Both Baker and Woolf write about short and seemingly mundane periods of time, whether it is a normal day at work or a June day in England. Having already read The Mezzanine, we have picked up on what Baker finds, to use Howie's favorite word, interesting, and as we indulge further and further into Mrs. Dalloway, we are getting a better and better sense of what Woolf writes about as well. We are able to see what she finds important through her essays and Mrs. Dalloway, and now that we have that better understanding I ask you, "How does Woolf's topic of writing differ or compare to that of Baker's in The Mezzanine?"
From what we have seen over the past weeks in both Woolf's essays and Mrs. Dalloway, it is obvious that she finds characters and their stories to be the focus of her writing, and any fiction writing for that matter. She writes about a group of different characters using free indirect discourse, and through this writing style she tells the reader about the story of many different characters all at once. Her focus on how these characters think and what their beliefs are help us to see how deeply based her novel is in those characters. Woolf tells us little about what is actually happening outside of her characters minds, but rather tells us about what they think about what is going on. For example in the scene with the car backfiring, we are told about who everyone, especially the main characters, thinks is in the car, but we don't learn much about what the area looks like. It is this focus on the unseen and mostly unspoken part of our world that defines Woolf's writing in Mrs. Dalloway.
In The Mezzanine on the other hand, Baker will tell us in painstakingly precise detail about each and every object for example the doorknob. This is something that Woolf's essay would say is materialist. Baker does not only spend his time on describing objects, since the other part of The Mezzanine is a tunnel into the mind of Howie as we see snippets of his past and we learn his views about each and every object and interaction. Since the readers time in The Mezzanine is spent in the thoughts of Howie he ends up being, in my opinion, a more developed and familiar character than any of those in Mrs. Dalloway.
The biggest difference I am able to see in their topics of writing is their focus on objects vs people. Although Baker manages to do a mix of both with his stream of consciousness writing allowing us to understand Howie, The Mezzanine doesn't get close to the amount of information about characters thoughts as in Mrs. Dalloway. So from my experience so far with these two writers I think that although both writers have a fascination with looking into the mind of the characters, the way that they created their characters, Howie focused on everyday objects the others on the people around them, shows us a major difference in these two writers.
In my opinion I feel like the Mezzanine was more enjoyable to read than Mrs. Dalloway. While it is true that Virgina Woolfe focuses on characters --rather than objects and surroundings -- I like Howie as a character better. I feel that Woolfe uses free indirect discourse in a way that doesn't allow us to learn things about our characters in a clear way. She only gives us bits and pieces, just enough to keep us interested. Baker on the other hand takes us deep into Howie's head and we often get large pieces of his past and are able to relate better to him. Don't take this as a fact, it just a matter of opinion.
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ReplyDeleteOne other big difference between The Mezzanine and Mrs. Dalloway is that Woolf more accurately depicts how one's thoughts progress through TIME. In The Mezzanine, Howie elaborates and researches on his thoughts from that specific lunch hour: His brain would not have been able to go through all 130 pages in that one hour. Baker is not going through Howie's exact thought progression during his lunch break, but rather takes Howie out of that hour and has him embellish and expand his ideas from that hour. Woolf, on the other hand, follows her character's thoughts through Big Ben's chimes and their thought progressions seem to follow their actions in real time.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really important distinction: Howie's narrative is explicitly a retrospective, written reconstruction--he's having many of these thoughts "now," as he writes, stimulated in part by revisiting this lunch hour in memory.
DeleteWoolf's characters aren't writing--they are thinking . . . and they don't know we're listening! Baker is so aware of an audience; Woolf's characters are, of course, totally unaware of an audience. We're like thought-voyeurs as we read.
Though it is a somewhat valid critique against Ms. Dalloway that none of the characters are quite as developed as Howie is in The Mezzanine, I think it's unfair to compare a novel with multiple complex (as people tend to be) characters, each of which she tries to expand upon in great detail and from multiple perspectives. In this way I think that she has accomplished a lot compared to the elaboration of a single character told from his singular point of view, much of which is actually quite distant from himself (though his attitude towards them does tell us much).
ReplyDeleteThe main difference I found in the writing styles of Woolf and Baker is that Baker tends to go into great detail describing all of the aspects of certain things, whereas Woolf will give us hints and clues about the personalities of her characters, and leave it up to us to put the pieces together.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that even though Baker and Woolf have different writing styles, and were trying to express different ideas in Mrs. Dalloway and in the Mezzanine, they have a similar spirit in that they both describe certain things in excruciating detail, and they try to fit their sentence structure and style to what they are trying to describe. As you say, Woolf is more focused on thoughts, whereas Baker discusses the minutiae in life, but the information content regarding each author's respective focus is abnormally high, to say the least. In addition to this, their style of prose itself seems to help in their description, as they both use somewhat rambling sentences to give the reader the feeling of a train of thought.
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