Elsewhere some Hindus were playing drums: he knew they were Hindus, because the rhythm wasn't congenial to him. (EM Forster, A Passage to India) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay While writing and revising Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf was corresponding with E. M. Forster, who was working on A Passage to India. In September 1921, he records in his diary: "A letter from Morgan [Forster] this morning. He seems as critical of the East as of Bloomsbury, and sits dressed in a turban and watches his prince dance" (Diary 2.138). Her novel came out long before she finished hers; he read it and noted: "Morgan is perhaps too reserved in his new book" (Diary 2.304). A note of the Anglo-Indian society that dominates A Passage to India resonates in the background of Mrs Dalloway, sounded partly by the returning Indian traveller, Peter Walsh, but also heard and overheard in the conversations and oblique references scattered throughout the tale. Reinforcing its literal presence in the novel, an echo of India appears in Mrs. Dalloway's narrative rhythms. Like the intricate percussion of the Indian tabla, the fabric of Woolf's narrative comprises a polyrhythmic texture that subtly undermines London's booming metronome: Big Ben. Mrs. Dalloway's beautiful and complex narrative seems to defy readers' power of description. David Dowling's Mapping Streams of Consciousness promotes the sense that it is necessary to "reconstruct" the text in order to understand it. In a section titled "A Reading," Dowling dissects the novel into neat structural packages so that the reader can easily study its anatomy. Includes maps of London showing movements and crossings of various characters, an hourly chronology of Clarissa's feast day, character sketches condensed from details scattered throughout the text, and, in the appendix, a sort of "miniature concordance" giving counts approximately 32 words ("India" appears 25 times). Other studies of Mrs. Dalloway are less detailed but also serve to illustrate the difficulties in describing her narrative patterns. In “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ideology: Language and Perception in Mrs. Dalloway”: Teresa L. Ebert discusses binary structures—“counterpoint…visions” (Ebert 152)—in the language of the novel. Drawing on Nancy Topping Bazin's Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, she explores how the feminine and masculine polarities in the text are resolved into images of androgyny. Instead of metaphor and metonymy, Caroline Webb examines the “antiallegorical” nature of the text (Webb 279). In “Life After Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway,” she argues that the narrative invites us to search for a “hidden story,” but ultimately frustrates our expectations (Webb 279). Focusing on the narrator as a specifically created presence in the work, Sharon Stockton draws on classical physics and phenomenology to show Woolf "deconstructing the conventions of authoritative representation" (Stockton, "Turbulence in the Text: Narrative Complexity in Mrs. Dalloway" 51 ) The novel's narrative has also been specifically described in terms of metrical effects. In "'On the Floor of the Mind': Sentence Shape and Rhythm in Mrs. Dalloway," Elizabeth Dodd explains the poetic qualities of Woolf's prose. Not only does it highlight the relationships between sentence rhythm and the thought patterns of specific characters, but it also shows that Woolf turned to poetry for literary inspiration when revising Mrs. Dalloway. By drawing the reader's attention to Woolf's diary entry for 21 June 1924 - the same in which Woolf commented on Forster's A Passage to India (above) - Dodd shows howpoint the poem was in the writer's mind: "I think I grow more & more poetic" (Diary 2.304). Undoubtedly, poetry informs Woolf's work, and Dodd's argument in this regard is convincing. However, although Mrs. Dalloway's sentences are metrical, "poetic" alone does not encompass the full rhythmic force of the narrative. Ebert's term "counterpoint" and Stockton's "turbulence" metaphor both evoke types of rhythmic structures, but in very different contexts. Indeed, Woolf consciously draws influence from various media in her attempt to "[throw away] the method...in use at the time" (Woolf, "Character in Fiction" 432). Robin Gail Schulze highlights Woolf's use of tonal music to show how she breaks with literary tradition in her novels, but concludes that "Mrs. Dalloway, by Woolf's definition, remains a conventional novel" (Schulze 8). I suggest, however, that Mrs. Dalloway's chronology, the poetic meter of her phrases, her turbulence and counterpoint, are all vectors in the intricate matrix of her polyrhythmic structure. Borrowed from the field of musicology, "polyrhythmic" describes a percussive structure unfamiliar to many Westerners. Because it does not rely on regular, repetitive patterns marked by uniform measures, polyrhythmic drumming may seem chaotic to the unaccustomed ear. These typically non-Western rhythms are somewhat analogous to several different metronomes, each generating a different pattern based on a different downbeat. The rhythms generated by these metronomes would have mathematical relationships with each other; the downbeats will intersect in various combinations and, at long but regular intervals, all the metronomes will play their downbeats at the same time. In Drumming at the Edge of Magic, percussionist Mickey Hart calls this sudden unity of seemingly chaotic structures "The One." Multiple metronomes, however, only superficially capture the complexity of Indian and other non-Western percussive traditions. Indian classical music is based on rhythmic variation and elasticity of time almost unheard of in Western music. The tabla, one of the most common Indian percussion instruments, consists of two small drums of different size, shape, material, pitch and timbre. The drummer uses one hand for each drum and all fingers of both hands to produce almost minimal accompaniment, often rippling and intricate, with a buzzing sitar or reed-like human voice. Forster describes the effect of this type of drumming in A Passage to India:Godbole... said a word to the drummer, who broke the rhythm, produced a thick, confused sound, and produced a new rhythm. This was more emotional, the internal images it evoked more defined, and the singers' expressions became fatuous and languid. They loved all men, the entire universe, and shreds of their past, tiny slivers of detail, emerged for a moment to melt in the universal heat. (286)Whether or not she used Forster as a conscious model, I think this distinctively polyrhythmic music provides a surprisingly descriptive analogy for Virginia Woolf's narrative technique in Mrs. Dalloway. The swirling, divergent, colliding, sometimes intersecting, and synchronous rhythms of Mrs. I Dalloway manifest themselves in the text in various ways and on numerous levels. Rhythm emerges in the novel in literal prose references to percussive sounds, in the sound of the words themselves, and in the overall narrative structure of the work: its rhythm, its pauses and dips, its movement through time, and its movement through and environment. minds of the characters. Like Forster's Drummer, Woolf's prose breaks the rhythm, produces thick little patches of sound, and produces a new rhythm;evokes internal images; and ultimately blends fragments of the past and tiny slivers of detail into a unified final beat of “universal warmth.” One of the elementary components in Mrs. Dalloway's polyrhythmic voice is the percussive soundscape that Woolf creates in the background of the novel. When Clarissa crosses the street at the beginning of the novel, she is immersed in a cacophony punctuated by the percussive stomping and clanking of people and traffic: in people's eyes, in the swing, in the tramping, and in the shuffling; in the bellowing and the tumult; the carriages, the motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; what he loved was the triumph, the jingle, and the strange high-pitched song of a plane overhead; life; London; this moment in June. (4)As Clarissa continues through the city towards the flower shop, the noise begins to form into a rhythm. When an enigmatic and important-looking car appears, its effects ripple, vibrate and echo through the street: The car was gone, but it had left a slight ripple that flowed through glove shops, hat shops and tailors on both sides of Bond Street. . ...When the sentence ended, something had happened. Something so insignificant in individual cases that no mathematical instrument, although capable of transmitting shocks in China, could record the vibration; yet in its rather formidable fullness and its common emotional appeal. ... In a pub in a back street a colonial insulted the House of Windsor, resulting in words, broken beer glasses and a general shindy, which echoed eerily across the street. ...Because the superficial agitation of the passing car as it sank touched something very deep. (18)After the ripple reaches a "general shine" and then dissipates, another important sound enters the scene, which can subtly evoke Indian music. Above the rhythmic sounds of life resounds "the strange high-pitched song of some airplane" (4), "boring in the ears of all the people in the mall" (18), like the hum of a sitar or a singer accompanying the tabla .Similar percussive "surface stirrings" propagate throughout the novel with clicks, taps, taps, and drips; we hear it in the chatter of voices, in the creaking of twigs, in the pulsations and thuds. Woolf gives us the cadence of Peter Walsh "speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of sound" (48). Septimus Warren Smith experiences "thunders of fear" and remembers the sound of Rezia and her sisters making hats: "he... could hear them; they were rubbing threads between colored beads in saucers. ... The scissors were tapping the table. . ..Again, scissors hitting, girls laughing” (87). The effect of these (and numerous other) sounds in prose is subtle but significant. Not only do they add an important sensory dimension to readers' experience of the text, but they give us percussive accents to reinforce the rhythmic beat of the novel. Complementing these sounds in the prose are words and phrases that, when read aloud, convey a sense of rhythm. and percussion. A passage that illustrates well both the prose sound and the prose sound appears when Peter Walsh is walking towards the park after leaving Clarissa's house: From behind came a pattering like the pattering of leaves in a wood, and with it a rustling, a dull, regular sound, which when it reached him drummed his thoughts, with stern steps, up Whitehall, without his doing so. Boys in uniform, armed with rifles, marched with their eyes straight ahead, they marched with stiff arms and on their faces an expression similar to the letters of a legend written around the base of a statue praising duty,gratitude, loyalty, love for England. . (51) The words “tap,” “rust,” and “thud” are onomatopoeic, as they both refer to and embody sound, while “drum” specifically evokes the percussive patterns that pervade the passage. Pairs of alliterative words, such as "regular rustle", "severe in step", "Whitehall without" and "written in the round" and the triplet "like the letters of a legend" sound when uttered like blows on the drumhead. Similar structures can be heard throughout the novel, especially in Septimus Smith's hallucinations: The earth trembled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled near his head. The music began to boom against the rocks up here. It's the horn down in the street, he murmured; but up here it sang from rock to rock, it divided, it met in sonorous gasps that rose in smooth columns (that the music was visible was a discovery) and it became a hymn, now the hymn is woven by a shepherd's flute (It's an old man blowing the whistle near the tavern, murmured) which, while the boy stood still, came gurgling out of his flute. (68)Onomatopoeia and alliteration appear here too, but the rhythm is noticeably different. Instead of the fast and decisive rhythm of the previous passage, Septimus's has a slower and less regular tempo. The repetition of the "h" sound and the greater distance between some alliterative words contrasts with the military precision of Peter Walsh's perceptions. Of course these are not isolated passages in the text; they simply illustrate some of the ways in which Woolf infuses her prose with sonic elements that contribute to the novel's overall polyrhythmic structure. These important stylistic elements – this superficial agitation – add texture to the fabric of the narrative. But the predominant rhythms in the novel follow a broader pattern. In a sense, Mrs. Dalloway's disparate rhythmic voices closely follow the "streams of consciousness" that David Dowling seeks to map (above). Each character in the novel has their own narrative rhythm. These rhythms emerge and retreat, diverge and intersect, approach chaos and then resolve. We might consider the primary components of narrative rhythm to be time and space. Using Dowling's cartographic diagrams and chronological table as guides (Dowling 51-57), we could follow the separate space/time rhythms of Septimus, Clarissa, Peter, Richard, and Elizabeth throughout Clarissa's feast day. We could then reconstruct these narrative and plot elements – these “slivers of detail” – in a way that would be hostile to the text. In a sense, we would like to insist that the tabla submit to the authority of a single metronome. Time and space are important metrical components in the text, but through elastic polyrhythmic tempos and voices, Woolf shows that they are subjective components, not rigid authoritative constants. Like Forster's description of the effects of the Indian drum ritual, Woolf shows us fragments of her characters' pasts as real parts of the present moment - "this June moment". In A Passage to India the "new rhythm" brings together memories and images to form a spiritual "wholeness" in the moment:Godbole... remembered an old woman he had met in the days of Chandrapore. Chance brought her into his mind while he was in this heated state, he didn't choose her, she came across the crowd of soliciting images, a little splinter, and he pushed her with his spiritual strength towards that place where wholeness can be found. Completeness, not reconstruction. (286) In Mrs. Dalloway the narrator does not simply describe these moments of completeness; He creates them for us. The narrative rhythm blends together past and present for Clarissain the first paragraphs of the novel. When Clarissa enters the street in front of her house, her past is suddenly with her: What a lark! What a dive! Because that's how it had always seemed when, with a soft creak of the hinges, which she could now hear, she had flung open the French doors and stepped out into the open air of Bourton. How fresh, how calm, quieter of course, the air in the early morning; like the edge of a wave; the kiss of a wave; cold and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she was then) solemn, feeling as she felt, standing there in front of the open window, that something terrible was about to happen... (3). Throughout the novel, the narrator conveys memory and present action to us simultaneously and ambiguously. “That he could hear now” apparently refers to the creaking of Bourton's hinges in Clarissa's memory. Yet "now" implies the moment of his dive into the street, suggesting either a kind of reverie - as in "I can almost feel it now..." - or that the doors through which he now dives also creak. The next sentence, "for an eighteen-year-old girl like back then" is equally disorienting. It locates the time of Clarissa's outbreak of opening Bourton's windows, but also implies that, through her memory, she turned eighteen again. The “then” contrasts with the earlier “now,” but neither refers concretely to its own relative time. Where Forster tells his reader that the rhythm pushes Godbole to an experience of "completeness, not reconstruction," Woolf's narrator makes us experience completeness. twice with Clarissa. Studying the passage we may feel obliged to untangle the threads of time to reconstruct the chronological plot. Dowling reprints diagrams that other readers have used to plot chronology in the novel: one constructs pyramids labeled with algebraic letters and numbers to indicate time intervals and characters, another draws zigzags that connect characters to each other (Dowling 71). But Dowling is forced to conclude that "despite the structure of the novel, therefore, it remains essentially disorganized" (Dowling 73). If we try to listen to the narrative with a Western ear, to delimit the measures and count the times, the novel will confuse us. Whatever tool we use, our attempts at reconstruction will deny the sense of completeness to which the narrator's rhythm pushes us. Clarissa's plunge into the street and air of Bourton shows, however, a specific awareness of simultaneous times: the air in Bourton was "calmer than that, of course." Rather than comparing the past to the present, Clarissa, through the narrator, compares Bourton's air to "this." Past and present are still contained simultaneously in the text, but their rhythms diverge briefly. As the passage continues in memory, we retain with Clarissa a vague awareness of the present moment:...looking at the flowers, the trees from which the smoke winds and the towers that rise and fall; standing and watching until Peter Walsh said, "Storing among the vegetables?" - was it like that? - "I prefer men to cauliflowers" - was that so? He must have said it at breakfast one morning, when she went out onto the terrace... Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July...(3-4). Within the narrative of memory, Clarissa's present emerges in the repeated "was that?" and the past becomes silent, undefined, speculative: “he must have said it…” The narrative focuses on the present as Clarrisa thinks about Peter, but mirrors the ambiguity of the past: “one of these days, June or July.” As Dowling writes, "the text oscillates rhythmically between memories and this day in June" (73). Past and present complement and complicate each other. The narrator thereoffers a small, thick fuzzy sound and then resolves into a new rhythm. Of course, the rhythm of Clarissa's dive is not conveyed by memory and moment alone. The prose meter conveys what Elizabeth Dodd calls "a visceral rendering of an emotional and intellectual concern" (279). Like the passage meter explained above, the text here contains accents, repeated patterns, alliteration, and assonance. Starting with a low accented rhythm: "What a lark! What a dive!" - the passage "squeaks" with the window, "flashes" like a wave, winds with the smoke of the trees, rises and falls with the towers. In its sound and its rhythm, in its dips and its pauses, this mixture of past and present, this little confusion of sound, establishes the polyrhythmic patterns that will overwhelm the reader throughout the novel. For Clarissa, the rhythm of the past in Bourton becomes as relevant to this moment in June as her preparations for her party. Similar to how it "swings rhythmically between memories and this June day," the text passes through and surrounds Septimus' hallucinations. When Rezia returns to his side in the park after taking a necessary but brief rest from him, the narrative cadence switches from her to him. In doing so, we move from "real" details to his fantastic improvisations on reality: why, when she sat down next to him, did he gasp, frown at her, turn away and point at her hand, take her hand, look terrified? Was it because she had taken off her wedding ring? “My hand got so thin,” she said, “I put it in the bag,” she told him. He dropped his hand. Their marriage was over, he thought, with agony, with relief. The rope has been cut; he mounted; he was free, for it had been decreed that he, Septimius, the lord of men, should be free; alone (since his wife had thrown away her wedding ring; since she had left him), he, Septimus, was alone, called before the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn its meaning, which now at last. .. it had to be delivered whole to... "To whom?" he asked aloud. (67, second ellipse in the original)As she passes through Septimus's mind, the narrator blurs the distinction between her and him. Grammatically, "their marriage was over" is the narrator's third-person comment; however he "thought" attributes it to him. The narrator thus merges his rhythm with that of the character, and then diverges again with "he asked aloud". Employed throughout the novel, this structure allows the text to "rhythmically oscillate" between "real" time—the chronological trajectory from Clarissa's plunge into the street to the final moments of her party—and what Robin Gail Schulze calls "mental time ". Schulze writes: During the mental time segments, Woolf releases various temporal streams at once, both in the mind of one character, who retreats into an internal soliloquy, collapsing past, present and future, and in the simultaneous perspectives given by several characters who record . just one moment. The result of both techniques is that plot time stops. (Schulze 8) Through these departures from the novel's chronological trajectory and through the metrical nuances of the language, Woolf achieves the elasticity of time and meter characteristic of polyrhythmic percussion. Time, however, is not entirely subjective and elastic in this text. The novel takes place in a prescribed temporal context, marked ominously by the booming of Big Ben: "First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The lead circles dissolved into the air." Schulze finds this chronology "inevitable" and bases his conclusion that Mrs. Dalloway is finally a mainstream novel largely on his reading of Big Ben's authority in it (Schulze 8). Indeed, the picturesmetronomic clocks in the novel represent an almost oppressive rhythmic structure that endangers non-Western polyrhythmic narrative force. The danger is such that Woolf titled the first working drafts "The Hours". I think, however, that the narrative ultimately subverts Big Ben's bluster to the rhythms it threatens to undo; its metronomic authority is absorbed and subsumed by a unified downbeat at the end of the novel that promises to launch into new polyrhythmic complexities. Woolf specifically inscribes Big Ben in the novel as a malevolent force. Immediately before Peter Walsh leaves Clarissa's house, the clock strikes the half hour: "The sound of Big Ben striking the half hour stands out among them with extraordinary vigor." As Peter leaves, the clock is heard again: "Peter! Peter!" Clarissa shouted, following him onto the landing. "My party tonight! Remember my party tonight!" She cried, having to raise her voice against the din of the open air, and overwhelmed by the traffic and the sound of all the clocks chiming, her voice cried out, "Remember my party tonight!" he looked frail, thin and far away as Peter Walsh closed the door. (48) By interposing "between them with extraordinary vigor" and then threatening to stifle Clarrisa's party invitation, Big Ben endangers the kind of human connection - the intersections and combinations of rhythms - that ward off the potential chaos of life. Clarrissa's perception, Peter Walsh, the returned "Anglo-Indian", seems impressed by the rhythm of the clock: Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he went down the street, talking to himself rhythmically, to time with the flow of the sound, the firm sound of Big Ben striking the half hour. (The lead circles dissolve into the air.) (48) As he walks "in time with the flow of sound", he turns red with self-importance: And there he was, this lucky man, himself, reflected in Victoria Street. All India was behind him; plains, mountains; cholera epidemics; a district twice the size of Ireland; decisions he had arrived at alone: ​​him, Peter Walsh... Because he had a predilection for mechanics; he had invented a plow in his district, he had ordered wheelbarrows from England, but the coolies did not want to use them, things of which Clarissa knew absolutely nothing. (48-49) But when his confidence suddenly fails, the rhythm of Big Ben abandons him: As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls into the mind. The effort ceases. Time beats on the mast. There we stop; here we are. Rigid, only the skeleton of habits supports the human structure. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh told himself; feeling drained, completely empty inside. (49)As it "flies on the mast," time is both elevated and reduced to a symbol. Like a flag, it is an abstract icon of an ideal that failed imperialists like Peter Walsh can only salute emptyly from the skeleton of habit. While Peter mourns his emptiness and thinks of Clarissa, a very different clock makes its voice heard: "Ah," said St. Margaret, like a hostess who enters her drawing room at the stroke of the hour and already finds her guests. “I'm not late” (49). Unlike Big Ben's "irrevocable" voice, "her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to impose her individuality. A certain sorrow for the past holds her back" (49). Fittingly, the "sounding sound" of St. Margaret (50), which comes sometime after Big Ben's announcement of the same time, reminds Peter of Clarissa: It is Clarissa herself, he thought, with deep emotion and remarkably clear sound , but disconcerting. , I remember her, as if this bell had entered years before the room where they sat in a great momentintimacy, had passed from one to the other and gone, like a bee loaded with honey, loaded with the moment. (50)For Peter too, this "reluctant" voice becomes part of the rhythms that blend between past and present, in contrast to the impetuous pace of chronology. Like the voice of St. Margaret, Clarissa silently resists the authoritative voice of Big Ben. When we first hear Big Ben, its relationship to Clarissa's sense of time seems tenuous: You hear,... Clarissa was positive, a particular silence or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that could be his heart, affected, they said, by the flu) before Big Ben explodes. There! It thundered outside. First a warning, musical; then the time, irrevocable. (4) Instead of pushing time forward, the passage suggests, Big Ben almost causes it to stop. Furthermore, the clock endangers Clarissa's biological rhythm, threatening to stop her heart. It is not surprising that the narrator later tells us that Clarissa "feared time itself...how year after year her share was divided" (30). As the novel progresses through the day, however, Big Ben's threat to Clarissa seems to diminish. When he interrupts his conversation with Peter, he seems more like a common bully than a serious force to be reckoned with: "The sound of Big Ben striking the half hour stood out among them with extraordinary vigor, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, reckless, they swung the dumbbells from side to side." Swinging dumbbells, flexing muscles, the watch is "reckless", but also looks a little silly. When the clock strikes three, the sound seems irritating to Clarissa, but not dangerous: "The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa's living room, where she sat, ever so irritated, at her desk; worried; annoyed" (117) . Eventually we see Clarissa subvert Big Ben's overbearing rhythm, as if its rules didn't apply to her: But here the other clock, the clock that always struck two minutes after Big Ben, shuffled in with its round full of strangeness and endings, which she threw down as if everything was all right at Big Ben with Her Majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so right, but she has to remember all sorts of little things too - Mrs Marsham, Ellie Henderson, the ice cream glasses - all sorts of little things came flooding, lapping and dancing in the wake of that solemn blow. (128) Clarissa will follow her own pace, regardless of Big Ben's empty authority. The rhythm of the prose here also evokes the non-Western structures that Big Ben would assimilate. The other rhythm is "shuffling", "flooding, lapping and dancing in the wake" of the insistent London metronome. Where Clarissa resists linear time, Septimus Smith deconstructs it. Stockton reminds us that observation and perception are subjective to the position of the observer. Thus, “we are irrevocably within our universe, and the authority that would have allowed us to speak of it in terms of truth or fact has been undermined” (Stockton 48). Septimus's madness stems, according to Sir William Bradshaw, from his "having no sense of proportion" (96). Unfortunately for him, Septimus understands that "the observing god-scientist, outside the system and predicting/controlling with the useful tools of legality and determinism, is an archaic fiction within the new narratives of chaos" (Stockton 49). Septimus will not submit to the authority of the Medici ("What power did Bradshaw have over him?" 147), he will not adhere to the fixed and eternal referentiality of language ("He attributed meanings to words of a symbolic type. A serious symptom" 96), nor he is bound by the metronomes of time “chop and slice, divide and subdivide.” Septimus sees and celebrates a relationship between time and language. Like words,..