It is interesting that I do some of my best thinking while I'm riding the bus. It is also interesting that my wandering mind tends to fall on whatever book I'm reading. I already wrote about how my bus-thoughts were influenced by The Mezzanine, so now I would like to write about how they were influenced by Mrs Dalloway. Interestingly enough, the beginning of my thoughts was similar to something I wrote about in my Mezzanine pastiche: I wrote about how I was imagining who a stranger on a bus was (by this I mean I was coming up with my own story about her job, her personality, etc.). My thoughts this time led me to a different place, though. This time, I was looking out of the window at all the passing people, mostly college students, and I began thinking about Mrs Dalloway. In Mrs Dalloway, we are able to understand each character's "cave" when they are described to us, because in Woolf's descriptions she is able to expertly delve into the mind of a character and tell us simple stories about them that somehow give us a sense of who they are underneath. It's impressive how she does this (and if you've ever tried to describe someone's "cave" you know it's very difficult to do), but she has a way of explaining the character's childhood and how that relates to their fears and outlook on life. She explains to us what each character believes in and loves. She is able to capture the essence of every character she writes.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could do this in real life? Wouldn't it be nice to not only be able to describe someone else's cave, but to be able to describe your own so that someone could understand you perfectly? Wouldn't it be nice to meet someone, or see someone on the street, and be able to see at once who they really are: what they love, what they hate, what challenges they've overcome, what they fear, what's shaped their personality? Obviously this is impossible. One of the only places where a person can even begin to understand others on this deep level is by reading a book by an author that is able to convey every character's cave. In real life, there's hardly any chance of truly understanding others on such a deep level. Perhaps it's possible to understand your closest friends or siblings or spouse, but do we really understand those people? Probably not. I know that even my closest friends probably don't know me on this level, and I don't know them on this level either.
Looking at people walking on campus and sitting on the bus, it struck me that every individual has some interesting story. Everyone has a huge part of their life behind them and has had to deal with obstacles and has strong beliefs and motivations. To really understand just one person would be incredible; to understand many seems impossible. Woolf makes it possible, though! She makes it possible for at least the reader to understand all her major (and some more minor) characters with her writing. She allows us to understand her, as well, assuming characters in the book are based off of her and other people in her life. As we read Mrs Dalloway we see the world not necessarily through Clarissa's or Septimus's or Rezia's or Richard's or Peter's eyes, but through the eyes of Woolf herself. In painting such convincing pictures of the characters in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf also paints a picture of herself for the reader to decipher and understand.
This idea of understanding a person is both comforting and frustrating. It is comforting because Woolf proves that it is possible: she is able to make her readers understand every important character in her book, and allows her readers to understand herself on top of that. All I can say about this is that I'm impressed. There is no easy formula to do this properly, but Woolf succeeds perfectly. However, this idea also frustrates me. I don't like knowing how hard it is to truly understand others; if it's nearly impossible to know each other very well, how can we feel close to people? Don't we as humans need companionship and understanding and closeness? Maybe the way to make up for this is to form close relationships with a few people. Maybe that is how we compensate. Maybe it's in the same way that Richard and Elizabeth seem to understand each other on a deeper level. Maybe Richard and Clarissa understand each other on this level too, but I have a feeling that Elizabeth and Clarissa aren't quite at that point. We can only hope that they will eventually reach it. It is still frustrating to me though, that it is almost instinct to judge people we see on the street and ignore the fact that they, like us, have something underneath (a "cave?") that we will probably never understand.
1 comment:
Very interesting comments--it's probably no accident, actually, that both the novels you find yourself contemplating during a bus ride actually feature their characters riding buses, and generally strolling through populous urban environments and people-watching. You're tapping into what I think is most compelling about Woolf's fiction (and, based on her remarks in "Modern Fiction," what was most compelling to *her* about *writing* fiction). Like Clarissa that day on the bus (significant location!), we're frustrated and sometimes even existentially bereft at the thought that we can't be "known" or "understood" by another, and that we can't really "know" another. Her fiction creates this illusion, by delving into these "caves," and it also maybe infects us with an awareness or attunedness to the *fact* that the surface is only a small part of anyone's story. Maybe we become more patient, empathetic people for reading Woolf.
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