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The Sublime Nature of Virginia Woolf's to the Lighthouse and the Waves

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The Sublime Nature of Virginia Woolf's to the Lighthouse and the Waves 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.
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