SOURCE: “The Tension of Stalemate,” in Chaos in the Novel/The Novel in Chaos, Schocken Books, 1974, pp. 120–140.

[In the following essay, Seltzer examines the inherent lack of integrity and stability in the human personality and the resultant personal and social distance and, ultimately, chaos as chronicled by Woolf in To the Lighthouse.]

Many contemporary novelists have surrendered a good deal or all of their artistic control to the belief that a chaotic vision of life can be truly represented only by a chaotic form. To the extent that artifice is falsification, its presence would seem to undermine the confusion that the author is trying to project. But must all aesthetic order dissolve before a philosophical sense of disorder can be communicated? If so, then the novel may be as dead as it has been rumored to be. But if the novel is flexible enough, it may be saved by the very artifice which has threatened to stifle it. In short, the novel can provide illusions of devastating experience without subjecting itself to the inevitable destruction that the experience itself might lead to. The trick is to know how to handle artistic freedom—and that in itself implies a discipline that many contemporaries are evading or willfully abdicating. Just as Marlow in Heart of Darkness can peer into Kurtz's abyss without falling into it, so the reader can be mentally jarred by the appearance of chaos without being thrust into its real-life equivalent. The author may very well want to give us the sensation of slipping occasionally, but once he pulls us over the precipice, art becomes indistinguishable from life and is therefore rendered superfluous. If art is to heighten and sharpen our awareness of reality, it must provide sufficient stability and detachment to enable the reader to use all his resources in coming to terms with the author's vision—no matter how chaotic that vision is. Otherwise, the reader becomes so helplessly lost in the chaos itself that he is no longer free to feel the kind of impact that art makes possible. The view from Kurtz's psyche may have the advantage of greater immediacy, but that same experience formalized through Marlow's intellect and disciplined by Conrad's artistic devices, gains universality and provides a basis for evaluating that experience. Art, then, need not falsify chaos in order to rescue something from it.

Like Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf values anything that art can salvage from a world that is “too dark altogether,” yet like him too, she is careful not to make too large a claim: the darkness she depicts can never be dispelled. She is under no illusions that the resistance art can offer is tantamount to triumph, but even a stalemate is sufficient assurance for her of art's value in our lives. Here, I think, is where her chief importance lies for us today, both as an artist and as an aesthetician for modern practitioners of the chaotic novel. In her, we may find hope for the future of a form currently in danger of being swallowed up by a vision that sees the futility of artistic control as the end rather than the beginning of a perpetual struggle.

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf handles chaos with such delicacy that the work seems almost too well-made to reflect her disturbing vision. Nevertheless, the balance between constructive and destructive forces is kept at such a teetering tension throughout, that the novel becomes an exciting, if subdued, contest between art and reality. If art's ultimate victory is tentative and precarious, it is still legitimate, for Virginia Woolf has not underestimated the power of her opponent. While her characterization of chaos lacks the terrifying aggressiveness accorded it by many contemporary writers, it is every bit as eerie, menacing, and devastating. Quietly seeping through the roots of our lives, it extirpates us quite as efficiently as much wilder forces, for it works from within and without. Like dusk descending slowly and silently, it settles over a scene until all forms become obliterated, and man himself is left a “wedge of darkness.”

Because the darkness surrounding our lives originates in the pores of the human personality, we cannot say that it prevents us from knowing ourselves, but rather that this darkness is the deepest thing we can know about ourselves. Like Darl in As I Lay Dying, who must empty himself out for sleep, Mrs. Ramsay also feels the falseness of her identity in active life when, alone, she divests herself of her various roles, which slip away into the night. Only now

she could be herself, by herself. … To be silent; to be alone. All the being and 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 … our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading; it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.¹

It would seem, then, that all appearances are essentially false suggestions of a unified personality. By implying that we can be known and reached, these outward projections of our internal realities are deceptive and ultimately illusory. For the artist who hopes to penetrate facades, therefore, acknowledgment of chaos is mandatory. Lily Briscoe, never deceived by public forms of personality, tries desperately to grasp the private world of Mrs. Ramsay, but recognizes the futility of her efforts when she finds intimacy itself an impossibility. Leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee, she is shocked to discover that

Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! … And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsay's heart. How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?

(P. 79)

It is this question that haunts Lily throughout the novel, and her determination to deal honestly with it that dictates Virginia Woolf's themes and techniques, as both author and her fictional counterpart contemplate the chaos separating all human beings from themselves and from one another.

By slipping in and out of her characters' minds, Virginia Woolf reveals all the subtle shifts in mood, idea, and response attesting to the fluidity of human consciousness; and her omniscient point of view enables her to define the remoteness of one mind from another with depressing clarity. We see one person flowing through a rainbow of moods, changing thoughts with the ease of a chameleon changing color, and continually sliding out of one self into another with such protean elusiveness that even the most astute observer must remain forever locked out of another's identity. Furthermore, the observer himself is affected and his own identity frequently modified or significantly altered by what he has perceived in the other person—and that perception itself is hardly constant, but influenced by the perceiver's particular mood, thoughts, and feelings at the moment. Because all this takes place in seconds, we see that even the form of chaos changes from one moment to the next. If truth is to be found at all, then, it is the truth of an instant—those spots of time when we suddenly rise to the surface to become one with our appearance.

Since Virginia Woolf defines the self as a wedge of darkness invisible to others, we may wonder if it is inaccessible as well. Certainly, it would seem that if her people, like Conrad's, are inevitably sealed off from one another and if, like Faulkner's, their own identities block accurate perception, then interaction is apt to be a haphazard collision at best. Like planets revolving in different spheres, all her characters seem separate worlds divided by vast chasms of darkness which absorb most of the signals sent from one body to another. To what extent does such a universe render meaningful communication possible?

one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. … For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?

(P. 265)

Even if, by chance, the words were to hit their target, their meanings would still be lost by the time they worked their way down into the emotional fabric of the receiver. The words emerging from one sensibility are necessarily distorted in the process of filtering through an entirely different sensibility; even when Mrs. Ramsay puts a relatively simple question to her daughter, “the words seemed to be dropped into a well, where, if the waters were clear, they were also so extraordinarily distorting that, even as they descended, one saw them twisting about to make Heaven knows what pattern on the floor of the child's mind” (p. 84). One must obviously objectify his feelings if they are to traverse the void successfully and reach another's mind intact, but since any kind of objectivity is impossible in such a world, words do indeed seem to be useless vehicles for the transmission of deep currents of feeling. This is why Lily sees the Ramsays without Mrs. Ramsay as “a house full of unrelated passions” (p. 221). Members of the family talk to one another, but no one seems to reach anyone else.

Words are not, however, the only means of trying to reach other people, and Virginia Woolf implies that feelings often can be communicated, even when language fails. The first section of the novel ends with Mrs. Ramsay's triumph in communicating her love to her husband without having to articulate it; and moments after Lily has seen the Ramsay household as one of unrelated passions, she watches the procession of the family across the lawn “drawn on by some stress of common feeling which made it, faltering and flagging as it was, a little company bound together and strangely impressive to her” (p. 231). Just as Marlow in Lord Jim can understand more than he can express and intuit more than he can comprehend about Jim simply because Jim is “one of us,” so, too, does Virginia Woolf suggest that shared instinctive feelings can often overtake chaos to a greater extent than would at first seem possible considering the ultimate isolation of each person. Though words are always inadequate conveyors of one's feelings, communication based on shared sympathies is always possible. When relationships are working well, silence will always transcend speech in eloquence of expression and exactness of thought.

The chaos emanating from within the human personality may, then, restrict self-knowledge and hamper relationships, but shared instinctive feelings can mitigate, if not overcome, the difficulty of having to live and love in such a world. Still, our lives are far more complicated than inner chaos alone would make them; to consider the other half of Virginia Woolf's vision, we must recognize the existence of outer chaos as well, which constantly undermines any order we may try to impose on the universe. This outer chaos is as quiet and invisible as the wedge of darkness at the core of our selves, but its presence is the most distressing fact of our existence because it denies everything we want to affirm, negates the value of our lives, and crushes out meaning with shocking swiftness.

When Lily and William Bankes, while watching a sailboat moving on the waves, feel a “common hilarity,” their silent communication promises to dispel the threat of inner chaos; yet both are cut short in their enjoyment by a sudden movement that turns them toward the dunes far away. They immediately become melancholy “partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest” (p. 34). In the middle of a beautiful moment, then, Lily and William are shaken by sudden awareness of their insignificance in time. Their sense of spatial vastness suggests a temporal infinity as well; and they are so dwarfed by both dimensions that even the union of two wedges of darkness cannot combat the realization that they have no share in the world's permanence but must remain strangers all their lives to a universe that will tolerate them only for an instant before swallowing them up. Time is one important component of chaos because it gnaws away at our sense of stability, suggesting how little we can hope to know about life when the most that can be known in one lifetime is worth virtually nothing over the ages which will cover and forget us, bury our bodies and our knowledge as effectively as if we had never existed at all. Our place in life is as significant as the position of an ant on a desert, and our minds can never be at home in such a world.

Another aspect of the outer chaos threatening us is the fluidity of the universe, which constantly undermines our sense of structure and security. For a human being to feel unanchored in the general drift of life is intolerable. Just as our feet were not made to walk in quicksand, so our minds cannot contemplate eternal fluidity without going under; we must presume stability before we can determine order, and we must be assured of order before we can hope to find meaning. The natural fluidity of all things is in direct opposition to the spiritual cravings of our souls, to the philosophical tendencies of our minds, and to the unifying obsessions of our imaginations. Unmoored in a shifting reality, man can acquire neither wisdom nor tranquility but can hope only to keep his balance; and it is the stability of his common cause with fellow human beings that alone can help him resist the hostile element in which he finds himself. Like Faulkner's runners, the sensitive characters in To the Lighthouse often feel as if they had been thrust into a mental and emotional whirlpool where they can never hope to establish order or feel safe. Fortunately, though, they are usually spared immersion by their feelings of fellowship. Even a scene as simple and familiar as the one at the dinner table can, in Virginia Woolf, evoke these feelings:

Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.

Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there.

(Pp. 146–47)

Inner chaos seems insignificant when people who can never know one another much better than they can know the universe itself band together and feel a common unity in their mutual fear of an antagonistic world.

A third aspect of chaos is emphasized in the second section of the novel when time and fluidity become synonymous with decay, disintegration and entropy; chaos here infests man's systematic life to the point where it erodes his most basic assumption of self-importance. As darkness infiltrates the Ramsay's summer home, swallowing up the forms of man's existence,

not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.

(P. 190)

The tenuousness of man's significance is felt keenly as Mrs. Ramsay, her daughter, and her son die in parentheses—victims of time, chance, and the general entropic drive of the universe. As the darkness eats away at the products of a man's life in bigger and bigger gulps, both people and things sink into the chaos with remarkable impartiality. Man's values, dreams and creations are swept off into the chaotic flood which renders them inconsequential and meaningless, while his philosophical, moral, social, and spiritual systems are wiped out as so much presumption. Using Nature and Time as its primary instruments, the dark forces of chaos dominate, then demolish all the order man has brought to his uncertain life:

Listening (had there been anyone to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

In spring … the stillness and brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible … (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds).

(Pp. 202–3, 204)

It would seem that man's chief responsibility in a hostile universe is to subdue chaos with all the energy he can muster, for the second he stops resisting it, it takes over and annihilates him, crushing out all the signs and symbols of his existence.

For now had come that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed down. One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness. In the ruined room, picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there, lying on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the bricks, and the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the cold. Then the roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have blotted out path, step, and window; would have grown, unequally but lustily over the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could have told only by a red-hot poker among his nettles, or a scrap of china in the hemlock that here once some one had lived; there had been a house.

If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion.

(Pp. 208–9)

But it is just at this moment, of course, that “slowly and painfully, with broom and pail, mopping, scouring, Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast, stayed the corruption and the rot” (p. 209). And so man regains his precarious supremacy over chaos through hard work and conscious will power.

We may leave the hard work to the cleaning ladies for a while, and concentrate on the more complicated mental process involved in combatting and finally controlling chaos. It is obvious that for Virginia Woolf, art represents the ultimate resistance of the mind to the disordered life around us—it keeps airborne that treacherous feather which, once fallen, will upset the scales against us. Although the second section of the book stresses natural chaos, it also embodies the social chaos of a world war and the philosophical and spiritual chaos of a cosmos which refuses to honor man's most prized values, concepts, and beliefs—all of which are founded on an assumption of some order. By facing squarely the aspects of chaos which threaten our security, art attempts to rescue for our benefit what the darkness is continually trying to remove. Thus, we see how the natural pull toward oblivion is met by the artist's struggle to pin down time and make it memorable; the tug toward fluidity is stayed by the permanence of the written word or painted line; the progress of decay is resisted by the vision which unifies and endures. The suction of natural things into a whirlpool of disarray is arrested by the imposition of aesthetic order which freezes reality; and the impulse of nature toward disintegration into unidentifiable atoms is thwarted by the unifying process of creativity.

The struggle of art against chaos is, then, a constant, agonizing, and intense one—infinitely exhausting, yet never futile. To shine a beam of light into the darkness and locate a truth which may be solidified into vision demands all of man's willpower and energy, but the war must be fought before man can ever satisfy his need for meaning. Because “the vision must be perpetually remade” (p. 270), the battle must be perpetually waged; and while any kind of lasting victory must remain impossible, those moments of mastery are enough to provide life with some semblance of order and to offer man the solace of meaning.

I have already mentioned the futility of words as instruments of communication between wedges of darkness, yet the novel does offer simultaneously a vindication for language founded on its permanence, if not its precision. While Lily stands looking at her picture and reflecting on what Mr. Ramsay would have said about her failure to capture her vision on canvas,

a curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things she could not say. … She looked at her picture. That would have been his answer, presumably—how “you” and “I” and “she” pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even of this scrawl, not of that actual picture perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it “remained forever.”

(P. 267)

Lily is humble enough to realize that no fantastic claims can be made for the art she is trying to create: its value is uncertain, perhaps even negligible, in a world that can never be grasped or defined. At the most, art's domination of a moment is still such a difficult process that the moment is a thing of the distant past long before art has mastered it. Still, it is the creative process itself which raises man's position from victim to challenger, and so his significance is ascertained independently of the success of his accomplishment.

By inserting the artist into her novel—at first in the background, then later into the foreground—Virginia Woolf is able to duplicate metaphorically her own frustration in the formidable process of wresting shape from chaos. Lily Briscoe may be a good, fair, or poor artist, but her integrity cannot be questioned as she strives to objectify her vision into universal symbols which alone can organize and express what she feels.

But conception and execution are separated by hours of anguish which attest to the difficulty of objectification. How does one translate vague, chaotic feelings into structured, coherent forms? How shed light on darkness without falsifying that darkness? In a passage filled with artistic angst, and strongly reminiscent of Sterne's descriptions of John de la Casse's exasperation while working on his Galateo, Virginia Woolf depicts Lily's effort as an incredible struggle of the will to project an ordered vision onto nothingness:

She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see,” and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

(P. 32)

The artistic temperament suffers as the tension increases between its efforts to objectify feelings and the efforts of chaotic forces to elude formalization. Lily's struggle becomes more desperate as the novel progresses, but even after ten years have gone by, she remains dedicated to her task. Even though “it was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on” (p. 287). In her refusal to ever consider the possibility of surrender, Lily as artist becomes the genuine hero of the novel.

Heroism never comes easily, however, and Lily hovers on defeat throughout the novel: as her emotions build in intensity, so does her frustration, until the canvas itself “seemed to rebuke her with its cold stare for all this hurry and agitation; this folly and waste of emotion. … She looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare” (p. 234). That white void is similar to the whiteness of Melville's whale in its suggestion of meaninglessness—the chaotic vision that mocks man's attempts to interpret the truth beyond appearances by implying that there is nothing really to interpret. “For what could be more formidable than that space?” Lily thinks as she decides to run the risk of filling it (p. 236)—and even the few nervous lines she finally puts there have a soothing effect on her as she watches them enclose and eventually define space. And arbitrary as this might seem, it is not artifice for its own sake, for as soon as the canvas begins to represent appearances, Lily feels a truth, a reality behind them that becomes the new focus of her concentration. It is not the truth which she senses, but a truth of this particular scene at this particular moment; still, it is a genuine reality she has discovered in her invasion of space—that space which represents chaos, yet which can be made to reflect meaning so long as man is willing to impose his imagination upon it.

The fact that chaos can be shaped to yield meaning does not imply, however, that the chaos itself is only an illusion; its inexplicability cannot be contested without gross falsification, and as a result, we must make sure that the process of formalizing never becomes too representational. That would constitute artifice rather than art, because as soon as chaos becomes defined, it disappears; and as soon as it disappears, we have a false sense of knowledge which leads us away from truth, rather than toward it. Chaos remains the reality behind appearances, not simply another appearance. Objectification is crucial, therefore, for rendering chaos only: it should not work to dispel it. This is probably the reasoning behind Lily's abstract method of painting, for a valid aesthetic principle must be an outgrowth of vision, and Lily's vision is one that acknowledges the reality of chaos, even while seeking to defeat it. When William Bankes asks her why she has depicted Mrs. Ramsay and James as a purple shadow rather than as identifiable human shapes, Lily replies that she has made no attempt at likenesses because her picture was not so much of them as of her sense of them. Her abstract techniques are, then, objectifications of her thoughts and feelings, not of the subjects which have evoked them. Art attempts to demonstrate perception rather than to delineate appearances, and so it must be able to mirror the chaos it perceives as an integral part of its vision.

Art, though, does more than reflect chaos; it also conquers chaos in the very act of rendering it. By capturing the symbolic moment that embodies enduring truth, the artist may apprehend a coherence in things that normally remains hidden behind the disarray of appearances. And again, it is not a matter of dispelling chaos, but simply of selecting from it that which is palatable to the human imagination and workable for the human mind. In the fluidity of time, truth—when it is found—exists only for the moment, but even so, these moments are to be treasured for the meaning they contain. Lily recognizes such a moment early in the book when she sees the Ramsays watching their children play ball:

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 symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife.

(Pp. 110–11)

And later in the day, while sitting at dinner, she experiences a similar sensation as the kernel of another moment explodes to reveal a harmony symbolizing a universal pattern of coherence:

Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all around them. It partook, she felt … of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

(P. 158)

These, then, are the moments that art must capture in order to transform life into tiny chunks of meaning which help to stay the chaos of the next moment.

While these moments may be sensed instinctively, they can be expressed only through the indirect means of re-creation; and since the meaning emanated not from the moment itself, but from the sensibility of a sensitive perceiver, the truth cannot be caught through a simple depiction of the moment, but must be molded into a vision embodying it as the moment's inner structure. Art may be constructed from chaos, but only through the painstaking process of selecting, organizing, and filtering impressions of reality through vision. As Lily realizes, the total subjectivity of perception, once disciplined and formalized, can refine life by unifying what exists in its raw state as so much disorganized matter: “There might be lovers,” she thinks, “whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays” (p. 286).

It is in the act of transmitting a moment into vision that art assumes a philosophical value, for the moment must be arrested before it can be contemplated; and only art can halt time long enough for us to discern shape, form, and the kernels of meaning that the fluidity of our lives keeps submerged. Lily sees her function as artist at the same time she realizes why Mrs. Ramsay is the great woman she has always thought her to be; for Mrs. Ramsay is herself like a work of art in her ability to hold back life long enough for it to yield answers to our one most desperate question:

What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question, one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here:” Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability.

(Pp. 240–41)

Suddenly perceiving Mrs. Ramsay as a synthesizing agent, Lily has an almost mystical revelation, which dismisses the relevance of ever again asking the meaning of life. The “little daily miracles” are the closest we can ever come to finding answers, for the conception of life as a whole is only another of man's illusions; reality contains only a series of seconds which may be known and even universalized as typical, but which can never be consolidated as if they then formed a unity which they never contained separately. One cannot get at life because that is an abstraction of the intellect; but moments, since they partake of the fluidity of time, are real.

Through her revelation, Lily gains an increased understanding of art's potential in a world of flux. The truth of life is in the moment and capturing the reality of the moment is therefore a miracle. But like Joseph Conrad, Lily sees the immense difficulty of rescuing the moment from its fluid setting:

One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must hold the scene—so—in a vise, and let nothing come in and spoil it. One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, it’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all.

(Pp. 299–300)

Art must put life into a vise and hold it there until its reality becomes discernible, making sure, however, not to tamper with that reality by detaching it from the flux in which it lives. Virginia Woolf suggests her own technique for controlling chaos by describing Lily's conception of the painting which acknowledges chaos on one level while defeating it on another:

Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.

(P. 155)

To have harnessed the strength necessary to bring chaos within the structured and eternal domain of art is already enough to signify that the artist has won the battle of the moment through sheer persistence. We do not, of course, tame chaos simply by capturing it, but we do at least hold it back for a while, and in this sense, the artist of chaos has done all that can possibly be done.

Virginia Woolf's concept of reality is introduced in the very title of the book, which emphasizes not the Lighthouse itself, but the movement toward it, producing an accumulation of multiple relative meanings as we watch it refracted through a succession of different perspectives and points of view. This mode of presentation characterizes every person, scene, and object that we encounter in the novel, and becomes ultimately the only way we can approach its reality.

The bay separating the Ramsay family from the Lighthouse is, for example, a perfect symbol of pure chaos: in its perpetual fluidity, its potential destructiveness as an erosive force, its overwhelming immensity, which devours a man's sense of significance, its flowing rhythms of eternality, which swallow him up in time as well, the sea—now peaceful, now turbulent, soothing or shattering one's nerves—serves as a continual reminder of the undertow beneath all our lives. Yet our sense of this reality is not static, but flickers in and out as our concentration is affected by constant shifts in the other layers of our realities. Early in the book, Mrs. Ramsay suddenly becomes conscious of an inner correspondence to the sound of the waves crashing outside:

The gruff murmur … this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, “How's that? How's that?” of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you—I am your support,” but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

They had ceased to talk; that was the explanation.

(Pp. 27–28)

Although the sound of the waves has not changed, Mrs. Ramsay's perception of it has; the sudden cessation of distracting noises in the foreground brings the background up to a higher level of her consciousness, and her refocused attention and concentration lead her to intuit a new meaning from a familiar sound: this fresh awareness of the emptiness at the core of her life. This reminder of her insignificance, her mortality, her vulnerability both pains and terrifies her, so that while she has not moved from her chair, her entire system has been shocked, her sensibility unstrung, her life changed.

Action is unimportant in the writing of Virginia Woolf because the movement of our bodies cannot change our realities; these are created, changed, and carried exclusively in the mind. In a world of flux, every perception is relative to all the conditions converging at that instant to produce a particular impression in the imagination which alone constitutes its apprehension of reality at that moment. It is in our mental processes that we live out our lives. And there is no ultimate truth to be discovered, only a progression of perspectives to be held simultaneously in the mind. As James finally gets close enough to the Lighthouse to be able to observe all its details, he responds at first with disappointment, until he realizes that his present perception does not negate, but can only modify his previous ones:

So that was the Lighthouse, was it?

No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.

(P. 277)

And Lily, watching from the shore, finds that the constancy of her angle of vision offers no real advantage in her attempt to keep reality frozen long enough to capture it on canvas:

But the wind had freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and the sea changed slightly and the boats altered their positions, the view, which a moment before had seemed miraculously fixed, was now unsatisfactory. The wind had blown the trail of smoke about; there was something displeasing about the placing of the ships.

(P. 286)

Thus does Virginia Woolf keep time flowing through her novel, and insure the constantly shifting perspectives characteristic of cubism as artistic process. The reality of the Lighthouse is never shown in stasis, but in constant revolution as the focal point for each mind trying to find its way out of chaos, but having to refocus, recenter, restructure, and rebuild its reality moment by moment. Even those rare moments of coalescence which solidify experience, unify relationships, and reveal a truth through structure are never presented as ultimate, permanent, or static, but are shown to shatter the second the mind has seized them. Like people posing for a group portrait who disband the instant they hear the camera click, all the atoms flowing together to create the molecule of the moment scatter instantaneously in a release toward entropy. Thus, as Lily's observation of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching their daughter throwing a ball turns into a revelatory moment in which they suddenly become symbolic of the ultimate meaning of marriage—the inner union between husband and wife—she finds that “after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became … Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey watching the children throw catches” (p. 111). Like a bubble breaking on contact with a hard surface, the moment bursts just when the mind seems to have caught it. It can be perceived in flight, but any attempt to arrest its motion will end by losing it altogether. Our perceptions, our very realities cannot be detached from time.

I have discussed Virginia Woolf's vision of chaos as a quiet but powerful, persistent entropic force which moves so slowly and subtly that one can never truly distinguish it from the general currents of a fluid universe. Such a vision seems entirely consistent with the “feathery,” “melting,” “evanescent” quality of the book which distinguishes its style, tone, and movement, and which Virginia Woolf has cited as the natural embodiments of her vision. But where in the novel are the clamps and iron bolts which hold this seemingly flimsy fabric together and fasten it onto the matrix of artistic expression? If art's great value is, as Lily comes to believe, its synthesizing function, how has the author managed to “unify” the chaos she sees at the deepest levels of our lives?

Since chaos is a mental reality, it is the mind, too, which must struggle to provide relief through proper discipline of its own impulses toward order. Reality can be fixed only when the mind can concentrate on a focal point which gathers to it all the lines of diverse energies usually running rampant. Ordinary moments are characterized by parallel lines of thought which never converge, but move independently in separate spheres. Thus, Mrs. Ramsay, walking with her husband, dissipates her mental energies by pursuing two lines simultaneously:

then, she thought, intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh molehills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping down to look, a great mind like this must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men … simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses.

(P. 108)

Obviously, the mind must steady itself before it can organize its impressions long enough to apprehend a controlling idea; but although Mrs. Ramsay is remarkably effective on the level of action, her mind is never terribly successful in combatting the chaos that unsettles her so at the core of her being. It is here, I think, that we can finally come to understand Mrs. Ramsay's enormous respect for her husband, whom she genuinely and consistently considers a “great man,” even though the reader tends to regard him far less favorably. Even Lily Briscoe, for all her superior powers of perception, cannot comprehend until quite late in the book, the “greatness” ascribed to Mr. Ramsay or the basis for his wife's love and devotion for a man so obviously her inferior. But Mrs. Ramsay's respect for her husband has little to do, really, with what he is. Rather, his real value for those who admire him is as an ordering principle, a resistance to the chaos:

It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on—that was his fate, his gift … he kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this guise that he inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley (obsequiously) and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the lawn, profoundly, reverence, and pity, and gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone.

(Pp. 68–69)

In his capacity to confront chaos head-on without being effaced by it, Mr. Ramsay becomes worthy of his wife's awe. Of course, just as courage can often be ascribed to a person's inability to recognize the real danger of his situation, we sense the very limitations of his perception to account for Mr. Ramsay's distinction as a still point in a turning world. While his philosophical investigations do demonstrate one kind of inroad against chaos, his confidence in his discipline impresses us more as presumption than wisdom. Nevertheless, his very presumption makes him a stalwart guardian of order and control which, embodied visually, makes a lasting impact on those who know him. Even Lily is finally able to admit that the man has something about him which causes chaos to recede in his presence. Foolhardy or not, his resoluteness represents something valuable.

Mrs. Ramsay is, of course, too aware to presume that she can contest the chaos she feels in the deepest levels of her mind, but as a mother and hostess, she does achieve in her own life that extraordinary sense of authority which characterizes her, too, as a stake driven into the flood, a marking point for others. Watching her leave a room, Lily notices that “directly she went a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about, went different ways” (p. 168). Like her husband, then, Mrs. Ramsay provides a point of concentration for others around which otherwise dissipated energies gravitate and lock together to form a meaningful, symbolical, ordered image which makes an imprint on the observer's mind that endures long enough to outlast the chaos. Lily's gratitude and respect for Mrs. Ramsay parallels that lady's feelings for her husband: as marking points in the flood, both blend into the central image of the Lighthouse as an ordering principle, a beacon, a refuge, a resistance to the dark, fluid formlessness which underlies our lives. But if Mrs. Ramsay is the chief synthesizer in the novel, how can we explain the continuous presence of Lily Briscoe, who ultimately seems as least as significant as the woman she so admires?

Obviously, the novel is working toward two objectives at once: (1) the delineation of a reality represented by human characters, and (2) the working out of an artistic theory as symbolized by Lily's effort to project her vision of reality onto a blank canvas. I have already noted Lily's revelation that Mrs. Ramsay's greatness was in her ability to provide a unifying point around which the chaos made up of other people fell into a harmonious pattern; but why, then, is her painting not finished at this point? The answer would seem to be that reality cannot be reflected by direct depiction; it can be grasped only when represented indirectly, as it filters through a selective consciousness. It is Lily who has the vision, yet so long as Mrs. Ramsay is alive, she cannot finish her picture because the immediate reality prevents her from achieving the distance requisite to capturing it aesthetically—that is, “ensnaring” it through the indirectness of metaphor. It is only in the third part of the book, when Mrs. Ramsay's charismatic presence is felt solely as a memory, that Lily feels she can finish her painting.

It is no coincidence that her vision crystallizes immediately after she has been contemplating the Lighthouse, for it is only then that she deliberates on how to make the parts of her painting coalesce. As unifying concepts merge unconsciously in her mind, the Lighthouse suddenly becomes a synthesizing symbol for the fluidity surrounding it in exactly the same way that both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have functioned in the first part of the book. Like the jar that Wallace Stevens places in Tennessee, the Lighthouse becomes an organizing principle in a sea of chaos. Lily herself has not yet seen it this way, but she does make the decision to move the tree into the middle of her picture, thereby showing an as yet unconscious awareness of the principle: the particular object being placed in the center is an arbitrary choice, but once that object becomes the central focus, everything immediately gathers around it and becomes ordered.

In the last section of the book, the Lighthouse is seen from all perspectives: from Lily's distant view and from the increasingly closer views of James, Cam, Mr. Ramsay, and the Macalisters as they approach this stark tower in the middle of the water. Seen from multiple perspectives (both psychologically and spatially), the import of the Lighthouse shifts, however slightly, each second that the boat draws nearer (we recall that the vision must be perpetually remade) as one observer surrounds it with his own psychological associations, another sees it as an unapproachable ideal, another as an artistic symbol, and so on. When, in the last chapter, it is seen closeup for the first time, it seems surprisingly insignificant; James is amazed to discover that his enchanted vision from the distance of the shore is nothing but “a stark tower on a bare rock” now that he is face to face with it. Divested of subjective interpretations, the Lighthouse, regardless of proximity, is as meaningless as any building on shore, but that is unimportant: what does count is the meaning people find in it, which renders it as significant as Mrs. Ramsay herself, with whom Lily finally equates it. As the Ramsay family reaches the Lighthouse, Lily suddenly represents it in her picture by drawing a line in the center—and that line is at once the metaphorical expression of both Mr. Ramsay and the Lighthouse. As such, it instantly controls and contains the inner chaos of the human lives on shore, and the outer chaos of the bay's fluidity. Lily is able to say, “I have had my vision” only when she had found a metaphor for it—a symbol to concentrate, centralize, and clarify meaning.

And Virginia Woolf works in exactly the same way: because she has rendered chaos so effectively as a major, ubiquitous element of reality, she must allow her reader, as she has her characters, an axis to keep the centrifugal forces from spinning out of control. This the reader finally finds in Lily herself, for her perception becomes the fundamental organizing principle to which the rest of the novel coheres. It is Lily's imagination which steadies the novel for us, and completes its experience as a meaningful investigation of reality.

Fluid and formless, chaos quite naturally resists our attempts at order, but every time we freeze or structure reality for an instant, we are gaining ground in the struggle to keep our minds on top of the confusion. And this is just what Virginia Woolf does for us as she rescues one image after another from the flood and turns them into powerful symbols which help mark the chaotic channels of our own minds: Lily represents the artist of chaos; the Ramsay home without man symbolizes the infiltration of chaos in our lives, and the Lighthouse functions as the ultimate, conglomerate metaphor for the centralizing factor which resolves the chaos of the author's vision. Such strikingly appropriate, brilliant metaphors are what finally constitute the bolts of iron which clamp the book together. As James Ramsay rides out to the Lighthouse he has been wanting to visit since the first page of the novel, he feels a terror and hatred which he cannot define, but which rests securely at the bottom of the dark abyss within him. Instinctively, he works toward a control of his inner chaos, as

turning back among the many leaves which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one's eyes, now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape.

(P. 275)

Nowhere can we find a better statement of the necessity for metaphor to control chaos, and nowhere can we find a more accurate explanation for the powerful projection of chaos in this book where art earns every bit of meaning extracted from its exhaustive struggle. Even so, the artistic triumph is never anything more than temporary relief from the struggle which defines the sensitive life. There is no more touching testimonial to this depressing truth than Virginia Woolf's own death: walking into the sea, she finally found the only possible permanent relief by submerging herself in the chaos which closed over her at last, drowning out anguish, fatigue, and life itself.

Note

1. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), pp. 95–96. All future page references, cited in parentheses, are to this edition.