British LiteratureMelfi 6 December 1993Communication is Health:Spectacles and Incommunication in Mrs Dalloway

In her novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf addresses the inability of her characters

to adequately communicate with one another. Signs lose their meaning, people

become deaf and scared, confusion and mystery dominate the public. Several

characters entrench themselves inextricably in the past, and cannot find

commonality with others in the present. They carry the baggage of their younger,

pre-war years, and find themselves and each other disillusioned and alienated

failures, afraid to move forward, to risk further failure. The only unmistakable sign,

Time rings loudly, steadfastly, as these jaded people age and wither. Other

characters busy themselves merely with judging the habits, manners, and

insufficient accomplishments of those who surround them. This attitude binds them

in a cynical egoism that not only reduces their capacity for sympathy and caring,

but also lessens the content of their own persona. Their communication

degenerates into an often malevolent, always empty, gossip; a gossip not just about

people, but about dry ideas and inconsequential behavior. It is a phenomenon

which, for purposes of discussion, and for lack of a better word, can be termed

incommunication, since it does not involve lies or misunderstanding, but rather a

fundamental lack of content and meaning. Younger people in the novel find

difficulty communicating with the older generation, an impasse that seems to result

in a sullenness and disillusionment of their own. The young further find a

discomforting cryptic element in the language and action of their elders that

illustrates the essentially futile or meaningless nature of the elders generation’s

incommunication. Their predecessors seem to pass down not only a world ailing

from a savage war, but a means of discourse that is insignificant and sterile. The

only times when a multitude of people come together is in the midst of a spectacle:

Big Ben chimes, a car backfires, an airplane writes in the sky, a party blossoms.

But even at these events, people are unable to communicate. They misunderstand

signs, they yearn for greater meaning, they gawk, conjecture, and disagree.

Finally, all these problems converge at Mrs Dalloway’s party, a gathering of people

who continually have failed to express themselves, to “simply say what one felt”

(191). At the public occasions and the private part, it seem as nothing or no one

can get through the barriers of incommunication people construct around

themselves. Septimus Smith, perhaps the ultimate victim of incommunication,

finding no one capable of understanding him, withdraws into himself and commits

an act which finally breaks the skin-deep shell of Clarissa Dalloway’s party.

Septimus’ suicide initially terrifies but later reassures Mrs Dalloway as she grasps

the mortality and failed communication previously “obscured in her own life” (184),

allowing her to end day with a heightened awareness of the beauty and the fun.

Until that moment, Woolf’s use of spectacle and randomly assembled crowds

anticipates the lack of understanding and communication which permeates the

novel, especially in the final scenes at the party.

Because the action of the novel is limited to a single day, the notion of time

plays a prominent role. The booming chimes and music of the clocks follow and

surround each of the characters in their urban travels, and remind them of their

debt to time. This sound seems almost universal in its message, but it is not an

unambiguous one. The happiness they knew in their younger years has faded for

many of the characters, who now emerge as sentimentalists. The half-hourly bells

communicate a ambiguous sentimentalism: they simultaneously reaffirm life while

signaling the steady, unstoppable march of time that may summon a sour vision of

the future. Woolf suggests the dual nature of these bells when she first describes

their sequence as “first, a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable” (4). The

irrevocability of time does much to make the characters in the novel overly

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sentimental. As the day, progresses, more and more characters communicate

through their past. That is what they have in common. That is when they were

happy, or at least happier. Only occasionally do they concentrate on the music,

rather than the boom. Those who do concentrate on the music, momentarily, may

be so enraptured in themselves, they project their happiness onto those who

surround them. It is perhaps her way of relating to those with whom she shares no

connection. By manufacturing an artificial one, she is able to continue her illusion

of legitimate contact with people outside her immediate social circle. “The leaden

circles dissolved in the air,” she observes. As Mrs Dalloway hears the chimes, she

bubbles over in a joie de vivre of “of creating every moment afresh” (4), and looking

around, she quickly assumes that “the most dejected of miseries sitting on

doorsteps...do the same” (4). This reaction to the bells indicates a larger blindness

on Mrs Dalloway’s part which becomes more evident in her later interactions with

other people.

The next sign Clarissa encounters in the public arena is less routine than the

bells, and therefore causes a greater confusion. Woolf skillfully illustrates the cult

of the spectacle in her discussion of the group psychology that responds to the

sudden backfire of a car. The reaction of the crowd suggests the mundane nature

of their collective life, the stale mediocrity with which they pass through each day.

The backfire hatches excitement and mystery, it immediately births a community of

the quiet and desperate, it connects the crowd in an enterprise of identification and

fame. Their lives are so bland and in need of stimulation, they have developed a

propensity to “perceive instinctively that greatness was passing” (18), as though

their survival depended on these morsels of curiosity. Most important, the sight of

the car gives them a commonality, a topic for conversation. The people who

witness the spectacle of what appears to be the “Proime Minister’s kyar” (14) have

together experienced an anomaly that transcends the sonic shot and enters into the

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realm of the sublime, the “magical” (17). The event, as well as the face in the

window, assumes the grandeur that accompanies great, mysterious spectacles.

“Passers-by who, of course stopped and stared, had just the time to see a face of

the very greatest importance...Everything had come to a standstill...Everyone

looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic

accumulated” (15). And, similarly to the way Clarissa projects her happiness onto

the bums of the London streets, there is opportunity for a figure to believe the

crowd revolves around him. Septimus’ paranoia is his way of relating to the mass,

of processing external disorder into something terrifying, yet somehow more

perversely comforting. His blunt statement of narcissism serves as a perfectly

fitting introduction to Septimus: “It is I who am blocking the way” (15). Septimus

searches for meaning in all this spectacular disorder, and he looks into himself and

the world around him for answers. His is the enduring question, “What does it

mean?” He wonders, “Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not

weighted to the pavement, for a purpose. But for what purpose?” These questions

eventually consume Septimus. He immerses himself in their answers and

meanings, searching for a feasible way of communicating his discoveries. He

communicates through a persecution complex (“The world has raised its whip;

where will it fall” 14) that is encased in an extreme egotism. He will come to

believe that his answers are the only answers, his meaning, the only meaning. For

Septimus (and for Woolf), the spectator becomes the spectacle.

The third grand event that captures Mrs Dalloway’s attention that morning

is the sky-writing airplane. It is a painter of ephemeral signs in the air that mean

different things to different people. The crowd’s reaction to the airplane attests to

their eagerness to unlock cryptic symbols from authority figures. That the writing

inhabits the heavens may be Woolf’s commentary on the state of modern religion,

but it also points to the remarkable inability of people to communicate, even when it

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involves five letters, each 200-feet tall. Clarissa and the crowd gather again to

witness the affair. With a reaction seemingly borrowed from the backfiring car

crowd, the airplane crowd ceases activity except to gaze. “Everyone looked up,”

and they, too, are dazed, “awestricken,” and behave “like...sleepwalker[s]” (20). As

the plane twists and turns above, the crowd begins to decode the message. They

doggedly pursue the word as though they were attempting to nail down the

Tetragrammaton, guessing alternately “Glaxo”, “Kreemo”, and “Toffee” (20). This

event offers yet another commonality as it temporarily distracts the audience from

the eleven bells of Big Ben and the banality of their common lives. Even the

dignitary’s car falls back into anonymity (21). The crowd wants to believe in the

significance of the event. It wants to understand this happening as a signal to

them, as something larger than their lives, like the royalty being shuffled away in a

limousine. The people fail to understand it for what it is: an advertisement

enjoining them to take part in a commodious lifestyle. For them, it must be an

effort of magnificent secrecy and magic. “Certainly so it was — a mission of the

greatest importance” (21).

This conception is not far from — indeed it is dangerously close to —

Septimus’ interpretation of the event. Shrouded by the anonymity of being a Smith

in London, and of simply being in London, Septimus yearns for recognition. While

his wife beckons him to “Look, look” (21) he wants people to notice him, to indicate

that his life after the war retains some meaning. Septimus needs have contact with

people to share his ideas before they either wither or explode inside him. He is

strangely aware of this failure to communicate, but hopes some exterior being will

rescue him from his misery and confusion. All that surfaces, however, is more

confusion in the form of a skywriting airplane, and he is left to decode the language.

The language for Septimus begins to move beyond “actual words.” Instead, it takes

on a heavier significance, one built on abstractions and ideas. His movement in

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that direction, away from concrete objects and actions, is what frightens Mr

Bradshaw and Mr Holmes of “human nature.” They ask Lucrezia to play the game

“Look” with her husband, as though constant identification of real things will

translate into constant identification with real things. Septimus’ resistance to this

indicates his comfort in the abstract zone, and his lack of need to reify his notions.

His communication is somehow more pure, because it does not require the

translation of thought to word. “Beauty” for example is not contained in arbitrary

letters or words, but in an idea and an action. Septimus thinks, looking up, “They

are signaling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is he could not read the

language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty” (21). The

prospects of this, Septimus realizes, are inexhaustible and joyous. He suddenly dis-

covers a beauty in life he had not know before, but it is incommunicable. Still, he is

able to rejoice in it. As he experiences this cumulative epiphany of form and idea,

“tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in

the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing

goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signaling their

intention to provide him for nothing, forever, for looking merely, with beauty, more

beauty!” (22).

This beauty clashes with its inexpressibility to others. Doctors think he is

insane, his maid laughs at his ramblings, and his own wife, the only person who

might understand, barely has enough English to keep up with his ramblings (“She

heard nothing” 140). With no one to talk to, and having found this beauty outside of

reality, Septimus generates a solipsistic world of his own unenterable, except by

force. Pulled back into himself, Septimus becomes unable to feel, to empathize with

anyone. And neither can they empathize with him, since his world view is so

radically different. He is aware of the danger he poses to himself in thinking this

way, and he translates that into his persecution complex. “What was his crime? He

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could not remember it” (98). As though he were strewn on the rack by inquisitors,

he chants “Communication is health; communication is happiness; communication

—”, but he speaks only to himself. He searches for an escape from his tormentors,

a way of addressing them in their own terms. “But what if he confessed? If he

communicated? Would they let him off then, his torturers?” (98). It is too late to

know by the tome Holmes, “a powerfully built man” enters. He communicates

through his strength, a mode as empty as gossip. This method of “human nature”

terrifies Septimus. He refuses to surrender, to express himself as Holmes does.

Septimus’ ultimate act captures his frustration and serves as his final statement.

His crime is that he “felt nothing,” (90) and said nothing. By Sally Seton’s logic,

this makes sense. It is she who suggests “One must simply say what one felt”

(191). The terrible irony of Septimus’ persecution is that while he feels nothing and

says nothing, so many other characters, especially at the party, feel nothing, yet

speak volumes.

Peter Walsh describes the party as “mere gossip” (161). He is accurate, as

Woolf goes on to portray old men and women talking of inconsequential empty

matters. “Everybody is the room has six sons at Eton” (189) Peter tells Sally, and

they go on to talk about either the good old days or other people in the room.

Professor Brierly “wasn’t hitting it off with little Jim Hutton” (176) as the elder

discusses Milton. Richard says distractedly, “Yes, they do...Yes” and wonders

“What more [can] one say?” (170). People generally restrict themselves to talk of

“cricket, cousins, the movies” (177). It is an empty spectacle, people gathering to

look at one another, discuss one another, revel in their egotism and disdain. They

are as wrapped into themselves as Septimus, yet the profundity of their theories

could never approach the grandness of his. The party proceeds in dreary malaise

for even Clarissa, until the arrival of the Bradshaws. They visit death upon the

party, forcing Clarissa into self-study, a realization of her own mortality. Suddenly,

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“a thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter” (184). The

intrusion of death into the party creates a post facto spectacle, in which the

Bradshaws spare no detail. It shakes Mrs Dalloway into understanding what was

“obscured in her own life.” She shares something with Septimus, she comprehends

the nature of his action. “Death was an attempt to communicate.” She sees

Septimus as unable to express himself, unable to overcome talk of cricket, cousins,

and movies. His “death was defiance.” That death escapes surrounding people, it

does not pull them together. “Closeness drew apart...One was alone.” Clarissa

discovers that “there was an embrace in death,” an embrace of one’s self (184). It

is with this new perspective that Clarissa engages the rest of the party. She

overcomes a sense of Septimus’ death and her subsequent hosting of a party as

“her disaster[,] her disgrace” (185) and comes to “[feel] somehow very like him”

(186). The same irrevocability contained in Big Ben’s chimes, the march of time,

strikes her at the party. “The leaden circles dissolved in the air...She must go back

to [Sally and Peter” (186). With them, she will “feel the beauty...feel the fun” (186),

just as Septimus did in decoding the skywriting.

The death of Septimus leaves something with Mrs Dalloway. It brings her

out of her party to fulfill one of her old theories: “One must seek out the people

who completed them” (152). For the first time in the novel, a spectacle contributes

to a character and inspires a true communication. Clarissa, inspired by the death of

Septimus, seeks out Sally and Peter to complete herself. It is this revivified, whole

Clarissa who excites Peter in the closing words. Peter, at last feels something, and

perhaps will be able to communicate with her.

2719 words

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