The Artful Ornament of Ordinariness

Abstract

Mrs Dalloway, the inexhaustible source-text, has invited multiple and varied dialogues with it and generated different nuances and variations. Numerous contemporary writers have drawn inspiration from its formal and thematic features and redeployed Virginia Woolf’s modernist strategies in their texts. The series of authors considered in the present chapter also prolong Woolf’s legacy and perpetuate her Dallowayisms, but offer a distinctive brand of neomodernist writing, quite different from the one considered in the previous chapter. Rachel Cusk (in Arlington Park [2006] and TheBradshaw Variations [2009]), Jon McGregor (in If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things [2002]) and Ali Smith (in Hotel World [2001]) revive and extend Woolf’s Dalloway-esque formal innovation, and reinvent in original ways her structural, narrative and stylistic techniques. While they perpetuate in various ways their predecessor’s legacy, they all have strong literary identities that allow them to trace their own experimental trajectory; in Winterson’s words, they are all ‘connected’ to Woolf, ‘but not a copy’ (‘Foreword’ vii) of her. Following T. S. Eliot, Winterson contends that tradition should inform all individual contemporary authors: ‘[W]e can only look for writers who know what tradition is, who understand Modernism within that tradition and who are committed to a fresh development of language and to new forms of writing’ (Art Objects 177). In their respective novels, Cusk, McGregor and Smith have demonstrated that they understand modernism and are determined to ‘make it new’.