The String Quartet

    I was asked what the deeper meaning to the story is. . It seemed that before the reader was inscribed on paper a true exercise in the stream-of-consciousness technique. It also seemed a rather impressive attempt for one might think to marvel at the speed of VW’s hand in capturing the rushings of a mind, any mind, in its raw, natural, and partly nonsensical path of thought contained on five and a half pages.

    So there we have it. A young lady’s thoughts, I might suppose, set down painstakingly on five typed pages. That in itself being a pretty mundane point, it leads to two ideas hopefully worthy of a little more time.

    Reading The String Quartet the first time through is a somewhat shocking experience. To equate it with the elegant flow of VW’s other works is not an easy task, and yet The String Quartet is not so far off from one of VW’s best--Mrs. Dalloway. The String Quartet was published in the collection Monday or Tuesday in 1921, four years before Mrs. Dalloway, but I cannot tell you the exact year the story itself was written. The refinements made stylistically from one work to the next are quite profound, but the similarities between the two ideas are not so hard to see. The String Quartet presents this young lady in the jungle of society, facing all of her duties and expectations sometimes with curiosity, other times with frustration, and maybe a little apathy. Relatively little is going on outside despite the hustle and bustle--meeing old acquaintances, hearing the latest gossip, and going to enjoy the sounds of a string quartet, etc. Little of importance one might hasten to say. We cannot see all that the woman sees, but there seems to be little doubt that the action of her mind could easily diminish that of her outside world. Similarly to our own situation guessing about the outside world, it is doubtful that the outside world can even begin to guess what VW has let us read in her experiment. Their loss is a grievous one, and it is the narrator who must suffer for their ignorance. We find much the same in the case of Clarissa Dalloway. “...the perfect hostess” turns out to be indeed something much greater than what Peter Walsh might ever have imagined. We lose a great deal by not knowing what is passing through Sally Seton’s mind as we see her sitting with a knowing and contemplative look on her face at the end of the book. But again, most fascinating of all is the evolution of our narrator set against the strumming string quartet and Clarissa Dalloway going about her daily tasks with the ringing of the clock chimes in the background.

    The second idea brought to mind is of a more philosophical nature, and therefore, not to discredit philosophy in any way, probably has less meat to it. The confusion arising from a reading of The String Quartet is an interesting occurrence that calls to mind the only line of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that I am acquainted with: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” It stems from the argument that our language is a product of words that are in existence simply from our own necessity to convey what those words represent. Of course, what words represent is attached directly to how we look at our own world. Those with wholly different ideas to convey in daily life would create a completely different language to express those ideas. The conception of the world would be something drastically different from one ‘language’ to another.

    It raises one to question if the language the mind speaks, if allowed to without the aid of a translator, is a language completely separate from the one our eyes absorb when we read something in print hence the great confusion. Our own need to clarify our thoughts before we set them to paper is a fine translator. But should we allow the mind to work without its very talented translator, are we faced with that jumbled language of The String Quartet? Our eyes don’t know how to take it in to give it back to our mind to interpret once again. To be sure, the thoughts made sense as we were thinking them before they were set to paper, but why didn’t the same sensical meaning come back later after being read?

    The confusion, in this case in particular, can surely be shrugged off as an effective way to make a political statement: the mind can be capable of a great many rapid, intriguing, and very important thoughts even whilst appearing extremely dull to the outside world whilst being forced to do those extremely dull everyday acts. It could be taken to an extreme of saying that women are forced into this tragic position because of the role they are supposed to play in society or something silly like that. For the sake of philosophical debate, though, it is much more pleasant to wonder about those previously mentioned languages.

    These languages lead to another interesting argument that if our foundation for the way we express ourselves in daily discourse is dependent upon how we conceive the world to be and what words are necessary to convey these conceptions, we become seriously crippled. Many things are possible beyond within and beyond the imagination, and if we cannot express these conceptions or think of them in the first place because our language binds us to what we perceive, we are presented with the worrisome threat of a plateau in thought somewhere along the line no matter how distant it is. It is then amusing, if nothing more serious, to look at the narrative in The String Quartet as the mind’s cry to be understood as it once was before enslaved on paper to be picked up and distorted by our eyes. One wonders if the mind is trying to express something that our eyes do not know how to perceive, and therefore do not have the language to understand.