『일반독자』와 『댈러웨이부인』의 대화적 글쓰기 : “의사소통은 진실이다”

"Communication is truth" : Dialogic Writing in The Common Reader and Mrs. Dalloway

The Common Reader was published three weeks before the completion of Mrs. Dalloway. Struggling to convey "the true reality" in her new experimental novel, Woolf wonders in her diary whether she is writing "essays" about herself in Mrs. Dalloway. On the other hand, while wrestling with how to shape a new book of essays, Woolf writes that "fiction is the prevailing theme" of The Common Reader. Indeed, these two works are closely related in their narrative strategies and their experimental aims. The essay, according to Adorno, is a form which refutes the conception of truth as something ready-made. When Montaigne first wrote a new mode of writing called essai, he questioned the stability of his own discourse with 'perhaps' and 'I think.' This indirect mode of writing comes from Montaigne's understanding that "life within us by no means agrees with the life outside," according to Woolf. Montaigne nevertheless succeeds in communicating the subjective reality of self and life by adopting a dialogic narrative voice, as Woolf notes in "Montaigne," and she too adopts the dialogic mode that questions the authority of the narrator in The Common Reader. Woolf emphasizes in particular the importance of communication between the text and the reader in the construction of meaning. Likewise, Mrs. Dalloway questions the truth of reality and tries to demonstrate the various ways that meaning is constructed. Woolf adopts a narrative voice, dialogic and uncertain. She also emphasizes in the novel that the truth of reality is not fixed but rather created through communication between subject and object, through the dialogic interaction between the text and the readers. Ironically, it is Septimus, isolated in his own consciousness, who understands the significance and the difficulty of this communication. Woolf has Septimus recite the lines from her essay on Montaigne―"communication is truth." Septimus's struggle to communicate his soul seems almost like an allegory of Woolf's struggle to communicate her sense of reality to her readers. Mrs. Dalloway is perhaps Woolf's essay on herself.