Voices in Time: Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
“The novels are beautiful, the language is rich and pure, and you are always with her, aware of genius, of gifts extraordinary and original. Our emotions are moved, at least some of our emotions are moved, often powerfully. And yet in a sense her novels aren’t interesting. This is the paradox of her work…” (Elizabeth Hardwick, “Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf” in Seduction and Betrayal.)
When I read this, I felt somehow absolved. I have long been a fan of Virginia Woolf, but I have always been able to put down one of her novels, mid-read, without that mad rush typically impelling me back to a book I enjoy. And for a long time, I thought my lack of urgency a poor reflection of my reading self. In hindsight, and thanks to Elizabeth Hardwick, I now realize that part of my attraction to Woolf’s work is the contemplation it effects. She has an uncanny ability to evoke the nostalgia, devoid of sentimentality, associated with the passing of time. And it takes time to read and simultaneously appreciate Woolf. Her writing is meant to be savored, not gobbled up in one sitting.
Like the fiction of Anita Brookner, Woolf's fiction concentrates on characters' inner lives and is not particularly plot-driven. That is not to say things do not happen in a Woolf novel; plenty happens. People die, marry, reconcile. But the pace is unhurried, and death, marriage, and reconciliation are secondary to the lesser events. As they frame major events, these lesser events, paradoxically, loom large in memory. You may have been routinely brushing your teeth on September 11th, for example, when you learned of the terrorist acts, and if you were, I bet you remember what flavor toothpaste you used. Colgate never quite tastes the same afterward.
Set in a summer home in the Hebrides, the novel spans almost twenty years and exposes the relationships among various members of the Ramsay family and among their visiting friends. When James, the Ramsays' youngest child, desires to sail to the lighthouse, his hopes are dashed by his father, who accurately predicts that the weather will prevent an excursion the next day. James will have a Colgate moment, for Mrs. Ramsay thinks, "But he would never forget, she knew..." James's disappointment will color his memory of the day, of his mother, and of his father.
Woolf, along with such contemporaries as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Joseph Conrad, is a modernist writer. In literature, modernism refers to a shift in aesthetic sensibilities. The atrocities of World War I destroyed the notion of a sane, coherent world, and artists began to depict the world through a lens resembling a kaleidoscope rather than corrective glasses. Meaning was no longer considered a fixed concept but rather a mutable process not readily brought into focus. Woolf achieves this kaleidoscopic effect through a style of writing called stream of consciousness, in which associations are provoked by characters' unending flow of thoughts (images, memories, emotions). Stream of consciousness allows Woolf to highlight those lesser events that return to haunt characters' memories. We're in characters' thoughts as repeating images trigger emotions tied to prior events. (Perhaps the smell of cotton candy returns you to the annual carnival? A certain shade of lavender reminds you of Aunt Ida's dining room?) In the opening pages, young James reacts to his father's damning forecast wishing there had been "an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then." His initial disappointment resurfaces in the last section of the novel when, fourteen years later, his father insists they make the long overdue trip. James is rowing the boat, and his father is reading. James thinks:
For in one moment if there was no breeze, his father would slap the covers of his book together, and say: "What's happening now? What are we dawdling about here for, eh?" as, once before he had brought his blade down among them on the terrace and she [Mrs. Ramsay] had gone still all over, and if there had been an axe handy, a knife, or anything with a sharp point he would have seized it and struck his father through the heart.
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