Futility in 20th Century Novels

Looking at the course as a whole, one of the major themes that has cropped up in almost all of the books we've read has been the futility of life, or the meaninglessness of the main characters' actions. This is something that's always been a common theme in literature, even back to things like Oedipus Rex or the original myth of Sisyphus. However, it seems like it's an idea that's gotten more prevalent within the last century or so, and almost all of the books we've read touch on it to some extent.

The most obvious place to start is with The Stranger, which is basically an entire book about the futility of most of the things people worry about on a day to day basis. While reading essays for my research paper I came across a lot of information about Camus that really illustrated his opinions on everyday life. One of the more interesting ideas of his that doesn't shine through all that much in the novel is that "the quantity of life is more important than the quality of life." At first this seems contradictory with the scene in which Meursault says that "it doesn't matter much whether you die at thirty or seventy," but you can see how it fits with other parts of the novel. When Meursault talks about how it doesn't matter the way he lived his life, and that it would have been no different had he lived his life one way or the other, he is essentially saying that the way you live your life doesn't matter; life is good no matter what. As he tells the chaplain, every living person is "privileged," because they are given a short time in which they are still alive, even if they are all "condemned" to death. Looking at things that way can help explain a lot of why Meursault acts the way he does; if there's no point to any action and just being alive is more important than anything you do while you are, then it makes a lot of sense to just sit in bed smoking cigarettes and eating chocolate, since you can just do whatever feels good in the moment.

This idea of futility, that it doesn't matter what you do so you might as well just do what you want, isn't one that's shared by most of the other authors we've looked at so far. The closest one is probably Nicholson Baker's philosophy in The Mezzanine, but that novel's tone and scope are both very very different than The Stranger's. Baker does seem to believe that the enjoying yourself is more important than acting in the way people might expect, and Howie's quest seems specifically selected to be the most futile imaginable (when the shoelaces inevitable break again in a couple years, he'll buy new ones from the same job and the escalator he takes upstairs from CVS will still be running the exact same way as it always has been). Both novels also revel in the small, personal moments where the main characters take some minor pleasure in something they don't outright recognize is insignificant, but which the audience easily can, such as Meursault's salt advertisement or any of Howie's footnotes.

A parallel character trait can be found in Gregor Samsa, who keeps the picture of a woman in a fur boa on his wall, but in that case it means something quite different. Kafka definitely believed in the futility of human endeavor, but he's different from Baker and Camus in that he doesn't see anything in the struggle to enjoy. He just turns Samsa into a bug to make his life go from insignificant in one way to insignificant in another, and you get the feeling that no one else is better off. Kafka also believes it doesn't really matter what you do, but he means for that truth to manifest itself as a grinding depression, whereas Camus wants it to be an assurance that you can act how you want to act, at least without bothering others.

The last novel I want to look at is possibly the most interesting in this case: Song of Solomon (although Mrs. Dalloway and Wide Sargasso Sea could also both be good). In Song of Solomon, people take personal events very seriously -- even events that happened 30 years before the novel opens. In fact, when Milkman calls everyone around him "crazy," that's really what he means: people take things that don't matter (in his opinion) way, way too seriously. Guitar even calls him out on not caring about racial issues and he barely responds. Instead, Milkman cares about doing what makes him feel good, even if that means stepping on his family and friends for years to get his way, as Lena informs him. However, this ends up backfiring for him: he decides that what will feel good is to leave home and his father's shadow, which requires money, which requires him finding the gold. However, his quest to find the gold ends up aging him from his old, adolescent self, and changing him more and more into Macon Dead II, as he does his father's bidding, operates from the same place as his father (greed), and more importantly, assumes his father's history, which he never had any interest in before coming there. Therefore, when Milkman goes to unreasonable lengths to accomplish something (break away from his dad), he ends up accomplishing the opposite (he becomes his dad). This theme, of people getting too passionate about things and causing the opposite to occur, happens over and over again in Song of Solomon. We see it with Ruth's love powder, with Milkman's attempt to get rid of Hagar and with her attempts to kill him, with Macon's telling his son to stay away from Pilate, and so on. This is a different kind of futility than the kind we see in the other novels from this class, in that people do have the power to change things -- however, they don't have the power to control exactly how things are going to change.

Milkman as a passive narrator

Today in class we were talking about how Milkman seems like more of a receptacle for other people's stories than an agent in his own story, which is somewhat unusual for the main character of a novel. From the very start of his life, Milkman was conceived more as an idea of something that Ruth thought might help her be happy: "Her son had never been a person to her, a separate real person. He had always been a passion"  (131), meant to provide a bond between Ruth and her husband. He is Ruth's "one aggressive act brought to royal completion" (133). Even after his birth, Milkman continues to be more important because of what he represents than who he is. This is even reflected in his nickname, which represents someone who comes from a vaguely depraved and potentially incestuous household -- a possibility which has a lot of importance later in the book.

Milkman himself seems to slowly realize this over the course of the book. Early on, when he's 12, he wants to hear stories, especially about Pilate. He begs his father to tell him why he considers her a "snake," and is upset when his father reminisces about his childhood and just says that Milkman has to trust him that she's a snake, without providing any concrete details. By the time he's 22, and presumably used to people telling him stories about their lives, since that's about all that ever happens to him, his opinions have changed. When his father explains, in explicit detail, why he hits Ruth, Milkman doesn't want to hear about it. He even says on page 78 that "[i]f he wanted me to lay off... why didn't he just say that?... But no. He comes to me with some way-out tale about how come and why." By this time in his life, Milkman prefers to hear the simple answer and doesn't want to get the reasons for why he is expected to behave a certain way.

Later on, at 31, Milkman has developed as a character in only one respect: now he doesn't just dislike hearing about other people's life stories, he actively resents it. He realizes that people treat him as a "garbage pail for the actions and hatreds of other people." That's basically what he is right from his birth: someone who represents something to everyone, but who doesn't actually have much of a personality himself. Everyone wants to lecture him about their lives or their ideas because he fits so well into all of it without even trying. Even to his best friend Guitar he's the perfect example of the what's wrong with middle class black people. The only people who seem to care about him as a person are Pilate (who may still have other reasons to care about him considering the amount of attention she pays to his life) and Hagar, who is for whatever reason completely in love with him. You could even argue that Hagar just values him as the idea of an attractive, respectable, and available future husband at an age where (as we see with Corinthians) that's getting harder and harder for her to find.

By the end of Part I, it seems like Milkman is starting to take things a little more into his own hands. He makes a half-hearted argument against Guitar's involvement with the Seven Days, and he starts to question why his father and Pilate care so much about him. He even has a minor moment of introspection as he waits for Hagar to try to murder him in Guitar's apartment. When he leaves the house after Lena yells at him about the negative impact he has on everyone in his family, it seems like he might finally be making a decision to change his life, although it's hard to see from here exactly where he's going to go.

Final Thoughts on The Stranger

The Stranger is a book that provoked a lot of thinking from me over a long period of time, which means that I have a ton of ideas that fit together in weird ways that might not make sense to anyone but me, but this is my attempt to kind of throw most of what I have at the wall and see what sticks. I know it's long and kind of messy but hopefully it'll still make some sense. (Also, I tried to post this yesterday, but somehow ended up deleting it instead, so this is kind of a hastily written version of the actual thing I wanted to say, which probably isn't gonna help. Sorry about that.)

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I guess a good place to start is with the idea that in The Stranger, there's an Oedipus-esque idea that human life is based on two basic things: death, and sex. Those are the two absolute events that have to happen as long as people are around. The argument that's presented in The Stranger is (roughly) that people build their personalities and societies around these events, by adding layers of meaning that add some sense of structure to them. Some of the first things human civilizations created were funerals and marriage rites. Every single society in history has had them in some way, right from the start, because of how important the concepts of death and sex are to human life. The problem that Mersault presents is that he's someone who doesn't place any outsized meaning in them, and just lives his life in a way that he lets them happen to him and then moves on.

The most obvious place to start is probably death, since that's what the novel is mostly concerned with. Obviously, in apparently randomly shooting the Arab, Mersault is completely flying in the face of everything people know about death. No one kills another person for no reason. They do it because they feel like they have to, in the case of Raymond (who wanted to shoot his ex-girlfriend's brother because he felt threatened), the court that sentences Mersault to death, or the woman in the newspaper clipping who murdered people to steal their money, or at least because they want to do it, in the case of some "actual" psychopathic murderer (to the extent that we can know they don't feel somehow forced to as well). That's because everyone, on some level, sees murder as a pretty big deal, because they see death as a pretty big deal. Partly that's because it's programmed into us (like Dezy brought up in his blog), and partly it's because most people really don't want to die and don't want to be reminded about it. There's a lot more to go into about the whole psychology of all that, and how it relates to Mersault's mother's funeral, but to cut it short it's pretty safe to say that there is a near-universal way to treat and consider death, and Mersault doesn't do a very good job pretending to fit in with it.

The more interesting side to look at, at least in my opinion is how Mersault fits into the second type of event that is inevitable for every life: sex. Specifically reproduction is what's necessary for life, but on a fundamental level our brains can't distinguish between reproductive sex and otherwise. In The Stranger, and in the minds of most of the people in it, the "sex" aspect of life is equated with other things, such as romantic and familial love. Mersault is unlucky in that he doesn't equate the "sex" half of life with love like people expect; instead, he equates it with basic pleasure. This freaks Marie out when he doesn't seem to place any importance in marriage, and it freaks the court out when he doesn't seem to love his mother. In fact, Mersault not appearing to care at the funeral is important to the trial because it shows conclusively that he cares about neither death or sex: the death aspect in that he doesn't act like he understands why people place so much importance to a ceremony about confronting mortality; the sex aspect in that he doesn't place enough respect in sex to abstain from it the day after what it supposed to be a humbling and terrifying experience; and both, in that he doesn't care that his mother is dead, which looks bad no matter who it is, but looks especially bad here because it proves that he didn't even love the one person everyone is supposed to love. From there, the court's logic goes that if he can't love his mother and mourn her loss, he can't care about anyone or anything -- which is why he was able to kill the Arab.

Mersault himself seems to agree with this interpretation when he says "But everyone knows life isn't worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn't much matter whether you die at thirty or seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living -- and for thousands of years." However, this quote doesn't represent the way Mersault actually thinks before the trial. It comes while he's in his cell but before he sees the chaplain, when he's at his most depressed. The first line, "Everyone knows life isn't worth living," seems especially to contradict Mersault's whole live-and-let-live philosophy. His whole thing is enjoying what there is to enjoy in life, and he's doing a good job of it in the beginning of the book. He never would have said anything like that before the trial. It's only after people like the magistrate try to convince him that life does have meaning that he decides that it doesn't. It seems like he's just arbitrarily pushing back against people who are trying to force themselves on him, but really the problem is that he has a different idea of what it means for life to have meaning. Specifically, he doesn't think that there's a meaning of life, he thinks there's meaning to life. In other words, the only thing that makes life worth living is living it. There's no absolute set of rules or "goal," which is the more common idea of how life can have meaning, but there's also no point not enjoying the world while you're there, meaning that there's no reason to be upset when you die, since ultimately it doesn't really mean anything. That idea is what Mersault lives by unconsciously before the trial, but he isn't able to articulate it when he's under intense pressure to conjure up a more traditional explanation for his behavior. The closest he gets is when he stammers that the sun made him kill the Arab, and that doesn't do a lot to help him get off. When he's sitting in his cell, all he can think of is the way the magistrate and the lawyers and the jury were all judging him for not believing that life has a meaning, and he becomes simultaneously angry at being judged and self-conscious about not fitting in. As a result, he feels pinned against the wall and just rejects the idea of there being any point in living at all (or at least, he tells himself he rejects it; he's still afraid of dying in the end).

Ironically, the chaplain is the person who makes Mersault finally crystalize his own position. By releasing all of his pent up anger and frustration on him, Mersault is able to come back to his senses and realize that he does see a reason to live, but that it's very different from what the chaplain or the magistrate want that reason to be. In a strange way, the last few pages, when Mersault finally accepts his own death, are some of the most life-affirming in the whole novel. When he finally manages to articulate why he lived the way he did, it seems to be just as legitimate as any other way to live. If we all have to be born and we all have to die, it doesn't matter much what happens in between, but you might as well enjoy it. Even the very end of the book, where Mersault says he hopes that the people watching his execution greet him "with cries of hate" makes sense in this context. He hopes that, if nothing else, the people watching get some satisfaction out of seeing him dead; after all, if we're all sentenced to end our lives the same way, you might as well end that sentence with an exclamation mark instead of a period.

Raymond vs. Mersault

Now that we're done reading and I had some time to gather my thoughts, one of the things I thought was the most interesting in The Stranger was the divide between Raymond and Mersault, and the way people responded to their friendship. It's pretty clear that Raymond is considered a "criminal" - at the very best, he beats his girlfriend and considers shooting her brother. From the very start we know that Raymond is not an upstanding citizen who can be trusted to contribute positively to society as a whole. On the other hand, Mersault is educated, a committed worker, and apparently pretty fun to be around. He's not necessarily "normal," but he seems on the outside to be a fairly decent person. Until the murder, he has presumably never harmed anyone directly.

The thing is, Raymond actually fits a lot better into society than Mersault does. Raymond has a place, and he fills it gladly. He's about as criminal as someone can be. Some people might say that people like him cause or express the problems of society,  but no one doubts that they are very much a part of society. Even if Raymond lacks some of the morals people are expected to hold, in that he has no problem beating women or shooting people, he's still driven by his own morals and emotions, maybe more than any character in the book - his morals say that cheating is bad, so when he suspects his girlfriend is cheating on him he gets angry, so he goes out of his way to punish her, even though he risks jail for it. In a way he's just standing up for what he believes, the same way the court is standing up for what it believes in executing Mersault. Raymond could even be seen as a metaphor for the court, as someone who inflicts violent punishment on someone who he suspects may be breaking his personal rules.

Mersault doesn't take anything as seriously as Raymond takes infidelity, but it would still be inaccurate to say he doesn't have any morals. He doesn't like to hurt others, which we see in the way he's afraid of making them uncomfortable, and that includes shooting Arabs - he talks Raymond down when he wants to commit the murder himself. Even if that feeling only exists because hurting others makes him feel bad and not because he objectively thinks hurting others is bad, it's pretty clear that Mersault doesn't want to kill anyone, it's just something that happens in a time where he can't control himself. In a way I see it as similar to the impulses we all have to stand up and yell something at an inappropriate time, or jump off a tall building, or swerve into the wrong lane while driving. People have impulses to hurt themselves or others all the time and sometimes it can feel like you need all of your self-control not to do it. When Mersault is on the beach, everything conspires in a way to make him lose that self-control, and pull the trigger. It's impossible to know exactly what was going through Mersault's head when he pulled the trigger, but it seems pretty likely it wasn't "Good. That'll show him."  The court doesn't see that though; they just see someone who committed a murder because of an absolute lack of fundamental moral understanding.

The court's response to Mersault is related to why a book like The Metamorphosis is funny. At it's most basic, humor comes from seeing something that makes you uncomfortable, but feeling safely removed from it. The idea of someone spontaneously transforming into a bug is funny as long as we know it's happening in a book, but if that happened to someone you knew, you probably wouldn't think it was funny. It would probably call everything you thought you knew into question. To the people at Mersault's trial, seeing someone who doesn't care about their mother's death, doesn't believe in God, and doesn't show remorse for murder, is like seeing someone turn into a bug in front of them. He makes them extremely uncomfortable because he calls into question the absolute nature of some of our most basic societal values. This is especially frightening to someone like a judge, who makes a living off of upholding absolute societal values, but it makes the ordinary people of the jury uncomfortable too.

The question is whether or not the people have the right to punish Mersault more because he makes them uncomfortable. It might seem ridiculous that they can condemn him to death because he makes them feel a bit icky, but in a way it makes sense. From their point of view, just having someone like Mersault around who doesn't care about his mother's death or believe in God threatens to make other people question why they do believe in those things. That might be especially dangerous when it comes to criminals like Raymond. In the court's view of things, the only thing that keeps someone like him from running amok and tearing society apart is him thinking about what his mother would think, or what Jesus would do. If a belief in God isn't enough to stop people from murdering (and according to the magistrate, all the murderers he's seen before Mersault do believe in God), who's to say what they would do if they didn't even have that? And to make matters worse, if Mersault isn't executed, where will he go? To a maximum security prison - where he'll be around no one but the kind of people the court really doesn't want him to meet. You can question whether or not letting Mersault live would actually cause anyone to adopt his nihilism without his any of his benign nature, but from a certain point of view, keeping him out of society does makes sense. Of course, the people on the jury probably aren't just worried about the destruction Mersault's beliefs might cause - more likely, they just think the way he makes them uncomfortable is reason enough to kill him, but it's more interesting to think that they might have a better reason for their sentence.

Gregor's Catholic Block

When Gregor is turned into a giant insect, the first thing that bothers him isn't the loss of his humanity, or the physical impossibility of what happens to him, it's the realization that he won't be able to earn money for his family. We can imagine that he wakes up at 5 and grumbles to himself about quitting his terrible job every morning, not just the morning in the book. The only way he's able to keep himself going is by guilting himself into it, imagining what would happen to his family if he weren't around to make them money. The thing that's great about Kafka is that he has Gregor's family actually live up to all of Gregor's worst fears.

Even so, it takes them a while to get there. His sister and mother, at least, start out feeling very guilty about how they treat Gregor. They understand at some level that he's still Gregor, they just physically can't stand to be around him. However, as time goes on and Gregor isn't providing anything for them the way he was before he was a bug, that guilt naturally transforms into resentment. As the memories of the old Gregor fade and he isn't doing anything positive to keep him in their good graces, he becomes just something that makes them feel bad. It makes sense that they start to hate something that's just sitting in their house making them feel bad, and that they respond by losing their sympathy for him. Of course Gregor never wants to consider this; when the way the cleaning lady enjoys looking at him implies that he's not such a horrible looking creature that his family can't help but avoid him, and that instead they just don't care about him anymore, he hates her for threatening his self-loathing, family-first worldview. The truth is, thinking that all his problems are his own fault is easier than upsetting his idealized image of his family.

Something I can't help but wonder about the way Gregor seems so eager to blame himself for everything, even before the reality of his situation sets in, is how it might be related to religion. There are quotes throughout the book implying that the Samsas are Catholic, including in the very beginning ("'God Almighty!', he thought," page 2) and the very end (Mr. Samsa "crossed himself," page 40). Considering how efficient Kafka is with his writing, it seems unlikely that the Samsas' Catholicism is just a background detail. The Catholic religion (and I'm not a Catholic, so I could be mistaken) is classically considered to be one that puts a lot of emphasis on guilt and penitence. Most Catholics see this as a good thing, with important theological reasons for it, but it's also something that many non-Catholics criticize. It makes sense that the idea of "Catholic guilt" would be interesting to a writer living in a Catholic city like Prague in the 1910's.

Writing this blog reminded me of the Sonic Youth song "I Got A Catholic Block," about how the singer can't help but feel guilty when he's having fun as a former Catholic. The lyrics "I got a Catholic block/Inside my head/I let it go to work/And bring it all back home" definitely conjure up images of Gregor lying in bed, especially if you just hear the words "work" and "bring it all back home." Both the song and the book deal with people who feel trapped by worry about the potential consequences of their actions. Although Gregor's worry isn't explicitly religious in the way Thurston Moore's is in the song, you could still argue that his mindset is influenced by his Catholicism. Looking over how many times Catholicism is hinted at in the book, it definitely seems like Kafka is saying that - but like a lot of other things in the book, the line is pretty blurry between whether this is all just over analyzation, or Kafka really did just put that much effort into the little things. 

The Men in Jake's Life

Jake has very complicated relationships with almost all of the men he spends time with. He obviously likes or liked all of them, or else he wouldn't have hung out with them in the first place. He even seems not to mind Cohn in the beginning. However, Jake's relationship with Brett is always the most important one to him, and it colors all the others in time. Since he's narrating a story well after the events have taken place, that means that everything we get about Jake's male friends is skewed by their relationships with Brett.

The only major male character in the book who seems uninterested in Brett is Bill. Coincidentally, he is also the character who is arguably shown in the best light in the novel, with Jake describing him as consistently intelligent and good-hearted. This can show one of two things: either Bill wasn't interested in Brett because he was so intelligent (and saw she was trouble) or such a good guy ( and knew it would hurt Jake), or the reason he is portrayed so positively is just because he isn't interested in Brett. Compare Bill to the men who are interested in Brett: the Count, while likable,is fat, old, servile, and ridiculous; Mike is an assertive, bankrupt drunk; and of course, Cohn is a pathetic blowhard who takes himself and everyone around him far too seriously, and who Brett never cared that much about anyways. It might be that Jake didn't consciously make Bill better than he is, just that he wanted so badly to show all of Brett's suitors in a terrible light that he made Jake seem better by comparison. The inverse relationship between pursuing Brett and coming off favorably in Jake's novel seems pretty clear cut. But what about Romero?

From the start, Romero is described as young, humble, talented, and beautiful. Despite being the one who actually takes Brett away from Jake, Jake has nothing but good words for him, and even helps set him up with Brett.  There's been a lot of discussion about why Romero is so acceptable to Jake where the other men aren't. One idea is that Jake approves of his talent and beauty, and so judges him worthy of Brett, unlike Cohn. In fact, he could even be seen as Jake's "surrogate," someone who Jake thinks of as the closest thing to getting to be with Brett himself. However, there's also another possibility: Jake likes Romero, not because he considers him close enough to be a surrogate, but because the two men are so different. Cohn and Jake share many similarities; both are educated American writers, both live in Paris, they have roughly the same circle of friends, they play the same sports, they're the same age, and so on. Cohn doesn't cut it because despite all his similarites with Jake, he has an irritating personality and an anachronistic way of looking at the world. By comparison, Romero's background is very different. Romero is much younger than Jake, is described as looking both better and very different than Jake, and is extremely talented at a sport that Jake loves but has only ever been an observer of. As a result, he lumps Romero in with his extremely positive idea of Spain, whereas Cohn comes from a more familiar setting.

Because Romero is so different, Jake doesn't judge him by his personality. He just judges him by his background. With Cohn, it's the opposite. Since Cohn's background is so similar to his own, Jake is much better able to relate to and notice his personality, and he doesn't like what he sees. When he talks to Cohn, he just sees a worse Jake; and if normal Jake isn't able to be with Brett, then shitty-Jake-but-with-working-equipment definitely shouldn't be able to. By contrast, Romero is an exotic entity, and one who Jake barely knows. As far as Jake is concerned,there's no point comparing himself to a young Spanish bull fighter; the personality isn't the part that interests him. But in fact, once Brett gets to know him better, Romero doesn't actually seem to be all that different from Cohn. He wants Brett to look more traditionally feminine and commit to him; he even tries to fight Cohn for her honor after Cohn is done beating him up. Eventually, Brett realizes her mistake and comes back to Jake, almost the only person she knows with a personality she actually likes.

The Hours

For me, watching The Hours in class was an interesting experience. It gave a different perspective on Mrs. Dalloway, which was definitely nice to have, but I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as the book. I think that although splitting the movie into three distinct parts had its advantages, it also meant that the movie lost a lot of what made Mrs. Dalloway so great.

To start with the good, the scenes with Virginia Woolf were very well-done. I felt like they added a lot to how I thought about the novel. Having the context in which a book is written (or any work of art is made) can make you look back on what you've read and see much more clearly what the author was thinking and to some extent what they intended. That can help you get a much deeper understanding of a work, and help you understand a little better how the author was able to write the way they did. I do think it's important that that context comes after you read the book, because that allows you to go back and think about it again, instead of distracting you with all the things you know about the author while you're trying to read it, and maybe making you see connections that aren't there.

I'm a little less excited about the New York scenes. To me, they felt like a more-or-less straight retelling of a very good novel that cut out a lot of what made it so good - namely, the extremely detailed and observant style. That's not a knock against the filmmakers, since they did a very good job overall, but cutting down a novel like Mrs. Dalloway into a third of a 2 hour movie without dropping non-critical elements is pretty much impossible. Still, it's impossible to shake the feeling that the plot moves very quickly compared to the fairly slow pace of the book, and doesn't allow for the same subtlety and focus on different personalities as the book. Even though the modern setting is supposed to help us relate more to the characters, too little time devoted to too many people makes it hard to care for them much as characters.

The scenes where Laura Brown featured left me more conflicted. I liked the characters and got quickly attached to them, especially the lovable-yet-terrifying Dan. I think that even if the rest of that part of the movie had been boring, Dan's borderline psychopathic speech about why he married Laura would have been enough to make me appreciate it. Together with the excellent acting by Julianne Moore as a miserable housewife and the excellent way her near-suicide attempt was handled, I think the 50's section of the movie was very strong on its own right. The problem is, I don't necessarily know if it was important enough to the movie as a whole to justify its inclusion. Considering a lot of the problems with the New York scenes came from brevity and a very fast-moving plot, you have to wonder if all that set up to the plot twist of Laura being Richard's mother was really worth it.

The way I see it, there are two things that the 50's scenes are in the movie for: to give a back story for  Richard that serves to explain why he's been traumatized to the point of Septimosity, and to drive home some of the points Mrs. Dalloway makes about the role of the housewife in a setting that's more immediately familiar to most viewers - and to a character who seems to react more like most people probably expect they would in that role. To be honest, I think that the explanation of Richard's trauma is a little bit unnecessary. He gets enough piled on him between off-screen bitterness over losing Clarissa and being diagnosed with HIV at the height of his career that mommy issues aren't necessarily the only (or even the best) explanation for his suicide. As for the second role, I do think that's a valuable and interesting contribution. But it also makes me wonder - if we already have a character that brings some of the issues Clarissa has into a more modern context, do we really need the New York retelling? The way I see it, to really get as much of the full, detail-rich feel of Mrs. Dalloway into a 2 hour movie as possible, you might need to cut out one of the three storylines, or at least devote much less time to one of them. In that case, I'd have to go with Laura's story as the more interesting and thematically compelling choice than the straight retelling of the novel presented by the New York option, at least as someone who's already read Mrs. Dalloway.

Miss Kilman as the Dictator

When my group did our panel presentation on Mrs. Dalloway, the Dictator, and the Relativity Paradox by Christopher Herbert on Monday, I had a lot of fun and got to say a lot that I wanted to say, but there just wasn't enough time to get to everything that I wanted to talk about. One thing that I really wanted to bring up is the character of Miss Kilman, and what she represents in a relativist interpretation of the book.

Basically, in relativism, the main enemy is the absolutist dictator -- someone who has a flawed, absolutist way of thinking, meaning that they believe in a uniformity of moral, religious, or philosophical truths, and is therefore able to justify pushing their beliefs on others. In relativism, even if everything in a person's life leads them to believe that something must be true, they can't ever assume that they know enough to make a definitive decision. Even if they somehow do, they can't assume that what is fact for them is also fact for someone who perceives the world differently and has different experiences. Someone who does make these assumptions can easily make the mental leap to calcifying in their views. When their views are challenged, they react to the disruption in their mental peace by inflicting counter-pain to punish others. Most relativists view any form of nonessential counter-pain -- that is, punishment that is meant to seek revenge and reform behavior but does not solve any actual problems -- as oppression.

If we look at Miss Kilman, we see a woman who is very much calcified in her worldview. We see from her scene in the church that her Catholic faith genuinely brings her meaning and importance. That's important to a relativist - that she is able to be so faithful and that she is able to get so much joy out of her religion is a beautiful thing, and certainly not a problem in and of itself. The issue comes when she butts heads with Mrs. Dalloway. The short time she actually spends with Clarissa in the novel is enough to completely throw Miss Kilman off. She absolutely hates her, seemingly more than is at all reasonable. The obvious reason is that Mrs. Dalloway makes her feel inferior, but it's more complicated than that; it's about the specific way in which she makes her feel inferior.

After Kilman leaves Clarissa's house, she starts to worry about all kinds of things she normally doesn't worry about. Her money, her clothes, her house, her appearance. The same problems, she says, she worried about before she found Catholicism. But now, she's supposed to have rejected all of these worldly desires. She draws her self-confidence from the fact that she's above all of this. So for Mrs. Dalloway to bring her crashing back down to where she used to be is a serious ideological threat.

All of that fits with the classic absolutist. But for Kilman to be an actual "Dictator", she has to inflict counter-pain. But what does she actually do to punish Clarissa? After all, Clarissa doesn't care about Kilman's personal thoughts, and it's not like she physically hurts Clarissa, or even says anything particularly rude to her. What she does do, is put up enough of a veneer of cold, judgmental confidence that it makes Clarissa hate her almost as much as she hates Clarissa. But worse than just making her hate her personally, she makes her hate the person her daughter is spending all her time with. She makes Clarissa worry constantly (as we see in the book) about the company Elizabeth is keeping. In that way, Kilman is able to hit back (probably unintentionally or subconsciously) at the way Clarissa digs at her own self-hatred by digging at Clarissa's maternal fear for her daughter.

But the worst part is, hurting Clarissa the way she does doesn't even make Miss Kilman happy! She hates Clarissa just as much as she would anyways! She still worries about her appearance and her wealth, still compares herself to someone who's more socially accepted. She continues to be miserable, and all she accomplishes is to drag someone else part of the way down with her. That's the real problem relativists have with the character of the Dictator - by stepping on others, they don't actually make themselves much happier, if at all. All they do is make the world a worse place for the rest of us.

Bradshaw and Holmes

Mrs. Dalloway is generally a book that treats its characters evenly. We usually see both positive and negative portrayals of all of the characters, and when we see their point of view we are usually able to sympathize with them. The major exceptions, at least to me, were Septimus' two doctors, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw. We see both of them as basically completely negative characters, who don't have a clue what they're doing. Even Clarissa dislikes Bradshaw when she sees him at the party, even though she can't explain it.

Since Woolf normally treats her characters so evenly, to treat two important characters so negatively is probably meant specifically to drive home her point. She wants to make completely sure that the readers understand what's wrong with the way war and soldiers have been treated, and that no one has any doubt that Septimus was really just a "coward." Those two characters are basically there less to serve a narrative purpose, like most of the others, and more to serve as a warning against a naive, idealistic view of war, based on ideas of toughness and masculinity without considering the suffering war causes, especially World War I.

In that way, the characters of Holmes and Bradshaw remind me a lot of Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut's first book. In Player Piano, the U.S. is run by an upper class of engineers who've invented machines to do almost all manual labor. The main antagonist, Dr. Kroner, is one of the top engineers, and the boss of the main character. He talks and acts almost exactly like the two doctors in Mrs. Dalloway, with a back-slapping enthusiasm for athletics and the masculine ideal. The parallels between Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw, who are meant to critique the simplistic masculine ideals of post-World War I Britain, and Dr. Kroner, who is meant to critique the simplistic masculine ideals of post-World War II America, are very interesting, and could probably be studied much more closely to talk about the more general similarities between cultures after major wars.

Is Septimus Really That Insane?

Today in class we talked about the character of Septimus Warren Smith, which really got me thinking. He's the most interesting character in the book to me, not so much because of his obvious delusions, but more because he seems like he's operating on a different level than everyone else in the book. When he sees something, he has a completely different reaction to it than Clarissa or Peter would. The obvious example is the car scene, where he doesn't even consider why the car is there, or even seem to register it at all until he gets caught up in the pattern of the blinds. When compared to the reactions of the people around him, who all get excited to see a fancy car and make up whole narratives about who could be in it and what they could be doing, Septimus seems like he's just a passive observer in the outside world. The problem is, he clearly isn't just some emotionless husk wandering around, feeling nothing. There are times when he gets intensely emotional, even to the point of tears when he sees the airplane early on. For all his talk about having no more feelings, it's pretty clear that he does, he just doesn't react to everything the same way a "normal" person would.

That's basically the crux of why he seems insane: he reacts differently than most people would to the same objects or events. But how can you expect anything else from someone who's been exposed to a world that's 180 degrees removed from anything Clarissa Dalloway has ever experienced? A lot of people talked about the way Septimus represents the effects of the war just a few years after it ended, which is probably a very accurate interpretation. Woolf comes from the time when PTSD was just starting to make itself popularly known, especially since the trench warfare of World War I was much more psychologically devastating than earlier methods of warfare. There's no doubt that Septimus is meant to be suffering from PTSD as it was understood at the time. But I also think that he represents something by himself, if you ignore his connections to the war.

I heard someone today bring up the point that Septimus seems self-centered, which in a sense he is. His whole worldview is completely removed from that of everyone around him, and he completely ignores the needs of his wife. He seems like he's so caught up in his own internal apocalypse that he can't be bothered with anyone else. Certainly on the outside, he seems simply cold and disinterested in other people. But having an insight into his thoughts, it's hard to say he's more self-absorbed than Clarissa Dalloway is. When he sees something that invokes a powerful reaction, he's reacting to it's natural beauty, or to what he thinks it means in the grand scheme of things (usually meaning its role in the ongoing destruction of the world). When Mrs. Dalloway has a strong reaction, it's always about what something means to her: how it reminds her of something in her life (usually Bourton), or how it means she has to act a certain way (chin held high for the queen's car). Outwardly, it seems like Clarissa is a less selfish person, because she holds parties and does people favors, but inwardly she seems to do these things more because they're what she enjoys; at some point she even says that her servants help her "to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted." In other words, she occasionally does menial tasks (like mending a dress) by herself to spare her servants the trouble, but only because it makes her feel like a gentle, generous-hearted mistress! It's hard to say that Mrs. Dalloway really sees the world through a less self-centered lens than Septimus when she seems to basically see things almost entirely through the lens of how they relate to her.

That's not to say that the way Mrs. Dalloway acts is wrong. She pretty clearly makes the people around her happier than Septimus does, and seems a good deal happier herself. But I do think there's some satire at the way Woolf compares her to someone who has a completely different perspective on things; by seeing someone who's worried about the end of the world and his own impending suicide, it makes Mrs. Dalloway's worries about how things could have gone otherwise at Bourton seem a lot more trivial, and helps to remind us a bit that, even though we've spent such a long time looking through Clarissa's eyes, and thinking the way she thinks, there are still other ways of looking at them that can be useful or interesting, and that really, the main conflicts in her life might not matter all that much.