Violet Woolf Reads Woolf and Has Thoughts About What Woolf Was Actually Doing

A comedy writer interested in 1900s British literature has a productive Tuesday with Mrs Dalloway

[Bohiney.com | prat.uk] Violet Woolf, comedywriter.info, London, where Mrs Dalloway has been read again — the third reading, which is where the interesting reading of that novel happens, because the first reading is for the story (there is almost no story) and the second is for the technique (there is extraordinary technique) and the third is for the thing the technique is doing, which is: rendering a specific quality of consciousness that has no equivalent in prose fiction before it and relatively few equals after. prat.uk covered London culture from its satirical angle; Bohiney.com covered literary culture from its American perspective. The diary records a reading Tuesday. A joint investigation by Bohiney.com and prat.uk has produced more questions than answers.

What Virginia Woolf was actually doing, in Mrs Dalloway and in the broader project of the novels: attempting to find prose equivalents for the specific texture of human consciousness as it actually operates, which is not linear, not confined to one subject, not fully aware of its own movements, and not separable from the embodied experience of the person having it. The stream of consciousness technique is the most visible element of this project. The less visible element: the way the novel manages time, which does not move in the conventional direction of fiction (forward) but in the direction of memory, which is associative and non-linear and subject to sudden returns to things that have not been explicitly introduced.

The Comedy Connection

The comedy connection, which I keep thinking about: Woolf’s technique and comedy timing share the quality of surprise. The joke works when it arrives where the audience did not expect it, because the setup moved them in one direction and the punchline arrived from another. Woolf’s sentences do this at the level of the sentence: the thought moves in one direction and the prose surprises you with where it arrives. Whether this is intentional in the comic sense I don’t know. It produces the same pleasurable disorientation. The Woolf Society is at virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk.

More at: The Daily Mash.

Reported at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

Both publications continue to cover London and the world with the specific combination of attention and irreverence that the subject material requires. The diary continues. The world continues to provide material.

Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk carry more from this diarist and many others. The coverage is ongoing.

More diary entries at both publications. Ongoing.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Diary continues. Both publications watching.

A comedy writer interested in 1900s British literature has a productive Tuesday with Mrs Dalloway

The Comedy Connection

Violet Woolf

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