Some Observations

Every so often I write a post that makes no attempt at organization or cohesion. Thought it was about time for one of those.

• At one point Jake tells Cohn that Brett's "one true love died in the war". This is conceivable given that a large portion of her generation was lost to WWI and that Brett must have known some of these young men during her time as a nurse. However, I happened to read this line just after glancing at a quote of Brett's employing the exact same phrase: "Jake, you're my one true love", which could afford a different interpretation of Jake's claim. Given that Brett's chances of being with Jake romantically died with his war injury, would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that Jake might be referring to himself when he speaks of Brett's dead lover? (darn it, Mr. Mitchell! I promise I wrote this before you mentioned it in class.) If this is the case, it seriously takes Jake's reliability as a narrator into question. If he could lie to Cohn in this believable but slightly self-flattering/pragmatic way (self flattering because it suggests that he is actually Brett's true love, and pragmatic in that it's meant to discourage Cohn from pursuing her) about Brett's past, he could be lying to us about his relationships with the aficionados or with Brett; about how Bill's little joke about impotency makes him feel-- who knows. Although he probably respects his reader more than he respects Cohn; don't know if that would make a difference in his honesty.
• Poor Cohn. Poor, poor Cohn. My classmates don't seem to agree with me, but I think that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Robert Cohn. I'm familiar with the dynamic going on between Cohn and the other's in the story: the group of friends+awkward outsider dynamic. And I don't like it. There's something about being in a group of people like you that makes a small seed of annoyance directed at someone who's socially unusual echo around, feed off the other members of your group and amplify into an unrelenting and unjustified cacophony of ridicule--even hatred. Basically, I think Cohn is being bullied. And it probably has something to do with the fact that he's a Jew, which makes it even worse. I'll grant you that Cohn's a little odd sometimes, and maybe a little too chivalrous, but in my opinion it's not an offensive chivalry, and he's certainly well meaning. For one thing, he's the only one who reacted reasonably to the bullfighting (a disgusting and unforgivable tradition). His discomfort with that alone made me like him more than the other characters, no matter how much more clever they are.
• There's this section at the end of book II in which Jake goes into all sorts of detail about the experiences of the older, less well-liked matador, Belmonte (perhaps he's only less well liked because he's more famous, but he's still less well liked). Apparently Belmonte had intended to have a good afternoon, but now everything hurts because he's sick. It's an odd, almost Clarissa-Septimus type moment, in that Jake seems to have this magically personal connection to this guy's experiences, despite not knowing him well at all. And it's only made weirder by Hemingway's strict refusal to look beneath the surface of any other situation or character (I think we've seen more of this guy's thoughts than we've seen of Jake's!), and by the fact that his character is hardly relevant to the rest of the story at all. I suppose it illustrates Jake's aficion that he's so in tune with the fighters, but it's a weird little passage. 
• Also, this is completely unproductive (and to you I'm sure uninteresting), but 2 summers ago I took a trip that included nights in Paris, Biarritz, Madrid, San Sebastian and a little Basque town near San Sebastian called Oartzan or something like that, so the descriptions in this book are really bringing back memories (although Madrid was not all that hot). 

Thesis

I wrote the underlined section below before our discussion today:

In class, Mr. Mitchell pointed out the section of the Mezzanine where Baker uses the white background trick as a metaphor for his style of writing. He called this Baker's "thesis", and I think we may have just encountered Woolf's thesis (or perhaps one of several) in this weekend's reading. The passage has a striking similarity to some of the essays we read in class that were written by Woolf right around the time that she was writing Mrs. Dalloway. Just to recap, the essays argued for character driven rather than plot driven writing in which the characters sacrificed nothing for the plot and the reader could get to know them on a deep level-- see all of their idiosyncrasies and motivations, etc.


It's a goal that Woolf realizes extremely well throughout Mrs. Dalloway by familiarizing the reader very intimately with the characters. The novel also explains the goal indirectly by presenting the characters as unable to fully understand each other-- which reflects Woolf's criticism of real life, and justifies her call for literature that bridges the gaps between people in the real world. In what I've been calling the "thesis passage", her criticism is quite directly explained.


It's presented as a theory of young Clarissa's (one of "heaps"), but Woolf frames it through Peter's point of view.


"(the theory) was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. (...)(Clarissa) felt herself everywhere;(...) It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps — perhaps."(Woolf 148)

I don't quite know what to make of most of this passage, but the 'apparitions are so momentary compared with the the unseen part of us' bit definitely makes sense in terms of Woolf's essays and the rest of the novel. One of the benefits of Woolf's wandering free indirect discourse is the illustration of this concept: that we are more complicated than we seem to be (not to mention the benefit of overcoming it by giving the reader more than the 'apparitions'). We are constantly being shown how characters are more complex than they seem to one another. A good example is the scene where Clarissa speaks to Peter while she's sewing up her dress. He thinks, but doesn't tell her that she looks older. And she's been having qualms about being too boring which he obviously doesn't think she's bothered by (though he is bothered by it--as she knows he will be). It's also a good example because they had "met every day; then not for six months, or years" like Clarissa complains about in the first bit of the theory (which she presumably came up with before they had stopped regular contact-- that's not really relevant, it's just interesting).

So I read the passage in a slightly less positive light than Mr. Mitchell. He seemed to think that Woolf was making a case for our relationships with other people completing our characters (which would really justify Clarissa's parties). And, now that he's explained this, I believe him and the latter parts of Clarissa's theory make a lot more sense. However, I originally thought that Woolf was still complaining a bit about our distances from other people, and the discrepancies between people's surfaces and their underlying thoughts. And I suppose this passage could sort of fit both of our interpretations, because if you're unsuccessful at finding other people or places to impress upon and have relationships with--if you remain too distant from other people--you would definitely have something to complain about--perhaps even the loss of some form of life after death in the preserved impressions you've made on other things. Like poor Miss. Kilman, who's not doing very well at extending her unseen self wide (at least not among people-- maybe among places). But I now agree with Mr. Mitchell that this problem doesn't seem to be presented as inevitable.








I'd also just like to note that Clarissa's theory that we might survive in some sense through our impressions on others fits in beautifully with her fear of and fascination with death (as we've seen throughout the book) as an atheist who doesn't believe in a conventional afterlife. We've seen her worry in disbelief about being gone, and it's like she's trying to console herself with the thought that maybe she will last after she dies.

Note #2: It's clear that Clarissa was never quite convinced by her theory ("perhaps -- perhaps"), and it seems that she's abandoned it mostly by age 52 because she hasn't mentioned it, even though she's been talking a lot about death.