As I was reading the Mrs. Dalloway reading for today, I specifically made a mental note to myself to discuss two sentences towards the end of the section.
The first, at the bottom of pg. 139, reads: "How it rejoiced her that!" The sentence shows what Rezia was thinking when Septimus described the hat jokingly as "an organ grinder's monkey's hat." The description presumably made her happy because Septimus was acting normally.
Talk about an awkward sentence! There seems to be almost no point to Woolf's placement of "that" at the end of the sentence. Why isn't the less awkward phrasing, "How that rejoiced her!" suitable? After today's class discussion, I decided that the intentional awkwardness was included because Woolf was trying to exactly show how Rezia was thinking through her grammar and punctuation. One possibility is that she is still uncomfortable with English, even in her thoughts, because she is a nonnative English speaker. A second possibility is that the less awkward version of the sentence somehow gives a sense of detachedness between Rezia and Septimus, and does not capture the immediacy of her thoughts. A third possibility is that the possible addition of a comma before the "that" was not included because a comma would give a sense of slowness to this thought.
The second sentence, at the bottom of pg. 141, reads: "But directly he saw nothing the sounds of the game became fainter and stranger ansd sounded like the cries of people seeking and not finding, and passing further and further away." Septimus has just had a happy relapse into normality with Rezia, and is now transitioning into sleep.
This is the epitome of the run-on sentence. I can think of two reasons for the intentional placement of this run-on sentence. The first is that, since Septimus is always slightly preoccupied with the fact that his senses are constantly over-stimulated and analyzed, and thus is predisposed to thinking in a less orderly fashion. The other possibility is that Woolf is using the run-on to imitate the way our thoughts string together in an increasingly random, senseless, uncontrollable way as we fall asleep.
In general, I find Woolf's phrasing to be interesting, almost inspiring. She is so deliberate in her breaches of proper grammar that she is able to emulate patterns of human thought with a surprising accuracy.
2 comments:
Very interesting comments. In both cases, you end up finding a compelling way to see these "errors" or "inconsistencies" as a deliberate part of Woolf's style. I hadn't thought of the Rezia line as a kind of ESL-trace, since Woolf doesn't do that throughout her monologues. But it's a possiblility. It also calls to mind a distinctively British colloquial feature, putting "that" redundantly at the end of the sentence. In any case, it's an important aspect of Woolf's style that, although certain general tendencies can be identified, she isn't constrained by rules--each sentence will do what it must do.
Yes, she is definitely not constrained by rules. Woolf seems to use "erroneous" grammar to make readers pay attention to what she is saying and the way she is saying it.
Post a Comment