Depth and Complexity in Mrs. Dalloway and The Heart of Darkness

1. Depth and Complexity in Mrs. Dalloway and The Heart of Darkness Niharika Gupta, Sandhya Jetty, David Looi, Eli Rosenthal Period 5

2. Dual-Layers • First/Shell: characterized by the plot events sans any hidden meanings or analyses. • Second layer/the core: the greater message, the underlying commentary on society and humanity itself…and the full extent of the character's psyche and rationale.

3. Characterization • Simple vs. Insightful • Clarissa: ex-social climber distraught and disillusioned with her way of life and choices • Septimus: prisoner of the fetters and chains that society (in the form of the vicious Drs. Bradshaw and Holmes) wishes to clamp onto him. • Marlow & Kurtz: "terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares" is the root cause of this evil (135).

4. Techniques & Styles • Narration: quasi “stream of consciousness” vs. seamless style • Woolf: "prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry“ (Dodd) • Conrad: transition between Stevenson and Proust

5. "Works of literature are often layered, and may require close attention to discover their depth and complexity." With respect to two or three other works you have studied, show how valid this view is.

6. The Approach “We will never ask what a book means...we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things...A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.” • --Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus pp. 4

7. The Novels • Why we chose Mrs. Dalloway and Heart of Darkness? • It is this difference of objectives as well as the ultimate tragic sensibility which further emphasizes why these particular works of literature appear to be layered • Marlow, who can’t grasp the fear that took hold of Kurtz, must return to the safety of predictability and habit • Clarissa decides not to follow Septimus’s fate as she finally understands what Septimus was so afraid of.

8. Style • Mrs. Dalloway uses interior indirect dialogue, ambiguous transitions between characters, and all events happen on a single day in June making the style of writing complex. • The narrative framing device heightens the appearance of complexity in the novel as Marlow assumes a role as the figure of enlightenment, “sitting cross legged on the deck like a European Buddha”

9. Mrs. Dalloway • “As readers we find ourselves in much the same position as Mrs. Woolf’s characters, called back from lyric passages of memory, from awesome flights of introspection, to the postwar world of 1922, by the sights of London, the texture of city light and stone, the traffic, and singular faces; and by the hour striking; drawn back to the day of Mrs. Dalloway’s party, to a present…If ever there was a work conceived in response to the state of the novel, a consciously “modern” novel, it is Mrs. Dalloway.” –Maureen Howard

10. Heart of Darkness • If we agree that Conrad essentially explores the truths of human nature through the endless journey to Kurtz, full of twists and turns that affect Marlow’s perception, and thus that HOD represents the understanding of base primitivism, we should be discussing if there is anything indicative of the text itself which could lend it to be a reading of complexity.

11. Beelzebub is the Devil, but the Devil as lord of the flies…What is a cry independent of the population it appeals to or takes as its witness? Virginia Woolf’s experiences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of fish, according to her variable relations of becoming with the people she approaches …every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack…It is at this point that the human being encounters the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us? --Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 239

12. Nature, Septimus, and the Africans • “But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion—”

13. Nature: Septimus and the Africans • “And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones” • “…at my back the fires loomed between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the forest…A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms, across the glow. It had horns -- antelope horns, I think -- on its head. Some sorcerer, some witch-man, no doubt: it looked fiendlike enough. `Do you know what you are doing?' I whispered. `Perfectly,' he answered, raising his voice for that single word: it sounded to me far off and yet loud, like a hail through a speaking-trumpet. `”

14. Identity, Modernity, Conrad, Woolf • “and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. `I knew it -- I was sure!' ... She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark -- too dark altogether... '‘ • Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. ``We have lost the first of the ebb,'' said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky -- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”

15. Identity, Modernity, Conrad, Wolf • “What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party—the Bradshaws, talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party! She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure? "If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy," she had said to herself once, coming down in white.”

16. Heart of Darkness • "But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." • "They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him— some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core…. I put down the glass, and the head that had appeared near enough to be spoken to seemed at once to have leaped away from me into inaccessible distance.

17. Heart of Darkness • He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: ‘The horror! The horror!’ ‘I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt: ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead.’ • I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for—what is it? half-a-crown a tumble—‘ ‘Try to be civil, Marlow,’ growled a voice, and I knew there was at least one listener awake besides myself. ‘I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of the price. 

18. Bibliography Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1994. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1998. Print. Woolf, Virginia, and Francine Prose. The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003. Print.