The Matter of Literary Memory: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Ian McEwan's Saturday

This article argues that the juxtaposition of Ian McEwan's Saturday with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates how one's experience of a text is doubled and amplified through repetition and remembering. By imagining the source text as a 'memory' embedded in the heart of the adaptation, we restore a measure of autonomy and agency to the adaptation: it is the text that is doing the remembering. As Woolf herself reveals in her diaries and her fiction, what makes memory so powerful is the comparison of the present to the past: the way that one moment recalls a myriad of others. To support the reading of Mrs. Dalloway as a memory of Saturday, this article offers a detailed analysis of both novels alongside recent scholarship on the neuronovel, adaptation theory, and the neuroscience of memory.