Chapter 20
Part 20 of Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Poetic Fiction Mrs. Virginia Woolf's Novel Experiment From The Morning Post, 21st June 1927 If any reader of Mrs. Woolf's book protests that this is not a novel,
there is something to be said for the opinion. It has a physical scene in a house located on a Scottish coast, but it is laid wholly in the minds of the hosts and their guests. The human figures in it are not of tangible substance, but only the reflections of such, given off by one another.
It has a plan, but scarcely what is known as a plot. In the first of its three sections, James Ramsey, aged six, is frustrated in a promised visit to the lighthouse, and in the last of them, he, now sixteen, makes out that expedition. That is all the action there is of firm outline.
The middle section, which projects a picture of the passage of time in between, merely mentions in parenthesis the death of the boy's mother, the Mrs. Ramsey, whose personality yet survives and is dominant to the last page. So far as there is any story, it is tucked away within brackets. There are no people in it beyond the shapes found in reported perceptions.
A reader of novels may not unreasonably protest that to the lighthouse is something quite different from the form that term assumes. What Mrs. Wolfe has done is to carry further than perhaps ever before the experiment of exhausting a fiction of its story circumstance and making it a vessel of philosophical and poetical content.
Her theme, in brief, is the contradictions in men and things which compose life's mystery and how it can be solved by their reconciliation in our various experiences. And this is illustrated and enriched by so much of story as remains, significant and trivial at one and the same time,
as Mr. Ramsey, for example, was at one and the same time venerable and laughable. The fiction framework, slight as it is, determines the book's form. The author's elusiveness is ultimately held by the limiting shape of the vessel itself. Her speculations are contained by the fixed lines of the James and his lighthouse incident and it is from her characters created in relation to that,
the self-centered, tyrannical, dependent Mr. Ramsey. Mrs. Ramsey, so effective and pervasive, their children, Lily Briscoe and the other guests, all individual in their various virtue and absurdity, that she strikes beauty with a poet's perception.
That is like a net, caught in which all the trivialities of her invented situation acquire significance. And this significance is always reflected with the heightened emphasis of the mirroring character while the expression responds in a curious kind of chanting writing. As, for example, when Lily, with Mr. Banks on the terrace, catches sight of the Ramses and So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.
That is what Mrs. Ramsey tried to tell me the other night, she thought, for she was wearing a green shawl and they were standing close together, watching Pru and Jasper throwing catches. And suddenly, the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the tube or ringing a doorbell,
descends on people, making them representative, came upon them and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures, sank down again and they became as they met them,
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, watching the children throwing catches. Whether or not it carries the book beyond the novel form, the experiment is justified by its results. End of part 20
