Around the World in 80 Books: A Literary Journey - Hardcover

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David Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature and chair of comparative literature at Harvard University, and director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. He is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including What Is World Literature?, The Buried Book, Comparing the Literatures, and the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature. He has lectured in fifty countries around the world, and his online Harvard course Masterpieces of World Literature has been taken by nearly 100,000 people.
 

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A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, through classic and modern literary works that are in conversation with one another and with the world around them. 80 B&W Images Throughout,

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Chapter one

London: Inventing a City

1. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
After making his round-the-world wager with his friends at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg strides to his home at 7 Savile Row, several blocks away, to collect some clothes and his newly hired French servant, Jean Passepartout. Halfway there, he crosses the route that would be taken by Clarissa Dalloway fifty years later (had she, or he, actually existed), on her way to nearby Bond Street to buy flowers for her party that evening. Woolf begins her novel with Clarissa's meditative stroll, which becomes a kind of hymn to the joys of London:

Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most localized of books, taking place on a single day in June 1923 within a few fashionable neighborhoods of central London. It might have seemed more logical to begin our journey with Woolf's picaresque, uncanny Orlando, whose hero has an affair with a Russian princess before changing sex in Constantinople and becoming the book's heroine. Or with the globe-spanning Joseph Conrad, with novels set in Malaysia and Latin America, whose Heart of Darkness takes us from London to the Belgian Congo and back again. Yet I've preferred to begin with a novel set squarely in London, not only because this is our point of departure but because Mrs. Dalloway shows London becoming the world city it is today. Clarissa's former suitor, Peter Walsh, has returned from India in order to arrange a divorce; her daughter's tutor and possible lover, Miss Kilman, feels radically out of place in an England that only recently was locked in a life-or-death struggle with her native Germany; and the Italian war bride Rezia struggles to adapt to London life and to rescue her shell-shocked husband, Septimus Warren Smith, from the brink of suicide.

The world has certainly come home to London, most ominously in the form of World War I, whose aftershocks resonate throughout the city and through the novel. Even as Clarissa enjoys "life; London; this moment of June," she also hears "the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead." This turns out to be a sky-writing biplane advertising a product that people on the ground try to make out (toffee? Glaxo milk powder?). Yet the plane's approach seems oddly like an air raid, its effects almost fatal:

Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted . . . Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose . . . and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps?

"Glaxo," said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up. (20)

Sky-writing had actually been invented that year by the aptly named Major Jack Savage, recently retired from the Royal Air Force; he wrote his aerial advertisements using airplanes decommissioned from the RAF after the war's end.

Mrs. Dalloway is haunted by the chaos that lies just outside the comfortable boundaries of Clarissa's upper-class environment. Anything at all can shake the foundations of a still fragile postwar world. As the biplane flies overhead, a curtained limousine glides along Bond Street, causing a stir of excitement, though no one can see who is inside the car as it heads to Buckingham Palace. Its discreet glamour stirs patriotic sentiments in prosperous gentlemen and an impoverished flower-seller, but also thoughts of loss and even a near-riot:


in all the hat shops and tailors' shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound. (18)

A few blocks away in Regent's Park, worried sick about her husband's erratic behavior, Rezia senses England's entire civilization dropping away, leaving her in a primeval wasteland:

"For you should see the Milan gardens," she said aloud. But to whom?

There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in . . . as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where-such was her darkness . . . (23-4)

In Heart of Darkness, Conrad's hero, Marlow, had already compared the European scramble for Africa with the Roman conquest of a dank and primitive England: "marshes, forests, savages,-precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink." Woolf brings the comparison home. Amid all of Clarissa's upper-class comforts (the irises and delphiniums, the dove-grey gloves, the Prime Minister dropping by her party) her London bears more than a passing resemblance to Conrad's heart of darkness. Even Mr. Kurtz's famous last words-"The horror! The horror!"-are echoed in a mounting crescendo in the novel's opening pages. First, Clarissa recalls "the horror of the moment" when she learned of Peter Walsh's impending marriage; then the shell-shocked Septimus feels "as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames," and finally nineteen-year-old Maisie Johnson, newly arrived from Scotland seeking employment, is disturbed by Septimus's behavior, and she wishes she'd never come to town: "Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She had left her people; they had warned her what would happen.) Why hadn't she stayed at home? she cried, twisting the knob of the iron railing" (8, 15, 27).

Virginia Woolf was a lifelong Londoner, but she was also a citizen of a wider literary world. She was studying Russian when she began work on the novel, and she read Sophocles and Euripides in Greek as she finished it. She also took a close, quizzical interest in foreign-born writers on the English scene, including Conrad, Henry James, and her friend T. S. Eliot. In her essay collection The Common Reader (published in the same year as Mrs. Dalloway) she wrote that "instances will occur to everybody of American writers in particular who have written with the highest discrimination of our literature and of ourselves; who have lived a lifetime among us, and finally have taken legal steps to become subjects of King George. For all that, have they understood us, have they not remained to the end of their days foreigners?"

A feminist, a socialist, and a pacifist in a largely patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist England, Woolf herself...