Woolf's take on Insanity

One of my favorite things about Mrs. Dalloway thus far has been Septimus' voice. I always love it when great authors write from the viewpoint of a madman, because it often gives them a chance to really cut loose and say things that are far too awesome to be constrained by "grammar" or "sanity." Ask anyone- Rorschach's mutterings of nonsense are the best part of Watchmen.

And Woolf, although most of what I've read so far in Mrs. Dalloway is very restrained, very structured prose, does a fantastic job with Septimus Smith, departing ever-so-slightly from the stately tone that Clarissa brings to the novel and reveling just a bit in a more poetic flow of thoughts. Listen for the difference:

So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had been right — and she had too — not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably — silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her — perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.


Distinctively Woolf, yes, and undoubtedly great writing, but compare:


Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.


Yes, there's something a little stream-of-consciousness there, and the obvious comparison is to Joyce- but the contemporary whom I'm reminded more forcefully of by that passage is actually H.P. Lovecraft. It might seem ridiculous at first glance- After all, one of them was recognized as a titan of American Literature in her own time, and one was writing for the pulps, when they would have him- but  there is something Lovecraftian about the pieces of brightly-colored, boldly-drawn images that reflect and refract off of Septimus' fractured mind. Everything's very grand ("Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society"), and everything has ancient power and significance, but in an eerie, half-understood book-of-Revelations way. Similes come thick and fast, but with archetypes and weird images, rather than familiar things, acting as the vehicles ("raising his hand like some colossal figure who has lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks, and now sees light on the desert’s edge which broadens and strikes the iron-black figure"). The language is straightforward enough, but it's luxurious, as Baker would say; she doesn't take it easy on the adjectives. Lovecraft was paid by the word- what's Woolf's excuse?

On the Indicated Passage

Howie's repulsion is predictable and simple enough; who among us, sitting in such comforting surroundings (milk and cookies, for chrissake) wouldn't find himself adopting an "Accentuate the Positive" view of existence? The question, then, is whether Howie would always- or at least often- give this response. He does seem, as we said in class, quite "well-adjusted" and happy despite his idiosyncrasies, but he also has frustrations and problems- he thinks about quitting his job quite often, apparently, and takes unusual amounts of umbrage at things like hot-air hand-driers. It's not hard to imagine a despondent Howie sitting on the corner of his bed, holding a scratched record or non-stapled bag, wondering if L will ever call him back, shoelaces untied, thinking about just how temporary and devoid of meaning life on earth is.

I don't think, therefore, that Howie's point-of-view or love of the mundane things in life is necessarily a cure for ennui. The passage doesn't have any great meaning to me. It's just an anecdote about how it's hard to be a downer when you're sitting in the sunshine with milk and cookies- Howie thinks a number of times every year, we know, about how happy sunshine makes you- and how viewpoints like Aurelius' seem utterly wrong then. Nothing we didn't already know, nothing about the nature of man, just a funny and clever little digression in a book of funny and clever digressions.