To the Lighthouse

Submitted by Sandy Rodolf on Wed, 04/10/2013 - 23:07

Many years ago I wrote a paper on Virginia Woolf and discussed her role as literary critic.  Today I dug up this paper out of an old box in the basement and read it.  To my surprise I found some interesting thoughts about Woolf that apply to our reading of  To the Lighthouse.  When I read the last phrase of the book in the voice of Lily saying to herself, "I have had my vision" I thought I understood her to mean that yes, she finally saw her painting as complete and she was pleased with her decade long effort.  She had managed to close the circle of her thoughts and apply them on canvas as a whole as she meant them to be remembered. But I was really amazed to see that something I had written about Woolf's criticism helped to explain to me why she wrote that last line.

I was struck by Wool's use of the word "vision" because I found this to be the exact word she used to describe as necessary in writing.  I wrote:  "Chief among her critical standards is this insistence upon wholeness, upon what she calls singleness of vision and effect in a work of art."  Later when discussing the novels of E.M Forster I wrote that Woolf declares, "if there is one gift more essential to a novelist than another it is the power of combination -- the single vision." Woolf, Essays I,p.345

Further,  that "Life escapes if not seized in a "moment of vision" that only occurs when the writer is able to cut through the daily mystification and see to the eternal."  This is why time did not matter to her. She is not concerned with description and temporal details.  Woolf felt it was the task of the writer to "catch and enclose certain moments which break off from the mass...to arrest those thoughts which suddenly are almost menacing with meaning.  Such moments of vision are of an unaccountable nature; leave them alone and they persist for years; try to explain them and they disapear; write them down and they die beneath the pen."  Woolf, Contemporary Writers,p75

I hadn't connected Lighthouse back then to my paper on Woolf as a literary critic and reading this now shows that she was practicing what she preached.  I am awed. So cool.

Comments

Jeff Drouin

Thu, 04/11/2013 - 23:06

Thank you for sharing this, Sandy. I'm struck by the closeness of detail between Woolf and Lily Briscoe, specifically the moment in the painting process when she picks up the brush and the vision she wishes to embody is suddenly beset by internal demons and "dies." It seems Woolf was translating her own experience as a writer into Lily. And yes, it's fascinating to see how unified her thinking was, in that her criticism and fiction make the same claims.

Sandy Rodolf

Fri, 04/12/2013 - 17:29

Thank you for choosing the book!  I am so blown away by V. Woolf and so happy to make this rediscovery of her work.  It's so much better to have a group discussion of the material and you have been illuminating.  I never would have seen all of the places where she was referring to the war, for instance, but for your class.  In Lighthouse she keeps asking,  What is the Meaning of LIfe? and What have I done with my life?  These questions are the eternal questions one asks in order to make sense of things.  I don't suppose she ever figured it out, or maybe she thought she did and that's what drove her to suicide....thinking that life was so arbitratry and perhaps meaningless.  In her diary she wrote: " And as usual I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth.  That is the only mitigation; a kind of nobility.  Solemnity.  I shall make myself face the fact that there is nothing--nothing for any of us.  Work, reading, writing are all disguises; and relations with people.  Yes, even having children would be useless." (p141)

Further, she asks, "Why is there not a discovery in life?   Something one can lay hands on and say "this is it"?  My depression is a harassed feeling.  I'm looking:  but that's not it - that's not it.  What is it?"(p.85)   She knows that "the truth" is not something static than can be found and labeled a "it", however much we wish it could, but that to attempt to find the truth is a never ending process of necessary exploration, and that's what keeps us all here and in the game.  When she does have a momentary "singleness of vision" either in nature, memory or at a certain moment Woolf hopes to capture it and she finds frustration when she is unable to pin it down with words.  I think that when Lily says she has had her vision in the last line of the book that is Woolf showing us that for that instant the painter was able to lay down in paint what she could not do with words.

Quite an enjoyble book. Woolf was certainly a genuis and reading her with these other Modernist works helps to understand her so much better.