Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Listeners. Readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor at Berkeley, bestselling author, and PhD
in literature. Today is a big day. It's a big
day for me. Readers. We are going back to Virginia
(00:26):
Wolf's To the Lighthouse. This is a book that I
read senior year in high school, and it, honestly, I
really think it was the beginning of my true interaction
with real literature. Until that point, I had been kind
of a sporadic reader. I spent one summer when I
was fifteen reading so much Daniel Steele that at one
point I walked into the kitchen of my house and
(00:46):
I like conceptualized something in my mind in exactly the
language that Daniel Steele was using. And even I, at fifteen,
knew that perhaps I had overdone the Daniel Steele. But
I had a teacher in twelfth grade who was going
to teach us to the Lighthouse, and she told us
all about how the rest of the faculty at our
high school thought she was crazy because so many people
(01:07):
did not think that high school seniors would be able
to appreciate Virginuolf's genius. So I was very flattered, I think,
by the challenge. And then we started reading, and I
had this sense that someone had somehow gone inside my
brain thought someone of course being VIRGINU Wolf, and had
found an ability to articulate exactly how my mind was working.
(01:28):
It was a complete revelation. It was such a revelation,
in fact, that I bought To the Lighthouse for everyone
for Christmas that year, because of course, when I was seventeen,
I couldn't figure out why everyone in my family would
not want to understand completely how my brain was working.
I do not think anyone read it, not a single person,
because of that initial impression, but also because of the
(01:49):
way that the book has held up every time I
have gone back to read it. It is very well
established as my favorite book, which is honestly saying a lot.
It's like I have Virginu Wolves to the Lighthouse, and
then there's a huge gap, and then there are a
bunch of other books that are in contention for my
maybe top five favorite books, and some of my thinking
right now is just the fact that it is almost
(02:09):
Memorial Day. I am recording this on the twentieth I
believe of May twenty first of May. In fact of
twenty twenty five, we're almost at Memorial Day, almost at
the beginning of the summer, and there is something about
to the Lighthouse that really speaks to summer. And although
the book is actually set in September, for me, it
(02:30):
is something that I tend to come back to in
the spring, just because I find it so affirmative and
so engaging, and for me at least, it puts you
in a very summer kind of mood. I once got
in trouble though, back when we were having these lectures
and these meetings in my local bookstore here in northern California,
I am somewhat mistakenly perhaps advertised to The Lighthouse as
(02:51):
the ultimate beach read. I don't think that many people
were confused by that, because I think Virginia Wolf has
enough of a reputation as some who is really challenging
to read. I don't think anybody was confusing it with
like that summer's hottest novel. And in many ways I
do stand by it. It is kind of the ultimate
beach read, and what we're going to do today is
(03:11):
a little bit different. I am looking at today as
a kind of introductory lecture for anyone who either has
not read To the Lighthouse before, or for anyone who
read it a long time ago or even recently and
wants to reread. So this is kind of an introduction
to this novel in particular, but also to Virginia Woolf
as a whole, and also certainly to the stream of
(03:31):
consciousness mode of writing. So for those of you who
like an agenda, we're going to do quite a bit
of close reading today, essentially of the first two pages
of the novel. Before we do that, we are going
to talk about the title of the book and the
title of the first chapter, the Window. We are going
to talk about the importance of this novel as starting
and media rests, which simply means in the middle of
(03:54):
the action. We're going to talk a little bit about
domesticity and maternity. We're going to talk about the primus
of sensibility meaning emotion meaning sensing things, the primacy of
emotion and sensibility over this idea of like facts or truths.
We're going to talk about the narrative stance, and then
we're going to really dive into stream of consciousness, essentially
(04:16):
how it is defined, why it is important. We're then
going to look again very closely at those first two pages,
and then when we close, I'm going to finish with
essentially what is a list of things that you might
want to be focusing on as you are reading through
this masterpiece. This lecture will be followed by a second
lecture where I will sort of purse a lot of
(04:37):
that stuff, really dig into a bunch of those things.
I'm also in that lecture going to dig into like
the evocation of summer, which is so interesting to me.
It's such a she does it like no one else.
So we're going to take a quick look at that,
which actually will just be joyful. And then we're also
going to talk about humor this time. In my reread
for some reason this book, which is usually not thought
(04:58):
of as a humorous book, I found a bunch of
instances of humor that really added to my experience this time.
Then we're going to talk about Lily Briscoe, and we're
going to talk about the structure of the book, a
bunch of other things so if you are someone who
wants to use this as an introduction, keep in mind
that there will be a second lecture where we will
really dig into things. Before we dive in to any
(05:19):
of this, I want to give you just a very
very quick bio of Virginia Wolf. I've read many, many
a biography. I will highly recommend the biography by Hermione Lee.
It's so good. I mean, it is very, very long,
but it is gripping. She was born in eighteen eighty two.
She died in nineteen forty one. Famously, she took her
own life by filling her pockets with rocks and wading
(05:40):
into the river near her house. She was born in
this kind of upper middle class family. Her father was
a very patriarchal and a very large presence in her life.
She has said very publicly that to the Lighthouse is
very much an exploration of her father. Her family of
origin was relatively large. She was one of the younger
of the siblings, very close with her sister Vanessa. They
(06:03):
were part of the Bloomsbury Group. So she grew up
as a young child in the Victorian era in this
kind of upper middle class family, but then got very
bohemian with that group of people who are really testing
a lot of the kind of moral strictures of the day.
She was not formally educated. She really would have liked
to have been formally educated. But she also there's lots
and lots of information about her reading life and her
(06:26):
life in general. She kept lots of journals. We have
lots and lots of textual evidence for what she was
thinking and how she was feeling. But she was very
happy in many ways with having read very very widely
and at random, along with many people in her generation.
Think of Ezra Pound, think of ts Eliot. She was deeply,
deeply affected by the First World War. So this is
this cataclysmic event that really persuaded her into this thinking
(06:50):
that the sort of standard novel, the realist novel, was
very hubuistic, That this idea of thinking that you could
provide the reader with this stable moralizing DIDACTI detailed world
being the realist novel, That that mode of writing just
wasn't working anymore. It was not a good enough medium
in which to talk about the trauma of this war.
(07:12):
She was someone who had some pretty profound mental health issues.
Her mom died. I think when she was thirteen, which
just sounds like a terrible, terrible time to have your
mom die. I mean, never a good time, but that
one seems particularly bad. And there's quite a bit of
information about these various sort of breakdowns that she would have. Unfortunately,
she was subjected at times to that Victorian rest cure.
Not my fantasy of it, which is like a fantasy
(07:33):
that you get to claim that you're like hysterical and
then they wheel you out onto a lawn with like
a book and some t in your like white wicker
wheelchair kind of situation with a blanket over your lap.
That's my fantasy of the Victorian rest cure. The real
thing was actually pretty gnarly because they would deprive you
of any kind of stimulation and have you be in
(07:54):
a dark room. And thinking that leaving a woman in
a dark room with no stimulation and only her mind
was a good idea. Yeah, she was married to Leonard Wolf,
but very famously had relationships with other women, Vita Sackville
West being one of those women. She did when she
did take her life. It was nineteen forty one. She
was relatively old, she was in her sixties. I think
lots of us think she was much younger, because it
(08:16):
seems like such a tragic end. I mean, it's still
a tragic end, obviously, but you do get the sense
that she had lived, you know, fairly full life in
many ways, and certainly had left her mark on literature.
But she felt this the Second World War coming, and
just felt that she did not have the strength to
live through another cataclysmic European war. Okay, as always, we
(08:38):
are going to talk about the title of the book.
When you are thinking about sort of reading better, becoming
a better reader, First of all, I would encourage you
to read with a pencil in hand always. I write
all sorts of stuff all over my books, Lots of
you know, stars, there's no rhyme or reason, you know,
underlining stars, circling hearts, all kinds of different things. I
(08:58):
generally don't go back and look at any of this,
but I do find when you read with a pencil
in hand, you are definitely more engaged with the book.
A kind of a dundum to that idea of having
a pencil is that, obviously, if you're going to be
marking up a book, you need to in fact own
that book. And here I'm going to put my little
plug out libraries are amazing. If you are getting your
books from the library, excellent. If you are listening to
(09:19):
your books on audio, also amazing. But if you are
someone who purchases books at your local independent bookstore, I
would encourage you to go ahead and spend the twenty
or thirty dollars that it costs to buy a book
instead of borrowing it from someone. There is this very
large ghost readership that is talked about in the publishing industry.
It's especially among women. I like the idea of the
(09:41):
economics and sort of the environmental impact of sharing books,
but I will say that writers need to be compensated.
I'm not sure how we think about that in terms
of Virginia Wolf. Maybe it's just fine for you to
go ahead, although we need to also support these publishing
houses certainly. So you should read with a pencil in hand,
and you should also simply pay attention. And part of
that is paying attention to the title. So this title
(10:04):
to the Lighthouse is so significant, it is talking. It's
really unusual when you step back and think about it
a little bit. We're going to talk in a little
bit about some books that we can kind of compare
this to some realist novels and some contemporary novels. Some
of them, for example, Anna Karenna, which is, you know,
very firmly the name of a woman. We are supposed
(10:26):
to focus on the Great Gatsby, we're talking about this
kind of mythological American dream figure. We're focusing in both
of those cases very clearly on a person. A book
like East of Eden. That's a biblical phrase. It's really
evocative of something very rich, but it is also you know,
a very specific kind of place, well, a mythological kind
of biblical place, but it is something that very firmly
(10:49):
stands on its own. In contrast, we have this fragmentary
to the Lighthouse. It is a prepositional phrase. It absolutely
kind of by definition, is a frag It's a fragment
of something larger. It's not a fragment from the Bible.
It's not a fragment from a lot of the Romantic
poetry that mister Ramsey is constantly reciting throughout the book.
(11:11):
It is simply a phrase that comes from the novel itself.
And not only is it a fragment, but what it
is connoting is this idea of movement it's this idea
of trying to get somewhere. It's also the idea of
not in fact arriving. It is not called the lighthouse,
it is called to the lighthouse. So you have this
idea of things happening, things moving, things not being complete,
(11:32):
things being fragmentary, things being unstable, and then of course
we have the idea of the lighthouse. A lighthouse, you know,
very famously and very symbolically, is you know, this tall,
actually very phallic thing that stands on rocky shores and
that helps bring ships into the harbor. And there is
(11:52):
a lighthouse, of course in the book that features very heavily,
and from the very beginning we have the light of
the lighthouse as being extremely important. So it's this idea
of illuminating things. It's also this idea of light as
being intermittent. You know, we can sort of illuminate things,
but we can't see the full picture of them at night.
It's this sweeping kind of light that illuminates things just
(12:14):
momentarily and in many ways, this idea of illuminating things
and then sort of moving along. You can imagine the
progress of that light illuminating things. It is very much
like the idea of stream of consciousness, which we will
find out is this kind of narrative stance where the
narrator and we the reader along with the narrator are
moving from sort of consciousness to consciousness person to person.
(12:35):
So you can imagine each of these minds as being
illuminated by a beam of light, very much like the lighthouse.
Also from the beginning, we have this idea of the
lighthouse and the beam of the lighthouse as being synonymous
with Missus Ramsey. This is a book that is highly
concerned with domesticity and with maternity, and this lighthouse and
(12:56):
the light that it is shining is very much symbolic
the idea of a mother as being protective and a
mother as being sort of illuminating things in this kind
of omnipotent way, but also as being fragile and intermittent
and not something that you can count on all the time,
especially when the weather gets stormy. So I want to
(13:17):
move on now and talk about the chapter titles. So
we have three sections. The structure of this novel is
very important, and the structure was something that Virginia Wolf
came up with before she had written the novel. It
was something that she conceived at the very beginning that
essentially you would have these two big chunks, the beginning
chunk and the end chunk, the first one called the window,
(13:37):
and the third one called the lighthouse, and then there
would be a middle section. When she conceived of it,
it looked kind of like a barbell. She had like
a little drawing with two squares at the ends, and
then kind of a long bar shaped thing in the
middle that is called time passes. So at the beginning
we have the window, then we have this middle section
called time passes, and then we have the lighthouse. And
(13:58):
again I would encourage you, if you're trying to be
like a better reader, I would encourage you to take
a look at these chapter titles. I'm someone for whatever reason,
I just kind of skip right over them. If there
are lots of them, I tend to sort of I
don't even know why. I just maybe I'm in such
a rush to get to the next chunk of prose
that I kind of skip right over them. This one, however,
is very important. So if we have the idea of
(14:19):
the window, we find out fairly soon that what this
window is all about is that we have missus Missus Dollaway,
not Missus Dollaway. We have Missus Ramsey sitting with her
youngest son and her favorite young James, who's maybe like
six or seven, and they are sitting inside this window,
and across from them out in the yard nearby ish
(14:40):
is Lily Briscoe. Lily Briscoe is a painter who is
largely read as a stand in for Virginia Woolf. Whenever
you're reading fiction, if there is a character in the
book who's like a musician or an artist or an architect,
you can often just read that person as essentially a
stand in for the writer. These are people who build them,
These are people who create creative things, and sometimes it
(15:04):
can feel heavy handed, but in this case it is
so important and so so well done to look very
closely at Lily Briscoe as a stand in for Virginia
Wolf in particular. So we have Lily Briscoe and she
is painting Missus Ramsey and James. One thing that's important
to note here when they're talking about the window in
this case, it's like a French window, which it took
(15:25):
me a while to figure that out. It's not like
a plate glass window. We don't have glass here. And
the reason you know that is because occasionally the people
on the porch will stop in front of this window
and have conversations with Missus Ramsey. We also know that
Lily Briscow can see you know, James, very clearly, so
you have to This window is like a French door,
we would say in the United States. So it's open,
(15:49):
so you have even more kind of intercourse between the
public and the private, even more fluidity, and even more
is revealed. But you still have that idea of them being,
of the two things being side. So the reason why
the window is important. First of all, we have this
frame and it is framing this very domestic, very maternal scene.
It's very important though that James and Missus Ramsey are inside,
(16:13):
they are indoors. They are very firmly inside the domestic sphere.
Lily Briscoe is outside the domestic sphere. She's on the
other side of the window. We have this idea of separation,
that things are separate, that people are separate from one another,
but also this idea that what Virginia Wolf is doing
is making that separation between people into something that is transparent.
(16:35):
Lily to a large extent is able to sort of
see the importance of Missus Ramsey as a mother and
in communion with James. We have this idea of, like
it's not quite voyeurism, but we have this idea of
looking into other people's lives, and not only that, but
looking into their private domestic lives, and stream of consciousness
if it does nothing else, it really does allow us
(16:57):
to look into people's private lives. On that note, there's
also this idea of you know, looking into the window.
It's like a window into someone's life. So metaphorically the
idea of the window, we have these windows open into
these people's lives. And the last thing I will say
about the idea of the window is that this present
moment that we are introduced to at the beginning, when
(17:20):
Missus Ramsey is sitting with James and we soon find
out that Lily Brisco is painting them, this idea of
the window is really helping us to focus on this
present moment because the present moment, through the vast majority
of the first chapter called the Window, is this kind
of moment to which we return. So when we talk
of stream of consciousness, we're going to cover this, but
(17:42):
we have this moment of Missus Ramsey and James, and
we digress from that moment. We talk about Minta Doyle
and Paul, and we talk about mister Carmichael, and we
talk about William Banks and Lily Briscoe, and we talk
about mister Ramsey who is often kind of interrupting this
present moment. And we move from you know, the mind
of Missus Ramsey into many of these different characters. And
(18:03):
when I say we move into them, it's a third
person narrator. We're not No one is saying I think this,
and I think that, or I feel this or I
feel that. But instead we have this very nimble third
person narrator who is who is dipping into the thoughts
and emotions and sensibility and feelings of many of these
different characters. But the idea of the window is important
(18:23):
as a frame while also anchoring us in this present moment.
So this idea of interiority is really important. And this
is I want to take a quick step back here,
or maybe like a widening here of the lecture. So
we have looked recently at a bunch of different realist novels.
Anna Karenina way back in the in the early days
of the Fox Page. We looked at Madame Bowerie, which
(18:45):
is kind of the first big realist novel. We looked
at East of Eden. We've looked at a lot of
novels that are in the realist tradition, and in that tradition,
the author is essentially trying to give us an entire world,
and the way that they are doing that is by
supplying a lot of details, but for the most part
they are staying out of the minds of the characters,
(19:06):
so they're describing things sort of from afar, and we
have this narrator who almost feels like a spectator or
a voyeur, where we have this idea of someone who
is this authoritative, omniscient, omnipotent force who is shaping the
story and deciding which parts to tell and deciding which
details to include. But the idea is that we were
(19:28):
going to have this world that you could step into
and essentially feel what that world felt like. This was,
you know, the second half of the nineteenth century, and interestingly,
toward the end of the nineteenth century you have something
called naturalism. So you think of amiel Zola, who wrote Lasonnoir,
and he wrote a bunch of different things where he
was taking realism and pushing it a little further, making
(19:50):
it political. So he would take this idea of this
very real, very inhabitable, very believable world, and then he
would put this like giant political spin on it, because
he would be talking about the horrible working conditions of
the working class in France. So the reason why I
mentioned that is because the realist novel and the naturalist novel, certainly,
(20:10):
you know, purport to provide the reader this kind of
true environment and with it comes a lot of political
weight and a lot of moral weight. I mean, these
are books that really come down one way or another.
You know, Anna Karena and I is definitely kind of
an anti well, depending on how you read it. You
can go back and listen to that lecture. You know,
for the most part, it feels like an anti adultery
(20:31):
kind of novel. We have lots and lots of certainly,
Madam Bowerie is that we have lots and lots of
moralizing that comes with those. So this idea of kind
of like a capital T truth that is promoted by
the realist and naturalist novel is completely upended with Virgin
you Wolf. So we talked about the effect of the
First World War, but also I think it's important to
(20:52):
think of her as a woman who is outside academia,
who was not educated the way her brothers were, who
is someone who had a lot of dependence and a
lot of drive, and a lot of ambition, and it
was very, very bright, but who definitely felt herself outside
of things. She also was someone who was brought up
during the Victorian era eighteen eighty two, Victorian era being
(21:14):
sort of eighteen fifty to nineteen hundred, so that is
an era when men were seen as incredibly authoritative and
women were seen as kind of a frail and retiring.
So this idea of kind of like this masculine, omnipotent,
omniscient narrator who can put forth this capital truth was
something that just wasn't resonating with Virginia Wolf. So instead
(21:35):
of this objectivity supposed objectivity of the realist novel and
this omniscient narrator, what she is doing is putting forth
this radical idea of subjectivity. So what we see with
all of this interiority into the Lighthouse and all of
her work is this idea of truth as being something
it's like a lowercase T truth in the sense that
(21:57):
many different people have their own version of the truth.
We see a bunch of kind of overlapping action, which
is so interesting. We'll see the same event from different
people's points of view, and it will take on radically
different truth in each one of these people's perspectives. It
is so fascinating. So instead of this kind of hubristic
(22:18):
idea that we could provide the reader this morally rigid, didactic,
true feeling world, what she's doing is putting forth this
idea that nobody really has, that idea of capital T truth.
No one should be putting forth an idea of this
objective sense of the world, because in fact, everyone's own
(22:39):
perspective on the world is subjective, and that subjectivity, of course,
allows for an enormous amount of empathy. When I think
of empathy in Virginia Wolf, I go sort of automatically
to Septimus Warren Smith, who is a character in Missus Dollaway.
He is a soldier from the First World War who
is experiencing very intense PTSD, and that is in some
(23:02):
ways one of her most radical experiments in helping the
reader understand what a character is going through. We don't, though,
have to go back to him to find, you know,
characters worthy of extreme empathy. As I was reading just
finishing up this morning, I really was struck by the
way that you can empathize with all of these people.
I mean, we think of mister with mister Delaway, we
(23:24):
think of mister Ramsey as someone who is this kind
of brash and somewhat unlikable male authority figure. But there
are lots of ways that we are made to empathize,
that we are made to really understand. And I don't
even mean sympathize, I mean that we are inside, you know,
the thoughts and feelings of these different people. We don't
spend a lot of time and this is significant because
(23:45):
I think Virginia Wolf was not, you know, her aim
here was not to step inside the idea of you know,
the mind of the patriarch. It was very much more
to illuminate everyone else. So we really do see mister
Ramsey mostly from the outside, but you find yourself empathizing
with everyone in the book in a way that is
really innovative and just sort of radical. Just before we
(24:09):
dive into our very close reading of the first two
pages pages three and four in my volume, I want
to just give you a quick sense of some of
the hallmarks of the stream of consciousness writing. So usually
it is this third person narrator. It's not first person.
We're not inside the minds of these people saying I
did this, and I think that we have this third
person narrator who is a lot of it is called
(24:30):
free indirect discourse, where you have that narrator moving in
and out of the minds of different people, but maintaining
some kind of objectivity and some sort of distance from
it all. Very famously, there are lots of run on
sentences in Stream of Consciousness, which makes sense. I think
you can tell from the from the term itself that
(24:51):
what we are talking about is the way that consciousness works.
And of course one of the ways that it does
is that our thoughts, over which we have very little control,
you know, each thought sort of succeeded by another, and
there are not kind of tidy finishes to one thought
and the next. So you have this idea of these
run on sentences. In Wolf we have a lot of
unorthodox punctuation, which of course I love. This is one
(25:12):
of those examples of like you have to know your
punctuation and your grammar in order to go ahead and
violate all of the rules. Because when she is violating
quote unquote these rules, what she's really doing is making
grammar work in some very unusual ways. I love her
use of parentheses. We're going to take a look at that.
There is a quality of musicality with stream of consciousness,
(25:34):
so we have a little bit of this kind of
verse and refrain. You also, of course have the musicality
of the prose itself. I mean, if you think of proofs,
do you think of in search of lost time? There
is a lyrical quality, a musical quality to each sentence itself.
But what I know mostly into the lighthouse is sort
of structurally that we have these moments that often will
(25:55):
be a phrase that she will repeat verbatim that sometimes
are signaling, you know, that we are in a present moment,
or we are returning to a present moment after a digression.
But sometimes it's simply for uh, for emphasis. Sometimes it's
to signal the end of a thought as we are
moving on to another thought. So there's a fair amount
of repetition. And with this repetition we have this beautiful
(26:17):
weaving together, so you may have a repetition of something
you know two or three pages later that's sort of
woven into the next thought. But it is this kind
of highly unusual and really beautiful way to present, you know,
the subjective experience of someone's mind. One of the aspects
that was most like shocking for me back in high
(26:38):
school is this idea of mimesis. So mimesis or mimetic.
If something is mimetic, it is basically mimicking reality. So
the best example in this book is that occasionally things
will happen, and often they're in parentheses that will be
very shocking to the reader. They will be just suddenly
presented inside a parenthesis and coming seemingly out of nowhere,
(26:59):
and as the reader, you are shook. And the beautiful
thing about that, and it illustrates mimisis very nicely, is
that when these things are happening, when they are presented
that way, the reason she's doing that is because because
the characters are also absolutely surprised, just sort of startled
and astonished by this thing that is suddenly occurring. So
surprise and mimesis is kind of the main thing that
(27:20):
she does. But there are other ways that if a
time is very soothing, or if a time is very complicated,
a lot of the language will reflect that, so that
the reader is essentially feeling the same thing that the
characters are feeling. So before we dive into our close
reading of the first couple of pages of To the Lighthouse,
I want to read a couple of opening sentences of
(27:41):
other works, just so you have some points of comparison
to understand the radical nature of what she is doing. So,
for example, we have George Elliott, we have Middle March.
It begins this way. Miss Brooks had that kind of
beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
It's an awesome opening sentence, very good, but you have
this sense of this narrator who is pulled back, and
(28:03):
this narrator actually has like kind of a sassy personality
thing happening here, which is really to her credit. This
idea of the narrator as feeling like it is almost
a character in the book, but certainly at a distance,
and describing the exteriority of Miss Brooke. What we see
throughout the book are things that can be described from
the outside. So this is I'm giving you kind of
(28:26):
a wide smattering. Here Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. In
the year eighteen seventy eight, I took my degree of
Doctor of Medicine of the University of London and proceeded
to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons
in the Army. So here we have a first person narrator,
but it still is very kind of it's providing these facts.
This is getting at some sort of like a you know,
(28:47):
true events that occurred that Arthur Conan Doyle is going
to kind of line up for us in what ends
up being a delightful way. But it's very different than
the interiority that we are about to see. This is
East of E by John Steinbeck. The Salinas Valley is
in northern California. I mean that's the first sentence right there.
I'm going to read the first little paragraph. The Salinas
(29:09):
Valley is in northern California. It is a long, narrow
swale between two ridges of mountains, and the Salinas River
winds and twists up the center until it falls at
last into Monterey Bay. So this is that archetypal omniscient narrator.
It's starting from very very far away. It's against sort
of biblical in the sense that it is having It's
not exactly hubris, but just like the scope to think
(29:32):
that you can add the authority of the land, of
the state of California, of this fertile valley, you can
kind of claim it as an aspect of your novel.
This is from The Great Gatsby. It came out the
same year as Missus Dollaway nineteen twenty five, so two
years before To the Lighthouse. The Great Gatsby is kind
(29:52):
of a bridge to modernism. It is so that book, man,
I mean, wow, talk about an amazing book to revisit
that we all read in the day. There are some
aspects of modernist writing, and modernist writing is the category
in which we see stream of consciousness. It's kind of
nineteen ten to nineteen forty ish where you have a
lot of experimentation, a lot of formal experimentation by writers
(30:15):
like Virginia Wolf certainly, but also James Joyce. We have
Faulkner in the United States, and Fitzgerald is mostly put
into kind of this late realist camp. But there are
lots of modernist elements. But still we have a fairly
kind of standard beginning to the novel. We have this
in my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave
me some advice which has been turning over in my
(30:38):
mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing someone, he said,
just remember that all people in this world haven't had
the same advantages as you have. So we do have
a first person narrator, but we have this kind of
wider scope piece talking kind of objectively about this piece
of advice that he got from his father. It's very
sort of patriarchal the opening of this whole thing, and
(30:59):
in some ways very kind of theoretical and broad. This
idea of you know, long ago I received a piece
of advice. It is not speaking to the specificity of
a given moment of experience in consciousness. Okay, with all
of that supporting information, we are going to dive into
the novel. And as I am reading this very first part,
(31:20):
keep in mind those other openings to those other famous novels,
just to experience the difference here. So this chapter is
called the Window. It begins like this. Yes, of course,
if it's fine tomorrow, said missus Ramsey, but you'll have
to be up with the lark. She added, So this
is absolutely crucial. What we are having here in the
(31:42):
beginning is we are beginning and media arrests. So that's
a Latin phrase simply meaning in the middle of something.
We are beginning in the middle of a conversation that
Missus Ramsey is having with her son. We don't actually
know to whom she is saying this, but it is
fragmentary enough. It's obviously a rejoinder. I know that she
is in conversation with someone. So a few things that
(32:03):
are really remarkable, Beside the fact that we're diving into something,
we're not sort of setting the scene. We're in fact diving.
We're opening by being right in the middle of the scene.
It's also very important that we are hearing Missus Ramsey's voice.
Hers is the voice that opens the entire thing. We
are hearing a woman speaking, and that is not true
of any of the other narrators that we were talking about.
(32:25):
Even when George Elliott is talking about Miss Brooke and
we have that kind of sassy narrator, you don't get
the sense necessarily that we are hearing a woman's voice.
It's also important here that we have this affirmative thing
at the beginning. Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow,
so missus Ramsey. Again, if we think of her as
the ray of the lighthouse, she is very positive in
many ways for everyone around her. She is someone inside
(32:49):
who is not feeling, perhaps as positive as the vibes
that she's giving to her family, but in many ways,
her role, I mean, as is the role of a
lot of women, and certainly those in the Victorian era,
is to be very positive and to buoy people, no
pun intended. So we have that opening sentence, we have
her quoted, we hear her voice, and then we have
(33:10):
this to her son. These words conveyed an extraordinary joy,
as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to
take place, and the wonder to which he had looked
forward for years and years, it seemed, was after a
night's darkness and a day's sail within touch. Oh my gosh,
it's so it's so good, it's so it's so moving.
(33:31):
Already I'm feeling so moved. So we have this this
statement by her and then immediately to her son. So
we are entering with that kind of economy and that
kind of straightforward statement. We are moving into the mind
of her son James, and right after to her son,
we have this emphasis on words. These words conveyed an
(33:53):
extraordinary joy. So here we have this emphasis on emotion.
We are not talking about advice that someone got from
their fone. We are talking about this sensation of joy.
Not only that it is extraordinary joy. And the important
thing right from the start here is that it is
words that are conveying this extraordinary joy. In many ways,
(34:13):
this is a study. This entire novel is a study
of subtlety, which is one of the many reasons that
resonated with me. So clearly, we're going to read a
little part where Missus Ramsey talks about her antennae as
being very attuned to what is going on around her.
A simple glance from her husband, a tone of voice,
something she hears in the other room, all of those
(34:34):
are things that completely alter her state. And importantly, we
are seeing this happening right here. She simply says something
and to her son, you know, this extraordinary joy is
arising from her words. We then have lots of all
of these different clauses that we have that are all
separated by commas. We have lots and lots of commas.
(34:54):
I mean, this is not technically a run on sentence.
Grammatically it works. We could diagram it. I loved diagramma
sentences back in the day. That is something. It's a
lost art, frankly. But we have all of these different
phrases that immediately are sort of putting us into the
mind of the child. So let's reread that quickly. To
her son, these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if
(35:17):
it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place,
and the wonder to which he had looked forward for
years and years, it seemed, was after a night's darkness
and a day's sale within touch, So very significantly, the
sentence ends with touch. You have this idea of senses
as being very alert and being very important. They're given
(35:37):
primacy here. And we also were introducing at the beginning
this idea of the trip to the lighthouse. So this
fragmentary title of the novel to the Lighthouse right here,
this idea of this expedition has been introduced. And then
moving on, Since he belonged even at the age of
six to that grade six earlier, I think I said seven.
(36:00):
Since he belonged even at the age of six, to
that great clan, which cannot keep this feeling separate from that,
but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows,
cloud what is actually at hand. Since to such people,
even in earliest childhood, any turn in the wheel of
sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment
(36:21):
upon which it's gloom or radiance rests. What an absolute
privilege it is to parse this language. So we have
this idea of this great clan. This is this kind
of infusion of kind of a male aspect, I mean,
the idea of belonging to this great clan and thinking
about it, I mean, it brings you right back to
you know, like the Scottish clans and you know, ancient
(36:45):
England and Scotland. So you have this evocation with this
very small word of this kind of capital h history,
which is in line with the kind of ways that
James might be thinking about things. But we also know,
because she's telling us very clearly, that he feels things
very deeply. One thing that's very important when she says,
(37:05):
here to the great clan, which cannot keep this feeling
separate from that. So the idea of this feeling. It
seems very subtle, but it's very important because this feeling
is immediate. It's not that he can't keep, you know,
that emotion separate from the other. It's this emotion. It's
a very it makes things feel very immediate in this
(37:26):
very subtle way. It's also very important and compelling here
that we have these extremes. Not only is the narrator
telling us that he feels these extremes, but we have
joys and sorrow, gloom and radiance, and all of the
characters in the book, the ones that we're focusing on,
do feel things in extreme ways. Again, this is a
(37:48):
real study of subtlety. But this idea of emotions as
being extreme is kind of a radical proposition. Even the characters,
you know, Charles Tansley, who is the young academ who
is there, who has a real chip on his shoulder,
or Augustus Carmichael or William Banks, these are characters who
are you know, relatively composed. Charles Tanseley's not so composed,
(38:09):
but the other two are these composed men, and yet
they are also feeling, you know, these extremes of emotion,
which is really part of the innovative nature of this
novel that not only is it talking about emotions, but
it is making them very dramatic and I think very
compelling and exciting. So then we're moving on James Ramsey
(38:29):
sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated
catalog of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture
of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss.
So here we have this really beautiful thing where we're
beginning with James Ramsey. We're talking here about the clan.
We're bringing in the last name, the idea of Ramsey.
(38:50):
We have the force of a ram but we also
have Ramsey's you know those Egyptian you know, kings. I
think that's the thing. I think King Ramsey's I think
that's a you know, some sort of Egyptian potentate. So
we have this kind of grandeur James Ramsey, and we're
kind of pulling back a little bit. But then we
have him sitting on the floor with his mother. So
we are going from this very kind of more formal
(39:12):
address into a very domestic setting. And then the Army
and Navy Stores catalog. I mean, nothing in Wolf, not
one single word is random The idea of the army
and navy is really important if you are keeping in
mind that this novel is in large part in conversation
with the horrors of the First World War. This emphasis
(39:34):
right at the beginning of this military presence in the
domestic sphere is subtle, but it is extremely important. We
see it again and again. Pretty soon we're introduced to
one of the little boys who's going around shooting at things.
We have guns, we have things that sound like explosions.
The presence of the war is very palpable, if very subtle.
(39:55):
So we also have this idea of him cutting out
a refrigerator and then endowing it with heaven bliss. So
this is this idea again of domesticity, but enormous emotion
being sort of part and parsonal with the domestic sphere.
So not only did he endow it with heavenly bliss,
but the next sentence says it was fringed with joy.
(40:17):
So here we're seeing this repetition. That is the third
time we've seen the word joy, extraordinary joy in the beginning,
joys and sorrows in the middle of the paragraph, and
then down here it was fringed with joy and importantly,
you know, fringed with joy is a very unusual sort
of image, and this is another thing that Wolf is
so good at, and all of the modernists. The idea
(40:39):
of a refrigerator being fringed with joy is unusual. It's
very evocative, and I think you get a sense of it.
You can kind of imagine how he would see it,
but it is not conventional. Then moving along, we're going
to move a little bit further now from the domestic sphere.
The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves
(41:00):
whitening before rain, rooks, cawing brooms, knocking, dresses, rustling. All
these were so colored and distinguished in his mind that
he had already his private code, his secret language. Though
he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with
his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid
(41:21):
and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty,
so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly
around the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine, on
the bench, or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in
some crisis of public affairs. We're not going to parse
this all the way through, but one thing to note
(41:42):
here is the idea that things look very calm. Things
look the surface of everything in this novel appears one way,
but what is happening beneath is anything but calm. And
as I mentioned, we are moving away from the domestic
sphere as soon as we're talking about the mower and
the poplar trees and the leaves whitening before the rain,
all of that is moving us out through the window
(42:04):
and into this world. It's really beautiful though the way,
and we have the refrigerator and then the mower as being,
you know, sort of another domestic ish tool, is providing
a kind of bridge. So we're moving from the private
sphere out into the nature into the afternoon slash evening.
And as we move there, we're having a kind of
(42:25):
a more masculine emphasis here. So we have stark and
uncompromising severity with his high forehead and his fierce blue
eyes and then frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty,
and the end of the paragraph where his mother is
imagining him on the bench or being very stern in
this public sphere, I mean she goes so far as
(42:45):
to imagine him in red and ermine, which is, you know,
obviously like a very royal kind of thing. I think
when she's talking about the bench or a crisis in
public affairs, that's kind of more like something in the
House of Parliament. He's not going to be dressed up
in red and ermine. To her. All of those sorts
of sign of authority are all kind of mixed together.
And what's fascinating is we're moving from this mother child
(43:06):
scene out into a more male world. And then we
have this, but said his father, stopping in front of
the drawing room window, it won't be fine. So significantly
and notably, hear the voice of authority of the father
comes in. And this is a very negative thing and
it stands in direct contrast to the positivity of Missus
(43:26):
Ramsey that we hear in the opening line. So again
we have this, but said his father, stopping in front
of the drawing room window, it won't be fine. It's
also important to note that these are he is responding
to what Missus Ramsey has said. So this is that
idea of there being this kind of present moment. It's
the moment when she's having this conversation with James, and
(43:47):
we are returning, you know, we've had this digression about
James and his you know, what he's doing with his
fringed joy refrigerator, and then also you know, a movement
into his future, and then suddenly we are brought back
right away, you know, almost instantaneously to the present moment
where mister Ramsey is opposing what his wife has just said.
(44:08):
And importantly, we are still very much in James's perspective,
although that's not clear right away, but it becomes very
clear soon. So we have his father saying it won't
be fine. Had there been an axe, handy or a poker,
any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his
father's breast and killed him there, and then James would
have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that
(44:30):
mister Ramsey excited in his children's breast by his mirror 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 so importantly, that little James thought
(44:52):
is in parentheses there, So Wolfe is kindly reminding us,
I'm not even sure we need it. It's kind of
like a nice point of emphasis. He that we are
still very much in the And then we do this
fascinating thing where we are moving right after this parenthetical
where it says James thought, we're moving toward mister Ramsey.
So we're moving toward a description of him, and at
(45:13):
first it's kind of an exterior description, but then we
are moving in more into his interior. So we have
his wife who is 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
(45:33):
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 his own children, who sprung
from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life
is difficult. So here we are very firmly kind of
in the things that he might say. You could also
argue that James is kind of articulating the way that
(45:56):
he sees his father, And if you're reading it that way,
it's James, you know, being sort of angrily like saying
that his father wields the truth and facts in ways
that are painful. They 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
(46:18):
barks founder in darkness. Here mister Ramsey would straighten his
back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon,
one that needs, after all, courage, truth and the power
to endure. So it's even I think probably as a
listener here it's a little confusing to follow all of this,
But what he's talking about is this fabled land of
(46:40):
adulthood that you sort of have these visions of yourself.
And we just above have this vision of what missus
Ramsey hopes that James might develop into. But then we
have this very do our very pessimistic view that is
put forth by mister Ramsey about how life is difficult.
So what's important here at the bottom of this paragraph,
(47:01):
very early in the book, is all of this emphasis
on facts and truth, and there's all sorts of repetition,
just like we had repetition of joy before when we
were talking about James. Now we are having this repetition
of true and truth and fact and facts to really
give us this sense of who mister Ramsey is and
what his emphasis, what his sort of orientation is all about.
(47:25):
So you might have noted in my voice there's another
parenthetical phrase. We are sort of in his mind where
he's thinking about the frail barks foundering in darkness, than
we have parentheses here. Mister Ramsey would straighten his back
and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon. Importantly,
he's looking toward the horizon. Everyone in some ways is
(47:47):
kind of focused on the lighthouse, is focused outward and
not just into the lawn and where the other people are,
but beyond that. So we have mister Ramsey looking toward
the horizon. We have games hoping to get to the lighthouse.
We have missus Ramsey, who is acutely aware of everything
that is going on around her, but she is the
one who first introduces, who first sees the lighthouse, and
(48:10):
she's obviously thinking about whether or not James will get
to go the next day, and she's thinking about the
weather so all of them while they are very firmly
in this domestic sphere. He's on the porch there inside
the house. They're all focused on the horizon. And then
this last sentence we're going to read here. But it
may be fine. I expect it will be fine, said
(48:31):
missus Ramsey, making some little twist of the reddish brown stalking.
She was knitting impatiently. So here we have ourselves returning
with her positivity, but also firmly to the domestic sphere,
because here we have this inclusion of knitting, which is
obviously a very domestic task. So these first two pages,
I mean, it's just fascinating what she is doing already,
(48:51):
and all of this emphasis on interiority and on feelings,
and some of this repetition, and the way we are
returning to the first moment. These are things that we
see throughout the entire novel, and they're expanded in many ways,
but we have this blueprint, this innovative and very different
way that she is operating right from the start. So
before we close, I want to just look at a
(49:12):
couple of different things. So again I put some emphasis
on the parentheses. If you plan to go back and
read pay attention to some of the parentheses. Sometimes she'll
open a parentheses and three pages later you will have
the close of the parentheses. And in some ways I
love how inconsistent she is with that. So in many
she has all these different tools that she will use
(49:32):
to sort of help the reader understand that this is
a digression or this is someone else's thought. But there's
so much variety, which I think is really excellent because
it speaks to kind of, you know, the variety with
which everyone's individual brain is functioning. So I want to
move on now just to look at these two instances
where I felt like Virginia Wolf is really articulating exactly
(49:55):
the way that my brain functions. And I think this
is worth worth looking at, not just you know, in
some self indulgent way, but because this is the kind
of interiority, This is the kind of stream of consciousness stuff,
the innovative intimacy and the emphasis on feeling an interiority
that is so strong in this novel. So we look
at page sixty one. This is when she's reading a
(50:17):
story about the fisherman and his wife, which, of course
Wolf is really using this to her advantage. In many ways,
the fable of the Fisherman and his Wife which she
is reading, has everything to do with her relationship with
her husband. It has to do with ocean, it has
to do with the lighthouse, the setting. But this is
a story that she is reading to young James. She
turned the page. There were only a few lines more
(50:40):
so that she would finish the story, though it was
past bedtime, it was getting late. The light in the
garden told her that and the whitening of the flowers
and something gray in the leaves conspired together to rouse
in her a feeling of anxiety. What it was about,
she could not think at first. Then she remembered Paul
and May and Andrew had not come back. So what
(51:02):
we have here is this description of what is happening,
and then we have this very strong emotion that it
is evoking. And then we have kind of a process
of the mind. And I think many of you have
experienced that where you have kind of a stab of
anxiety or sorrow or concern or whatever the thing is,
and you're like, wait, why do I feel like this?
What is it that is bringing up this emotion? Then
(51:24):
she has this very neat colon and she has the
brief and economic and distinct description of what it was
that one of her sons and her guests have not
yet returned. There's one more example. I want to read
again of how my mind functions, and I think how
many people's, obviously how many people's minds function. We have
moved at this point in the novel. We are now
(51:44):
on page one oh seven, so we're almost halfway through.
We are no longer with the present moment of Missus
Ramsey and James. We've moved into the dining room a
little bit later, where everyone is assembling for dinner, and
this is very much in Missus Ramsey's point of view,
and she's experiencing the comment. She would be saying she
liked the Waverley novels or had not read them. She
(52:04):
would be urging herself forward. Now she said nothing. For
a moment, she hung suspended. Ah, but how long do
you think it'll last? Said somebody. It was as if
she had antennae trembling out from her which intercepting certain sentences,
forced them upon her attention. This was one of them.
She sent a danger for her husband. A question like
(52:26):
that would lead almost certainly to something being said which
reminded him of his own failure. How long would he
be read? He would think at once William Banks, who
was entirely free of all such vanity, laughed and said
he attached no importance to changes in fashion. Who could
tell what was going to last in literature or indeed
in anything else. So this is not only a beautiful
(52:49):
articulation of how my brain works, this idea of these
antennae and and sensing some sort of danger and then
trying to figure out how you might in fact solace
the people around you, But she's also talking about something
very important here, this question of what will last, and
not only what will last, but in this specific case,
she's talking about literature. It's very meta in some ways.
And honestly, that's a great note to end on, because
(53:11):
this is a novel that has lasted. I mean, we
are coming up on the one hundredth anniversary of To
the Lighthouse. It's crazy to think that this is the
anniversary we just celebrated Gatsby, but this is also the
anniversary of Missus Dollaway. I don't know why more is
not being made of that. Perhaps it's coming in the fall,
But this idea of lasting literature is so significant, and
one of the reasons why this novel does last is
(53:33):
because it was so innovative. And this is an excellent
point at which to ask, So what what is it
about this that's innovative? I mean, just with something being innovative,
you know, you could move right beyond it and not
and have it not be very resonant anymore in the
present day. But this is extremely resonant, I think because
Virginia Wolf is moving us from this kind of vision
(53:54):
that is from the outside of the world and moving
us into a description of what is happening on the
level of thoughts but also of feelings. It's really a
radical change and really the reason I think why the
novel endures. So thank you so much for tuning in.
Get out there and read some more. Cormick McCarthy straight away.
Happy reading.
Listeners. Readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor at Berkeley, bestselling author, and PhD
in literature. Today is a big day. It's a big
day for me. Readers. We are going back to Virginia
(00:26):
Wolf's To the Lighthouse. This is a book that I
read senior year in high school, and it, honestly, I
really think it was the beginning of my true interaction
with real literature. Until that point, I had been kind
of a sporadic reader. I spent one summer when I
was fifteen reading so much Daniel Steele that at one
point I walked into the kitchen of my house and
(00:46):
I like conceptualized something in my mind in exactly the
language that Daniel Steele was using. And even I, at fifteen,
knew that perhaps I had overdone the Daniel Steele. But
I had a teacher in twelfth grade who was going
to teach us to the Lighthouse, and she told us
all about how the rest of the faculty at our
high school thought she was crazy because so many people
(01:07):
did not think that high school seniors would be able
to appreciate Virginuolf's genius. So I was very flattered, I think,
by the challenge. And then we started reading, and I
had this sense that someone had somehow gone inside my
brain thought someone of course being VIRGINU Wolf, and had
found an ability to articulate exactly how my mind was working.
(01:28):
It was a complete revelation. It was such a revelation,
in fact, that I bought To the Lighthouse for everyone
for Christmas that year, because of course, when I was seventeen,
I couldn't figure out why everyone in my family would
not want to understand completely how my brain was working.
I do not think anyone read it, not a single person,
because of that initial impression, but also because of the
(01:49):
way that the book has held up every time I
have gone back to read it. It is very well
established as my favorite book, which is honestly saying a lot.
It's like I have Virginu Wolves to the Lighthouse, and
then there's a huge gap, and then there are a
bunch of other books that are in contention for my
maybe top five favorite books, and some of my thinking
right now is just the fact that it is almost
(02:09):
Memorial Day. I am recording this on the twentieth I
believe of May twenty first of May. In fact of
twenty twenty five, we're almost at Memorial Day, almost at
the beginning of the summer, and there is something about
to the Lighthouse that really speaks to summer. And although
the book is actually set in September, for me, it
(02:30):
is something that I tend to come back to in
the spring, just because I find it so affirmative and
so engaging, and for me at least, it puts you
in a very summer kind of mood. I once got
in trouble though, back when we were having these lectures
and these meetings in my local bookstore here in northern California,
I am somewhat mistakenly perhaps advertised to The Lighthouse as
(02:51):
the ultimate beach read. I don't think that many people
were confused by that, because I think Virginia Wolf has
enough of a reputation as some who is really challenging
to read. I don't think anybody was confusing it with
like that summer's hottest novel. And in many ways I
do stand by it. It is kind of the ultimate
beach read, and what we're going to do today is
(03:11):
a little bit different. I am looking at today as
a kind of introductory lecture for anyone who either has
not read To the Lighthouse before, or for anyone who
read it a long time ago or even recently and
wants to reread. So this is kind of an introduction
to this novel in particular, but also to Virginia Woolf
as a whole, and also certainly to the stream of
(03:31):
consciousness mode of writing. So for those of you who
like an agenda, we're going to do quite a bit
of close reading today, essentially of the first two pages
of the novel. Before we do that, we are going
to talk about the title of the book and the
title of the first chapter, the Window. We are going
to talk about the importance of this novel as starting
and media rests, which simply means in the middle of
(03:54):
the action. We're going to talk a little bit about
domesticity and maternity. We're going to talk about the primus
of sensibility meaning emotion meaning sensing things, the primacy of
emotion and sensibility over this idea of like facts or truths.
We're going to talk about the narrative stance, and then
we're going to really dive into stream of consciousness, essentially
(04:16):
how it is defined, why it is important. We're then
going to look again very closely at those first two pages,
and then when we close, I'm going to finish with
essentially what is a list of things that you might
want to be focusing on as you are reading through
this masterpiece. This lecture will be followed by a second
lecture where I will sort of purse a lot of
(04:37):
that stuff, really dig into a bunch of those things.
I'm also in that lecture going to dig into like
the evocation of summer, which is so interesting to me.
It's such a she does it like no one else.
So we're going to take a quick look at that,
which actually will just be joyful. And then we're also
going to talk about humor this time. In my reread
for some reason this book, which is usually not thought
(04:58):
of as a humorous book, I found a bunch of
instances of humor that really added to my experience this time.
Then we're going to talk about Lily Briscoe, and we're
going to talk about the structure of the book, a
bunch of other things so if you are someone who
wants to use this as an introduction, keep in mind
that there will be a second lecture where we will
really dig into things. Before we dive in to any
(05:19):
of this, I want to give you just a very
very quick bio of Virginia Wolf. I've read many, many
a biography. I will highly recommend the biography by Hermione Lee.
It's so good. I mean, it is very, very long,
but it is gripping. She was born in eighteen eighty two.
She died in nineteen forty one. Famously, she took her
own life by filling her pockets with rocks and wading
(05:40):
into the river near her house. She was born in
this kind of upper middle class family. Her father was
a very patriarchal and a very large presence in her life.
She has said very publicly that to the Lighthouse is
very much an exploration of her father. Her family of
origin was relatively large. She was one of the younger
of the siblings, very close with her sister Vanessa. They
(06:03):
were part of the Bloomsbury Group. So she grew up
as a young child in the Victorian era in this
kind of upper middle class family, but then got very
bohemian with that group of people who are really testing
a lot of the kind of moral strictures of the day.
She was not formally educated. She really would have liked
to have been formally educated. But she also there's lots
and lots of information about her reading life and her
(06:26):
life in general. She kept lots of journals. We have
lots and lots of textual evidence for what she was
thinking and how she was feeling. But she was very
happy in many ways with having read very very widely
and at random, along with many people in her generation.
Think of Ezra Pound, think of ts Eliot. She was deeply,
deeply affected by the First World War. So this is
this cataclysmic event that really persuaded her into this thinking
(06:50):
that the sort of standard novel, the realist novel, was
very hubuistic, That this idea of thinking that you could
provide the reader with this stable moralizing DIDACTI detailed world
being the realist novel, That that mode of writing just
wasn't working anymore. It was not a good enough medium
in which to talk about the trauma of this war.
(07:12):
She was someone who had some pretty profound mental health issues.
Her mom died. I think when she was thirteen, which
just sounds like a terrible, terrible time to have your
mom die. I mean, never a good time, but that
one seems particularly bad. And there's quite a bit of
information about these various sort of breakdowns that she would have. Unfortunately,
she was subjected at times to that Victorian rest cure.
Not my fantasy of it, which is like a fantasy
(07:33):
that you get to claim that you're like hysterical and
then they wheel you out onto a lawn with like
a book and some t in your like white wicker
wheelchair kind of situation with a blanket over your lap.
That's my fantasy of the Victorian rest cure. The real
thing was actually pretty gnarly because they would deprive you
of any kind of stimulation and have you be in
(07:54):
a dark room. And thinking that leaving a woman in
a dark room with no stimulation and only her mind
was a good idea. Yeah, she was married to Leonard Wolf,
but very famously had relationships with other women, Vita Sackville
West being one of those women. She did when she
did take her life. It was nineteen forty one. She
was relatively old, she was in her sixties. I think
lots of us think she was much younger, because it
(08:16):
seems like such a tragic end. I mean, it's still
a tragic end, obviously, but you do get the sense
that she had lived, you know, fairly full life in
many ways, and certainly had left her mark on literature.
But she felt this the Second World War coming, and
just felt that she did not have the strength to
live through another cataclysmic European war. Okay, as always, we
(08:38):
are going to talk about the title of the book.
When you are thinking about sort of reading better, becoming
a better reader, First of all, I would encourage you
to read with a pencil in hand always. I write
all sorts of stuff all over my books, Lots of
you know, stars, there's no rhyme or reason, you know,
underlining stars, circling hearts, all kinds of different things. I
(08:58):
generally don't go back and look at any of this,
but I do find when you read with a pencil
in hand, you are definitely more engaged with the book.
A kind of a dundum to that idea of having
a pencil is that, obviously, if you're going to be
marking up a book, you need to in fact own
that book. And here I'm going to put my little
plug out libraries are amazing. If you are getting your
books from the library, excellent. If you are listening to
(09:19):
your books on audio, also amazing. But if you are
someone who purchases books at your local independent bookstore, I
would encourage you to go ahead and spend the twenty
or thirty dollars that it costs to buy a book
instead of borrowing it from someone. There is this very
large ghost readership that is talked about in the publishing industry.
It's especially among women. I like the idea of the
(09:41):
economics and sort of the environmental impact of sharing books,
but I will say that writers need to be compensated.
I'm not sure how we think about that in terms
of Virginia Wolf. Maybe it's just fine for you to
go ahead, although we need to also support these publishing
houses certainly. So you should read with a pencil in hand,
and you should also simply pay attention. And part of
that is paying attention to the title. So this title
(10:04):
to the Lighthouse is so significant, it is talking. It's
really unusual when you step back and think about it
a little bit. We're going to talk in a little
bit about some books that we can kind of compare
this to some realist novels and some contemporary novels. Some
of them, for example, Anna Karenna, which is, you know,
very firmly the name of a woman. We are supposed
(10:26):
to focus on the Great Gatsby, we're talking about this
kind of mythological American dream figure. We're focusing in both
of those cases very clearly on a person. A book
like East of Eden. That's a biblical phrase. It's really
evocative of something very rich, but it is also you know,
a very specific kind of place, well, a mythological kind
of biblical place, but it is something that very firmly
(10:49):
stands on its own. In contrast, we have this fragmentary
to the Lighthouse. It is a prepositional phrase. It absolutely
kind of by definition, is a frag It's a fragment
of something larger. It's not a fragment from the Bible.
It's not a fragment from a lot of the Romantic
poetry that mister Ramsey is constantly reciting throughout the book.
(11:11):
It is simply a phrase that comes from the novel itself.
And not only is it a fragment, but what it
is connoting is this idea of movement it's this idea
of trying to get somewhere. It's also the idea of
not in fact arriving. It is not called the lighthouse,
it is called to the lighthouse. So you have this
idea of things happening, things moving, things not being complete,
(11:32):
things being fragmentary, things being unstable, and then of course
we have the idea of the lighthouse. A lighthouse, you know,
very famously and very symbolically, is you know, this tall,
actually very phallic thing that stands on rocky shores and
that helps bring ships into the harbor. And there is
(11:52):
a lighthouse, of course in the book that features very heavily,
and from the very beginning we have the light of
the lighthouse as being extremely important. So it's this idea
of illuminating things. It's also this idea of light as
being intermittent. You know, we can sort of illuminate things,
but we can't see the full picture of them at night.
It's this sweeping kind of light that illuminates things just
(12:14):
momentarily and in many ways, this idea of illuminating things
and then sort of moving along. You can imagine the
progress of that light illuminating things. It is very much
like the idea of stream of consciousness, which we will
find out is this kind of narrative stance where the
narrator and we the reader along with the narrator are
moving from sort of consciousness to consciousness person to person.
(12:35):
So you can imagine each of these minds as being
illuminated by a beam of light, very much like the lighthouse.
Also from the beginning, we have this idea of the
lighthouse and the beam of the lighthouse as being synonymous
with Missus Ramsey. This is a book that is highly
concerned with domesticity and with maternity, and this lighthouse and
(12:56):
the light that it is shining is very much symbolic
the idea of a mother as being protective and a
mother as being sort of illuminating things in this kind
of omnipotent way, but also as being fragile and intermittent
and not something that you can count on all the time,
especially when the weather gets stormy. So I want to
(13:17):
move on now and talk about the chapter titles. So
we have three sections. The structure of this novel is
very important, and the structure was something that Virginia Wolf
came up with before she had written the novel. It
was something that she conceived at the very beginning that
essentially you would have these two big chunks, the beginning
chunk and the end chunk, the first one called the window,
(13:37):
and the third one called the lighthouse, and then there
would be a middle section. When she conceived of it,
it looked kind of like a barbell. She had like
a little drawing with two squares at the ends, and
then kind of a long bar shaped thing in the
middle that is called time passes. So at the beginning
we have the window, then we have this middle section
called time passes, and then we have the lighthouse. And
(13:58):
again I would encourage you, if you're trying to be
like a better reader, I would encourage you to take
a look at these chapter titles. I'm someone for whatever reason,
I just kind of skip right over them. If there
are lots of them, I tend to sort of I
don't even know why. I just maybe I'm in such
a rush to get to the next chunk of prose
that I kind of skip right over them. This one, however,
is very important. So if we have the idea of
(14:19):
the window, we find out fairly soon that what this
window is all about is that we have missus Missus Dollaway,
not Missus Dollaway. We have Missus Ramsey sitting with her
youngest son and her favorite young James, who's maybe like
six or seven, and they are sitting inside this window,
and across from them out in the yard nearby ish
(14:40):
is Lily Briscoe. Lily Briscoe is a painter who is
largely read as a stand in for Virginia Woolf. Whenever
you're reading fiction, if there is a character in the
book who's like a musician or an artist or an architect,
you can often just read that person as essentially a
stand in for the writer. These are people who build them,
These are people who create creative things, and sometimes it
(15:04):
can feel heavy handed, but in this case it is
so important and so so well done to look very
closely at Lily Briscoe as a stand in for Virginia
Wolf in particular. So we have Lily Briscoe and she
is painting Missus Ramsey and James. One thing that's important
to note here when they're talking about the window in
this case, it's like a French window, which it took
(15:25):
me a while to figure that out. It's not like
a plate glass window. We don't have glass here. And
the reason you know that is because occasionally the people
on the porch will stop in front of this window
and have conversations with Missus Ramsey. We also know that
Lily Briscow can see you know, James, very clearly, so
you have to This window is like a French door,
we would say in the United States. So it's open,
(15:49):
so you have even more kind of intercourse between the
public and the private, even more fluidity, and even more
is revealed. But you still have that idea of them being,
of the two things being side. So the reason why
the window is important. First of all, we have this
frame and it is framing this very domestic, very maternal scene.
It's very important though that James and Missus Ramsey are inside,
(16:13):
they are indoors. They are very firmly inside the domestic sphere.
Lily Briscoe is outside the domestic sphere. She's on the
other side of the window. We have this idea of separation,
that things are separate, that people are separate from one another,
but also this idea that what Virginia Wolf is doing
is making that separation between people into something that is transparent.
(16:35):
Lily to a large extent is able to sort of
see the importance of Missus Ramsey as a mother and
in communion with James. We have this idea of, like
it's not quite voyeurism, but we have this idea of
looking into other people's lives, and not only that, but
looking into their private domestic lives, and stream of consciousness
if it does nothing else, it really does allow us
(16:57):
to look into people's private lives. On that note, there's
also this idea of you know, looking into the window.
It's like a window into someone's life. So metaphorically the
idea of the window, we have these windows open into
these people's lives. And the last thing I will say
about the idea of the window is that this present
moment that we are introduced to at the beginning, when
(17:20):
Missus Ramsey is sitting with James and we soon find
out that Lily Brisco is painting them, this idea of
the window is really helping us to focus on this
present moment because the present moment, through the vast majority
of the first chapter called the Window, is this kind
of moment to which we return. So when we talk
of stream of consciousness, we're going to cover this, but
(17:42):
we have this moment of Missus Ramsey and James, and
we digress from that moment. We talk about Minta Doyle
and Paul, and we talk about mister Carmichael, and we
talk about William Banks and Lily Briscoe, and we talk
about mister Ramsey who is often kind of interrupting this
present moment. And we move from you know, the mind
of Missus Ramsey into many of these different characters. And
(18:03):
when I say we move into them, it's a third
person narrator. We're not No one is saying I think this,
and I think that, or I feel this or I
feel that. But instead we have this very nimble third
person narrator who is who is dipping into the thoughts
and emotions and sensibility and feelings of many of these
different characters. But the idea of the window is important
(18:23):
as a frame while also anchoring us in this present moment.
So this idea of interiority is really important. And this
is I want to take a quick step back here,
or maybe like a widening here of the lecture. So
we have looked recently at a bunch of different realist novels.
Anna Karenina way back in the in the early days
of the Fox Page. We looked at Madame Bowerie, which
(18:45):
is kind of the first big realist novel. We looked
at East of Eden. We've looked at a lot of
novels that are in the realist tradition, and in that tradition,
the author is essentially trying to give us an entire world,
and the way that they are doing that is by
supplying a lot of details, but for the most part
they are staying out of the minds of the characters,
(19:06):
so they're describing things sort of from afar, and we
have this narrator who almost feels like a spectator or
a voyeur, where we have this idea of someone who
is this authoritative, omniscient, omnipotent force who is shaping the
story and deciding which parts to tell and deciding which
details to include. But the idea is that we were
(19:28):
going to have this world that you could step into
and essentially feel what that world felt like. This was,
you know, the second half of the nineteenth century, and interestingly,
toward the end of the nineteenth century you have something
called naturalism. So you think of amiel Zola, who wrote Lasonnoir,
and he wrote a bunch of different things where he
was taking realism and pushing it a little further, making
(19:50):
it political. So he would take this idea of this
very real, very inhabitable, very believable world, and then he
would put this like giant political spin on it, because
he would be talking about the horrible working conditions of
the working class in France. So the reason why I
mentioned that is because the realist novel and the naturalist novel, certainly,
(20:10):
you know, purport to provide the reader this kind of
true environment and with it comes a lot of political
weight and a lot of moral weight. I mean, these
are books that really come down one way or another.
You know, Anna Karena and I is definitely kind of
an anti well, depending on how you read it. You
can go back and listen to that lecture. You know,
for the most part, it feels like an anti adultery
(20:31):
kind of novel. We have lots and lots of certainly,
Madam Bowerie is that we have lots and lots of
moralizing that comes with those. So this idea of kind
of like a capital T truth that is promoted by
the realist and naturalist novel is completely upended with Virgin
you Wolf. So we talked about the effect of the
First World War, but also I think it's important to
(20:52):
think of her as a woman who is outside academia,
who was not educated the way her brothers were, who
is someone who had a lot of dependence and a
lot of drive, and a lot of ambition, and it
was very, very bright, but who definitely felt herself outside
of things. She also was someone who was brought up
during the Victorian era eighteen eighty two, Victorian era being
(21:14):
sort of eighteen fifty to nineteen hundred, so that is
an era when men were seen as incredibly authoritative and
women were seen as kind of a frail and retiring.
So this idea of kind of like this masculine, omnipotent,
omniscient narrator who can put forth this capital truth was
something that just wasn't resonating with Virginia Wolf. So instead
(21:35):
of this objectivity supposed objectivity of the realist novel and
this omniscient narrator, what she is doing is putting forth
this radical idea of subjectivity. So what we see with
all of this interiority into the Lighthouse and all of
her work is this idea of truth as being something
it's like a lowercase T truth in the sense that
(21:57):
many different people have their own version of the truth.
We see a bunch of kind of overlapping action, which
is so interesting. We'll see the same event from different
people's points of view, and it will take on radically
different truth in each one of these people's perspectives. It
is so fascinating. So instead of this kind of hubristic
(22:18):
idea that we could provide the reader this morally rigid, didactic,
true feeling world, what she's doing is putting forth this
idea that nobody really has, that idea of capital T truth.
No one should be putting forth an idea of this
objective sense of the world, because in fact, everyone's own
(22:39):
perspective on the world is subjective, and that subjectivity, of course,
allows for an enormous amount of empathy. When I think
of empathy in Virginia Wolf, I go sort of automatically
to Septimus Warren Smith, who is a character in Missus Dollaway.
He is a soldier from the First World War who
is experiencing very intense PTSD, and that is in some
(23:02):
ways one of her most radical experiments in helping the
reader understand what a character is going through. We don't, though,
have to go back to him to find, you know,
characters worthy of extreme empathy. As I was reading just
finishing up this morning, I really was struck by the
way that you can empathize with all of these people.
I mean, we think of mister with mister Delaway, we
(23:24):
think of mister Ramsey as someone who is this kind
of brash and somewhat unlikable male authority figure. But there
are lots of ways that we are made to empathize,
that we are made to really understand. And I don't
even mean sympathize, I mean that we are inside, you know,
the thoughts and feelings of these different people. We don't
spend a lot of time and this is significant because
(23:45):
I think Virginia Wolf was not, you know, her aim
here was not to step inside the idea of you know,
the mind of the patriarch. It was very much more
to illuminate everyone else. So we really do see mister
Ramsey mostly from the outside, but you find yourself empathizing
with everyone in the book in a way that is
really innovative and just sort of radical. Just before we
(24:09):
dive into our very close reading of the first two
pages pages three and four in my volume, I want
to just give you a quick sense of some of
the hallmarks of the stream of consciousness writing. So usually
it is this third person narrator. It's not first person.
We're not inside the minds of these people saying I
did this, and I think that we have this third
person narrator who is a lot of it is called
(24:30):
free indirect discourse, where you have that narrator moving in
and out of the minds of different people, but maintaining
some kind of objectivity and some sort of distance from
it all. Very famously, there are lots of run on
sentences in Stream of Consciousness, which makes sense. I think
you can tell from the from the term itself that
(24:51):
what we are talking about is the way that consciousness works.
And of course one of the ways that it does
is that our thoughts, over which we have very little control,
you know, each thought sort of succeeded by another, and
there are not kind of tidy finishes to one thought
and the next. So you have this idea of these
run on sentences. In Wolf we have a lot of
unorthodox punctuation, which of course I love. This is one
(25:12):
of those examples of like you have to know your
punctuation and your grammar in order to go ahead and
violate all of the rules. Because when she is violating
quote unquote these rules, what she's really doing is making
grammar work in some very unusual ways. I love her
use of parentheses. We're going to take a look at that.
There is a quality of musicality with stream of consciousness,
(25:34):
so we have a little bit of this kind of
verse and refrain. You also, of course have the musicality
of the prose itself. I mean, if you think of proofs,
do you think of in search of lost time? There
is a lyrical quality, a musical quality to each sentence itself.
But what I know mostly into the lighthouse is sort
of structurally that we have these moments that often will
(25:55):
be a phrase that she will repeat verbatim that sometimes
are signaling, you know, that we are in a present moment,
or we are returning to a present moment after a digression.
But sometimes it's simply for uh, for emphasis. Sometimes it's
to signal the end of a thought as we are
moving on to another thought. So there's a fair amount
of repetition. And with this repetition we have this beautiful
(26:17):
weaving together, so you may have a repetition of something
you know two or three pages later that's sort of
woven into the next thought. But it is this kind
of highly unusual and really beautiful way to present, you know,
the subjective experience of someone's mind. One of the aspects
that was most like shocking for me back in high
(26:38):
school is this idea of mimesis. So mimesis or mimetic.
If something is mimetic, it is basically mimicking reality. So
the best example in this book is that occasionally things
will happen, and often they're in parentheses that will be
very shocking to the reader. They will be just suddenly
presented inside a parenthesis and coming seemingly out of nowhere,
(26:59):
and as the reader, you are shook. And the beautiful
thing about that, and it illustrates mimisis very nicely, is
that when these things are happening, when they are presented
that way, the reason she's doing that is because because
the characters are also absolutely surprised, just sort of startled
and astonished by this thing that is suddenly occurring. So
surprise and mimesis is kind of the main thing that
(27:20):
she does. But there are other ways that if a
time is very soothing, or if a time is very complicated,
a lot of the language will reflect that, so that
the reader is essentially feeling the same thing that the
characters are feeling. So before we dive into our close
reading of the first couple of pages of To the Lighthouse,
I want to read a couple of opening sentences of
(27:41):
other works, just so you have some points of comparison
to understand the radical nature of what she is doing. So,
for example, we have George Elliott, we have Middle March.
It begins this way. Miss Brooks had that kind of
beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
It's an awesome opening sentence, very good, but you have
this sense of this narrator who is pulled back, and
(28:03):
this narrator actually has like kind of a sassy personality
thing happening here, which is really to her credit. This
idea of the narrator as feeling like it is almost
a character in the book, but certainly at a distance,
and describing the exteriority of Miss Brooke. What we see
throughout the book are things that can be described from
the outside. So this is I'm giving you kind of
(28:26):
a wide smattering. Here Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. In
the year eighteen seventy eight, I took my degree of
Doctor of Medicine of the University of London and proceeded
to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons
in the Army. So here we have a first person narrator,
but it still is very kind of it's providing these facts.
This is getting at some sort of like a you know,
(28:47):
true events that occurred that Arthur Conan Doyle is going
to kind of line up for us in what ends
up being a delightful way. But it's very different than
the interiority that we are about to see. This is
East of E by John Steinbeck. The Salinas Valley is
in northern California. I mean that's the first sentence right there.
I'm going to read the first little paragraph. The Salinas
(29:09):
Valley is in northern California. It is a long, narrow
swale between two ridges of mountains, and the Salinas River
winds and twists up the center until it falls at
last into Monterey Bay. So this is that archetypal omniscient narrator.
It's starting from very very far away. It's against sort
of biblical in the sense that it is having It's
not exactly hubris, but just like the scope to think
(29:32):
that you can add the authority of the land, of
the state of California, of this fertile valley, you can
kind of claim it as an aspect of your novel.
This is from The Great Gatsby. It came out the
same year as Missus Dollaway nineteen twenty five, so two
years before To the Lighthouse. The Great Gatsby is kind
(29:52):
of a bridge to modernism. It is so that book, man,
I mean, wow, talk about an amazing book to revisit
that we all read in the day. There are some
aspects of modernist writing, and modernist writing is the category
in which we see stream of consciousness. It's kind of
nineteen ten to nineteen forty ish where you have a
lot of experimentation, a lot of formal experimentation by writers
(30:15):
like Virginia Wolf certainly, but also James Joyce. We have
Faulkner in the United States, and Fitzgerald is mostly put
into kind of this late realist camp. But there are
lots of modernist elements. But still we have a fairly
kind of standard beginning to the novel. We have this
in my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave
me some advice which has been turning over in my
(30:38):
mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing someone, he said,
just remember that all people in this world haven't had
the same advantages as you have. So we do have
a first person narrator, but we have this kind of
wider scope piece talking kind of objectively about this piece
of advice that he got from his father. It's very
sort of patriarchal the opening of this whole thing, and
(30:59):
in some ways very kind of theoretical and broad. This
idea of you know, long ago I received a piece
of advice. It is not speaking to the specificity of
a given moment of experience in consciousness. Okay, with all
of that supporting information, we are going to dive into
the novel. And as I am reading this very first part,
(31:20):
keep in mind those other openings to those other famous novels,
just to experience the difference here. So this chapter is
called the Window. It begins like this. Yes, of course,
if it's fine tomorrow, said missus Ramsey, but you'll have
to be up with the lark. She added, So this
is absolutely crucial. What we are having here in the
(31:42):
beginning is we are beginning and media arrests. So that's
a Latin phrase simply meaning in the middle of something.
We are beginning in the middle of a conversation that
Missus Ramsey is having with her son. We don't actually
know to whom she is saying this, but it is
fragmentary enough. It's obviously a rejoinder. I know that she
is in conversation with someone. So a few things that
(32:03):
are really remarkable, Beside the fact that we're diving into something,
we're not sort of setting the scene. We're in fact diving.
We're opening by being right in the middle of the scene.
It's also very important that we are hearing Missus Ramsey's voice.
Hers is the voice that opens the entire thing. We
are hearing a woman speaking, and that is not true
of any of the other narrators that we were talking about.
(32:25):
Even when George Elliott is talking about Miss Brooke and
we have that kind of sassy narrator, you don't get
the sense necessarily that we are hearing a woman's voice.
It's also important here that we have this affirmative thing
at the beginning. Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow,
so missus Ramsey. Again, if we think of her as
the ray of the lighthouse, she is very positive in
many ways for everyone around her. She is someone inside
(32:49):
who is not feeling, perhaps as positive as the vibes
that she's giving to her family, but in many ways,
her role, I mean, as is the role of a
lot of women, and certainly those in the Victorian era,
is to be very positive and to buoy people, no
pun intended. So we have that opening sentence, we have
her quoted, we hear her voice, and then we have
(33:10):
this to her son. These words conveyed an extraordinary joy,
as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to
take place, and the wonder to which he had looked
forward for years and years, it seemed, was after a
night's darkness and a day's sail within touch. Oh my gosh,
it's so it's so good, it's so it's so moving.
(33:31):
Already I'm feeling so moved. So we have this this
statement by her and then immediately to her son. So
we are entering with that kind of economy and that
kind of straightforward statement. We are moving into the mind
of her son James, and right after to her son,
we have this emphasis on words. These words conveyed an
(33:53):
extraordinary joy. So here we have this emphasis on emotion.
We are not talking about advice that someone got from
their fone. We are talking about this sensation of joy.
Not only that it is extraordinary joy. And the important
thing right from the start here is that it is
words that are conveying this extraordinary joy. In many ways,
(34:13):
this is a study. This entire novel is a study
of subtlety, which is one of the many reasons that
resonated with me. So clearly, we're going to read a
little part where Missus Ramsey talks about her antennae as
being very attuned to what is going on around her.
A simple glance from her husband, a tone of voice,
something she hears in the other room, all of those
(34:34):
are things that completely alter her state. And importantly, we
are seeing this happening right here. She simply says something
and to her son, you know, this extraordinary joy is
arising from her words. We then have lots of all
of these different clauses that we have that are all
separated by commas. We have lots and lots of commas.
(34:54):
I mean, this is not technically a run on sentence.
Grammatically it works. We could diagram it. I loved diagramma
sentences back in the day. That is something. It's a
lost art, frankly. But we have all of these different
phrases that immediately are sort of putting us into the
mind of the child. So let's reread that quickly. To
her son, these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if
(35:17):
it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place,
and the wonder to which he had looked forward for
years and years, it seemed, was after a night's darkness
and a day's sale within touch, So very significantly, the
sentence ends with touch. You have this idea of senses
as being very alert and being very important. They're given
(35:37):
primacy here. And we also were introducing at the beginning
this idea of the trip to the lighthouse. So this
fragmentary title of the novel to the Lighthouse right here,
this idea of this expedition has been introduced. And then
moving on, Since he belonged even at the age of
six to that grade six earlier, I think I said seven.
(36:00):
Since he belonged even at the age of six, to
that great clan, which cannot keep this feeling separate from that,
but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows,
cloud what is actually at hand. Since to such people,
even in earliest childhood, any turn in the wheel of
sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment
(36:21):
upon which it's gloom or radiance rests. What an absolute
privilege it is to parse this language. So we have
this idea of this great clan. This is this kind
of infusion of kind of a male aspect, I mean,
the idea of belonging to this great clan and thinking
about it, I mean, it brings you right back to
you know, like the Scottish clans and you know, ancient
(36:45):
England and Scotland. So you have this evocation with this
very small word of this kind of capital h history,
which is in line with the kind of ways that
James might be thinking about things. But we also know,
because she's telling us very clearly, that he feels things
very deeply. One thing that's very important when she says,
(37:05):
here to the great clan, which cannot keep this feeling
separate from that. So the idea of this feeling. It
seems very subtle, but it's very important because this feeling
is immediate. It's not that he can't keep, you know,
that emotion separate from the other. It's this emotion. It's
a very it makes things feel very immediate in this
(37:26):
very subtle way. It's also very important and compelling here
that we have these extremes. Not only is the narrator
telling us that he feels these extremes, but we have
joys and sorrow, gloom and radiance, and all of the
characters in the book, the ones that we're focusing on,
do feel things in extreme ways. Again, this is a
(37:48):
real study of subtlety. But this idea of emotions as
being extreme is kind of a radical proposition. Even the characters,
you know, Charles Tansley, who is the young academ who
is there, who has a real chip on his shoulder,
or Augustus Carmichael or William Banks, these are characters who
are you know, relatively composed. Charles Tanseley's not so composed,
(38:09):
but the other two are these composed men, and yet
they are also feeling, you know, these extremes of emotion,
which is really part of the innovative nature of this
novel that not only is it talking about emotions, but
it is making them very dramatic and I think very
compelling and exciting. So then we're moving on James Ramsey
(38:29):
sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated
catalog of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture
of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss.
So here we have this really beautiful thing where we're
beginning with James Ramsey. We're talking here about the clan.
We're bringing in the last name, the idea of Ramsey.
(38:50):
We have the force of a ram but we also
have Ramsey's you know those Egyptian you know, kings. I
think that's the thing. I think King Ramsey's I think
that's a you know, some sort of Egyptian potentate. So
we have this kind of grandeur James Ramsey, and we're
kind of pulling back a little bit. But then we
have him sitting on the floor with his mother. So
we are going from this very kind of more formal
(39:12):
address into a very domestic setting. And then the Army
and Navy Stores catalog. I mean, nothing in Wolf, not
one single word is random The idea of the army
and navy is really important if you are keeping in
mind that this novel is in large part in conversation
with the horrors of the First World War. This emphasis
(39:34):
right at the beginning of this military presence in the
domestic sphere is subtle, but it is extremely important. We
see it again and again. Pretty soon we're introduced to
one of the little boys who's going around shooting at things.
We have guns, we have things that sound like explosions.
The presence of the war is very palpable, if very subtle.
(39:55):
So we also have this idea of him cutting out
a refrigerator and then endowing it with heaven bliss. So
this is this idea again of domesticity, but enormous emotion
being sort of part and parsonal with the domestic sphere.
So not only did he endow it with heavenly bliss,
but the next sentence says it was fringed with joy.
(40:17):
So here we're seeing this repetition. That is the third
time we've seen the word joy, extraordinary joy in the beginning,
joys and sorrows in the middle of the paragraph, and
then down here it was fringed with joy and importantly,
you know, fringed with joy is a very unusual sort
of image, and this is another thing that Wolf is
so good at, and all of the modernists. The idea
(40:39):
of a refrigerator being fringed with joy is unusual. It's
very evocative, and I think you get a sense of it.
You can kind of imagine how he would see it,
but it is not conventional. Then moving along, we're going
to move a little bit further now from the domestic sphere.
The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves
(41:00):
whitening before rain, rooks, cawing brooms, knocking, dresses, rustling. All
these were so colored and distinguished in his mind that
he had already his private code, his secret language. Though
he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with
his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid
(41:21):
and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty,
so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly
around the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine, on
the bench, or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in
some crisis of public affairs. We're not going to parse
this all the way through, but one thing to note
(41:42):
here is the idea that things look very calm. Things
look the surface of everything in this novel appears one way,
but what is happening beneath is anything but calm. And
as I mentioned, we are moving away from the domestic
sphere as soon as we're talking about the mower and
the poplar trees and the leaves whitening before the rain,
all of that is moving us out through the window
(42:04):
and into this world. It's really beautiful though the way,
and we have the refrigerator and then the mower as being,
you know, sort of another domestic ish tool, is providing
a kind of bridge. So we're moving from the private
sphere out into the nature into the afternoon slash evening.
And as we move there, we're having a kind of
(42:25):
a more masculine emphasis here. So we have stark and
uncompromising severity with his high forehead and his fierce blue
eyes and then frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty,
and the end of the paragraph where his mother is
imagining him on the bench or being very stern in
this public sphere, I mean she goes so far as
(42:45):
to imagine him in red and ermine, which is, you know,
obviously like a very royal kind of thing. I think
when she's talking about the bench or a crisis in
public affairs, that's kind of more like something in the
House of Parliament. He's not going to be dressed up
in red and ermine. To her. All of those sorts
of sign of authority are all kind of mixed together.
And what's fascinating is we're moving from this mother child
(43:06):
scene out into a more male world. And then we
have this, but said his father, stopping in front of
the drawing room window, it won't be fine. So significantly
and notably, hear the voice of authority of the father
comes in. And this is a very negative thing and
it stands in direct contrast to the positivity of Missus
(43:26):
Ramsey that we hear in the opening line. So again
we have this, but said his father, stopping in front
of the drawing room window, it won't be fine. It's
also important to note that these are he is responding
to what Missus Ramsey has said. So this is that
idea of there being this kind of present moment. It's
the moment when she's having this conversation with James, and
(43:47):
we are returning, you know, we've had this digression about
James and his you know, what he's doing with his
fringed joy refrigerator, and then also you know, a movement
into his future, and then suddenly we are brought back
right away, you know, almost instantaneously to the present moment
where mister Ramsey is opposing what his wife has just said.
(44:08):
And importantly, we are still very much in James's perspective,
although that's not clear right away, but it becomes very
clear soon. So we have his father saying it won't
be fine. Had there been an axe, handy or a poker,
any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his
father's breast and killed him there, and then James would
have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that
(44:30):
mister Ramsey excited in his children's breast by his mirror 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 so importantly, that little James thought
(44:52):
is in parentheses there, So Wolfe is kindly reminding us,
I'm not even sure we need it. It's kind of
like a nice point of emphasis. He that we are
still very much in the And then we do this
fascinating thing where we are moving right after this parenthetical
where it says James thought, we're moving toward mister Ramsey.
So we're moving toward a description of him, and at
(45:13):
first it's kind of an exterior description, but then we
are moving in more into his interior. So we have
his wife who is 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
(45:33):
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 his own children, who sprung
from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life
is difficult. So here we are very firmly kind of
in the things that he might say. You could also
argue that James is kind of articulating the way that
(45:56):
he sees his father, And if you're reading it that way,
it's James, you know, being sort of angrily like saying
that his father wields the truth and facts in ways
that are painful. They 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
(46:18):
barks founder in darkness. Here mister Ramsey would straighten his
back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon,
one that needs, after all, courage, truth and the power
to endure. So it's even I think probably as a
listener here it's a little confusing to follow all of this,
But what he's talking about is this fabled land of
(46:40):
adulthood that you sort of have these visions of yourself.
And we just above have this vision of what missus
Ramsey hopes that James might develop into. But then we
have this very do our very pessimistic view that is
put forth by mister Ramsey about how life is difficult.
So what's important here at the bottom of this paragraph,
(47:01):
very early in the book, is all of this emphasis
on facts and truth, and there's all sorts of repetition,
just like we had repetition of joy before when we
were talking about James. Now we are having this repetition
of true and truth and fact and facts to really
give us this sense of who mister Ramsey is and
what his emphasis, what his sort of orientation is all about.
(47:25):
So you might have noted in my voice there's another
parenthetical phrase. We are sort of in his mind where
he's thinking about the frail barks foundering in darkness, than
we have parentheses here. Mister Ramsey would straighten his back
and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon. Importantly,
he's looking toward the horizon. Everyone in some ways is
(47:47):
kind of focused on the lighthouse, is focused outward and
not just into the lawn and where the other people are,
but beyond that. So we have mister Ramsey looking toward
the horizon. We have games hoping to get to the lighthouse.
We have missus Ramsey, who is acutely aware of everything
that is going on around her, but she is the
one who first introduces, who first sees the lighthouse, and
(48:10):
she's obviously thinking about whether or not James will get
to go the next day, and she's thinking about the
weather so all of them while they are very firmly
in this domestic sphere. He's on the porch there inside
the house. They're all focused on the horizon. And then
this last sentence we're going to read here. But it
may be fine. I expect it will be fine, said
(48:31):
missus Ramsey, making some little twist of the reddish brown stalking.
She was knitting impatiently. So here we have ourselves returning
with her positivity, but also firmly to the domestic sphere,
because here we have this inclusion of knitting, which is
obviously a very domestic task. So these first two pages,
I mean, it's just fascinating what she is doing already,
(48:51):
and all of this emphasis on interiority and on feelings,
and some of this repetition, and the way we are
returning to the first moment. These are things that we
see throughout the entire novel, and they're expanded in many ways,
but we have this blueprint, this innovative and very different
way that she is operating right from the start. So
before we close, I want to just look at a
(49:12):
couple of different things. So again I put some emphasis
on the parentheses. If you plan to go back and
read pay attention to some of the parentheses. Sometimes she'll
open a parentheses and three pages later you will have
the close of the parentheses. And in some ways I
love how inconsistent she is with that. So in many
she has all these different tools that she will use
(49:32):
to sort of help the reader understand that this is
a digression or this is someone else's thought. But there's
so much variety, which I think is really excellent because
it speaks to kind of, you know, the variety with
which everyone's individual brain is functioning. So I want to
move on now just to look at these two instances
where I felt like Virginia Wolf is really articulating exactly
(49:55):
the way that my brain functions. And I think this
is worth worth looking at, not just you know, in
some self indulgent way, but because this is the kind
of interiority, This is the kind of stream of consciousness stuff,
the innovative intimacy and the emphasis on feeling an interiority
that is so strong in this novel. So we look
at page sixty one. This is when she's reading a
(50:17):
story about the fisherman and his wife, which, of course
Wolf is really using this to her advantage. In many ways,
the fable of the Fisherman and his Wife which she
is reading, has everything to do with her relationship with
her husband. It has to do with ocean, it has
to do with the lighthouse, the setting. But this is
a story that she is reading to young James. She
turned the page. There were only a few lines more
(50:40):
so that she would finish the story, though it was
past bedtime, it was getting late. The light in the
garden told her that and the whitening of the flowers
and something gray in the leaves conspired together to rouse
in her a feeling of anxiety. What it was about,
she could not think at first. Then she remembered Paul
and May and Andrew had not come back. So what
(51:02):
we have here is this description of what is happening,
and then we have this very strong emotion that it
is evoking. And then we have kind of a process
of the mind. And I think many of you have
experienced that where you have kind of a stab of
anxiety or sorrow or concern or whatever the thing is,
and you're like, wait, why do I feel like this?
What is it that is bringing up this emotion? Then
(51:24):
she has this very neat colon and she has the
brief and economic and distinct description of what it was
that one of her sons and her guests have not
yet returned. There's one more example. I want to read
again of how my mind functions, and I think how
many people's, obviously how many people's minds function. We have
moved at this point in the novel. We are now
(51:44):
on page one oh seven, so we're almost halfway through.
We are no longer with the present moment of Missus
Ramsey and James. We've moved into the dining room a
little bit later, where everyone is assembling for dinner, and
this is very much in Missus Ramsey's point of view,
and she's experiencing the comment. She would be saying she
liked the Waverley novels or had not read them. She
(52:04):
would be urging herself forward. Now she said nothing. For
a moment, she hung suspended. Ah, but how long do
you think it'll last? Said somebody. It was as if
she had antennae trembling out from her which intercepting certain sentences,
forced them upon her attention. This was one of them.
She sent a danger for her husband. A question like
(52:26):
that would lead almost certainly to something being said which
reminded him of his own failure. How long would he
be read? He would think at once William Banks, who
was entirely free of all such vanity, laughed and said
he attached no importance to changes in fashion. Who could
tell what was going to last in literature or indeed
in anything else. So this is not only a beautiful
(52:49):
articulation of how my brain works, this idea of these
antennae and and sensing some sort of danger and then
trying to figure out how you might in fact solace
the people around you, But she's also talking about something
very important here, this question of what will last, and
not only what will last, but in this specific case,
she's talking about literature. It's very meta in some ways.
And honestly, that's a great note to end on, because
(53:11):
this is a novel that has lasted. I mean, we
are coming up on the one hundredth anniversary of To
the Lighthouse. It's crazy to think that this is the
anniversary we just celebrated Gatsby, but this is also the
anniversary of Missus Dollaway. I don't know why more is
not being made of that. Perhaps it's coming in the fall,
But this idea of lasting literature is so significant, and
one of the reasons why this novel does last is
(53:33):
because it was so innovative. And this is an excellent
point at which to ask, So what what is it
about this that's innovative? I mean, just with something being innovative,
you know, you could move right beyond it and not
and have it not be very resonant anymore in the
present day. But this is extremely resonant, I think because
Virginia Wolf is moving us from this kind of vision
(53:54):
that is from the outside of the world and moving
us into a description of what is happening on the
level of thoughts but also of feelings. It's really a
radical change and really the reason I think why the
novel endures. So thank you so much for tuning in.
Get out there and read some more. Cormick McCarthy straight away.
Happy reading.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com