Having just completed tonight's reading, I realized something that seems very significant: there are no "bad" characters in this book at all. Although Clarissa is a snob, she is also wise and has depth as a person. She loves life and doesn't lose value because she is a snob.
Initially, I did not like Peter at all because of how Clarissa introduced him as the type of guy who is obnoxious, pretentious, and judgmental even though he seems to be in love with her. However, after spending some time inside Peter's head, I couldn't help but sympathize with him. It was the same with Richard--I wasn't sure at first whether I liked him because of Clarissa's initial attitude toward him. She seemed like she didn't really care about him that much, and didn't seem to think he was all that wrapped up in her. After being in Richard's head though, I really like him. He's conscious of social classes and doesn't think very positively of them. Even though his wife is clearly a snob, he doesn't treat her in the rude way that Peter does, and he doesn't even think of her as a snob, which I think is pretty admirable.
The same goes for other characters, such as Lady Bruton. At first when Clarissa reacted to her own lack of a lunch invitation from her, I assumed that Lady Bruton was a snob to an even greater extent than Clarissa. Of course, when I got inside Lady Bruton's head and heard about her time spent with her brothers riding her pony named Patty. Hearing about people's childhoods makes me see them as more human and real for some reason, and the characters in Mrs Dalloway are no exception.
It is interesting and odd to be reading a book with characters that are actually all likable in one way or another. I can sympathize with every single one of them. This is especially weird for me, because with almost every character there is something I either don't like about them or something I think I don't like about them, but there are many more things that I do like. This mimics human beings so well, and ultimately contributes to Woolf's excellent job of creating "real" characters.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Clarissa's "Character"
A few days ago in class, we were discussing Clarissa's relationship with Sally, and someone mentioned that it seemed "out of character" for Clarissa to look up to Sally so much. I guess this depends on how you define "character"--generally when we read books we consider characters on primarily a surface-level basis. Many novels that we are used to reading for pleasure, that are much more plot-based than Mrs Dalloway (not that Mrs Dalloway is plot-less), don't go into as much depth about their characters as Mrs Dalloway does. I don't think that even The Mezzanine, which was more lacking in plot than Mrs Dalloway, explored the character of Howie as fully as Mrs Dalloway explores Clarissa.
When we read The Mezzanine, we are certainly in Howie's mind, getting to hear some of his most private thoughts (which are not private because they are secret, but rather because by the nature of these thoughts, it is not common to share them with people), but we do not hear about his worries, regrets, what-ifs, and insecurities the way we do for Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway. Especially in light of Virginia Woolf's comments about characters requiring more depth in order to be realistic, I definitely think that it is her goal to create a character who is not seemingly perfect like Howie, but to break down the illusion of happiness and a nice marriage and show the reader what really goes on in the deepest corners of Clarissa's mind. Perhaps we haven't gotten to those really deep corners quite yet, but I expect that by the end of the book we will understand Clarissa in a way that we were never able to understand Howie by reading The Mezzanine.
So is it really out of character for Clarissa to be thinking of Sally, or even for her to have looked up so much to Sally previously? I would argue that it is completely in character, in fact more so than even her marriage. The fact that she cannot let go of Sally in her mind and that when she thinks of love, her first impulse is to consider her relationship with Sally, shows us that Sally is important to her in a way that nobody else is. Everyone else that Clarissa interacts with lives their life within boundaries the way that she always has; however, she has always been infatuated with the idea of being free-spirited like Sally (ironically though, Sally is now in the same sort of position as Clarissa--married with children). This is what her mind keeps going back to. This is a huge part of the person Clarissa really is. Yes, Clarissa appears to be an upper-class snob with a perfectly satisfying life, but since we are deep inside her mind, we understand that that is not all she is. She is still the 18-year-old girl who envied freedom of spirit and looked up to Sally Seton.
I really wish I could make this a footnote, but I just wanted to touch on Sally's current role in life in comparison to Clarissa's. I find it really interesting that both women ended up as what you could call "the perfect hostesses," especially Sally, who is expected to be the more outgoing, free-spirited one in life, who does not end up conforming to social "rules." I wonder if this is meant by Woolf to be commentary on the way that societal expectations and rules can stifle a person's true character. Sally probably wasn't raised with quite the expectations as Clarissa, but those expectations seem to have still affected her life and possibly her personality just the same, if not more, than they did for Clarissa. I would assume this would be worse for women, especially in the time period that this book takes place, but I would expect some degree of this to be true for men too, and even true for people in general today.
When we read The Mezzanine, we are certainly in Howie's mind, getting to hear some of his most private thoughts (which are not private because they are secret, but rather because by the nature of these thoughts, it is not common to share them with people), but we do not hear about his worries, regrets, what-ifs, and insecurities the way we do for Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway. Especially in light of Virginia Woolf's comments about characters requiring more depth in order to be realistic, I definitely think that it is her goal to create a character who is not seemingly perfect like Howie, but to break down the illusion of happiness and a nice marriage and show the reader what really goes on in the deepest corners of Clarissa's mind. Perhaps we haven't gotten to those really deep corners quite yet, but I expect that by the end of the book we will understand Clarissa in a way that we were never able to understand Howie by reading The Mezzanine.
So is it really out of character for Clarissa to be thinking of Sally, or even for her to have looked up so much to Sally previously? I would argue that it is completely in character, in fact more so than even her marriage. The fact that she cannot let go of Sally in her mind and that when she thinks of love, her first impulse is to consider her relationship with Sally, shows us that Sally is important to her in a way that nobody else is. Everyone else that Clarissa interacts with lives their life within boundaries the way that she always has; however, she has always been infatuated with the idea of being free-spirited like Sally (ironically though, Sally is now in the same sort of position as Clarissa--married with children). This is what her mind keeps going back to. This is a huge part of the person Clarissa really is. Yes, Clarissa appears to be an upper-class snob with a perfectly satisfying life, but since we are deep inside her mind, we understand that that is not all she is. She is still the 18-year-old girl who envied freedom of spirit and looked up to Sally Seton.
I really wish I could make this a footnote, but I just wanted to touch on Sally's current role in life in comparison to Clarissa's. I find it really interesting that both women ended up as what you could call "the perfect hostesses," especially Sally, who is expected to be the more outgoing, free-spirited one in life, who does not end up conforming to social "rules." I wonder if this is meant by Woolf to be commentary on the way that societal expectations and rules can stifle a person's true character. Sally probably wasn't raised with quite the expectations as Clarissa, but those expectations seem to have still affected her life and possibly her personality just the same, if not more, than they did for Clarissa. I would assume this would be worse for women, especially in the time period that this book takes place, but I would expect some degree of this to be true for men too, and even true for people in general today.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Buses
Every morning, I ride the bus to school from my dad's work, and every afternoon I ride the bus back from school. I never really realized this until reading The Mezzanine, but my mind wanders a lot on the bus. Until one day (maybe the second day of school) as I was riding the bus and letting my mind wander as usual, I didn't fully appreciate the wanderings of my mind or the wanderings and tangents in The Mezzanine. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading The Mezzanine. I just never realized how much the mind really does wander in a very short space of time. I never realized how many of the things I think about that are actually interesting, at least to me.
While I was on the bus, I found myself mostly thinking about social interactions and situations. I thought about the nature of bus rides, especially morning ones. For example, when I ride the bus in the morning, it is always an inherently independent and quiet activity. I began to consider what it would be like to ride the same bus as a teacher, or the parent of a friend, or some other person who I felt I had some obligation to talk to, but preferred not to. Would a conversation with one of those people be inevitably awkward or forced? Probably. I have been in a position similar to that before, in fact, and it was both forced and awkward, so now I tend to avoid that type of situation as much as possible.
So as I was sitting on the bus considering these extremely interesting thoughts, I realized that I was thinking in a way similar to Howie. I was surprised by this fact, and suddenly I fully understood Baker's (and Howie's) philosophy. I realized how interesting the social interactions on buses can be. Of course, during the course of the bus ride, I thought about other things, such as how the smell of olive oil reminds me of home (because my mom makes pasta all the time), and how nice it is to go to school when the weather is good (and how I am absolutely dreading the shorter, colder winter days).
I plan on writing my pastiche about a bus ride, though I plan to embellish that bus ride with thoughts from many bus rides, as I'm sure Howie did when he was writing his memoir about his elevator ride. I'm not entirely sure what this blog post is about--it's mostly just me writing down some of my ideas and planning to expand on them for my pastiche.
I guess what I discovered through all of this is that I'm actually really impressed that this novel has had such an impact on my way of thinking. It's sort of funny because back when we read Housekeeping, it had a similar effect on me, yet its philosophy is the complete opposite of The Mezzanine's; in fact, if Howie were to read it, I'm sure he would be deeply disturbed--though he may enjoy some aspects of it. It definitely does force you to slow down in the same way that his own book does. Now I've gotten onto a complete tangent (and I probably have The Mezzanine to thank for causing me to go off on tangents like this one). Maybe I'll pursue the comparison of Housekeeping and The Mezzanine in another post.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker--Prompt 1
Prompt: "Near the end of The Mezzanine, as his lunch hour nears its close, Howie settles in the sunlit plaza with his milk and cookies to read a little of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations.He encounters the following passage:
'Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes' (120).
His response is immediate and impassioned: 'Wrong, wrong, wrong! I thought. Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue!' (120).
So why is he so repelled by this passage? What insight might this reaction offer into Baker's more general aims in this novel? In some sense, might Baker's narrative method be construed as a kind of antidote to Aurelius's view?"
Response: The passage that Howie reads reminds me a lot of a book that we read in the Coming of Age Novel class--Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. In Housekeeping, Ruth and Sylvie share the opinion that life is transient, and end up living their lives as transients. What this means, as Ruth explains throughout the book, is that each individual life is insignificant, no matter how much people try to create a significance and importance for it. According to Ruth, life is by nature transient. The world is constantly changing, and that seems to be okay with her.
Howie is Ruth's polar opposite. He spends his entire book trying to convince us that all the little, supposedly insignificant things in life, are important, significant, and worth thinking about. Since the passage that Howie reads speaks of life's transience in such a matter-of-fact sort of way, Howie is immediately repelled, and even disturbed, by this take on life. Since Howie sees the importance in what seems to be absolutely everything he encounters, the idea that he himself is insignificant and worthless must be terrifying to him. He immediately suppresses this idea of transience, exclaiming (to himself) that it is simply wrong and "completely untrue!" This alone tells us a lot about Howie's character. To him, since the little things in life are so important, actual lives of people must be incredibly important and significant as well. Take, for example, the way he thinks about the man who is cleaning the escalator handle. Howie takes this job (and this person), which is not generally considered very important, and elevates it (and the man doing it) to a very high, important, desirable level. Howie is able to see how the small things in life all work together like a big machine and keep his entire world running smoothly. Howie is fascinated by the systematic way his life works. He's so interested in these small things that once he's forced to think about transience he can't deal with it, so he shuts it out.
This tells us that, in the same way that Howie is Ruth's polar opposite, Baker can be seen as Robinson's polar opposite as well. While Robinson explains and advocates the idea of transience in Housekeeping, Baker advocates stability and routine and a sort of anti-transience in his novel. While I loved Housekeeping and found it to be very successful in explaining the idea of transience, I also found The Mezzanine to be successful in explaining and promoting ideas that go completely against transience. The way that Howie tells us about recognizable things such as awkward social situations and the feeling of running out of tape or staples makes us think to ourselves, "Oh! I know exactly what he means!" It makes us feel as though we're friends with Howie. It's as if we understand him and he understands us. This way, Howie (or Baker through Howie) is able to make us understand and agree with his appreciation for small things and hatred for the idea of transience. I think Baker is absolutely successful in doing this--The Mezzanine really made me slow down as I was reading it, and space out, considering the world around me, and then return to the book and smile to myself at whatever the next tangent was that had begun.
As for whether Baker's method serves as an antidote for Aurelius's, and Robinson's, views, I feel like it does without a doubt. Especially since I've read Housekeeping, I know what it's like to be immersed in the idea of transience, and to understand the thinking behind it. It's scary to think that human life is insignificant, when we basically spend our lives trying to plan for the future and, in many cases, to do something significant. Baker's novel is somewhat comforting, because it's so easy to relate to and recognize many of his tangents, so it makes the reader feel like there are many other people out there who share their fascination with little things in life. Baker's novel makes the reader feel as though life is significant, because Baker shows us how special and important the little things are.
'Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes' (120).
His response is immediate and impassioned: 'Wrong, wrong, wrong! I thought. Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue!' (120).
So why is he so repelled by this passage? What insight might this reaction offer into Baker's more general aims in this novel? In some sense, might Baker's narrative method be construed as a kind of antidote to Aurelius's view?"
Response: The passage that Howie reads reminds me a lot of a book that we read in the Coming of Age Novel class--Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. In Housekeeping, Ruth and Sylvie share the opinion that life is transient, and end up living their lives as transients. What this means, as Ruth explains throughout the book, is that each individual life is insignificant, no matter how much people try to create a significance and importance for it. According to Ruth, life is by nature transient. The world is constantly changing, and that seems to be okay with her.
Howie is Ruth's polar opposite. He spends his entire book trying to convince us that all the little, supposedly insignificant things in life, are important, significant, and worth thinking about. Since the passage that Howie reads speaks of life's transience in such a matter-of-fact sort of way, Howie is immediately repelled, and even disturbed, by this take on life. Since Howie sees the importance in what seems to be absolutely everything he encounters, the idea that he himself is insignificant and worthless must be terrifying to him. He immediately suppresses this idea of transience, exclaiming (to himself) that it is simply wrong and "completely untrue!" This alone tells us a lot about Howie's character. To him, since the little things in life are so important, actual lives of people must be incredibly important and significant as well. Take, for example, the way he thinks about the man who is cleaning the escalator handle. Howie takes this job (and this person), which is not generally considered very important, and elevates it (and the man doing it) to a very high, important, desirable level. Howie is able to see how the small things in life all work together like a big machine and keep his entire world running smoothly. Howie is fascinated by the systematic way his life works. He's so interested in these small things that once he's forced to think about transience he can't deal with it, so he shuts it out.
This tells us that, in the same way that Howie is Ruth's polar opposite, Baker can be seen as Robinson's polar opposite as well. While Robinson explains and advocates the idea of transience in Housekeeping, Baker advocates stability and routine and a sort of anti-transience in his novel. While I loved Housekeeping and found it to be very successful in explaining the idea of transience, I also found The Mezzanine to be successful in explaining and promoting ideas that go completely against transience. The way that Howie tells us about recognizable things such as awkward social situations and the feeling of running out of tape or staples makes us think to ourselves, "Oh! I know exactly what he means!" It makes us feel as though we're friends with Howie. It's as if we understand him and he understands us. This way, Howie (or Baker through Howie) is able to make us understand and agree with his appreciation for small things and hatred for the idea of transience. I think Baker is absolutely successful in doing this--The Mezzanine really made me slow down as I was reading it, and space out, considering the world around me, and then return to the book and smile to myself at whatever the next tangent was that had begun.
As for whether Baker's method serves as an antidote for Aurelius's, and Robinson's, views, I feel like it does without a doubt. Especially since I've read Housekeeping, I know what it's like to be immersed in the idea of transience, and to understand the thinking behind it. It's scary to think that human life is insignificant, when we basically spend our lives trying to plan for the future and, in many cases, to do something significant. Baker's novel is somewhat comforting, because it's so easy to relate to and recognize many of his tangents, so it makes the reader feel like there are many other people out there who share their fascination with little things in life. Baker's novel makes the reader feel as though life is significant, because Baker shows us how special and important the little things are.
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