Ambiguity in the Motor-Car Montage

           We spent the later part of our discussion on Friday of last week with the famous “motor-car montage” early in Mrs. Dalloway, where the narrative becomes untethered from Clarissa’s interior point of view and bounces among a range of Londoners, all of them fascinated by the mysterious backfiring car that probably contains the Queen, or the Prince of Wales, or maybe the Prime Minister . . . only no one is really sure. The car’s “blinds” are drawn (the 1920s version of tinted windows), and although the driver does present some card that leads the cop to wave them past the traffic jam, and the car does indeed enter Buckingham Palace, we never learn who was inside. And no one actually notices once the car does reach Buckingham Palace, because they’re all distracted by the skywriting plane.

          What is Woolf doing here? Besides using the car as a “vehicle” for her narrative’s meanderings (as Howie uses the escalator as the “vehicle” for his “memoir” in The Mezzanine), a convenient structuring device that allows her to move smoothly from one subject’s perspective to the next, what does this section of the novel (seven full pages) seem to be “saying” (if anything) about the British public? Does Woolf’s narrator share or understand or sympathize with the patriotic pride this car engenders in the breasts of those it passes? Is this a moment of sudden unity and common feeling among a disparate bunch of strangers? Or is her tongue in cheek here—is this a satirical depiction of a sheeplike populace hypnotized by the specter of royalty, or celebrity, or Empire, or “greatness,” or whatever, only it’s really just an anonymous car, the occupant of which has the blinds drawn tight and couldn’t be less interested in the doting populace? Is this a critique of British empire, or of royalty as disconnected from its subjects, and its subjects too wonderstruck to care or think critically?

            At some points in these pages, it sure seems like it. Woolf’s narrative tone is extremely difficult to pin down: there’s often a potential undercurrent of irony, but you’re not entirely sure you’re really hearing it. From the start of this section, when the narrator states that “[p]assers-by . . . of course, stopped and stared” (13), we could take it in either direction: do you hear “of course” as an understanding, sympathetic narrator (“of course they stared; I would too, and so would you”)? Or do you hear something more snide, detached, and ironic (“of course these idiots had to all stop and gawk”)? As the scene proceeds, evidence can be produced that points to either general attitude. When the narrator asserts that “there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street” (16), the reader who hears irony might say, Of course there could be doubt. No one has any idea who’s in the car! But then Clarissa is part of this general reaction; she puts on her best “look of extreme dignity” (16) as the car passes, just in case the Queen were to peek out at her. Is Woolf depicting her protagonist as just another sheep? And when the narrator describes the “vibration” produced by the car as “in its common appeal emotional. . . . [S]trangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire” (17), I don’t hear irony but a rather poignant reminder of how much the people depicted in this scene have suffered in the war that’s only recently ended. Their somberness is justified. At this point the narrator seems quite sympathetic to them, even to be joining in the fellow-feeling and national pride.

            But then she has all this somber reverence interrupted by a skywriter advertising . . . Glaxo? Kreemo? Is it toffee? Wow! Look at him swoop and swirl! She must be gently mocking her characters here, right? As people gawk, slackjawed, at the sky, trying to read the celestial message—and as we realize that the message is just a crass advertisement for something ephemeral like toffee, although, as with the occupant of the car, no one really knows for sure what the plane is trying to write—it seems increasingly clear that there’s at least a gently comical irony at work here. (Mrs. Coates’s “strained, awe-stricken voice” and Mrs. Bletchley murmuring “‘Kreemo’ . . . like a sleepwalker” add to this effect.) We see a quintessentially modern phenomenon: a populace hypnotized to stupidity by advertising gimmicks.

            But even here I can see it both ways. Imagine how amazing skywriting must have been when it premiered (it’s still pretty amazing, if you stop and think about it). In other words, of course they all stare upward as this daring young pilot dips and dives through the clear sky on a June morning (an uncommon and very modern sight in London in 1923); so would Virginia Woolf, and so would you. There’s nothing condescending, to my ear, when Woolf’s narrative starts to dip into Howie-style exclamation points: “There it was, coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind . . . actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Every one looked up” (20). Of course they did.

            And yet, it’s all a banal advertisement to try to sell these people something, and it fails, since the plane departs without anyone decisively reading its message. There still seems to be something ironic or satirical going on here, and this is one of the funnier moments in the novel. People just look silly when they gape at the sky, and it’s funny how they all see different letters, read completely different things, and how the wind keeps blowing the letters apart, and they blend with the clouds. A good essay could be written on the skywriting incident as an anticipation of that decisive twentieth-century phenomenon of advertising and consumer culture.

            So I keep seeing it both ways. And in a sense, this is typical of Woolf’s stuff, so get used to it. As Clarissa thinks of herself, “She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on” (8). She is happily married to Richard and has no regrets about the course her life has followed, and yet she can’t stop thinking about Peter, and what might have happened if she’d married him. Peter is content with his less stable existence, and he’s “in love” with Daisy, and yet the first person he rushes to see in London is Clarissa, and he can’t help but compare himself unfavorably to her and her world. People aren’t one-dimensional in Woolf’s fiction, and we must keep mutually contradictory ideas in mind for each character. If the author’s feelings about a crowd on a London street gawking at a passing car are ambiguous (maybe Woolf herself can see it both ways, and this is why the prose is so ambiguous here), then the characters’ own feelings—about themselves, the people in their lives, and the endeavor of life itself—are similarly ambiguous. But ambiguous doesn’t mean vague; it means containing more than one active possibility for interpretation at one time.

            Why can’t the motor-car montage be both a portrait of surprising unity and fellow-feeling among Londoners and also a moment of authorial irony and satire?