So, with all that thrown into your face like Sally Seton into Clarissa Parry's, where do we go from here? To Mrs. Dalloway. How does one describe her? She is 52, living in 1923 London married to Richard Dalloway. Yes, thank you Mr. Bennett, all that is true, but who is Clarissa (minus the Dalloway)? Would I like her if I met her? Virginia Woolf really delves into the mind of Clarissa, showing us more than an outward description ever could. She doesn't tell us who she is socially or what she does primarily. Not outright. Woolf shows us everything and leaves it to the reader to decipher humanity out of the flashes of meaning bouncing around in Clarissa's mind.
There is something, I believe, called Human Understanding - that every person who has ever lived knows about. It's indescribable and self-contradictory, but it is an author's passion to capture snapshots of it like shadowy 'bigfoots' in grainy images.
In this sense, we know Mrs. Dalloway better than our best friends and better than we may know ourselves. It's Woolf's approach to character that I really love. She knows her characters better than she knows herself, and not just from an analytical point of view. She can both become the character and write what they think and feel, while still seeing things about them that they will never know. This kind of intense understanding of another human - which characters are, really - is character-based fiction. This is what it's all about. Fiction stands just on the brink of humanity, and yet there is something so very human in the existence of fiction.
On a related note that I may or may not find worthy of a separate blog later, I read as a writer now. Basically I like paining attention to how writers make thing fit together into one solid work. Right now, I'm struggling with plot since my novel is so character-based, so I find it fascinating that Woolf can tell so much of a story through her character's self-revelations, which we all have every day - usually small things.
I think on the next quiz I'll just answer all the questions by saying "Ah yes, another example of The Great Unanswerable."
ReplyDeleteYour transition about Sally Seton made me laugh.(cue Mr. Sutton's phrase "How's that for a transition?")
I think that Virginia Woolf would have to do some deep "introspective homework" or whatever Majerus called it in Nonfic, in order to be able to write about other people's thoughts. Usually, people can only really write well when they're writing about what they know. And I don't think that Mrs. Dalloway is just Woolf BS-ing her way through human thought. I think that in order to write a book like this, Virginia Woolf must have had to think a lot about what it means to be human, and the only way for her to really do that is to dwell on her own life and her own thoughts.
That said. I do love how you explain her writing process "She can both become the character and write what they think and feel, while still seeing things about them that they will never know." It's so cool to think about it that way! That's one of the reasons I love this book so much. It's a giant puzzle. But it's not. because Woolf gives us all the information and it's all right in front of us but we still have to decipher it or something. Yay for books making us smarter people.
"Reading as a writer" is an excellent approach, indeed. All writers who talk about "learning" to write cite books and authors that shaped their sense of how sentences work, how plots are shaped, how characters are drawn, etc. Indeed, the pastiche assignments are a way of me prompting you to examine the "model" text in just this kind of light.
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