In The Beginning

The Hours is a very good film.  I really was engaged by it, so much so that my mood afterwords was acutely altered for the next half an hour or so.  The most interesting thing about the film from a stylistic sense for me was by opening with Virginia Woolf's suicide.  It is much in the tradition of Greek drama, telling the audience from the outset what the ending will be.  Yet it is such a dark mood for the film to take from the first seconds, here is the author of Mrs. Dalloway which gives birth to the "main" setting in New York, ending her life before the title placard has even come up.  It's not as if audiences would enter the film expecting to see a happy film, but such a beginning seems an odd choice all the same.  It shocks the viewer before they have even settled in their seat, so why did Stephen Daldry choose to do it this way?

I think the answer lies in the three heroines themselves.  The three of them know what is going on with themselves, and yet others don't accept that they know themselves.  This is most clearly shown with Virginia and Leonard at the train station.  It's clear that Leonard cares for his wife, and honestly wants the best for her, but he is convinced that the doctors know best, that Virginia is forgetting the bad times she went through.  Clarissa Vaughan finds herself to be the only one who can understand Richard, and also the only one who has a vision for the party and its guests.  Sally seems doubtful of everything coming together, and she clearly seems to resent Clarissa's near obsession with Richard.  Louis seems to make light of Clarissa's breakdown much like Leonard, again not out of a place of spite but more from taking things at face value, Clarissa said she's okay after a few minutes, so she's just okay in his mind.  Laura is confined to housewife status, clearly something she neither wants nor excels at, but everything around her is screaming that not only does she need to do it (housewife life) but that anyone can do it--the cake is very emblematic of this.

So by showing us that Virginia kills herself right away, and telling us that it isn't until 1941, viewers are stuck in the same place the heroines are.  We know what is going to happen, so when the other characters don't seem to recognize the severity of the matter it is frustrating to us.  Suicide for many viewers is probably a relatively foreign concept in that they themselves haven't seriously considered it.  This shared frustration helps viewers identity with Virginia and through her the other two main women.  And this connection is what ultimately drives the film, you don't want Clarissa's party to be spoiled, you want Laura to have a great birthday party for Dan, and probably most of all, you want to see Virginia happy.  Even though from the beginning it seems clear that nothing is really going to go well for any of them, you're still cheering for them because a piece of you deep inside probably has felt or feels like them.

Loving to Feel Hatred

Who do we want in life, friends or enemies?  Enemies inspire you to defeat them, friends support you when you need them.  Enemies are the antithesis to your life, friends are people to model.  Perhaps for those of us lucky enough to be able to motivate ourselves to action without an antagonist, an enemy isn't necessary.  For Clarissa Dalloway, it is.  "She hated her: she loved her" (170).  That her is Miss Doris Kilman, and her reasoning is simple, "Hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth's seducer; the woman who had crept in to steal and defile" (170).  Clearly the feeling is mutual, Miss Kilman certainly is no fan of Clarissa, which is unsurprising as they are both after the attention and affection of Elizabeth.  Maybe even more so is to leave an impression on Elizabeth, as they both fixate on whom Elizabeth's behavior resembles (or doesn't resemble).

It seems strange that Clarissa would ever say she loves Doris, really it seems strange for Clarissa to say she loves anyone, even Elizabeth or Richard (of course Richard can't say it at all).  But maybe that's just it, she makes Clarissa feel something—feel something in a way that her mind doesn't have to tell her how to feel, like when she straightens up as the car passes to feel more dignified, or when she feels her party isn't quite right because there isn't dancing.  This is an intense feeling, and really the only one I notice ever being described by Clarissa.  Put in this way this seems like a stark similarity to Septimus to follow from one of the panel presentations from my section today.  Septimus can't feel and he tries anything to feel, marrying Lucrezia hoping she can make him feel again.

So now comes the question: if Clarissa could, would she get rid of Doris, even though she "loves" her because she makes her feel something?  I would say the answer is no, because as Elizabeth is not independent, Clarissa really could stop Elizabeth from seeing her.  I think she chooses to allow her to stay, so as they can continue to have this war over Elizabeth.  To some extent I buy that the fear that if ever forced to choose, Elizabeth would pick Doris over Clarissa, does play a role in allowing Doris to stay.  Still though, I believe that Clarissa will do anything to keep the one feeling she has, even if it is hatred.

What Time is it?

Mrs. Dalloway takes place on one day in June 1923.  It is a character-centric novel, not a plot based one, so that short time frame works perfectly well.  Yet surprisingly, there is a common focus on time.  Often times Woolf stops her characters in the middle of thoughts to give us the time.  It is only on the second page that we first hear mention of Big Ben, by far the loudest clock Clarissa would hear in Westminster.  She says, "One feels even in the midst of traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense...before Big Ben strikes" (4).  It is a consciously understood that people pause when they feel the time has reached a significant milestone.  Clarissa doesn't elaborate on this behavior, indeed characters don't seem to pause before the impending "leaden circles" dissolve in the future, but I find it interesting that so early on, in fact in the same sentence we learn where Clarissa lives, time (a very important part of plot based stories) is mentioned.

For Woolf, it makes more sense structurally to keep bringing up time.  It gives readers a sense of proportion (one Sir William would no doubt approve of) as to how long different thoughts or conversations take place.  Peter and Clarissa's conversation is almost exactly thirty minutes, Clarissa questions who would interrupt her at eleven in the morning (39) while Peter steps onto the street from Clarissa house as the leaden circles dissolve after the half hour chimes (47).  It also allows her to swap between character's points of view very quickly, all while maintaining a linear line of movement in the story.  After we see Septimus and Lucrezia leave Sir William's office and read of Lucrezia's dislike of the man, it is the chiming of clocks that switches us to Hugh and Richard (100).  It is a quick and easy way to create a more traditional element to her story without compromising her intentions to make this about the people.

Then of course there is the idea of physical passing of time.  A lot of the characters think back to a different point in time in their life.  Clarissa and Peter (and Richard to some degree) think incessantly of what once was at Bourton.  Septimus and Lucrezia think back to their time in Italy, for Lucrezia the Septimus she fell in love with then, and for Septimus Evans and his ability to feel.  Time is something they all wish they can control, and can have more of, but of course time is constantly moving at a consistent rate.  I have no doubt time will continue to play a role in the remainder of the novel, especially at the party when the characters will probably spent most of the time reminiscing, though in general I still find it interesting that it has a large place in the novel at all.   

The Name Game

Howie fixates on a lot of little details.  That's what makes Howie Howie.  From the modernist design of staplers to the inefficiencies of air dryers in bathrooms, no object or task is too small for lengthy discourse. Yet there is something seemingly large and important that is almost completely ignored by our observant protagonist of The Mezzanine: the names of people.  It would seem appropriate to discuss names in The Mezzanine, after all, a few letters are often all that represent us on the written page, people judge us for what our name is and how we spell it.  Names have deep roots in culture, reflecting a family history as well as contemporary culture.  It's no coincidence that generations will often have a lot of...Johns or Alices or Stephens...names are shown to go in trends, the more people hear about a name becoming popular the more they use it or a variant.  So why is it that Howie doesn't discuss names, and goes so far as to almost completely ignore them?

Let's take the case of his own name.  Howie, the diminutive form of Howard, is a pretty average name, at least in my own head it doesn't evoke any strong images, if anything the only thing that stands out is how unremarkable it is, neither common nor rare, not specifically from any given culture or time period.  Perhaps Howie doesn't mention his name because it is just that--his name, since it's his story he doesn't need to remind himself of his main character.  I normally don't think of myself in the third person, and if this were a stream of consciousness style book I would have no quibble with only seeing his name once (in the bathroom of all places).  Looking at a different example of a book with a similarly styled first person narration from a somewhat removed version of the narrator who is authoring the story, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield manages to slip his name into the narrative often.  Granted, Holden is more specifically writing to the reader, though Howie clearly talks to us through his footnotes (something Salinger chose never to deploy). Think about how many times in conversation (either in real time or revisiting in your memory) someone says your name.  Maybe not as much as "you" but my bet is that it comes up every now and then, enough that if you were to write to the detail that Howie did, it would probably be included many times.  This would lend to the idea that Howie is intentionally editing out his name in his depiction of his lunch hour.

The other person's name that stands out to me would be L.  In class people brought up that we never really get a description of L., what she looks like, who she is, what she does, we see only fleeting glimpses of her in relation to one of Howie's observatory stories.  Forgive me for going to a different novel for comparison, but I immediately saw the connection to E.C. of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  In that, she is the romantic interest of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus.  E.C. who the reader later finds out is named Emma, has minimal contact with Stephen, with little more actually taking place between the two of them than glances during different scenes.  Emma is one of the key pieces that Stephen fails at during his maturation that ultimately drives him from his native shores of Ireland to seek a new country to achieve his potential.  We don't quite see the same thing from Howie and L., they seem to be in a long term relationship.  Though she is a seemingly large part of his life, perhaps Howie's reluctance to name L. derives from her importance in his mind that ultimately does not fully fit with her place in reality.

So now I will finally attempt an answer to my question initially posed above.  I suggest that it is in response to Aurelius that Howie chooses to ignore names.  "Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spices and ashes."  If we do not live meaningful lives as Aurelius argues, then what in death are we remembered by if not our actions and mannerisms?  Our names.  For millenia humans have carved the names of the dead onto rocks so that if nothing else, that singular description will survive.  Is there any way Howie could have refuted Aurelius more, then by focusing on all the trivialness of mortal life, while ignoring the one thing of relative permanence?    

Here Lies

Here lies the end of my coming of age, and the beginning of my journey in the 20th century.

The Coming of a Writer

I figure since all the seniors seem to be reflecting on their time in individual classes and at Uni as a whole that I can spend one blog post reflecting.  Of course I'm not leaving this school, but it is the end of the year after all.  For all the books that I've read this year in AA Lit and now Coming of Age, the amount of allusions, allegories, social commentary, and a whole host of other literary elements found in the books we've read has been amazing.  Last semester I remember wondering if Ralph Ellison intended everything that we (and professional literary critics) were able to see in his words.  Surely, I thought to myself, it would be impossible for Ellison to finish a novel of Invisible Man's complexity and intentionally add in all that he did.

This curiosity of mine was reinvigorated when I began writing the semester project.  There was so much I wanted to say, I wanted to continue the story lines of Holden and Jane, have Julia meet new people, make social commentary, all while trying to make a just plain interesting story at the surface level.  In the end, my semester project turned into a long, roughly thirty page short story that really did hit almost everything I wanted to cover.  At times though, I sacrificed brevity to make sure everything was fleshed out.  Sure, it made the paper more accessible to an average reader who hadn't read the books it was based on, nor was versed in reading between the lines, but did that make it better or worse?  Is it the author's responsibility to make it possible for nearly any reader to understand their work, or as the author is it okay to make the reader work for it a little bit?

In the end, I realize that maybe it isn't always best to spell everything out so much.  That may be where the genius of someone like Ralph Ellison lies, he puts in just enough that an astute reader (or group of readers) can get an inkling as to his point, and from there notice it recurring and being supported later in the novel.  James Joyce didn't write Portrait with all the notes that we had the benefit of in the back of the book.  That was a publishing decision, and one which I imagine he wouldn't have chosen.  Those notes certainly made the already complicated novel more understandable for modern readers, and in turn more popular (because an average reader doesn't like books it doesn't understand).  That is what a publisher's job is then: to sell the most books possible.

That was Salinger's greatest success, maintaining control over the physical book, not just the story.  He's famous for not including a picture of himself in his bio, not allowing the cover of the book to be fancy, and to control all the information from cover to cover.  Take that in comparison to another book from a few years earlier in The Great Gatsby.  That book is known for it's cover, with the faceless eyes and lips, and the stylized version of the New York skyline.  Fitzgerald was even quoted as saying once that the cover art came first (without the artist having read the manuscript) and he, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then incorporated images into the book that could be related to the cover.

Of course my "Re-Illusion off Oxford" will never be a world famous work.  There won't be movie deals or famous cover art, but I can still, in some small sense, relate to the struggles of authors to maintain ownership over their own work.  In my case I fought with myself, over giving my work a more accessible level of detail, or keeping it more below the surface in an elusive attempt to create art.  The reader friendly version won out, though even the struggle between the two roads diverging was important for me, both as a writer, and as a reader relating to the authors I've begun reading more and more.

Do we need it to be fresher?

When I read over Mr. Mitchell's blog post the other day about the teacher who found that Black Swan Green was more relatable to her students than Catcher in the Rye, I was somewhat surprised, though not entirely.  I wrote earlier about how coming into Catcher I didn't like that everyone told me it was the book that would change my life.  When I would tell assorted family members at different Hanukah parties during winter break that I was taking a class on coming of age novels, with few exceptions everyone would ask, "Are you going to read Catcher in the Rye?  You just have too."  I was then often treated to their personal take on the book, its role in their life and their guess as to how it may change my life.  Like Mr. Mitchell said in his post, discovering a book (or telling yourself you've discovered it) can make a book really appealing.  I would never get a book that's sitting at the front table of Barnes and Noble, with posters and flyers advertising it, I like to go and find books that I've never heard of.  Catcher was certainly not that kind of experience.

I did enjoy the book in large part because I related to Holden though.  Maybe because I thought his struggle to remain a childlike teenager in a society that told him that as a rich white man he should relish in his ascension to the pinnacle of 1950s American society mirrored my similar struggle with going to a school and having friends college plans are a given so the focus is on career outlook and things of that nature.  Though he was from a different time, and many of the images a contemporary of Holden's would understand I didn't, translating from that time to this time wasn't that much of a stretch.  The things expected of you, the phoniness of some of the people around you, those things haven't really changed.  It's not to say that the students in Roake's article live in some alternate universe where the aforementioned behavior doesn't exist, or that somehow they aren't astute enough to be able to translate Holden into something more relatable to them, maybe the complex voice of Stephen Dedalus made Holden's more real-world oriented banter seem much closer to current life.

That isn't to say that I couldn't relate to Jason Taylor because I related to Holden, his many struggles were very familiar, either things that I went through or saw others have to overcome.  It was nice to start reading Black Swan Green and have no one who saw me read it know what it was about.  It was nice to feel that feeling (though probably untrue) that I was connecting something from the text that hadn't been though of before.  It was a similar feeling to when I read White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty last semester.  It's also relatively new, by a largely unnoticed author in the prose world (though Beatty is a known poet).

Jessica Roake's point in her Slate article, that English departments should replace Catcher with Black Swan Green, on the surface I suppose makes sense, if you can only do one coming of age novel you might as well go with the more modern one.  But it doesn't seem right to just swap out one book for another to fill the spot deemed "young boy coming of age and struggling with his society."  I really didn't like on the back of Black Swan Green's cover when it had a quote reading that it was Britain's Catcher in the Rye.  I believe that there are elements that Mitchell probably picked up from Salinger, and traits of Jason that may trace back to Holden, but with a new book to say that it is only a translated version of an old classic seems sacrilegious for a literary critic and an author.  No one would ever say that Don Quixote is a Spanish version of Canterbury Tales (perhaps because the plots are distinctly different), but both these novels serve the same purpose as the beginning of each nation's literary tradition.  Both Catcher and Black Swan Green say that being independent is okay, that you don't have to follow every whim of the society around you, so why would anyone who likes these two books, let alone wrote them or about them define them in terms of each other.  In the end I think each book stands on its own as an important member of the larger coming of age genre, and while I disagree with Roake's position that Black Swan Green is the new Catcher in the Rye, I don't envy her for having to make the decision between a classic in the genre and what may well be a future classic.