DOI article:
Bałus, Wojciech: Turning points, crises, evolutions
DOI Page / Citation link: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.52521#0027
Wojciech Bałus
TURNING POINTS, CRISES, EVOLUTIONS
I
The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And Clarissa saw—
she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So it wasn't a failure after all!
It was going to be all right now—her party It had begun. It had started. But it was
still touch and go. She must stand there for the present. People seemed to come
in a rush. Colonel and Mrs. Garrod... Mr. Hugh Whitebread... Mr. Bowley... Mrs.
Hilbery... Lady Mary Maddox... Mr. Quin... intoned Wilkins. She had six or sev-
en words with each, and they went on, they went into the rooms; into something
now, not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had beat back the curtain.1
Most likely, this quotation from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is well
remembered by every reader of Wiesław Juszczak's book Zasłona w rajskie
ptaki [A Curtain with the Birds of Paradise] which unfortunately has been
almost forgotten by scholars. In his book, Juszczak analyzed Woolf's novel as
an example of modernism. In his view, not only did she want to tell the story
about how Clarissa Dalloway organized her party, but also present on a deep-
er, covert level an artistic process of form making as the goal of art. A banal
gesture of beating back a yellow chintz curtain has been interpreted as a mo-
ment when the incoherent elements of a composition, he., a party suddenly
began to form a whole. Juszczak argued that Woolf did the same, quite openly,
in her next novel, To the Lighthouse, where fulfilling a promise to go for a sea
trip coincided in the last paragraph of the book with Lily Briscoe's finishing of
her landscape painting:
Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas.
There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up
and across, its attempt at something. ... She looked at the steps; they were empty;
V Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, London 1960, p. 187.
TURNING POINTS, CRISES, EVOLUTIONS
I
The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And Clarissa saw—
she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So it wasn't a failure after all!
It was going to be all right now—her party It had begun. It had started. But it was
still touch and go. She must stand there for the present. People seemed to come
in a rush. Colonel and Mrs. Garrod... Mr. Hugh Whitebread... Mr. Bowley... Mrs.
Hilbery... Lady Mary Maddox... Mr. Quin... intoned Wilkins. She had six or sev-
en words with each, and they went on, they went into the rooms; into something
now, not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had beat back the curtain.1
Most likely, this quotation from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is well
remembered by every reader of Wiesław Juszczak's book Zasłona w rajskie
ptaki [A Curtain with the Birds of Paradise] which unfortunately has been
almost forgotten by scholars. In his book, Juszczak analyzed Woolf's novel as
an example of modernism. In his view, not only did she want to tell the story
about how Clarissa Dalloway organized her party, but also present on a deep-
er, covert level an artistic process of form making as the goal of art. A banal
gesture of beating back a yellow chintz curtain has been interpreted as a mo-
ment when the incoherent elements of a composition, he., a party suddenly
began to form a whole. Juszczak argued that Woolf did the same, quite openly,
in her next novel, To the Lighthouse, where fulfilling a promise to go for a sea
trip coincided in the last paragraph of the book with Lily Briscoe's finishing of
her landscape painting:
Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas.
There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up
and across, its attempt at something. ... She looked at the steps; they were empty;
V Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, London 1960, p. 187.