Imagined Cities by Alter Robert

Author:Alter, Robert. [Alter, Robert.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300127072
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2005-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

6

Woolf

Urban Pastoral

TO JUDGE BY THE NOVELS we have considered so far, the modern metropolis seems to earn a triple-A rating for angst, alienation, and anomie, with a certain appropriateness in the trilingualism of the alliterative triplet if one thinks of the pan-European scope of these urban pathologies. This somber view of the city is not merely the reflection of the writers’ private obsessions (although of course it is often also that), for there is abundant evidence that the unprecedented demographic mushrooming within urban space throughout the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth was rarely matched by a collective ability to order that space effectively and make it attractively habitable for individuals and communities. Our continuing problems in the twenty-first century with urban crime, crowding and squalor, traffic, and pollution suggest that we are still far from finding our way out of this historical impasse.

Yet most people who live in great cities, including the three cities we have looked at up till now through a novelistic prism, are likely to conclude that these dire visions represent a rather partial view. The vast new cities are also places of excitement and enlivening energy that can elicit a sense of exuberance in the urbanite. This upbeat sense of the city may be enhanced by grand avenues and gracious parks and other manifestations of enlightened urban planning, but it is chiefly the consequence of the sheer teeming variety of city life, superabundant in varying human types, fashions, merchandise, vehicles, architecture, and cultural activity. Just as in painting there is a modernism that responds enthusiastically to the exciting rhythms of modern urban existence—Léger and Mondrian do this in radically different ways—there is a current in modernist writing that registers a sense of affirmation quite unlike the themes of anguish and apocalypse which criticism so often associates with modernism. This affirmative trend in modernism has been finely described in The Art of Celebration by Alfred Appel Jr., a critic whose evocative prose emulates the celebratory mood of the writers, painters, sculptors, composers, and jazz musicians he admires.1 Appel does not devote particular attention to Virginia Woolf, but her representation of London in Mrs. Dalloway is a vivid literary instance of the modernist art of celebration.

To make this claim in no way implies that Woolf should be seen as a cheerfully optimistic writer. She famously had her demons, and they are much in evidence in Mrs. Dalloway. Their main locus here, of course, is the figure of Septimus Warren Smith, who serves as an alter ego not only for Clarissa Dalloway, viscerally identifying as she does with his suicide when she hears of it at her party, but also for Woolf herself. The novelist’s bouts of severe depression, accompanied by excruciating hypersensitivity and suicidal impulses, are transferred to this young veteran of the Great War and given a historical grounding in his traumatic battlefield experience.

If the war has inflicted unspeakable wounds, London five years after the end of hostilities is also seen in the book as a place of renewal.

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