Conversation, Conversion, Proportion
Résumé
On the grounds of the etymological kinship between the words ‘conversion’ and ‘conversation’, the diatribe against Dr Bradshaw’s worship for ‘Proportion and Conversion’ in Mrs Dalloway can be read as a shadow praise of the art of conversation: a violent political and aesthetic manifesto echoing a number of Virginia Woolf’s essays and autobiographical texts.
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1Conversation, though revered in Bloomsbury, is never actually tackled as an object of reflection in Virginia Woolf’s works. It is nowhere and everywhere, omnipresent and systematically eluding theory. One must almost invent traps in order to capture the author’s conception of conversation, and such a trap could perhaps be devised by using two fragments out of her writings, two passages in relation to conversation, which seem to echo each other in spite of absolute disparity.
- 1 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; London, Penguin Books, 1992) 109.
2The first fragment comes as an epilogue to the ‘professional conversation’ between Doctor Bradshaw and Septimus in Mrs Dalloway.1 The narrative is abruptly interrupted, or rather disrupted by a diatribe, an intriguing soliloquy about two notions turned into allegories for the sake of the argument. The so-called ‘conversation’ shows Sir William considering mental disease as ‘a lack of proportion’; after which the narrative seems to swerve into the style of an essay: two allegorical figures, ‘Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess’ and ‘her sister Conversion’, loom into the foreground.
- 2 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol.I (London, The Hogarth Press, 1966) 309–13.
3The second fragment is a very short essay entitled ‘Mr Conrad: A Conversation.’2. This particular text sounds like a fragment because its form suggests an unfinished narrative. It appears as a short fiction with two characters involved in a conversation started long ago and rather abruptly interrupted at the end.
4The two passages indeed stage two opposite modes of conversation—professional and friendly—, but more importantly they impose themselves to the reader’s attention through the device of conspicuous formal imperfection. The gross digression observed in the novel, the blatantly unintellectual, unfinished conversation reported in the essay suggest irony on the part of the author. Irony supporting deliberate, half-concealed demonstration prompting one to suspect an artist’s intellectual and aesthetic credo rendered through intentionally commonplace or disharmonious prose.
Conversation as Conversion’s Enemy and an Instrument for Thought
5The significant element in the diatribe about Proportion and Conversion seems to be the parodying tone of the passage which eventually sounds like a ghost scene in a gothic novel. Bradshaw is possessed and exerts fascination:
Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women [. . .] so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude [. . .]. (Mrs Dalloway 109)
6Horror goes on with Proportion’s sister, Conversion, ‘fastidious goddess, [who] loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will’. She is:
[. . .] a less smiling goddess, more formidable, a goddess even now engaged–in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever, in short, the climate of the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own—is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in her place her own stern countenance. [. . .] she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. (Mrs Dalloway 110)
7Conversion, the narrative says, ‘[. . .] shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help but desires power [. . .]’ (Mrs Dalloway 110).
- 3 See John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins (London: Bloomsbury, 1990) 135. The compound verb convert (...)
8The parody turns Bradshaw’s ‘professional conversation’ into a perverse transmogrification of conversation into conversion, which naturally draws attention to the etymological kinship of the two terms. Conversion and conversation branch out from a common root, convertere in Latin which meant ‘to turn towards something’, ‘to turn round’, ‘to transform’.3 Behind the two fearful sisters Proportion and Conversion, a third sibling is actually hiding. Because of such remarkable kinship of words, Conversation, Bloomsbury’s goddess, haunts the passage probably even more than the two fearful sisters, making the diatribe a real manifesto. A manifesto defending anonymous sovereignty over the domain too easily abandoned to philosophers and scientists, the domain occasionally controlled by psychiatrists. The voice heard in the diatribe sounds close to the voice of a novelist (as opposed to a philosopher), and close to the voice of someone refusing the idea of being cured by another Sir William.
9‘To converse’ and ‘to convert’ both mean ‘to turn’, due to their common origin, but with a tiny and radical difference. ‘To converse’ refers to the mental gesture of ‘turning one’s mind towards something’, whereas ‘to convert’ applies to a gesture exerted on someone. It means ‘to urge someone to turn or to operate a change’, to draw someone towards faith or right opinion.
- 4 Alain Rey, Dictionnaire historique de la Langue Française, vol.1 (Paris: Ed. Le Robert, 1992) 491.
10The novel indeed offers many specimens of converters using science (like Bradshaw), religion (like Miss Killman) or politics (like Lady Bruton) to carry out their reasonable and rational missions. Besides, we notice that the bad ones tend to be called by their family names and the better ones are preferably evoked in a much more familiar way—which insidiously asserts that such ordinary monsters as Bradshaw and the like have no interior space, no interior forum for conversation with themselves. And Sir ‘William’ is no exception because the formal pedestal offered by ‘Sir’, makes things worse for him: it stands as a sort of prefixed negation to what might have referred to his true self—whereas Clarissa in particular has so many doubts and uncertainties that she keeps arguing with herself. Resuming etymology, the specific modern sense of ‘to converse’, ‘to talk’, was not brought into play until the late 16th century. More interestingly, in 17th century French, under the influence of the noun ‘conversation’, it meant at the same time ‘to speak to oneself, to produce mental soliloquy or imagine a dialogue with oneself or someone else.’4 True reflection is clearly displayed in the novel as conversation with oneself.
11But how does this episode of the diatribe enlighten the sisterhood between Conversion and Proportion? The idea of proportion implies the existence of a common divider, of a convention or norm. A lack of proportion as Bradshaw underlines in the behaviours of lunatics objectively delineates right and wrong, conform and non conform, proportionate and disproportionate elements. Quantitative appreciation propagates into the texture of the psyche, sparing Bradshaw the trouble of personal, individual commitment. Bradshaw tries to convert his patients exactly as Lady Bruton tries to colonize the minds of her contemporaries—writing a letter to The Times, annexing Richard’s turns of speech and Hugh’s handwriting. The curious diatribe (placed exactly between the two episodes just mentioned) ultimately targets a sort of Euclidean mapping of the soul. The idea of measure is being blown out while the author is ironically breaking the rules of good narrative.
12The essay entitled ‘Mr Conrad: A Conversation’ stands as a complementary demonstration of the enmity between conversation and Conversion. It starts like a narrative, with the portraits of two strongly individualized characters. They receive full names, David and Penelope. Details abound about their backgrounds, with instant effect, making the two voices perfectly audible, the tones and personalities clearly identifiable. A man and a woman are speaking with equal sincerity and authority about their impressions and opinions as readers of the same books. The conversation itself is based on details again, conviction and persuasion resting on experienced feelings, but most interestingly the conversation is launched in a highly significant way. Hazard plays master of ceremonies, David’s eyes coming across five volumes taken down from some shelf in Penelope’s library. And then, as a prelude to conversation, the protagonists articulate each other’s opinions. David saying: ‘So I see you have made up your mind. Mr Conrad is a classic’; triggering Penelope’s quick reaction: ‘“Not in your opinion,” she replied; “I remember the bitter letters you wrote me when you read The Arrow of Gold [. . .]”’ (Collected Essays 309). An initial shift of voices which certainly conveys meaning as to the necessity in a real conversation to acknowledge irreducible alterity. Respective opinions can be swapped but never disproved.
13A very animated conversation follows, full of invectives and commitment, David soon saying: ‘such a mind can never be among the classics’ and Penelope losing her sense of proportion indeed and retorting: ‘your gimcrack theory is a confection of cobwebs spun while you shave’. The conversation is not an idealized lesson in good manners, nor does it offer a model of confidence in friends. Yet we observe that the vivid discussion does not exclude the tightest reciprocal attention. David: ‘My ears are pricked, explain your theory’. And indeed Penelope’s so-called theory brings to light as many versatile aspects in Conrad’s writings and personality as the essay can reveal between David and Penelope themselves.
Conrad is not one and simple, he is many and complex [. . .] a common case among modern writers [. . .] And it is when they bring these selves into relation, when they reconcile their opposites, that they bring off those complete books which for that reason we call their masterpieces. (Collected Essays 310).
14But there’s an even more interesting demonstration than such praise of versatility. David is definitely not converted by Penelope’s cumulative arguments, his opinion is transformed by Conversation itself and the kind of unpredictable accidents it creates—something Penelope cannot master or control. David:
‘Your theory may be a good one, but the moment you quote Conrad himself theories turn to moonshine. Unfortunate art of criticism, which only shines in the absence of the sun! I had forgotten the spell of Conrad’s prose. It must be of extraordinary strength, since the few words you have quoted rouse in me an overpowering hunger for more.’ (Collected Essays 311)
15The two then read passages from Conrad and the essay ends most abruptly in the midst of the conversation, Penelope urging David to read Chance:
‘It’s a great book, I think. But you will now have to read it yourself, for you are not going to accept my word, especially when it is a word which I cannot define. It is a great book, it is a great book,’ she repeated.
(Collected Essays 313)
16The radical pointlessness of any form of conversion is therefore asserted all along, down to the last word of the essay. The last sentences come as an illustration of what Penelope says about Conrad’s characters, whose ‘personal relations are never final’ (Collected Essays 311). The essay displays Penelope’s ineffective arguments and David’s assumed distrust. But ineffective arguments and distrust finally appear as the main ingredients of true friendship—which of course deserves investigation.
Conversation as Proportion’s Enemy and as an Instrument for Creation
17What is made prominent in the essay is precisely an inter-space, a distance between David and Penelope which remains intact throughout their conversation. Penelope does not convince David, they simply get closer to a third term, namely Conrad’s prose. This distance and inter-space is precisely what Bradshaw tries to annihilate between Septimus and himself, to erase. The inter-space between Penelope and David is rather reminiscent of the unbridgeable gap between Septimus and Clarissa. It is an empty space which gradually appears as a beckoning space for readers: a boundless, shapeless territory, opening the perspective of further conversations.
18The parallel between the two texts reveals that this space lies beyond language and can be conjured only through the poetic dimension of the text. This space finds an expression, for instance, in Clarissa’s vision of herself ‘spreading like mist between people she knows best’ (Mrs Dalloway 10), or seeing ‘her self’ as a many-sided diamond in her mirror, an ever-eluding centre, a mystery (Mrs Dalloway 40). The revelation of this poetically conquered space certainly characterizes the passage from dialogue or monologue to conversation—the stream of consciousness being just one mode of conversation. ‘Je est un autre’ (the formula significantly invented by a poet), is turned by Clarissa into a far more radical statement: ‘Closeness draws apart’ (Mrs Dalloway 202).
19Gaps, Virginia Woolf seems to say, form an open territory for ever to be re-discovered and endlessly explored. The work of art, introducing tension, reveals the linking function of gaps, transforming chaos into complex order. The pattern of conversational relationship—that is to say the prominence of details separated by innumerable gaps and the vertigo engendered by the permanent risk of dislocation— is regulated by the mysterious alchemy of jarring chords, of disharmony. And indeed, the very music of Life made audible in the novel sounds like chaos:
[. . .] the swing, tramp and trudge; the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead; life; London; this moment of June. (Mrs Dalloway 6)
20We might hear overwhelming dislocation if the last words were not there to suggest tension. Details imply unity, they never impose unity. Details suggest spaces deserted by logic and left open to more mysterious laws of attraction, inviting our minds to venture in more shadowy perspectives as temporary nomads.
21There seems to be a model of ‘conversational relationship’ between elements, and this model is nowhere so rigorously exemplified as in Virginia Woolf’s portrait of Bloomsbury’s most respected conversationalist, Roger Fry. In the chapter of Moments of Being entitled ‘Old Bloomsbury’, Roger Fry becomes some sort of allegory of Conversation, standing in opposition to the ghostly figures of Conversion and Proportion seen previously, advertising the charms and virtues of conversation:
- 5 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1976; London: the Hogarth Press, 1978) 175.
[. . .] had just had one of the most interesting conversations of his life. It was with Roger Fry. They had been discussing the theory of art for hours. He thought Roger Fry the most interesting person since Cambridge days. So Roger appeared. He appeared, I seem to think, in a large ulster coat, every pocket of which was stuffed with a book, a paint box or something intriguing; special tips which he had bought from a little man in a back street; he had canvases under his arms; his hair flew; his eyes glowed. He had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us put together. His mind seemed hooked on life by an extraordinary number of attachments. We started talking about Marie-Claire. [a note says: an autobiographical novel by a seamstress] And at once we were all launched into a terrific argument about literature; adjectives? associations? overtones? We had down Milton; we re-read Wordsworth. We had to think the whole thing over again. There was always some new idea afoot, some new picture standing on a chair to be looked at, some new poet fished out from obscurity and stood in the light of day.5
- 6 An expression coined by Daniel Arasse in: ‘[. . .] le détail est un moment qui fait événement dans (...)
22Details, sovereign details (books, canvases, paint boxes, adjectives, overtones), details concrete or abstract abound and create innumerable, mysterious juxtapositions, defeating the power of the mind to organize perception. Number is essential. Accumulation, and an absence of hierarchy between details result in overwhelming, chaotic disproportion. It is interesting to observe how all the atomised details in the portrait are made equal rather than proportionate, how they are considered and examined as ‘moments of perception’6 rather than harmonized or re-arranged. The figure is never reduced to what the observer can understand.
- 7 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (1940; London: Penguin Edition, 1979) 231.
23The impression left by such novels as The Waves or Mrs Dalloway, the overwhelming impression of innumerable, mysterious juxtapositions, shows how efficiently fiction defeats doxa and dogma. Not in a frontal way, stating principles, but in a rather abrupt way nevertheless, confounding the logic of reason. ‘Ideas’, Virginia Woolf writes in her biography of Roger Fry, ‘must be sketched on other people’s minds. Theories must be discussed, preferably with someone who can demolish them’.7 This is precisely what Penelope does in the essay on Conrad. And she ends up reading a passage of Conrad, thus inferring how fiction naturally dissolves theories, how fiction performs prodigies unknown to arguments.
- 8 Virginia Woolf, ‘Impassioned Prose’, Granite and Rainbow (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960) 35.
24Fiction, for Virginia Woolf, stands as a privileged way of re-creating and exploring the mental space partly deserted and partly colonized by science, religion, rational philosophy and politics. Fiction provides modes of tolerance for absurdity, fiction can shelter and deal with chaos on a larger scale than poetry itself. Unexplained, mysterious details can abound and casually tease vertigo without the secure frame of verse length. Perhaps, and above all, the novelist does not detain the kind of prestige and expertise that the history of literature and even the history of civilization has endowed poets with. Prose ignores what Virginia Woolf calls ‘the self-sufficiency of poetry’.8 And therefore novelists challenge Life bare-handed or, as it were, bare-minded.
Fiction and the Poetry of Conversation
25What fiction borrows from poetry escapes formal aspects altogether. In Idée de la Prose, Agamben, in search for a definition of poetry, refuses or rather fails to identify poetry to the measure or rhythm of the line, or to the very presence of rime. He shows that in the final reckoning, poetry can be identified only to the presence of enjambement, to the disruption created by this artificial gap that poetry introduces between lines: the contrapuntal conjugation of the metric and syntactic frames. The essence of poetry would then lie in the interspace that stems out of such repeated dislocation, a dislocation adding meaning instead of undoing meaning. Agamben produces a definition of poetry which turns out to be directly transposable to Woolf’s fiction. He speaks about a discord.
- 9 Giorgio Agamben, Idée de la prose (Paris: Christian Bougois, 1988) 23.
L’enjambement révèle une non-coïncidence, un décalage entre le mètre et la syntaxe, entre le rythme sonore et le sens, comme si (contrairement au préjugé répandu qui voit dans la poésie le lieu d’une parfaite adéquation entre le son et le sens) le poème ne vivait que de cet intime désaccord.9
26Enjambement opens perspectives, stimulates imagination, gives time to the listener or reader to explore images and trespass boundaries.
27The passage from one verse to the next—what Agamben calls versura—naturally evokes the essence of conversation, the passage from one voice to the next, the fact that someone’s idea may be sketched on someone else’s mind. The space in-between verses is comparable to the space between voices and minds in a conversation. ‘En se précipitant dans l’abîme du sens, l’unité purement sonore du vers transgresse sa propre identité en même temps que sa propre mesure’. (Agamben 24) This is very precisely what makes The Waves sound like a long poem in prose—prose referring to the form, and poetry to the essence of repeated returns and the space between voices.
28In poetry as in conversation, ideas and visions force their way mysteriously up to the surface, the world becomes more audible, drops the mask of order that reason has shaped for it. There is something similarly and fundamentally unpredictable in a poem as in a conversation and this is how they both develop a form of attention to things as they are.
La versura, dont il n’est pas fait mention dans les traités de métrique, et qui constitue cependant le noyau du vers, est un geste ambigu, tourné à la fois en arrière (versus), et en avant (pro-versa). Ce suspens, cette sublime hésitation entre le son et le sens, voilà l’héritage poétique que la pensée se doit d’assumer jusqu’au bout. (Agamben 24)
29Conversation, even with oneself, tolerates and includes silence and this is its most musical essence. Conversation is therefore an attitude rather than a situation, an attitude quite evocative of the very essence of poetry.
- 10 An expression that Meschonic borrows from Cicero in his lecture dated February 2002, l’E.N.S. Ulm.
- 11 Roland Barthes, Vivre Ensemble (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002) 8.
30And yet a more important affinity between poetry and conversation, generally obscured by the written form, imposes itself with particular strength in Woolf’s prose: that is the paramount presence of voice and mood. The novel, for Virginia Woolf, must restore words to their native soil, namely the human voice coloured by emotion. Through the vehement diatribe, the author makes it clear that what Henri Meschonnic calls ‘un chant plus obscure,’10 is to be heard beyond the narrative. A voice gradually rises, nameless and yet affected, which operates a reflective, poetic return to the world, that transforms the novel into a totally new kind of conversation between consciences, into a place for encounters. A voice which also resumes the oral, ancestral essence of poetry. A voice which implicates poetry into the humble epic that Woolf calls Life. A voice which performs a kind of prodigy, retaining the mystery of the beggar’s inarticulate song heard by Peter Walsh in the street, and at the same time the Socratic hallmark of true philosophy—the Socratic dialogue being a sort of interface between dialogue (and its allegiance to logos) and conversation (as the art of being with), since Socrates never uses logos to impose doxa but to undo it, bringing forth complexities, contradictions, ignored perceptions, and claiming to act as a mid-wife. What Barthes calls ‘la pression poétique de la chose parlée’ endlessly defeats and sometimes ridicules ‘la distance frappée de la chose écrite’11 in Woolf’s prose.
- 12 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. II (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966) 6.
31Superficial Clarissa, a reader of Plato as the narrative incidentally specifies (Mrs Dalloway 36), casually, insidiously, and therefore perhaps socratically imposes new territories of cognition, irruptive fragments of knowledge, a new approach to the mystifications of theory and history, making the novel a handbook of disharmony or anti-aesthetic, an implicit celebration of conversation seen not as ‘a god of small things’, but rather as a god of oceans and seas, the very same god as the god of nooks and crannies; the one who, among many attributions, looks after ‘the purer truth of fiction’12—in fact, the Reader’s tutelary god.
Notes
1 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; London, Penguin Books, 1992) 109.
2 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol.I (London, The Hogarth Press, 1966) 309–13.
3 See John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins (London: Bloomsbury, 1990) 135. The compound verb convertere (cum & vertere) has spawned such English nouns as ‘verse’, ‘version’ and ‘vertigo’. Its most direct descendant is ‘to convert’. The past participle conversus produced the noun ‘a converse’ not to be confused with the verb ‘to converse’ (to talk) which came via a specialized form of the Latin vertere: the specialized form vertare, denoting repeated action. From it came versari (‘to live’, ‘to dwell’, ‘to associate’ or ‘communicate with others’). This passed via old French converser into English, but at first the verb converser and its derivative conversation were both limited semantically to the notion of dwelling and the context of social life.
4 Alain Rey, Dictionnaire historique de la Langue Française, vol.1 (Paris: Ed. Le Robert, 1992) 491.
5 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1976; London: the Hogarth Press, 1978) 175.
6 An expression coined by Daniel Arasse in: ‘[. . .] le détail est un moment qui fait événement dans le tableau, qui tend irrésistiblement à arrêter le regard, à troubler l’économie de son parcours. Or, cet écart, s’il risque d’être catastrophique pour le ‘tout ensemble’, si le tableau risque de s’y disloquer et le regard de s’y noyer, c’est aussi un moment privilégié où le plaisir du tableau tend à devenir jouissance de la peinture’. Le Détail, (Paris: Flammarion, 1992) 12.
7 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (1940; London: Penguin Edition, 1979) 231.
8 Virginia Woolf, ‘Impassioned Prose’, Granite and Rainbow (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960) 35.
9 Giorgio Agamben, Idée de la prose (Paris: Christian Bougois, 1988) 23.
10 An expression that Meschonic borrows from Cicero in his lecture dated February 2002, l’E.N.S. Ulm.
11 Roland Barthes, Vivre Ensemble (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002) 8.
12 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. II (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966) 6.
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Françoise Bort, « Conversation, Conversion, Proportion », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 11 juillet 2024, consulté le 09 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15096 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwo
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