A century on, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway still resonates

Sydney Morning Herald

3 days ago

Emily Coates is the first to notice the smoky letters. The mother stands outside Buckingham Palace, watching the aeroplane sketch a message in the sky. 'But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they move and melted…'
One sample and you're in the world of Mrs Dalloway, or more the mind of Virginia Woolf, her novella-in-a-day marking a century this month. In the space of two linguistic quirks, from verbless sentences to lower-case sentence openers, you can see Woolf's rebellion against orthodox prose.
On paper the plot seems facile. A society woman, early 50s, walks down Bond Street to buy flowers. ('What a lark! What a plunge!' ) Later that night, she will host a party with her Tory husband, Richard. Whoopee-doo, you're thinking. As was I, escorting Clarissa on her florist stroll last week, but then the skywriter arrived.
In a sense, the aeroplane woke me. Until then, I was dealing in telegrams and omnibuses, a woman's reveries from another epoch, my own mind meandering as I tackled Woolf's language, her semicolon fetish, her block paragraphs, only for the floaty letters of GLAXO? KREEMO? to remind me of the novel's nowness.
Mentally, who hasn't drifted during a chore? Clarissa herself drowns in a maelstrom of to-do lists and would-be lives. Self-awareness too ('She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged') as much as guessing the lives of passersby. Next comes the aeroplane, uniting the Westminster straggle – from Emily Coates to Mrs Dalloway to Septimus Smith on his park bench. It's a deft touch, and a reminder of Woolf's nearness to our own timeline.
Even before smartphones deepened distraction, the human brain strayed. We think in 'toggle language' – the what-if subjunctive of competing realities: what is and what might be. What was, and what could have been. Here versus there. Septimus is embalmed in the past ('…he cried, into the flames! and saw faces laughing at him…″⁣) just as Clarissa dwells on stolen kisses in a younger garden, or the garden party looming.
Peter Walsh, Clarissa's would-be flame of youth, likewise sees the sky-letters. His thoughts match the message's fraying forms 'as if inside his brain by another hand strings were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of endless avenues…' Later, Woolf resorts to spider strands as her metaphor, the fugitive tangents of thought seeking to attach to some focal point, an anchor in the swash of pondering.
Dutch director Marleen Gorris deserves a medal, being the only soul brave enough to distil the text into film, as the feat can only fall short. Despite the flowers, the repaired doors, even Smith's jump from an upper window, the real action is invisible. Bells chime to remind the reader as much as the characters that time is passing, a random day being meted on the page.