For Lucy Had Her Work Cut Out For Her: Mrs Dalloway and the Aesthetics of Woolf's "Ordinary Language" Show Notes
Let's Take a Closer Look at Mrs Dalloway; the Cordelivres Criticism Club
This post contains the show notes for the most recent edition of the Cordelivres Criticism Club podcast, a deep dive into Mrs Dalloway, continuing our anniversary series on the novel.
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.
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