MONDAY OR TUESDAY

All through her life Virginia Woolf used at intervals to write short stories, but published only one volume in 1921, Monday or Tuesday. This extract is the third chapter of her collection. The title well illustrates Virginia Woolf ’s intention. Indeed the “life of Monday or Tuesday” stands for a life during ordinary days. So, an intelligent reader may expect the story to be about ordinary people, maybe portrayed in their social context or during their usual activities.

The narrator seems totally eclipsed in line with the modernist necessity to put character’s consciousness at the centre of investigation, thus explaining the adoption of internal monologue or other rhetorical devices (such as in - directed speech) as the privileged strategies adopted. Together with symbolic Realism, the narrator asks the ideal reader to cooperate in making up meaning while reading.

To tell the truth, what the reader comes across reading the very first lines of the quotation is Virginia Woolf ‘s delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experiences really lay.

Indeed the narrative starts with a poetic image of a heron flying in the sky, “shaking space easily from his wings”. But immediately, the poetic balance is broken. The short story go ahead by associations that came across in Virginia Woolf’ s mind. From the sky to a lake, from a lake to mountains, from sun to ferns. So, the text does not seem to respect a classical balance, typical of Romantic poems.

Virginia Woolf’s own style handles the stream of consciousness with a carefully modulated poetic flow and brought into prose fiction something of rhythms and the imagery of lyric poetry.

It seems as if the content of the composition deals with typical lyrical topics, such as the concept of truth expressed in the second paragraph. Truth is here depicted as something that cannot be caught, (“for ever desiring”) and the use of the adverb laboriously adds a sense of pain to the never-ending search for truth.   

Despite what a common reader may understand, the use of parenthesis is very interesting. It is not a simple device used only to tell something that is not so important, but during Realism, it keeps the novelist’s point of view. It is a tool used to make not visible the narrator’s intrusion.

What’s more the parenthesis, in particular, convey a very interesting concept, that is, a binary view of life: “a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergentely. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict”. So, the intelligent reader came across here, to a pessimistic view of life, a life that is conflict between opposites (“left and right” mean that) and will never reach a solution.

Indeed, going on reading the text you will find different questions keeping up the idea of a life full of questions without a suitable solution.

The third paragraph is the more difficult one. Indeed the syntax is very structured.

Starting from a reflection above two “feets”, that increase the idea of a life made of opposites that is developed in the whole story, the narrative goes on describing a close space (“firelight”, “room”) and finally it seems as if the reader is imposed to jump from closed spaces to opened ones. So, the concept of space that you gather reading this story is very complex as the concept of time. It seems as if time flew incessantly like a river towards death. There is no way of seizing its reality since it is continually changing. So, art and poetry is the only way of  stopping time through the intensity of the ecstatic moment, which is the only certainty or the only illusion.

This moment of ecstasies, the full comprehension of life and destiny, time and art, and all, in

one single figure, was the only kind of success worth pursuing in life. It seems as if the world during this moment of ecstasy were substituted by the impressions the heron gets from its fast flight. Everything is an impression and the fourth paragraph reaffirm this thesis. In a very confused way, in a blasting use of sounds (gathered, scattered, squandered) different sensation are presented probably trough particular associations that came across in Virginia Woolf’s mind. So, there isn’t a logical criteria, in that, all the heron suggested in her mind, she translated in a piece of paper. And probably this is what makes Virginia Woolf a great novelist. She can made of her impressions a poetic creation. A simple heron flying in the sky becomes a poetic creation made of associations. The story seems to conclude in a circular way, since the first phrase is “lazy and different” is retaken in the last phrase of the story. So, the personification of the heron, described by adjectives usually used for human beings (lazy and indifferent) is the centre of the whole narrative since it is the point from which the story starts and finishes. All the narrative is a reflection on the heron flight and it is a collection of sensation due to the view of the great bird.