Virginia Woolf (19 page)

Into her writing, she infuses now painting and music, two arts distinct from her own. Characteristic of her mature thought and style, she combines structure with rhythm, shape with dark flowingness, and permanency in space with the flux of time.

__________

¹
“Jacob’s Room” p. 139.

²
Ibid. p. 132.

³
“Jacob’s Room” p. 218.

⁴
Ibid. p. 89.

⁵
“Jacob’s Room” p. 265.

⁶
Ibid. p. 174.

⁷
Ibid. p. 228.

⁸
Ibid. p. 284.

⁹
“Jacob’s Room” p. 288.

¹⁰
Ibid. p. 289; p. 61.

¹¹
“Mrs. Dalloway” p. 55.

¹²
Ibid. p. 54.

¹³
Ibid p. 268.

¹⁴
Ibid. p. 262.

¹⁵
Ibid. p. 58.

¹⁶
“Mrs. Dalloway” p. 112.

¹⁷
Ibid. p. 17.

¹⁸
Ibid. p. 79.

¹⁹
Ibid. p. 79.

²⁰
Ibid. p. 5.

²¹
Ibid. p. 7.

²²
“Orlando” p. 262.

²³
“Mrs. Dalloway” p. 52.

²⁴
“Mrs. Dalloway” p. 77.

²⁵
Ibid. p. 114.

²⁶
Ibid. p. 159.

²⁷
Ibid. p. 138.

²⁸
Ibid. p. 137.

²⁹
“Mrs. Dalloway” p. 257.

³⁰
Ibid. p. 256.

³¹
“L’Ame et le Corps” p. 44.

³²
“Orlando” p. 83.

³³
Ibid. p. 83.

³⁴
“Mrs. Dalloway” p. 228.

³⁵
Ibid. p. 176.

³⁶
“Mrs. Dalloway” p. 259.

³⁷
Ibid. p. 97.

³⁸
“Relativitätstheorie” p. 20.

³⁹
“To the Lighthouse” p. 59.

⁴⁰
“To the Lighthouse” p. 56.

⁴¹
Ibid. p. 58.

⁴²
“To the Lighthouse” p. 195.

⁴³
“To the Lighthouse” p. 196.

⁴⁴
“The New Spirit in Literature” p. 23.

⁴⁵
“To the Lighthouse” p. 199.

⁴⁶
Ibid. p. 199.

⁴⁷
“To the Lighthouse” p. 200.

⁴⁸
Ibid. p. 212.

⁴⁹
Ibid. p. 214.

⁵⁰
Ibid. p. 215.

⁵¹
“To the Lighthouse” p. 201.

⁵²
Ibid. p. 202.

⁵³
Ibid. p. 203.

⁵⁴
Ibid. p. 203.

⁵⁵
Ibid. p. 49.

⁵⁶
“To the Lighthouse” p. 52.

⁵⁷
Ibid p. 218.

⁵⁸
Ibid. p. 47.

⁵⁹
Ibid. p. 104.

⁶⁰
Ibid. p. 104.

⁶¹
“To the Lighthouse” p. 177.

⁶²
Ibid p. 201.

⁶³
Ibid. p. 288.

⁶⁴
Ibid. p. 80.

⁶⁵
Ibid. p. 77.

⁶⁶
Ibid. p. 249.

A
LAW OF POLARITY, OF CONFLICTS
as irreconcilable, as endless as night and day, reverberates through all Virginia Woolf’s writing and reaches ultimate expression in “The Waves”. It is her final solution to her problem of style and her riddle of life. No truth is absolute, no style supreme.

She has perceived in her struggles, the necessity of both elements, their unquestionable truth. Recognizing the duality of life, she erects no single overwhelming standards, no damning proofs. Lacking the urgent need to negate the truths of others, she lacks also the need to point the way. Artistically and morally, she is content to observe the conflict of two forces as teleological, and in their necessary being, as good. Her struggle between the two inimical poles of style, her recognition of the need for their existence, their vital truths, has molded her philosophy of life. If integrity shows her which force, which pole she must select for herself, tolerance holds her from repudiating its counterpart. “One must put aside antipathies and jealousies” in reading a poem whose style is antithetic to her own. “One must have patience and infinite care … Nothing”, in this polarity, “is to be rejected in fear or horror.”
¹
Significantly she notes the deviations from her own critical formulas, from the forces she has selected for herself. “There are no commas or semi-colons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths.”
²
Objectively, she marks the lack of rhythm, and notes the disruption of her own rhetorical devices, without censure. “Much is sheer nonsense. One must be sceptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely.”
³
Tolerance of high order, to accept absolutely. But it is the tolerance of past oppression. Having suffered herself, she recoils from complete negations. Desperately she desires to accept all the values in an organic concept of life.

“Don’t you feel that life’s a perpetual conflict?”
⁴
she had written in her first novel. And in “The Waves”, symbolic title of the rhythm of life, she repeats and perfects this philosophy of conflict. Six different characters, three men and three women, struggle against the amorphous collectivity of the waves to create form, to attain one moment of rested perfection. They resolve to hew their own identity, like a Rodin, within the formless massive substance of life. Like a Bible of Creation, the “Waves” describes the evolution of their lives; their childhood, where a sponge of water pressed above their heads is symbolic of the breath of life. Their
struggle for identity begins; physical, sensuous at first, they belong completely to earth. But with the need for words, identity asserts itself. The terrible realization is immediate; nature remains unaltered; it is only man who modulates her image by his own conceits. Each man seeks a different way through which to beat against the universe. The realization of this egoistic identity, of a different nose and different thoughts and sensibilities, is as painful as it is strange. “ ‘I am myself, not Neville,’ ” Bernard exclaims, “ ‘a wonderful discovery’.”
⁵
But “ ‘We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies’ ”.
⁶
In youth, he is most clamorous for this pole of individuality; the world is to be conquered, to be impressed with his distinct form. But with the urges of sex and of marriage, individuality loses its compulsion. Two separate identities seek to merge within each other; the desire to stand alone, one self against the sky, gives way slowly to the waves, to continuity, to bearing sons. The staccatoed sharpness of individuality changes in style to harmonic rhythm: “ “And the little fierce beat—tick-tack, tick-tack—of the pulse of one’s mind took on a more majestic rhythm’.”
⁷
“ ‘We are the continuers, we are the inheritors,’ ”
⁸
Bernard analyzes his life, contrasting it with the friends who do not marry, refusing to surrender to the rhythm.

In their struggle for identity or their immersion in the waves, the characters personify the greater, cosmic polarity of light and darkness, of shape and ambiguity. “The Waves” is the consummation of the problems in philosophy and style which have confronted Virginia Woolf. In artistic form, it encompasses the aesthetic problem of fact versus fancy, of sober realism and feminine illusions. It recalls the earliest problem of the critic and the poet; and denotes the divergence in the two borrowed mediums of painting and music. In philosophy, it is the struggle for individuality, of man against the masses. The problem of time is implicit, the Bergsonian distinction between the measured time of the waves and the fitful time of the creative consciousness. The urge to make “life stand still”, the perfect moment abstracted from infinity, is restated with the fundamental urge to hew one form out of chaos. It is a return to the original struggle between light and darkness, order and confusion.

The aesthetic crises through which she has progressed, are thus, with urgent clarity, reanimated in “The Waves”. Two poets are presented, Bernard and Neville, to personify the faction of
romanticism and classicism. Bernard revels in subjective imagery, arbitrary and unselective; Neville in Roman precision and absolute concept of beauty and truth. Bernard is like young Orlando, the emotional, all-observant phase of Virginia Woolf’s character. Bernard is sensuously alive to nature, to people, to his environment, but it is through his fancy rather than his eye alone. Like Virginia Woolf, objects fascinate him as they recall past associations and are convertable into literary conceits. “Up they bubble—images. ‘Like a camel’, … ‘a vulture’. The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel; for Bernard is dangling wire, loose, but seductive. Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparison, a lightness comes over one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels.”
⁹

The “bubble” is the imprint of Virginia Woolf’s self-consciousness. Though she justifies images, seeing in them the release of pent emotions, she is conscious also of the argument against them—her perception of polarity. Style-conscious, she acknowledges the unsolidity of many of her images, absurdly broken by the mere touch of reality. Innately visionary, she experiences the constant struggle for a deeper truth. “ ‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?”
¹⁰

Where Bernard is rhapsodic and darkly symbolic, Neville is in love with the unclouded daylight of an Italian sky. His is the southern clarity, repelling Bernard’s northern romanticism. He is the least Christian, the most Hellenic of the characters, desiring a perfection such as the Greeks had known. Admitting of life and its disorders, he seeks the Greek harmony, the beauty in nature and the vital present.

“ ‘In a world which contains the present moment,’ said Neville, ‘why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure. The sun is hot. I see the river, I see trees specked and burnt in the autumn sunlight. Boats float past, through the red, through the green. Far away a bell tolls, but not for death. There are bells that ring for life. A leaf falls, from joy. Oh, I am in love with life! Look how the willow shoots its fine sprays into the air! Look how through them a boat passes, filled with indolent, with unconscious, with powerful young men. They are listening to the gramophone; they are eating fruit out of paper hags. They are tossing the skins of bananas, which then sink eel like, into the river. All they do is beautiful. There are
cruets behind them and ornaments; their rooms are full of oars and oleographs but they have turned all to beauty.’ ”
¹¹

Of the varied characters, Neville is the humanist, the T. S. Eliot in the modern classic-romantic antithesis. He detests all vagueness and fitful connotations; he recoils from sentimentality. Reflecting the younger Virginia Woolf, influenced by the rhetoricians, he seeks the classic peaks of structure. “That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection, to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead.”
¹²
Like Rodney of “Night and Day” he is a lover of Roman ratiocination. He seeks an order implicit in form: “Everything must be done to rebuke the horror of deformity. Let us read writers of Roman severity and virtue, let us seek perfection through the sand.”
¹³

This desire for perfection is counterbalanced in Bernard’s more feminine aesthetics and aspect of life. He lacks Neville’s sense of firm, logical sequence. His are the irrational, chaotic experiences of life: “Arrows of sensation strike from my spine, but without order.”
¹⁴
Life for him is a stippled inlay of the observations of little things. He is captured by the immediate image, distracted by the haphazard accidents of life.

Poetic, like Virginia Woolf, his irrelevant and unordered words are his peculiar weapon: “ ‘It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue—the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook’ ”.
¹⁵
Words, mosaically lovely, are his offering to life. “ ‘I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent. And each of you feels when I speak, “I am lit up. I am glowing” ’ ”.
¹⁶
Again like Virginia Woolf, he is conscious of the limitations of his words and images, of his romantic lawlessness. “ ‘I am apt to be deflected. I make stories. I twist up toys out of anything. A girl sits at a cottage door; she is waiting; for whom? Seduced, or not seduced? The headmaster sees the hole in the carpet. He sighs. His wife, drawing her fingers through the waves of her still abundant hair, reflects—et cetera. Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter—all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then another, I do not cling to
life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once’ ”.
¹⁷

Representing the two poles of literary style, the two phases of Virginia Woolf’s conflict, neither Bernard nor Neville surpasses the other. Neither one can proclaim that his is the absolute style, nor boast that his poetic recreation of life is the true one for mankind. Signally, both poets fall short of immortality; an intimation, sub-conscious perhaps, of the author’s personal fear.