Right before we started Mrs.
Dalloway, we read two essays by Virginia Woolf. In these, she writes that
she, and all other authors, should be in search of character and accuracy of
life of that character. In her scenario with Mrs. Brown, she criticizes other
authors for describing only the carriage and scene and forcing readers to fill
in the blanks when it came to Mrs. Brown’s character. She is frustrated by the
materialistic tendencies of this fiction. This made me think back to The Mezzanine and wonder what Woolf
would think of the novel, specifically Howie’s “character”.
On the one hand, The
Mezzanine is incredibly materialistic. It could essentially be
characterized as a person going on and on about things he encounters and
sometimes talking about an aspect of life. We are presented with a picture of
Howie, but only through the objects he describes and the experiences he shares
with us. In many ways, the reader’s only way to glean Howie’s character is to analyze
his analysis of life, or his descriptions of life.
On the other hand, after finishing The Mezzanine, I feel like I know about the character of Howie. The
footnotes and the way in which he describes objects and characterizes his
interactions with the world define a rather specific kind of character. How
many people would refer to escalators as “a pair of integral signs”? And even
if you wouldn’t typically refer to the escalators as integral signs, I think it
says something about Howie (and Baker?) that, when trying to make the mundane seem
important, their instinct is to go for this specific wording. When I was
writing my pastiche, I felt like parts of my character/personality made subtle
appearances. Even when I was writing in Baker’s style, I had some control over
my word choice and portrayal of the world.
I think that Baker does create a character from Howie, and I
think this has to do with the perspective. If all of the events were simply
told, without the personal anecdotes or quirky phrases, I would have been bored
out of my mind and unable to relate to the issues and joys Howie points out in
life. But how would the events be told without character (assuming that it
could not simply be presented as fact, because then it would not be fiction)?
If the “events” were just written, without a traditional character’s voice (such as Howie's), would the
narrator’s voice (the omnipotent) count as a character? One of the things that
gives me pause in saying Howie does have character is that I don’t know how
much of the writing depicts the world from Howie’s perspective and how much of
the writing is the world from Baker’s perspective. Where do we stop learning
about Howie and start learning about Baker? Does the author count as character?
I don’t know, but I’m hoping that reading Mrs. Dalloway will help me learn more
about what counts as character (because at this point, even an attempt at a definition
would help).
What do you think?
