Longwinded Circumlocution, Verbosity, and Tedium in Monday or Tuesday

I’m glad to know that Woolf was just “experiment[ing]” (Kemp 66) when she wrote this nonsense. Reading Monday or Tuesday splashed cold water on any excitement I had to read Virginia Woolf’s novels. I keep trying to come up with ways to explain why I dislike these short stories so much, but the characteristics that I dislike about them are the same characteristics that Sandra Kemp praises.

I’m starting to feel like Margaret in Howard’s End. If Woolf wanted rhythm, she should have composed a song. If she wanted fragmentation, she should have stuck to painting. Even The Times Literary Supplement said that the stories “‘aspire to the condition of music’: it cannot reach it” (66). The stories seem like a fun experiment and that it is a great writing exercise, but Woolf was correct when she described them as “wild outbursts of freedom, inarticulate, ridiculous, unprintable mere outcries” (63). She said that they are “inarticulate, ridiculous” and “unprintable.” I’ll just say I believe her and leave it at that.

Another issue I have with Monday or Tuesday is that the stories aren’t about anything. I even have trouble watching “Seinfeld” because it drags on and on about nothing until I feel like I’ve aged three years in a thirty minute time span. The same applies for Woolf’s short stories. Kemp intimates, “They are rarely about anything in the conversational sense” (63). Literature that isn’t conversational is like Monopoly money—it does have some value, but one still can’t take it to a real bank. At the end of the day, what about Woolf’s short stories can one take to the bank? What can one value, practice, or appreciate about it? Maybe some of my classmates can help me find the literary value in Monday or Tuesday. As of now, however, I would tweak the The Dial’s review to say that “she has mastered starting anywhere and arriving” nowhere (66).

Woolf also experiments with fragmentation in Monday or Tuesday, which adds another annoyance and “inarticulate[ness]” to the text. Monday or Tuesday is filled with incomplete thoughts, phrases, and perspectives and sudden deceptive shifts in perspective. Her fragmentations are meandering boxcars of thought that reject the tradition of the full train of thought: thus, they try to function as isolated boxcars but lack locomotion. Ergo, they lose function and become a hindrance. Kemp says that “Woolf used the stories to introduce perceptions that didn’t obviously lead anywhere, or become part of a larger unit” (62). This makes me think that Woolf is selling ideas rather than plots, drama, comedy, etc. Kemp also compares Woolf to Eliot saying that they both “present the boredom, the horror and the reality of the everyday world rather than to construct a fictional one” (63). The problem with this comparison is that these grand ideas are not put into boring, everyday circumstances like Eliot, who gracefully and dexterously twines verbose into gold; they are instead buried under boring, pointless, dribble in Monday or Tuesday. Who wants to find a cupcake in a garbage dump? Even if the cupcake is found, no one would want to eat it. Presentation is everything and Woolf wraps her ideas in garbage. I don’t think this is what Woolf meant when she spoke of “‘rubbish reading’” (64) but this is definitely what I think of.

However, in Monday or Tuesday there is the idea of crossing genre lines. This is clear but is still unappealing. The only thing reading Monday or Tuesday has done for me is illustrate how writers tried to incorporate the dominant themes of different genres into their work. Because Woolf admitted these stories were inexperienced trials and diversion, I can’t allow myself to put much stock into it. Despite this rant, I do like “A Society” and “Kew Gardens.” They are the lone soldiers in this collection.