PI

Question 1

Berryman on his poetry

Answer 1

‘People have forgotten what tragic literature is - but they’ll remember. Gigantic, unspeakable but articulate disaster. Perhaps I can’

Question 2

Discourse between time and self-&knowledge rests on paradox that…

Answer 2

Contemplation of time, despite enhancing self-&knowledge, effectively unravels the fabric of ‘self’ as characters become conscious of the tenuousness of existence in an indifferent enormity of time

Question 3

‘Rottenness of the two pillars’ - TGS & MD

Answer 3

Post war destruction & resulting ideological shifts destabilises the entire artifice

Question 4

The Compson family…

Answer 4

Cannot hold onto the Cavalier identity (an anachronistic model I delete in a world which continues without it), nor can they detach from the myth completely

Question 5

Despite the insensibility of their outlook, there is

Answer 5

Beauty in their hopeless desire to make any scratch on the ‘blank face of oblivion to which we are all doomed’

Question 6

Mrs dalloway - post war British society constructs

Answer 6

A bourgeois masquerade of ‘carefully calculated gaiety’ to veil underlying suffering: but tragedy can’t be recovered

‘The five acts of a play.. were now over’ (Mrs dalloway - tragedies have 5 acts)

Question 7

Texts connected by depiction of societies..

Answer 7

Damned to decayed yet clutching at whatever meaning they can lay their hands on; give voice to tragic profundity of existing in a ‘state of continuous becoming’

Question 8

When does Mrs a Dalloway take place?

Answer 8

Single day, 13th June 1923

Question 9

Fragmented forms show in order to fully depict a character,

Answer 9

The breakup of the narrative plane is just as vital as the fragmentation of the visual plane was for the Cubists

Question 10

Slipperiness of time - prolepsis and analepsis in Fury

Answer 10

E.g. Quentin’s muddying caddy, Quentin’s present fading into background as he’s consumed by thoughts of caddy’s promiscuity

Question 11

Time slippery in Dalloway

Answer 11

Her mind returns continually to her eighteenth birthday & romance with Peter Walsh (her daughter 18 & female life cycle about to repeat itself) - the hours’ - working title

Question 12

Ricouer on time In Dalloway

Answer 12

Woolf Gives ‘temporal depth’ to narrative

Question 13

Chronological straightforwardness is sacrificed for the authenticity offered by what Eliot calls…

Answer 13

‘A perception, not only of the last ness of the last, but of its presence’

Question 14

Henry - endless past / continuous past

Answer 14

• destiny leads him toward ‘the grand sea [which] awaits us, which will then us toss / & endlessly is undo’
• prosodic pattern allows elegiac syntax to resonate rhythmically
• use of 6-line stanzas a loose variant of the traditional draws attention to the way in which Henry IS his past

Question 15

Time in Dalloway

Answer 15

• biological mortal time (sketches of women at diff stages in line time, daughter, Rezia Smith, milly brush, kilman)
  Operates against background of monumental time (Big Ben, which acts as temporal grid to organise narrative)

Question 16

Time in Berryman

Answer 16

Henry’s chaotic self contrasted w the monumental time rep by ‘ancient sculpture’ ‘enigmatic ladies larger in stone than life‘- evokes human transience

Question 17

Weaves together the worlds of action and introspection…

Answer 17

The time of clocks and of inner consciousness to create a sense of hyper-focused Bergsonian time

Question 18

Compson - time a boiling vacuum; urgent pain faced by family

Answer 18

‘Square, paintless house with its rotting portico’

Question 19

How does time persist in Fury?

Answer 19

• beats to ticking of Quentin’s broken watch

- cabinet clock in kitchen which evinces an ‘enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand’

Question 20

Suspension / frozen ness provides a burgeoning potentiality, a ‘still violent fecundity’ which

Answer 20

‘Hurries is so tragically along’ giving poignancy to mortal affairs, while affording then a quality nobler and richer

Question 21

Clarissa childhood image frozen within her consciousness - disconnected present feeds off an unreachable last

Answer 21

Incident in Clarissa’s childhood where she ‘had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun’ (with all Freudian connotations of a little girl discovering sexuality ) makes such impression on her that when she feels most deserted, jealous, excluded later in life she climbs up stairs to her room ‘alone’ and thinks of herself as a ‘child exploring a tower’

Question 22

Mrs Dalloway - clock quote - transient unity

Answer 22

‘An indescribable pause, a suspense.. before Big Ben strikes. There!… the hour, irrevocable. The leader cjrcles dissolved in the air’ - presence within time

Question 23

Quentin contrast w chimes of clock quote

Answer 23

Chimes linger ‘vibrating’ ‘in the air, more felt than heard, for a long time. Like all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying light-rays.’

Question 24

Modern Fiction quote

Answer 24

‘Life’ is not ‘a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged’ but a ‘luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’

Question 25

Linear, historical time (measured by distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock) is important…

Answer 25

Insofar as it distended psychological time in accordance with the intensity of a moment

(Big Ben triggers inner time)

Question 26

The river in fury

Answer 26

• constantly flowing and staying still
• integration of opposites; masculine (logic order Gerald bland rowing in steady measured pull)
  Feminine - uncontrollable flow of nature, surfing steam of consciousness

Question 27

Doom to repetition

Answer 27

1. Repetition is the order of things (& only way reader can make sense of the novel) - both in plot and in the language used
2. Again and again / was saddest word
3. Use of doubles in Dalloway

Question 28

Doubles in a Dalloway

Answer 28

Mrs Dalloway and septimus linked through anxieties about sexuality, marriage and mortality & a shared sensitivity to surroundings which goes over line to madness

Question 29

Dalloway - intersubjective and multi personal

Answer 29

Temporal experience depicted as belonging to no one character to exclusion of others. Instead a network of consciousness - one experience reverberates e.g. narratorial shifts

Question 30

Dalloway’s different selfs

Answer 30

changes from having ‘the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen’ to ‘being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway’

‘Her self when some effort, some call on her to be herself, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one entre, one diamond, one woman’ who ‘had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her’

Question 31

Henry - no integrated ego -

Answer 31

Vendler - There is only Conscience at one end of the stage and the Id at the other, talking to each other across a void, never able to find common ground

Question 32

Henry as American Proteus with as many selves as dreams can bestow

Answer 32

He talks about himself variously in the first, second, and third person, combining myriad dialects and poetic forms including slang and childlike language

Question 33

Berryman childlike quote song 311

‘Hunger was constitutional with him, women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need
Until he went to pieces.
The pieces sat up & wrote. They did not head
Their piecedom but kept very quietly on
Among the chaos.

Answer 33

Dismembered ‘pieces’ of Henry struggle in unison, achieving peace and resolution from the clamorous percussion (‘need need need’).

Multidimensionality imparts an authenticity and spontaneity that makes it feel like a capering jazz syncopation

Question 34

No isolated self without shared reality - Clarissa

Answer 34

Without dying herself, is made more visible, more present ‘for there she was’ through her reflections on septimus’ death: tone shift to defiance
‘He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun’

Question 35

Value of subjective in understanding historical moments shown by..

Answer 35

Car backfiring - Dalloway perceives it as a gunshot whereas Septimus its a whip

Question 36

Vickery on Caddy’s promiscuity a s interpreted by others - sex of little intrinsic value; response generated where potency lies

Answer 36

‘The sequence of events is not caused by her act… but by the significance which each of her brothers actually attributes to it’

Question 37

Dowell

Answer 37

1. Constant process of dissolution
2. ‘Queer shifty thing’ - formless self
3. Ford draws attention to limitations of a solely inrersubjective point of view

Question 38

Dowell forced to acknowledge the ‘rot’ at the ‘core of the goodly apple’ just like how…

Answer 38

Berryman channels grief to emphasise stagnation at heart of progression (use of vaudeville dialect - ‘negro’ identity metaphor & symptom of American failure)

Question 39

What is Henry’s primal loss

Answer 39

His fathers suicide - ‘I thought I was in private with the Devil / hounding me upon Daddy’s cowardice’ - ‘father will not swim back’ (292)

Question 40

Henry reliving Past

Answer 40

Use of incongruent present case within ‘hacks her body up’ suggests Henry relives imaginary murder over and over in the present

Question 41

The irony in the good soldier is that…

Answer 41

Dowell never acknowledges his ‘irreversible loss’ which creates helpless irony in Dalloway, fury, Berryman

Question 42

first dream song plunges is into…

Answer 42

A fall,, or departure which left ‘thereafter nothing [to fall] as it might or ought’

Question 43

Dowell’s cynicism is a means by which Ford excoriates British society for its denial of its intrinsic malady:

Answer 43

‘Yes, society must go on; it must breed like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don’t like society much.’

Edward Ashburnum - regress towards false glory of past

Question 44

Dalloway embodies the vanity of British society suffering a ‘traumatic shattering of her identity’

Answer 44

‘The public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-spirit class’ Walsh critiques

Question 45

Dalloway - inability of British society to deal with change; deep trauma haunts and linger

Answer 45

Clarissa’s class appears to be ‘living in borrowed time. It’s values… are under attack.. the empire was crumbling fast’

Question 46

Berryman channeling pain caused by racism at core of southern values

Answer 46

‘But I do guess mos people gonna lose. / I never saw no pinkie wifout no hand. / o my wifout no hand’

Question 47

Benjy, with his disjointed consciousness and mind like a shattered mirror, exemplifies the modern psyche

Answer 47

He is the embodiment of disintegration, his mind shattered by the pain of evil (singal)

Question 48

Paul Valéry

Answer 48

Time is a construction

Question 49

Donald M. kartiganer on Benjy

Answer 49

‘Benjy, is perception prior to consciousness, prior to the human need to abstract from events an intelligible order’

Question 50

Berryman plangent mourns those who ‘cry oursel’s awake’ Yet celebrates those who

Answer 50

Concert grief into energy so they can survive the lure of suicide which so takes Quentin and septimus Smith, And ‘make it all the way to bed on these feet’ at the end of the day

Question 51

Dalloway attempts to create beauty around her

Answer 51

gathers flowers for party: attempts to find beauty in life even if she knows ‘it is too ephemeral to instigate real change’ - just like artificial monuments British society constituted as aesthetic substitutes for dark reality and death all around

Question 52

Self

Answer 52

1. Disconnected fragments of past and present pierce together a shattered mind
2. Continually changing conglomerate of impressions

Antithesis of a fixed monolithic entity

Question 53

Caddy mutability - wealth of perceptions out of which we reconstruct a ‘self’ who can just about articulate the pain and limitation of her disconnection in a broken world - without actually being given a voice.

Answer 53

Constructed out of an eliotesque heap of images:

1. The odour of honeysuckle
2. The colour red
3. Twilight
4. The river
5. Fire

Question 54

In much the same way as Caddy attempts to achieve a identity through her promiscuity…

Answer 54

Dalloway hosts parties and entertains bourgeois friends in the hope of reclaiming a sense of ‘self’ and purpose

Question 55

Celebration of Dalloway nonetheless by Gilbert and gubar

Answer 55

‘Kind of Queen’

Who with ‘a divine grace… regenerates the post-war world’

Question 56

Deterioration: stasis- incomplete… elevated to transcendence bc of perpetual lack of closure

Answer 56

timelessness and beauty of the texts reinforce this idea

Question 57

Prevent us from boiling down characters and stories to singular identities the way Dalloway used to….

Answer 57

Before she decides she would no longer ‘say if anyone in the world that they were this or that’

Question 58

Quentin and Dalloway achieve a form of self-knowledge outside of time…

Answer 58

Enabling them to momentarily transcend their transient, tragic statuses