an introduction to the novel by virginia woolf
Virginia Woolf's fifth novel 'To the Lighthouse', published in 1927, is one of her most experimentally modernist works. The book's genius is hard to summarize, except by saying that reading it is a uniquely immersive experience. To ask what the novel is about is not an easy question either. Putting it philosophically, 'To the Lighthouse' may be said to be about the time and space between people. Bear with me while I try and explain...
On the surface, 'To the Lighthouse' is a portrait of the Ramsay family during a summer stay on the Isle of Skye. At the center is Mrs Ramsay, mother of eight children, famed for her beauty and with a dominant, radiant character that holds the whole family together, along with a number of guests. Her husband, Mr Ramsay, an eccentric scholar searching for abstract truth, is her opposite in many ways, but also her complement. Among the Ramsay's guests are an angry young academic, an old poet with laudanum stains in his beard, and a young, independent woman aspiring to be a painter.
However, there is not much story to speak of: very little 'happens' in the book, nor is there much dialogue. The novel 'takes place' almost entirely inside people's heads, shifting from one character to another and describing their thoughts and perceptions. Without guidance from an objective, omniscient narrator, this multiple stream of consciousness may seem daunting, but its effect is to bring the book's characters to life 'from the inside' in a way that few conventional stories ever manage.
Proust and Joyce pioneered stream of consciousness writing, but Woolf perfected it, and only Beckett, in his monologues, ever rivalled her in conveying so vividly and realistically the hermetic realm of thoughts, emotions and impressions, both trivial and profound, sometimes only half-formulated, going on inside people's heads at any moment.
the time between
Despite its stream of consciousness style, 'To the Lighthouse' has a tight narrative structure: it is limited to two single days, separated by ten years. This structure can also be seen as a combination of Woolf's earlier novels 'Mrs Dalloway' (a single day) and 'The Years' (a number of days over a period of thirty years), with the novelty of devoting a whole part of the book to - quite literally - the description of time passing.
Woolf herself thought of the structure as shaped like a capital H, "two blocks joined by a corridor," which is reflected in the novel's three parts:
- The Window (one day)
- Time Passes (ten years)
- The Lighthouse (one day)
Thus the book both extremely condenses time, in the streams of consciousness in the first and third part, where several pages may be devoted to one minute of reality; and extremely stretches time, in the second part where ten years are summarized in a couple of pages. It is as if, to borrow a film metaphor, the book consisted of a collection of extreme close-ups and one long panorama shot in which all detail is lost.
The first and third part are composed as a number of tableaux, settings really, in which the various characters are occupied with leisurely activities - reading, knitting, painting, eating, sailing - giving them plenty of time for introspection and revery. Significantly, the only real 'events' in the book happen in the middle part: Mrs Ramsay dies, as well as two of her children, one in childbirth, the other on the battlefield of World War I.
The tableaux of 'The Window' and 'The Lighthouse' are set up as mirror images, separated by time, and dominated by the presence and absence of Mrs Ramsay. During the first part of the book there is talk of visiting the nearby lighthouse, on a small island on the coast, an expedition particularly anticipated by the youngest child, James. But circumstances and the weather prevent this from happening. Ten years later, the remaining family members revisit the house, and this time they do make the trip to the lighthouse, but it is not the same as they had once anticipated it. As James, now sixteen, realizes, comparing the lighthouse of his childhood to the one he is sailing towards, "nothing was simply one thing." With its lack of objective description, 'To the Lighthouse' is all about how different characters, at different points in time, see things in different ways.
If 'The Window' is charged with the various characters' aspirations for the future (looking forward to the lighthouse, starting a painting, a couple announcing their engagement, finding the truth), 'The Lighthouse' is suffused with nostalgia, with comparing the present with the past of ten years ago, and making the best of what's left (finishing a painting, finally going to the lighthouse). In everything the absence of Mrs Ramsay is felt.
To sketch Mrs Ramsay's character and that of her husband, take the following two quotes. Mr Ramsay is best characterized by his work, which Lily Briscoe, the young artist, thinks of like this:
Whenever she 'thought of his work' she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his father's books were about. 'Subject and object and the nature of reality', Andrew had said, and when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. 'Think of a kitchen table then', he told her, 'when you're not there.'
By contrast, "the nature of reality" for Mrs Ramsay is quite different. Instead of the reassuring abstractness of "a kitchen table when you're not there," for her it is quite real and intimate, but terrible as well:
There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.
In fact, many of Mrs Ramsay's thoughts and impressions in the first part foreshadow her death, her ultimate "transaction" with life. In one scene she sits in the house with her youngest son, James, while she keeps one eye (and ear) on the rest of the household who go about their various business outside. Note how Woolf manages to transform the atmosphere in the course of a single (long) sentence from reassurance to terror:
The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window), that the men were happily talking, this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, 'How's that? How's that?' of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, 'I am guarding you - I am your support', but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow - this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.
In the third part of the book, with Mrs Ramsay gone, the place has become "a house full of unrelated passions." It is Lily Briscoe who observes most clearly perhaps the absence of the binding force of Mrs Ramsay.
The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachments here, she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step outside, a voice calling ('It's not in the cupboard; it's on the landing,' some one cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup.
The crucial point, however, is that the pivotal event of the book - the death of Mrs Ramsay - happens in part 2, where it is presented almost as a footnote of time passing. All we really experience of the event is foreshadowing (in part 1) and looking back (part 3). Thus what is emphasized is the time between, the long dark "corridor" between the short "blocks" of human thought. As Woolf described it, with the disinterested, fleeting style of the middle part of the novel she tried to evoke "life as it is when we have no part in it." (Which reminds of the "kitchen table when you're not there.")
To put it differently, if 'The Window' and 'The Lighthouse' are mirror images, it is time which mirrors (and distorts) them - time which in 'Time Passes' is again likened to a flood, engulfing and destroying everything and everyone in darkness.
So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say 'This is he' or 'This is she.' Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.
the space between
In his classic close reading essay 'The Brown Stocking' (an excerpt from which can be found here), Erich Auerbach took one scene from 'To the Lighthouse' and analyzed the different perspectives that comprise it. The scene, in part 1, is when Mrs Ramsay sits in the house knitting a brown stocking, as a gift to the lighthouse boy. Her son, James, sits at her feet playing, and Mrs Ramsay measures the stocking on his leg, while outside other characters pass by the window. In terms of what happens (measuring a stocking) it is a trivial scene, but it provides a good example of the complexities of Woolf's writing. Though most of the scene is from Mrs Ramsay's perspective, at least four other perspectives are presented, while some passages can't be contributed to a specific character at all. One paragraph in particular, a description of Mrs Ramsay, appears puzzling:
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
Who is observing this? The text offers no clues, and normally one would suppose this to be a statement by the narrator. However, as Auerbach notes, in this case it is more complicated. In his words:
'Never did anybody look so sad' is not an objective statement. In rendering the shock received by one looking at Mrs Ramsay's face, it verges upon a realm beyond reality. And in the ensuing passage the speakers no longer seem to be human beings at all but spirits between heaven and earth, nameless spirits capable of penetrating the depths of the human soul, capable too of knowing something about it, but not of attaining clarity as to what is in process there, with the result that what they report has a doubtful ring. (...) We are not dealing with objective utterances on the part of the author in respect to one of the characters. No one is certain of anything here: it is all mere supposition, glances cast by one person upon another whose enigma he cannot solve.
The same question can be asked of the novel's whole middle part: who is observing ten years passing? We can even make it into a Zen riddle: who is observing the house, and the kitchen table, when no one is there? Who is observing "life when we have no part in it"? Again, in a conventional novel this wouldn't be a very relevant question. But here it is precisely the fact that most of the book is presented from subjective, stream of consciousness perspectives – as if Woolf were 'locking us up' inside the characters' minds – that creates the rather vertiginous contrast with the passages which have no perspective at all. From the bright "sunlight" of the various characters' consciousness we are suddenly thrown into the dark "depths" of the empty space between them.
Woolf's husband and publisher, Leonard Woolf, called 'To the Lighthouse' a psychological poem, emphasizing its lyrical style and great psychological insight. But the style of 'To the Lighthouse' may best be explained - paradoxically - by comparing it to a film. Even though by its nature film usually looks at people from the outside, imagine for a moment a film that would look at people and the world literally through different people's eyes, in one continuous camera movement, floating from one person to the next with seamless transitions between people's subjective perspectives. Imagine, furthermore, that while shifting from one person to the next, from one mental sphere to the other, the camera would also be able to show the mental space between them. What would this look like?
We have already seen several instances where time is felt as a great darkness threatening to engulf and destroy, until "there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say 'This is he' or 'This is she.'" In another passage in 'Time Passes', Woolf explicitly links this darkness to a kind of primeval chaos:
Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine weather, held their court without interference. Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.
It is our consciousness, our perceptions, thoughts and ideas, that impose order on the world – a subjective order to be sure, but in Woolf's view that may be pleonastic. When we are not there to observe and – literally – make sense of the world, everything is left to decay and disintegration into chaos. There is no kitchen table when we're not there, because we make it into a kitchen table. Without us, there is only a "confounded" object, a plaything of "amorphous leviathans". Mrs Ramsay, the brightest consciousness of all the characters, knows this intuitively, and is terrified of it, which is why she gathers all her loved ones around her. Ironically, Mr Ramsay, the scholar and philosopher, doesn't seem to know it: he looks for objective truth (which is really a contradiction in terms) in a vain attempt to transcend his own subjective experience.
Thus 'To the Lighthouse' shows reality to be nothing but a shifting constellation of subjective experiences, of people alone with their thoughts, guarding themselves against the vast emptiness and chaos that surrounds them. The disintegration into chaos of "life when we have no part in it" is shown most clearly in the ten year span when the house stands empty. But it is also visible in those problematic passages like the paragraph of "Never did anybody look so sad." They convey the empty space between people into which all human experience is threatened to disappear like a tear into water. Consequently, all the trivial thoughts and perceptions that make up our consciousness can be seen as attempts to ward off that chaos. More than just trying to realistically describe human consciousness, Woolf shows human beings in an existential nakedness: our trivial, subjective experience is all we have, as temporary strongholds of order in the frightening chaos of the universe.
Finally, to add one more perspective, there is the character of Lily Briscoe, the independent, artistic woman, who is perhaps closest to Woolf herself. In several places she describes the artist's struggle to secure her unique personal perspective against the darkness that surrounds her. Here we see the same theme in heightened form: the artist striking out from her stronghold, defying the chaos to bring a new piece of order into the world. Note, too, that she likens her struggle to a passage down a dark corridor.
It was in that moment's flight between the picture [in her mind] and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage, to say: 'But this is what I see; this is what I see', and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck away from her.