Author: Virginia Woolf
Year: 2006 (1927)
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translators IngaLisa Munck and Sonja Bergvall)
When our minds
endeavour to grapple with the vastness of the universe, they often confine themselves to matter. Infinite matter. Infinite space. Infinite time, however, is assumed.
Before there was something, there must have been nothing. But nothing as such,
as the presocratic thinker Parmenides argued, cannot exist, since if it did,
nothing would be something which is self-contradictory. Existence itself,
therefore, is the essential something. There is no before and no after. There
is just isness.
But if
there is no before and no after, is there time at all? If there is, it must be
static. It always was, and always will be. Or more accurately: it just is. Yet
we still experience time. We can even measure it. We inarguably move in
relation to time. It should follow then that it is matter that moves through
time. Are you and I travellers through time as well as space? In a universe of
expanding entropy, do we journey into increasing confusion and disorder? That
is then, the fate of existence to be that something which is subject to time.
Such as life.
Virginia
Woolf’s classic novel “Mot fyren” (”To the Lighthouse”) seems to explore the
concepts of mankind as a traveller through time by means of a narrative of an
imagined journey: the short boat ride from a summer house to a nearby island
lighthouse. Little James Ramsay, the
youngest of a litter of eight, has no
higher desire than to visit the lighthouse, but every day the infamous Scottish
weather prevents him and his family from going. Mrs Ramsay, a caring mother and
housewife always eager to safeguard the emotional harmony of those around her,
consoles the boy and gives him hope. Maybe tomorrow the weather will improve.
Surely tomorrow they will be able to go. James’s father, Professor Ramsay, is
less sentimental. Not only is he vocal about his pessimism about their ever being
able to go to the lighthouse, he moreover questions the value of going there
and derides his wife and son for being so emotionally attached to the idea. He
is more preoccupied with his own philosophical musings and his lack of
confidence in his intellectual ability and legacy as a philosopher. In a famous
passage, he compares wisdom to the alphabet and concludes that most people
barely manage to cover the first few letters. In his own judgment, he has come
as far as Q but he also realises that he will never master R. Others, however,
will or indeed already have. In one scene, his pride and shame are captured by
two letters of the alphabet.
Apart from
the Ramsays, there are a handful of other guests in the summer house, each of
which plays their role. Both Mrs Ramsay and Professor Ramsay have their
admirers. The young artist Lily Briscoe is Mrs Ramsay’s fan and the philosophy
student Charles Tanley is Professor Ramsay’s. How Woolf portrays these persons
in terms of their emotional response to their respective objects of affection
and to each other is quite revealing. Together, this quartet fights a tempered
and subdued war between the sexes seething with male indignation over female
ambition and enterprise.
The book is
divided into three sections: the Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. Woolf
in her diary calls it “two blocks connected by a corridor”. The first and the
last part each describe one day in the life of the Ramsays. The middle part,
which is the shortest, covers ten years. Woolf seems to argue that time is an
illusion and that events such as war, death, or our planet’s revolution around
the sun, can easily be overshadowed by the idea of a boat ride to a lighthouse.
There is no great revelation to Virginia Woolf.”Instead, there were little
daily miracles. Illuminations. Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Or, if one will, the death of a moth trapped
between two panes of window glass.
The
perspective in the first and third sections is fleeting. The reader is hurled
from mind to mind, sometimes mid-paragraph. The internal to external dialogue
ratio is probably 10 to 1. Just like the lighthouse on the island, to which the
Ramsay party never seems to arrive, which appears constantly distant and
isolated, so does each individual float around the summer house like a detached
particle among many, their reality affected by but independent from the other
individuals around them.
In my own
research many years ago, I proposed a person’s navigation through social reality
to be studied on three interlocking levels:
factual reality, communicated reality, and construed reality. Based on
the concepts of exchange and reciprocity most poignantly developed by the
French anthropologist Marcel Mauss in the 1920s, I proposed that reality (not
to be confused with constructions such as “fact” or “truth”) is the result of layered
inter-human relationships. Woolf, I believe, is pursuing a similar line of
thought allowing the reality at the summer house to be a cross-section of the collective
minds present there. The childish expectation that the weather might improve
thus becomes an integral part of the pessimistic scorn for such a forlorn
promise. Lily Briscoe’s observations about the beauty of Mrs Ramsay contrasts
Charles Tansley’s submissive idolisation of Professor Ramsay’s greatness as a
thinker. A lingering uncertainty pertains, however, to the authenticity of
these perspectives. How genuine or hollow are they? How aware are the characters of their
own mind? How much is fact, communication, and construal respectively?
A surprising
turnaround awaits in the middle section, ”Time Passes”. The perspective no
longer jumps between individuals but rather between inanimate and nameless
witnesses. Woolf reinforces the non-identity of the narrator. She writes ”If
someone had listened in the rooms on the upper floor of the empty house (but
there was no one there that could listen) …” whereby she tosses us into the
cosmos of the all-seeing, above and beyond the understanding of the individual
observer from the first section of the book. ”Time Passes” is a strictly
chronological account of events. Of life and death. Of turmoil, storms, war,
and destruction. First world war begins and ends. A new order is established.
In the last
part of the book we are back at the summer house where the Ramsays, decimated
by the war, again plan a boat ride to the lighthouse on the island. They have
all changed. Time has changed them as they have travelled through it. But the
lighthouse remains. And so does the party’s careful eye on the weather
forecasts. The changes seem superficial. At the core, reality has remained
unscathed. “Mrs Ramsay saying life stand still here.” Not time. Life!
There is a
lot to unpack in “Mot fyren”. It is one of those books which I would appreciate
some help to understand. I am particularly interested in the Lily Briscoe-character
whom I understand to be a symbol of feminism despite her timid personality. Her
choice to paint a portrait of Mrs Ramsay and James instead of the stunning
ocean landscape like I imagine any other artist would. I would also love to
hear your interpretation of James’s and Cam’s pact against Professor Ramsay in
the final part of the book.
The novel is
a challenge to read but chances are it will never leave you once you have taken
the time to submerge yourself in it. Hardly a page-turner, the plot is
everything but exciting. Don’t look for quick action. Don’t look for snappy
dialogue. None of that will be found in ”Mot fyren”. What you will find, is an
introspective microcosm of humanity, and an analysis of reality as a function
of time and mankind. Looking at it this way, it is not half-bad, is it?
