Book Bits is a new “How to Talk” feature I’m launching today in which I look briefly but closely at bits of books that have gripped me lately.
I’m reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for the first time. I have my daughter to thank for prompting me to read it now, and I have myself to blame for taking this long to pick it up.
I haven’t quite finished the book, but I find it gorgeous, compelling, sometimes difficult to follow, but thoroughly dazzling. It seems as if each page contains at least one impossible passage — a deft fade between minds, a detail that in its precision points to a whole world, each character like one of those magic tents that are so much bigger on the inside than the outside.
Read even a little of this book, and it’s clear that Woolf is just doing something different — so different, in fact, that to me it seems modern and groudbreaking despite being published in 1925. Novels routinely enter the mental lives of characters, but so often those fictional mental lives consist of neat sentences, one after another, as if thinking always consists of ideas holding hands. Woolf’s characters each have swirling streams of consciousness — thoughts and feelings rise and break like waves on rocks, often regather and break again, with the world (a backfiring car, a girl with flowers) managing to push through. Words and phrases pile up and get stitched together by association and semicolons as much as logic. I have yet to find another picture of mental life that more closely resembles the experience I have of my own head circus (though mine is admittedly not as Woolf-rich in vocabulary).
But Woolf’s depiction of mental life isn’t really what I’m here to talk about and why I’m launching this Book Bits business. (Don’t forget to subscribe and share, by the way.) Mrs. Dalloway is fundamentally a book about the relation between selves and time and how being a self is shot through with time travel. Though the philosophical question of the nature of a self has nagged us for a long, long time, I haven’t found many writers who capture the experience of being the kind of self that we are. Let’s look at this bit from p. 30 of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (2021):
Clarissa Dalloway, like most of us at some point, wonders how so much time has passed while resisting the urge to see herself as old, assuring herself that she has so much time left in her life, “months and months of it were still untouched.” She looks at her face in the mirror, as has done “how many millions of times,” and Woolf shows us selfhood at work: Clarissa sees herself as others see her (“pointed; dartlike; definite”), or rather she sees the self others see when “some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together”. But she also sees how that self is a construction, Selves are baggy, disparate, made up of different and “incompatible” parts, composed to present to others as “one center, one diamond.” And the world cuts back through the thinking (“Now, where was her dress?”). It’s important to note that Clarissa is not mentally flawed or unique; she is all of us.
The philosophical problem of selves has, roughly, two dimensions: What makes a self the self it is at any particular moment, and how does a self persist (if it does) over time. The answer to the first can sometimes help with the second, as in Locke’s theory of personal identity that sees selves essentially as the persistence of memory over time; I carry my experience of this moment with me into the next, which gets added and then carried into the next, etc.
Problem is, as Woolf so deftly demonstrates, that mental lives are full of jumbled time. Take, e.g., this bit from p. 35:
Clarissa’s mention of the word “lake” sends her back into her memory of herself as a child, but she is also there as she is now, compressing the time between her selves, turning time itself into a puzzle. How can this child be this woman? How can this whole life be the one she has made from throwing bread to the ducks between her parents and to the present?
To be a self is to be something like a pile of experienced time, loose, variable and variegated. To read Mrs. Dalloway is, I believe, to see a self as few have show it — to see oneself more as one is.