few days, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

This rare two-book episode covers Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, in the lens of their status as Mrs Dalloway interiority-texts.

And there’re a couple photos of my edition down below.

Let’s get into it!

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MRSD Centenary Series

This latest meeting of the Cordelivres Criticism Club continued our mini-series looking at Mrs Dalloway in its centenary year. We started off talking a little about the reading and research I’ve been doing, and why I looked at the novels for this episode before re-reading MRSD itself. We also get into some of the member episodes in the series, including an Indirect After Dark convo about the book and Mark Hussey’s recent Biography of a Novel on Dalloway, and the deep-dive I did on the first 538 words, looking at Wittgenstein, meaning, and Woolf’s narration.

We also covered something like a “goal” for this series: to explore the expansiveness of the novel and consider how much Woolf’s seminal book has permeated our literary consciousness. The novels for this week are, of course, great examples: Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a Pulitzer-winning novel published in 1998 and made into a film (which, as we say, definitely features Nicole Kidman and may or may not also include Meryl Streep and Amy Adams), and Robert Lippincott's Mr. Dalloway, a lesser-known (but equally good—maybe even better?) novel published by Saraband Books in 1999. We get into them both, and jump around a little as we think about how these “inter-texts” function.

Style and Ancestry

While both novels employ similar stylistic techniques to Woolf—and, of course, neither Cunningham nor Lippincott is on her level as a writer, so we sort of just state that and move on (mostly)—their blending of scenic immediacy with interior thoughts, especially, showcases the complexities in how exactly the novels operate in relation to MRSD. Mostly narratively, we’re talking about here.

A few things we get into:

• Narrative Structure: Mr. Dalloway follows a much more linear timeline centered on Richard Dalloway’s throwing a party for his wife on a single June day. It’s essentially a retelling of MRSD, plot-wise. The Hours, on the other hand, employs a more complicated structure with three interwoven timelines across different eras. While each of those timelines also converges on single days, the fact of having three narrative threads gives more plot-level texture to the work than Lippincott, who stays closer to Woolf’s original approach in relying on memory-based temporal movement.

• Relationship to the Original: Lippincott's approach is more direct—essentially pretending to be Virginia Woolf, continuing the same characters, while Cunningham's approach is more meta-textual, with characters aware of MRSD as a novel within their world, as we noted with Clarissa Vaughn.

• Prose Style: Lippincott relies heavily on parenthetical and cross-perspective movement (talked about more in the second episode), embracing a playful imitation of Woolf's style. Cunningham probably demonstrates greater prose virtuosity, particularly in the prologue, and is more commercially accessible in method.

Narrative Structure and Narrational Departure

We discussed the structure and themes of Cunningham's novel, which interweaves three timelines: one set in present-day New York City following Clarissa Vaughan, another in 1950s Los Angeles with Laura Brown, and a third depicting Virginia Woolf writing MRSD. We talked about the novel's incorporation of meta-textual elements, including a joke about Clarissa's name and her friend Richard's reference to her as “Mrs. Dalloway," reflecting both characters' awareness of Woolf's novel even as she herself is (obviously) a literary descendant of Woolf’s character. This simple yet effective structure of the book, which moves between timelines with short chapters, unlocks Cunningham's ability to create organic narrative propulsion.

Lippincott, on the other hand, more deliberately adopts Woolf’s own stylistic techniques and is clearly less concerned with updating them for a late-20th-century mainstream literary market (perhaps why one of these books won the Pulitzer and one didn’t…). Both novels play with her use of parentheticals and the "basket weave" narrative structure that blends scenic immediacy with interior thoughts, something we’ve talked about before on the podcast. The narrating entity in Mr. Dalloway effectively incorporates information organically into the narrative without excessive exposition, using techniques like character interactions in relatively static moments to convey details about the fictive world. His style, while rich in descriptive detail, differs from Woolf’s far more idiomatic and consciousness-driven narration, though both authors share a focus on the balance between character introspection and social dynamics. In his author's note, Lippincott describes his work as "a creative response" following "25 years of passionate immersion in the life and work of Virginia Woolf," offering it as "a token of admiration,” which is pretty cool.

In The Hours, we see a more robust prosody at work; Cunningham is a formidable sentence-level writer (which also probably helped with that whole Pulitzer thing). The Prologue, especially, is super compelling; we spent a bit of time looking at how he inaugurates both this style and his thematics in this depiction of Woolf's suicide.

While they have vastly different ways of doing it, both Lippincott and Cunningham have pulled off something rather tricky: a retelling/reimagining of a titanic novel that feels spiritually connected to MRSD while being an effective work in its own right. It’s a shame that one of these novels receives so much less recognition than the other; they’re both very cool books that are compelling works of intertextuality with Woolf’s masterpiece. In Part Two of this conversation, we get more into the nuances of their methods and how they each achieve their endgame—in a manner quite distinct from Woolf’s own.

Thanks so much for listening, and I hope everyone enjoyed the talk.

À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.

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She is allowed, for now, to read unreasonably.

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This episode is the first half of our conversation on the intertextualities of Mrs Dalloway, looking at Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Robert Lippincott's Mr. Dalloway. We introduced the books, spending a little time on each and discussing the MRSD legacy more broadly before turning to the texts themselves.

We talk about how both authors approach narration differently, with Lippincott using a more playful style that closely mimics Woolf's technique of moving between multiple character perspectives within a single point of view, particularly during a party scene set on a train. Cunningham's approach is a bit more structured, with distinct chapters for each timeline and perspective character. Ultimately, these are both very accomplished novels that are super cool emanations of the great Mrs Dalloway.

Stay tuned for the Substack post with complete show notes next week, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

Let’s get into it!

The “Ordinary Language” of Narration in Mrs Dalloway

We started off with a bit of a recap of the International Conference on Virginia Woolf held at the University of Sussex the past July, and then got into the essay I presented there, “The Hour Irrevocable: Death, Time, and Narration in Mrs Dalloway, and my work a bit more broadly, which essentially is a (quixotic?) quest to mapping Wittgenstein—and Cavell’s—account of language into an account of narration, mostly heterodiegetic, Modernist-type narration. This is a long project that’s still probably closer to the beginning than the end—and maybe we’ll have more episodes about this if people are interested; I thought of a lot more I wish I’d said after recording—but I think it’s fruitful for thinking about composition and how some of these novels can function.

A basic formulation of the question is: if inner lived experience is largely extra-linguistic (which seems to be the case, not only in Wittgenstein, and in, so to speak, common sense), how it is that novels, as a language-bound art form, can succeed in faithfully, convincingly, and compelling rendering interiority? To do this, both in my broader work and here on the podcast, I focus on narration and use of language; MRSD is a great case study to get into some of these ideas. narrative style and its connection to philosophical ideas. In the essay—and so in the episode—we dissect the novel’s first 538 words, which gives an idea of our levels.

As an aside, I realized in doing the prep for another episode in our MRSD series that this 538-word cutoff—which takes us to the long sentence ending in “life, London, this moment in June”—is also where Michael Cunningham cuts off the excerpt he reproduces in the first Mrs. Brown section of The Hours. ‘Tis wondrous strange. (Not really I suppose; it’s a pretty natural first break).

A few of the things we hit in the show:

• Free indirect discourse - dwhite examines how Woolf blends Clarissa's interior thoughts with enigmatic narration, creating a "basket weave" of scenic immediacy and character interiority.

• Philosophical framework - dwhite applies Wittgensteinian philosophy and Stanley Cavell's theories about language to understand how meaning transcends dictionary definitions in the novel's narration.

• Translation analysis - By comparing different French translations of key passages, dwhite reveals how idioms and figurative language create meaning beyond literal text.

• Temporal movement - dwhite highlights Woolf's dexterous movement between past and present through "pseudo-immersive memory" rather than flashbacks.

• Death-time concept - dwhite introduces this dyadic concept where time and death are irrevocably linked throughout the narration, creating a shadow beneath the novel's surface.

• dwhite specifically analyzes the first 539 words of the novel to demonstrate how Woolf's narration communicates meaning "not through language, but through words" - creating what dwhite calls "a ghost in the ink" that conveys understanding that is both "uncommunicable and unmistakable."

• One thing I didn't mention on the episode that I wish I had was a quote from the Cavell essay that really fits into our discussion, so I thought I’d mention it here.

Modernist Narrational Techniques in Mrs. Dalloway

We discussed the use of figurative language—principally idioms—in MRSD. Right from the very beginning we can see how Woolf qua Modernist is lightyears away from the Victorian novel she castigates in “Modern Fiction” or “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” The novel’s opening sentence could fit plausibly been found in any 19th Century novel—stylistically, there’s nothing all that remarkable about it (I do like it; I have it tattooed on my arm!). It’s that second sentence, then, that really gets us in to her Modernist narrational mode, one that "bleeds" the characters' minds into the scenic immediacy—the woven tapestry we’ve discussed before on the show.

“We impose a demand for absoluteness,” says Stanley Cavell in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” “(typically of some simple, physical kind) upon a concept, and then, finding that our ordinary use of this concept does not meet our demand, we accommodate this discrepancy as nearly as possible”. It is this imprecision of language, following Wittgenstein, that unlocks Woolf’s narrative method in Mrs Dalloway.

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

Stylistically, the most obvious device here is the use of free-indirect style to bleed Clarissa’s interior thoughts with the idiomatic narration. From the second sentence through to the end of the paragraph, the reader is immersed in her worldview. Immediately the book begins we are plunged into Clarissa’s existence, her manner of seeing and interacting with the people, things, and events around her. This establishment of mind-style is a key stylistic feature in the novel as a whole; Woolf will use her exceptional technique and voice to bring to life in a modicum of words each of the novel’s perspective characters.

On the podcast, we talked about how the first section of Cavell’s essay entangles Wittgensteinian (non)meaning with figurative language, contending that metaphors, unlike literal speech, are paraphrasable (for him, meaning that they can be expressed with equal force in different words); they have a meaning, and we either grasp it or we do not. This paraphrasability is a defining characteristic of language functions, according to Cavell, and implicate Wittgensteinian conceptions of sense: “To give the paraphrase, to understand the metaphor, I must understand the ordinary or dictionary meaning of the words it contains and understand they are not there being used in their ordinary way, that the meetings they invite are not to be found opposite them in the dictionary.”

We can consider the opening of Mrs Dalloway in relation to this argument, which is concerned principally with idiom and metaphor. Happily, Woolf (nearly) provides one of each in her second paragraph. I talk in the episode about an especially pernicious footnote I have in the essay about this; here it is:

The last line of the second paragraph in Mrs Dalloway is, obviously, a simile (albeit a sort of half-one). Cavell explicitly distinguishes metaphors from similes in his in his discussion of paraphrasability, holding that the former contain a heightened sense of understood-yet-inarticulate(able) meaning than the latter. “It is not up to me to find as much as I can in your words,” he says of similes. I find this distinction somewhat puzzling as a general rule but especially unconvincing for similes using as and not like. As is less precise than like, and permits a metaphorian range of (possible) meaning. More to the point, it seems to me that the engaging philosophical argument Cavell puts forth regarding metaphors and meaning applies with full force to the line of Mrs Dalloway in question, and so I’m overlooking the distinction. To the critic go the spoils. See Cavell, 78-9.

Anyway, back to business. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. This is a great description, one that conveys, like all good imagery, an immediate sensation, a lit-up spot on the emotional map. In attempting a Cavellian paraphrase, we find that it is also our first invocation in the novel of Death/Time; for a beautiful as a moment is conjured up, it is by its very definition past, gone, dead. The innocence of childhood, like the untrod beach, is no more, is unable to ever be again, and therefore really brings out—rather, makes manifest—the thematics of the novel.

We can keep going a bit down the page and check out some more classic Woolfian figurative language, slipping somewhat closer to Clarissa’s cognition, encountering a brighter display of mind-style and somewhat more explosive prose:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave;

This next example of figurative language marks the novel’s first true transition into the past. Making use of freely-associative movement, in which the narrating entity rapidly relocates the temporal immediate via inner thought, Woolf actualizes a moment in Clarissa’s past into a pseudo-fictive present, one that is overlayed atop the actual fictive present in order to concentrate the reader’s attention on the memory; an intricate tapestry dropped over an open window (see what I did there).

This passage also ignites Mrs Dalloway’s wild, totally wild, temporal movement. Clarissa is already identified as Mrs Dalloway, and overseeing people and things, such as a maid and a house where work must be performed—the gap between her lived (quite inner-focused) lived experience and her youth is a sharp one. The way in which Woolf’s language operates on a dual track—moving us through the narrative while shaping the textures of the narration—is key to this novel, and Modernist literature as a whole.

Translation Across and Within Language

Towards the second half of the episode we get into translation, bouncing off some of the work I did in the essay in looking at French versions of MRSD; a central quote here is Emily Apter’s observation that “for Wittgenstein, translation is the mechanism by which language logic is tested.” [Against World Literature, 15]. We get into the importance of cross-language analysis in understanding narrative nuances and the capacities of inter-language translation in testing intra-language narrational logic: that is, figurative language, especially metaphor and simile. We also explore the feminist implications of how characters like Clarissa Dalloway are presented in the novel, noting the tension between character and personhood via the French word elle-même, which does a lot of work towards an ontology of words.

Car Lucy avait bien assez de pain sur la planche. This is how the most recent Gallimard edition translates the second sentence of Mrs Dalloway: as an idiom. We talk about how Cavell finds a moderate difference between idiom and metaphor in that to explain the meaning of the former “is to simply tell it—one might say you don’t explain it at all; either you know what it means or you don’t”—either there is an intuitive, immediate grasping, or there is not [Must We Mean What We Say?, 79]. In this way he likens explaining an idiom to a sort of intralanguage translation, raising interesting parallels to interlanguage translation and the (in)ability of language to capture meaning.

The effect of the idiom in the original is to bleed the narration with the mind-style of Clarissa. We spent a bit of time on how For Lucy had her work cut out for her is not the manner in which any detached heterodiegetic narrating entity (the type of Victorian-Edwardian stuffy third-person against which Woolf leads her fearless revolution) would describe the rationale behind Clarissa going for the flowers instead of her indisposed maid but how the novel’s opening sentence, conversely, could have been written by any number of 19th century narrative entities; it is thus imperative that this second line—in a novel where text-time, the pace of the composition, is equally important as fictive-time, that of events in the story—swiftly and coherently bring us into MRSD’s landscape, both narratively and narrationally.

And so Woolf uses idiom. Cavell’s observation that idioms, like metaphors, rely on both the meaning of individual words and comprehension that they are being used in an unusual way point towards their effectiveness for the narration of Mrs Dalloway. It is Clarissa’s manner of putting it that tells us something about her, beyond the literal meaning of the words she employs. The specific idiom she uses, too, is illustrative; it simply sounds, in a way that cannot exactly be expressed, like something an amiable, middle-age, upper-class London woman might say. The Cavellian importance of transcending dictionary definitions in figurative language is particularly visible in the case of interlanguage translation; translate Pasquier’s choice literally back into English and we come up with have bread on the (cutting) board—i.e., something left to do. While this is also a strikingly good choice, connoting themes of domesticity and Lucy’s role in the house, it has very little resemblance to the notion of one having their work cut out for them—a sentence which itself is effectively nonsense, taken literally, in English, and thereby supports Cavell’s further reflection that idioms are obviously false but, importantly, could be literally true, if rather absurdly. That they both succeed indicates there is something beyond comprehensible language at work in the sense-making achieved by Mrs Dalloway’s narrational mode.

So, what we want to say is that: translation works as a vacillating, liminal space, illuminating the depths of extra-linguistic meaning; where the gap between the notion behind the expression and the expression itself is widened, brought into relief. We can see this back in Woolf’s opening line, which some très cool people have tattooed on their arm and where we find intriguing translation choices. The Gallimard iteration reads, Mrs Dalloway dit qu’elle se chargerait d’acheter les fleurs—foregoing the opportunity to land on herself. Her/self, following (anticipating) a Beauvoirian feminist duality—the external her, married to Dalloway, putting on a party, concerned with the guest list; the internal self, remembering lost loves, thinking of Peter and Sally, indulging in nostalgia for youth—is a crucial aspect of the architecture in the original.

The Novel As Meaning-Making

Looking at this type of nuance in style, imagery, and translation, particularly focusing on how meaning can be conveyed through the connotations of words rather than just language structures, gets us towards the concept of word functionality in narration, and Woof’s work is a great example. That there’re degrees of quality to a translation makes this (Wittgenstein’s) idea even clearer. That one literal, denotative option to translate something can be better or worse than another choice points to the fact that there’s a greater meaning lurking somewhere behind language itself—one lost in the utterance. The achievement of literary artistry such as Mrs Dalloway is to get this meaning back. In fact I think both these ideas—Woolf (and Dalloway)’s feminism and the ontology of narration—will have to be topics for future Bloomsbury Club episodes.

We closed the conversation with a quote from her essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” “There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means.” I think we could add another one to it, which I didn't mention in the conversation, “The meaning is just on the far side of language.” Ultimately, Woolf is a supreme novelist due to, at least in part, her ability to craft the compositions of her novelistic projects to achieve an aesthetic, rather then mimetic, rendering of inner life, creating meaning that is, as we say in the show, both uncommunicable and unmistakable.

It’s so essential that we create space for works that communicate these ideas, that require reader engagement and immersion, that move away from purely entertainment-focused narratives towards those with greater aesthetic value. That’s what we’re trying to do here at Indirect Books, and all of you supporters in the Cordelivres Criticism Club. More on the Dalloway series to come.

À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.

In this episode of Les Cordelivres Criticism Club, we dive deep into the narration, language, and aesthetics of Woolf’s seminal novel Mrs Dalloway—maybe the greatest novel of all time? One could make a strong case.

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The discussion is somewhat based on an essay I presented at the 34^th Annual International Conference this past July, titled ”The Hour, Irrevocable: Death, Time, and Narration in Mrs Dalloway,” which looks at some implications of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell on the first 538 words of the novel. The core of my (very much still in-utero) idea is looking for a way to map the account of language—and thereby the world—made by Wittgenstein (and Cavell, among others) onto an account of narration—and thereby consciousness—in the novel. I do successfully manage to avoid making this a straight philosophy podcast, however, although maybe we could get more into this stuff in a future episode.

For now, we focus on the ways in which Woolf's use of methods such as free-indirect discourse, figurative language, and temporal movement creates meaning beyond the literal text, drawing on Wittgensteinian “ordinarily language philosophy” and Cavell's work on metaphor, simile, and idiom. We also look at some interesting complications presented by translation (en Français!), as well as this idea of “death/time” that I’ve fashioned. We also talk a little about the conference and one of my tattoos.

Stay tuned for the Substack post with complete show notes in a few days, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

If you’d like to join Les Cordelivres Criticism Club—for free!—and support fearless writing located beyond convention, simply follow the link below.

Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody.

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This episode is the first in our series on Mrs Dalloway, for the 100th anniversary of its publication. In this episode, we talk somewhat generally about the novel, getting into Woolf’s style and narrational mode, and how she manages to create a sense of her book being “lived-in.”

What’s really interesting about MRSD, (well, one of the many, many things), is how scenic it is. Literally: the novel is almost entirely scene. This creates a sense of it being “shot in one continuous take,” to use a cinematic comparison, and deepens the feeling of life at its core. This universality, I think, gives MRSD its remarkable staying power.

This series will continue over the rest of the year, looking at other texts, taking a deeper dive into MRSD itself, and having a guest or two on to discuss. It’s my favorite book and I really enjoyed recording this one; an excellent way to spend Halloween.

Stay tuned for the Substack post with complete show notes next week, and in the meantime check out everything happening at the journal and the press and, of course—stay critical.

Merci !

A sharp spur of anxiety runs up her leg.

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This episode focuses on the second half of Eimear McBride's 2020 novel Strange Hotel, talking about the way her prose creates a parallel relationship between the reader’s repose to the text and the character’s response to memory. We looked at some more of that awesome McBride language, and had fun with quotes. Check out the first half of our conversation, from a couple weeks ago, below!

In part two, we focused on how the novel's language and structure create immersive memories and emotional depth, with specific attention to the narrative's shift from third-person to first-person perspective in the final pages. Then we talked a bit about stream-of-consciousness, and where Strange Hotel does or does not fit into that world—a conversation that’ll be ongoing in the Club. Hopefully this is only the beginning of McBride’s “experimental” phase.

Stay tuned for the Substack post with complete show notes next week, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

And there’re a couple photos of my edition down below.

Let’s get into it!

(Even More) Modernist Narration in Strange Hotel

In this episode we continue our discussion of Eimear McBride's novel Strange Hotel, focusing on its Modernist narrational approach wherein the reader's experience mirrors the characters' isolated and traumatic journey through both her peripatetic hotel-based voyages and her own haunting past. In the novel's second half we’re given more about the protagonist's past relationship and memories, via our third-person present tense narration, which effectively conveys her status and strained, to say the least least, emotional state. We look some more at Mcbride's skillful use of language and focus on a specific passage where the protagonist envies others' belief in an approaching future.

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Narrative Techniques in Protagonist's Memory

One très cool maneuver used in Strange Hotel is McBride’s method of gradually revealing—or, rather, pulling out—our heroine’s memories throughout the story arc. In the episode we very profoundly compared this approach to the scene from Seinfeld where Elaine is trying to save three seats at the movies, fighting everyone off before finally giving up. Similarly, the narration circles ever closer—we also invoked the image of a pack of hyenas (that’s how hyenas work, right?)—until, eventually, the protagonist’s resistance to sharing memories is broken through, after holding them back for 60-70 pages. This type of narrational changing-speeds is critical to novel-length work; we (somehow, again), mentioned The Great Gatsby as an example of a novel with conventional first-person narration that still varies in its storytelling (narrational) approach.

McBride uses what we call “pseudo-immersive memory” to bring memory to the fictive present, relying on vivid, multi-sensory language and the protagonist’s struggles with her past to emphasizing a building of tension and eventual climax through a shift in narration rather than traditional plot progression. Her search for some respite, amidst her wanderings, reminds a bit of classical itinerant figures such Odysseus or Aeneas. The character's past decisions and current situation are, we learn, tied in to her careful management of her personal life and relationships—and the way we learn about it all. These techniques, again, collectively create a reading experience that mirrors the protagonist's isolation and disconnection as she travels between hotels, making readers work through dense prose just as the character struggles through her experiences. That’s the core of this novel’s compositional success.

A nice touch to this book is the way in which he various hotels function as liminal spaces where the protagonist can maintain emotional detachment from her past trauma and lost relationships. As in Part One, we look at how these spaces create a "suspended animation" that mirrors her internal state with the readerly experience. The protagonist's movement between hotels worldwide (from Auckland to Oslo to Austin) physically manifests her attempt to outrun memories while paradoxically searching for something.

A few brilliant lines bring this out— "It is the farthest furthest she has ever been" (Auckland); “One could—in the main—eat dinner off the manner in which she’s conducted her sex life”—suggesting both physical and emotional distance. The hotel rooms become containers for memory that the protagonist both avoids and confronts; spaces where her carefully maintained emotional barriers gradually break down.
The metaphor culminates in "The Imagined Room" section, which we talk about towards the end, where the hotel setting transforms into a psychological space where past and present collapse together, forcing confrontation with what she's been avoiding throughout her travels.

As a foundational architecture, the narrational structure of Strange Hotel reflects the protagonist's psychological state - initially keeping memories at bay through controlled, stylized language, then gradually allowing those memories to "chip in" until they finally break through completely in the last section, where the narration dramatically shifts from third-person to first-person. As we talked a bit about last week, this shift embodies the character's ultimate inability to maintain emotional distance from her past despite her attempts to "stop fucking around with language."

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Perspective and Point of View

The discussion also focused on broader bits of literary analysis, specifically the distinction between perspective and point of view in narration. We look at my own use of these terms, defining perspective as the character(s) whose thoughts are revealed, while point of view refers to the technique used to render that interior life. This becomes central to Strange Hotel’s narrative style, and we look at its shift to first-person POV for the final 15-20 pages, discussing how the narration takes on the character's voice through an advanced understanding of mind-style.

This last section, titled "The Imagined Room,” features first-person syntax to achieve an immersive exploration of memory. The abrupt transition from third-person to first, after 120 pages, culminates in a significant narrative twist and a flood of first-person revelations. There’s a bit of Molly Bloom here, although this was left as an open point for future discussion.

Stream of Consciousness in Literature (Part One of…Many)

We close with a fairly brief foray into stream of consciousness narrational techniques, looking at its role as a third-person, rather than first person, school of methods. True stream of consciousness involves total immersion in a lived space—which is not what we have here. We’ll definitely be getting into that in future episodes, but for now we attempted something of an overview vis-a-vis Strange Hotel.

The close of the novel, despite this grammatical shift, isn't a true first-person narrative but rather a close approximation that allows the narrator to inhabit the character's interiority. McBride uses this technique to explore the limitations of language and the tension between maintaining distance and revealing the story's underlying themes, paying off that grand narrational arc that begins in the first hotel scene—the seats in the movie theater have finally been given up.

Ultimately McBride’s command of elliptical language and composition creates a compelling character study, despite limited character information, and stands as an important example of Modernist novelistic approaches. Let’s hope that her future work continues in this direction, as Strange Hotel is a very cool novel.

Thanks so much for listening and hope everyone enjoyed the talk.

À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.

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