[Music]
Our show today is devoted to Virginia Woolf's novel to the lighthouse.
Before I introduce you to my guest who is standing by in the studio here at KZSU,
I'd like to quote a somewhat long passage from a memoir
that Virginia Woolf began writing in 1939
when she was almost 60 years old. A sketch of the past as it's called
explores the meaning behind certain indelible moments of her childhood,
almost all of which took place during her family's long summer vacations at St.
Ives on the Cornwall Coast in England. Here we go.
Often when writing my novels I have been baffled by how to describe what I call in my private
shorthand "non-being". Every day includes much more non-being than being.
I've already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch yesterday,
and at tea. Although it was a good day, the goodness was embedded in a kind of non-descript
cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously.
When walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done.
As a child my days just as they do now contained a large proportion of this cotton wool,
this non-being. Week after week passed at St. Ives and nothing made any dent upon me.
Then for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock
something happened so violently that I remembered it all my life.
Virginia recounts three instances of such shock. One had to do with fighting with her brother,
Phobe on the lawn. Just as she raised her fist to hit him, she felt, "Why hurt another person?"
She dropped her hand and let her brother pummel her. I remember a feeling of hopeless sadness
it was as if I had become aware of something terrible and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone
feeling horribly depressed."
Another instance involved overhearing her parents one evening mentioned the suicide of one of their
acquaintances. Walking by an apple tree in the garden, that night the young Virginia felt that
the apple tree was somehow connected with Mr. Valpe's suicide.
I could not pass it. I stood there in the moonlight looking at the gray green creases of the bark
in a trance of horror. I seemed to be dragged down hopelessly into some pit of absolute despair
from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralyzed.
The third instance she recounts is the most significant one.
"I was in the garden at St. Ives. I was looking at the flower bed by the front door.
That is the hole," I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves and it seemed suddenly
plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth that a ring enclosed what was the flower.
And that was the real flower. Part earth, part flower. It was a thought I put away as being
likely to be very useful to me later.
This revelation that the whole flower included more than the apparent plant that included the
earth as well as the horizon ring was in some ways generative of wolf's future career as a writer.
This shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. Ever since I saw the flower in the bed
by the front door at St. Ives, I realized that behind the cotton wool of daily life is hidden
a pattern and that we, I mean all human beings are connected with this and that the whole world is a
work of art and that we are parts of the work of art. There is Virginia Woolf goes on to say
some real thing behind appearances and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by
putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me.
It gives me perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed
parts together. And one last passage. This intuition of mine that we are the words, we are the music,
we are the thing itself has given its scale to my life ever since I saw the flower in the bed
by the front door at St. Ives. It proves that one's life is not confined to one's body
and what one says and does. One is living all the time in relation to certain background rods
or conceptions. Mine is that there is a pattern hid behind the cotton wool and this conception
affects me every day. I prove this now by spending the morning writing when I might be walking,
running a shop or learning to do something that will be useful if war comes.
I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.
And now to my guest Miles Osgood Miles, thank you for standing by patiently while I read those
passages from a sketch of the past and welcome to entitled opinions. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Miles Osgood received a PhD in English literature from Harvard in 2019. He specializes in global
modernism, women's literature and James Joyce, among other things. And he teaches in Stanford
structured liberal education program where he lectures regularly on Wolf and her novel
to the lighthouse published in 1927. Now, Miles, the reason I read those passages aloud is because I think
they help us understand Virginia Woolf's vocation as a writer. I'm curious whether you think that
in her novel to the lighthouse. Wolf did in fact succeed in putting together the severed parts
as she says and revealing hidden patterns behind the cotton wool of daily life.
That's a terrific question. Thanks again for inviting me to talk about this. I love that passage
from a sketch of the past. And I think thinking through an answer, I start with maybe the first
words of to the lighthouse, the words that Mrs. Ramsey gives to her son James. Yes, of course,
if there's an element of yes, of course, we recognize that throughout to the lighthouse,
Woolf is very committed to articulating her notion of being. There's hardly a page in this novel
that isn't suffused in a way with maybe not a specific moment of being, but the state of being
that Woolf positions against non being. That is a state of fine awareness of oneself and of others,
a keen consciousness and thoughtfulness. Woolf even says in that section of a sketch of the past
that she struggled to have novels that could balance non being and being. And I think it's very much
an evidence that to the lighthouse is a novel of being. But the more complicated question that you
ask about whether a pattern emerges in that being or whether things that have been ruptured or torn
apart are put back together into the lighthouse, I think brings in Mrs. Ramsey's if, which is to say
those patterns and that reconciliation of things torn apart is there, but only if we learn to read
this novel in a very particular way. And I think that's the thing that's difficult about to the
lighthouse for many first time readers. It certainly was for me when I read it the first time.
The expectation from the title and from the opening that maybe what we're dealing with here
is a narrative that we're wondering whether James will ever make to the lighthouse. That's
frustrated that desire to have a plot and conventional aspects of suspense and climax are in some ways
frustrated. What we learn to do instead, I think is to move about this novel, not in a linear
fashion from beginning to end from James's initial question to its eventual resolution,
but rather back and forth. And that brings me to one little detail that I know we've talked about
before about this novel, which is wolf's structural design for it. That might be the first place to
start looking for a pattern or looking for how wolf would think about bringing two different
two different sides of a problem together. In her early notebooks thinking about to the lighthouse,
wolf imagines it as two blocks joined by a corridor. And I think that invites us certainly to think
about the overall architecture of this novel and a novel about a house, but also to think about
ways we might move around in this novel. The novel, let's remind our readers, those who haven't
read it, it has three parts, I mean three chapters, right? And this, the middle chapter serves as a
kind of corridor between chapter one and chapter three. Yeah, absolutely. The window is the first part
and represents kind of a pre-World War One gathering of the Ramsey family and their friends,
not in Cornwall, but but transposed to Scotland, the Iowa sky, and a vacation house. Then the last part,
the lighthouse involves a return of some of those characters to that house. And then there's
many years later, many years later, about 10 years later. And then there's this eerie strange middle
section known as time passes where we see little glimpses of characters here and there,
sometimes entering the house or sometimes bracketed off, that's something I'm sure we'll talk about.
But really what happens is we see the ravages of time on the house itself and out on the world at
large from the perspective of that house. So I have a couple of questions for you from what you said.
You said that it's a novel of being, but you also said that it's trying to reconcile
the non being with parts of life with the being parts. In a certain sense, as you say, it frustrates
expectations of plot and action, because you could say that the whole first chapter,
it's an ordinary day in the summer house, and it's an ordinary day of non being.
But when Wolf writes it in the way that she writes it, almost every one of those moments in the
cotton wool seems to come alive on the page. And I think that she's infusing being into the cotton wool.
That's what I think is, that's my view of the extraordinary achievement of the non.
Yeah, and Wolf moves around quite a bit in that section, the window from one character to another,
and maybe her choice of selection is to win to enter the mind of one character another,
is at the moment when they themselves are transitioning from non being to being.
That this is a good moment to think about Mr. Ramsey's irritation with his wife, or to think about
Lily's irritation with Mr. Ramsey or to think about James' frustration with his father
interrupting his moment with his mother, that she might choose these moments to move from one
of the other in a moment when that character is experiencing being. I think one of the clearest
examples of that being is occurring in the terms that Wolf puts it in sketch of the past
is Mrs. Ramsey's intuition that James was frustrated in this, at this young age and his desire to go
to the lighthouse will always remember this slight. We'll always remember his father and this guest
Charles Tansley allying against him. Yeah, let me just tell our listeners. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that it the novel begins with the mother telling him, as you quoted the line, that yes,
we will go tomorrow to the lighthouse if the weather is fine. If the weather is fine.
And the father comes in there brutally says, but the weather will not be fine. We won't be going to
the lighthouse and James presents that enormously. He's an eight year old boy, I believe.
And the entire, I mean, certainly the first chapter, but really the entire first section of the
window is an interrupted and protracted version of that conversation and that debate. The beginning
of the window begins with Mrs. Ramsey promising James, it seems that he'll be able to go and then
backpedaling and saying, if it's fine tomorrow. And by the end of the section, Mrs. Ramsey will
have made a small but very significant concession to Mr. Ramsey to admit to him or to agree with him
that the weather won't be fine and that James won't be able to go. And in the middle of that
seemingly small and insignificant and mundane and daily conversation, all these different
character thoughts and dynamics will come in to interrupt and to consider what's at stake.
Yeah, I think that's that's the indication that that Mrs. Ramsey's right that James will remember
this. He remembers it in the final section of the novel in the lighthouse section. And that to us
is significant because that's how Virginia thinks about her own childhood memories, the ones that
stick out. Yeah. So could we could say that for James, the boy of eight years of age, the prospect
of going to the lighthouse is the prospect of a moment of being something that breaks out of, you know,
the ordinary daily routine and everything comes alive in that moment of being. And there's the
father. He's a very kind of archetypical father in this sense in the Freudian, like Connie
and sense that his purpose is to, you know, to be the know, the negation. And if you want to be
psychoanalytic, which I never am and don't favor doing, but it is a kind of castration that the
law of the father is the law of thou shall not. Right. And thou shall not go to the to the lighthouse.
He does remember that, you know, to the to the very end, even though they end up going to the
lighthouse 10 years later. Yeah, I'm certainly also, you know, reluctant usually to make those kinds
of observations, but it's it's certainly the case that Wolf has a curiosity about Freud in this
period and will eventually end up meeting him and working on a translation of his work, I think.
And yeah, the it's very easy to read that into the family drama that James seems to have a real
intense affection for his mother and an edible desire to kill the father. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Expluses. Oh, yes. He thinks if you know, if he had a knife at hand, he would plunge it into
his father's breast. And that feeling doesn't really leave him. He really thinks of his father as a
tyrant and an enemy almost until the very end of the novel. And then there's a moment where we
might think that he gets what he wants from his father, but, you know, it remains a little bit
ambiguous and certainly certainly there's a there's a great war between them at the center of the
whole book. And yet if one looks at this novel as a symphony, because I think it's symphonic in the way that
it brings many the thoughts and streams of consciousness of multiple characters into play. Yeah.
The moment at the beginning is has this under current of dark negative emotion. And yet that is mixed
and intermix as you pointed out with a number of other impressions and perceptions and thoughts
taking place in the minds of other characters where you do go from, you know, a whole spectrum of
emotions from enchantment, love, hatred, despair, in the case of Mr. Ramsey at times, you know,
I think about being unloved. And I suppose to go back to the question of the hidden pattern behind
daily reality, whether this kind of symphonic composition of a day at the summer house of the
Ramsey family is the real signature of this novel that makes it such a
such a favorite work for a lot of people. That's a nice way of thinking about it. You know, I think
there are a lot of motifs set up early in the novel that we could think of as independent musical
phrases that various characters play out, whether that's William Banks worrying about the fact that
he's never had a daughter or something as small but significant as that, or Lily Briscoe working on the
first version of her painting and then returning to another version later in the novel, which becomes
so major to the work, or, you know, various dramas that are happening between James and his father or
between Mrs. Ramsey and Mr. Ramsey, that, yeah, I get played out in these little vignettes early,
sort of mixing artistic metaphors here, but early in the novel, but then there are these moments
where the whole orchestra comes together. And I think the most significant early moment of that is
the dinner party that Mrs. Ramsey throws where she manages to bring everybody into the house,
and it's a little bit discordant at first. There's certain quarrels going on where
Lily Briscoe, a friend of the family who's there to paint, who's a single woman at 33,
is worried that she's being prevailed upon to be the conversational voice of sympathy to some
of the frustrated men at the table, namely this young atheist intellectual Charles Tansley,
who's probably a student of Mr. Ramsey's. Meanwhile, William Banks, another friend of the family,
is sort of thinking about the the vipidity of Mrs. Ramsey and how he doesn't really care to
converse with her. And it seems as though this dinner party might end in failure as all these voices
and all these thoughts kind of meet around the table. And then as the daylight goes out and the
candles are lit, there suddenly is this joy and union around the group of trying to make something
of the day together. And it really does feel like a sort of symphonic crescendo of suddenly everything
being in harmony.
But yeah, the mood changes entirely when they light the candles, darkness is outside,
and all of a sudden something harmonizes in that group of people. And it turns out to be
a moment of being, a true moment of being. Also, the windows, we could talk about some of the
symbols in the novel, maybe the importance of the window in that scene, the windows then become
like a watery surface. And there's a kind of impressionistic view of the outside. And it seems like
it creates a certain kind of trance-like state where everyone is kind of levitating for a moment
at this dinner table.
Right. Yeah, there's this moment of looking together, uniting them.
Yeah, so we see, you know, the window is the name for the whole first section of the novel. And I
think we first see a glimpse of one window when Mr. Ramsey impuriously is standing in front of one in
the very first chapter saying, it won't be nice, it won't be well enough tomorrow to go to
the lighthouse. And, you know, the window, I think it was as a very powerful modernist image and
metaphor. You see it a lot in significant paintings of Henri Matisse or also of Vanessa Bell,
of Virginia Wolf's sister. There's something about it that represents a modernist desire among
fiction writers and poetry writers and artists of all stripes to still be committed to
representing reality in the real world, to looking out the window, but to always being aware of the
frame within the frame that there is inevitably a wooden frame through which one looks at the world.
That is one's own frame of reference. And so I think one of the magical things about the
dinner scene where the light becomes dark behind the window and suddenly the candles need to be lit
inside is yes, I think there are really beautiful impressionistic glimpses of what's still coming
through the window. But on the other hand, I think there's also a feeling of that Wolf wants to convey
of everybody suddenly being forced to reckon with one another in the lit room, rather than kind of
behind their individual windows, perhaps. Mrs. Ramsey is framed within the window with her son,
James, and I guess that Lily, Roscoe, the painter is trying to render that image in a rather
modernistic style, right? Because it's not certainly not a real kind of painting. It's abstract.
Would you like to speak a little bit about some of the symbols, including those that are
suggested in the painting itself? And a few others that we can talk about flowers, for example.
For sure. Yeah, there's a really great conversation between Lily and William Banks, where he's trying
generously to understand what she's doing with her painting. And he wonders what it is that she's
doing because it seems so abstract. There seem to be these lines and varied colors and a purple
triangle that's somehow supposed to represent Mrs. Ramsey and James together. And he doesn't
understand how this is supposed to be a representation of a family scene. And funnily enough,
Banks offers us a mode of comparison, a little landscape painting. I think he picked up as his
honeymoon that has sort of sentimental value to him and that he's had a praised. So for him,
you know, the question of the value of art is something to do with its commercial value and
its sentimental value. You can sort of see certain, you know, standard middle class attitudes about
decorative art in one's home there. It has to please. Yeah, exactly. And Lily is really committed to
something that represents a very subjective vision of what she sees. And she insists that
that her purple triangle representing Mrs. Ramsey and James is what she sees and how she sees them.
And we can try to map on a certain art historical logic to this of saying, oh, well, the mother and
child, the Madonna and child are often in the shape of a triangle or something like that. And that's
been, that's been proposed. And I kind of like that reading. But at the same time, you know, within
the logic of the novel, one thing it makes me think of is the fact that Lily's very concerned with
the fact that people seem to her sometimes like inaccessible domes or beehives that that's that the triangle
shape kind of evokes for me is she, she worries that she would love to know what goes on inside
Mrs. Ramsey's mind and that's something she struggles with the whole novel. But she feels as though
she is not allowed in that particular hive. And that maybe to represent, represent this abstract
triangle is both, you know, her frustration with trying to get at the essence of, of, of who
Mrs. Ramsey is and what her, her love for her son is like, but also just a representation of that metaphor for her.
Yeah. Do you think there's a correlation between the kind of art in the painting and the way the novel is written?
Yeah, although I don't know that that becomes clear right away. You know, Wolf's novel is transcends, I think,
what Lily's trying to do at the beginning of the, at the beginning of the work in that I don't think it's just Wolf saying,
this is how I see it. She's trying to do something more than that. Certainly one can read this novel is very personal, right? Wolf goes into this project thinking that she's going to write about the old man by which she means her father Leslie Steven that she's going to write about her mother who died when she was very young and that ultimately this is a portrait of her family and certainly that's here.
At the same time, you know, I think there's a, there's an omniscience over an array of characters that suggest more than just Virginia Wolf trying to relay something about her own subjective perception.
By the end of the novel, you know, and we can maybe wait, wait for some of these details, Lily will make a mark on her second version of the painting that seems very closely related to the structure of, to the lighthouse itself and that she'll draw a line in the center.
And in a way evoke the structure that Wolf started out with the two blocks in the corridor, or the line being the corridor. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So the narrator gets, goes in and out of the minds of the characters with impunity really. It's not easy to jump from one consciousness to another.
And you mentioned that Lily Briscoe would love to know what's taking place inside the mind of Mrs Ramsey. Right.
And every now and then we get into the depths of what's taking place in Mrs Ramsey, we should mention that Mrs Ramsey is the center of gravity of this whole, certainly narrative, even though she dies.
Right.
And it's casually mentioned in a clause and it's written in a clause within brackets. Yeah, within brackets. Never the less up until the end, even years after her death, she's still everything is kind of rotating around.
Absolutely.
And she's a life giving force. She seems to evoke in almost all of the characters, but some of the, I think it's Mr Banks who's immune to the only one or is it.
Car my car Michael is. Yeah, I mean, thanks certainly also has that resistance at times, but he comes back around.
But I'd like to read this passage about when we, when the narrator gets into something in Mrs Ramsey, then when everyone is left and she's still in the window for now, she need not think about anybody. She could be herself by herself.
And that was what was now she often felt the need of to think. And I'm going to continue all the being and all the doing expansive glittering vocal evaporated and one shrunk with a sense of solemnity to being oneself.
A wedge shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Yeah. And then she goes on a page later, not as oneself does one find rest ever in her experience.
She accomplished here something dexterous with her needles, but as a wedge of darkness losing personality one lost the threat, the hurry, the stir, and there are rows to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this
piece of this rest, this eternity.
Airy thought for a voking that she's liberated from the Mrs Ramsey that everyone is envisioning and fantasizing about and loving. And in this deep dark region of the self that's independent of the world of others, she feels this kind of oceanic trans
that it's unworld, but it does not belong to the world and that's what no one will ever be able to go into. Not only in Mrs Ramsey's case, but I think the suggestion is that there's a wedge of darkness in the
there's a wedge of darkness in each one of us that makes intersubjectivity something that takes place on the sea's surface, not in the depths of the sea.
Right. Yeah. One wants almost to say that, oh, you know, Lily's triangle must be an intuition about that wedge or something. But I think, yeah, it's significant that everybody has thoughts about Mrs Ramsey and everybody has perspective on Mrs Ramsey and we can try to constitute a version of who she is on that basis.
But she herself is so defined in so many of her social relationships by what she gives to others that, yeah, that we really, we really learn a lot from that one moment of tranquility and we learn about the sadness that other people seem to perceive behind her beauty, but don't really fully understand. There's another corollary quote to the one that you just gave where I think she says that she was a shell scarcely to know herself by or something like an empty shell. See if I can find it at some point.
But there's a sense that that Mrs Ramsey empties herself out on others behalf. Everybody recognizes certain things that she gives them, but maybe don't they don't recognize what's left behind.
You could call that her canosis that's invoking a theological term here about God's canosis in the sun.
But emptying himself out of his divinity, come human to see me becoming empty shell. And yeah, I'm interested also miles about the images of flowers or if you want to call them symbols perhaps that's not a misnomer.
But flowers and near lecture I gather you often draw attention to the fact that the appearance of flowers is not haphazard, but that it follows certain pattern. No. Yeah.
Flowers and bees and so forth. Right. I think this is one of the really key patterns of the novel and easy to miss. So superficially everybody seems to agree that one of Mrs Ramsey's qualities is her beauty and they're able to put that in the abstract.
We see this kind of over and over again whether it's Mr Mr Ramsey her husband whether it's William Banks whether it's Lily whether it's Charles Tansley and that abstracted beauty is important to her outdoor identity and even even if it's Ramsey identifies in herself how could one miss it.
But what's really remarkable is that when you look at the passages where that abstract beauty comes up in a number of cases the character will then go on to think about it in the terms of flowers specifically.
You know Mr Banks for instance thinks you know yet she's no more aware of her beauty than a child she sort of worried about what's behind the beauty and the line liner to before that he's thinking the grace is assembling seem to have joined hands and meadows of Asphadelle to compose that face.
There's you know Charles Tansley thinking she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen with stars in her eyes and veils in her hair with cyclamin and wild violets.
What nonsense was he thinking but that thought overtakes him in a way that she's associated with flowers.
And one remarkable thing that happens toward the end of the novel is that Lily trying is trying to remember Mr Ramsey after Mrs Ramsey has died in the time passes section.
She's thinking if only she had access to Mrs Ramsey she could complete her painting or kind of continue with her art and she has a real longing and mourning over Mrs Ramsey.
And then she has this visionary experience and remember Lily somebody who's preoccupied with thinking about people as inaccessible and accessible hives.
She starts to reflect on on Mrs Ramsey's beauty and she thinks but beauty was not everything beauty had this penalty it came to readily it came to completely it's still life froze it.
And she's worried that you know this this label that's applied to Mrs Ramsey over and over again of simple beauty is is not the reality.
And a few pages later I guess technically a few chapters later she'll return to this and have this mysterious sense that she's trying to paint of someone there of Mrs Ramsey next to her.
Relief for a moment of the weight that the world had put on her staying lightly by her side and then in a really significant parenthesis and all of Wolf's parentheses and brackets are so significant.
For this was Mrs Ramsey in all her beauty raising to her forehead a reef of white flowers with which she went and then Lily is able to to press the paint out of her tubes and start painting again.
That gesture not just of Mrs Ramsey being beautiful and being among flowers but a vision of Mrs Ramsey as it were creating a garland of flowers and loriating herself with them being able to put that crown on her head.
Shifts our perception I think of who Mrs Ramsey is and who Mrs Ramsey is specifically to Lily which is to say not just an object of beauty but a creator of beauty.
We see this when Mrs Ramsey composes the dinner I think as a kind of composer or conductor of that symphonic moment and Lily is quite explicit about it that Mrs Ramsey in her ability to bring people together almost like a director or a stage manager is able to create moments of being is able to create still life moments.
That change when perceptions of other people and change when perception one's own memory and Lily explicitly connects that to her own creative work.
You just mentioned still life and there's another symbolic object at the dinner table which is the fruit bowl that the daughter I don't remember her name now created this beautiful bowl of fruit with flowers also certain flowers there.
And of course what you were saying about the connection between Mrs Ramsey and the flowers reminds me of the passages I quoted from you know the sketch of the past where that vision of a flower in the flower bed and its connection to the earth and to the surrounding environment that wholeness.
I can't imagine that it's not directly related to the way in which the flower is a symbol of interconnection and something which is not exhausted in its phenomenal.
But that evokes the whole and Mrs Ramsey is the organizing whole of this family and it's cohort of friends.
Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, that description of that particular arrangements really nice specifically because Lily will think of Mrs Ramsey as a creator of still life in comparison to her maybe as a creator of landscapes or portraits or something like that.
Yeah, there's another moment very close to the end of the window where flowers come back and bees come back where Mrs Ramsey having heard a poem that her husband was reciting at the table kind of starts humming it to herself is specifically the lyric.
But the china roses all a bloom and buzzing with the honey bee and as she thinks about this the words start to wash from side to side in her mind rhythmically little shaded lights one red one blue one yellow lit up in the dark of her mind seeming to leave their perches up there to fly across and across.
So we have a we have a suggestion I think of the of the modern metaphor of across pollination as a kind of intersubjectivity that if will Lily was worried that ultimately we are all kind of separated isolated inaccessible hives one of the things that Mrs Ramsey represents as she as she plays with her needles in the yarn.
Or as she reads at random in a book as as Wolf puts it shoving her way up under pedals that curved over her reading here in there at random that Mrs Ramsey represents the possibility that we are not just hives but we are also flowers in the field or we are also bees that we have ways of communicating with with one another and and that our thoughts and words can enter one hive in that another.
So weaving metaphors are quite prominent in part one above all yeah so one more one more motif or symbol before I ask you about the corridor and that's the lighthouse.
So the lighthouse is a major symbol and it can represent all sorts of things but it's also associated with Mrs Ramsey especially the third long right stroke is there's two short strokes and one long stroke of light one yeah yeah and she kind of identifies with the long stroke yeah.
So the lighthouse how do you understand it's symbolic significance yeah so Wolf's bloomsbury friends came to her and were wondering about the same question and wanted to impose some kind of symbolism on it and Wolf was very resistant to that she she didn't want it to stand in for any one thing and I think no that's what a symbol is a teacher might said you know if you can if you can say what a symbol represents and it's not a symbol it has to be indeterminate yeah.
Yeah yeah yeah and I think that I think Wolf actually in a way ironically is somewhat explicit about that by the end of the novel in so far as James maybe expects the lighthouse to be one thing when he gets to it he represents the kind of the physicality of he finally gets to see it up close.
He thinks was that the lighthouse and he realizes no the lighthouse was also the other thing which is to say the thing it wasn't his memory from ten years ago and already by adding that kind of multiplicity of meanings I think Wolf is suggesting to us well the lighthouse is one thing for Mrs Ramsey and one thing for James it's also multiple things for James in fact.
So the meanings proliferate I have a zany theory about this I don't know what the last third stroke means for for Mrs Ramsey although that's a really beautiful passage when she's thinking about it and one could think about the symmetry of that passage itself actually.
One zany theory I have about it is that this is related to think about this novel as as characters looking at each other and being aware of each other and trying to understand one another and the interest of activity that Wolf is committed to is that the two short strokes in the long stroke are the more are Morse code for you or the letter you I should say.
And and that James when he approaches the lighthouse sees it as an eye E. Y. E. and that there's something going on with the light of the lighthouse is it shines on different people and as different people look at it that is both subject and object and as all the characters in this novel are as they are looking at each other.
Well certainly one thing it does is give rhythm yeah a steady rhythm you could say that.
In some ways it represents chronology I don't have.
Sure I would want to call it chronological time but it is something that is endlessly repetitive in proper temporal measure and so much of this novel is about time and the way in the way time is woven together around in between various characters and the way in which human time in its moments of being is
different from mere clock time chronological time and this lighthouse out there in the middle of a sea but this kind of ocean of being which is beyond time because it's associated with eternity and you certainly cannot live humanly in a kind of human time in the sea it has a different kind of.
Temporality that the constant strokes of that lighthouse will perform mean different things to different people at different times yeah and here I'd like to talk a little bit about.
Time passes which is the middle section the middle chapter that corridor because if we thought that to the lighthouse was this kind of.
Virginia will showing off her virtuosity as a writer to enter into the consciousness of multiple characters and harmonize them in the symphonic way what she shows in those twenty pages for me at least in time passes is that.
She could also do it.
In person I mean you could describe things with independently of human consciousness and it's the most extraordinary you know you know one day I should probably just come into the studio and read that whole chapter you know it'll take about forty five minutes.
Yeah but it's one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing known to me in any novel and it's about what happens to the Ramsey house in the ten years where because World War one and all these.
I mean the the elder son Andrew is is killed off in by a shell hit by a shell the one of the daughters what's their name proved dyes and child burn the child.
Mrs Ramsey has also died so in ten years is chronological time but what she does she enters into the house yeah that is emptied of its occupants and inhabitants and she describes how.
Nature the elements the wind the salt the thing how it takes over and wears down the human elements of the house and it's just unbelievable how she can switch from a subjective base type of narration to this other kind of.
Description of the effects of the elements on yeah on a human.
You know it's interesting it makes me think about the fact that it's about Mr Ramsey's philosophy so Mr Ramsey is sort of involved in phenomenology and epistemology it's called metaphysics in the first part of the.
The novel and he's invested in questions you know as a lot of I think Wolf Cambridge intellectual friends were invested in of.
Questions of what what happens do things went out of existence when we no longer perceive them when we're no longer out them.
Andrew the the the all the sun explains this to Lily is like is a kitchen table still there when you're not in the room I think.
And Lily from that point on has this vision of a kitchen table stuck in a tree which which I think is very funny in relation to.
Wolf's sketch of the past memory of like having particular association particular plants and trees.
And there's something there's something so human centric about that line of thinking that Wolf then really yeah so abruptly and aggressively defies in that middle section playing with the omniscience that she's all.
And I think that's a really.
And I think that we see them juxtaposed.
As it were kind of in an artistic montage.
Against this progression of time in the house itself.
And there's something so eerie about reading this.
Time passes section now.
Where, you know, so many of us have been confined.
To otherwise empty houses.
For a long time.
And have had to imagine these awful tragedies.
Bracket it off far away.
While that time is passing.
I think this is a section that's well worth revisiting.
Now in light of the last few years.
Yeah, for sure.
And speaking of, you mentioned Mr. Ramsey's metaphysics.
Yeah.
And he's a weird character.
I can tell you.
He also has a very linear.
Conception of knowledge.
Right.
Where he feels that you go from A to Z.
Z would be the absolute knowledge.
Maybe a Hegelian.
Yeah.
Only one man in a generation makes it to Z.
I think he thinks.
He thinks that he's made it to, he's let her are or cue.
He wishes he could make it to R.
I think he feels as though he's made it to cue.
He's made it to cues.
He's struggling with R.
And that's the tragedy of this man if you, if you,
yeah, because he realizes that his conception of what knowledge is.
It's probably so misguided from my point of view.
Yeah.
But you think that you, it's like an encyclopedic entry that you go from A to Z.
Right.
And, you know, that kind of time.
Is, I mean, a sequential, it's a notion of a sequence.
And of course, that middle chapter just takes the whole notion of
sequenceality as I think you're suggesting it.
Yeah.
And shows that it's all wrapped up in the natural elements and the effect that things have on other things.
Right.
And time is not an abstract set of metric.
Yeah.
That's in the abstract.
Time is what happens.
Two things and among things by things.
Yeah.
So what a way to bring that, you know, notion of time alive.
Yeah.
That she does in that, in that section.
Yeah.
No, I think that's so much of this novel is, is looking back on those ideologies of progress of the 19th century.
I think you bring up Hakelist, kind of their progenitor, that Mr. Ramsey adopts in some way.
And imagining that he himself is part of this progress of intellectual history and is on this path of personal,
intellectual, telos.
And not only does time passes defy that by making us think about time differently and how time proceeds, you know, without humans taking apart in it.
But I think also that that feeling of, yes, you know, this novel spans 10 years and yes, the first part happens before the last part.
But that's not really the experience.
That's not really the richest experience one can have of the novel of just reading it linearly through once from A to Z.
I think once one realizes what's happening in the third section where memories of Mrs. Ramsey are evoked, memories we haven't even seen in the first section in some cases.
We are invited, you know, as I was saying at the beginning to read the way that Mrs. Ramsey reads, which is to say flipping a page here and there at random.
Certainly we need to know the whole story to some extent to the extent there is a story.
But, you know, thinking about that last scene in the window at the end of the first section where Mr. Ramsey is frustrated that there's been some debate at the dinner table about Walter Scott and whether Walter Scott will hold up and there he is reading the last, you know, some kind of final pages of a Scott novel and thinking like, no, this is brilliant and it's moving and it's great.
And that's a nice moment.
But Mrs. Ramsey, on the other hand, you know, reading an anthology of poetry it seems and kind of poking in one page and then the other and kind of moving around.
A beat, like a beat.
Like a beat.
Yeah.
Are two very different ways of thinking about reading in two different ways you could read this novel to the lighthouse and certainly I think the richer experiences, Mrs. Ramsey's version of that, which is to move about in time and in the book.
Yeah.
And certainly the boat trip to the lighthouse ten years later is integrated temporarily with, I mean, yes, in psychological time with the very beginning of the novel.
Yeah.
And it turns out to be somewhat, well, I don't know if it's climactic, to me it's kind of anti-climactic.
I don't understand why James gets, you know, so much satisfaction from the fact that his father dame to make a comment that he steered the boat well.
Yeah.
It's not, it's probably not going to resolve the ultimate resentment among them or the absence of Mrs. Ramsey fundamentally in this family or the tragedies that they've all felt.
There's that moment.
There's also, you know, another significant moment where James is wondering whether Cam, his sister, will extend sympathy or extend some kind of kindness to their father.
One of the real features of that's most striking about Mr. Ramsey's personality in the last section of the novel is that without asking for it directly, he demands, again,
impuriously upon people around him, especially women around him, whether that's Lily or whether that's his daughter, Cam, for sympathy for all the tragedies that he's experienced.
And this wolf is pulling this very much from her experience of her own father's late years.
And James is thinking, you know, Cam, don't do it. You've got to resist. We've got to be allied as children against this tyranny of this particular emotional demand.
I mean, look at what, you know, look at what these kinds of emotional demands did to our mother, you know, back when she was alive.
And I think it's a real moment for them, you know, one thing that we'll certainly interested in this period is in what it means to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman.
And it's a real juncture, I think, for both James and Cam as to, in their maturation, as to what, whether they will be the kinds of men and women that their Victorian parents were, or whether they'll be different kinds of men and women.
Whether Cam will continue to be the sympathetic ear, you know, the sympathetic woman in the way that Lily's supposed to be to Tanzu in the way that Mrs. Ramsey's supposed to be to everybody.
And whether James will be the kind of adventurer who, you know, takes satisfaction out of being congratulated for manning the tiller. And, you know, they both make concessions in that direction, ultimately.
Well, I apologize to all our listeners who haven't read the novel before, but I'm hoping that our conversation will intrigue people enough to read it if they haven't read it because it's really, I don't know what to call it.
For me, it's a master piece. Do you believe it's a robust?
I think so. Yes. She has novels that are more experimental in that way, recognizably more modernist, like the waves, or novels that seem in some ways more integrated with political and social questions like Mrs.
And those are certainly also wonderful novels. And, you know, I think reading either of those extremes of what Wolf can do or something that really pushes the boundaries of how one thinks about gender and sexuality like Orlando, you might think, oh, to the lighthouse is this more sedate story of a family vacation house and their friends and just all these people thinking in very minute ways about the daily,
lights that they inflict on one another or the daily forms of love that they show for one another. And if one were to reduce it to that story, it would maybe seem underwhelming relative to, you know, the suicide of a war veteran or a man who becomes a woman or, you know, these kinds of other grand narratives.
But there's something about the texture and, as we were saying at the beginning, the patterns that are created in the richness of the language of the lighthouse that makes it, I think, a cut above anything else she wrote, all of which is wonderful, but this is truly magnificent.
She's the man who's an old expression, absolutely expression, but you know what I mean. Well, thank you. We've been speaking with Miles Osgood on entitled opinions about to the lighthouse, my Virginia Wolf, and thanks for coming on, Miles, maybe we can talk one day about James Joyce, who is another main focus of your work.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Take care.
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