She was right in that “books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately”; we ought to take the writer in her totality. But in my mind “To the Lighthouse” is the culmination of everything Woolf has been working toward. She spoke about the interdependence of words, how they color and infect one another, that there is no pure meaning, that each word is nudged and changed by those strung to it. Like the words we have invented, we, too, cannot exist outside history. But what also appears here is a new silence. All great writing is infected with silence, but it is very rare indeed to observe a master wielding that vacuum blankness of the unsaid with such elegant precision. Part of the effect is that you feel you are inside a mind, inhabiting another’s interiority. But there also is the register of history, in the vast expanse of the sea welded in a continuous fabric to the sky. Everything out there is unknown, and the lighthouse has no hope to illuminate where we are heading. All it does is call attention to itself and the rock it stands on. It is a perpetual circular warning, a white scream. We are trapped in history, poised between two world wars. Novelists often find themselves or themselves create situations in which they are obliged to speak about one of their books, a book they are no longer writing. A process of justification and rationalization and remembering ensues. More often than not, this ends up with over-defended stories that attempt to explain motives and intentions that are now long in the past, and therefore might be accurately remembered but are, more often than not, invented under obligation to explain oneself or else to retrospectively attempt to reenter that pure space where one was a servant of and a contributor to, with all one has got, the mechanism of a work of fiction. It is very rare to hear a novelist speak accurately about writing a novel because it is extremely difficult to explain. Virginia Woolf was a rare example. She wrote well about her writing. She described working on “To the Lighthouse” as a process “without any premeditation.” And I believe her. What she arrived at here was not the outcome of calculated stylistic intent but, rather, the result of a long process of observation and then surrender and fidelity to the outcomes. newyorker/books/page-turner/unsaid-silence-virginia-woolf
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:06:14 +0000
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