SOURCE: “Woolf's Metaphysics of Tragic Vision in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 75, Winter, 1996, pp. 109–32.

[In the following essay, Levy argues that “at the most profound level, To the Lighthouse portrays the journey toward tragic vision, where the object perceived is the transience of the perceiving subject and the tendency of time to efface the structure on which personal stability depends.”]

In “The Brown Stocking,” a much quoted chapter of his celebrated study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Eric Auerbach argues that To the Lighthouse inverts the conventional relation in fiction between inner and outer events: “In Virginia Woolf's case the exterior events have actually lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events, whereas before her time … inner movements preponderately function to prepare and motivate significant exterior happenings.”¹ According to his analysis of the novel, events external to character are subordinate to the subjective musing or “chains of ideas” (477) they evoke, as if the function of the outer world were to provide a stimulus for the inner one: “the exterior objective reality of the momentary present … is nothing but an occasion. … The stress is placed entirely on what the occasion releases, things which are not seen directly but by reflection, which are tied to the present of the framing occurrence which releases them” (478). As a result, the very notion of reality is transformed. That which happens as “exterior occurrence,” though indisputably concrete and actual in its own right, becomes merely the context or frame in which “a more real reality” (477) unfolds. This pre-eminent reality is constituted by the subjective processes (such as rumination and contemplation) activated through experiencing the objective or external world.

Auerbach concludes from his investigation of the real and the more real that the mimetic project of To the Lighthouse is to represent how life is experienced as the ongoing need to formulate its own meaning: “We are constantly endeavoring to give meaning and order to our lives in the past, the present, and the future, to our surroundings, the world in which we live …” (485). Yet, while his reading brilliantly highlights the hermeneutic tendency of character in the novel, it simultaneously obscures the very meaning which this need to interpret intends. For, if the search for meaning is somehow more real than the reality to be explained, the inevitable result of this inquiry will be to devalue the significance of what it explicates. The experience of explaining becomes more important than the experience it explains. Or, to invoke Auerbach's own phrases, the “interpretation of life” enjoys a higher reality than “life itself” (485).

As we shall see, though invaluable for emphasizing the two realities, outer and inner, this exegesis ultimately distorts their relation in the novel. But brief consideration of a later author, Samuel Beckett, whose fiction takes to its logical conclusion the very dichotomy that Auerbach describes, will help us clarify Virginia Woolf's approach to the problem. In Watt, the eponymous hero, bewildered by the unintelligible events in Mr Knott's abode, is consumed with the vain attempt to hypothesize meaning: “the long dwindling supposition that constituted Watt's experience in Mr Knott's house.”² In The Unnamable, the struggle to interpret is not only more real than exterior reality: it is the only reality. For the narrator is now situated inside his own state of absolute perplexity: “Where now? Who now? When now?”³

In To the Lighthouse, characters display a similar tendency to reduce reality to the subjective inquiry concerning it: “For the whole world seemed to have dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a deep basin of reality. …”⁴ But the paradoxical result of such intense introspection is, not to preempt what Auerbach calls “the exterior objective reality” (478), but to deepen the sense of connection with it. The fundamental voyage implied by the title is toward a point of view or perspective from which the polarity between subject and object, inner and outer reality, is temporarily overcome: “What device for becoming, like waters poured into a jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored” (60). Like Mr Ramsay, its distinguished “metaphysician” (44), the novel explicitly treats the question of “[s]ubject and object and the nature of reality” (28). But, whereas he, as professional philosopher, no doubt formulates his propositions in appropriately technical terms, the novel develops a different mode of expression—and one that ultimately concerns, not the distinction between subject and object, but the means of their momentary union.⁵

At the most profound level, To the Lighthouse portrays the journey toward tragic vision, where the object perceived is the transience of the perceiving subject and the tendency of time to efface the structures on which personal stability depends: “It will end, It will end, she said” (74); “this cannot last” (120); “How long would they endure?” (144).⁶ Thus, what is seen ultimately confirms the intrinsic strength of character necessary to perceive it: “But this is what I see; this is what I see” (23); “What could he see? Cam wondered. It was all a blur to her” (235). Yet, just as the tragic vision demands separation and independence, it also involves identification through community; for the harsh truth which it confirms is valid for all who live. This universality, however, entails more than a negative unity, where all inevitably confront the same “oblivion” (158). The most vital function of the tragic vision is to reveal, not merely a common vulnerability to disaster, “in a world of strife, ruin, chaos” (170), but some positive value or good founded on this insecurity and capable of transfiguring the meaning of every life lived.⁷

In To the Lighthouse, the redeeming value derives from the flux of time itself. For once this tragic condition is recognized, life becomes an “adventure” (117) whose wonder is its evanescence, always mingling the familiar with the strange. Inevitable loss, though the fundamental cause of pain, assures newness: “nothing stays; all changes” (204). Every moment can thus become a “treasure” (98), never to be taken for granted: “One wanted, [Lily] thought … 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” (229—my emphasis). Here, as in Auerbach's analysis, we find explicit reference to two levels of reality. But where for him the two levels concern the real and the more real (or the exterior and the interior), the passage before us offers a different dichotomy: “ordinary experience” versus “ecstasy.”

In this ecstasy, the subject is transported out of mere subjectivity by the act of perception; for that which is perceived is no longer just an object registered by the mind and subordinate to it, but a separate existence maintaining itself against ineluctable “nothingness” (144) and hence present with the vibrant immediacy of a “miracle” (229). To perceive in this way is not merely to intend or become aware of an object but to participate perceptually in its own act of being. Therefore, this mode of experience is also called “visionary” (176); for it perceives the object, not as a sense datum whose value depends on interpretation, but as a manifestation of irreducibly independent presence. Life, of course, can be lived only momentarily on this intense level. But it is established in the novel as an ideal—and equally as a reward.

To reach this “sudden intensity” of “vision” (237) or “intensity of mind” (52) is supreme victory of character in the novel, but one whose accomplishment requires surrendering the very illusions of security on which character ordinarily depends. Objects can stand out in the fullness of their own being only if the need to consider them against a subjectively constituted horizon or background of meaning is first overcome. But the task is not an easy one. For the inveterate human tendency, as presented in the novel, is to make objective reality reflect the assurances of stability and purpose which the subject prefers to see in it: “In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water … dreams persisted … that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules …” (150-51—my emphasis). The most importunate intellectual need involves, not truth, but certainty. The first principle which the mind seeks to affirm is security, even if that requires distorting “the nature of reality” (28) in the false “mirrors” (150) of thought. Thus the opposition, already noted, between “ecstasy” and “ordinary experience” (229) presupposes a more fundamental one: that between the tragic vision and mere mirror vision. The tragic vision confronts life or, to use Joyce's more capacious phrase, “the reality of experience”⁸ directly and without the embellishment of persistent “dreams” (150). In contrast, mirror vision sees the meaning of life as “a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself … forms in quiescence when nobler powers sleep beneath” (153).

The passage from mirror to tragic vision thus implies a psychological awakening as vivid as the physical one Lily experiences at the end of the second section: “Her eyes opened wide. Here she was again, she thought, sitting bolt upright in bed. Awake” (163). Significantly, the Lighthouse itself, that magnificent symbol, as we shall see, of the tragic vision which looks unflinchingly at the inevitability of destruction, is described in terms of indefatigably wakeful watchfulness: “Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over the bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw. Nothing now withstood them …” (157). Moreover, in one great scene early in the novel, Mrs Ramsay's own tragic vision is explicitly identified with the Lighthouse beam and opposed to mirror vision.

While contemplating the brevity of life (and of childhood), Mrs Ramsay “suddenly” thinks: “We are all in the hands of the Lord” (74). But just as suddenly she repudiates this thought (“Who had said it? not she”), and affirms that life is lived without divine protection. At that moment, she notices the Lighthouse, flashing rhythmically across the waves. The truth of her own perception is identified with its beam: “She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie” (74—my emphasis). Nowhere in the novel is the opposition between tragic vision and mirror vision more effectively expressed. In gazing at the Lighthouse beam, Mrs Ramsay has the impression of “her own eyes meeting her own eyes,” exactly as would occur were she looking in a mirror. But in this case, there is no mirror. What she sees is not a reflection of her need for security, but profound awareness of her own willingness to perceive the “pitiless” (75) truth about vulnerability: “No happiness lasted” (74). Soon after this recognition, as she continues her contemplation, Mrs Ramsay's mind is flooded with “waves of pure delight” (76) released by the perfect harmony of this moment and by the memory of similar moments of “intense happiness” (75) in the past: “It is enough! It is enough!” (76). Through accepting transience, she finds fulfillment. There is nothing more to ask from life than the fleeting moments of “ecstasy” (76) that occur in it.⁹

But momentary plenitude is not the greatest reward offered by the tragic vision; for if it were, life would have no higher purpose than the accumulation of what Maslow has called “peak experiences.”¹⁰ Repudiating the false reflections of order created by mirror vision and acknowledging the “gigantic chaos” (153) to which life is necessarily exposed enables a more durable and authentic order to be constituted—one whose validity is founded on the ephemeral: “Mrs R 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” (183—my emphasis). This extraordinary union of the momentary and the permanent, chaos and shape, flux and stability, is the seminal paradox of Woolf's tragic vision. The answer to the recurrent questions about the purpose and meaning of life depends on it: “What does one live for?” (103); “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?” (165); “What is the meaning of life?” (183); “Who knows what we are, what we feel?” (195); “What does it mean? How do you explain it all?” (203).

The source of these questions is the tragic awareness of mutability—that “eternal passing and flowing” (183) which, in virtue of its ceaseless alteration, seems without definite or intrinsic meaning. But this same unintelligible mutability becomes the medium in which immutable meaning abides and can be perceived: “there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out … in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby” (121). In this formulation, the flux of time (“the flowing”) is the medium through which form (“coherence”) manifests itself (“shines out”), just as in the Thomistic aesthetic (as Maritain paraphrases it) “beauty is [the] splendour of form shining on the proportioned parts of the matter” (20—original emphasis).¹¹ Though the Woolfian and Thomistic interpretations of art and reality are radically different, pursuing the implications of this important connection between them will deepen our understanding of the novel and the role of the moment in it. For the relation between matter and form in the Thomistic metaphysics of substance (derived directly from Aristotle) is analogous to that between time and the moment in the tragic vision expressed in To the Lighthouse. But before showing how the concepts of matter and form apply to the novel, we must clarify their original philosophical meaning.

According to Aristotle, Being presupposes intelligibility: that which is must have a distinct and unambiguous identity in order to be known as itself and nothing else. As Owens explicates, “Entity implies determination”¹²—and “determination” here means to be provided with differentiating or specifying attributes. Now that which par excellence is determinately constituted in its own identity and no other is substance or the individual thing. Hence actuality belongs primarily to it. As Windelband explains: “The truly real is the individual thing constituted in itself by its form.”¹³ But every individual thing in the natural world (as opposed to the immaterial world of the heavens) is subject to a process of development or becoming whereby its own distinct identity tends toward full expression (entelechy). In virtue of this tendency, each substance is necessarily a composite of form and matter.

Form designates the “whatness” or specific identity of the substance which, through the process of self-realization just mentioned, progressively achieves complete determination, as the form of treeness is progressively fulfilled as the individual tree itself grows. In contrast, matter is understood as that which underlies this process. In Father Copleston's words, matter is “the ultimate basis of the real changes that [substance] undergoes”;¹⁴ to Owens, it is “the substrate of generation and corruption”;¹⁵ to Ross, “Matter [is] that which is presupposed by change.”¹⁶ Since this notion of matter will be invaluable in clarifying the Woolfian notion of time, some further explication of it is necessary.

The crucial point to emphasize is that Aristotelian matter is not material in the conventional sense. As the metaphysical counterpart of form, it is itself “wholly formless” (Mat. 199, n.6.) and “conceptually indeterminate” (His. 1:144). It is the thing considered only as bare subject disposed, as Owens explains, “to receive predication” (Mat. 203). As such, matter signifies the potency or aptitude to manifest form, as Windelband succinctly states: “The matter or … substratum is the possibility of that which, in the complete thing, has become actual or real by means of the form” (His. 1:148). It is crucial to recognize with Owens that, unlike the matter studied by physics, Aristotelian matter has no physical attributes: “Nor can the Aristotelian matter be represented by anything capable of detection by means of a pointer-reading. There is nothing about it, in itself, that could register in quantitative terms” (Mat. 201). Matter is simply that whose very “indeterminateness” (Doc. 345) is presupposed by the process of developing determination or form.

Equipped with these concepts, we can return to the novel. There we find a similar emphasis on matter and form, but one pertaining to a reality that is temporal, not substantial. Just as matter is the substratum of change in the Aristotelian metaphysics, so time is the substratum of change in reality as perceived by the tragic vision. But this time is not as innocuously abstract as that expressed in the conventional philosophical notion compactly summarized by Whitehead: “Time is the ordered succession of durationless instants.”¹⁷ Instead, tragic time is a seething flux of generation and corruption, a formless “chaos” (183) of coming to be and passing away, with no purpose other than its own continuation: “… as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself” (154). But from this formless flux elements can be retrieved and ordered so as to create one composite experience whose “wholeness” or integral form becomes a means of illumining the meaning of the lives in which it is remembered: “There might be lovers 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” (218–19—my emphasis).

These “globed compacted things” are Woolfian moments, as the novel defines them. The description of moments as “things” highlights the transposition of the language of substance from its original context to one involving the tragic experience of time. Just as, in the Aristotelian doctrine of substance, form achieves “phenomenal manifestation” (Doc. 1:143) only through the matter it orders, so in To the Lighthouse the moment achieves form only through giving stable “coherence” (121) to the disparate and transient elements in time which it comprises. Yet, these moments are not to be construed as identical units following each other in “ordered succession” according to Whitehead's notion of time noted earlier. The Woolfian moment is not so much a measure of time as the principle by which the experience of time achieves structure and intelligibility: “Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after” (121). Just as form “constitutes the ground of the coherence of individual characteristics” (Doc. 1:142), so the moment constitutes the ground of the “coherence in things” actually experienced (121). And just as matter, though itself bereft all characteristics, becomes the “vehicle of some conceptual determination,”¹⁸ so time, in the tragic vision, though itself mere flux, becomes the vehicle of that luminous conceptual determination which is the moment that “shines out … in the face of the flowing, the fleeting … (121).

Yet whereas, according to Aristotle, the emergence of form from matter typically results from the natural process of development, in the tragic vision the emergence of form from the flux of time depends on some creative agency, as in the example of Mrs Ramsay: “… she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite … something … which survived, after all these years, complete … and it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art” (182–83—my emphasis).¹⁹

The locus classicus for the creation of a moment occurs during the Boeuf en Daube dinner party near the end of the first chapter. At first each diner is isolated in unshared preoccupations: Mr Carmichael swills his soup, Mr Ramsay deplores such “disgusting” (110) gluttony, Charles Tansley yearns for his books, Lily remembers her painting, and Mr Bankes wishes he were “free to work” (102). Eventually, however, through the influence of Mrs Ramsay, all are “united” (112) by participation in the same experience: “There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity … (121—my emphasis). Significantly, the phrase, “There it was,” indicating the sudden intuition of presence, recurs later as Mrs Ramsay reads one of Shakespeare's sonnets (No. 98): “And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here—the sonnet” (139—my emphasis). The juxtaposition of these two passages obviously suggests that somehow the moment, like the sonnet, also expresses the “essence sucked out of life and held rounded here.” The suggestion is reinforced when we remember that sphericity is attributed not only to the “rounded” essence expressed in the sonnet but also to moments as “globed compacted things” (218–19), each of which moreover, as we have noted, is “almost like a work of art” (182–83).

To clarify the essence or form expressed by the moment, we must return to the description of the dinner party. As they engage in animated conversation, the diners are “composed … 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” (112). This is a crucial image founded on an extraordinary paradox. While emphasizing the opposition between “inside” and “outside,” the image simultaneously implies their identity or congruence. Initially, inside and outside are opposed, because the former appears as “order and dry land” and the latter as a rippling “reflection” of wavering and vanishing figures. Yet this opposition yields to the pressure of a subtle but insistent irony. Since the objects revealed by the glass appear to be reflected, the window is here associated with a mirror. But since the diners are facing the glass, they themselves become the implied referent of the “reflection” appearing in it, as if the seemingly reflected figures that “wavered and vanished” mirrored their evanescence.

This unusual mirror rewards closer examination. Ordinarily, no object more effectively establishes individual identity than a mirror. A subject knows himself or herself as this particular self by affirming the relation of sameness obtaining between himself or herself and the reflection.²⁰ But instead of establishing individual identity, the implied mirror in the passage before us reflects its inevitable disintegration. Hence, the dinner party moment constructs what might be called the tragic mirror (the contrary of the false mirror connected earlier with “mirror vision”). To see oneself in the tragic mirror is to see one's own identity vanish “waterily” (112) into the same flux as that which dissolves everyone else's.

Yet, by thus foregrounding flux, the mirror here paradoxically reveals a principle of identity more stable than self-relatedness or ipsorelation. That principle is the “common feeling” (176, 218) or “community of feeling” (131) through which the moment itself is constituted and through which the separate and transient identity of each participant is subsumed by “the unity of the whole” (62): “that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically … it was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps, were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose …” (131—my emphasis). As a result, the notion of flux (“it was all one stream”) receives a different signification. Flux now portends, not the tragic extinction of individual identity, but its subsumption by a higher order of unity than that which individual identity sustains.

Thus, the tragic mirror symbolized by the glass-enclosed room reflects the extraordinary paradox on which Woolf's tragic vision is founded.²¹ On the one hand, the momentaneity of the moment implies the existential transience of each of its participants. But on the other hand, the collective experiencing of this momentaneity constitutes a supervenient unity that is said to partake of “eternity” (121); for its value abides “for ever after” (121), even though the moment engendering it has elapsed. To resolve this paradox, we must focus on the conclusion of the dinner party moment. On leaving the room, Mrs Ramsay turns back for one last look at the moment which has just ended: “With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene that was vanishing even as she looked, and then … it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past” (128). The terminal clause in this passage deserves close attention; for here the moment is described as simultaneously ending and undergoing transformation. After reaching the term of its development in the present, the moment ends but in doing so continues to develop; for it becomes the past: “it had become … already the past.”

This new opposition between ending and developing clarifies the earlier one concerning momentaneity and permanence that we found at the ontological core of the moment. If, after elapsing, the present moment is actually to become the past and not merely vanish into the undifferentiated flux of time, it must be remembered. The past which the present moment becomes depends for its very being on being remembered by a subsequent present moment—or series of them. For the past, to be is to be perceived, by memory. What is permanent in the moment pertains to the memory of it as the past. What is transient in the moment pertains to its inevitable elapsing in the present.

Here the distinction between the Woolfian and conventional notions of time is crucial. In the conventional notion, time is conceived as a conveniently ordered series extending backward and forward as past and future from any present point or instant. According to this view, the past is construed as a segment of time which the present moment automatically joins after expiry, subsisting there unchanged except for temporal position. But as we saw when consulting Whitehead, this is precisely the notion of time which the tragic vision dispels. Time in this novel is not linear, but “chaotic” (166). It is an indeterminate “fleeting” (121) which must be given “coherence” (121) in order to achieve structure and meaning. Under these conditions, there is no past in the sense of a separate section or compartment of time distinct in kind from the present and future. There is simply an undifferentiated temporal expanse, sometimes symbolized in To the Lighthouse by the nocturnal ocean where “our frail barks founder in darkness” (6). Indeed, the most devastating result of tragedy is to destroy the flimsy compartments separating the tenses, so that the present, losing its proper boundaries, seems engulfed by a sea of meaningless duration which heaves relentlessly in every direction: “… as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut and they floated up here, down there. … How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too” (166).

The extraordinary transition in focus here from the vast sea of time to the empty coffee cup invites examination. To the victims of tragic loss, time seems at once boundless and void of significance; for what once was is now no more than shattered wreckage floating precariously in the memory. Each day, however beautiful, succumbs to the inexorable necessity by which “night … succeeds to night” (145), and life itself seems but “a little strip of time” (69) tenuously suspended above the “waters of annihilation” (205). But when the sheer passage of time is seen as the sole abiding reality, and everything occurring in it appears as the mere elapsing of adjectives that qualify time temporarily but are themselves evanescent and hence ultimately “unreal” (166), then a deeper understanding of both time and reality can be achieved. When time is suffered as “aimless” (166) flux that “eats away the ground we stand on …” (52), a “passing and flowing” (183) in which “nothing stays; all changes” (204), the very function of memory changes.

Ordinarily, the function of memory is to recall the past, to summon it into mental presence. But in the midst of the tragic agon depicted in the novel, when the present seems to contain nothing but scattered memories of a past into which it too must inevitably vanish, to remember the past is to be aware only of absence and futility. Remembering, in these circumstances, is strangely similar to forgetting, because it now heightens awareness of loss, not retention. To remember is to intensify awareness of a void where once there was presence, an emptiness that no future can fill, an appallingly spreading darkness where once there was light. But from this nadir of despair, memory enables a staged ascent toward the sublimity of tragic vision. Though not clearly differentiated in the text, these stages are implicit in the narration, and can be discriminated by analysis. A vigorous dialectic unfolds through these stages, wherein a certain thought or insight engenders its own antithesis so that resolution must be sought in a higher order of unity which, in turn, generates its own contradiction and so on until the ultimate resolution is reached in the moment of tragic vision.²²

STAGE 1—DISTANCE:

The longer memory remembers, the farther recedes the past which is recalled, as Lily herself recognizes when grieving for Mrs Ramsay: “She recedes further and further from us” (198). But this very confirmation of the temporal distance between remembered past and remembering present can overcome the grief it entails; for the object of nostalgic longing becomes “… something receding in which one has no longer any part” (188). Hence, instead of evoking pain, memory can achieve detachment from the past, with the result that the value of the past as a guide for the present can eventually be illumined.

STAGE 2—MOMENTANEITY:

As the past becomes more remote, the present becomes more immediate. Past and future, as points of departure and destination, seem temporarily withdrawn or bracketed, so that only the momentaneity of the fleeting present remains: “[Lily] could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller … knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again” (220). Here momentaneity or transience undergoes revaluation. Instead of reducing the present to a succession of instants, each equivalently meaningless because inevitably replaced by the next, awareness of momentaneity now gives supreme value to the present as that which is unrepeatably unique—and hence, by implication, uniquely memorable or worthy of remembrance: “he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.” But paradoxically, the consecutive momentaneity of these images ensures that they can never be remembered with the distinct individuality which constitutes their claim for attention in the present. For as swiftly as the train carries the traveller toward new perceptions in the future, so the present ones recede into the past where they become too numerous and distant to recall clearly or even differentiate.²³

STAGE 3—ABSTRACT MEMORY:

The novel elsewhere emphasizes this paradoxical tendency of memory to become an increasingly complex and intricate accumulation of forgotten content: “He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had lain down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold, incessantly upon his brain …” (192). As accumulated in memory, the past has no intelligible form, and subsists as a “vast imbrication” (to interpolate a Beckettian phrase) of overlayed and undifferentiated content.²⁴ Hence, the function of recollection in To the Lighthouse is not simply to recall what was forgotten. It involves more than “the actualizing … of memory which has become merely potential, i.e. has disappeared from consciousness” (to invoke a passage from Ross's discussion of Aristotelian memory).²⁵ Memory in the novel does not provide a mere inventory of what once was present, but instead determines what is essential in that which is recalled: “She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach it; separate it off; clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends of things, and so to hold it before her …” (129–30).

Thus, the function of memory is to abstract the form or fundamental meaning of the past from the myriad particulars in which it is concealed, as Lily recognizes when remembering Mrs Ramsay: “… that essence … that abstract one made of her …” (203).²⁶ In becoming the past, the present moment loses its inviolable singularity, and becomes matter for the formation of a larger unity. Just as conception is the act by which the mind understands its own content, so recollection is the act by which the mind orders the past into formal clarity, and allows its form—its intelligible structure or meaning—to shine out from the recollected matter in which it is embedded. In fact, To the Lighthouse provides an unexpectedly profound gloss of Wittgenstein's famous dictum: “Man learns the concept of the past by remembering.”²⁷ Just as, in preparation for Mr Ramsay's return, the neglected objects inside the “ruined” (158) house must be “rescued from the pool of Time” (159—my emphasis) by the toiling charwomen, so by means of focussed contemplation can particulars be arduously retrieved from the flux into which they have lapsed, then rearranged and perfected so that, as shown by a passage quoted earlier, memory becomes a creative act which actually constitutes the remembered past and thus transforms the meaning of the remembering present: “There might be lovers 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 … over which thought lingers, and love plays” (218–19).

A detailed expression of this process occupies much of the concluding chapter where Lily's act of painting, synchronized with Mr Ramsay's sailing to the Lighthouse, ultimately symbolizes the act of rememoration: “She went on tunneling her way into her picture, into the past” (197).²⁸ Painting and remembering are further linked by the imagery pertaining to each. The physical act of “dipping her brush” (229) into the palette is suggested in the description of remembering: “she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art” (183).²⁹ But the tendency to abstract the form of the past from the matter comprising it draws attention from the present, and risks reducing it to the mere occasion of rememoration.

STAGE 4—UNIFICATION OF PAST AND PRESENT:

Once again a contradiction must be resolved at a higher level of unity—in this case, one where past and present are fused in one sublime moment of comprehensive awareness. The ultimate purpose of Lily's rememoration is to use the past as a painter might use the colours in her palette—as matter to be formed into the expression of her own vision of reality in the present. The past is “illumined” (195) by the perspective in the present which it enables and focusses. In this context, the description of the canvas confronting Lily before she begins to paint is extremely significant. Glaring at her “with its uncompromising white stare” (178), the canvas is perceived as a “presence … which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention” (180). The perspectival imperative expressed by the blank canvas can be explicated by juxtaposition. The “white stare” of the canvas corresponds to the “sudden stare” (157) of the Lighthouse and to the “serious stare from [Mrs Ramsay's] eyes of unparalleled depth …” (58–59). These associations suggest that, just as Mrs Ramsay during her communion with the Lighthouse identifies her own “searching” view of life with its beam (“it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes”—74), so Lily in remembering must identify with the “uncompromising white stare” of the canvas, probing for reality “at the back of appearances” (180). Through truthfully “illumin[ing] the darkness of the past” (195), the perspective reached by Lily in the present can become a beacon that “shines out” (121) across the welter of experience, “the waste of the years” (42), like the Lighthouse beam across a tumultuous sea.

To do so, Lily must exploit her own need for the past as the means of focussing her perspective in the present. Though she remains unaware of her own strategy, the narrative vividly implies it through an extraordinary interpolation. As Lily succumbs to “grief” (172), her longing for Mrs Ramsay becomes overwhelming: “To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain” (203). Suddenly the narrative of her “anguish” (205) is interrupted by a brief description of Macalister's boy baiting a hook with a small “square” (205) of flesh cut from a living fish which he then throws back into the sea. The narrative immediately returns to Lily whose “pain” (205) grows so intense that she falls (metaphorically) into “the waters of annihilation” (205). The interpolation of the brief Macalister section between the much longer sections concerning Lily has powerful implications. Just as Macalister's boy inflicts pain on the fish in order to catch a bigger one, so Lily (unconsciously) increases her agony concerning loss in order eventually to achieve her own tragic vision. It is as if Macalister's fish willed the excision of its own flesh in order to enjoy enhanced sight on returning to the sea. For Lily's experience of vision in the present (“I have had my vision”—237) is gained only by forcing herself to concentrate on the painful loss of the past: “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” (229).

Her arduous concentration is eventually rewarded by the sudden apparition of Mrs Ramsay, manifested as “an odd-shaped triangular shadow” suddenly cast on the step as if by someone seated in the drawing-room beside the window (229). Overcoming consuming grief (“to want and want and not to have”), Lily incorporates this presence into the retrospective moment she is experiencing with such equanimity that the invisible figure knitting “her reddish-brown stockings” (230) comes to signify, not just the deceased Mrs Ramsay, but the extraordinary facility for unifying awareness which Mrs Ramsay displayed and which memory of her inspires in Lily. Mrs Ramsay's characteristic act, knitting, beautifully epitomizes her gift for unifying the awareness of others in a shared moment which each remembers ever after: “… she brought together this and that and then this, and so made … something … which … survived, after all these years, complete …” (182). But now the “effort of merging” (96) is exerted by Lily in a different way, not with others but in the solitude of artistic creation when, by focussing on the past, she achieves her moment of “vision” (237) in the present.

The significance of this achievement is clarified by Mrs Ramsay's posthumous manifestation as an “odd-shaped triangular shadow” (228)—an image obviously associated with the “wedge-shaped core of darkness” (72) with which she once identified in moments of solitude: “All the being and the doing … evaporated; and one shrunk … to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others” (72).³⁰ In this state, Mrs Ramsay experiences herself a pure perspective, able in meditation or memory to “go anywhere”: “Her horizon seemed to her limitless” (73). Throughout the novel, perspective is deemed the essence of selfhood or “being oneself” (72); to be is to perceive, as evident, for example, in the aversion of the Ramsay children to Charles Tansley: “It was him—his point of view …” (10—my emphasis).³¹ But perspective is ordinarily limited by the need to be seen and validated or to see only the assurances which insecurity and importunity demand. Once these limitations are overcome or at least suspended, the “point of view” intrinsic to a given character can be focussed more freely—and more profoundly so as to reveal the truth “at the back of appearances” (180).

Lily's approach toward vision is synchronized with that of Mr Ramsay who, as Lily stands on the terrace painting, undertakes a literal voyage to the Lighthouse, in a sailboat with the Macalisters (father and son), and two of his own children, James and Cam. As with Lily, here the approach toward the moment of tragic vision is coordinated with a physical act. But unlike Lily's, Mr Ramsay's introspection is only implied or suggested, not directly expressed. In the boat, he reads “a little shiny book with covers mottled like a plover's egg” (208), while allowing James to steer as helmsman. On reaching the Lighthouse, Mr Ramsay does indeed seem to have hatched into a new perspective on life. Whereas, in an earlier period of his life, self-doubt compelled him to intrude as a “beak of brass” upon his wife, demanding “sympathy” (44) and self-image reassurance, Mr Ramsay at last gains the self-confidence that allows him to foster the self-confidence of his son, without feeling that his own worth is thereby threatened. Instead of criticizing his son as always in the past, he now praises him, to the latter's astonished delight: “He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody take a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him” (234).³² Moreover, instead of “dramatizing” (172) his feelings in order to impress, dominate, or exploit others, Mr Ramsay now displays courageous confidence in his own independence: “He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, ‘there is no God’ …” (236).

At the core of this confidence is a new attitude toward time. Instead of seeking pity for what time has taken (“You will find us much changed”—168), Mr Ramsay now becomes aware of the moral stamina that has carried him this far. Instead of arousing “[h]is immense self-pity” (173), the suffering imposed by time finally awakens a profound self-respect born of reliance on his own endurance. Indeed, Mr Ramsay's voyage through spatial distance is described in terms that also suggest movement through time or temporal distance. For just as the passage of time causes the dead Mrs Ramsay to recede “further and further from us” (198) so, from Lily's perspective, Mr Ramsay in the boat becomes “more and more remote” (217).³³ The linkage between spatial and temporal movement is reinforced by the fact that the much delayed voyage to the Lighthouse is first referred to as an enterprise to be undertaken in the future: “Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow …” (5). Hence, ten years later when the aged Mr Ramsay finally does sail to the Lighthouse, the voyage comes to signify his acceptance of the inevitable movement of time toward the future and away from the past.

This development is clarified by his gaze. The island which he perceives in the distance from his vantage point alongside the Lighthouse appears to have been volatilized—in the same way that the past itself has disappeared: “They watched him … staring at the frail blue shape which seemed like the vapour of something that had burnt itself away” (235). To look at an object which seems to be no longer there is to become aware of his own triumphant continuation and to affirm the independence of his own subjectivity. For what he sees on this occasion is the courage and clarity of his own point of view just as, during her communion with the Lighthouse beam, Mrs Ramsay becomes aware of her own fearlessly honest perspective: “it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes …” (74). The connection between these two moments of vision is reinforced in another way. For Mr Ramsay's atheistic attitude here obviously recalls that of Mrs Ramsay who, on seeing the Lighthouse beam long ago during solitary contemplation, “purifi[ed] out of existence that lie … [that] [w]e are all in the hands of the Lord” (74).³⁴

The juxtapositioning of these two moments of tragic vision, when the ultimate object of perception of vision concerns the character's own point of view, entails a third. As Mr Ramsay looks back at the island, Lily at the same moment looks toward the Lighthouse which she can no longer see: “‘He must have reached it,’ said Lily Briscoe aloud, feeling suddenly completely tired out. For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away in a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost” (236). Thus, in the closing passages, the three moments of tragic vision in the novel—Mrs. Ramsay's, Mr Ramsay's, and Lily's—are startlingly triangulated, giving special significance to the “triangular” (228) shape of the “wedge of darkness” (73) already symbolic of Mrs Ramsay's perspective in the solitude of contemplation.

In all three of these moments, the characters concerned are exalted above the strain and mundanity of “ordinary experience” (229), and achieve the experience of “ecstasy” (76, 229). In this state, momentarily liberated from practical preoccupations as well as from self-image concerns with “inadequacy” and “insignificance” (23), each triumphantly identifies with his or her own perspective on life.³⁵ It is a moment of supreme fulfillment, when selfhood, to borrow Santayana's phrase, is resolved into a “comprehensive and impartial view” whose object is the tragic meaning of experience.³⁶ According to Santayana, “this synthesis and objectification of experience, constitutes the liberation of the soul and the essence of sublimity” (164). In fact, Santayana's description of the sublime applies so precisely to the moments of tragic vision in To the Lighthouse—even to the point of emphasizing the same notions of ecstasy, blurring of the object, and triumphant achievement of perspective—that our inquiry can approach closure with it:

It is the pleasure of contemplation reaching such an intensity that it begins to lose its objectivity, and to declare itself, what it always fundamentally was, an inward passion of the soul. For while in the beautiful we find the perfection of life by sinking into the object, in the sublime we find a purer and more inalienable perfection by defying the object altogether. The surprised enlargement of vision, the sudden escape from our ordinary interests and the identification of ourselves with something … much more abstract and inalienable than our changing personality … carries us away from the blurred objects before us, and raises us into a sort of ecstasy.

(167)

The more intimate to himself the tragedy he is able to look back upon with calmness, the more sublime the calmness is. … For the more of the accidental vesture of life we are able to strip ourselves of, the more naked and simple is the surviving spirit; the more complete its superiority and unity, and, consequently, the more unqualified its joy.

(163)

In Mrs Ramsay's words, “It is enough! It is enough!” (76).

Notes

1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1953), 475. Hereafter, cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953; New York: Grove, 1959), 131.

3. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, translated by Samuel Beckett and Patrick Bowles (New York: Grove, 1958), 291.

4. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 203. All further references to this edition will be cited in parentheses within the text.

5. For an application of concepts formulated by Lacan and Kristeva to a discussion of the subject-object relation in terms of the damage caused by love to both the lover and the beloved, see Sheldon Brivic, “Love as Destruction in Woolf's To the Lighthouse,” Mosaic 27.3 (1994): 65-85. In contrast, William Handley reads the novel as a critique or deconstruction of the “[s]ubject-object philosophy [that] positions subjects toward each other as objects to be dominated [by the interpretive frame in which the judging subject places them].” See William R. Handley, “The Housemaid and the Kitchen Table: Judgment, Economy, and Representation in To the Lighthouse,” in Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variation, Selected Papers from the Second Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey (Pace U. Press, 1993), 314.

6. Cf. Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Hogarth, 1965), 393: “The passing of time … there is only the futility and insensibility of nature, its life where, as in our own, before and after have no meaning. …”

7. Compare F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 3rd ed. (Oxford U. Press, 1958), 107: “For if it is part of the function of every great artist to transform his age, the tragic writer does not do so by delivering an abstract idealization of life, but by giving to the people who live in the age a full reading of its weakness and horror; yet, concurrently, by revealing some enduring potentiality of good to be embraced with courage and with an ecstatic sense of its transfiguring glory.”

8. See James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 253.

9. For a discussion of Mrs Ramsay's communion with the Lighthouse in terms of Indian mysticism, see Jack Stewart, “Light in To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century Literature 23.3 (1977): 380. In contrast, Su Reid, The Critics Debate: To the Lighthouse (London: Macmillan, 1991), 88, compares Mrs Ramsay's “non-signifying in the lighthouse beam” with “… Kristeva's idea of the semiotic, the store within consciousness of non-figurative experience.”

10. See Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton: Nostrand, 1962), 67-108.

11. See Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. F. Scanlan (New York: Scribners, 1930), 20. For Stephen Dedalus’ famous interpretation of this doctrine (derived from the Summa Theologica 1a, 39, 8), see Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Note 8), 213: “The radiance [Aquinas' concept of claritas] of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing.” For a discussion of this passage, see S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper: A Study of James's Joyce's Ulysses (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 47-55.

12. Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1951), 333. Hereafter, cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated Doc.

13. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, trans. James H. Tufts, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (1901; New York, Harper, 1958), 1:141. Hereafter, cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated His.

14. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, 9 vols. (Garden City, New York: Image, 1966), 1:2:50.

15. Joseph Owens, “Matter and Predication in Aristotle,” in Aristotle: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. M. E. Moravcsik (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1967), 198, n.6. Hereafter, cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated Mat.

16. Sir David Ross, Aristotle, 5th ed. (London: Methuen, 1949), 167.

17. See Alfred North Whitehead, The Interpretation of Science: Selected Essays, ed. A. H. Johnson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 43. Compare the refutation of this notion of time in A. C. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (1893; Oxford U. Press, 1930), 33: “If you take time as a relation between units without duration, then the whole time has no duration, and is not time at all.” A similar point is made by Gaston Berger, “A Phenomenological Approach to the Problem of Time,” trans. Daniel O’Connor, Readings in Existential Phenomenology, ed. Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 191: “… time is made up of instants, but an instant is nothing. An ideal limit between the future and the past, it has neither thickness nor consistency.”

18. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle, 2nd ed., trans. Richard Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 382.

19. But Lucio P. Ruotolo, “The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf's Novels,” in Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Margaret Homans (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993), 170, devalues Mrs Ramsay's ability to create indelible memories: “Ideas that remain ‘intact’ are ideas ill-disposed to change.” According to Ruotolo, such ideas smack of “the absolutism of totalitarian ideology.”

20. For further discussion of this point, see Eric P. Levy, “‘Company’: The Mirror of Beckettian Mimesis,” Journal of Beckett Studies 8 (1982): 100; 95-104.

21. But, according to Kathleen Kendoza, “‘Life stand still here’: The Frame Metaphor in To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf Quarterly 3.3-4 (1978): 266, n. 23, the “window-mirror image can best be understood in terms of Gestalt theory of perception.”

22. Howard Harper, Between Language and Silence: The Novels of Virginia Woolf (Louisiana State U. Press, 1982), 139, posits a dialectic in To the Lighthouse founded on the “two states of consciousness described by Bergson, in which time is experienced as either durational and leading to freedom or as immutable and leading to necessity.” For an earlier formulation of this dichotomy, see James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (U. of California Press, 1954), 43-44. For other discussions of Bergson and To the Lighthouse, see Kendoza, “Life stand still here,” (Note 16), 255-56; J. H. Roberts, “Toward Virginia Woolf,” Virginia Quarterly Review 10 (1934): 587-602; and William Troy, “Virginia Woolf and the Novel and Sensibility,” in Virginia Woolf: “To the Lighthouse”: A Casebook, ed. M. Beja (London: Macmillan, 1970), 85-89.

23. For a similar view of the past, see David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge U. Press, 1985), 214-15: “No historical account can recover the totality of past events, because their content is virtually infinite.”

24. See Samuel Beckett, How It Is trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1964), 140.

25. Ross, Aristotle (Note 16), 144.

26. In this context, it is useful to cite Father Copleston's definition of abstraction: “To abstract means to isolate intellectually the universal apart from the particularizing notes.” See Copleston, A History of Philosophy (Note 14), 2:2:110.

27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), Y231e.

28. Many critics emphasize the influence of Roger Fry on Lily's aesthetics. See John Mepham, Criticism in Focus: Virginia Woolf (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992), 41; D. Dowling, Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf (London: Macmillan, 1985), 96-98. For a contrary opinion, see T. Matro, “Only Relations: Vision and Achievement in To the Lighthouse,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 99 (1984): 212-24. According to Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton U. Press, 1970), 75, emphasis on perspective “… is what separates [Woolf] most clearly from the Post-Impressionists.”

29. In contrast, several critics interpret the act of creativity in the novel as a symbol of the act of creativity represented by the novel itself. See J. Hillis Miller, “The Rhythm of Creativity in To the Lighthouse,” in Modernism Reconsidered, ed. Robert Kiely (Harvard U. Press, 1983), 167-89; Pamela L. Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself (U. of Illinois Press, 1991), 33-39; and Harvena Richter, “Hunting the Moth: Virginia Woolf and the Creative Imagination,” in Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Morris Beja (Boston: Hall, 1985), 203.

30. W. R. Thickstun, Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel (London: Macmillan, 1988), 118, relates Mrs Ramsay's “wedge of darkness” to Keats' notion of negative capability.

31. According to Tori Haring-Smith, “Private and Public Consciousness in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,” in Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb (Troy, New York: Whitson, 1983), 156, characters “define themselves” by their perceptions.

32. For Oedipal interpretations of James' relation to Mr Ramsay, see Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 68-69; Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (U. of Chicago Press, 1989), 46-58; Maria Diabattista, “To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Winter's Tale,” in Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, ed. Ralph Freedman (U. of California Press, 1980), 161-88. Perhaps the most extreme Freudian interpretation of the novel is that of Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 87, who explicates Mrs Ramsay's celebrated knitted stocking as “a counter-phallus.” See also Mary Jacobus, “‘The Third Stroke’: Reading Woolf with Freud,” in Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan Sheridan (London: Verso, 1988), 93-110. Other critics emphasize James' developmental shift in emphasis from paternal to institutional and political tyranny. See James Batchelor, Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels (Cambridge U. Press, 1991), 107; and Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (U. of California Press, 1986), 195.

33. For the use, in dreams, of spatial distance as a symbol of temporal distance, see Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Pelican, 1964, 1973), 55, vol. 2 of The Pelican Freud Library, 15 vols., 1973-1986.

34. Yet Louise A. Poresky, The Elusive Self: Psyche and Spirit in Virginia Woolf's Novels (U. of Delaware Press, 1981), 128, identifies the lighthouse with God; N. C. Thakur, The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf (Oxford U. Press, 1965), 79, views the Lighthouse as a “symbol of the Eternal and the Immutable.”

35. The polar opposite of this interpretation emphasizing the fulfillment of self through the achievement of tragic vision is that which stresses the loss of self. See David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (1942; Binghamton: New Directions, 1963), 86: “To reach the Lighthouse is … to surrender the uniqueness of one's ego to an impersonal reality.” See also James Naremore, The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (Yale U. Press, 1973), 150, who emphasizes the intense desire to lose the self through love or union.”

36. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory, (1896; New York: Collier, 1961), 164. Hereafter, cited parenthetically in the text.