Chapter 14
XIV. The Cauldron of Perception by Zona Gale. From the Saturday Review of Literature. 25th June 1927. If Virginia Woolf has not made a contribution to the novel of the future, it will be because
the future shall arrive at the same essence of novel by another method. Some notion was in both of them, she says, about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought. It is at this notion that she has arrived and it lies implicit in her novels, and never more surely so than into the lighthouse.
Through 300 pages there streams the current of the thought, directed, subconscious, accidental, tremendous, of half a dozen quite average human beings. All that actually happens, namely the death of the central character and two of her children, goes into parentheses of from two to four lines. The unsweeping stream of the book has to do with these average living ones, looking out
from an interior unknown to them onto exteriors equally unknown. All of these being cauldrons of perception, memory, and associative awareness. And not in event, she seems to say, but in this thunderous drama lies life. The life of life. The essence of fiction.
The stuff of a novel. This is far more than the stream of consciousness. In the one book of Dorothy Richardson's which I have read, Pointed Roofs, Miss Sinclair in her introduction defines this novel as one consisting of that which Miriam sees and feels, uttered precisely as she sees and feels it, and as consisting of no more.
There the stream is swift, flat, defined, self-evidential. Mrs. Wolf carries all this into another domain, a domain not of impression, but of a deeper perception of actual spiritual contact with personality, relationship, speculation, and irrelevance. Her art consists in thus touching toward trail, peak, ray, at every such release the reader
is challenged to follow. Following, he finds his own in personality, relationship, speculation, irrelevance, or he does not find these. Either he too creates as he reads, or he does not create. Thus for fiction Mrs. Wolf is doing what Stravinsky does for the orchestral, both are shifting
the area of participation. For me the charm of To the Lighthouse is beyond all words, but one ought to be careful to whom one says this. Not to one who would stare if you mentioned that the book begins in the afternoon with a projected trip to the lighthouse, and that nearly 200 pages later falls twilight of the
same day with the trip abandoned, and that more than 100 pages and 10 years later the book ends just as the lighthouse island is reached. But to mention this outline is beside the point. Is irrelevant to the book, is treacherous, is, in fine, a comment in a dimension other than the book's dimension, since in the rushing consciousness of those few people summering
in the Hebrides there have taken place innumerable excursions through all the apparently static which is found to be beating and pulsating with life. For in action Mrs. Wolf has found that which science has discovered for the inorganic, that there is no such thing. One can quote from the book for the pleasure of the ordinarily dimensioned, but like wild
flowers brought into the house, these are then unintegrated and reveal nothing of the meadow dimension. This community of feeling with other people which emotion gives, as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically the feeling was one of relief and happiness, it was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose,
and Paul and Minter would carry it on when she was dead. Besides, she knew, directly she came into the room, that the miracle had happened. She wore her golden haze. Sometimes she had it, sometimes not. She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she had it.
Yes, tonight she had it, tremendously. She knew that by the way Mr. Ramsay told her not to be a fool. She sat beside him, smiling. Nothing opposite him could she not see, as in an x-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man's desire to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh,
that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation. Phrases came, visions came, beautiful pictures, beautiful phrases, but what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh, get that and start afresh, she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel.
No quotation avails. The distinction lies here. A spoonful of brine gives the flavour of the barrel, but a spoonful of the sea at sunset, because of that. The method now is of sufficient importance to enspell one for the space of a volume.
Can such a method be integrated, permitting both action and inaction to take their places in a novel, as in life, events too being played upon by pulsation, as in this book Mrs. Wolfe plays upon that which we have been accustomed to call monotony. Why not? For this method, like the methods of all literature, is a quest.
Meanwhile to the lighthouse moves towards the core of life in letters. End of part 14.
