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Minogue VisionStructuringEmptiness 1997
Minogue VisionStructuringEmptiness 1997
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Journal of Modern Literature
Sally Minogue
Canterbury Christ Church College
1 welve months before starting to write the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse,
Virginia Woolf records in her diary:
London . . . is shot with the accident I saw this morning & a woman crying Oh oh
oh faintly, pinned against the railings with a motor car on top of her. All day I have
heard that voice. I did not go to her help; but then every baker & flowerseller did
that. A great sense of the brutality and wildness of the world remains with
me?there was this woman in brown walking along the pavement?suddenly a red
film car turns a somersault, lands on top of her, & one hears this oh, oh, oh.1
This brief passage shows many characteristic Woolf qualities: impersonality of observation,
quivering sensibility, distaste for the vulgar, and the need to reshape imaginatively through
repetition. Most notable, however, is the sense of the absurd, issuing, along with the almost
comic "oh, oh, oh" as from a cartoon balloon squeezed out between car and railings, and from
the Camus-like flat reductiveness to surface, shapes, colours and sounds. Woolfs ability to
remove herself from the world and see it in its cosmieally comic proportions can chill?as can
her snobbery?but here it is redeemingly shot with her tragic sense of "the brutality and
wildness of the world" within it.
Woolfs diary entry, with its suddenness, its mixture of distress and detachment, and
perhaps most of all its railings, recalls Septimus' suicide in Mrs. Dalloway (the oroofs of
1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vois., ed. Anne O. Bell (The Hogarth Press, 1980), Vol. HI: 1925-1930, p. 6.
All future references are to this edition, this volume, and will be cited parenthetically.
Sally Minogue, "Was it a Vision? Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse," Journal of Modern Literature, XXI,
2 (Winter 1997-98), pp. 281-294. ?Foundation for Modern Literature, 1998.
which Woolf had recently reviewed). While the actual death occu
novel (and its immediate aftermath barely a page), its narrative
Clarissa excruciatingly relives it (as it were) on hearing of it during
obligatory touch of bathos enters: "What business had the Bradsh
party?"2 But its inconsiderate intrusion "in the middle of my p
extension of the way in which death has been inconsideratel
consciousness all day. The hidden seduction of "Fear no more . .
into the open, as is the meticulous detail of the plunge onto the r
enactment (both hitherto narratively submerged). Clarissa's long ref
between life and death, as her party eddies around her, brings
annihilation which floods below the thin strip of her existence, y
in order to be freed from that fear which floats always at the edg
obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chat
It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a
It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia. (p. 27)
2 Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Claire Tomalin (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 241. All future references are to this
ir?n anri \i/ill K/? n'ttf*A r?ar*?nth#?tir?a1I\j
edition and will be cited parenthetically.
But here the deflation is poignant, emphasizing the innocence of Septimus' view of th
And if he sees beauty in Creemo advertisements, he also sees the revelatory figure
while both are distortions of reality, their being given equal significance in Sep
understanding comes from the terrible logic of his insanity. What he sees all the
"thing there was that mattered") Clarissa can see only at odd moments, if she is t
living. Life cannot carry on if its emptiness?an emptiness residing in the consta
indifference of death?is fully understood. The structural linking of Septimus wit
thus insists on the seriousness of her glimpses of life's inherent absurdity, for,
moments, she sees what Septimus sees. It also allows the persistent bathos accompanyi
glimpses both to remind us of a shallowness in Clarissa's life which actually protect
to represent the inherent irony of existence, for notions of greater and lesser sig
cannot be properly conceived when the whole is made meaningless by death.
And it is autumn; & the lights are going up; & Nessa is in Fitzroy Street?in a great
misty room, with flaring gas & unsorted plates and glasses on the floor,?& the
Press is booming?& this celebrity business is quite chronic?& I am richer than I
have ever been?& bought a pair of earrings today?8c for all this, there is vacancy
& silence somewhere in the machine. . . . If I never felt these extraordinarily
pervasive strains?of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort?I should float
down into acquiescence.. . . If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling ofthe
singing ofthe real world, as one is driven by loneliness & silence from the habitable
world. . . . But anvthine is nossible. And this curious steed. life: is genuine?Does
3 To the Lighthouse, ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 244. All future references are t
this edition and will be cited parenthetically.
I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like t
room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips. That is t
These remarks come in the same entry as the reported car acciden
to the news of Jacques Raverat's death, which, close friend as h
temporal order to the fate of the "brown woman." Her comments h
response to the deaths of others and some notion of her own d
present tense of "I like to go out. . .," which seems to carry an
4 In 1926 alone, coinciding with the writing and revision of To the Lighthouse
several times in her diary (pp. 62, 73, 95, 110, 111, 113).
5 See pp. 173, 181, 314, 322, 334. We can trace a line from these responses strai
which she describes thus: "I noticed that one nurse was sobbing, and a desire to l
myself as I have often done at moments of crisis since 'I feel nothing whatever.'" "A S
of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Triad/Granada, 1976), p. 107.
in it).6 The stepping out into the darkness of her suicide may at least have had the consolat
for her that she chose her moment, a last refusal to "doff the cap."
Woolfs inclination to answer death's indifference with her own is, of course, at the sa
time a recognition of its power: human response can make no difference to it. Her fi
attempt to find a formal, structural solution to the problem of expressing this in fiction co
in Jacob's Room, as we learn of Jacob's death on the last page?which also constitutes the
chapter?of the novel.7 But in this attempt at representing death as the arch non sequit
undercutting all that has gone before and making meaningless all that is to come, Woolf
I think, unsuccessful. The intended lacuna, the gap in the narrative, with his death announc
only in the past tense of the words of his friend Bonamy, "'He left everything just as it w
fails to impress, because Jacob himself is like a large gap in the fiction.8 He exists only
a collection of "all sorts of qualities" endowed on him by the observer, qualities which
however, as Woolf immediately avers, "he had not at all" (p. 61). While she may here
trying to foreshadow the emptiness to come, in doing so she fails to persuade the reader
the charm of Jacob's "mystery" (p. 61) (a charm strongly felt by the other characters in
novel). Thus, for us there is no point of contrast for his lack on the final page; someho
Jacob has always been missing. The description of his forever empty room at the end of
novel ("Listless is the air in an empty room. . .," p. 155) gains no significance by his dea
it hangs as a simple repetition of the first description (p. 31), because Jacob has neve
imaginatively occupied the room, or the novel. A clear indicator of this is the complete
of sentimentality of the closing image of Jacob's mother:
Pace Sue Roe in her introduction to the Penguin edition (p. xxxviii), this surely does not car
the dead symbolic weight which has been attached to Van Gogh's famous image. But, leac
of sentimentality, it is also without poignancy. For us, Jacob remains a man without qualiti
The specter of sentimentality haunted Woolf in the writing of To the Lighthouse, bot
its start?"this theme may be sentimental; father & mother & child in the garden: the de
the sail to the lighthouse." (Diary, p. 36)?and at its end: "this last lap, in the boat, is har
. . . I am forced to be more direct & more intense . . . & I go in dread of "sentimentalit
Is the whole theme open to that charge?" (pp. 109-10). This is odd, ofa novel so thoroug
6 Her words here, and the understated idea of death as leaving the room, recall Keats's "I can scarcely bid y
goodbye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow." Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats (J
Dent and Sons, 1954), p. 217. But Woolf cannot manage Keats's fine balance?acutely charted by Christop
Ricks?of bathos and pathos, embarrassment and despair; as Ricks says, "It must be the least awkward bow ev
made." Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 218-19.
7 She deals with it thematically rather than structurally in The Voyage Out.
8 Jacob's Room, ed. Sue Roe (Penguin, 1992), p. 155. All future references are to this edition and cit
parenthetically.
"WELL, we must wait for the future to show," said Mr Bankes, coming in from the
terrace.
"It's almost too dark to see," said Andrew, coming up from the beach.
"One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land," said Prue.
"Do we leave that light burning?" said Lily as they took their coats off indoors.
9 Quoted from Woolfs 'Notes for Writing' in Hermione Lee, 'Introduction to To the Lighthouse', in
Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, ed. Julia Briggs (Virago Press, 1994), p. 161.
10 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., eds. N. Nicolsonand J. Trautmann (The Hogarth Press, 1975-
m, p. 374.
11 She refers to working on the "last chapter" of the novel, "In the Boat" (Diary, p. 106), although this evidently
became the penultimate chapter, 12, in the final version.
to lie awake a little reading Virgil, kept his candle burning rather longer than the
All of these characters have been left at the end of chapter 18 (the penultimate chapter of
"The Window") in mid-fiction: left by Mrs. Ramsay as she retreats to "the other room" and
the company of her husband, and left by Woolf in order to give over chapter 19 entirely to
Mrs. Ramsay. Now they have to be rescued from their narrative limbo. There is perhaps a
sense that this tidying up of the other characters, their going to bed and putting the lights out,
might properly have belonged to the end of the first "block," from which it has been displaced
in order to close "The Window" with our last view of Mrs. Ramsay (it is, after all, the end
of her). But in its position at the start of "Time Passes," chapter 1 becomes both valedictory
and transitional. The apocalyptic associations of "One by one the lamps were all extinguished"
are veiled by the domestic scene of Mr. Carmichael keeping his light on longer so as to read
his Virgil. But as soon as we read the first sentence of Chapter 2?"So with the lamps all put
out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense
darkness began" (p. 171)?the tones of catastrophe and desolation east their shadow back on
the domestic realism of chapter 1." A bleak significance seeps back in to "we must wait for
the future to show" and "It's almost too dark to see." Like the swift turn of participle in
Keats's "The Eve of St Agnes" ("And they are gone: ay, ages long ago These lovers fled
away into the storm"), which moves us in the one word from the lovers' present ("gone,"
escaped, from Madeline's castle) to their long-dead past ("gone . . . ages long ago"); or the
double-edged repetition of "forlorn" in "Ode to a Nightingale," ejecting us from the
imaginative vision of "faery lands" into the dreary, songless present of the poem's last
verse?so "the flood, the profusion of darkness" (p. 171) released in chapter 2 submerges the
innocent realism of chapter 1 and makes it irretrievably ironic.12 When it later turns out that
we have also seen the end of Prue and Andrew in this short insignificant passage, they too
become victims of the writer's irony, their unawareness, like the reader's own, made to seem
foolish.
The "impersonal thing" which begins its habitation of the house in chapter 2 and is the
architect of this foolishness, had previously been attempted by Woolf, with varying degrees
of success, in Jacob 'sRoom and Mrs. Dalloway. What makes it so powerful in "Time Passes"
is the sense which we have of impersonality strengthening its grip as the section progresses,
to the point that it is difficult to remember that there is a living author behind it. As chapter
2 trivializes the domesticity of chapter 1?for the first but not last time placing the ordinary
mortals of the novel firmly in square brackets?so chapter 3 moves us a stage further, turning
round in the same way on the previous chapter with its still just recognizable "jug and basin,"
"red and yellow roses on the wallpaper," even its "picture on the easel," and mocking it.
Chapter 3 begins:
12 John Keats, Poems, ed. Gerard Bullett (Everyman, 1982), p. 188, p. 190.
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when th
sections which are quite other in their intent and in their technique. The Waste L
allows the reader to succumb to an artistic illusion; constant unsettling is its un
characteristic and becomes its authorial voice. But in the first section of her novel, "The
Window," Woolf creates a fictional world of such power that the reader is, and is surely
intended to be, taken in by it. I mean by that not deceived, except in so far as fiction is always
a deceit, but embraced by, welcomed into. This is not, as some critics have suggested, a world
echoing the certainties of Victorian fiction, to be rounded on by the Modernism of the latter
sections, for in "The Window" Woolf uses to the full the shifts of perspective, the myriad
impressions, the turning inward, the multiplicity of voices which render a highly uncertain
world.14 But in it, Mrs. Ramsay is a creation who exerts her influence not only over the
other characters but over the reader. Much as one might resent her apparent irresistibility,
much as one might mock the fact that her zenith of creativity is a dinner party at which the
triumphant "Daube" has in fact been produced by her cook, she remains the line running
down the center of "The Window," vital to its composition. In that sense, this section does
hark back to a realistic tradition, in that it is representational, just as Lily's paintings are
representational?not in the usual formal sense, but in that they still seek to represent a view
of the experienced world. In Mrs. Ramsay, without letting us forget the shiftingness of
perspective, the uncertainty of subjectivity, the difficulty of grasping the relationship between
the material world and the living perceiving human, Woolf still seeks to offer us a full
experience of the person, the felt self and the observed and experienced "outer" self in one.
In that sense, she is not questioning a common reality in "The Window," she is representing
it, in the person of Mrs. Ramsay.
No doubt Woolf was influenced in the realism by the fact that the model was her mother.
But we must also bear that fact in mind when we meet Mrs. Ramsay's swift despatch at the
author's hands. Just as her life is rendered representationally, so is her death. Indeed, that is
the point of the shift between "The Window" and "Time Passes." Woolf is not playing
fictional games here, or flirting self-reflexively with the nature of artistic illusion; in both
sections, although the techniques differ profoundly, the artistic creation is in the same service,
that of representing experience. It is the experience of life (of which "The Window" is just
one representation) which is made to seem, retrospectively, illusory, by the experience of
death represented in "Time Passes." Woolf seeks to convey the suddenness, the
unpredictability, the resultant savagery of death, but perhaps most of all its devastating effect
on our sense of the life that has gone before. Her narrative solution lies in the perfunctory:
[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning,
but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his
arms out. They remained empty.] (p. 175)
The curt, laconic, parenthetical way in which this death is imparted has been much commented
on. Randall Stevenson is right when he says that it is "one of the most disturbing moments
14 Randall Stevenson, for example, suggests that "'The Window' does end much as a Victorian or Edwardian novel
might." "'But what? Elegy?': Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs. Ramsay," with Jane Goldman, in The
Yearbook of English Studies, XXVI (1996), p. 175.
15 Stevenson, p. 174.
16 Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1927, reprinted in Virginia Woolf: To th
cmillan. 1970V
(Macmillan, n. 75. p. 75.
1970),
17 Lee, p. 158
being square is crucial to it?but also the difference in tone and content between th
narrative and the bracketed narrative. This is why the vatic voice of chapter 3 is im
It establishes the extremity of the move away from the comforts of the human world
Window." Thus, when we come to the communication of Mrs. Ramsay's death, that
longer carry the weight it would have done in the first section of the novel. Graver
have intervened; the trajectories of planets, the diurnal round, the ebb and flow o
have replaced the printless footfalls of the Ramsay family and friends. And agai
oracular voice is placed the lightness of "Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly t
before."
18 In her Diary entry for 14 January 1927, she records fmishing To The Lighth
been revising & retyping (some parts 3 times over) & no doubt I should work at it
infers that Woolf made further changes at proof stage and that "the English edit
(Diary, p. 128).
retrospectively equates her life with her death. As the second, but grammatically equa
of the stain on Belinda's new brocade devalues the earlier stain on her honor, so th
of Mrs. Ramsay's death robs her earlier life of meaning. Of course, there is a m
between the two structural terms: the whole erection, that big "block," "The Win
balanced by a mere two sentences in brackets (although as we have seen, those two
are given their force by the narrative tone of the whole second section). Nonetheles
perfect keeping with the working of zeugma that such a large fictional structure be p
by such a small one. The narrative smallness accorded to Mrs. Ramsay's death ma
largeness allocated to her life all the more vacuous.
There is more to "Time Passes" than the bracket of Mrs. Ramsay's death, and na
more beyond it. But the same structures are simply repeated, the accumulations of
brackets not so much gathering force from the first most telling death, as being sub
it, just as Prue's and Andrew's lives are subsumed in their mother's in the first sect
novel. However, the effect of the zeugma becomes more shocking as the whole of
World War, with its desolation and destruction, is drawn into the brackets ofthe triv
term of this great sentence structure. Yet, paradoxically, although again in keeping
inverted value structures of zeugma, this does not seem such a lapse compared with th
sudden void in the narrative.
Woolf recognizes this herself in the third section of the novel, in which there is an
attempted resurrection of Mrs. Ramsay, of the life of the first section, albeit through the
second-class, and second-order, auspices of Lily. Lily is second-class because in "The
Window" she is found, by Mrs. Ramsay and by implication Woolf, too, finally wanting, her
artistic ambition placed well behind Mrs. Ramsay's fruition in the value terms of that section.
She is second-order because an artist, trying to represent as the fiction is trying to represent.
Far from placing her "vision" above and beyond the impermanent world (as almost every
reading of the novel concludes), this makes it dependent upon, and so secondary to it. If art
has a permanence which life does not, it is one contingent on the observer, the mortal human.
Lily fully recognizes this, and Mrs. Ramsay reading her Shakespeare sonnet with its suggested
infinite regress (Shakespeare's sequence erecting as it does the permanence of art against the
transitory nature of existence) only confirms it. Shakespeare has to have a reader. Thus, the
resurrection of "The Lighthouse" can only be second-order, artistically erected, after the fell
swoop of "Time Passes." If "Time Passes" is the deflating second term which brings down
"The Window," "The Lighthouse" is the first term in a new sentence. But the reader has
learned her lesson. Expecting the subsequent deflation, she does not get overly excited.
Similarly, the reader learns to read the zeugmas of the Augustan mock heroic; the very
expectation of bathos affects us, and the comedy floods backwards. Thus, Lily's grief about
Mrs. Ramsay has already been undermined for us by the bathetic structure preceding this last
section; we no longer trust the narration when it grows serious.
In this analysis, then, To the Lighthouse can never recover from the laconic shock of "Time
Passes," its undercutting of the human, its depersonalization of what had been so fully, if
fictionally, lived. It is a final paradox that the bathos of that whole section (a larger version
of the bathos of its bracketed parts) is itself dependent on a sort of higher heroic, that of the
oracular, impersonal voice of "Time Passes." The sustaining of such apparent contradictions
is part of the artistic triumph of the novel. When Woolf voices her sense of them