Du sens aux sens : éclatement et rassemblement synesthésique dans la version filmée du roman de Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway

When Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway (1925), one of her first impressionistic novels, cinema was becoming a mass phenomenon, typical of the post-war period. In Mrs. Dalloway, a novel clearly influenced by film techniques and based on contrapuntal writing, two voices, two worlds, intermittently fusing or running parallel, intervene according to a method close to music. The cinematographical transcription by Marleen Gorris (1998) attempts to suggest this fundamental character of Woolf’s impressionism. Through the use of two instruments — the violin for Clarissa and the piano for Septimus — the visual counterpoint and musical polyphony result in an intricate semiotic interplay between signified and signifier. It is the primary essential fragmentation of beings that gives its style to Woolfs writing. However, these «shivering fragments » soon give wary to an impressionistic «Gestalt » — a kind of «splintered mosaic » blending the images and the sounds of a chaotic world. Music thus becomes a key-notion to penetrate the mystery of the woolfian world and acts as a solvent both in the novel and in the film.Delpech Gaudin Ingrid. Du sens aux sens : éclatement et rassemblement synesthésique dans la version filmée du roman de Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway. In: Anglophonia/Caliban, n°11, 2002. Musique et littératures : Intertextualités. pp. 237-243