thingy

Erin McKean took on verbification in last Sunday's Boston Globe.[1] We friend and unfriend, we Google, we TiVo, we Photoshop, we party! Verbing comes naturally; so much so that about a fifth of our verbs were originally nouns.[2] Shakespeare did it much and well.[3] It can humorize language and the subject itself is a source of humor, as Bill Watterson knew well.[4]



It's not long since McKean's colleague, Sam Allis, vented his prejudices on the subject. He says he likes "sext," but not "caveat" or "impact" and ends, lamely, with the obvious: it's all a matter of personal likes and dislikes.[5] Some people may cringe on hearing "we have to decision this." Others detest "I'm going to gift him this" or "I'm going to re-gift this hideous clock we got as a wedding present." But many converted nouns enliven the language and eliminate wordy constructions. Why shouldn't we "text" our friends when the alternative is "sending a text message" to them?

You can verb names as Xander shows us: "Does anybody else feel like they've been Keyser Söze'd?"[6] The politics of confirmation hearings has given us "Borked" and (with less success) "Lewinskyed." And speaking of her, the use of passive-voice confessions is, we all know, Clintonizing ("mistakes were made").

Some verbifications only work poetically; you can't see using them in ordinary speech. For example, when Cleopatra explains why suicide is better than being paraded through Rome like a trophy she complains that "mechanic slaves with greasy aprons...shall uplift us to the view...and I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness i' the posture of a whore."[7]

I would have thought a most extreme example of impractical verbing to have been Heidegger's verbing of the word thing. He uses the German word bedingt to mean bethinged and talks about the things in a work of art thinging the observer. He says that things present in works of art can gather meaning into themselves by a process he calls thinging of things. In a passage of masterful obscurity he tells the reader "by thinging, things carry out world.... Thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture &mdash gestate — world."[8]

It turns out, however, that thinging isn't only an arcane philosophic term used by a weird ex-Nazi. It's "an ambiguous verb used to replace a verb that you can't come up with at the moment," as in "Hey mom. Yeah, just got back from, um, thinging my friends" or "Is Kayla dating that guy now? I thought they were just friends..." "No, they aren't dating, they are just thinging now."[9]

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Some sources:

Conversion (linguistics) article in wikipedia

Languaging at Its Best


The Modern Practice of Making Certain Nouns into Verbs on Volokh Conspiracy

Heidegger the Shaman

The Thinging of the Thing: The Ethic of Conditionality in Heidegger's Later Work

Da kine on wikipedia

Thing theory on wikipedia

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Notes:

[1] Verbed!,
Not every noun wants to stay that way, by Erin McKean, in The Word, on boston.com, July 25, 2010

[2] In his book, The Language Instinct (Morrow, 1994), he says, "Easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English. I have estimated that about a fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns. Considering just the human body, you can head a committee, scalp the missionary, eye a babe, stomach someone's complaints, and so on -- virtually every body part can be verbed." (Quoted from Grammar Puss on the Harvard web site.)

[3] Shakespearean examples include "I'll unhair thy head." "The thunder would not peace at my bidding". "He ploughed her, and she cropped." "Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels." "Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle."

[4] If I find that I'm violating copyright in reproducing this image, I'll promptly remove it.

[5] Allis writes: "I’m saddened to report 'unfriend' was named Word of the Year in 2009 by the New Oxford American Dictionary. ... Let’s not forget former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who famously used 'caveat' as a verb at a Senate hearing in 1980. This prompted New York Times word guru William Safire to define such usage as 'a new linguistic form called haigravation.' The first Marquess of Argyll reportedly used 'caveat' as a verb — 'But I would caveat this' — in his short address before he was executed for treason in 1661. Does that matter a whit to you?"
-- War of words, The English language is constantly changing, but it doesn’t mean we have to like it, by Sam Allis, Boston Globe, May 24, 2010

[6] "The Puppet Show," Buffy the Vampire Slayer, May 5, 1997. Xander verbifies names quite often. The BuffyGuide explains this one: "In the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects, Keyser Söze was the name of a legendary master criminal whose name was on the lips of everyone who'd witnessed one of his crimes, but who the police couldn't even begin to find. At the end of the movie, it's revealed that he was right under everyone's nose the entire time."

[7] Scene 2 in Act 5 of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra:

Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’ tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ th’ posture of a whore.
-- Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, Scene 2.

[8] The quotes come from Heidegger's essay Language which analyzes Georg Trakl's poem, A Winter Evening. Here's the poem:

“Ein Winterabend,” von George Trakl

Wenn der Schnee ans Fenster fällt,
Lang die Abendglocke läutet,
Vielen ist der Tisch bereitet
Und das Haus ist wohlbestellt.

Mancher auf der Wanderschaft
Kommt ans Tor auf dunklen Pfaden.
Golden blüht der Baum der Gnaden
Aus der Erde kühlem Saft.

Wanderer tritt still herein;
Schmerz versteinert die Schwelle.
Da erglänzt in reiner Helle
Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein.



“A Winter Evening,” by George Trakl
Literal translation by Ted Hayes

When the snow falls on the window,
The Vesper bell tolls long,
The table is readied for many,
And the house is well ordered.

Many on their wanderings
Come to the door on dark paths.
Golden blooms the Tree of Graces
From the Earth’s cool sap.

Wanderer steps quietly herein,
Pain turns the Threshold to Stone.
There shines in pure brightness
On the table bread and wine.

“A Winter Evening,” translated by Albert Hofstadter

Window with falling snow is arrayed,
Long tolls the vesper bell,
The house is provided well,
The table is for many laid.

Wandering ones, more than a few,
Come to the door on darksome courses.
Golden blooms the tree of graces
Drawing up the earth’s cool dew.

Wanderer quietly steps within;
Pain has turned the threshold to stone.
There lie, in limpid brightness shown,
Upon the table bread and wine.

--
From Limina.Log:

[9] (urban dictionary)

Clarissa, samurai

Not long ago I made a case for Clarissa as existentialist hero and found I was not alone in holding this view.  I drew some parallels between existentialist authenticity and religious insights: the visions of mystics as to the wholeness of things, of eternity and emptiness, of life and death. I linked both to Zen Buddhist percepts and made a final connection with the goals of samurai warriors and the guides for achievement of those goals, particularly Musashi's Book of Five Rings. 

There's no evidence that Virginia Woolf was directly influenced by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, or another of the existentialist thinkers (so-called), nor by any practitioners of Eastern philosophies; and it's a good guess that she never read a samurai sword fighting manual.  It's true that some of the popular philosophies of the day were congruent with existentialism, mystic perceptions of wholeness, and the Japanese ethics of Zen and samurai.  The influence on T.S. Eliot of the philosophies of India are well known and, during the years VW was developing her ideas for and then writing Mrs. Dalloway, her complex relationship with Eliot was evolving into a close friendship.  At the same time G.E. Moore was writing and speaking about his ideas on intuition and collective states of mind which have something in common with Eastern thinking.  And he too was part of Woolf's circle of friends.  But these are tenuous connections.  VW might have absorbed some of her ideas on continuity and expansion from others, but nothing even remotely tending toward the writings of Miyamoto Musashi.  The parallels I find in Mrs. Dalloway and existentialism, Zen, and samurai training are coincidental ones.  They're nothing she intended.

But present all the same.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa's personal growth and final realization are those of a samurai.  To be sure, there is much about her that protests this characterization.  She is far from the time and place of the samurai, a creature of 20th-century England.  She is a woman and samurai are men.  Moreover the cultural milieu of Japanese society in the time of the samurai was resolutely masculine.  Women were subjugated to second-class status. 

Still, she possesses what we used to think of as aristocratic attributes --  poise, bearing, dignity, humility.  Peter points out these attributes in her.  The samurai aspired to the same. 

She has an unselfconsious grace.  During the course of the novel, she becomes more and more self-possessed.  The reader can visualize development of her senses of balance and rhythm, an ability to dispel inner tension so as to become relaxed and alert, self-respect sufficient to keep her from being easily intimidated, ability to empathize, freedom from prejudice, clear-headedness, ability to resist mindless adherence to social conventions, ability to be either reticent or communicative as occasion calls for.  One might debate the extent to which VW shows Clarissa's personal growth to include all these abilities to which samurai aspired, but they belong to her as a cluster of traits in greater or lesser degree.

There's no doubt that she shares with samurai her highly-developed powers of observation and perception, an instinctive awareness not just of the objective world but of its moral, aesthetic, and metaphoric content.  WV tells us how Clarissa sees things and Peter does not, how she must make him put on his glasses to see what is around him.  But more than seeing, she comprehends.  As VW tells us, she knew people by instinct, "If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred." 

And she has a samurai ability to remove herself from the context of the moment, to release herself from the busy noise of thoughts running through her mind, to shake off distracting complacencies, and to make instantaneous, intuitive judgments.  As VW says, "She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."

Clarissa knows how to position herself so as to remain grounded, as when she is receiving her guests, has the knack of perceiving her milieu all at once, of experiencing emotions fully and not blocking off their free flow through her and out of her. 

She knows that she is not strong -- not physically strong (particularly so as a recovering invalid), not strong by right of political or social accomplishment, not strong by fame or inherited position -- but her weakness is not a liability.  During the course of the novel she comes to understand the samurai (and also Zen) paradox of weakness as a source of strength. 

All these are samurai affinities that Clarissa possesses, comes to possess, or shows aptitude for possessing as she continues he life-path.

Clarissa's eventual ability to accept unflinchingly the pointlessness of existence and, beyond that, her faith in goodness without promise of religious rewards is also samurai.  As VW has Peter think, "To see your own sister killed by a falling tree ... before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness."

As I say, it's quite common for religions to tell of adepts (mystics, say) who can achieve a sense of oneness with the universe and all that it contains.  But both Zen and samurai (neither of them a religion of mystical revelation handed down by God) take this a step further.  They see the possibility that people can achieve this completeness repeatedly in the affairs of ordinary life.

Eiji Yoshikawa expresses this in his novel, Musashi.  He presents the swordsman as a brash youth who gets put on the path to enlightenment by an eccentric Zen monk who treats him abominably. He demonstrates his Buddhist reverence for all life forms by tricking Musashi, tying him high up in a tree, and to all appearances leaving him to die of exposure. This tough love works, turning Musashi from a thug into a devoted student of samurai. Thereafter , in hundreds of sword contests Musashi is never defeated but his amazing success does not lead him to believe he has mastered his art.  Frequently these fights are over a microsecond after they start.  Musashi parries an attack and counters with such blinding speed that no one present sees what has happened, even his adversary can't immediately comprehend how rapidly he has been defeated.  Gradually, Musashi comes to understand that there are men who can overcome him without use of any weapon, merely by force of personality, by intangibles of which he's only vaguely aware, such as the breadth of their understanding,  their creativity, their mastery of high art, all conveyed wordlessly in the way the hold themselves, by their calm dignity -- a kind of charisma, though that is not quite the right term for it. 

We say that the possession of charisma gives a person power over others.  Stated this way it sounds like charisma is an attribute, but samurai charisma is better seen as a fullness, an authenticity, a freedom from self-deception.  This form of charisma isn't something you aim to get so you can have power, but something that conveys a gentle self-possession -- not authority, nor strength, but rather a state of being vulnerable without being weak.  It's only perceived as power.

I'm less than half-way through the book, but eventually I believe Yoshikawa will describe how Musashi develops a technique called "no-sword" based on this understanding of artistic achievement. 

VW shows us that Clarissa is developing a skill in no-sword contests with an opponent in her encounters with Peter.  Always bickering -- his puncturing of her aesthetic, emotional joys -- flowers as vegetables, his preference for men over cauliflowers, his trivializing Clarissa's moment with Sally as star-gazing.  Their first encounter is a contest with everything that's important left unsaid, but intuited all the same.  He with his knife out.  She with her sewing needle, her scissors. 

Clarissa and Peter confront each other not just with weapons, but with their emotions, memories, the weaknesses that give them strength.  And, in this contest and as the novel progresses, Peter remains what he is and has been, while Clarissa develops her competence, learns how to exist fully in the moment, how to be real.  This growth and its culmination in authentic being -- with the gift of a the life of a stranger, thrown away -- bring Clarissa not just to existential fulfillment, but also to a samurai mastery, the mastery of a Zen art.

You can imagine two warriors facing off for a contest in VW's descriptions of Peter and Clarissa. 

Her recall of his past thrusts at her: "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."

His positioning himself defensively: "Then, just as happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when one person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, and yet as the other sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does not like to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices some iron scroll on a table leg, stirs a leaf, but says nothing—so Peter Walsh did now. For why go back like this to the past? he thought. Why make him think of it again? Why make him suffer, when she had tortured him so infernally? Why?"

Their first moves. first his: "'Well, and what’s happened to you?' she said. So before a battle begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His powers chafed and tossed in him. He assembled from different quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage, which she knew nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and altogether done his job. "

Then hers: "She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping the woman, the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with three strokes of a knife. What a waste! What a folly! All his life long Peter had been fooled like that; first getting sent down from Oxford; next marrying the girl on the boat going out to India; now the wife of a Major in the Indian Army—thank Heaven she had refused to marry him! Still, he was in love; her old friend, her dear Peter, he was in love.

And at the end, Clarissa's ability to be fully vulnerable, gives her an edge: "Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over."

And it is all quickly over.  Clarissa has bested Peter, but not so as to defeat him: "Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter. ... And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky."

This power of Clarissa's is ineffable.  As the rest of the novel unfolds, it's possible, more and more, to see in it the elements of samurai greatness.

Clarissa, Waldo, and Tom

There are parallels and correspondences between Emerson's Brahma and Eliot's Burnt Norton, on the one hand, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, on the other. They are tantalizing, but, unfortunately, they are not profound. Emerson tells us much that Woolf shows: the dispassion of a fully-realized life and the paradoxes that emerge from that realization: the collapsing of space and time and the temporary suspension of the compulsions of ego and id.

Burnt Norton's resemblance is not so superficial. The place from which the poem takes its name is something like Clarissa's Bourton, a manor house he once visited having an ethereal rose garden. Possessing uncannily similar names, both are in Gloucestershire and both are freighted with nostalgia of nearly Edenic intensity.

Both the poem and the novel have a circular structure, returning at end to the point of departure, though this is less obvious in the novel. Both use the imagery of time to convey esoteric meaning: the flow of time; the experience of past, present and future; the illumination that accompanies a release from the confinement imposed by time. For both the word that best describes the enlightened state is love, not of physical desire, but a metaphysical acceptance of all and everything -- good and bad, important and trivial, handsome and ugly, permanent and transient. Both evoke nonexistence as counterpoint to the physical world, what Eliot calls the still point in the gap between un-being and being.

The big difference is one of religious faith. Eliot's point of view is entirely Christian, his faith in redemption and eternal life. Woolf neither accepts nor denies religious faith. It, like everything else, is part of life, but is not life itself. Woolf's point of view is more complex. She gives us the minute details of each living moment to treasure. She gives us our lives to live, fully if we can, but without any certainties, lacking all permanence, and having no freedom from doubt. Woolf's imagery deals with unfathomable nature -- that of oceans, skies, and piercing light -- and also much natural beauty -- of trees, gardens, and bounteous flowers. Her essential theme, I believe, is the peculiar courage that can face up to aboriginal fear -- fear of non-being, fear of death -- and, having allowed ourselves to exerience this deep amorphous dread, do more than survive, ourselves shine forth in fully-realized humanity. This is very different from Eliot's vision of purification, perfection, and spiritual unity.

Early in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa decides she should mend her dress. Woolf uses the dress itself, her acquisition of it, the maker, and its need for repair to show us Clarissa's compassion, ability to live life as it is, and potential to experience fear -- existential dread I would say -- as a necessary part of life. Using fairly complex imagery it's possible also that in this passage Woolf intimates Clarissa's capacity for enlightenment, the epiphany Clarissa will experience at the end of the novel which will reveal her fully to us as existential heroine, transformed but still present ("there she was") and still the person who will do for herself that she was at the outset.

Here is the passage:

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.

Here's Emerson's poem. It's one of only a handful of really good ones that he wrote during his long lifetime and it first appeared in the very first issue of The Atlantic Monthly in November 1857.

Brahma
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Eliot's poem is widely available. An internet search turns up a number of locations where you can read Burnt Norton including this one.

He is the much greater poet; they are not in the same league at all. And Four Quartets, of which Burnt Norton is a part, is a masterpiece.

There's no intersection between the lives of Woolf and Emerson, of course, and no reason to expect that Woolf had more than passing interest in his poetry. Eliot, on the other hand, was more than an acquaintance of hers. She and Leonard published his poetry -- hand-setting it for printing at the Hogarth Press which they jointly ran. And Eliot is mentioned in her diaries, though it's not evident that his work had any influence on hers. Some anecdotes of Eliot and the Woolfs, along with a description of their early publishing business, is given here.

Clarissa: existentialist heroine

I promised to revisit my essay on Clarissa Dalloway as existentialist heroine in the context of Lucio P. Ruolto's treatment of the same.

Ruotolo and I both draw upon the same existentialist pantheon to establish the boundaries and essence of the philosophy, including Kierkegaard, Sartre, and, more than anyone else, Heidegger. However, Ruotolo's main secondary source appears to be William Barrett's What Is Existentialism? whereas mine is Anthony Manser's article in the old Dictionary of the History of Ideas.

Ruotolo says explicitly what I imply, that Woolf's novel is extraordinary existentialist literature. Most works in the genre are pessimistic. They depict the mass of humankind as passive and tragically self-deceived. They depict life as an absurdly futile interval between the vacancy that precedes birth and the vacancy that succeeds death. They may have a main character who possesses innately, or works to achieve an ability to perceive all that's wrong, but they generally show this person as lonely victim of persecution -- an outcast.

Ruotolo points out that Clarissa Dalloway is unusual in that Woolf gives her an existential triumph, not of course by defeating adversaries but by permitting herself to confront and to respect the absurdity of life and the inevitability of death; to dislodge and examine her own personal strengths and weaknesses; and to closely observe both the superficial attributes and underlying foibles of others and to find within herself a unpassionate love for each in their full individuality.

Ruotolo shows us Clarissa's emerging self-realization partly, as I do, by revealing the incompleteness of the novel's other characters, but he does this much more thoroughly. On the other hand I more than he try to show the transformation which Clarissa undergoes during the course of the day. He brings in other writings of Virginia Woolf to explicate his thesis, particularly the Diary and a lecture she gave at Cambridge in 1924, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. I do not.

Ruotolo is more prudent than I in maintaining the boundaries of the frame we've chosen. He writes about Clarissa as existentialist hero and doesn't let his imagination wander on to the other pathways which lead to authentic living -- those of the religious mystics, Zen masters, and even Samurai warriors. Whereas I . . . . well to quote myself,

For me, Zen is existentialist. Its end product is overcoming dread of nothingness and of death by facing up to both. It is subjective practice aiming at a transcendent objectivity. It values the absurd and is enemy of complacency. Zen adepts are fully conscious of the choices they make; if there is self-deception among them, it is conscious self-deception.

And I use this amplified frame to show something Ruotolo doesn't bring out: that in the end, Clarissa, now enlightened -- in the Zen sense -- is back where she began. She has given herself time and space in which she can transform -- move gracefully from cherished memories of the past, through each precious moment of time in which she finds herself, into a future which is indetermined, but in which she knows she will be both different from whom she was time past and is time present, but also, paradoxically, the same. She is, that is to say, not transformed out of her life, but into it. Accepting this paradox is a heroic achievement, an existentialist triumph.

Ruotolo more than I stresses the presence Clarissa has attained. He uses the Heideggerian term "being there" to describe this and he closes his essay by emphasizing the importance of the phrase with which Woolf closes the novel:

Peter and Sally, however, are no less human by virtue of their inauthenticity. The fear that drives them to dominate others is stamped upon Clarissa's world and no doubt our own. If Peter has denied (more than once) the sanctity of the human heart by reducing Clarissa to "the perfect hostess," on other occasions he has responded to such mystery. Early in the book he describes the magical quality of her parties. Clarissa, he confesses, has "that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be." During her parties it was not what she did or said that one remembered but rather the extraordinary sense of her being there, "There she was" (pp. 114-115).

In the closing scene, as Clarissa moves from her small room toward Peter, her miraculous presence fills him once again with an undefinable sense of terror and ecstasy; reduced to wonder he can only exclaim: "It is Clarissa." The novel's last words, reiterating Peter's messianic invocation - "For there she was" - challenge each critic's effort to fathom Mrs. Dalloway. Is the statement a final irony - Peter's romantic affirmation of a presence that sustains his melancholy - or does the reader respond with similar apostolic fervor to Clarissa as being there in some special way? Since Virginia Woolf sought to portray the mysterious reality of character it is fitting that, finally, this question remains unanswered.

A few more differences as afterthought: (1) Ruotolo very nicely brings in support from Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. The connection between Woolf and Wittgenstein is tenuous but Ruotolo says "In a letter dated July 28, 1965, Leonard Woolf informs me that although he and his wife did not know Wittgenstein well they spent some time with him when the philosopher stayed with Maynard Keynes in a house close to their own." (2) And also brings in support from Sigmund Freud. He says "Freud's late comments on the artist, quoted by Ernest Jones, seems particularly relevant: 'The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination; but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality.'" (3) I make more of the Shakespearean quote Fear no more the heat o' the sun. (4) He does not point out as I do that Clarissa, in counterpoint to the fearful sun, is a radiant being (Clarissa = "clear," "bright," "famous").

Clarissa Dalloway: Existential Heroine

Mrs. Dalloway continues to occupy my mind. Though there's a vast amount of scholarly output on the book, until today I'd been able to find only a few passing references to its existential nature. What I found today is an excellent little book called Six Existentialist Heroes, by Lucio Ruotolo. Since it's contents are not web-accessible, it took me a little extra effort to discover that Clarissa Dalloway is one of Ruotolo's heroes. (I borrowed a copy in the library where I work after seeing a reference to it in an academic journal; the reference didn't mention Clarissa or Existentialism, but the context made me suspect it would be worthwhile taking a look at the book.)

I'll write about the content of the chapter in another post. For now, here's some information about the author, written in appreciation following his death a few years back. Note that his treatment of Clarissa as Existential Hero almost didn't appear in print.

Longtime professor Lucio Ruotolo, expert on Virginia Woolf, dies

Stanford Report, July 23, 2003

extract: Lucio Ruotolo, a professor emeritus of English whose work on Virginia Woolf helped to cement her reputation as one of the great writers of the 20th century, died July 4 at Stanford Hospital. He was 76.

Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is a subject of his award-winning first book, Six Existential Heroes: The Politics of Faith (Harvard University Press, 1973), in which he explores existentialism as a positive, life-embracing philosophy that can serve as a catalyst for change.

"The book grew out of the notion of a hero who develops in relation to a world he seeks to remedy," Ruotolo said in a 1983 interview with the News Service. "My object was to redefine the notion of an existential hero in more political terms. ... A recurring criticism of existentialism is its supposed disposition to pessimism, anarchy and disillusion -- that it remains essentially a destructive posture. I assume that the courage to raise the question 'If not something, why not nothing?' is linked to the capacity to suspend, at least provisionally, traditional solutions and to entertain often radically new procedures."

================


MEMORIAL RESOLUTION LUCIO RUOTOLO, Ph.D. (1927-2003)

extract: Lucio Ruotolo, a professor emeritus of English, died July 4, 2003, at Stanford Hospital, of complications following heart surgery. He was 76.

His first book, based in part on his dissertation, Six Existential Heroes: The Politics of Faith, contained a chapter on Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway. A long-time friend recalls that he was pressured to exclude Woolf from the book because she was the only woman in the study and not highly regarded, but Ruotolo refused to back down. He even had to change his publisher in order to stick to his principles. The book won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize, awarded by the Harvard Board of Syndics.

Miyamoto Musashi

Calligraphy and paintings by Miyamoto Musashi, who wrote A Book of Five Rings (Gorin no shô)

A cormorant, ink on paper


A dragon (detail of a large painting)



Horse



The god, Hotei, contemplating two fighting cocks. Hotei is one of the gods of good fortune.



The calligraphy on the left is Senki, the War Spirit. It reads, "The Moon in the cold stream like a mirror." The drawing on the right shows Daruma (Bodhidharma) the father of Zen Buddhism in China and Japan



A shrike



One side of a screen



The other side



Not by Miyamoto, but an imaginary depiction of what he might have looked like



Also not by Miyamoto, this is the character Earth (or Ground) by Dr. K. Itoh (Earth is the first book in Five Rings)



The character Void by Dr. K. Itoh (Void is the last book in Five Rings)



Sources: About half the images are scans from the book. The others came from an image search. Ultimately, most are reproductions of works held by the Eisei Bunko museum in Tokyo (described here).

Clarissa's day

I said that The Traveler and Mrs. Dalloway were less unlike that one might expect. Among their likenesses is an existential core which they share. In The Traveler this core is in plain sight; the novel is forthrightly speculative and its author sets out his thesis forthrightly: humans exist in a tragic, futile, passivity. Only a few adepts can break free of this anomie. They do this at great risk and their success does not lead to the power of social control, but only the power of self-realization. Between the unhappy mass of humans and the few enlightened warriors, the author places a third body -- an evil order of men that abuses technology to impose its twisted will on humanity. The plot is driven by the unequal contest between the sword-carrying warriors and the steel-willed devils having immense resources at their command.

Virginia Woolf is both less direct and more satisfying in showing us a life well-lived.

She lets her characters speak to us, shows them to us from the inside. Each makes individual response to the fundamental challenges of life. And together their individual struggles help the reader see the surprising fullness of the life of the central character. It's fitting that this central character, a Mrs. Dalloway, is gradually shown to be Clarissa, a woman who, having her own light, fears not the heat of the sun.

The incompleteness of other characters is made plain by absence: Richard and Elizabeth in simplicity, love of nature, and awkwardness among people; Doris Kilman in failure to respect her own self and false faith in salvation through religion; Peter Walsh in his dependence on others, in his awkwardness with his pocket knife as unacknowledged defensive weapon, and in a fickle inability to make right choices in life; Sally Walsh, charming like Peter, like him volatile, and more than him adventurous, not fickle in making choices, but too cowardly to make right choices all the same.

Septimus Smith shows more than others the fullness of life that Clarissa is eventually able to claim for herself. He cannot hide from knowledge of death, but he is overwhelmed by it and has lost his ability to experience emotion. He sees life as meaningless but cannot accept what he sees. Pursued by the only truly evil character in the book, his despair drives him to suicide, a violent, ugly, and disfiguring death.

Woolf shows us Mrs. Dalloway struggling to acknowledge the unfairness of life -- futile, mean, barren, and lonely -- and to use that knowledge to achieve a love beyond the love of individuals for other individuals, a love of humankind in all its flawed beauty. It is a love that transcends the shallowness of complacency (Hugh Whitbread's for example), accepts the inequity that makes life nasty, brutish, and short for many (the Armenians, or maybe it's the Albanians, for example), and does not judge the shortcomings of all others (forgives them for judging her). Clarissa, Woolf tells us, simply likes life. Speaking aloud to life itself she says "That's what I do it for." She comes to possess the most perfect ease as if she were a creature floating in its element; her dignity is inexpressible, her cordiality exquisite.

Struggling also to come to terms with fear of death. Mrs. Dalloway fears death, so the author tells us. Most of the characters fail to face this fear and of course Septimus is done in by it. Peter has thoughts of death but they are a component of his mood swings -- he does not face up to it, but fears and denies alternately.

Clarissa knows how it is certain we must die. Helped by her reaction to the odious Sir William Bradshaw, she is given the grace to overcome her dread. At the party which ends her day she thinks how that morning she had experienced her fear of death. She thinks, "there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear." Then, learning of the suicide of Septimus, she begins to come to terms with this terror. "Somehow [she thinks] it was her disaster — her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton."

Indirectly, Woolf lets us know the practice that Clarissa follows as her acknowledgment leads to acceptance. She views the death with sacrificial empathy. More than a scapegoat, Septimus becomes a token for the mortality of oneself and all humankind. Of course she knows that Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. But when she absorbs the news of Septimus's death, the event is not a topic for gossip or quick moralizing. In her emerging sense of self-awareness she sees the importance of death in the midst of life. She is not shocked and she does not pity him. As the novel comes to an end, of all the characters, she alone, in the fullness of her life, learns not to fear the heat of sun.

Woolf's recurrent images of ageless womankind help us see the connection Clarissa comes to make between her own individuality and all the individuals who were, are, and ever will be. Using these images of female presence, she indirectly reaffirms this connectedness, continuity, primal force.

• The beggar woman at Regent's Park tube station.

ee um fah um so
foo swee too eem oo

And rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze.

Through all ages — when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise, the battered woman—for she wore a skirt — with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love—love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple-heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.

• Old Miss Parry who is dead and not. Here is how Richard renders her:

There was old Miss Parry, her aunt.

For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was past eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She was placed in a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had known Burma in the ‘seventies were always led up to her. Where had Peter got to? They used to be such friends. For at the mention of India, or even Ceylon, her eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld, not human beings—she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies—it was orchids she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ‘sixties over solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never beheld before) which she painted in water-colour; an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the War, say, which dropped a bomb at her very door, from her deep meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying in the ‘sixties in India—but here was Peter.

• The old woman in the building opposite. Here is Clarissa's epiphany on this woman:

She [Clarissa] walked to the window.

It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him — the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.

What has Mrs. Dalloway done? She has ended where she began, as Clarissa, but grown and changed as the day extended into evening and night.

How is this existential? The poetic force of Woolf's writing makes this now seem a trivial question.

Still, Mrs. Dalloway -- Clarissa -- has achieved what was given to the great medieval mystics to achieve, what the Yogi's seek, what Zen masters sit endlessly to become, what Samurai swordsmen trained for: she has allowed herself to become an authentic being. She is lover of life. She has discovered the gift which others lack. As Woolf says it is to exist, to be, not needing to add, to exist wholly, to be authentically human.

And she has done this as Heidegger says we must: First by asserting her individuality, e pluribus unum; a full realization that each of us is essential. The all that we call the world cannot exist without us, each person an own individual self. Second by absorbing and rising above the full busyness of life with its trivialities, its work-of-the-world, its tedious, meaningless, futility; by transcending the ordinary without denying it. Third by facing up to the twin dread of emptiness and death; experiencing the blank void where nothing exists and fully accepting that death is an essential feature of life. Though traditionally the process of overcoming fear of emptiness and death is depicted as descent in to the dark and return to light, experiencing the dark night of the soul and welcoming the morning sun as enlightened adept, Clarissa -- life-lover, whose symbols are floral and who famously will buy her own flowers -- she fears no more the heat of the sun. She is, I think Woolf is saying, her own brightness, not a helpless creature whom the universe overwhelms by its unimaginable immensity, but her own fully-realized authentic self.

I wish to give the last word not to Heidegger (who possessed much of Sir William's odiousness) but to Miyamoto Musashi and those other adepts who teach that the end brings you back to the beginning. As Musashi's translator says: "The first technique is the last, the beginner and the master behave in the same way. Knowledge is a full circle." This is Clarissa's story. In the 24 hours of one particular day she has realized her life in its timeless fullness and unique individuality. She has ended where she began. Coming full circle, she is not the same self, but a fully-realized instance of the same.


Sources: All my Dalloway quotes come from an online edition. My source for Musashi is the Overlook Press edition.

Mrs. Dalloway, a demi-review

I'm half way through Mrs. Dalloway, so it may be time for a demi-review. I've been struck by the many correspondences with Ulysses by James Joyce, but they've been noticed by many others as well: [1], [2], [3], [4].

The book seems wholly opposite to The Traveler (which I did finish after all) -- the one a thriller set in a dystopic near future having minimal character development and in-your-face metaphysics, the other a quiet tragedy of manners in a very specific time and place close to a century past.

However ....

So far as I can tell from the first half of Mrs. Dalloway ....

Both have a strong female protagonist, both treat alienation as principal theme, and the prevailing attitude of both is a profound pessimism. Both ponder the meaning of life by examining its opposite, not just death, but the absence of all matter, absence of time, absence of place. Whatever unimaginable nothingness beyond the infinitely great, the infinitely little. Virginia Woolf expresses this covertly in those of her misfit characters whose minds wander farthest from common reality, both Septimus and Peter. For Septimus it is plain death earned by illicit survival. For Peter, it's a typically romantic "the death of the soul." But I think it's also latently present elsewhere. For example in the tall quivering shape outside the Regent's Park tube station whose "ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo — " is outside human history, eternal, ageless, awaiting a time when "the pageant of the universe would be over."

And also both books, it seems to me, have an existentialist core. I think I'll write about that when I have more time.