proximoception | (no subject)

I didn't mean anything very complex. Woolf's obviously remodeling Ulysses in the direction of clarity and class, and much more importantly replaces the gender of the integrated artist of the everyday (Bloom -> Clarissa) while keeping and also killing the Stephen/Wastelander ephebe. The implication is that certain women, like Woolf and Woolf's mother (who Clarissa sort of merges) are already doing this - which Joyce might have agreed with, since the partial feminization of Bloom, and Stephen's radical estrangement from the female, seem to be the keys to their respective success and failure. Woolf's making a gesture of sympathy toward the impasse of young male modernism while also implying the guys'll continue to be stuck in it because they won't give up love. She's probably offering Peter as a way out of that, who accepts that love is always half-created. The only problem there is that Peter is presented as pretty silly. Conrad is a tertiary target but still an important one, I think: Woolf sees the white Intended at the end of Heart as a bit of a slander, though she siphons off the just aspects of that attack in the form of Lady Bruton. Bruton deserves the reproach, Clarissa does not, as she accepts the void. Whereas Marlow can't. Septimus isn't quite Marlow, though - since Woolf gives him her own transcended madness, he reacts more to the too-muchness of life, which is why Clarissa gets to understand him so well. The unresolved currents of sympathy and annoyance with her male peers, while fun to trace, might be part of what stopped Mrs. Dalloway from being To the Lighthouse - Mrs. D is a truly rare case of a novel that's absolutely fantastic but near-totally supplanted by a later novel by the same person. Nearly everything she says here she says better there, while adding still more. But Dalloway more than justifies itself, both as a more leisurely introduction to Woolf for newcomers, and for the rest of us as more Woolf. And it does go some places Lighthouse doesn't: the madness stuff and Peter's dream are endlessly fascinating - I think she handles madness, real madness, better than Shakespeare, unless jealousy counts as madness. Her handling of Lucrezia, whose shoes boy have I exactly been in, has an irritated tinge - presumably Leonard would have benefited by seeing Take Shelter - but also a lot of accuracy and sympathy.

Er, and I write all this without having actually finished the book. I guess I just felt I remembered all the party stuff. Perhaps I don't.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think it's a pretty amazing book - 's got things in it that the others don't. But so do Love's Labor's Lost and Dubliners too. And I think it's important as a Great War novel as well, I mean somehow a better one than Mrs. D wrt the Great War.

As the years go by I am more and more amazed that my grandfather fought in it, and then that he was a refugee from the events of and a gold star parent in WWII.

I need to go back to posting in

sforalhistory

alternately, I would like that.

Yeah, having the war be the missing puzzle piece was very powerful - works better than Mann's attempt to retrofit the already long in progress MM into something similar. Actually mentioned but deleted Dubliners, as it's been too long for me to say anything at all about that book.

Now I'm hungry for more modernism. Dumb as that word ever shall be.