When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
Some literature is necessary precisely because we don’t and can’t scientifically understand our own brains. Yes, you’ll tell me, there’s a field called neuroscience for that, but I just don’t buy the second half of the word. Science? Please. We’re talking about the brain here, not what keeps a skyscraper standing or how to span the Hudson. We might know how it fires, how trauma can deprive us of functionality, what sections light up when we think about torrid sex or hot fudge sundaes, but how an aggregate of molecules, responding to electric signals through nervelike ganglia, can reason and err and invent and suffer and remember and dream and long—no. No matter how clear the MRIs are and how many electrodes they hook up, the magic of what makes the meat conscious, capable of thinking and feeling—much less of loving—is going to remain obscure. By the time man understands man, another organism will have taken our place as the highest species in the known, and it won’t understand itself either.
For this reason, Virginia Woolf deserves garlands for her finest books, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway (and, by the way, these two are much better than any of her others). Both novels show us thinking and feeling as they really are, allowing us to see their complexity and nuance more clearly than in any other literature—or perhaps any other books. Though Molly Bloom’s interior monologue in Ulysses is supposed to be the apex of modernist stream-of-consciousness writing, to me it reads like someone representing thinking, not entirely like thinking itself. One can still sense Joyce’s hand (and libido) behind the language. But with Woolf the illusion is stronger, more convincing, much more real. Somehow her disjointed choppiness and herky-jerk redirecting oddness (a kind of controlled stylistic epilepsy) seems more like the actual disjoint of our mental functions. Time and again I can’t help but think, “Ooh, that’s good. That’s it. That’s how it really is. How did she know that? How did she hear it that clearly, much less restate it?” To my mind no writer had as great an instinctive sense of the movement and fabric of consciousness as Woolf, placing us deftly inside the awesome aware pulp of her characters’ minds and hearts.
We also feel her characters so strongly because they themselves feel so strongly. Here the puppeteer risks showing the strings as we see figure after figure with similar propensities probe and fret in deep, dark emotional waters. The novel centers around the Ramsays—he a philosopher of modest repute, she an entrancing, regal beauty—their eight children, and some of the guests at their summer house. But apart from the drama over whether they can and will make an excursion to the lighthouse (which represents, among other things, a self-sufficiency that few of the characters possess), the novel is really about the emotions of each individual as they struggle with themselves and one another. They are all deeply emotive: from Mr. Ramsay knowing he can think to the level Q but disconsolate that he can’t reach R (see “Best Line”); to his wife who wants to esteem him but can’t quite; to their children who must fight both to resist and to forgive the father’s tyranny; to the communal bewitched fascination with Mrs. Ramsay; to the Ramsays’ friend, the painter Lily Briscoe, her romantic fantasies and renunciations, and her fraught relationship with her art (the major theme of the novel’s last section). You can’t help but marvel at how much access we get to virtually everybody in To the Lighthouse. Unfortunately, Woolf’s unorthodox mode of representing her characters’ thought and emotive processes can get annoying if you try to piece the sentences together logically. Don’t bother; let the overall impressions leave their moth-wing traces on you and move on. The point is to get a sense, emotional and intellectual, of what’s going on inside the character, not to get a pure understanding. What you’re after is a feeling of communion, a little Vulcan mind-meld, as it were. Sometimes it’s going to work, sometimes you’re going to think that Woolf was batty or just jotting down words at random, but what she was after is elusive, not something one can make an exact science. Nor will we ever.
The Buzz: Virginia Woolf is rightfully held to be one of the pioneers and most important figures in the development of the so-called “modernist” novel. I’m not the biggest fan of that category since it’s typically only negatively defined—novels that don’t use traditional narrative, that aren’t realist, naturalist, etc.—but at least it points to what otherwise might be called “experimental” writing, as if all writing isn’t a kind of lab project. Historically, Woolf’s technique was absolutely original, but practically it’s just cool and challenging, and different from anything else you’ve probably ever read. (If I can recycle the neuroscience analogy, Woolf was effectively a self-taught surgeon who lets you stand in the operating room and watch.) As books in English go, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway are mentioned alongside Joyce’s Ulysses as the earliest and strongest developers of the interiority and “stream of consciousness” (which for Woolf isn’t so flowing) that I talk about above.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): In Part III of the novel, “The Lighthouse,” it becomes clear that Lily Briscoe is in some ways the heroine of the novel and that her painting is as primary a metaphor as the lighthouse itself. Through that optic, we can see this line as a declaration of Woolf’s intent to try to record both the particular thing and the majesty of all things (one of my favorite themes): “One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.”
Best Line: Mr. Ramsay’s Q/R problem (mentioned above), takes up the last five pages of section VI in Part I, “The Window,” and is, I think, the single most impressive depiction of a man reflecting on his life in all literature (please, drop this book and go get hers!). Below is but a taste, but note how Woolf intermingles Ramsay focusing his thoughts, Ramsay being distracted, and some truly extraordinary narrative descriptions. And this is just a quarter of it!
If thought is like … twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for a moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q?
… He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q, then is Q—R—Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. “Then R …” He braced himself. He clenched himself.
Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?
A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R.
What’s Sexy: Throughout Part I, especially in section V, Mrs. Ramsay’s radiance is described in some of the more original and funky ways since the French poet Lautréamont (in 1869) famously wrote that a boy was “beautiful like a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” The longer, more impressionistic of Woolf’s descriptions you’ll have to read for yourself, but here’s one of the great compliments of all time, Mr. Bankes’s Yeatsian comment to Mrs. Ramsay: “Nature has but little clay like that of which she moulded you.”
Beyond this, there are some romantic leanings from various characters but nothing especially sexy, though Woolf does mention the “arid scimitar of the male.” …
Quirky Fact: Woolf was born the same year, 1882, and died the same year, 1941, as her modernist rival, James Joyce.
What to Skip: The second part of To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes,” seems almost intended to be skipped. It attempts to represent a chronological fast-forwarding of ten years with an extended, often seemingly confused and garbled description of wind moving through the summer house, noting in parenthetical asides SPOILER ALERT that Mrs. Ramsay and two of the children, Prue and Andrew, have died. This information is repeated in Part III, however, as if she knew we’d either skip Part II or nod off on the davenport trying to read it.