'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

 I have written before about the element of panpsychism in the novel.  Here is the perfect expression of the pervasion of consciousness delivered by Mrs. Ramsey’s handmaiden Lily Briscoe who is attempting to complete her painting of the beautiful mother and her son James sitting on the steps leading from the french windows.

 

“She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling which held the whole together.”

But it won’t come together for her, composition eludes her.  The empty space that is Mrs.Ramsey, gone, a portal to inanition. She misses her, the reader misses her as an avatar of the Moirae all combined in the one person but one  whose thread has been cut.  Prue gone, inheritor of beauty, Andrew gone, the mathematician, yet lingering on is Mr.Ramsey, Augustus Carmichal with his yellow stained beard now a famous poet and a personage, Tansley has a fellowship and probably still thinks women can’t write, can’t paint .  Ramsey continues to bully with his moods and the need for reassuarance from women.  Lily does not give this homage to the great man whose pondering on the reality of the kitchen table may be the source of his irascibility.  

The house has a speaking part.  In the ‘Time Passes’ section the passage from desuetude to near dereliction beautifully plots the course of decline of the energies of its inhabitants.  Once it was, could Woolf be so parallel, a lighthouse. Philosopher Ramsey, Poet Carmichael, Scientist Bankes, Tansley young scholar, Briscoe seeking a vision and lattely finding it.  The long Edwardian summer is over, the happiness of Paul and Minta, now the Doyles, cankered by infidelity.  The thread of fate is cut, the clew falls back.  Were those brown stocking ever finished?  

What is it that they bring as offerings to the lighthouse:

“Then, wheeling about, he led the way with his firm military tread, in those wonderful boots, carrying brown paper parcels, down the path, his children following him. They looked, she thought, as if fate had devoted them to some stern enterprise, and they went to it, still young enough to be drawn acquiescent in their father’s wake, obediently, but with a pallor in their eyes which made her feel that they suffered something beyond their years in silence.”

Is it possible to reconstitute your world?  A mark, a smudge, an impressionistic blur is Lily Briscoe’s way of finishing her picture.  There seemed to be a flash of white across the french windows.  Mrs.Ramsey?

“Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

Professor Auerbach meets Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse

It’s pointless knowing a lot if you only see what you already know. Auerbach in Mimesis was hewing to certain lines but when he comes to modernist writers who run off those he seems to be a little blunted. Knots no doubt. The Brown Stocking which I skipped to wanting to see what he made of To the Lighthouse misses a great deal particularly the influence of Bergson via Proust. (Proust was the best man at the wedding of his cousin Louise Neuberger to Bergson.) The concept of Duration, how memory sifts it and the density of poetic expression which reflects its compression in the present moment; all these elements are present in To the Lighthouse. I have posted before on the panpsychist element in the book
panpsychism
Mrs. Ramsey is herself the lighthouse illuminating with intense beams different sections of the cone of memory.
cone of memory
She is compared in Auerbach’s citation to a Greek goddess. I think this must be an ironical reference to the Moirai (Fates), the spinners which decide the fates of men, here ironically knitting her yarn into a pair of socks. Her matchmaking schemes are the fates she ordains.

Mr. Ramsey shares with the author’s father fussiness about soup. Leslie Stephen in his essay A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps taken from the collection Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking admits to this crankiness but does not specify its exact nature. I take this essay i.e. ‘Bad 5 mins.’, to controvert William James’s Will to Believe. More on that later. L.S. edited a collection of the essays of William Kingdon Clifford of which The Ethics of Belief is one and of course Clifford is perhaps the first of the modern panpsychists. ‘What goes around comes around’.

((All of Sir Leslie Stephen's books can be found at wikisource:
Leslie Stephen

Correction: William James’s essay was delivered in 1896 and the Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking were first published in 1873 and so for James to tackle Stephen on the matter of faith under pressure would be proleptic time travel, or something. In any case the connection is clear because James mentions Stephen in his first paragraph.

Panpsychism in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Q: What’s the story of To the Lighthouse?
A: In the first major section they don’t go to the lighthouse. After an interval during which some people die, offstage; they do go.

Most of all it is a portrait of Mr. Ramsey and Mrs. Ramsey who are based on Woolf’s parents. From my reading of Leslie Stephen, who was enthusiastic agnostic reared in an evangelical hothouse with a suggestion of having been forced in it but not hardened off to withstand the cold air of Cambridge rationalism, I find this introduction to him true.

Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

Here it is worth noting that both Leslie Stephen and his father James suffered from serious depression. Ramsey/Stephen was a very high maintenance individual constantly seeking reassurance from the women around him. I will leave out the parallels which may be heightened by the retrospective imagination of the author who was 15 when her father died.

If not much happens what sustains the beautiful flow of the novel? The story is not wrenched on by incident as though the characters were stuck in the slough of facticity and needed a brisk shove. Above all it is a world in which as we move from mind to mind are always aware of where all the other bodies are. Mr. Ramsey is walking up and down the terrace declaiming fragments of poetry and worrying about his reputation, Mrs.Ramsey is knitting on the steps of the drawing room and here we are given the feel of French windows but not stated, on the lawn Lily Briscoe is making tentative marks on her painting afraid that it may already be spoiled, Mr.Carmichael is reading a French novel, the ‘little atheist’ Tansley is muttering ‘can’ paint, can’t write’ about women. We never loose sight of them all, they never loose sight or mind of each other. The children brood and fume over the tyrant whose wrath can shift to blessing in a trice. There are no defined edges to each mind or person, they flow together, the house broods over all and its lares and penates are mediated by the hosts Mr. and Mrs.Ramsey. The Boeuf en Daube triumph is one of the great dinners of literature. I am moved by such sustained skill. Will Ramsey spoil it by his anger at Carmichael asking for more soup? That passes over. But what has happened to Roger Rayley and Minta Doyle? They should marry Mrs.R. has decreed, William Bankes should marry Lily Briscoe. The world should marry and mothers will read stories and it all will process down a broad avenue which is also called life.

Here is an example of the permeability of minds and the panpsychism of the alert hedge:

Shabby and worn out, and not presumably (her cheeks were hollow, her hair was white) any longer a sight that filled the eyes with joy, she had better devote her mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and so pacify that bundle of sensitiveness (none of her children was as sensitive as he was), her son James.
“The man’s heart grew heavy,” she read aloud, “and he would not go. He said to himself, ‘It is not right,’ and yet he went. And when he came to the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and no longer so green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood there and said —”
Mrs. Ramsay could have wished that her husband had not chosen that moment to stop. Why had he not gone as he said to watch the children playing cricket? But he did not speak; he looked; he nodded; he approved; he went on. He slipped, seeing before him that hedge which had over and over again rounded some pause, signified some conclusion, seeing his wife and child, seeing again the urns with the trailing of red geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought, and bore, written up among their leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which one scribbles notes in the rush of reading — he slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into speculation suggested by an article in THE TIMES about the number of Americans who visit Shakespeare’s house every year. If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization? Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity.

Leslie Stephen - Hours in a Library

There is something very modern about the note of plangent sadness which Leslie Stephen sounds as he regrets the seeking of signs and wonders by the devotee who is looking for confirmation of the truth of his faith. One might read this gentle lament in an essay by Gary Gutting in the Opininator of the New York Times.

You are seeking for outwards signs and wonders when you should be impressed by the profound and all pervading mysteries of the universe; and therefore falling into the hands of mere charlatans, and taking the morbid hysterics of over excited women for the revelation conveyed by all nature to those who have ears to hear. Has not the word 'spiritual' till now expressive of the highest emotions possible to human beings, got itself somehow stained and debased by association with the loathsome tricks practiced by importers aided by the prurient curiosity of their dupes?

Stephen is writing about Carlyle's Ethics and mentioning in passing the sad decline into what he could only see as charlatanry of Edward Irving, Carlyle's friend.
irving

This point is made as it were in passing but from other of his writings I feel that he went out of his way. You see Sir Leslie Stephen was a Victorian freethinker and therefore somewhat at bay and inclined to growl. The portrait of him in To The Lighthouse as Mr. Ramsey does not shed a kindly light. The Calvin Carlyle which he offers us was probably influential. More on that perhaps.

Find the essay on Carlyle's Ethics in Bk.III of Hours in a Library
Hours in a library