1Considering the subject ‘Impersonality and Emotion in British Literature’ and the paradox that it brings forward, it seems crucial to pay special attention to the tremendous stylistic change that affected the use of subjective pronouns in Modernist fiction, generalizing and trivializing the occurrence of free indirect speech and free direct speech. I would like to dwell one moment—not too shortly—on the shock that this syntactic distortion must have produced on readers when it first appeared, the treatment of emotions it implies and the new conception of subjectivity that novelists display either through characters in fiction or more generally through their approach to writing at large.

2I chose to concentrate on two particular novels to serve the purpose: Dusty Answer1 by Rosamond Lehmann and Mrs Dalloway2 by Virginia Woolf, both published in the 1920s. The two novels are the expressions of two different generations, but two generations equally overwhelmed by the trauma of the Great War. Both novels bully stylistic conventions sometimes in strangely comparable ways and display a particularly free use of subjective pronouns.

1 The Fluctuation of subjective pronouns

3It is extremely difficult for us now to figure out the scandal created by Dusty Answer, Rosamond Lehmann’s first novel, when it appeared in 1927. The trauma of hundreds of letters of insults haunted the novelist till late into her career.3 Of course the letters of insults were not attacking Rosamond Lehmann’s use of pronouns but they were extremely vitriolic against the author’s ignorance of social rules and morality. And I think that the distortions that affected subjective pronouns in Dusty Answer have something to do with the scandal it roused.

4Nearly a century later, we have certainly lost the ability to feel the brunt of the shock and we can hardly retrieve a shadow of its impact. We have to imagine the amount of sacredness in the definition of personal identity that was being gnawed at by sentences like these,4 directly in the incipit: ‘When Judith was eighteen, she saw that the house next door, empty for years, was getting ready again... the war was well over and Charlie, so you supposed, forgotten.’ (D.A. 7) In Mrs Dalloway, spectacular shifts of pronouns literally blow out the character’s limits:

... such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. (M.D. 4)
Take me with you, thought Clarissa. (M.D. 51)
... Time flaps on the mast. There we stop, there we stand... He [Peter Walsh] stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me. (M.D. 54)

5The limit between the reader’s subjective space and the character’s is made so thin that it sometimes seems to vanish, especially with the use of ‘you.’ ‘You’ can be either plural or singular. It can be perceived as an address to the character insidiously including the ideal reader, whereas ‘we’ would rather suggest the community of actual readers. The author teases the frontier that separates fiction and reality. Pronouns are made to sound deliberately vague. What is bullied and tormented in such fake third-person narratives is not only the syntax but beyond that, the very definition and contours of identity, the limits of subjectivity and the way words can adjust to or coincide with reality. Madness is threatening, and the risk-taking dimension of such syntactic wanderings somewhat escapes us nowadays.

6To the numerous characters of fiction who are haunted by the craft of letters, writing, that is to say organizing meaning, or rather re-organizing meaning, appears as the new form of heroism. Judith Earle, like all of Rosamond Lehmann’s central heroines—noticeably without exception—, wants to write. All the main characters in Mrs Dalloway have at least once in their lives envisaged the challenge.5

7What could thus urge authors to ignore the rules regulating the proper use of pronouns, and blur the frontier between words thought and words uttered, words reported and words found? Indeed the subjective pronoun ceases to single out, to separate, to focus attention on one entity at a time, and it tends from then on to signify instead. Considering the two proprieties of pronouns—namely pointing out and signifying—that Agamben distinguishes in Le Langage et la Mort,6 we can say that the semantic function of the pronouns has been warped. Instead of locating and delineating subjective entities, instead of anchoring words in a definite character’s mind or speech, subjective pronouns de-locate words from the character’s supposed self or recognizable speech.

8Such conspicuous fluctuation provocatively expresses a wandering search for some new representation of interiority. Instability suggests a particular urge to produce a more adequate map of the self, to give further consideration to the articulation between the individual and the adjoining collective context.

9Modernist fiction is preoccupied or rather obsessed with a minute observation of the mind through ordinary characters’ minds at work. It is obsessed with the way one tackles the most ordinary tasks. In her essays, Virginia Woolf speaks about her interest for the anonymous pedestrian seen from the top of an omnibus, the woman standing at the corner of the street. The novel seems to specialize in banality, precisely because banality provides an ideal context for the quest that is being carried out. Fiction, ‘the purer truth of fiction, ’7 displays a self that is both subjective and objective, observing and observed. A self that acknowledges and explores some in-built alterity. A self captivated by the way it comes in contact with the outer world. When Virginia Woolf supposes that ‘the shock-receiving capacity is what makes [her] a writer,’8 or when she evokes ‘the party consciousness’9 explored in Mrs Dalloway, or when she writes ‘we learn through feeling,’ (Woolf 1966, 9) and ‘Facts are a very inferior form of fiction,’ (Woolf 1966, 6) she says in many different ways that the novel has changed objectives. The author observes and examines self-observing and self-examining characters. The centrifugal force suggested by the etymology of the word ‘emotion,’ the latin verb ex-movere, is a force that draws the individual out of one’s current subjectivity and because emotion derives from a particularly intense contact between the psyche and the outer world, emotion then causes an unveiling which concerns both the psyche and the outer world.

10The instability of subjective pronouns would then derive from the most accurate observation of the process of emotion, of the movement it involves. One can go as far as saying that the multiplication of pronouns referring to one and the same character does not derive from the new object of fiction we have just circumscribed, but on the contrary it is the very impossibility for the mind to grasp its own limits that stalls the narrative and makes it both impossible and pointless. The plot seems to be most active in the very disintegration of subjective pronouns. The intrigue resorts to the intrigue of meaning itself.

2 Ex-movere and the still centre

11Yet the paradox of impersonality is not so easily solved. It recedes into a much more disconcerting opposition between the self-conscious, self-analysing process of emotion and the notion of ‘still centre’ which a number of writers borrow from Heidegger in the late 1920s. The notion of still centre is to be found in the works of Stephen Spender as the title of a book of poems,10 and also in a number of reviews by Rosamond Lehmann through the 1930s and 1940s. According to Spender and Lehmann, good writing, that is to say genuine writing, originates from ‘the writer’s still centre.’

There is a ‘still centre’ for the novelist as for any other artist. He or she who has not discovered it, or refuses the patience and concentration necessary to remain within it, will never produce a work of art, however brilliant and fertile his or her ideas for plot and characterization. Authors who have a perfectly clear scheme laid out for their novels, and can ‘tell you the plot’ in detail from the outset may (or may not) produce a lively piece of entertainment or a stark chunk of social realism, but they have nothing to do with the novel as a work of art. For this kind, the same is true as for poetry: its genesis is the image, or isolated images which have become embedded in the mass of accumulated material in the author’s ‘centre’. When the moment comes (it cannot be predicted, but can be helped on by the right kind of passivity) these images will start to become pregnant, to illuminate one another, to condense and form hitherto unsuspected relationships. The characters will begin to emerge, to announce their names and reveal their faces, voices, purposes and destinies. The author does not ‘invent’ his characters or know about them from the outset. They reveal themselves gradually to him in and through that state of doubtful conviction which I have mentioned before. Characters must make the plot or action: never the other way round.11

12The expression is inspired by the image of a wheel, the centre of which remains still whatever the movements of the outer part.

13The notions of ‘still centre’ and ex-movere stand exactly poles apart: the word ‘still’ contradicting movere and the notion of centre contradicting the ex-centring, outward movement contained in ex-movere. Yet, if the notion of still centre proves compatible with the prominence of emotion, this is due to the new model of subjectivity on which characters are based. However different Clarissa Dalloway and Judith Earle may be, they have something in common: they never consider their emotions as expressions of their subjectivities but as sources of knowledge on the world as it is, on the laws of life including the laws of the mind. And most of all, this is an approach they share with their authors. These characters are not busy fabricating experience, they are rather analysing the way one fabricates experience. They are even disproving the commonly accepted value of experience: they keep doubting the very capacity they may have to grasp anything of life or of themselves. Instead of acquiring experience, they seem to be experimenting their share of human understanding. Emotions are no longer taken (neither by the character nor by the author) as an expression of the individual psyche, but as a form of in-built transcendence. The word ‘transcendence’ being taken here in the sense that Agamben specifies: as something which has always existed and the existence of which stands above language. (Agamben 50) Something, therefore, that has something to do with pronouns. The essential impersonality of emotion then becomes identified as the way transcendence unveils itself in the human mind: not through exceptional mystic situations but in the most capricious mode, at unexpected moments, in the midst of ordinary occupations. The self suddenly unfolds into several layers of consciousness, mingling with the world outside, reflecting or condensing it more clearly at times.

14We may think of the pause before Big Ben strikes which might be Clarissa’s heart affected by influenza. (M.D. 6) Clarissa speaks about ‘an emptiness about the heart of life’ (M.D. 35) that is curiously evocative of the still centre. And Judith Earle for her part experiences similar epiphanies:

... she saw all things begin to turn lingeringly, richly towards their end; and at long last, felt in herself the first doubtful stir of new awakening.
... It was the first spontaneous impulse from a mind diseased, so it had seemed, beyond the hope of revival.... she must go home, be alone, find work, write a book, something. (D.A. 279-380)

15The expression ‘roman-monde’ applied to Mrs Dalloway does not so much apply to the novel as to the character of Clarissa herself. She is a ‘sujet-monde.’ And of course one cannot help thinking of ‘The Lady in the Looking-glass’12 who might very well be a remarkable prototype for the new self displayed in Modernist fiction. Virginia Woolf’s preference for the term ‘looking-glass’ rather than ‘mirror’ stresses the identification of the reflecting surface to the scope of fiction.

16What Rosamond Lehmann and Stephen Spender call ‘the still centre’ appears as the interior standpoint to which the mind recedes in order to keep listening to its own truths and teachings. It is not a specific state of mind but a place that the writer has to find, and a place characters occasionally reveal. We may think of Clarissa in front of her mirror, seeing herself as ‘one centre, one diamond, one woman.’ (M.D., 40) This centre is ‘still’ because it works as a source, and a source of images rather than a source of thoughts. Though the expression never occurs in Virginia Woolf’s writings, yet she provides the best illustration of what the still centre is when she describes her first ‘moment of being’: the rhythm of her own breathing merging into the rhythm of the waves at Saint Ives. The extatic feeling enlightens the subtlest aspect of the still centre, the consciousness of being one with the world, of coinciding with its own secret rhythm and absence of limits. This awareness enhances perception and works as a source of mysterious, uncontrolled images, as if the world were speaking directly through the mind. And only the true poet or writer can shape these images into meaning through fiction or poetry, indifferently. Writing as such stands above any specific modes of writing.

17Both Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf have evoked the role of mysterious images as the origins of their novels. Both authors pay solemn attention to these images, trying to retrieve the quality and the process of emotion by which they were first inscribed. The still centre delineates a particular contact zone between obscure regions of the mind and the world, characterized by a strange continuity. While the mind appears as part of the mystery of the world, the world turns out to be a magnified image of the complexity and obscure laws of the mind.

3 The Memory of the world

18In spite of their deep-rooted love for nature, their contemplation of nature in ordinary life, neither Virginia Woolf nor Rosamond Lehmann deal with nature in a contemplative way when it comes to writing. They stand observing the world as a system in which the mind and nature feature as components regulated by similar laws.

19We may here recall Woolf’s choice of a title such as The Waves to characterize this weaving of human voices and thoughts, and the particular treatment of landscapes in the interludes. Landscapes cease to be meaningful or relevant settings for characters to move about, they are rather turned into visions. But because these are well-known passages, I will rather quote less known Rosamond Lehmann for whom landscapes appear as a remarkable mixture of visions and tales:

The church itself was tiny, crooked, Norman, with a pretty, rosy, lichen-crusted roof of tiles. Beside it grew a yew tree, said to be a thousand years old. Its trunk was a gigantic girth, belted with a chain to hold it together, twisted and moulded into vast bosses, knots, inlays and depressions, into sculptured reliefs of frenetic inspiration and irresponsibility. Silvery, veined with iron black, its substance, seen from close, gave a mineral impression: it had nothing of the warmth and life of wood. From farther off, this stoniness dissolved, became fluid, tender; became a column of water, pale and dark, pouring down silently out of the core of the sombre spread of branches, in snaky interlacing whorls and spirals.13

20The description suggests that the shape of the tree might be a scripture of times immemorial, and that it can be read with the help of the observer’s archaic memory, as if some record of the Creation had always been inscribed in the deepest layers of individual memory and in the texture of the world, similarly. These passages tend to give transcriptions of a form of oneness which tends to abolish all poetic figures such as metaphor, metonymy or allegory. When Woolf refers to ‘the tides of the body, two forces meeting in a swirl, morning and afternoon’ (M.D. 123) or when she places in Clarissa’s mind an image working the other way round: ‘It was a splendid morning too. Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets,’ (M.D. 59) she is not trying to sound poetical, she is wording a poetic reality.

21Such visions partly explain the reluctance of both Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf to indulge in autobiography. Writing, for them, seems inadequate to record facts and remembrances. Writing operates in more subterranean layers than conscious remembrances. It is rather the capricious violence of reminiscence, surfacing unpredictably, interrupting the stream of rational thoughts, that attracts them as the precious raw material of a meditation on the origin and mystery of consciousness itself. Both Virginia Woolf and Rosamond Lehmann suggest, each in her own way, that human memory is anchored in geology, that the human experience of time should be considered in the context of a geological measurement of temporality:

Or there could be a story with that title. Landscape with figures. The inside story. Starting from a point in the dead centre, work upwards, outwards; placing the figures in the landscape. Figures already visible but not yet known; to be connected with one another, and also with the landscape. All of them there but not yet incorporated; and separated still, one from the other; seen but not recognized; to be found, made, related, figures with one another, with the landscape.14

22Such visions certainly owe a considerable debt to Darwin, and Rosamond Lehmann for her part proved obsessed throughout her life with one particular book which was an anticipation of The Origin of Species, published anonymously by her ancestor Robert Chambers, and entitled Vestiges of Creation. The world is a book to be read and deciphered. After reporting her first ‘moment of being,’ Virginia Woolf words it very clearly:

It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what... it is at any rate a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. (Woolf 1978,72)

23Rosamond Lehmann gives a compact version of the same idea. Her expression: ‘God is imagination,’ asserts her allegiance to writing and gives shape to her conception of the still centre as the only form of transcendence accessible through art.

24All this eventually throws new light on one particular set of images that pervades the prose of both novelists: images of drowning. I am not in the least referring to the gross biographical fact that every one probably has in mind when speaking about drowning and Woolf. Precisely not. For if we now consider the image (and not the fact) of drowning by the light of the vision of the world we have just been examining, then drowning appears as a way for characters to make one with the world, to stop looking at the landscape and merge into it, bringing the ex-movere process to confines. When Clarissa remembers throwing a shilling into the Serpentine, not only does she remember dissolving a wish of hers into water but she also realizes that the event is surfacing from the abyss of her memory. Judith Earle, an eager reader of Pêcheurs d’Islande, receives from Martin the following confession: ‘I worship the soil... sometimes I absolutely wish I were dead so that I could be buried in it and have it all over me and inside me for ever and ever.’ (DA 325) In the ensuing love scene she thinks: ‘Oh to slip into the water and become something minute non-sentient....’ (DA 250) A standpoint which indeed is likely to cause awkwardness and rouse uncertainty in the character’s way of referring to herself. A standpoint which, in addition, has something to do with the contemporaneous pictures of dead soldiers of the Great War taken by the first reporters’ cameras: undistinguishable bodies submerged in the mud of battlefields. A reality reinforced by veteran’s testimonies such as Wilfried Owen’s remembering his days in a war hospital: ‘I am three-parts shell.’ One cannot ignore the impact of the anonymous, nameless hero of this particular war. In her last novel published fifty years after Dusty Answer, in 1976, Rosamond Lehmann still prompts to one of her characters: ‘Life is sad nowadays, Anemone. You may not agree with me, but there’s been a change. August 1914 it started. Nothing will ever be the same. The heart of the world is broken.’ (Lehmann 1956, 46) Anemone, the author specifies, is a name chosen for its assonance with the word ‘anonymous.’ Anonymity indeed characterises the war heroes and the more humble survivors at war with words. Rosamond Lehmann defined the activity of writing not only as a way of trespassing the frontier between life and death but also as a form of depersonalization verging on sacrifice: ‘One might almost be dead, watching from the world of shades, so pure is one’s observation, so freed from will, from the desire to shape or alter to personal ends.’15 And she goes on describing the life and development of mental images in terms of vegetable growth.

4 The novel as sanctuary

25In one of his essays, Heidegger asked ‘Pourquoi des poètes en temps de détresse?’ and considering the Modernist period one could resume the question and ask: why do poet-novelists characterise the period so well?

26The flexibility of fiction seems to stand half way between poetry and philosophy, or rather to combine the poetic handling of images and the kind of attention poets pay to words on the one hand, and on the other hand the art of observation that phenomenology has borrowed from nineteenth century scientific spirit. Heidegger was obliged to resort to poetry-reading in order to observe the still centre: he wrote extensively about Rilke, Trakl and Hölderlin. The philosopher must first feel, then analyse, whereas novelists can recreate the poised attention required by the still centre, through characters considered as test-tubes for that. The novelist can put emotions under the microscope and maintain the impetus and freshness of emotion through ‘the purer truth of fiction.’ (Woolf 1966,6)

27Yet, neither in Mrs. Dalloway nor in Dusty Answer is the practise of systematic observation taken as an end. It is an instrument serving crucial purposes. Certainly for the first time in the history of literature the novel becomes the very expression of Tragedy. Through its particular handling of pronouns and all that is involved in such syntactic landslide, it seems that the novel is discarding one conception of individual identity, in order to impose an extremely subversive conception of individual consciousness. The novel appears, like tragedies in other times, as the most adequate instrument to test and experiment old and new conceptions of sacredness, to sort out what is sacred and what is not: ‘Dans la tragédie, il ne s’agit ni de présentation ni de représentation. La tragédie est le lieu de la lutte entre anciens et nouveaux dieux,’16 Heidegger writes. ‘Être poète en temps de détresse, c’est être attentif à la trace des dieux enfuis.’ (Heidegger 222) The new complex individual exposed in novels is one whose voice can no longer be silenced because the most elevated truths may be heard and observed through his or her most ordinary thoughts and occupations. The new individual is one whose voice will soon make the epic tone of history writing sound utterly false and jarring.

28As Dominique Rabaté suggests,17 the tragic author no longer addresses a theatre audience or a cultivated elite gathered in an ephemeral celebration of collective despair, relishing a sophisticated image of their own dejected spirits. As a novelist he or she addresses individual minds, the readers of fiction, at the slow pace of novel-reading, for days or weeks on end, in the privacy of their homes. The reader of fiction is then the only resort of the voice of despair, and also the protagonist of the mental reconstruction that is at stake. The novel enables the reader to realise the nature of his or her own strength in the matter, namely the strength of the unconscious and the new sense of collective identity that stems from it. Paradoxically, this collective identity is based on the acknowledgement of an irreducible core common to all individuals. The reader is thus summoned to bear his or her own capacity for observation and emotion, his or her own still centre to bear upon the text. And novelists themselves show the way as senior readers, producing new readings of renowned fellow authors, finding new interest in great ancestors of remote desperate times.

29But certainly the most subversive aspect of the novel comes from the suspended kind of attention it conveys, as if novelists were building a safeguard against theory, an actual sanctuary for emotions. It is remarkable to see that the two novels we have been examining, both Mrs Dalloway and Dusty Answer, end on a suspended moment. Everybody will remember the recurrence of Peter Walsh’s emotion suggested by the last sentence ‘For there she was.’ As for the end of less known Dusty Answer, this is how it reads:

She [Judith Earle] was a person whose whole past made one great circle, completed now and ready to be discarded.
Soon she must begin to think: what next?
But not quite yet. (D.A. 303)

30These lines suggest the very suspension both of emotion and of tragedy, an infinitesimal space in-between two thoughts, or between the ‘no longer’ of discarded gods, and the ‘not yet’ of gods to come.