Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  On some occasions, in masterpieces that mark a new development in narrative form, the form overshadows the characters and the plot to such an extent that life seems to become frozen and disappear from the novel, consumed by the technique, by the words and order or disorder of the narration. This is what occurs, at times, in Joyce’s Ulysses, and what takes Finnegans Wake to the bounds of illegibility. None of this happens in Mrs Dalloway (although in To the Lighthouse and, above all, The Waves it is on the brink of happening). The balance between the form and content of the tale is perfect, and readers never feel that they are witnessing what this book is as well, a daring experiment; only that they are witnessing the delicate and uncertain network of events that happen to a handful of human beings on a hot summer’s day in the streets, parks and houses of central London. Life is always there, on each line, in each syllable of the book, brimming with grace and refinement, prodigious and incommensurable, rich and diverse in all its aspects. ‘Beauty was everywhere’ is a sentence that springs to the befuddled mind of Septimus Warren Smith, who was to be driven by fear and grief to kill himself. And it is true; in Mrs Dalloway the real world has been remade and perfected to such a degree by the deicidal genius of its creator, that everything in it is beautiful, including what in our unstable objective reality we hold to be dirty and ugly.

  To reach this sovereign state, a novel must free itself from real reality, convince the reader that it is a different reality, with its own laws, time, myths and other characteristics that are proper to it and to it alone. What gives a novel its originality – marks its difference from the real world – is the added element that the fantasy and art of the writer provide when he or she transforms objective and historical experience into fiction. The added element is never just a plot, a style, a temporal order, a point of view; it is always a complex combination of factors that affects the form and content and the characters of a story, and which gives it its autonomous existence. Only failed fictions reproduce reality: successful fictions abolish and transfigure reality.

  The miraculous originality of Mrs Dalloway lies in the ways in which life is embellished, the secret beauty of every object and every circumstance being thrown into relief. Just as old Miss Parry has abolished from her memory everything except the orchids and some images of gorges and coolies, so the world of fiction has segregated from the real world sex, misery and ugliness and has metamorphosed everything that is in any way a reminder of them into conventional feelings, unimportant allusions or aesthetic pleasure. At the same time it has intensified the presence of ordinary, banal or intangible things, arraying them in unexpected sumptuousness and imbuing them with a hitherto unheard-of prominence, life and dignity. This ‘poetic’ transformation of the world – for once this epithet is justified – is radical and yet is not immediately perceptible, for, if it were so, it would give the impression of being a fake book, a forced distortion of real life, and Mrs Dalloway, by contrast, as with all persuasive fictions – these lies so well made that they pass as truths – seems to submerge us fully in the most authentic of human experience. But it is clear that the fraudulent reconstruction of reality in the novel, reducing it to the most refined, pure aesthetic sensibility, could not be more radical or complete. Why is this sleight of hand not immediately apparent? Because of the rigorous coherence with which the unreality of the novel is described – or, rather, invented – that world in which all the characters without exception have a marvellous ability to detect what is extraordinary in the mundane, what is eternal in the ephemeral and what is glorious in mediocrity, the way Virginia Woolf herself could do. For the characters of this fiction – of every fiction – have been fashioned in the image and likeness of their creator.

  But is it the characters of the novel that have these exceptional attributes, or rather just the character who narrates and dictates them, and often speaks through their mouths? I am referring to the narrator – and here we should talk about a female narrator – of the story. The narrator is always the central character in a fiction. Invisible or present, singular or multiple, embodied in the first or second or third person, omniscient god or implied witness in the novel, the narrator is the first and most important character that a novelist must invent in order to make the tale convincing. This elusive, ubiquitous narrator of Mrs Dalloway is Virginia Woolf’s great achievement in this book, the reason for the story’s magic and irresistible power of persuasion.

  The narrator of the novel is always located in the private world of the characters, never in the outside world. What is narrated to us comes through filters, diluted and refined by the sensibility of those people. The fluid consciousnesses of Mrs Dalloway, Richard, her husband, Peter Walsh, Elizabeth, Doris Kilman, the tormented Septimus and Rezia, his Italian wife, offer the perspectives from which that hot summer’s morning is constructed, in the streets of London, with the din of horns and engines, and its green and scented parks. The objective world dissolves into these consciousnesses before it reaches the reader and is deformed and reformed according to the state of mind of each character; memories and impressions are added, which become blended with dreams and fantasies. In this way, the reader of Mrs Dalloway is never provided with an objective reality, but only with the different subjective versions that the characters weave out of this reality. This immaterial substance, as slippery as quicksilver, and yet, essentially human – life transformed into memory, feeling, sensation, desire, impulse – is the prism through which the narrator of Mrs Dalloway reveals the world and tells the story. This is what creates, from the opening lines, the extraordinary atmosphere of the novel: that of a suspended, subtle reality, suffused with the same evasive quality as light, scents and the tender and furtive images of memory.

  This immaterial, evanescent climate that the characters inhabit gives the reader of Mrs Dalloway the impression of being faced with a totally strange world, despite the fact that what happens in the novel could not be more trivial or anodyne. Many years after the book was published, a French writer, Nathalie Sarraute, attempted to describe in a series of fictions what she called human ‘tropisms’, those pulses or instinctive movements that precede action and thought itself and establish a slender umbilical cord between rational beings, animals and plants. Her novels, which were interesting, but which were never more than audacious experiments, had the virtue, for me, of enriching retrospectively my reading of this novel of Virginia Woolf. Now that I have reread it, I am quite clear that in Mrs Dalloway she managed to describe this mysterious and recondite first stirring of life, the ‘tropisms’ that Nathalie Sarraute, with less success, would seek to explore some decades later.

  This withdrawal into the subjective is one characteristic of the narrator; another is the ability to disappear into the consciousnesses of the characters, to become one with them. This is an exceptionally discreet and figurative narrator, who avoids being noticed and who often jumps – but always taking the utmost care not to reveal herself – from one interior consciousness to another. When it exists, the distance between the narrator and the character is minimal, and constantly disappears as the narrator disappears and is replaced by the character: the narration then becomes a monologue. These changes occur constantly, sometimes on several occasions in one page, and despite this, we hardly notice them, such is the skill with which the narrator carries out these transformations, disappearances and reappearances.

  The beautifully fashioned narrative employs both an indirect libre style and interior monologue. The indirect libre style, invented by Flaubert, consists of narrating through an impersonal and omniscient narrator – from a grammatical third person – who is placed very close to the character, so close that on occasion the narrator seems to become confused with the character, abolished by the character. The interior monologue, perfected by Joyce, is the narration through a narrator-character – who narrates from the first person. The person who tells the story of Mrs Dalloway is at times an impersonal narrator, very close to the characters, who recounts to us thei
r thoughts, actions and perceptions, imitating their voice, their accent, their reserve, taking on their sympathies and phobias, and at times it is the characters themselves, whose monologues cast out the omniscient narrator from the narration.

  These ‘changes’ of narrator occur innumerable times in the novel, but are only noticeable on a few occasions. On many other occasions it is impossible to determine whether the narrator is the omniscient narrator or the characters themselves, since the narration seems to take place in a liminal space between the two, or seems to be both at once, an impossible point of view in which the first and third persons would not be contradictory but would form a single grammatical person. This formal flourish is particularly effective in the episodes relating to young Septimus Warren Smith, whose mental disintegration we witness from very close up, or we share from within the unfathomable depths of his insecurity and panic.

  Septimus Warren Smith is a dramatic person in a novel where all the other characters have conventional and predictable lives, so decrepit and boring that only the revitalising, transforming power of the prose of Virginia Woolf can fill them with enchantment and mystery. The presence of this poor boy who went as a volunteer to the war and returned decorated and apparently unharmed, though wounded in spirit, is disquieting as well as piteous. Because it allows us to glimpse the fact that, despite the many pages that seek to bedeck it in beauty and loftiness, not everything is attractive, agreeable, easy or civilised in the world of Clarissa Dalloway and her friends. There also exists, albeit far from them, cruelty, grief, incomprehension and stupidity, without which the madness and suicide of Septimus would be inconceivable. All this is kept at a distance through rituals and good breeding, through money and good fortune, but at times it tracks them, on the other side of the walls they have erected to remain blind and happy, with its keen sense of smell. Clarissa has premonitions of it. For that reason she shudders in the presence of the imposing figure of Sir William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, for she sees him, she does not know why, as a danger. She is not wrong: the story makes it very clear that if young Warren Smith was unhinged by war, it is the science of psychiatrists that makes him hurl himself into the abyss.

  I read somewhere that a celebrated Japanese calligrapher was in the habit of staining his writing with a blob of ink. ‘Without this contrast, the perfection of my work would not be given its due,’ he explained. Without this small trace of raw reality that is the story of Septimus Warren Smith, the world into which Clarissa Dalloway was born, and which she helped so much to create, would not seem so unpolluted and spiritual, so golden and so artistic.

  Fuengirola, 13 July 1989

  Nadja

  Nadja as Fiction

  Surrealism, and André Breton in particular, had a very low opinion of the novel: it was a pedestrian, bourgeois genre, too subordinate to the real world, society, history, rationality and common sense for it be able to express, like poetry – the preferred genre of the movement – the everyday-marvellous, to laugh at logical order or to delve into the mysterious recesses of dream and the world of the subconscious. In the Surrealist Manifesto, description – which is inseparable from narrative – is ridiculed as an impossible aspiration and a vulgar pursuit. No Surrealist worthy of the name could have written a text beginning, as novels are wont to begin, with sentences as banal as the one detested by Valéry: ‘La marquise sortit à cinq heures’.21

  The novels that Breton tolerated and even praised were those hermaphrodite books which fell between story and poetry, between real reality and a visionary, fantastic order, like Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia, Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, or the novels of Julien Gracq. His sympathy for the English Gothic novel or for Henry Miller’s Tropics always underlined the eccentric, unconsciously rebellious or unruly nature of these works, and their marginality with respect to the form and content of what is usually considered to be the terrain of the novel.

  However, the passage of time has altered the strict ideas that still separated the different genres when the Surrealists exploded on to the scene in the 1920s, and today, more than a century after Breton’s birth, anyone trying to establish a border between poetry and the novel would find themselves in some difficulty. After Roland Barthes has proclaimed the death of the author, Foucault has discovered that man does not exist and Derrida and the deconstructionists have established that not even life exists, at least in literature, for literature, this dizzying torrent of words, is an autonomous and formal reality, in which texts refer to other texts and overlap with, replace, modify and clarify or obscure each other without any relation to life as lived and to flesh-and-blood bipeds – who, in these circumstances, would dare to keep poetry and the novel as two sovereign entities as André Breton and his friends once did?

  With all the respect in the world for a poet and a movement that I discovered as an adolescent – thanks to a surrealist poet, César Moro – that I read with fervour and which has surely been an influence on my formation as a writer (although at first glance it would not appear so), I would have to say that I think that the passage of time has deconstructed surrealism both historically and culturally in the sense that would have upset André Breton the most. That is to say that it has become a quintessentially literary movement whose verbal stridency, provocative spectacles, word play, defence of magic and unreason, pursuit of verbal automatism and contempt for the ‘literary’, now appear undramatic, domesticated and non-belligerent, without the slightest power to transform customs, morality or history, quaint displays by a group of artists and poets whose chief merit lay in their ability to stir up trouble in the intellectual field, shaking it out of its academic inertia and introducing new forms, new techniques and new themes – a different use of word and image – in the visual arts and in literature.

  Today Breton’s ideas seem closer to poetry than to philosophy, and what we admire in them, apart from their casuistic intricacy and luxuriant verbosity, is the moral attitude that underpins them, that coherence between speech, writing and action that Breton demanded in his followers with the same severity and fanaticism that he applied to himself. This coherence is doubtless admirable; the same cannot be said of the intransigence shown to those who did not subscribe to the changing orthodoxy of the movement and were excommunicated as traitors or as sacrilegious or were struck down as Pharisees.

  All this agitation and violence, the dictates and the cutting remarks, have remained in the past. What is there left? For me, apart from a rich collection of anecdotes, a storm in a glass of water, a beautiful utopia, never achieved and unachievable – to change life and to enthrone total human freedom through the subtle weapons of poetry – there are some beautiful poems – the best of them the ‘Ode à Charles Fourier’ – an anthology of black humour, a very partisan but absorbing essay dedicated to Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, and, above all, a delicate, highly original novel about love: Nadja.

  Although definitions often confuse more than they illuminate, I will define the novel provisionally as that branch of fiction that sets out to construct, with imagination and words, a fictitious reality, a world apart that, although taking inspiration from reality and the real world, does not reflect them, but rather supplants and denies them. The originality of every fiction lies – although this might seem a tautology – in its being fictive, that is to say, in not resembling the world in which we live, but rather in freeing itself from this world and showing us a world that does not exist and, precisely because it does not exist, it is something we dream about and desire.

  If that is a fiction, then Nadja is the best illustration there can be. The story that it tells is not of this world, even though it pretends to be so, as happens in all good novels whose powers of persuasion always have us taking as objective truth what is mere illusion, and even though the world that it describes – yes, that it describes, although in every novel description is synonymous with invention – seems, through a number of very precise references, to be Paris in the twenties, with a handful of stre
ets, squares, statues, parks, woods and cafés recreated as a backdrop to the action and even illustrated with beautiful photographs.

  The story could not be simpler. The narrator, who tells the story as a protagonist within it, casually meets in a café the female character Nadja, a strange, dreamy woman who seems to inhabit a private world of fantasy and dread, on the border between reason and madness, who from the first moment captivates him completely. An intimate relationship grows up between them that we might describe as sentimental rather than erotic or sexual, on the basis of planned or casual (the narrator would like us to call them magical) meetings which, in the few months that they last – from October to December 1926 – open for the narrator the doors to a mysterious and unpredictable world of great spiritual richness, not governed by physical laws or rational schema, but rather by those obscure, fascinating and indefinable forces that we allude to – that the narrator alludes to frequently – when we speak of the marvellous, of magic, or of poetry. The relationship ends as strangely as it began, and the last we hear about Nadja is that she is in a mental asylum, because she is considered mad, something that embitters and exasperates the narrator who hates psychiatry and asylums and who sees what society calls madness – at least in the case of Nadja – as an extreme form of rebellion, a heroic way of exercising freedom.