TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

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?