Mrs. Dalloway, Clocks And Sounds

23 Pages 5808 Words

n terms of its metrical effects. In ```On the Floor of the Mind': Sentence Shape and Rhythm in Mrs. Dalloway,'' Elizabeth Dodd explicates the poetic qualities of Woolf's prose. She not only points out relationships between sentence rhythm and specific characters' thought patterns, she also shows that Woolf turned to poetry for literary inspiration while revising Mrs. Dalloway. Calling the reader's attention to Woolf's June 21, 1924 diary entry--the same one in which Woolf commented on Forster's A Passage to India (above)--Dodd shows the extent to which poetry was on the writer's mind: ``I think I grow more & more poetic'' (Diary 2.304).

Undoubtedly, poetry does inform Woolf's work, and Dodd's argument to that effect is convincing. While the sentences in Mrs. Dalloway are metrical, however, ``poetic'' alone does not encompass the full rhythmic force of the narrative. Ebert's term ``counterpoint'' and Stockton's metaphor of ``turbulence'' both evoke kinds of rhythmic structures as well, but in very different contexts. Indeed, Woolf consciously draws influence across diverse media in her quest to ``[throw] away the method...in use at the moment'' (Woolf, ``Character in Fiction'' 432). Robin Gail Schulze points to Woolf's use of tonal music to show how she breaks with literary tradition in her novels, but she concludes that ``Mrs. Dalloway, by Woolf's definition, remains a conventional novel'' (Schulze 8). I suggest, however, that Mrs. Dalloway's chronology, the poetic meter of its sentences, its turbulence and counterpoint, are all vectors in the intricate matrix of its polyrhythmic structure.

Borrowed from the field of musicology, ``polyrhythmic'' describes a percussive structure unfamiliar to many Westerners. Because it is not based on regular repetitive patterns marked by even measures, polyrhythmic percussion may sound chaotic to the unaccustomed ear. These characteristically non-Western rhythms are somewhat analogous to seve...