Virginia Woolf (21 page)

Two great divisions become apparent, two phases of human thought. On the one hand are the characters who seek a Reason behind the universe, an order divined by the intellect. On the other, are the characters, intuitive and more poetic, who conceive life as an incessant rise and fall of waves. For them there is no higher meaning, no absolute Reason within and beyond their own existence. It is in such a philosophy of irrational continuity that Virginia Woolf, as poet and woman, believes. Yet in her endless struggle for the meaning of life, traces of a search for some cause, some higher force, create in her a philosophic conflict, analogous to the conflict into which she divides her characters.

Life is poetically symbolized in the waves; the characters distinguished as they accept the apparently meaningless rhythm or seek imposed order. All of them search for happiness, each through his own vision, his own reaction to the waves. It is Susan who seeks the “natural happiness” implicit in merging herself within the endless organism of nature. “ ‘I shall never have anything but natural happiness. It will almost content me. I shall go to bed tired. I shall lie like a field bearing crops in rotation; in the summer heat will dance over me; in the winter I shall be cracked with the cold. But heat and cold will follow each other naturally without my willing or unwilling. My children will carry me on; their teething, their crying, their going to school and coming back will be like the waves of the sea under me’ ”.
²⁷
The eternal movement holds for Susan the meaning of life. She has no desire to impose her will upon the waves; she is too sensible of the futility in defying the stupendous rhythm. Hers is a cosmic order in which her own sharp identity is lost. It is Louis, supersensitive, who seeks a volitional order, a personal superiority, to compensate for his “neatness”, his “Australian accent”, aggravated idiosyncrasies barring him from the “protective waves of the ordinary.”
²⁸
Being antisocial, he revolts against the amorphous rhythm: “ ‘I will reduce you to order’ ”
²⁹
is his cry against the irrelevant details in the mosaic of life. It is his flaunt against the “hats bobbing up and down”, the opening and shutting of the door, “the hesitations at counters; and the words that trail drearily without meaning; I will reduce you to order’ ”.
³⁰

Inseparable from this problem of identity against the waves, is the problem of time, a constant throughout her novels. The one moment consummate of all time, is sought for, despaired of, and even if ultimately experienced, returns, with the inexorable law of the waves, back into the dark massive flowingness of time. In the conflict between the one identified moment of light and the dark progress of eternity, lies the Bergson-Orlando discord between “time in the mind and time in the clock.” Neville, “who had been thinking with the unlimited time of the mind, which stretches in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves, poked the fire and began to live by that other clock which marks the approach of a particular person. From the myriads of mankind and all time past he had chosen one person, one moment in particular.”
³¹

Against the confusion of eternity, he erects one unity. In the arbitrary order he imposes upon time, the conflict of chaos and shape, the great conflict of “The Waves” is thus reflected. Neville, like Louis and like Lily of “To the Lighthouse”, seeks to objectify the chaos, to pierce it with light. But upon him, as upon all the characters, hangs the shadow of primal darkness, ridiculing their activity, almost negating their lives.

“ ‘Our separate drops are dissolved; we are extinct, lost in the abysses of time, in the darkness’ ”.
³²
The quests for identity, for classic order, for light, for the supreme moment, are rendered futile in a pause of silence, an effigy of the long nothingness.

“ ‘As silence falls,’ ” Bernard says, “ ‘I am dissolved utterly and become featureless and scarcely to be distinguished from another. It does not matter. What

matters?’ ”
³³
Embedded in English futilitarianism, the characters for a time lose their driving will for power, upon which Freud has laid man’s struggle for happiness. Viewing their lives against the setting of eternity, they become apathetic to the urge for fame. Kings and paupers fall alike into the great oblivion of time: “how strange it seems to set against the whirling abysses of infinite space a little figure with a golden tea-pot on his head. Soon one recovers belief in figures: but not at once in what they put on their heads. Our English past—one inch of light. Then people put teapots on their heads and say, ‘I am a King!’ No I try to recover, as we walk, the sense of time, but with that streaming darkness in my eyes I have lost my .grip … What do we oppose, with this random flicker of light in us that we call brain and feeling, how can we do battle against this flood; what has permanence? Our
lives too stream away, down the unlighted avenues, past the strip of time, unidentified.”
³⁴

Power, majesty, identity are all illusions, all futile, at this stage of middling life. The waves are impervious. Characteristic of her womanhood, Virginia Woolf surrenders herself more and more to their amorphous rhythm, to the periodicity of sleeping and waking, of living and dying. The desire to impose order is “a mistake … a convenience, a lie. There is always deeply below it … a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights.”
³⁵

She negates for a time all the characters who seek to subjugate the waves into an order in which they alone are supreme. Neville’s cry, “ ‘Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos … this formless imbecility’ ”
³⁶
is immediately softened. The beauty in endless nature, in this very chaos, makes man seem ugly, insignificant with petty lusts. The struggle for the reins with which to govern life, directing it with kingly power, is subdued. She longs no longer to order the waves but to be ordered within them.

Meaningless, aimless, it is this dull acquiescence to the rhythm of life which makes men futilitarians. Apparently, all is vain; only a “memento mori”, the medieval refuge remains. In the final judgment of all their lives, Bernard, aged, a failure to himself, reflects “ ‘How we surrender, how we submit to the stupidity of nature’ ”.
³⁷
The youthful struggle for identity has crumbled. He is certain of what in childhood had been mooted: “satiety and doom”—death. “ ‘I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin to break the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me’ ”.
³⁸

“ ‘How then does light return to the earth after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly … There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun.”
³⁹
So Bernard ends not in disillusion; light returns to him in the need to struggle, in the exertion of power, in the search for identity and freedom. In opposition alone can he find happiness. Not in solving the conflict but in the very struggle, life fulfills its meaning. “ ‘Fight! Fight!’ … It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is
the shattering and piecing together—this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit’ ”.
⁴⁰

The philosophy of futilitarianism has been defeated once more by activity. The body’s urge for action has rejuvenated the spirit of youth. It has saved the poet from nihilism and spiritual apathy. “The Waves”, a Vulgate of existence, ends not in death, but in dawn. The struggle against death is reanimated, the rhythm of night and day, of life and death is retrieved.

“There is a sense of the break of day … . Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.

“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’ ”

“The waves broke on the shore.”
⁴¹

To the last note, the conflict is sounded. Man must struggle for freedom, struggle against death. And yet, inexorably, the waves rise and fall; death is the one law of life.

It is the constancy of antitheses, the rhythm of conflicts, which determines Virginia Woolf’s philosophy as well as her style. It is the two weights upon the balance which she sees struggling for supremacy. Hers is the philosophy of the earliest primitives a philosophy to which all others revert; out of darkness came light, out of death, life. She sees all things, like a Noah’s ark, in pairs of like and unlike, of classicist and romanticist, of man and woman, of night and day. There is no synthetic solution to their opposition; health lies in being a man
or
a woman, not a compromise between them.

__________

^{1 2 3}
“The Waves” p. 216.

⁴
“The Voyage Out” p. 45.

⁵
“The Waves” p. 262.

⁶
Ibid. p. 264.

⁷
Ibid. p. 283.

⁸
Ibid. p. 283.

⁹
“The Waves” p. 40.

¹⁰
Ibid. p. 176.

¹¹
“The Waves” p. 87.

¹²
Ibid. p. 94.

¹³
Ibid. p. 196.

¹⁴
Ibid. p. 170.

¹⁵
Ibid. p. 200.

¹⁶
Ibid. p. 237.

¹⁷
“The Waves” p. 238.

¹⁸
Ibid. p. 88.

¹⁹
Ibid. p. 90.

²⁰
“The Waves” p. 40.

²¹
Ibid. p. 110.

²²
Ibid. p. 272.

²³
Ibid. p. 176.

²⁴
Ibid. p. 5.

²⁵
“The Voyage Out” p. 262.

²⁶
“The Waves” p. 7.

²⁷
“The Waves” p. 142.

²⁸
Ibid. p. 101.

²⁹
Ibid. p. 102.

³⁰
Ibid. p. 102.

³¹
“The Waves” p. 299.

³²
Ibid. p. 246.

³³
Ibid. p. 245.

³⁴
“The Waves” p. 248.

³⁵
Ibid. p. 279.

³⁶
Ibid. p. 246.

³⁷
Ibid. p. 294.

³⁸
Ibid. p. 311.

³⁹
Ibid. p. 313.

⁴⁰
Ibid. p. 295.

⁴¹
“The Waves” p. 324.

I
NFLUENCED BY MEN IN
the beginning of her career, Virginia Woolf evolves, with irresistible force, the woman within her. A womanly love of details subverts the more rigid sense of form; her novels have a feminine expansiveness, an apparent irrelevancy which is truer to life than to art. She has little of the logic and restraint called manly; her sensibilities, her emotions, her philosophy of life are normally feminine. Freed from the shame of her sex, a shame which drove other women to hide behind male pseudonyms, she explores her femininity and within it, creates her style.

She accepts the tradition that women cannot think abstractly, that their scope is smaller than man’s. It is this very limitation which she consecrates, availing herself of the smaller scope, of the petty and the concrete. Seeking always the meaning of life, its great profundities, she has discovered that a mention of their names alone, of immortality or God or death, is no persuasion of their truth, no crucible of the profundity of her work. In life itself, the recurring wonder of finding these deepest realities reflected even in trivialities, impresses her; she converts her observation into art. She particularizes truth; the meaning of life she detects in “waves of hands, hesitations at street corners”, in “a nightingale, who sings among the trampling feet.”
¹
Peculiarly feminine, she finds more vividness and perhaps more truth in these small symbolic details. Philosophic Latinities, pale and abstract, are often so suggestive, she feels, that they lose distinction and suggest nothing. All must be concrete, and if not personal, at least specific. “ ‘I have little aptitude for reflection,’ ” says Bernard, “ ‘ I require the concrete in everything. It is only so that I lay hands upon the world’ ”.
²

It is as though a new realm had been opened in literature, the world of women, correlated to the other longer established one of men, and yet remaining peculiarly distinct. Both seek the same finalities of love, reality and death, but it is as if two unique towers had been erected and the men peered through one telescope and the women through another. Fundamental differences, ultimately acknowledged by man and woman, now can he developed. The problem of describing the world she sees, uninhibited by convention, is one of the first difficulties Virginia Woolf confronts. From the start, her ideal is to create as a woman: in her earliest novel she pronounces Jane Austen “incomparably
the greatest female writer we possess … and for this reason: she does not attempt to write like a man. Every other woman does.”
³
With increasing consciousness, this ideal progresses through her works, unmitigated by critical opinion, becoming less a spoken theory than the general insinuation.