The Sublime Nature of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves Tiffany Ann McCormack English Southern Oregon University Faculty Mentor: Dr. Terry DeHay
Abstract: Through a postmodern approach, this paper examines the ways in which Woolf utilizes form and nature imagery in her two novels To the Lighthouse and The Waves to activate the sublime state in the reader. Woolf’s use of imagery fuses with the structure of her novels; in The Waves, imagery is the dominant piece, the interludes that serve to interrupt the story, while in To the Lighthouse, nature overcomes the Ramsay house in the “Time Passing” section. Nature becomes defined as that which is outside of civilization’s order, moving beyond definition. Woolf incorporates aspects of Roger Fry’s formalism to compliment her use of nature-oriented imagery, which purposefully calls attention to the form and not to the content, creating a peculiar effect in the reader. A reader, entering a sublime state brought on by the formal elements, experiences a slower rate of perception of the “real” and civilized world, allowing her reader to slip into the world of the imagination where knowledge and questions that have yet to be developed in the collective knowledge bank suddenly appear. The content and/or language serve to illuminate thematic issues and enhance the sublime state in the reader, while the form is responsible for activating the sublime state altogether, readying the senses for a hyper- perception. Thus, this paper argues that the structure of Woolf’s novels serve to relocate the boundaries of perception outside of the finite knowledge of civilization to the infinite unknown, in other words the sublime.
The Sublime Nature of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves
The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgment upon these multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. –Virginia Woolf “How Should One Read a Book?” Virginia Woolf, a writer engaged in the rapidly changing scene of literature, arts and politics of the early twentieth century, spent her life creating and shaping literature and criticism. Woolf assisted the art form’s evolution and transcendence beyond a narrow conception of dominant story structure and assumptions revolving around fiction and poetry. There are dozens of books on Woolf. Some like Suzanne Nalbantian’s Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Anaïs Nin, portray Woolf as very British, unable to move outside her circle, the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists, writers, and critics in Britain. Some books, such as Christine Froula’s Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity, portray Woolf as European with her avant-garde aesthetic that developed from her circle’s interests in the literary, critical, political, and artistic revolutions going on in Europe during the early twentieth century. An avant-garde artist, to borrow from Simon Malpas and his article, “Sublime Ascesis: Lyotard, Art and the Event,” is an artist who “breaks with traditional cognitive and representational structures, experimenting with the materials of art (line, colour, space, etc.) to produce new ways of seeing and feeling which, in turn, might open the possibility of new ways of thinking and acting” (199). Malpas’s definition of an avant- garde artist echoes Roger Fry’s formalist “emotional elements of design” that break with “representational structures” to focus on form (22). Fry found the “materials of art” and the formal focus to be on the “rhythm of the line,” mass, space, light and shade, and color (22). Woolf transcended the borders encasing fiction much as Fry, a fellow Bloomsbury critic, stretched the borders of perception towards art. Woolf challenged readers to try new ways of perceiving fiction and of participating in the process of writing and creating through utilizing the sublime, as well as through her experimentation with Fry’s formalism. Woolf applied sublimity in her work through the process of creating indeterminacy by experimenting with the materials of her art and not remaining fixed within any one form or idea. At the core of Woolf’s sublime aesthetic is what Jean- François Lyotard calls a presentation of the unpresentable. This oxymoronic idea stems from the Kantian sublime sentiment born from art’s evocative experience where the pleasure of conceiving of an idea or concept through questioning, having yet to be universally accepted, is met with terror when discovering there is no tie to collective knowledge (“Answer” 77). Kant’s sublime terror is about discovering the limits of society’s knowledge and potential to continue to conceive of new modes of thinking. By examining the intersection between formalism and the concept of the sublime within Woolf’s two novels To the Lighthouse and The Waves, I will demonstrate how the motivation behind creating art reveals that the finished product is less important than the process the artwork makes evident. In other words, the purpose of art is not about the end, but about the means of producing questions (“the faculty of conceiv[ing]”) with no resolution (the terror) so the potential for thought and new perspectives reaches no end (“Answering” 77). With her postmodern approach to Woolf in the critical text Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature in Quest & Question of Itself Pamela Caughie illuminates the indeterminacy of Woolf’s work which has been classified as modernist, postmodernist, Post-Impressionist, near formalist, and feminist. One of the main attractions to Woolf’s work over half of century later is her ability to elude classification. Especially considering that she experimented with those classifications, but never chose one as a superior or prescriptive mode of writing. Woolf’s aesthetic developed because she experimented with the line, as is evident with her long semi-colon ridden sentences that change from one character’s perspective to another’s seamlessly in novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. She experimented with color. For example, blue and green amongst other colors show up throughout Woolf’s novels and operate as arousers to sharpen the reader’s imaginative vision. While some scholars like Jane Goldman make enticing arguments about Woolf’s color usage being evocative of the suffragette and feminist movement, Woolf’s use of color is complimentary of artistic vision creating a heightened sense of perceiving, involving the reader in creating his or her own vision (Goldman 166-185). Woolf mentions in her Reading Notebooks that when reading poetry “the Colour Sense is first touched: roused” (13). In To the Lighthouse, first the splashes of color stand out throughout the novel assisting the reader in perceiving the vision, creating the painting, or novel in his or her own mind. Woolf experimented with space and the passage of time as well. In To the Lighthouse the “Time Passing” section is narrated primarily from the perspective of the Ramsay’s summer home. The space is invaded with the green fecundity of nature where the home desires to “[l]et the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries” (142). Because of Woolf’s approach to time passing and space changing, the reader can sense the span of ten years going by before the house is occupied again. There are allusions in the passage to World War I, but the allusions are made through the perspective of the house, off in the distance. Because Woolf did not present a definitive account of ten years passing the reader must actively perceive the text and move into a different frame of mind beyond the absolute of knowing and into one of sensing and perceiving. This participation by the perceiver is one aspect of a sublime state. It is also a difference between the reader receiving answers through representation and the reader creating the impression by exercising his or her own reason and imagination. It comes down to a difference between being led and being a leader. In the essay, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Lyotard, a theorist of sublimity, warns of the dangers of accepting the ways of representation which “preserve consciousnesses from doubt” (74). Skepticism keeps consciousness from settling for one kind of viewpoint. Malpas states that representation or realism is “consciousness in a pre-packaged form with all the presumptions, prejudices and possibilities already mapped out” (200). “Presumptions, prejudices and possibilities” have to constantly be tested through doubt to keep people from resting in complacency, apathy or prejudice. This pro-skepticism argument can be problematic since too much skepticism can lead to another set of pre-packaged viewpoints entirely raided by doubt and therefore already “mapped out.” This is why Woolf consistently experimented with different forms. Caughie discusses the techniques and styles of Woolf’s writing and how it calls attention to its form. Caughie explains that since Woolf uses unfamiliar forms made out of familiar items, such as words, sentences, and paragraphs, the form grows more apparent. This technique of using familiar items, like words, that can easily be taken for granted and ignored, and then defamiliarizing (Shklovsky 12-13) them by placing them in an unfamiliar setting, like the abstract perspective of a beach home, exemplifies Malpas’s description of Lyotard’s sublime, that which “challenges representational norms by alluding to that which disrupts them. In the sublime nothing appears, there is no solution or resolution, but rather an iteration and solicitation of common conceptual understanding” (200). While Woolf draws attention to the abstract form she employs and the nature in which the form disrupts “common conceptual understanding,” Woolf also draws upon Lyotard’s sublime by bringing attention to individual materials that make up the form. This means that words are given more attention and can be perceived in different ways; especially if the words are questioned. This means that, by stepping outside the “representational norms,” Woolf draws attention to as many aspects of the work as the reader can grasp, right down to the semi-colon and comma usage. This self- conscious approach towards form raises the reader’s attention and places the reader in a heightened state of awareness. But, as Malpas states, there is no resolution offered by this deviation from the norm. Resolution is sought after by some readers; they want answers and facts, but instead Woolf’s readers find sublimity through the questioning/questing after knowledge and answers. The heightened sensory state opens the reader to perceiving the text, to discovering how the “common conceptual understanding” is not the finale. There is a great deal of distance the mind and imagination can go in order to conceive of new understanding and concepts. Woolf’s essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” clarifies that Woolf was not interested in laying out rules or dictating solutions to a problem, but rather involving the reader by way of his or her own perception. This means the reader draws upon his or her own mind and becomes aware of the “presumptions, prejudices and possibilities” in both writer and reader. Woolf seems, in this essay, to have anticipated the more contemporary literary theory of reader-response criticism. She implores readers to draw their own conclusions and to engage with the writer/writing. Woolf writes: If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. Woolf believed in exercising the mind in reading, in involving it in the creative process of perceiving literature, and in engaging it in pushing boundaries that surround preconceptions. By doing so, the reader gains enough distance to reflect upon his or her own biases and presumptions. This distance comes from entering a sublime state, which writing or artwork can evoke in the perceiver. Indeed Woolf evokes the sublime state. In his essay “The Sublime and the Avant- Garde,” Lyotard describes the avant-garde artist’s use of sublimity and his or her efforts “to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible,” a version of presenting the unpresentable (102). Woolf engaged with this exercise of sublimity within her work to such a point as to almost anticipate Lyotard’s stance. Within To the Lighthouse, Woolf places the reader alongside the artist Lily Briscoe as she journeys through her painful self-doubt and into her past and impressions of Mrs. Ramsay to the sublime state where the artist can detach herself and begin to see multiple perspectives. For instance, while Lily is in the sublime state and painting, she carries on an imaginary conversation with Mr. Carmichael, a character whose inner dialogue the reader never hears. Lily thinks to herself, A curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things she could not say. He was an inscrutable old man, with the yellow stain on his beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing serenely through a world which satisfied all his wants, so that she thought he had only to put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he wanted. She looked at her picture. That would have been his answer, presumably—how “you” and “I” and “she” pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. (182) Lily merges with Mr. Carmichael’s perspective. The friction of stepping into another perspective “defamiliarizes” the “habitual way of thinking” from the “automatic” perspective found in the self (Lemon and Reis 4). And the result for Lily is recognition of the constant change. The reader begins to see what destabilizes Lily’s vision enough to make her pay attention to the conception of her painting; the reader sees what makes Lily see. Following the imaginary conversation with Mr. Carmichael Lily begins to doubt the outcome of her process and believes that her painting will “be hung in the attics…it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it ‘remained for ever’” (182-183). Woolf is highlighting what makes Lily see as the reader senses what moves Lily to paint. The memory of Mrs. Ramsay and the process to arrive at a true impression of Mrs. Ramsay motivates Lily. The reader does not definitively see Lily’s vision and the final outcome of the painting based on the vision, but instead perceives of the process of artistic creation. This process-oriented style is similar to the formalism alluded to in Fry’s “An Essay in Aesthetics,” where the final piece of art is not discussed, but instead the techniques that create the art and the artistic imagination are discussed. As noted by Christine Froula, Woolf was challenged by her intellectual circle of friends in the Bloomsbury Group (179). Fry’s formalism challenged Woolf because it required her to adapt her writing to ideals and motivations behind painting. Woolf considered Fry to be the one who kept her “on the right path, so far as writing goes, more than anyone,” she wrote in a letter to him after publishing To the Lighthouse (Reed 25). In his “An Essay in Aesthetics” Fry describes formalism by first approaching the artist’s state of mind while creating; a sublime state of mind. Only this imaginative state is suited to create what Fry calls a “disinterested intensity of contemplation” where a “heightened power of perception” occurs (19). Fry uses the example of looking at a street scene through a mirror, rather than actually viewing it, and observes how this “visionary quality” of “abstract[ing] ourselves” and creating distance between ourselves and the street scene is an act we engage in with our imaginative selves to create the “artistic vision” (13). Woolf exercises Fry’s sublime “artistic vision” in Lily. Lily struggles to distance herself enough to see the scene she is to paint. Woolf writes of Lily’s experience, Can’t paint, can’t write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously considering what her plan of attack should be. For the mass loomed before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then, as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current (162-63) By approaching the automatic assumption brought to Lily’s attention ten years earlier by Mr. Tansley about women being unable to paint and write, Lily finds her way to a “disinterested intensity of contemplation.” She no longer cares to address the inanity of such a statement and the disinterest leads her to being overcome by the artistic vision, which is something she cares to fall into. Lily no longer cares about the imposed scene that comes from a limited perspective of the actual life, like Fry’s street scene, but instead wants to engage with the scene from a different, indirect perspective.
Fig. 1. Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne’s Still-life with apples (1890-94). Private collection, U.S.A.
Post-Impressionism is the body of art that inspired Fry’s conception of formalism (Twitchell 3). Through his contemplation of formalism Fry attempted to put bounds on the boundless imagination in order to better understand what goes on behind the scene of artistic perception, both for the artist and for the receiver. In doing so, formalism developed away from content where content is the direct, realistic, limited perspective. Simply put, a cup or other piece of dishware is from the actual life; the “rhythm of the line” that forms the cup, the mass, space, light and shade of it are what matters in formalism. This aesthetic development calls attention to itself in that both artist and responder become aware of the techniques that create the artwork, not of trying to discern exactly what is represented in the realm of cold hard facts. Therefore formalism is a self- conscious, or form-conscious philosophy of art. After writing To the Lighthouse Woolf took about two years to write her Post- Impressionist style novel or play/poem The Waves (Broughton 57). The Waves is considered one of Woolf’s most experimental works due to her elimination of certain literary structures, like traditional use of character and her practice with Post- Impressionist elements. The novel is a series of impressions of objects, which are known as interludes, followed by a series of impressions resonating from six people. The impressions begin at dawn and end as the sun exits the sky. The sun, in effect, becomes an extended metaphor throughout the novel that parallels the dawning impressions that the six people make throughout their lives until their deaths when the sun has gone. The interludes utilize formalistic construction. Woolf abstractly handles simple forms, like dishware, and places them alongside ocean waves, a cupboard and the sun’s rays. The relationships between the forms changes throughout the day based on how time is proceeding and where the sun is in the sky, and also based on where Woolf is in the development of the six characters’ impressions. In the first interlude that precedes the first stories, or rather soliloquies, of the six people Woolf describes the scene as follows: The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky…The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up…The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue fingerprint of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window…all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside. (3) Everything in the scene is related to the next object or form with the sun playing a pivotal part. The sea to the sun, the sun to the sea and then to the garden trees, which stirs a bird, then the sun enters the house and touches upon a leaf. The interlude is laid out like a painting with each object relating to one another, not clumped together. There are lines drawn to create a center, there is shadow, light, color and mass. Subsequently the layout of the scene with its reference to the insubstantial and birds with blank melodies parallels the insubstantiality posed by the first impressions of the six people as children. The seemingly insubstantial impressions become woven into their lives until death because of the initial brightness of the sunlight, which parallels the initial impressions. The relationship of light and shadow in The Waves is of particular importance because of the sun’s relationship to the developing impressions. Woolf juxtaposes the impressions of objects with the impressions individually created by the people in her novel. The novel could be read by focusing on process, where the interludes, or writerly paintings, and the objects within the interludes allow the reader to create his or her own impressions. Then the reader witnesses the process by which the character-developed impressions take place. All the while the reader continues to make his or her own impression of the characters with a self-conscious viewing. The effect of this artistic technique is to illuminate the shadowy, indeterminate side of personal impressions and the process whereby impressions derive presumptions and prejudices. The reader never sees what the characters see, or how exactly their impressions are drawn, but again the reader senses what is not visible and senses how the characters arrive at their impressions. This effect is also mirrored in the reader and the reader begins to puzzle over his or her own impressions and presumptions. The abstract style Woolf employs in The Waves exemplifies her process-oriented position making this novel about an idea that goes beyond discernible bounds. One of the characteristics within a sublime work of art is the ability to displace perception, suspending the usual or automatic way of interacting long enough to conceive of a new perception. The reader’s perception is displaced when Woolf illuminates and paints impressions, and approaches character in a totally different way in The Waves. Or just as Lily fell into the “disinterested intensity of contemplation” while painting and began to perceive of the environment and memory of Mrs. Ramsay differently, the reader falls into a sublime state where the once familiar boundaries surrounding the treatment of character and point-of-view in fiction are gone. Through the reader’s imagination the actual life is let go, and a different, creative and sublime perspective is found. For a work of sublime art, the different conception being tested out is too big to have determinacy. Edmund Burke remarks upon the expansiveness of sublimity. He says, “hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness which does not make some sort of approach toward infinity; which nothing can do while we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, are one and the same thing. A clear idea is, therefore, another name for a little idea,” and conversely a big idea is not clear since it goes outside the bounds of perception (63). Sublimity is a very large idea. Tying back to Fry and his concept of formalism; formalism provided another option to explore the development of a large idea by taking away attention to the bounds that classify a form. Sublimity is a concept not easily defined. Some scholars like Jane Forsey would argue it is not a concept that can be defined or theorized about at all. Nonetheless it is a concept that has drawn critical attention in recent years (Forsey 381). In “The Limits of the Sublime, the Sublime of Limits: Hermeneutics as a Critique of the Postmodern Sublime,” Jerome Carroll develops the idea that sublimity cannot be defined or pinned within recognizable boundaries and is, therefore, a problematic philosophical concept. Carroll expounds upon Lyotard’s “conception of art’s oppositional force” as it was brought to him by Kant: “Kant’s sublime [is] the point at which meaning in a more general sense gets opened up to radical interpretive indeterminacy, in the face of which the only plausible response is joyous openness” (171). Meaning loses its explicit borders, as with formalism where the borders that lead to the “general sense” of meaning, the recognizable form of a cup or plate, are no longer meaningful. To Woolf, there is no superior standard or “core of meaning” to apply to literature or reality (Caughie 9). Woolf, along with others before her like the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, found God, the creator of meaning, to be dead (Lokke 427). Instead of focusing on being the arbiter of meaning, Woolf challenges stability and creates works that engage the reader’s mind, asking the reader to let go of preconceptions in order to participate in the imagination and its creations. Reading Woolf is a mental and imaginative exercise to reflect upon how far the intellect can go before encountering limitations. This is revolutionary because Woolf challenges the constructs of limitation, such as nationhood, gender, and belief systems, along with authorial authority and literary forms. Woolf uses the concepts of formalism and sublimity to slough off the boundaries of literary convention and raise doubts about many constructs that she alludes to in her novels. Woolf challenges patriotism, clothing and ceremonies, the professions, fiction, poetry, gender, war, education, history, realism, traditions, authority, and the role of the reader through her fictions, her hybrids like Three Guineas and her critical essays. Her novels and essays confront the notions behind nation, war, gender, the professions, and education finding the cultural constructs narrow and “pre-packaged.” She offered no resolutions, to some readers’ dismay. Instead she offered the sublime in her vision, grabbing the readers’ attention and assisting them in developing receptivity if only for a fleeting moment. A fleeting moment is preferable otherwise Woolf’s style becomes conventional, losing its contemporareity. Woolf discovered the means to heighten the readers’ awareness through the sublime found in experimentation and a detachment from the norms of structure and habit. Her artistic devotion to moving the imagination beyond perceivable boundaries is evident in both To the Lighthouse and The Waves. If art was about the end, a work of art would be obsolete in no time, worth only its monetary value and perhaps whatever definitive knowledge it brings. But, when a piece of art relays its process before the perceiver, like Woolf’s artistic novels, the art is capable of changing along with humanity’s ability to conceive of ideas and evolving perspectives. The works of art that move and change with the times are those found to be ahead of their time simply because the process they illuminate can be re-examined repeatedly, and as Italo Calvino says in The Uses of Literature, “give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social and individual unconscious” (19). Woolf’s art presents the unpresentable, which even still brings a multitude of different interpretations. Reading Woolf suspends the reader’s consciousness in sublimity, where questions like those surrounding the creating of prejudicial or presumptive impressions, or narrow- minded viewpoints like Mr. Tansley’s, create a sense of “joyous openness” by allowing the reader to step into a perspective where for a moment he or she is free from the normative way of viewing the world; free from prejudices and restrictions. This way of perceiving and thinking has not entered into the mainstream consciousness where singular viewpoints, facts, defined knowledge, and mapped out cultural concepts and fictional structures are still the norm. Woolf was a revolutionary for giving the unvoiced a voice. She gave the reader a vision of freedom.
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