To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

It was announced last year that Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury would be reissued in a color-coded format, with the various timelines and streams of consciousness differentiated and highlighted. I am sure this was a fun task for the editors, but the published version would seem to promise all the fun of a pre-assembled jigsaw puzzle.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse could be approached in the same way as Faulkner's text (and Joyce in essence begged for this fate): something to be annotated, winnowed, and re-assembled, with a cooing awe that Woolf could take a mundane series of events--children running on the beach, a walk into the village, a boating excursion--and splice them into multiple temporalities and subjectivities.

All the time, our annotator--armed with colored highlighters, timeline charts, and a determination to sort out every utterance and retrospection--must imagine that at the bottom of all of this intricacy lies the work's imbricated, deepest secrets.

On the contrary, the fragmented, subjective style itself already is the meaning of the novel. The prose can be cleanly divided into description, performed action, dialogue, on one hand; and internal consciousness (the "real" action) on the other hand. The soul and the world can be sifted out into different sentences in the same paragraph.

In saying this, one has already arrived at the profundity of Woolf's worldview, as in the observation by Mrs. Ramsay of "the discrepancy--that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing." Self-consciousness for Woolf is what is deepest, most individual, a self-communion, a "free," "invisible" "core" without attachments. Our real being-in-the-world is an inauthentic "apparition." (This is basically Henri Bergson's philosophical dualism: the inner is free, unlimited, creative, temporal; our external lives are confined, determined, and ruled by natural laws.) At the same time, the entire novel is a document of the difficulties in living this way, of accessing this self, of having knowledge of those other selves outside of our own.

Here is a passage about Mr. Ramsay, the moderately successful philosopher who has married an extraordinarily beautiful woman, has eight children, and surrounds himself with adoring pupils, respected scientists and poets, at the Scottish beach house that gives the novel its setting. Notice how Mr. Ramsay's faults (vanity, sensitivity, pompousness) run together with his own painful awareness of them and the central fact of his life, that "he had not done the thing he might have done." His very (trivial, social) dishonesty is couched in (self-lacerating, inner) honesty.

"He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks’ time to talk “some nonsense” to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge—all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase “talking nonsense,” because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like—this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time."

Woolf's writing, like George Eliot's, situates acts and character. Minds are contextualized, their processes of feeling exposed down to the root. Resentment is exculpated, connections drawn. Self-consciousness, just in being one of many ongoing threads, is partial, ridiculous, vain, miscomprehending and miscomprehended.

What is left over from all this, then, other than the cliché that one must "walk a mile in another person's shoes"? (Note here the contrast with a Dostoyevsky novel, where the endless monologue of the central characters only renders them more opaque, more mediated by the desires of others, and framed by the red herring of spurious ideological "context."

What is left over, in Woolf's account, are what she (elsewhere) calls "moments of being."  The spinster-artist Lily Briscoe is struck at several moments by the way that transitory, everyday moments will get transfixed by meaning, dipped into symbolism, estranged from their surroundings and made to stand for more-than-themselves. Here is one such moment of being:

"The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, 'Life stand still here'; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere [the artistic] Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)--this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape."

This aesthetic, timeless, symbolical eruption of meaning is an escape from the quotidian and corresponds to the invisible core of self that Woolf prizes. Once Lily is "drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people," *then* she can face "this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on here" in the act of painting. Her word is "emergence," or "the thing itself before it had been made anything."

But perhaps the opposite is truer: what’s hard and rare is for us to see things as they really are, as mere physical items in the inventory of the world. For things are always already “more” than themselves. Our first encounters are fundamentally deja-vu. Other people’s words, and other meanings, are attached to everything in advance. Woolf makes things too easy on herself by seeing the symbolic as something rare.

Woolf writes that "intimacy itself is knowledge." Ah, but intimacy is hard. At a certain point, our failures are just who we are. The promises of youth don't take place, resentments set in. The self, in its very form, doesn't find expression in the world. It is hard to be a person without smothering others, reducing their concerns, drawing in upon oneself. Between the messiness of intimacy, of death, of banal getting-through, and the aesthetic, momentary conjuration of "life stand still," stands the entire problem of life.