Woolf, Character, The Mezzanine, and a lot of questions

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?

Future Posts are for 20th Century Novel!

Beryl

*This post is talking about a scene that is in the final In Dallas. So go read that first. 

Beryl intrigued me more and more as the novel went on. She is by no means a primary character, nothing like Jack Ruby or Oswald or Marina, but her presence at the end of the book felt important to me. She’s just sitting there, watching and rewatching the assassination of Oswald, knowing that she’s supposed to feel something like satisfaction, but she can’t. It’s only a sad experience. That said, she continues watching and is unable to pull herself away because it just keeps replaying over and over. “She felt morally bound to watch.” (DeLillo 446).

On the one hand, Beryl is interested in the shooting: “The camera doesn’t catch all of it. There seem to be missing frames, lost levels of information. Brief and simple as the shooting is, it is too much to take in, too mingled in jumped-up energies. Each new showing reveals a detail” (DeLillo 446). The way this is phrased reminds me of Nicholas Branch and the entire conspiracy theory culture out there around the JFK shooting. Each time people look at the assassination, a new plot aspect or piece of evidence is considered. Throughout the novel, Nicholas Branch is overwhelmed by the amount of information, but there seems to perpetually be something missing.

Beryl is not by any means rooting for Oswald; she remembers Kennedy fondly and does not like Oswald. She understands Jack Ruby’s motives and even realizes that hers are somewhat similar. But she still questions why they keep showing the Oswald assassination: “We want him [Oswald] out of here too. And now he’s gone but it isn’t helping at all” (DeLillo 446).

Beryl cries when Oswald is shot, and yet she keeps watching because of “something in Oswald’s face” (DeLillo 447). She feels bad for Oswald and at the same time is curious about what Oswald knows. She seems to pick up on the fact that Lee was living his life for history: “He is commenting on the documentary footage even as he is being shot. Then he himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes another kind of knowledge. But he has made us a part of his dying” (DeLillo 447).

This passage has been sticking with me. Beryl seems relatable for me and my opinions of Libra and the JFK conspiracies as a whole. On the one hand, I am interested in finding out what really happened. To some extent, it is a feeling of being “morally bound” to be interested; someone shot the president. Almost all my instincts are programmed to find the truth; that is the moral thing. I should want to know what actually happened. And to some extent I do, but I question what would come from knowing the truth. What issues would it actually resolve? JFK is killed, Lee is killed, Jack Ruby dies. If we know what actually happened, would that add to or take away from the tragedy? I'm always down to hear a good conspiracy theory, but part of me wonders what they actually do in terms of helping. 

Lee in Jail

By now, we’ve read about Lee’s formative years in Libra. Lee has gone from a kid on the streets to a marine in Japan. Lee is thrown into prison for “wrongful use of provoking words to a staff noncommissioned officer,” a relatively minor charge when he could be arrested for treason or use of an unauthorized weapon (DeLillo 97).

Lee believes that prison is an incredibly formative experience for great minds and thinks that his stay will be similar. His studies of communism and his idealization(?) of its leaders made him think that being imprisoned or isolated is crucial in his development as a communist. Lee describes Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin (I’m assuming the description is influenced by his perspective and not purely factual):

“These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room.  They felt it and waited.” (DeLillo 34).

Once Lee is actually imprisoned, he attempts to make his short stay into something like the lives of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky. “He tried to feel history in the cell,” implying that his quest to find the force of history is unsuccessful (DeLillo 100). He is disappointed in Dupard for not being the wise cellmate that he read about. His entire jail stay doesn’t seem particularly successful (if what he was going for was important thought, epiphanies, etc. But then I have no idea how one measures how successful jail time was). I don’t know how critical his jail time was to his development as a communist thinker.

However, “he could see how he’d been headed here since the day he was born,” so he still feels somewhat in place (DeLillo 100). He doesn’t act particularly different when he is in jail (I’m mainly thinking of how he tries to antagonize people). Lee realizes that the jail “was just another name for the stunted rooms where he’d spent his life” (DeLillo 100). This made me think about the other “stunted rooms” he lived in: the Bronx and New Orleans.

This ties in with something else I’ve been noticing: DeLillo uses repetition of phrases, sort of similar to what Kurt Vonnegut does in Slaughterhouse-Five. The one that jumped out to me the most was the phrase “spent serious time…”, firstly because I thought it was odd that a phrase that reminds me distinctly of prison would be used in Lee’s case (because he spent such a short time in jail before getting killed) and secondly because it’s only used with important aspects of his life. A list of all the places where I’ve spotted it:

·       - “Learn the alleys, use the dark. He rode the subways. He spent serious time at the zoo” (DeLillo 6)

·       - “He spent serious time at the library” (studying communist works) (DeLillo 33)

·     -  “Or he sat in an unused office in a far corner of the third floor, where he spent serious time reading the Marine Corps manual” (DeLillo 42)

·     -  “Back in Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, kept to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs.” (DeLillo 112).

Lee’s experiences in all these places and times seem very important and formative. I’m wondering how influential his prison stay actually is to his opinions and development, because he doesn’t really change throughout his prison stay, but communist works and the Marine Corps manual are very influential for him. I’m also excited to see where DeLillo takes Lee’s idea of and experiences in prisons, particularly at the end of the story.

Thoughts?

Dana's Morality

In Kindred, Dana is repeatedly forced to visit the Antebellum South and adapt to her surroundings. By using this unpredictable mode of time travel and the relatable way in which Dana’s story is told, Octavia Butler forces us to reckon with what we would do if we were in Dana’s place.

Dana’s first trip to the 1800s seems like the most straightforward version of the time travel. She is sent back without warning, but upon arrival, she knows exactly what she has to do: “Before me was a wide tranquil river, and near the middle of that river was a child splashing, screaming…Drowning! I reacted to the child in trouble. Later I could ask questions, try to find out where I was, what had happened. Now I went to help the child.” (Butler 13). Dana is the hero in this situation. She saves Rufus using 1970s technology, despite not totally knowing artificial respiration. Margaret beats Dana and Tom threatens to kill Dana, but nonetheless, she saves Rufus. She is then transported back to the 1970s. This is probably the most cut-and-dry situation Dana faces:  A toddler needs her help in a life-or-death crisis. Dana is immediately sympathetic. As readers, we would like to think that we attempt to do the same. This creates a precedent for a reader’s perception of Dana: she is a reliable narrator and moral person by our contemporary standards.

The reader’s initial identification with Dana makes her subsequent choices more understandable.  In her second encounter with Rufus, Dana learns more context about the time period of her travels. She puzzles out the real reason she keeps travelling back in time is “to insure my family’s survival, my own birth” (Butler 28). Therefore, a sense of preservation prevents her from harming Rufus or Alice because doing so could jeopardize her own life.

Throughout the rest of the novel, Dana makes incredibly difficult moral decisions about what to do in the 1800s.  Rufus is a slave owner.  Dana must struggle with the immorality of his position and his actions with the need to preserve her own life. As readers, we recognize and identify with her contemporary morality.  Thus, we are forced to go along with her choices.

Butler makes it very hard for readers to question Dana’s decisions. By painting Dana as a morally responsible character who is trying her hardest in unpredictable situations, Butler makes Dana sympathetic to the reader.  Through Dana, we must confront the difficult and uncertain options of what it means to behave morally.

blue and ivory

The phrase “so it goes” encompasses the attitude of Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians, particularly about wars and the bad parts of life. It represents their views of time and gives detachment and inevitability to any death for Billy. Because the phrase is used to describe the death of anything, from prisoners to a half-full bottle of champagne, it assigns a certain equality (and therefore loss) to any death. It also shows how disturbingly easy it is for Billy to process death and immediately dissociate with it.

Another phrase that is repeated often in a variety of situations, both in the war and out of it to show and critique Tralfamadorian thinking is “blue and ivory”. The first time the phrase is used is after the plane crash, when Billy is writing a letter to a newspaper about Tralfamadore. It was cold, he was in the cellar, and, “He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a bathrobe, though it was late afternoon. His bare feet were blue and ivory” (Vonnegut 28). Later, Barbara visits Billy, but can’t find him: “Billy didn’t answer her, so she was nearly hysterical, expecting to find his corpse” (Vonnegut 28).

The next time “blue and ivory” is used is while Billy and Roland Weary are walking after being captured by the German soldiers: “Billy found the afternoon stingingly exciting. There was so much to see—dragon’s teeth, killing machines, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory. So it goes” (Vonnegut 65). This is a striking difference to the scene before. What was once describing a very mundane experience now describes a corpse—something deeply disturbing and traumatizing to see.

The next few quotes all come from the scene where Billy is about to be abducted by the Tralfamadorians (at the beginning of chapter 4). Once again, each mention of the “blue and ivory” seems normal and not at all associated with anything that happened during the war from Billy’s perspective:

“He felt spooky and luminous, felt as though he were wrapped in cool fur that was full of static electricity. He looked down at his bare feet. They were ivory and blue.” (Vonnegut 72)

“Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet.” (Vonnegut 73)

“Out he went, his blue and ivory feet crushing the wet salad of the lawn.” (Vonnegut 75)

“Blue and ivory” is also used when Billy is in the boxcar: “Listen—on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy’s boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the sill of the ventilator.” (Vonnegut 80).

The final time “blue and ivory” is used is the most disturbing to me. It is used to describe the corpse of the hobo in the boxcar:

 “They came to the prison railroad yard again. They had arrived on only two cars. They would depart far more comfortably on four. They saw the dead hobo again. He was frozen stiff in the weeds beside the track. He was in a fetal position, trying even in death to nestle like a spoon with the others. There were no others now. He was nestling with thin air and cinders. Somebody had taken his boots. His bare feet were blue and ivory. It was all right somehow, his being dead. So it goes” (Vonnegut 148).

 “Blue and ivory” bothers me just as much as “So it goes.” The blue and ivory feet specifically associate with death for the reader. However, Billy doesn’t explicitly draw these conclusions even though he should be able to. Fitting with his character, Billy simply seems to not care. He appears to think that death is not awful, in fact he excitedly characterizes the corpse as something to see and says that the death of the hobo was “all right somehow” (Vonnegut 148). Though he has experienced his entire life before, he does not appear to draw the connections between his own blue and ivory feet walking down the stairs and the feet of the dead hobo. And while this is consistent with the Tralfamadorian ideas about death and time, it still disturbs me a lot (which is Vonnegut’s point, I guess).

Earline

We touched briefly on Earline’s role in Mumbo Jumbo during class and this post is a product of my thoughts on that.

Jes Grew is a phenomenon spread by the youth. One of the main issues the white people (and the Atonists) have with Jes Grew is that teens are getting into it as a form of rebellion. The only named white person in rebellion of Atonist beliefs, other than the dancing hordes affected by Jes Grew, is Thor Wintergreen, whose foray into the Mu’tafikah ends after he gives the rest of the group up to Biff Musclewhite. He starts out very committed to the Mu’tafikah, but eventually he is forced/convinced to go back to the dominant Atonist culture.

   

Earline seems to be the equivalent youth that doesn’t fit in with Jes Grew. Although she works for Papa LaBas, she is skeptical of his ideas and methods in the beginning, saying to LaBas, “There you go jabbering again… Your conspiratorial hypothesis about some secret society molding the consciousness of the West. You know you don’t have any empirical evidence for it that; you can’t prove….” (Reed 25). She obviously isn’t totally convinced of LaBas’ ideas about the Wallflower Order. She also says to LaBas that, “We need scientists and engineers, we need lawyers” (Reed 26). With the emphasis on fact and order, Earline’s ideas mix more with those of Atonism that those of Jes Grew. However, after Papa LaBas talking with her for a short paragraph, she breaks down, revealing that she’s stressed because of Berbelang. This breakdown reminded me a bit of Thor’s, but the circumstances are not as dire.

By the end of the book, however, Earline has changed, saying to LaBas that she’s “thinking about going to New Orleans and Haiti, Brazil and all over the South studying our ancient cultures, our HooDoo cultures. Maybe by and by some future artists 30 to 40 years from now will benefit from my research. Who knows. Pop, I believe in Jes Grew now” (Reed 206). Throughout the book, Earline commits herself to the idea of Jes Grew. However, rather than being forced to agree with Jes Grew, she is persuaded through her possession by a loa and Papa LaBas’ story.

Earline plays a background role, but nonetheless one that is very important. In my opinion, in addition to being one of the youths convinced by Papa LaBas, Earline shows the advancement of the reader’s perspective while reading Mumbo Jumbo. In the beginning, she has an Atonist background and is merely asking for some clarity, similar to what readers are thinking. By the end, she, as well as readers, have been relatively convinced that Jes Grew and Papa LaBas’ ideas are legitimate. Where we leave Earline is also significant. She invites Papa LaBas to a play “in Lafayette Theatre” called “Mumbo Jumbo Holiday” (Reed 206-207).  In class, we talked about how events in theaters are typically Atonist. Perhaps this is Reed’s way of reminding us that we are reading Mumbo Jumbo with an Atonist background and that we can't truly see Jes Grew in an unbiased way?

What do you think?