Human Consciousness

Mrs. Dalloway a novel by Virginia Woolf and The Hours a novel by Michael Cunningham.  A Combined Edition.  Picador.  417 pp. (more or less).  $20.00.  *****

I haven’t read much Virginia Woolf and don’t have any particular excuse.  She was all the rage in the seventies and eighties, when her diaries and letters were coming out.  Everyone seemed to be a Virginia Woolf fan.  The Bloomsbury group was imposing, as if you had to read everything if you read anything.  At times I thought to make up my Virginia Woolf deficiency and asked friends where to start.  There was some disagreement about that (though everyone agreed that I would enjoy the diaries and letters, all ten volumes, or whatever it is).  People who write so much are so intimidating.  It’s as if she recorded everything she ever did.

But the occasion of the new opera at the Met made up my mind.  The Hours, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham, which was based on Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, has already been made into a movie with a score by Philip Glass (and an amazing cast), and now it’s an opera with three divas at the Met, including Renee Fleming.  My wife and I love the Met broadcasts that show at a local movie theater, but I’ve never actually prepared for one.  I remember back in high school when my brother would go off to the library to find the libretto for an opera before he went to see it.  He was just a high school kid!  He didn’t even speak Italian!  Now he’s an opera aficionado who speaks eight or nine languages.  I figured the least I could do was read a couple of novels (in English).

I found Mrs. Dalloway an astonishing performance, also rather hard to describe.  It’s tempting to say that it’s a day in the life of the consciousness of an ordinary woman, Clarissa Dalloway, who is getting ready to throw a party that evening, but the novel doesn’t inhabit just her consciousness.  It wanders away, sometimes, to the mind of someone she observes.  At first it does that briefly, then for longer and longer periods.  It’s like the omniscient narrator of some older novels, but this narrator is just giving us the interior lives, and keeps coming back to Clarissa and her party, but also the rest of her life, her relations with various men (including her husband), her daughter.  It’s an idea so daring that it’s almost astonishing: it could easily be deadly boring (can you imagine occupying the consciousness of people around you?  No thanks, is my response).  But it isn’t boring for a moment.  The language sings.  And the people are fascinating, though Clarissa is an upper middle class British woman, not a group I think of as dynamically exciting.

Sometimes in Buddhism we talk about human consciousness as if it were all one thing, as if there were one great mind and we’re all a part of it, occupying our little corner.  (What my teacher Larry Rosenberg used to say is that, if we can make our consciousness a little saner, that will improve human consciousness in general.)  Woolf seems to drift around in that great mind (though she keeps coming back to Clarissa) and somehow, in the way she does it, shows us the inherent worth of everyone.  We all have the same basic hopes, fears, and dreams.  And we all translate them into action differently.  Woolf allows herself to be an all-knowing narrator (though she’s giving us just little smidgens of everyone).  How do you end such a novel, I found myself thinking, as I read through.  And yet the ending seemed perfect.  A perfectly encapsulated book.

If Woolf’s project seems daring, what about Michael Cunningham’s?  He takes on one of the iconic novels of the 20^th century, and proposes to do a kind of sequel, but featuring three women, a version of Clarissa in late 20^th century New York (instead of London); a portrait of Virginia Woolf herself, as she was writing the novel (and battling depression); and a portrait of a fifties housewife who is living in that bizarre era while reading Mrs. Dalloway (Cunningham knows that decade, as I do, by having been a child then.  We’re rough contemporaries).  What nerve! I was ready to say.  How can this man try to measure up to one of the great novelists of the 20^th century?

He’s not trying to do exactly what Woolf did.  He alternates among three women (making Woolf herself one of them was a real zinger) and doesn’t confine himself to their consciousness; he gives us more outer action.  But he does wander among various minds within each section.  And the way he deals with these different time periods is fascinating.  He focuses a lot on gay life (Cunningham himself is gay), but that seems appropriate to the times as well (he can write in a way that Woolf was unable to).

An incident happens toward the end of The Hours that is so sad I can hardly believe Cunningham could write it.  But he doesn’t flinch at all; he stares at it directly.  It brings all three sections together in a way that startled me.  As I’ve said elsewhere[1], it’s tough being a moron, but I didn’t realize until the very end of the book the way in which the three sections connect.  It’s an absolutely brilliant idea.  It takes the novel to a whole new level.

I’m not about to say it’s as great as Mrs. Dalloway (comparisons are odious), but I didn’t feel a let down moving from one novel to the other.  This combined edition (the way they used to do pulpy science fiction novels) is a brilliant idea.  The two books make for a great reading experience.

We’re left with the puzzling fact (which Cunningham faces quite directly) of Woolf’s suicide.  You can’t help thinking, how can someone who saw so much, who saw the true beauty of this world, who was able to render it so well, how can that person want to take her own life?  That’s always a mystery, but there’s a muted suggestion that it was precisely because she saw so much that life was difficult for her, that the highs of her mind were counterbalanced by lows that were unbearable.  It sounds stupid to say, but it’s all I’m left with.

These novels show us both the beauty and the ugliness of life, and take them as one thing.

[1] https://davidguy.org/2022/10/01/movin-on-up/