Upon looking back at my reading of The Mezzanine, I notice that I retained at least 98% of the material in the book. When Mr. Mitchell would cite a specific sentence, quoting from the beginning of the sentence, I often found myself nodding, remembering the rest of the sentence and the context. How unusual! And I do not think that this effect was lost on the vast majority of the other students in the class. How is it that Baker can write a book from which each sentence can be separately memorable?
Conversely, when I am reading Mrs. Dalloway, I realize that it is immensely difficult to think of one specific passage or sentence, and recognize the context, or know what occurs in the rest of the sentence. Woolf' is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Baker in terms of sentence, plot, character, and action recognition. Why would two books that are both generally trying to achieve a true representation of a real-life person, to encompass what humainty actually is through a character, both express it in such different ways?
I think in Mrs. Dalloway, the sentences are hard to keep track of and to remember specifically because they lead all over the place in general, because there are so many tangents, un-retraced, and unfinished lines of thought in Woolf's writing. I opened up the book to a variety of random pages just now to find an example. In trying to open the page randomly (several times, in fact) to select a specific sentence or sentence section to quote, I proved to myself just how convoluted Woolf's sentences seem to be. I could not even select a coherent section out of a sentence, because they tend to go on and on, with the beginning of the sentence usually nowhere near the end in terms of subject matter. However, the sentences are long enough such that there is significant space to concisely yet clearly transition between thoughts. Thus I believe that it is difficult to remember specifics from Woolf's writing because of the lack of complete coherence of a section of her writing. If each sentence cannot even stay centered on one topic, her sections definitely could not.
Yet the lack of complete conclusion of all thoughts and topics in Woolf's writing is essence of the reality of her writing style. She is capturing the image of the "wandering mind."
In looking back at Baker's novel as a whole, it seems as if he is making more of a point about how we should think, rather than what or how we actually do think as humans. He will spend long sections of writing focusing on minutia. Baker overemphasizes his points, keeps focus on one of his minutiae or the other for so long that the reader cannot help but comprehend. And his focus on minutia has an unnamed attractive quality that also helps his cause. Though Baker does follow tangents, his writing is almost outline-able. His chapters all focus on specific topics; his paragraphs lead logically from one to the other, with completely, even overly-explained transitions. Not to mention an innumerable number of a, i, ii, iii; b, i; c, i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi...etc. Because Baker focuses so completely on coherence, even though it is widened coherence, it is very easy to remember specific sentences in his book upon mention, because it is as if his writes as if he is transcribing thoughts already catalogued into his mind. The pre-storage of thoughts, mapped onto paper, is thus easily mapped onto the reader's mind, becoming their own memories.
Thus, whereas Woolf captures the thoughts as they are formed, Baker captures the thoughts after they have been purified and categorized. Herein lies the essential difference between the writing styles of Baker and Woolf.
1 comment:
You're definitely onto something here: the fundamental difference is that Howie describes his own narrative within the narrative itself as a "reconstruction" of a memorable lunch hour. It's a piece of writing, created years later, for which he's assembled notes and done some research in preparation. His "tangents" are deliberate writerly choices, and you're right that there's more underlying coherence than first meets the eye. Woolf is trying for something different--to "record the atoms as they fall upon the mind" ("Modern Fiction" 155), to attempt to recreate how an individual mind idles so actively on a typical day. The choppiness you perceive (not nearly so choppy as Joyce's version in his novel _Ulysses_, where it's a more traditional stream of consciousness that's often impenetrable to the outside reader) is an effect of *realism*. But under close examination, Woolf's sentences are grammatically coherent and tightly structured, and even as she moves among points of view, there's typically an external structuring agent (such as the motor-car) to facilitate the move. She's subtler, less "showy" than Baker. But after reading _Dalloway_ a couple of times, it seems a lot less choppy and remarkably coherent, even tightly structured.
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