Woolf's Metaphysics of Tragic Vision in 'To the Lighthouse.'

Abstract

Brown Stocking, much quoted chapter of his celebrated study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western literature, Eric Auerbach argues that To Lighthouse inverts conventional relation in fiction between inner and outer events: In Virginia Woolf's case events have actually lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events, whereas before her time . . . inner movements preponderately function to prepare and motivate significant happenings.(1) According to his analysis of novel, events external to character are subordinate to subjective musing or chains of ideas (477) they evoke, as if function of outer world were to provide stimulus for inner one: the objective of momentary present . . . is nothing but an occasion . . . The stress is placed entirely on what occasion releases, things which are not seen directly but by reflection, which are tied to present of framing occurrence which releases them (478). As result, very notion of is transformed. That which happens as exterior occurrence, though indisputably concrete and actual in its own right, becomes merely context or frame in which a more real reality (477) unfolds. This pre-eminent is constituted by subjective processes (such as rumination and contemplation) activated through experiencing objective or external world. Auerbach concludes from his investigation of real and more real that mimetic project of To Lighthouse is to represent how is experienced as ongoing need to formulate its own meaning: We are constantly endeavoring to give meaning and order to our lives in past, present, and future, to our surroundings, world in which we live . . . (485). Yet, while his reading brilliantly highlights hermeneutic tendency of character in novel, it simultaneously obscures very meaning which this need to interpret intends For, if search for meaning is somehow more real than to be explained, inevitable result of this inquiry will be to devalue significance of what it explicates. The experience of explaining becomes more important than experience it explains. Or, to invoke Auerbach's own phrases, interpretation of enjoys higher than life itself (485). As we shall see, though invaluable for emphasizing two realities, outer and inner, this exegesis ultimately distorts their relation in novel. But brief consideration of later author Samuel Beckett, whose fiction takes to its logical conclusion very dichotomy that Auerbach describes, will help us clarify Virginia Woolf's approach to problem. Watt, eponymous hero, bewildered by unintelligible events in Mr Knott's abode, is consumed with vain attempt to hypothesize meaning: the long dwindling supposition that constituted Watt's experience in Mr Knott's house.(2) The Unnamable, struggle to interpret is not only more real than reality: it is only reality. narrator is now situated inside his own state of absolute perplexity: Where now? Who now? When now?(3) To Lighthouse, characters display similar tendency to reduce to subjective inquiry concerning it: For whole world seemed to have dissolved in this early morning hour into pool of thought, deep basin of reality. . . .(4) But paradoxical result of such intense introspection is, not to preempt what Auerbach calls the objective reality (478), but to deepen sense of connection with it. The fundamental voyage implied by title is toward point of view or perspective from which polarity between subject and object, inner and outer reality, is temporarily overcome: What device for becoming, like waters poured into jar, inextricably same, one with object one adored (60). …