Hours to Spare

In Andelys Wood’s “Walking the Web in the Lost London of Mrs. Dalloway,” the author discusses the time distortion that is associated with Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus’ walks in London, and how they amount of distance covered is not possible in the time allotted by Woolf (Wood). She cites this quote form Woolf’s Orlando:

An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. (61)

 and goes on to say “Woolf had already started that investigation in Mrs. Dalloway” (Wood).  The relationship between timepiece and the mind is not one-to-one, but there are some important timepiece times noted in Mrs. Dalloway.

In reading Wood’s piece, I was reminded that time is an arbitrary, man-made concept. The timepiece, clock, or watch could be argued to be man’s attempt to control time. But in Mrs. Dalloway, we are also reminded that nature will follow its own time schedule.

When Clarissa is in the florist shop -- named Mulberry’s, which Wood points out is an “apparently invented name” – she is reminded of her youth in the country and the flowers associated with it. Clarissa remembers the evening primrose. This flower opens its bloom in approximately one minute, which can create a sort of time distortion for the watcher. (It is also known as a “colonizer,” which speaks to other themes in the novel.)

During this reflection, Clarissa is also thinking of the “moment between six and seven when every flower--roses, carnations, irises, lilac--glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds” (Woolf 13). Later in the novel, the reader finds out that Septimus commits suicide at approximately six in the evening, and the reader might be reminded of the flowers that glowed, and the way their colors represent  death and violence (red, deep orange) and the loss of innocence (white, violet). Connecting Septimus’ suicide with the horrors he experienced in World War I, these flowers and colors attached to a certain time in the evening presents a foreshadowing of his death.

The fact that Peter hears the ambulance on its way to recover Septimus’ body and he thinks of it as a “triumph of civilization” (Woolf 147), may also lead the reader to think of what else is a “triumph of civilization.” Since Septimus’ identity throughout this novel is connected to World War I, we might think of war as, if not a triumph, at least a consequence of civilization. Following this train of thought, another important time in the novel is 11:00 am. This is when Peter and Clarissa reunite, argue, and seem to settle things in the drawing room. As their relationship was often tumultuous, it could be compared to a war. Knowing that at the same time – 11:00 am – World War I was officially declared on July 18, 1914, and officially ended on November 11, 1918, the reader can see a parallel drawn between Peter and Clarissa’s relationship and the Great War that Woolf so often included in her writing.

It's Greek to Me

While reading Jacob's Room, coupled with "On not Knowing Greek," I was struck by the problems of language and translation--not only of translating Greek, but of translating the body through writing. By reading the Greek plays, or letters from loved ones, the reader must translate the writer's body into the readers space to gain any understanding. Likewise, the writer must translate their body onto the page to be understood. The problems with translation are the gaps in understanding that are left through the navigation of time and space; whether that be a gap in understanding the language, the culture, or the "place" of the author upon writing.

Woolf opens her essay "On not Knowing Greek" with the following passage:

For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say? (Woolf, "Greek")

Ironically, she begins by saying that it is foolish for girls to want to learn Greek, as they would be at the bottom of a class of boys, and that they can't understand the "difference of race and tongue…[or] tradition." The same could be said for boys, who also can't get back to the original sounds and meanings. But she continues on in the essay describing Greek literature as though she has learned Greek, and has been able to "know [Electra], that we have picked up from little turns and twists of the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance, which, characteristically, she neglected; of something suffering in her, outraged and stimulated to its utmost stretch of capacity," (Woolf, "Greek"). She hints at some understanding of Greek after having just told the reader that it is "foolish to talk of knowing Greek."

 Woolf also seems to claim that the time and space that have been traveled lends unintended meaning to the Greek. She says, when reading a Greek play,

at once the mind begins to fashion itself surroundings. It makes some background, even of the most provisional sort, for Sophocles; it imagines some village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea. Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the wilder parts of England, and as we enter them we can scarcely help feeling that here, in this cluster of cottages, cut off from rail or city, are all the elements of a perfect existence (Woolf, "Greek").

When translating a Greek play, the reader can’t help but to place the play in his or her current space. One does not imagine an Ancient Greek village, but a contemporary English village. The meaning of the play, the knowing of the characters, depends on the space in which they are read and understood.

In Jacob’s Room, Woolf also looks at the problems of translation. She states, “A strange this--when you come to think of it--this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden” (Woolf, Jacob's Room 77). For Jacob, Greek is obscure, distorted, and discourage, and yet “Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumble through a play" (Woolf, Jacob's Room 78). The term “stumble” leaves the reader to believe that Jacob can’t get full meaning or understanding from the Greek, but can only get the meaning he creates for it based upon the space he occupies, where meaning “leap[s] out, all of a sudden, especially on leaving crowded rooms, or after a surfeit of print, or when the moon floats among the waves of the hills” (Woolf, Jacob's Room 77). By changing space – moving out of a crowded room – meaning becomes suddenly apparent.

 Much like Greek, the letters in Jacob’s Room must be translated. The difference in language and culture is presumably smaller, but the reader must keep in mind how words can hold different meanings for different people. Each person’s background and experiences shape how that individual understands the world. Woolf says of letters in Jacob’s Room

 Still, there are letters that merely say how dinner's at seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated -- speech attempted. (Woolf, Jacob's Room 97)

The translation of the letter’s conveying concrete information is simple—be ready for dinner at seven, bring this amount of coal, etc. But the translation of a writer’s body (hand) and voice is an attempt at speech, translating the written to spoken and attempting to recreate the author in the reader’s space.

White Space

In The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf, Jane Goldman claims the following:

Woolf is putting forward a model of the writer's mind as an 'ordinary' one, and one that is best understood as a blank sheet of paper, which absorbs mental impressions from the data of the outside world. (104)

This reminded me of John Locke’s concept of the tabula rasa, or blank slate. Locke believed that the mind upon birth was essentially a blank slate, devoid of rules or knowledge, and everything we learn is through sensory perception. (See Locke’s An Essay on Concerning Human Understanding.) While the analogy isn’t completely solid – I don’t believe Woolf thought the mind of an author was a blank page – it is clear from her stories The Mark on the Wall, Kew Gardens, and An Unwritten Novel that she is interested in impressions on the mind and stream of consciousness writing.

The previous quote seemed to connect with passages from Key Thinkers on Space and Place. In the editors’ introduction, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine give the reader some background on the theory of space and place, and show connections between different fields that can all contribute to space and place. They state, "until the 1970s, most human geographers considered space to be a neutral container, a blank canvas that is filled in by human activity" (Hubbard, et al 4). When I read this, I immediately thought of Goldman’s quote above. If Woolf thought of the mind a blank “space” absorbing impressions, and human geographers of the 1970s thought of space to be a “blank canvas” filled in by human activity, then we have an essentially one-to-one analogy, the difference being one of the inner self and one of the outer world.

But the editors go on to say that "not until the work of Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre (1991) that this notion of space as socially produced was convincingly-(if sometimes obtusely) articulated" (Hubbard, et al 5). What led from Lefebvre’s work is the "idea that culture not only takes place, but makes place, [which] is now manifest in a bewildering variety of work" (Hubbard, et al 7). While this seems like a change in the theory, we still have almost a one-to-one analogy, but instead of impressions, or human activity creating from a blank space, we now have culture constructing place.

While I agree that culture does create space (and many other things as well), I am most disturbed by the idea that these spaces are created on a blank page, canvas, or other “white space.” (The racial implications are clear, but that is for another essay.) Whatever page, canvas, or place that impressions, human activity, and culture start out with are not without some construction of their own. A blank page is constructed from wood pulp and such, a canvas from cloth and wood, a place from wood, brick, cement, etc. Even a “blank page” on a computer screen is not really blank. Likewise, the impressions, activity, and culture are not creating from nothing, they are all filtered through past experiences, human schema, and cultural norms. So while an author may write from their impressions, he or she is not filling a blank page with pure impressions. Instead, that author is constructing upon a construction with impressions that are filtered through the past.

Works Cited

Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge UP, 2006.

Hubbard, Phil, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine, eds. Key Thinkers on Space and Place. London: Sage, 2004.