The mezzanine as Virginia Woolf's fiction
In class we talked about Woolf's essays from the early 20th century on what she thinks fiction should be and, we read the Mezzanine which is a book of fiction from the late 20th century. The mezzanine has many aspects mentioned by Woolf some it follows very well and some points are changed and modified slightly which is reflected in the differences between Ms. Dalloway and the Mezzanine.
One key concept of Woolf's essays is that the character is far more important than the plot or setting in novels and that novels should be focused on the characters and make them seem human. In Ms. Dalloway this is achieved by staying in characters heads the whole book and almost never describing the facts but only how they are seen and interpreted by the character. In the Mezzanine there is even less plot than in Ms. Dalloway but the entire novel is told by a single character who is aware of the readers. To me this makes the character of Howie more relatable and I fell like I really understand who he is more than Clarissa.
One idea of Woolf's essay is recording the atoms as they fall on the mind. Woolf's novel tackles characters thoughts as the characters have them the memories they relive are ones they are having in the moment. In the Mezzanine Howie is writing his account of the escalator ride from some time in the future. He goes on extensive tangents and recalls so many memories that there is no way that they could fit just on the escalator ride. The Mezzanine is less about preserving the thoughts and experiences of one day like Ms. Dalloway and is more about getting a look into the mind of Howie. Instead of one using one day we get months of his recollections and a much better feel of how he really thinks and sees things because he has had time to digest and pick his words so that we the readers understand what he is talking about
I really like this connection of Woolf and Baker! I agree that The Mezzanine seems to be an extreme case of lack of plot in a sense and of being character focused. Your comment about Howie being aware of the reader made me think that perhaps Baker is not only showing us Howie as a character but also possibly the audience; that the audience is as much a part of the story as the characters that are explicitly being talked about within the novel.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about how Howie seems more relatable because of the way The Mezzanine is written versus how Mrs. Dalloway is written. In The Mezzanine, Howie is relatable because we follow every thought he has, and as a result, we reflect on our thoughts we have and compare them to how Howie thinks. However, because of the way the third-person narration describes the characters in great detail, there is also some relatability to the characters from Mrs. Dalloway, but the connection has to do with traits and attributes whereas the connection to The Mezzanine comes from our train of thought.
ReplyDeletenice post! I liked that you pointed out Howie is writing from the future. I think this narration style is related to the sentence structure and topics in the mezzanine. Howie's tangents may seem random but many of them circle back to his original point. Similarly some of his sentences can be confusing but are consistently grammatically correct . This supports the idea that howie is actively narrating the mezzanine for us and slowing down time actively!
ReplyDeleteI agree with your points about the style in which The Mezzanine is written making Howie more relatable to the reader. I also feel like another part of why Howie is more relatable than Clarissa Dalloway is that one is about an office worker in his mid-20s living in America in the late 80s and the other is about a 50 year old British aristocrat from 1925.
ReplyDeleteThe Mezzanine does a truly excellent job of capturing atoms as they fall on the mind. However, I feel that the characters in The Mezzanine feel a bit less fleshed out. Howie gains a fair amount of depth over the story (especially how he looks at the world), but the other characters fall short of this as we never get inside their heads and in some ways are present merely so that Howie does not exist in a void. In Woolf's novel, you get a real sense that every character is a universe unto themselves, and because of that, I think Mrs. Dalloway is the superior novel.
ReplyDeleteI feel like both authors made their books more engaging by specifically picking a very small moment in time and centralizing around the characters thoughts. While Howie packed several memories from months ago into one escalator ride, you still want to see more of his thought process and attention to detail on other simple topics after finishing the book. The same goes for Mrs. Dalloway. Even if there was no party and it was an ordinary day for Clarissa, Woolf's style of jumping from character to character and really getting their point of view could make even an hour in a day interesting.
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