Author: Ejuerleigh Jones
Aura is a theoretical concept that Walter Benjamin coined and developed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). He defines it as an intrinsic element common to both natural objects and art objects, which Benjamin also considers historical objects. He begins his development of this concept through art objects. Aura, in his view, is embedded in art objects by their physical existence, “presence,” in a particular time and space to which it testifies. Consequently, aura is linked to historicity and tradition. Its physical existence allows us to track its movement through space and time from the moment of its emergence. Benjamin argues that manual production determines the aura of original objects, determining their aura. Embedded in the art object by manual production is the authority of historical testimony earned by the object’s presence within a particular history, tradition, and the place in which that history occurs. Aura both affords and is afforded by a sub-concept: authenticity. The physical existence of a manually produced art object of a particular space and time affords its authority of that time and space. Once removed from that time and space, its authority diminishes and, with it, credibility of its historical testimony.
Distance further refines the concept of aura by giving it a social/human base and a second conceptual layer. Benjamin hones in on the experience of aura through sense perception. Linked to experience rather than an artistic process and product of history and tradition, the aura of nature derives from the distance between a person and natural objects—be they a mountain range or the branch of a tall tree—as the condition of our experience. One’s perception of this distance provokes a desire for closeness, which implies that distance provides a barrier or gap between perceiver and object perceived. The appeal of aura rests on the paradox that certain objects provoke a desire for closeness that they cannot satisfy. Aura, as intrinsic to the authentic products of manual production, cannot survive the evolution of modes of social existence, evolution that proceeds in tandem with changes in sense perception that demand new forms of mediation between perceiver and the world of objects. In contemporary life, this demand is so all-encompassing that it surpasses the demand for traditional art forms and their objects. Benjamin writes:
A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few… Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience… The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. (8)
In the age of mass mediation, aura becomes inherently exclusionary. Benjamin is especially attentive to the ways that traditional media have become outdated by changing modes of existence and sense perception. The aura “of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition is thoroughly alive and changeable” (4). He uses the transition from art as an object embedded in religious ritual to art as mass medium to explain what happens to aura in the early twentieth century. This shift from religion to politics frees art from the rituals that maintained its distance from business as usual and releases it into media forms that can be experienced immediately, forms capable of transforming collective experience.
As this implies, Benjamin considers aura antithetical to the value that it acquires in its mechanical reproduction, and he goes on to clarify the concept of aura by explaining how it is dismantled by mechanical reproduction. The manufacture of such objects results, he says, in “a tremendous shattering of tradition [and] the liquidation of traditional value of the cultural heritage” (3). If aura can neither be captured by nor transferred to the mechanically reproduced object, then mechanical reproduction destroys the distance maintained by the occult object. In doing so, mechanical reproduction consequently satisfies “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly” (3). He accuses mechanical production “prying an object from its shell, to destroy its aura [and e]xtracts it even from a unique object” (3). This image of the oyster deprived of its living core conveys a clear sense of how the unique properties of an object vanish into a “universal equality of things” that he considers directly related to the “increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life [and which recognizes] the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura” (3). Mechanical reproduction extends the experience of art objects to virtually anyone at the cost of stripping the object of its aura. It does so by removing the art object from its time and place in history, subdues its authority as an authentic work of art, and destabilizing its capacity to serve as a historical witness. Liberated from tradition and the limitations of manual reproduction, the art object can provide a bridge between the public and the critic, as it elicits reactions from the former that provoke a reaction that critics must explain and evaluate. Art becomes political in the sense of a “progressive reaction” (8).
Film and photography are mechanically reproduced art forms that afford this simultaneous collective experience. To illustrate this point, Benjamin argues:
Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons [during the second half of the nineteenth century], there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception… With regard to the screen, the critical and receptive attitudes of the public coincide (8)
At stake in stripping objects of their aura is the ability to adjust reality for mass perception so that the masses can better adjust to a rapidly evolving reality. Mechanical reproduction affords a closer look at objects unobstructed by distance or historicity. This sense of immediacy generates a desire for more: “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction,” inspiring the inventors of photographic and film technology to provide a closer view of the object than can be experienced with the naked eye. Benjamin argues that the mechanical lens has the advantage of being
adjustable and choos[ing] its angle at will… Enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision… Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations…out of reach for the original itself… [It] meet[s] the beholder halfway (2).
By allowing the beholder to experience this apparent closeness to the object and consequently “extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives, [while] managing to assure us of an immense unexpected field of action” (9).
As this statement suggests, the aura of an object establishes a certain form of distance between itself and its beholder. Inasmuch as aura is the preserves traces of another time within a space, inhabited by the original, the art object’s ability to provide historical testimony, that is, the experience of aura, will necessarily be retrospective. The spectator experiences traces of an object’s history when he or she engages with an authentic object, which is to say “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (2). On this basis, aura can be understood as the event of a spectator bearing witness to historical testimony. This historical testimony is inextricable from the object’s materiality which displays the work of its particular maker. Because the present mode of mechanical reproduction obscures precisely that work, Benjamin argues, the mass-produced object will lose the authority of historical testimony. But as much as he seems to lament the loss of aura, Benjamin still insists that its loss is a gain for society as a whole.
Here, I must stop to consider the basis for his resistance to historical testimony: Under what conditions might a close encounter with the past be somehow deleterious? Benjamin would seem to be saying that historical testimony in not a good thing if it maintains the limits of traditional art. “Tradition,” and the modes of perception caught up in that term, are for him problematic because perception necessarily changes with changes in the mode of production, especially with the development of new technologies of perception. As if bent on closing the distance between object and spectator, modern societies devise new technologies for reproducing and distributing their culture. When the drive to close this gap succeeds—as it does with the invention of calotype photography in the 1830s followed by the cinematic image six decades later—spectators become participators in a collective experience, he argues, and “the critical and receptive attitudes of the public coincide” (8). This, it would seem, is what Benjamin means in claiming human sense perception was evolving toward an ability to grasp universal equality of things. In this trajectory, mechanical reproduction operates as an equalizer.
The paradox of aura—that it provokes a desire for a closeness that new forms of mediation are by definition incapable of fulfilling—generates an urgent need to recapture the lost dimension of the object through artistic innovation. To put it simply, the problem of the distance produced by mediation is resolved through artistic innovation, specifically by forms of mediation that, like film and photography, appear to do away with mediation. The new technology of transparent images destabilizes the traditions of art and sets a precedent for future art objects, which sees to it that “[t]ransitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade” (7). During the twentieth century, film became the exemplary medium for registering the artistic response to changes in public sensory perception. Film was not only a medium of reproduction; it also became an art form in its own right. Hence “[t]he cathedral leaves its locale…the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room” (2).
MRS. DALLOWAY AS TEST CASE
Written in 1925, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway provides a test case for the novel’s response to the loss of aura in the face of new technologies of reproduction. The novel does not make us aware of this displacement of traditional modes of perception by such innovations as the skywriting over Trafalgar Square, so much as by the ways it calls attention to itself as a mechanical reproduction of its own narrative form. To unfold a narrative that bears resemblance to the traditional machinery of the bildungsroman, Woolf mines film and photography to produce a series of close shots—transitions between people and moments that escape the conscious notice of Woolf’s characters as they bustle through the events of an ordinary day. By means of these techniques, Woolf magnifies the subtle transitional moments that escape the naked eye when one is in the process of negotiating an ordinary day. Woolf calls attention to her technical virtuosity in dilating the novel’s perceptual lens by striking a compelling contrast between her novel and the Western canon. In this respect, we might even say that Mrs. Dalloway operates as a mechanical reproduction of literary history.
While, as Benjamin insists, the mechanical reproduction of art “destroys aura” as a means of conserving the tradition of art in order to favor of art forms intended for reproduction. In reproducing the novel itself through the medium of print, Woolf succeeded in placing herself among an international group of modernists who sought to elevate the novel to literary status by means of direct and indirect references to the Western canon. In a novel that intentionally departs from tradition, then, she made clear just what aspects of the tradition she was departing from and earned her fiction inclusion as the end point of Erich Auerbach’s canonical study Mimesis.
The impact of this gesture can be understood in relation the ways that technology and its relentless progression impacts the production of art objects in general. Thanks to improvements in printing by the time Woolf wrote, the novel was at the forefront of the mass production of literary art objects. Novels had to compete for readers in an ever-expanding marketplace for popular fiction, and any attempt to the fiction of one’s time to the past tradition was bound to produce some formal rupture. Woolf simultaneously compounds and resolves this problem by drawing on the art of the moving image, as it was developing in innovative ways during the period between World Wars.
Example 1. MRS. DALLOWAY AND THE WESTERN CANON
Clarissa asks herself, “What was she trying to recover?” as she is “dreaming” of the past and mourning a way of life that is now largely memory (Woolf 9). She reminisces about “the book,” though never citing Cymbeline or Shakespeare specifically, and while contemplating an evening that promises to recover something of the past, she raises questions of that past that can only emerge in retrospect. As a spectator of what has past, she aspires to a closeness that modern culture disallows. What does this say about her relation to Cymbeline, which has been sliced, copied, and pasted into this novel, as of to distinguish it from any other? Shakespeare’s immortal words gain a form of immortality quite apart from their traditional status, as they are reproduced mechanically, detached from their source, fragmented, and dispersed. The two lines—“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages…”—would seem to bring the original work of art and space of performance object close to the reader. Instead they call attention to the artificiality of an excerpt from an original work of literature that has already been mechanically reproduced many times over and scattered throughout the culture of the novel. How did these passages find their way into the novel, we must wonder, if as Clarissa says of her education, “[s]he knew nothing; no language; no history; she scarcely read a book now…How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think” (8). These fragments confirm her claim that “she sliced like a knife through everything,” but they don’t explain why the novel neglects to name “the book” their origin. While she may not have been “properly” educated, the novel indicates that she has encountered Shakespeare at least second or thirdhand. By the same token, neither do these passages indicate the author’s erudition and a signpost for reading the novel. By flaunting its casual use of Shakespeare, the novel reminds us that the publication industry in which the novel thrives has usurped the position once occupied by public theater as the primary literary expression of the ruling class.
When Shakespeare and his work do appear by name, it is to invoke Richard Dalloway’s remonstrance that “no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes” (Woolf 75). Later still, the shattered victim of combat, Septimus Smith, reminisces about his encounter with Antony and Cleopatra, the words to which remain unquoted. Woolf displays her literary education throughout the novel; the characters give voice to its history through indifference, criticism, and praise. Where Clarissa is self-admittedly ignorant and her husband Richard, dismissive, young Septimus, by contrast, wanted nothing more than to “[devour] Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Western Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw” (85). As Benjamin explains, “[t]he situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated” (2). Indeed, this depreciation is evident throughout Woolf’s reproduction of literary history in the novel. Establishing just how this happens is a precondition for examining aura and the revolutionary structure of threaded narrative in Mrs. Dalloway.
Example 2. THREADED NARRATIVE
According to Erich Auerbach, stream-of-consciousness narration came into its own during the early decades of the twentieth century. The intersecting, crisscrossing, simultaneity of the characters’ movements in extended moments of interiority is not only rebellion against tradition, but, more fundamentally a response to cultural evolution prompted technological innovation. There is no denying the connection between the development of cinema techniques and the narrative structure of interiority that distinguishes literary modernism. Certainly, what is evident in both media is the premium they place on “closeness.” Benjamin writes:
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses… By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film…extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives… The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. (9)
By contrast to the stage, film visually bridges the distance between actor and spectator, giving the spectator a sense of closeness to things, ideas, and human beings that he or she can then presume to know intimately. In that film is produced for a viewing audience, it troubles the tradition of the stage. Mrs. Dalloway not only aspires to the cinematic “close-up” but also reproduces magnified snapshots to anchor the narrative structure. As a result, there is no singular optic, or central consciousness, with which we can identify the authorial perspective; there is only the movement of narration through one character’s thought processes to another’s. One might argue that this novel takes the cinematic close-up further than it can take itself as narration penetrates the invisible stream of thought and reproduce it for a readership, while film was then limited to public theaters, regional viewings, community censorship, and racial restrictions. Woolf brings us close to a form of interiority that is presumed to exist within each of us but cannot be represented by the visual arts, at least not directly. The poignancy of this mode of art is its language—the element of literary art objects, through which we read the evolution forms of life and community. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s account of how mechanical reproduction destroys aura and dismantles its testimony to its moment in history holds true for this novel as well.
Mrs. Dalloway opens as Clarissa reminisces while walking through London. She stops in at Mulberry’s on Bond Street, but there is a “violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump” (14). As a result of this event, the novel enacts its first transfer of interiority from Clarissa to Septimus. Amongst the “passersby who, of course stopped and stared,” is Edgar J. Watkiss who speculates that the mysterious vehicle is “the Prime Minister’s kyar.” Septimus Warren Smith, “who found himself unable to pass, heard him.” True to form, Septimus’ thoughts are not self-enclosed but interwoven with information about the people around him and what they have in mind: “Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas… Old ladies on the tops of omnibuses” (15). Although he fails to pay particular attention to the protagonist, the reader understands that these movements happening around him indicates the movement that links and separates streams of consciousness, allowing the novel’s free indirect discourse to shift from one to another at will to make us experience the simultaneity of individual experiences.
Once “[t]he car had gone…had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street,” Clarissa is notably ‘absent’ for eleven pages (17). In the meantime, “the sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd… White smoke…curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters” (20). She emerges again while standing at her front door, asking the maid, “What are they looking at?” (29). Although this sentence begins a new section of the novel, the question Clarissa has posed is carried forward in time and elsewhere to make her present by virtue of her absence in the social interactions that follow. This begs the question of what Clarissa was thinking about that made her miss out on the action. A return to the novel’s opening reveals the missing thread that ties her to this event. Contemplating the extent to which Big Ben is embedded in London life, she notes a “strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead” (4). In capturing the complexity of daily life in which introspection is neither self-enclosed nor cut off from the environment that prompts it, the novel might have lost track of this moment of collective focus in the catalogue of her surroundings that Clarissa provides, had Woolf not recalled it from oblivion at a critical moment in the novel. In short, nothing is wasted here. The novel attends to the most subtle movements and stillnesses of consciousness, opening them to the glimpse of those readers willing to take the time to see.
“Remember my party to-night! she cried having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air, and, overwhelmed by the traffic and the sound of all the clocks striking” (48). Clarissa issues this plea to Peter Walsh as she is standing on the landing and Peter turns to make his way down the street. The plea makes a seamless transition from a fixed location inside the contained space of the Dalloway home, where their minds interact and they exchange dialogue, directly into Peter’s consciousness and his path through London. Although their conversation was over and Peter had already gone, the novel’s thought process reaches out in pursuit of his, even as it leaves her behind for a while. As he continues to ruminate on that plea and the frustration prompted by painful recollections of their past, her call to come to “my party to-night” threads its way through multiple people to the time of multiple clocks.
The novel makes the tenacity of this thread explicit in the following description of Peter’s thoughts the next day at a lunch with Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread, and Richard Dalloway:
And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing the service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept…let the thread snap; snored. (112)
Looking back down this thread to Clarissa’s encounter with Peter, one sees her plea as a thread that Peter picks up and stretches throughout the day, allowing it to extend in various directions through his interaction with others and theirs with still others, until it is barely discernible in Lady Bruton’s exchange with Hugh and Richard and snaps as their consciousnesses separate and Lady Bruton chooses sleep over, continuing within the stream of consciousness. By making the members of Clarissa’s social circle the keepers of the thread, the novel suggests that they, rather than the author, determine where the novel’s thought will wander next. This sense intensified at those moment when a character’s consciousness seems to digress from the character’s purpose. Richard, for example, walks a short while with Hugh but is soon agitated because “Hugh was becoming an intolerable ass” (114-115). This detour is the more annoying because Richard is “very eager, to travel that spider’s thread of attachment between himself and Clarissa; he would go straight to her” (115). The wayward threads then return to their socially consolidating patterns of thought when, at luncheon, Lady Bruton announces that Peter is back in London. Whereupon, Richard Dalloway recalls that “Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa” and resolves to “go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa…tell her, in so many words, that he loved her” (107). Indeed, one could argue, this narrative structure holds a mirror to social relations, how they form and reinforce one another and so endure over time.
It is difficult to imagine how this way of pulling a dispersed social class together over the course of one day could have been accomplished at another period in time. Drawing on the camera’s ability to capture a moment of history within the space of a shot and either render it reproducible as such or the evolution of cinematic techniques from those of a magic show to an instrument of realism. Just as “close-ups of the things around us [focus] on hidden details of familiar objects…exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, [so] the film…extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives” (9). Woolf shows that the novel can do for half formulated thought processes and interpersonal communication what cinematic techniques could do for visible phenomena: which is to show that human beings are an integral part of one another’s inner lives, lives therefore composed both of the people and things one thinks with.
Leaving Regent’s Park, Peter notices Septimus and Lucrezia “having an awful scene”: “And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed them” (70). This is a short and seemingly casual transition that demonstrates the variety of characters that Woolf can assemble by softening the boundaries between those who happen to be in Regent’s Park. The reader sees both the struggle between the couple’s interiorities and Peter’s experience in the park as he tunes in briefly to Lucrezia’s frustration with Septimus. With his observation of the pair, the relies on Peter’s thought to carry the thread of social life to the novel’s next section.
Example 3. THE AUTHORITY OF TIME
We progress through the time of the day leading up to and immediately following Clarissa’s party. The fact that the novel marks time through the chiming of Big Ben and subsidiary clocks only heightens our awareness that successive time does not mark the movement within and between streams of thought. The narrative thread of Mrs. Dalloway maintains another form of time that is punctuated by shifts in consciousness rather than the chimes of the clock. Woolf’s emphasis on the transitions between interiors strikes a contrast between the keeping of time and the passing of time, which allows Woolf to emphasize the relative independence of the movement of consciousness from the passing of time and how human movement marks the keeping of time. The keeping of time is nevertheless there, always near, as marked by the movement between past and present as characters reminisce.
Aura is so inextricably connected to the keeping of time that we might think of the phenomenon as the keeper of tradition, as Benjamin understands the term. To explain how the keeping of time as tradition is related to the passage of time is the task that Woolf undertakes with Mrs. Dalloway. By contrast to the process by which human beings think through the events of an ordinary day, Big Ben is impersonal, monotonous, demanding, but constant and unchanging. The conscious processing of information is unwieldy and spontaneous and largely dependent on factors outside oneself. The concept of aura—as the keeping of time—deals with the discrepancy between the conscious experience of time and the passage of time. It is in keeping of time that historical changes in sensory perception take place and art helps a readership/audience adjust to those changes.
“One feels…a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense…before Big Ben strikes” (4). Big Ben is established as the authority of time early on in the novel. However, this is written through Clarissa’s interiority which immediately casts doubt on this claim because “it might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza.” She follows this with a rumination on Londoners’ mysterious affection for the clock. “Such fools we are, “she thinks, “building it round one, tumbling it, creating every moment afresh.” At the same time, she equates the daily events of keeping time with life in London and how one can’t help but love it. There is illuminated, here, a contrast between keeping time (Big Ben) and passing time. The passing of time is marked by people’s eye: “they love life… The swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging, brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle… Can’t be dealt with…by Acts of Parliament.” The authority of time “speaks” in moments but is forgotten in the keeping of time by the people living within time; “The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” The keeping of time and the passing of time contrast a macro/micro dynamic. Contrasted here is the structure of time, as embodied by Big Ben, with the perception of time. That is, the passage of time is continuous, but its keeping is not.
The timekeeper captures our attention again and again, if only for that moment. Perhaps, this is the “suspense” and “indescribable” pause to which Clarissa refers. Even as people forget the timekeeper, the authority of its rhythmic presence is embedded in the group consciousness. The difference between keeping and passing time is a permanent feature of modern time must be negotiated by each individual in his or her particular social space. So, too, must the artist negotiate the gap between the tradition and the development of new techniques. Although it may not present itself as to us as a negotiation, the MR work of art responds to and incorporates aura even as it intentionally departs from it.
The intricacies of passing time in Mrs. Dalloway are manifest in its threaded narrative, which proves, for all the estrangement among the major characters demonstrates that human experience is not self-enclosed. Clarissa, Septimus, Richard, Peter, Lucrezia—their stories are not told as separate narrative segments, but moments within a single stream of time. Understood retrospectively, the experience aura requires one to “look back” and acknowledge distance; aura is a preservation of what was, of what traditionally embodied the authority of authentic experience. Big Ben, the keeper of time, is challenged the passing of time accentuates the tension Woolf maintains throughout the novel. That keeping and passing is always in conflict is reinforced by all the clocks throughout the city:
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority…until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street announced…that it was half-past one… Subconsciously one was grateful to Rigby and Lowndes for giving one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude (so Hugh Whitbread ruminated, dallying there in front of the shop window), naturally took the form of buying off Rigby and Lowndes socks or shoes. (102)
What manner of time is being authorized, here? The clocks of Harley Street “counsel submission” to the authority of time as a dissemination of the “mound of time”? At this point in the novel it is only Big Ben, with its “direct downright sound,” that informs the time (4 11am; 49 11.30am; 70 11.45am; 94 12pm; 102 1.30pm). This authority travels throughout London, from the clocks of Harley Street to Oxford Street. Doubly, the mound of time operates as a transition between interiorities, from Lucrezia Smith to Hugh Whitbread. The presence of its authority metaphorically materializes in “leaden circles” that “dissolve in the air” (4, 48, 94). So present is Big Ben that there is a subconscious gratitude for this dissemination and the proprietors that provide it. Though “subconsciously one was grateful,” Hugh does more than that. He attempts to express that gratitude by keeping “guard at Buckingham Palace, dressed in silk stockings… He had been afloat on the cream of English society [Lady Bruton] for fifty-five years” (103). With the character of Hugh, Woolf makes the point that there is no clear break between keeping and passing time. Hugh’s way of passing time as a palace guard is inseparable from his keeping of time.
CONCLUSION
Through Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf responds to the diminishing aura of the novel as a function of updating the novel as the means of mechanical reproduction. By drawing on cinematic techniques that fragment and artificially reassemble various moments in time changes, Woolf expands the inner lives of characters at the points of their intersection to follow the thread connecting those lives through a day in the life of modern London. While the novel’s narrative adheres to the passage of the hours of a single day, Woolf slows down that narrative by zooming in and expanding certain moments when the inner life eclipses “real-time.” The moments on which I have focused are but a few of many in which the novel departs from clocktime, and these departures invariably close the distance between individual human interiority and allows the reader to see the past that informs its relation to the present moment. As Benjamin contends:
Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride…The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. (9)
Such is the effect of the threaded interiorities that we follow through the day: to magnify the moments of transition from one human consciousness to another as they move through social space in relation together.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Translated by Harry Zohn. Marxists Internet Archive. Web. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Harcourt, 1925.
