Giving the Mundane its Due: One (Fine) Day in the Life of the Everyday

Abstract

No, Lytton does not like Mrs Dalloway ... What he says that there discordancy between ornament (extremely beautiful) and what happens (rather ordinary--or unimportant). Virginia Woolf's Diary 18 June 1925 The country recovering from trauma war. A middle-aged woman ventures out house; as unfolds, we will witness series small events that will amount to no more than drama doorstep which will conclude before night falls. (1) We will examine an ordinary mind as it receives myriad impressions, an incessant shower innumerable atoms which, as they fall, shape themselves into life Monday or Tuesday. This course plot Mrs Dalloway (even though we know that Clarissa went to buy flowers on Wednesday); it is, however, also plot A Day Off (1933) Margaret Storm Jameson and One Fine Day (1947) Mollie Panter-Downes, writers whose company Woolf would have shirked. Jameson had puzzled admiration for Woolf, although she worried that novel like Mrs Dalloway will leave reader something so fluid and nebulous that it will slip through his fingers altogether and leave him staring at pattern made sunlight on floor his room (Georgian 62, 21). Woolf, on other hand, loathed the ignominious tribes Walpoles and Storm Jamesons (letter to Vita Sackville-West, 16 September 1931). And, given how she despised middlebrow, which she castigated for mixing life and art rather nastily, with money, fame, power or prestige and sticking geniality and sentiment together with sticky slime calves-foot jelly (Middlebrow 115, 117) her censure would not have spared Panter-Downes either. Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Jameson's A Day Off, and Panter-Downes's One Fine Day are all examples circadian novel (one first was Henry Ceard's Une belle journee (1881)--of which Mollie Panter-Downes's title is, surreptitiously, literal translation). This narrative one which, as Steven Kellman has noted, not only restricts itself to rhythms one day but which is celebration quotidian--as both ordinary and diurnal. Days are where we live, and house fiction commonly filled with topologies these phantom designs for living (225, 211). This sub-genre, which stems from a revulsion toward (Kellman 211), remarkably suited to tell stories that if not about are of war (Adolph 21), for in all three central character reflects and recovers (or not) from disarray caused (albeit not same war). All three counter history as invented by gentlemen in tall hats in Forties who wish to dignify mankind with lives obscure, history everyday. (2) All three texts centre on one plucked out from humdrum everyday, valiantly making their focus narrative middle, which, like Franco Moretti's fillers, notoriously impossible to sustain--undecided, transitional, vacillating, even cowardly (Levine and Otiz-Robels 2). They grapple with difficulty salvaging not only what unique and avoiding imposing on narrative teleology that extraneous to rhythm day. For if shape may be microcosm life, assumption also that in fact it isn't--a will be followed another day; one does not write word at end day. All three are narrated through free indirect discourse and, written middle-aged women, have middle-aged women at their centre. All three are committed to giving visibility to everyday and to telling world about undistinguished our existence despite world's resistance to such attempts. As Liesl Olson has reminded us, Victor Shklovsky Art as Technique, essay that with its notion ostranenie, its insistence on ability art to defamiliarize ordinary, was to prove so extraordinarily influential in shaping modernism, was only nineteen. …