Characterization: Continued Musing on Montage Aspect of Mrs. Dalloway

While reading Mrs. Dalloway, I only gradually became immersed in characterization for the features and personalities of both major and minor characters come to light in a novel way. The players in the story emerge gradually--a mention here, an enlargement there, with surprising juxtapositions overall. Characterization relies on an accrual of detail over time. Individual portraits are layered--sometimes one over the other and, at other times, positioned in close proximity to each other. The connections are often indistinct, even blurred. What appears to be a random reference to a bystander on one page pops up again later, only this time that minor character somehow augments a moment of a major character in a way that defines them both.

I cannot help but to enlarge upon this aspect of characterization in Mrs. Dalloway and associate her presentation of characters to other forms of creative expression labeled as modern. Last week, I related completely to both Mike's and Brandon's posts about setting, because they too mention "multiple perspectives," and the word "interplay" is threaded throughout their comments. If "setting" was portrayed in that fashion, it follows that Virginia Woolf might present her characters in the same interconnected, montaged way upon the substrate of setting, for what is characterization but the placement and delineation of personalities against the backdrop of time and place?

Modernist artistic expression was often abstract and ambiguous. It resulted in music that was disharmonious--the tone and not-the-tone presented in awkwardly close proximity. Clippings, advertising, packaging, and photographs appeared in art works alongside traditional media. Just as Woolf mixed and mingled random characters at random moments, interweaving and interconnecting at the same time that she sundered and scattered bears witness to the fact that modernist aesthetics seemed to blur distinctions between high and low culture, between the new and the old, between the avant-garde and the expected. The result in Mrs. Dalloway is that one grows to apprehend, bit by bit, how each character interrelates in isolated moments when each touches upon the other--but yet remain quite isolated and alone--separate and distict pieces in the large collage.