‘I should say a great deal about The Hours and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that all the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment. Dinner!’ ( Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary)
I love Woolf’s use of analogy. Her creative restlessness reveals how much she recognised the inadequacy of so much expression. And here, when she is thinking about The Hours( Mrs Dalloway) her desire to find a resonant image for her process of characterisation is rewarded by her caves! As a way of thinking about human character and how secretive and labyrinthine we all are, it works! How do we ever know whom we are truly meeting?
I also enjoy the juxtaposition of the creative thinking with the very imperative to eat! ‘Dinner!’ And interestingly these caves ‘behind’ characters are superbly explored in the wonderful Boeuf en Daube Dinner party scene in To the Lighthouse, her next novel after Mrs Dalloway. For in this novel we see the ‘tidal’ progression of human connection in one highly compressed scene: where ‘waves’ of human communication, defensive self-consciousness and solitary reflection weave in and out of each character’s ‘private’ life cave. The whole Dinner scene is like a prism. Each person is seen from within and from without and this oscillation in the way that an one character is perceived by the reader, engenders ‘humanity., humour and depth’ ;
‘For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle.’
Patterns are so important to us all, and this careful displacement of Lily ‘s awkwardness as she sits resolutely independent at the dinner table, seems to me exactly right. She makes a seemingly small ordinary movement on a table cloth and regains her composure and stature.
Wonderfully done!
