Журнал научных разысканий о биографии, теоретическом наследии и эпохе М. М. Бахтина
ISSN 0136-0132
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп. → 1995 → 4
36 37
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 4
Brian Kennedy (Cedarville College, USA)
Recalling "A General Shindy": Carnival Tension in Mrs. Dalloway
Mikhail Bakhtin, most notably in Rabelais and His World, has written of societies where carnival gave relief from the hierarchies that dominated culture. Recently, critics such as Allon White, M.Keith Booker, and David K. Danow, have advanced the notion of the «carnivalesque», a sort of mood rather than a fixed social condition or specific set of cultural events. Booker comments that White and Peter Stallybrass generalize Bakhtin's notion of carnival into a broader idea, «transgression», «which involves a violation of the rules of hierarchies in any number of areas»1. Jeanne Dubino suggests that carnival be thought of as a «notion», rather than an event, «a stance that opposes the established order, a stance characterized by laughter and irreverence, and one that, privileging the body — particularly the grotesque body — over the mind, reverses standard hierarchies»2.
In their text The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White suggest that as the European middle class grew in the 19th century, carnivals as outward social acts — the sort of positively disruptive social celebrations Bakhtin studied — were slowly stopped in the name of law, order, and propriety3. As a result, carnival became repressed into people's consciousnesses, transferred from an outward social festival to an internal psychological phenomenon (180), becoming the very thing from which bourgeois subjectivity was constructed. Further, as Freud discovered in his early work, this internalized sense of the carnivalesque remained repressed in «normal» people, only surfacing as a trauma caused a person to become (in Freud's parlance) «hysterical» (174). The existence of bourgeois culture depended upon the degree to which «the "base" languages of carnival» were repressed (181). The result is what Stallybrass and White term «a strange carnivalesque diaspora» (190), with carnival appearing everywhere and nowhere simultaneously in bourgeois life.
In making their argument, Stallybrass and White rely on readings of European culture which show carnival as a fixed social event which is gradually eradicated. Yet in their relentless focus on the historical past and present, I wish to argue, they fail to consider the possibility that carnival might recur at some future time. Simply because European culture had managed to eradicate most instances of carnival in the past does not mean that carnival could never again happen. Further, it would seem that once a culture knew about carnival, especially if it were so familiar that its dominant class used carnival, whether intentionally or not, as a building block for its collective psyche, it might reenact carnival, should the need and proper conditions arise. This being the case, I submit that a careful observer might be able to see the preliminary signs of an eruption of carnival before carnival proper occurred, and that this would not only signal a cultural memory of the past but also the possibility for carnival to happen once again in the future.
By way of analogy, in carnival, as in any staged cultural happening such as a football match, the actual playing of the game is not the totality of the event. Rather, the game or carnival itself is a center which attracts the most attention, because it is played out in ritualistic detail. What interests me is what occurs before the carnival, in the pre-stage to carnival, wherein preparations are being made, the event — even if it has no formal beginning point — is being anticipated, and where, perhaps, brief glimpses into the carnival itself are allowed to escape the scrutiny of the «officials» whose word reigns in the culture which carnival disrupts. I propose that the culture so characterized might be in a kind of carnival tension, where hierarchy rules, not quite ready to entertain its opposite, yet perhaps knowing that carnival free play is on the brink of exploding into carnival proper.
I want to explore how the pre-carnival stage, or the crucial and recognizable stage of carnival tension which occurs before the carnival itself, might both signal that a sense of unease is gripping a culture, threatening the solidity of bourgeois identity, and indicate that the culture is looking forward, perhaps with fear, perhaps with hope, to a renewal of «real» carnival. In making my argument, I will look at Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway4, in order to show that even in a fictional portrayal of a highly stratified society, elements of carnival tension exist. This, I believe, will open the possibility for using carnival to read novels not previously discussed in these terms,
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Brian Kennedy
Recalling "A General Shindy": Carnival Tension in Mrs. Dalloway
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 4
38 39
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 4
works thought not to portray the sort of carnival upheaval that is evident in, for example, Rabelais. At the same time, it will confirm Stallybrass and White's notions about the construction of bourgeois subjectivity by showing the places where carnival eruptions occur in the lives of Woolf's characters.
Stallybrass and White claim that by repressing the culture's history of carnival «bourgeois life elevated its status but simultaneously became increasingly vulnerable to the unexpected, destabilized emergence of these "othernesses"» (190) and here they speak of sudden eruptions of what is the opposite of the rules of daily middle-class life. To my knowledge, no critic has examined Woolf's writing for such carnivalesque elements, and certainly not for its carnival tension the way I have defined the term above. Yet doing so enables one to understand the social-cultural situation in this novel, which is only recently being contextualized in historical terms, critics prior having concentrated on formal analysis of the novel as Modernist. The carnival tension in Mrs. Dalloway, I will argue, provides a way to contextualize the novel into the British 1920s because it creates a link to British memory of the Great War, which has occasioned the sort of hysteria, or, to use Freud's later term, «melancholia», which brings carnival once again to the surface of middle-class consciousness. Further, such an approach allows for formal continuity by providing thematic links between characters as they experience brief explosions of carnivalized emotion which interrupt their otherwise staid London lives.
Perhaps since Virginia Woolf wrote the introduction to the 1928 edition of Mrs. Dalloway, in which she specified the purpose of the book to be concern for a new aesthetic, critics have read the novel as definitive of Bloomsbury/Modernist aesthetics, thought to be a «high» cultural poetics which worked at portraying reality from an inward perspective5. Indeed, Brian W. Shaffer says that «for years it has been a truism that high literary modernism is properly viewed as eschewing the language of the world for the language of art; that instead of representing the world this art competes with it»6.
The novel certainly evokes a sense of ennui for
readers schooled in Jamesian realist conventions. From its very first
line, «Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself» (3), the
text breaks with realist narrative, leaving the reader floating free
between the consciousnesses of characters. Yet while the formal aspects
of
Woolf's technique are not without interest, the text is significant
for something other than Woolf's attempt to rewrite novelistic
conventions. One might view the feeling of indeterminacy which the
novel evokes as a corollary of the mental state of characters dealing
with the delayed effects of the Great War, which apparently were
only fully felt years later (the novel, of course, is set in June,
1923)7. In commenting on the work's social contexts, recent critics go so far
as to say that «there is a case for regarding Mrs. Dalloway as the
finest "war novel" that World War 1
produced»8. Samuel Hynes suggests that, «… in fact the entire novel [is] full of death, haunted by
death and war… War and death are there in the middle of everything
because, in this world-after-the-war, they are part of
reality»9. In fact, however, this is not so much a Great War novel as a novel about
the repercussive effects of that conflict on a group of people trying
to recover from it and go on with lives similar to those the war
disrupted.
The members of Woolf's fictional set are still — or perhaps only now — dealing with World War 1"s delayed effects. Septimus Warren Smith, discussed by critics as a victim of Shell Shock10, is the most obvious case of this, but many other characters give small hints which I will suggest indicate that their present concerns have been shaped by the European War. Given that this is one of the novel's major concerns, Freud's theory of grief, set forth in the treatise «Mourning and Melancholia» (1917), provides an instructive methodology to account for the effects of this War on these people. In this essay, which is part of his collection of works on metapsychology, Freud distinguishes between the acceptable practice of mourning a loss, and the similar yet abnormal condition of melancholia, which involves «profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity», and so forth11. Melancholia involves having identified with an object and experiencing the loss of that object, but then turning the loss into anger at one's self. Certainly we might, given these symptoms, see Septimus Warren Smith as a melancholic. And, given the proximity of Freud's work to the time of Septimus's condition, so might his doctors have. Yet a further connection might also be forged, that between the British people as a whole and a post-war sense of loss. Hence, one might read certain of the moments where elements of carnival burst into characters' consciousnesses as indicative not of an aesthetic which privileges distance from the world
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Brian Kennedy
Recalling "A General Shindy": Carnival Tension in Mrs. Dalloway
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 4
40 41
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 4
but as one which is deeply mired in real life.
As Freud carries on describing the condition of melancholia, several of the components he identifies apply to the case of a people mourning for the loss of an ideal. Melancholia may be provoked by «a loss of a more ideal kind» (than that of the death or loss of a loved object). «The object has not perhaps actually died, but has become lost as an object of love (e.g. the case of a deserted bride)» (155). Melancholia may stem from situations of being «wounded, hurt, neglected, out of favor» and so forth (161). Or, it may be that «a loss of the kind [eg. similar to loss of an object of love] has been experienced, but one cannot see clearly what has been lost». «The patient [may not] consciously perceive what it is he has lost» (155). The vagueness Freud indicates here seems fitting to describe the loss of a cultural ideal shared by a large number of people12.
As the loss is being processed through one's psyche, a sequence of events which Freud is reluctant to describe with too much specificity, time passes. Freud says that reality has to «pass its verdict», or verify that the object of love is no longer available for attachment by the subject. In so doing, the ego must run through «each single one of the memories and hopes through which the libido was attached to the lost object» and decide in turn that the object no longer exists (166). Because the process of the ego severing itself from the object of loss is slow (166), one might assume that a great deal of time passes as one mourns. In melancholia, the relationship to the object is even more complex than in instances of loss which produce mourning, so the process of separation is even harder, and, one might suggest, longer (167), this because the ego must detach itself from an object which is not dead.
The result of such a loss, as Freud describes it, goes to the heart of carnival. To overcome a loss is the attempt by the individual ego to «[re-]incorporate the object into itself», a process which is accomplished «in this oral or cannibalistic stage, … by devouring it». One sees, in melancholia, «a regression from object-cathexis to the still narcissistic oral phase of the libido» (160). We may notice the parallel to Bakhtin here. To shift to Bakhtin's terms, this regression into the libido might well become a celebration of the grotesque body with its emphasis on sexuality, eating, eliminating, and so forth.
Or, to recapture my earlier context, we might revisit
Stallybrass and White, who also deal with this question when they
suggest that Freud, albeit in work done much earlier than
«Melancholia
and Mourning», saw hysteria as a condition in which persons
«attempt to mediate their terrors by enacting private, made-up
carnivals» (174). These episodes are not public, like carnival proper,
but rather often occur when the patient is by himself or herself,
and often occur in the head rather than outside the body. The
hysterical patient would, under analysis, «vomit … out horrors and
obsessions which look surprisingly like the rotted residue of traditional
carnival practices» (174). This, I am suggesting, is what makes Woolf's
characters more than aesthetic abstractions; they are people who
exhibit such «vomiting», because they have psychological war
wounds which upset them to the point of unearthing memories of the
carnival rituals of transgression, debasement, of the mass, and of
the body. However, even as they recall a repressed version of
carnival from the past, they stand on the edge of carnival future. For if
their worldview was constructed upon a repression of carnival, only
its reemergence and EX-pression will allow for their healing. Yet
they are frightened of its disruptive aspects, because their cultural
identity has been forged by repression of what they have been taught
is carnival's «dirty» side, and they thus do their best to contain it
by continued repression.
Further complicating their grieving process is that fact that any collective act of mourning by a people aggrieved at the loss of cultural myths of superiority Empire, and civility, would be a slow process because dispersed over so many consciousnesses. However, with respect to the British reaction to the Great War, a further problem exists in that the information which people needed to run through their consciousnesses was not immediately or easily available to them during the War, and in the years afterwards it only slowly seeped into the public mind through the tales of returned veterans and the constant sight of disabled former soldiers walking around London. On the matter of delayed effect, Karen L. Levenback suggests that «If one was [sic] to measure the effect of the war and understand it well enough to write about it, it had to be experienced first-hand», yet there was a problem, in that the British seemed unable to talk about it for years afterwards13. Paul Fussell claims that civilians never knew the truth during wartime, since the versions that made it home were always poeticized14, and states unequivocally that had the British known the truth about what was going on at the front, they would have immediately called for the cessation of hostilities. Given that they did not, it appears that it was only as 1914-18 receded into
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Brian Kennedy
Recalling "A General Shindy": Carnival Tension in Mrs. Dalloway
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 4
42 43
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 4
the past that the truth about the War crept into the British consciousness. Josephine O'Brien Schaefer claims that 1918-23 were important years. «They were the years in which the experiences of the Great War were absorbed into people's lives»15. Thus it is that Woolf may portray a world five years removed from the gunfire yet full of people who have moments when the surface calms of their psyches break, to reveal the turmoil underneath. These characters, thus, represent bits of mini-carnivals floating across a London stage, controlled and contained as is carnival at a circus, yet threatening to explode16. The result leaves the novel full of carnivalesque moments which push toward a full realization which remains absent, yet possible, to the end of the novel.
Mrs. Dalloway begins by invoking the crowd as a key metaphor, through the main character. Clarissa, out buying the flowers, sees a car pass and speculates, along with others, as to who might be within. While critics have concentrated on identifying the various guesses made by those who see the car, we might usefully note rather that the scene displaces its emphasis onto the crowd, almost picturing them as a carnival mass, the «ordinary people» who gather in such profusion along the street in order to glimpse what they think is royalty (23). The novel says that «The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through the glove shops and hat shops … on Bond Street». Why? Because «For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way — to the window» (25). The car had, though for an instant, created a mass indistinguishable from one another because united by a common interest in the spectacle on the street. More fascinating still is that the passing of the car leads to «words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy» in a pub (25-26); a carnival riot has erupted, though on a small scale. This alone suggests a challenge to bourgeois culture, which, as Stallybrass and White point out, prided itself on being able to recognize and control cultural «others», especially in urban environments17.
Woolf's summary description of the scene provides a
telling sense of perspective: «[T]he surface agitation of the passing car
as it sunk grazed something very profound» (26). What it grazed
is both a memory of the Great War, and a need for a renewed sense
of release which this War had created. I say this not without
evidence, for Woolf's narrator comments that the crowd is reminded of
the War which has been over for 5 years, continuing, «in all the
hat
shops and tailors' houses strangers looked at each other and
thought of the dead; of the flag, of Empire» (25). This sense of delayed
reaction to the War provides a beginning point for a novel which is
replete with carnivalesque elements.
The most obvious person to whom these carnivalesque episodes occur, Septimus Warren Smith, is at best on the margins of «proper» society. In fact, the text details his attempts to construct a bourgeois sense of the world, and indicates that the War had interrupted this process and eradicated any possibility of his succeeding. Now, he is thrust back into society to cope with the effects of his Wartime experience. His glimpses of Evans — come back from the dead — break the surface calm of London on a hot June day. He further displays a carnivalized sense of life and death, thinking himself «lately taken from life to death … the scapegoat» (37).
Septimus Smith perhaps enacts carnival more vividly than any other character. His physical image when alive resembles the grotesque body of carnival, for he is «angular, big-nosed» (126) with loose lips and large eyes (127). In many small ways, he is like the carnival clown, creating scenes by invoking images of death in his speech, as when he suggests that he and Rezia, his wife, kill themselves after having had a fun day together (100). Further, he creates a positive mood of carnival release and togetherness by talking about «love, universal love … profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them forever» (102).
And yet, oddly enough, while Septimus seems like a lost carnival clown, he sees himself in a strangely sanitized, that is, uncarnivalesque, light18. His love for Shakespeare, for example, is based on what he thinks of as Shakespeare's loathing for humanity: «the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words» (134). Yet if his life was a mixture of carnival and anti-carnival, his suicide turns him into a grotesque figure, impaled on the railing below the window he jumped from.
More odd still is that the reason he killed himself was his loathing for the propriety prescribed by his doctor as cure for his mental illness. He needed, he was told, proportion restored (150). He had to rest, gain some weight, learn to see the world from the perspective of Dr. Bradshaw (153). Perhaps we may understand Septimus's rejection of this advice when we note that Dr. Bradshaw converts
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Brian Kennedy
Recalling "A General Shindy": Carnival Tension in Mrs. Dalloway
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 4
44 45
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 4
people to his way of life by carnivalizing them, creating a riot by leaving people «naked, defenceless, … exhausted… He swooped, he devoured» (154). In the face of this carnival appetite, Septimus, carnival clown or not, cowers, but he refuses to succumb. Instead, he waits for the right time, and turns himself into a picture of the grotesque body by throwing himself out a window and becoming «horribly mangled» on a railing below (227).
The irony of the novel, of course, is that Septimus lacks credibility with all of those he contacts, from the doctors to his wife. They don't understand that he is not so different from others; his hysterical/melancholic confusion is shared by all of the bourgeois in the novel (excepting perhaps the doctors) to one degree or another. Yet in modeling this behavior, he suggests a sense of carnival freedom which would release them from the sense of gloom leftover from the Great War. Yet people can only see a lunatic when they look at him, and never see him as embodying carnival hope, even in his grotesque final form.
Miss Kilman, too, is an outcast, her sympathies during the War having cost her her teaching position. And, like Septimus, she functions as a carnivalesque figure, most obviously as it concerns her body, which is a model of the grotesque. Clarissa thinks of her as «heavy, ugly» (190); she herself becomes upset that Mrs. Dalloway judges her on her appearance, «the infliction of her unlovable body which people could not bear to see» (195). In fact, the one detail we get about her body is that «Do her hair as she might, her forehead remained like an egg, bald, white» (195, my emphasis).
Kilman's preoccupation in her religious zealotry is,
ironically enough, with the repression of the body. As she stands in the
street after leaving the Dalloway house, for example, the narrator
reinforces this by saying, «the body of Miss Kilman [stood] in the
street», and Kilman thinks as she stands there, «"It is the flesh"» (194,
my emphasis). This is, «It was the flesh she must control» (194).
Yet she reinforces her bodily woes by her love of food. Her most
vivid scene revolves around the eating of cakes. She and Elizabeth
Dalloway are having tea, and Kilman unknowingly turns the event into
a carnival celebration of the mouth19. «It was her way of eating,
eating with intensity, then looking, again and again, at a plate of
sugared cakes on the table next to them» (197). «Miss Kilman
opened her mouth, slightly projected her chin, and swallowed down the
last inches of the chocolate eclair, then wiped her fingers, and
washed
the tea round in her cup» (199). She offers a (missed) opportunity
to Elizabeth to cleanse herself by sharing in the carnival ritual.
Elizabeth fails to take advantage of the chance, however, and
leaves, «drawing out, Miss Kilman felt, the very entrails in her body,
stretching them as she crossed the room» (201). Kilman, like
Septimus, becomes the disemboweled carnival figure, but no one
recognizes her as embodying the hope of renewal signalled by the
grotesque body20.
Yet if these two outcasts display life as carnivalesque, so too do the members of the Dalloway set. Early on, as the narrative turns from the car to paint the first park scene, a woman observes young Maisie Johnson, a servant girl recently arrived in London, and thinks, «what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and the good, life had been no mere matter of roses…» (40). Even in this polite and genteel world, people reveal that the construction of their subjectivity, just under the surface, is carnivalesque.
Often, the carnivalesque appears in places where it would not in the Rabelaisian world. Rather than being open and public, carnival moments happen in private, in the psyches of Woolf's characters, as when the narrative shifts from the park to Clarissa as she comes home. Going up to her bedroom, away from the crowd she has just been a part of, she contemplates her life. Suddenly alone, «a single figure against the appalling night», she feels «shrivelled, aged, breastless» (40). Her bed seems to narrow as she looks at it, and it is said that «she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her» (41). As she thinks about what makes her this way, she realizes that she lacks neither beauty nor mind. Her realization goes to the heart of the carnivalesque: she lacks a sense of the carnival body, «something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaced and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together» (46). Clarissa longs for the carnival sexuality which she does not possess. But every once in a while, she reports, she feels «what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check, and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion…» (47). In replaying sexual fulfillment in her mind, Clarissa gains a glimpse into the carnival world which her class, by definition, has repressed in their creation of themselves. As in Rabelais, where «the essential topographical element of the bodily hierarchy [is] turned upside down,» here, but only for an instant and in
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Brian Kennedy
Recalling "A General Shindy": Carnival Tension in Mrs. Dalloway
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 4
46 47
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 4
private, «the lower stratum replaces the upper stratum»21.
Richard Dalloway, too, has brief moments when the carnivalesque surfaces in his mind. In another scene which creates the crowd, the bell at St. Margaret's tolls, and as Richard hears it, he is shocked: «[T]he sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for death that surprised in the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she stood… No! he cried. She is not dead! I am not old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his future» (75).
Again, this parallels the fully carnivalized world of Rabelais, where death and regeneration are linked22. Richard's notion of carnival death is associated here with the cycles of life, the notion of youth and age. Time, suspended, turns into an unending future. As Richard Dalloway walks along toward Lady Bruton's lunch, his mind is invaded with a mini-explosion of carnival thought. Interestingly, the task to which he advances is connected directly with the War. His lunch at Lady Bruton's is to be the occasion for the writing of a letter concerning a «project for emigrating young people … born of respectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada» (164), the post-War situation in England not being conducive to their prosperity. This receives reinforcement from a brief essential phrase added to the letter: they must do this because of «what we owe to the dead» (167).
But if the War left a psychological aftermath which prompts a sort of melancholia/hysteria to arise in various characters, it also changed external social culture. Immediately after Richard's park scene, Peter Walsh, the other main figure in the novel, sees a group of soldiers pass him by. The soldiers form a mass, their legs and arms working as if by «one will» (76). They remind Peter of the touchstone which the War had been: «[L]ife, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stuff yet staring corpse by discipline» (77). But the soldiers do more: they bring to mind the ways in which public behavior has been, one might say, carnivalized after the War. Peter lays this open for the reader later on:
Now for instance there was a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn't have done ten years ago — written quite openly about water-closets in a respectable weekly. And then this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder-puff and making up in public (108).
The body, both in terms of its functions and in terms of its features, is suddenly on display in a way never seen before. Now to be sure, these small actions are hardly the same as the celebration of vulgarity and sexuality that Bakhtin describes as occurring in the medieval world's carnival. Yet, to use the terms I have been employing, there is a sense of the carnival afoot, little bits of which burst into the open from time to time, betraying an underlying tension, a need for carnival release.
To this point, I have painted the characters as collections of unfinalized carnival elements, none strong enough to take the social stage and develop a full carnival; each character, rather, lives in unresolved carnival tension. This being the case, and following the clues of the text and of Woolf herself, I have placed little emphasis on plot thus far23. However, the events of the June day do lead to the party at the Dalloways', and this party thus serves both as the climax of the plot and the culminating point of the novel's accretion of carnival tension.
As readers will remember, this party is hardly attended by the Septimus Smiths of the city; rather, it gathers the most prominent people in London, including the Prime Minister. It thus resembles the medieval carnival not at all. However, though critics tend to read the party as if it occurred outside of space and time24, thus making it in one sense analogous to Woolf's/Modernism's poetic, in fact the novel couches the event in a series of contexts. Noting these will indicate how close beneath the surface of the text, or of the Dalloways' world, carnival lies.
Perhaps most significant is that Septimus is in fact present, in the fullness of his grotesque body, because of Clarissa's reliving of his death. As she does, her «dress flamed, her body burnt» (280), yet she feels that «There was an embrace in death» (281). She sets this good against the evil of Dr. Bradshaw, whom she characterizes negatively as being «without sex or lust» (281) — uncarnivalized! Septimus by contrast allows her to see life as it really is. «He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun» (284). He, through his death, makes her life seem worthwhile because he has exposed Bradshaw, himself a strange mix of propriety and carnival appetite, as one who makes life «intolerable» (281). The suggestion might be that, could Septimus's message only be heard, life would change.
Second, it seems to be important that as Clarissa thinks about Septimus, she notes the woman living across the street, as if to
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Brian Kennedy
Recalling "A General Shindy": Carnival Tension in Mrs. Dalloway
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 4
48 49
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 4
point out that she knows that her party is not all there is to London on this night. There are others out there, an unrealized mass, though ignored by the elite at the Dalloways' (283).
Finally, and perhaps most interesting, yet not commented upon by readers of Woolf, is Peter Walsh's portrait of London, offered as he goes to the party. He says that London life has changed remarkably in the past several years, that there has been a «shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immovable» (246). The whole town is alive with a certain sexual energy, which he sees in the embraces of couples, the stockings hung in windows, the vignettes of people sitting across from one another as he passes, and even in «a shindy of brawling women, drunken women» (250). He feels, in short, that he is «in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious» (248).
Though people of the Dalloways' class fail to recognize it on this night, London is on the brink of a renewal of carnival. The trouble is, Clarissa's class privileges a different sort of living. Hence, as Peter enters the house, it becomes imperative that he adopt anti-carnival behavior as his mode of being, the text saying that «The brain must wake now. The body must contract now» (250). Yet while in this small slice of London the body is suppressed, all around it, and in the psyches of Richard, Clarissa, and Peter, carnival tension threatens to erupt into carnival proper. If enough people could get in touch with these carnivalesque elements, perhaps things would be different, for this is surely a culture which needs carnival release.
That they fear that their carnivalesque moments will
somehow be exposed to others, or take over in a generalized instance of
what Bakhtin would label «carnival» is in one sense ironic, since
carnival would in fact allow for healing without permanent reversal of
the social order. Carnival's disruption may be deconstructed to
show not a seamed and imperfect underside, but a set of hierarchies
which the carnival reacts against or questions. M. Keith Booker,
talking about writers who cross boundaries, and invoking Bakhtin's
carnival as a key tool of transgression, says, «One must not forget that
the carnival itself is in fact a sanctioned form of "subversion"
whose very purpose is to sublimate and diffuse the social tensions
that might lead to genuine
subversion»25. Michael Gardiner affirms
this by saying that carnival existed within the highly officialized
culture, giving people a way of surviving in it by offering them a
«"second
life"»26.
The characters in Mrs. Dalloway have a tool for social healing at hand; in fact, its repression is the very thing of which their consciousness is constructed, but they cannot, or do not, fully realize it, and hence continue to suppress social carnival. Despite Woolf's intention to critique her class27, their reluctance to embrace carnival is probably a result of their high social position. Yet while carnival proper never happens, the novel portrays a kind of tension — carnival tension — the wounds created by the War festering, but creating a sense in which a changed future begins to come into view.
Mrs. Dalloway is thus a novel of nostalgia and tension. There's an odd sense in which the characters look back at the War as a terrible time and yet know somehow that it was socially transformative. That their psyches are no longer able to repress carnival memories of broken hierarchy, celebration of the body, and the grotesque, suggests that they are no longer comfortable trying to make the world work in the way they used to. However, at the same time, they intuit that to allow carnival to break out would be dangerous. There's a carnival waiting to happen, if the players could only gather together. The problem is, carnival threatens their way of life even as it reinforces it, and thus they both need it and fear it, almost as much as they might fear the idea of another war.
1 Booker, M. Keith. Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection, and the Carnivalesque. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1991, p.13.
2 Dubino, Jeanne. «On Illness as Carnival: The Body as Discovery in Virginia Woolf's "On Being Ill" and Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World» // Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives. Ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Veverow. New York: Pace UP, 1994, p.39.
3 Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986.
4 Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway (1925). New York: Modern-Random, 1928
5 Tony E. Jackson, to cite just one recent example, discusses Mrs. Dalloway in terms of plot, suggesting that the novel is a series of plots which are opened and which readers expect to intrude into Clarissa's story. However, in each case, we get just enough infor
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mation to «open a vein of narrative anxiety» (Jackson, Tony E. The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterationsin the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994, pp.122-23). Then, we leave the character and don't return to a conclusion, except in the case of Septimus. The novel uses traditional plot , but displaces it (ibid., p.126). Characters instead become aware of themselves as metaphors, always living in a realm of metonymy, a sort of metaphor-of-the-metaphor zone, not real, but approximating the real (ibid., p.129).
6 Shaffer, Brian W. The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993, p.35.
7 In saying this, I don't uncover new ground. The recent volume Virginia Woolf and War, details Woolf's connections with war and with the Great War particularly. This comes on the heels of a turn toward a more culturally-conscious criticism which began with the revival of Woolf by feminist scholars in the 1970s. Now, readings which contextualize the book in terms of its time and in terms of the class issues it discusses are not uncommon. See for example, Brian Shaffer's book. He claims that Mrs. Dalloway confronts the notion of civilization and the threats to it after WW1, especially as censorship threatens civilization.
8 Poole, Roger. «"We All Put Up with You Virginia": Irrecievable Wisdom About War» // Hussey, Mark, Ed. and Introd. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991, p.79. Bazin and Lauter say simply, «Mrs. Dalloway, is a war novel» (Bazin, Nancy Topping, and Jane Hamovit Lauter. «Virginia Woolf's Keen Sensitivity to War: Its Roots and Its Impact in Her Novels» // ibid., p.17).
9 Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. New York: Atheneum — Macmillan, 1991, p.345.
10 Compare Shaffer, who talks about Septimus as an example of the way that health was fetishized and how certain persons — Bradshaws and Holmes — were appointed to guard and ensure normalcy (op. cit., pp.85-86). There is in addition an entire recent article on the subject by Sue Thomas (Thomas, Sue. «Virginia Woolf's Septimus Smith and Contemporary Perceptions of Shell Shock» // English Language Notes Dec. 1987: 49-57.).
11 Freud, Sigmund. Collected
Papers. Authorized Translation under the Supervision of Joan Riviere. Vol. 4. New York: Basic,
1959,
p.153.
12 Peter Gay makes the point that Freud didn't distinguish clearly between the psychology of the individual and that of the group, or mass (Gay, Peter, ed. The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989, p.628).
13 Levenback, Karen L. «Virginia Woolf's "War in the Village" and "The War From the Street": An Illusion of Immunity» // Hussey, Ed., p.53.
14 Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. Cf. 165ff.
15 O'Brien Schaefer, Josephine. «The Great War and "This Late Age of World's Experience" in Cather and Woolf» // Hussey, Ed., p.144.
16 Yet as Allon White says, the mere presence of other voices doesn't equal carnivalization; contestation of authority must accompany (White, Allon. Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing: Collected Essaysand Autobiography. Clarendon: Oxford UP, 1993, p.148).
17 They devote an entire chapter of their book to showing how the city was constructed in bourgeois thought by repressing as dirty many aspects of the urban environment, making distinctions between «us» and «them» on the basis of sanitation (126ff.)
18 Makiko Minow-Pinkney discusses Septimus's love for Shakespeare by saying, «Like Clarissa and Kilman, Septimus cannot come to terms with the body». She claims that his refusal to procreate is in effect a refusal to enter the world of symbol — which is coincident with patriarchy (Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987, pp.77-78).
19 Cf.: Bakhtin, M.M. Rabelais and His World (1968). Trans. by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Midland-Indiana UP, 1984, p.338.
20 Cf.: ibid., p.48.
21 Ibid., p.309.
22 Ibid., p.205.
23 Woolf makes clear in her essay, «Modern Fiction» (Woolf, Virginia. «Modern Fiction» // The Norton Anthology of English Literature 6e, vol. 2: 1921-26), that she has little concern for realist conventions, criticizing Arnold Bennett for his careful construction of realist plots, for example (1922).
24 Minow-Pinkney indicates that «parks and parties are privileged symbols for Woolf because they are protected enclaves out
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side the normal run of social life» (op. cit, p.57), which I have suggested may be shortsighted. However, her next comment is interesting: «They are places of libidinal indulgence that must be repressed elsewhere, mini-utopias of the senses» which allow one to get «in touch with libidinal energies the social ego suppresses» (ibid.). Her concern is with language and the connection of the subject to the realm of the symbolic, but her emphasis on libidinal expression suggests carnival, as does the phrase «mini-utopias of the senses».
25 Booker, M. Keith. Op. cit., p.6.
In his book The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1995), David Danow asks, «[Is there] any more evident and disturbing instance of carnival, in its broad, universal, and archetypal sweep, than war?» (62). Further, he suggests that the vast reversals of war suggest carnival, «contorted from its original playful aspect into its most deadly manifestation» (63). He does indicate, however, that Bakhtin essentially views carnival as positive, and that his idea is to take a more negative tack (105). Danow's text studies, in large part, Holocaust literature. We might compare Bakhtin's characterization of carnival:
While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part (7).
Replacing the word «carnival» with the word «war» in this quote is instructive, for it indicates the pervasiveness of war, its nature as a shared social experience.
26 Gardiner, Michael. The Dialogics of Critique: M.M.Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology. London: Routledge, 1992, pp.5152.
27 Shaffer, Brian W. Op. cit., p.95.
В своей статье «Вспоминая "общую драку": потенциал карнавальности в "Миссис Дэллоуэй"» автор, опираясь на работы М.М.Бахтина, З.Фрейда и ряда современных исследователей, развивает концепцию «скрытого» (т.е. «вытесненного» с поверхности благонравного буржуазного бытия) карнавала. Этот ракурс избран для анализа известного романа В.Вульф «Миссис Дэллоуэй», который рассматривается как произведение о людях, повергнутых в меланхолию последствиями I Мировой войны и препятствующим психологической разрядке обилием социокультурных запретов.
ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Brian Kennedy
Recalling "A General Shindy": Carnival Tension in Mrs. Dalloway