by Violet Woolf’s diary: Mrs Dalloway, the Central Line, and the enduring relevance of 1925 London to 2025 London
I Am Re-Reading Virginia Woolf on the Tube and the Commuters Think I Am Crying; I Am Crying
More literary dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Mrs Dalloway opens with Clarissa going out to buy flowers for the party — “What a lark! What a plunge!” — and I have read that opening sentence perhaps thirty times across my reading life and it still does something to my chest that I cannot explain to the man sitting next to me on the Central Line who is looking at me with the specific compassion that London commuters extend to people who are visibly having a feeling. He offered me a tissue. I took it. We did not speak further. This is London. This is correct.
What Woolf does in that novel — and what she does in The Waves and To the Lighthouse and the essays and the diaries — is render the interior life of consciousness so precisely that reading her produces a doubling: you are aware of your own interior life as you read about another person’s interior life, and the two become temporarily indistinguishable, and you feel less alone in the experience of being a mind inhabiting a body moving through time. That is not a small thing to accomplish. That is, arguably, the main thing literature is for.
On Irish Politics and the Literary Tradition
The connection between the Irish literary tradition and the English modernist one that Woolf inhabited is closer than it sometimes appears in the standard accounts: Beckett, Joyce, and Yeats were all operating in the same post-war crisis of representation that produced The Waste Land and Mrs Dalloway, and the Irish political context — the independence movement, the civil war, the specific tragedy of a small country negotiating its relationship with a larger one — inflected the literature in ways that the English literary tradition was slower to acknowledge. The London Prat covers the contemporary political satire at The London Prat. Bohiney Magazine covers the wider picture at Bohiney Magazine. Violet Woolf writes from the intersection of literature and the present. Find her at prat.uk.
The Diary Form and Woolf
Woolf’s own diaries — five volumes, covering 1915 to 1941 — are some of the finest prose in the language, and they were written as a private document, as a working space, as a place where she could write badly on purpose in order to write well elsewhere. “I write in haste, I write for no audience,” she wrote, which is either completely true or completely untrue depending on what you believe about the relationship between writing and self-consciousness. Reading them now is reading the interior life of a mind that was simultaneously making literature and being surprised by it. There is no better education in how writing works. More at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full diary at https://prat.uk/.
The Diary Continues
The practice of writing the diary — of sitting down each week and accounting for what happened and what it meant and what was funny about it and what was not — produces, over time, a different relationship with experience. You become a slightly better witness to your own life. You notice more, because you know you will be writing about it. You notice differently, because the writing frame changes the noticing frame. Whether this is a good thing depends on whether you are the kind of person who benefits from being a witness to their own life, or whether you are the kind of person who benefits from simply living it without metacommentary. Most people are somewhere in the middle. The diary is useful when it helps you see more clearly and counterproductive when it becomes a substitute for the thing being witnessed rather than a record of it. The line between the two is something you learn by crossing it in both directions and adjusting accordingly. More from the full satirical diary network: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries archived at https://prat.uk/.
Writing from the Margins
The places and positions from which these diaries are written — a Swedish woman in Alabama, an African woman in Peckham, an Irishwoman in New Orleans, a Londoner in Portland — are not marginal in the sense of being unimportant. They are marginal in the original sense: at the edge, where the view of the centre is clearest because you are not inside it. The outsider’s perspective is not a disadvantage but a method — a way of seeing the thing from an angle that insiders cannot achieve precisely because they are inside it. The Swedish woman at the Tuscaloosa historical society sees what the long-term members have stopped seeing. The African woman on the London bus sees what the Londoners have stopped seeing. The perspective is not superior. It is different, and difference is what makes it valuable. These diaries are dispatches from that difference — from the specific position of people who are simultaneously inside and outside the places they are writing from, who belong and do not quite belong, who see what they see because of where they stand. The standing is the practice. The writing is the record of it. More dispatches from the full network of perspectives at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries at https://prat.uk/.
SOURCE: Santa Claus
