MRS. DALLOWAYAND FUGUE: “SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, ALWAYS THE BEST . . ."i
Jocelyn Slovak
My research takes to heart a statement Virginia Woolf made to Bessie Trevelyan in 1940 when the violinist detected a musical dimension in her biography of Roger Fry. Woolf responded to Trevelyan in a letter, “It’s odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them . . . I’m extraordinarily pleased that you felt this.”ii Embracing Woolf’s rare statement that she always thought of her books as music before she wrote them, it follows that she thought of Mrs. Dalloway musically as well; in particular, that she conceived of it as a fugue. The following is a good description of fugue:
The Latin noun, fuga, meaning “flight” or “fleeing,” is related to both the Latin verbs fuggere, “to flee” and fugare, “to chase.” Its vernacular equivalents are chace and caccia, nouns that likewise designate a chase or hunt. [. . .] Musicians chose to draw upon the analogy between canonic imitation and the hunt apparently because canon involves a second voice, which “chases after” the first while the first flees before it.iii
The theme of a “hunt” or “chase” extends across Mrs. Dalloway: Peter pursuing a young woman in the park; Miss Kilman pursuing Elizabeth; the young Clarissa flinging herself upon a dog who likes to chase sheep.iv Woolf seems to take the chase theme even further by developing it on a grammatical level with repeated use of the formula, “first this one, then that” or “first one and then another” (elucidated by endnote).v Mr. Bentley, one of the witnesses of the mysterious airplane flight at the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, offers a brief but compelling explanation for the meaning of the airplane as a symbol. As he watches the airplane in the sky his consciousness winds into the narrative: “Away and away the aeroplane shot till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination [. . .] to get outside his body” (28). It is this interpretation of the flight as a symbol of “man’s determination to get outside his body” that seems to infuse with meaning, the multitude of cannoning flights in Mrs. Dalloway from Clarissa’s initial flight of fancy back to her girlhood at Bourton, “What a lark, what a plunge!” (3) to Septimus’s fatal flight out a window; from Sally’s spirited abandon and Peter’s detachment, to a scene of Elizabeth’s burgeoning wanderlust in which she appears to exhibit “the problem of the female vagrant” (116) described by her father. The two primary figures of fugue, which are fuga (i.e., a flight) and cannone (i.e., a round or repetition), create a texture within the narrative of the novel.vi Woolf prompts the reader to visualize a fugue at moments in the text as brief and subtle as the following literary charade, “the voices of the birds [fuga] and the sound of the wheels [cannone] chime and chatter in a queer harmony” (69). Here, Woolf asks the reader to discover, as Septimus does, “that music should be visible” (68); she invites us to see with “musing eyes; gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears musical” (104).
Fugue is considered a highly artificial form given all of its compositional feats and rhetorical prescriptions. Paradoxically, the quintessential fugues, all written by Bach, have an organic quality as though only nature or God could have achieved their formal perfection. Woolf wrote in her 1928 Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway that, “the idea started as the oyster starts or the snail to secrete a house for itself. And this it did without any conscious direction.”vii Most readers of Mrs. Dalloway can attest to its formidable complexity of language and structure, so for Woolf to claim that its form was “secreted . . . without any conscious direction” seems a call to attention. Woolf obviously had a conscious direction when she fashioned Mrs. Dalloway, but a salient feature of that structure is the complex web of flights woven unconsciously by the characters. To take the snail-shell analogy one step further, both the spiral of a snail shell and the circular striations of an oyster shell evince an unconscious pattern, but a pattern nonetheless. If one conceptualizes this pattern as the result of a centrifuge or series of developments away from the body of the mollusk, the shell-formation might be considered the physical reprensentation of a cannon or a series of flights away from one’s body, as described by Mr. Bentley. The idea of centered circular movements seems to resonate in Woolf’s description of Lady Bruton. “[It] may be Emigration, it may be Emancipation; but whatever it be, the object round which the essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous, half looking-glass, half precious stone; [. . .] Emigration had become, in short, largely Lady Bruton” (109). The characters of Mrs. Dalloway make up parts of a larger pattern, personally catching short glimpses of the pattern—glimpses which the reader must then incorporate into a whole. Mr. Bentley sees the aeroplane as “a symbol of man’s soul and his determination [. . .] to get outside his body,” and his revelation comes as he, himself is absentmindedly winding around his yard, “rolling his strip of turf [. . .] sweeping around the cedar tree” (28). He is oblivious to his own role in the pattern upon which he reflects. The text winds, fugue-like, enveloping one and then another perspective.
Here I will hazard a leap to what I see as an essential connection between the fugue form and the psychology of Mrs. Dalloway’s characters. By the end of World War I, doctors first described automatism as “psychogenic fugue,” likening the disoriented wandering of the mental disorder to musical fugue. In 1922, the English war doctor W.H.R. Rivers described automatism in the context of shell-shock. “The most characteristic example of dissociation is the fugue in which a person shows behavior, often of the most complicated kind, and lasting it may be for considerable periods of time, of which he is wholly unaware in the normal state.”viii The novelty of this strange ailment gained wide public attention, Rivers and other war doctors publishing their findings in the London Times, which Woolf read habitually.
At the time Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway, Hogarth Press was distributing back volumes of the newly acquired International Psychanalytic Library, which included Freud’s “Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of War Neuroses.”ix Freud’s text refered (widely) to the neurotic state as the human psyche’s selfdefensive “flight into illness.”xThis poetic description of mental illness contrasts the more literal analogy that could be forged between musical and psychogenic fugue. It presents a less pathological model of “flight;” a model that is universal among the characters of Mrs. Dalloway.
Recognition of the emotional vulnerability of the human psyche was part of a changing climate in medicine and psychology after World War I. With the return of shell-shocked soldiers from the front, doctors were slowly beginning to understand mental illness as the pure potential of emotional trauma, not the result of moral deficiency and not necessarily the result of bodily demise as had previously been believed.xi The relationship between Clarissa and Septimus Warren Smith highlights a suddenly plausible interchange between civilian mental illness and the shell-shock suffered by soldiers. Fear and pain similar to the sufferings of shell-shocked Septimus are insinuated into Clarissa’s sheltered, civilian life. Walking down Bond Street Clarissa reflects, “she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” (8). Clarissa is momentarily transported into a battle-scene in the middle of her party, visualizing her guests as war-torn sufferers, “Anything, any explosion, any horror was better than people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch at a corner [. . .] not even caring to hold themselves upright” (168). Musically, the relationship between Septimus and Clarissa is contrapuntal, Clarissa’s party contrasting harmonically with Septimus’s war experiences over the course of the novel. Themes are traded between Clarissa and Septimus in much the same way a musical theme is handed off between contrapuntal subjects in a fugue, and even though the two characters never meet one another, their consciousnesses intertwine within the narrative. For example, Clarissa remembers lines from a Shakespeare sonnet, “Fear no more the heat of the sun/ Nor the furious winter’s rages” (9) and, ironically, Septimus utters a harmonic inversion of that theme right before he commits suicide: “He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot”(149). The flight theme is similarly traded off between Septimus and Clarissa; her perpetual window-side hesitations are strongly linked to his suicide by defenestration. Indeed, Clarissa opens the novel by announcing the flight theme as a pleasant escape from age, back into youth: “What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air” (3). Septimus’s suicidal plunge out a window is a variation on this theme, harmonizing with it as musical notes harmonize, the perfect differences between two tones bringing each voice into relief. Clarissa offers similar variations on the theme over the course of the novel, later stopping by the window more soberly, suddenly feeling her age, “she paused by the open staircase window which let in blinds flapping, dogs barking, let in, she thought, feeling herself suddenly shriveled, aged, breastless, the grinding blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of her body” (31). Tinged by Septimus’s suicide, the flight theme likewise haunts the language thoughts and actions of the other characters. For example, shortly before Septimus commits suicide Dr. Holmes tells him “throw yourself into outside interests” (91), at once naming a cheerful cure for Septimus’s mental illness, while eerily foreshadowing his patient’s final flight. Holmes’s words also indicate the hypocrisy of “human nature” as Septimus calls his doctors. That is, he seems to be saying that the best way to live life is to flee oneself, taking refuge in outside interests.
Here, I would like to return to the scene of the sky-writing aeroplane. It is Clarissa who offers the musical link to fugue in this scene when she detects the plane several pages before attention is drawn to it as the central spectacle. On the second page, she already hears it as “the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead.” (4) Taken together with Mr. Bentley’s interpretation of the flight as representing man’s soul and his desire to get outside his body, Clarissa’s musical perception of the airplane is significant. In fact, if one is to get at the heart of the airplane scene, one must realize that the “mission of greatest importance” is not the conveyance of the sky-written advertisement, but the meaning of the flight itself as a musical-rhetorical figure. Given the rapt attention of everyone on the ground, the plane spells out nothing more than an advertisement for toffee. As Septimus notices, there is another kind of communication going on in the airplane scene, “Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty” (21). His experience of the airplane’s language provides us with a musical connection as he listens to a nursemaid spelling out the sky-written letters: “Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ . . . and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke” (22). Septimus seems to be in a liminal state between life and death, hearing music nobody else hears, which gives new meaning to Woolf’s description of Big Ben striking, “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (4). (Here, one notices the cannon, leaden circles moving outward). And again, on the threshold between life and death, Septimus listens to his wife‘s voice, not hearing words, but rather a “contented melody” (146) as she speaks to him.
The idea of continuity between language and music hearkens back to Baroque times when rhetorical devices contributed to fugue’s development as the most highly sophisticated style of Baroque music. In the Seventeenth Century, Joachim Burmeister wrote a treatise called Musica Poetica, which secured a connection between rhetoric and music, making figures of composition interchangeable between the two fields. In his introduction to the newly translated edition of Musica Poetica, Benito Rivera writes, “[Burmeister] seizes every occasion to borrow vocabulary from grammar and rhetoric to demonstrate the affinity between these areas and music.”xii With his writing, Burmeister set the stage for composers of Baroque music, or musica poetica, in the Eighteenth Century: Bach’s fugues were the pinnacle of this genre. Here is a fascinating potential connection to the airplane scene in Mrs. Dalloway. Considering Septimus’s tonal experience of the letters in the sky, which after all, don’t spell anything of import, it is interesting to consider the following baseline connection between music and language, made by Burmeister. Describing the way that letters can be transcribed into the tones of a scale and tones can likewise be transcribed into letters, he writes, “An alphabet letter is an element taken from grammar and applied to this art of music, and it has been devised to represent a pitch in letter form.”xiii The flight of the aeroplane seems to communicate the subtle dominance of musical poetics over the written word throughout the text of Mrs. Dalloway. In fact, Woolf’s use of the flight figure, fuga, in the airplane scene demands comparison to Bach’s use of figures taken directly from the field of rhetoric. Stripped wordless, the meaning of the rhetorical figures turns tonal in the composition of a fugue. Meaning is musical in the airplane scene as well, and words become vestiges, as though when she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf aspired to a kind of writing that would ring out into music beyond the words. The fact that fugue represents a synapse between rhetoric and music would have offered Woolf fertile grounds for the fugal/literary metaphor, especially given her selfeducation in the classics. Rivera writes in his introduction to Burmeister’s treatise, “Every student of Cicero and Quintilian would have instantly recognized the intended analogy between the disciplines of music and rhetoric.”xiv Woolf’s knowledge of poetics and her interest, if not expertise in music, make it believable that she would have tapped into this aesthetic metaphor.
On this note, Woolf may also have had more of an understanding of music than we tend to give her credit for. Besides her avid concert-going and evenings spent listening to the BBC, she had an intimate friendship with the composer musician Ethel Smyth who was a Bach scholar and practiced counterpoint extensively as well. Seeming evidence of Woolf’s interest in musica poetica is the fact that Bach is the best represented composer among those whose music is listed in records of the Woolf’s impressive gramophone collection, housed at the University of Sussex.xv
Woolf’s interest in fugal form and structure can be identified in her early novel, The Voyage Out (1915), which was a partial prototype for Mrs. Dalloway, as well as the source of several of the later novel’s characters.
In three minutes [Rachel] was deep into a very difficult, very classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote, impersonal expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. [. . .] [An] invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in the work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together [. . .] that she never heard a knock at the door. It was burst impulsively open, and Mrs. Dalloway stood in the room, leaving the door open [. . .]. The shape of the Bach fugue crashed to the ground.
‘Don’t let me interrupt,’ Clarissa implored. ‘I heard you playing and I couldn’t resist. I adore Bach!’xvi
The last lines of this passage from The Voyage Out echo in Mrs. Dalloway during the final scene of the party. Clarissa once again bursts in to announce her love of Bach, “Professor Brierly (Clarissa could see) wasn’t hitting it off with Jim Hutton (who wore red socks, his black being at the laundry) about Milton. She interrupted. She said she loved Bach” (176). A comparison between these two passages illuminates Woolf’s transition from outward description of a fugue in The Voyage Out, to internal use of musical poetic convention in structuring Mrs. Dalloway. For example, Woolf uses parentheses here and in other instances throughout the text to sort out character’s internal thoughts so that their perspectives are seen to interweave, their voices gathering in polyphony. Burmeister lists a fugal-rhetorical figure, parembole, which means an explanatory, parenthetical insertion.xvii Clarissa’s interruption has a fugal-rhetorical equivalent as well, that is, exclamatio or ecphonesis, “a musical exclamation.”xviii I have been able to identify many other instances in the text where Woolf’s phrasing resembles fugal-rhetorical device. Without insisting too much on such a technical interpretation, it is possible to conceptualize the idea of Clarissa’s internal narrative as fugue-like; the “invisible lines” that string together the “notes,” or the interactions between her party guests.
In this case, it is Clarissa’s gift of “knowing people almost by instinct” (9) that makes her capable of steering the conversation between Mr. Hutton and Mr. Brierly. Here, it is evident that Clarissa has rhetorical skills which are tied to a musical theme. This is an interesting connection to musica poetica, whose power to move the human affections was considered impersonal, grounded as it was in a set of objective and clearly prescribed, musical-rhetorical figures. Clarissa herself reflects that “half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that,” (10) and Peter agrees, “She had some queer power of fiddling on one’s nerves, turning one’s nerves to fiddle-strings” (61). And after Clarissa announces her love of Bach to Mr. Brierly and Mr. Hutton, the latter reflects on how she is “purely impersonal about music”(176). Notice that in the passage I quoted from The Voyage Out, Rachel also exhibits a “queer remote, impersonal expression” as she plays the Bach fugue. These instances in the text cannot prove beyond a doubt that Woolf had fugue in mind when she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, however, they act together to strengthen the possibility.
In conclusion, I would like to consider Clarissa’s party in the context of an unconscious pattern woven by the characters. Without really understanding the source of her impulse to “combine and create,” (phrasing which suggests compositional techniques) Clarissa rationalizes her party as best she can, “It was an offering, which sounded horribly vague . . . it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of an offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano” (121-122). If indeed there is a fugal aesthetic inherent in Mrs. Dalloway, then Clarissa composed the stretto, or culminating rapid juxtaposition of voices towards the end of the fugue. Her whole day builds toward the moment of the party, when she brings voices together in a final compositional feat.
Clarissa, herself, as a character, is gradually developed and then illuminated at the very end of the novel in the same way that a fugal subject is augmented over the course of a fugue, then reiterated at the end, this time, exalted by chords. The final chords of Mrs. Dalloway happen as the guests leave the party and the voices of two characters cross on the last page. Richard and Peter unconsciously pass a theme between them, Richard illuminating Elizabeth’s nascent character as a precedent to Peter’s remark on Clarissa, which is, of course, the final chord. Richard asks himself, “Who is that lovely girl?” (194) suddenly realizing that it is his own Elizabeth. He then cannot help voicing this subject to Elizabeth, “He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, Who is that lovely girl? And it was his daughter!” (194). Finally as the other voices are exiting, Peter looks at Clarissa and is immensely moved by her: “What is this terror? What is this ecstasy? . . . What is this that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was”(194).
And I have no better words to end with than Woolf’s own.
i Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, 1925), 191.
ii Leonard Woolf Papers II D 5.b. University of Sussex Library, Special Collections.
iii The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, Eleventh Edition, ed. Bruce Bohle. (New York: Dood, Mead and Company, 1985), 784-5.
iv “in came that great shaggy dog which ran after sheep. [Clarissa] flung herself upon him” (60).
v “[R]umours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other” (14); “Clarissa was suspended on one side of Brook Street; [...] the old judge on the other” (17); “singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that” (19); “ first one gull leading, then another” (20-21); “it soared up and wrote one letter after another” (21); “one shape after another of unimaginable beauty (22); “A sparrow [...] joined by another sparrow” (24); “the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings” (37); “one woman [...] never showing a sign of all the other sides of her” (37); “one person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, [...] as the other sits silent” (42); “as if this bell had come into the room years ago [...] and had gone from one to the other and had left like a bee with honey” (51); “What with one thing and another, the show was really very tolerable” (55); “There was quite a scene one night – an argument about something or other” (55); “ an absurd statue with an inscription somewhere or other” (56); “’It’s got to be finished one way or the other,’ he said to himself” (64); “the Hughs and the Dalloways and all the other ‘perfect gentlemen’” (75); “one hand exposed for coppers the other clutching her side” (82); “neither one thing nor the other”(84); “fasting one day, drinking another”(85); “It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth rug; one worrying a paper screw [...] the other lying somnolent” (86); “an improvement in public shelters was one [reform]; the protection of owls in Norfolk another” (103); “Anyhow, the difference between one man and another does not amount to much” (104); “so she went through one thing and another” (121); “that one day should follow another” (122); “Mrs. Dalloway and all other fine ladies” (124); “here was one room; there another” (127); “’I don’t pity myself’ [...] ‘I pity other people,’ she said” (132); “Another penny was it to the Strand? Here was another penny, then” (136); “For so it had always happened. First one thing, then another. So she built it up, first one thing and then another” (144); “Hat, child, Brighton, needle. She built it up; first one thing, then another, she built it up, sewing” (146); “Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw another” (148); “the drip, drip, of one impression after another” (152); “our apparitions [...] are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us” (153); “One scene after another at Bourton” (153); “a burst of laughter [...] then another burst of laughter” (166); “every one was unreal in one way; much more real in another” (171); “they came up the stairs one after another” (171); “They kissed each other, first this cheek then that” (171); “rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another” (185) ...
vi “The close identification of the fuga with mimesis [or rondello, cannon] remains the most common fugal-rhetorical application throughout the whole [baroque period] and even beyond, right up to the present day.” Gregory Butler, “Fugue and Rhetoric” in Journal of Musical Theory. Spring, 1997, vol. 21, No. 1, 51.
vii The Essays of Virginia Woolf ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), 4:550.
viii William H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psychoneuroses. (London, 1920), 73.
ix J. H. Willis Jr. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1992), 300-1.
x Sigmund Freud, “Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses” from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XVII(1917-1919), ed./trans. James Strachey, A. Freud. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955) 207-8.
xi For an in-depth discussion of this, see Ted Bogacz, “War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914-22: The Work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock’,” from Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 24, Issue 2, Studies on War (April, 1989), 227-256.
xii See Benito Rivera’s Introduction to Musica Poetica, by Joachim Burmesiter, trans. Benito Rivera ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), xxiv. xiii Burmesiter, 25.
xiv Burmeister, xxi.
xv Music Card Catalogue of Gramophone Records, Leonard Woolf Papers, University of Sussex Special Collections. Box #37 “other property and taxes,” file II.J.5.b.
xvi Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1920), 57.
xvii Burmeister, 177.
xviii Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 265-269.