Caracciolo, Leaping Into Space

Poetics Today 31:2 (Summer 2010) doi 10.1215/03335372-2009-020© 2010 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Leaping into Space: The Two Aesthetics of To the Lighthouse

Marco CaraccioloUniversity of Bologna, Comparative Literature

Abstract This essay argues against the prevalent view of the aesthetics implicit in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. It is an aesthetics of closure, an attempt to make “of the moment something permanent” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 176), which is usually associated (as are Woolf ’s own theoretical statements) with the novel. This “formal-ism,” no doubt related to Roger Fry’s art criticism, takes fictional shape in the char-acter of Mrs. Ramsay. In fact, it is by bringing life to a standstill, enclosing it in crys-talline “moments of being” (Woolf 1976), that Mrs. Ramsay struggles against the grasp of time. However, this aesthetics is shown to be illusory and self-deceptive: the very opposition between humanity and nature stems from the human desire to com-prehend and thus reduce to reason (and language) what the text constructs as irre-ducible. Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetics gives way to the aesthetics of virtuality enacted by Lily Briscoe’s painting. Only by reformulating the problem of time in spatial terms can Lily overthrow the limitations of the formalist framework: her art—a hybrid image/text—hinges on the blanks of aesthetic communication (which I define by reference to the work of Wolfgang Iser and Louis Marin). Lily’s painting qualifies as the only viable alternative to Mrs. Ramsay’s self-contained crystals of shape. Finally, I show how Woolf herself tried to (p)reenact Lily’s painting in the central section of the novel, “Time Passes.” Apparently built on the humanity/nature oppo-sition, this baffling segment revolves in fact around a blank (the absence of any perceiving consciousness internal to the fictional world) and encourages the reader

My thanks to Federico Bertoni for his continued support and to Donata Meneghelli for her remarks on an earlier version of this essay. I would also like to thank the referees of Poetics Today for their close reading of this text and their perceptive comments.

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to fill it in by imaginatively moving into the fictional world with a virtual body (as defined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

“Maybe the idea is to think of time differently,” she says after a while. “Stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up. Make a still life that’s living, not painted.”Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

Beyond the Crystallization Metaphor

“Art discloses . . . beauty in conferring a timeless form on time’s passing”: so Ann Banfield (2003: 511) concludes her investigation on the influence that Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore had on the philosophy of time implicit in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. Be it historically true or not (and it probably is, given the sophistication of Banfield’s arguments), I will take that view as a starting point for my own reading of To the Lighthouse. The idea that art structures an unstructured reality, making of it “some-thing permanent” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 176), is as old as the hills and has been duly applied to Woolf ’s work.� No doubt Woolf herself espoused it, perhaps through the mediation of Roger Fry’s (1926; 1960 [1920]) formalist aesthetics,� which seems so central to most readings of the novel, including Woolf ’s own: “One stable moment vanquishes chaos. But this I said in The Lighthouse,” she wrote in her Diary (1979–85, 3:141). Banfield (2003: 492–97) draws attention to the “crystallization” meta-phor that Woolf frequently employed to indicate art’s flawless and clear-cut result. Consider just one example from To the Lighthouse: “There is a coher-ence in things, a stability; something, [Mrs. Ramsay] meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 114). The crystal, Banfield (2003: 496) points out, stands for the whole “chemistry of a formalist aesthetic, one that, like science, aims to make apparent the underlying ‘pattern,’ the ‘logic,’ the ‘geometry’ of its objects.” Naturally, Fry’s name turns up again, along with those of Leslie Stephen and Russell: they all used—in different contexts—the crystalliza-tion metaphor. Denying the centrality of this aesthetics in Woolf ’s work, and particu-larly in To the Lighthouse, would be pointless. Yet I believe that Woolf ’s novel outlines (perhaps less visibly) a second aesthetics, which critics seem

1. See, e.g., Hussey 1986: 126: “It is . . . timelessness that Lily Briscoe attempts to capture in her painting, through the recreation of her own past as a work of art.”2. See, e.g., McLaurin 1973: 17–25; Stewart 2000: 78. According to Stewart, “Fry’s formal-ism gave Woolf [the] shaping principles” of her novel.

Caracciolo • The Two Aesthetics of To the Lighthouse 253

reluctant to acknowledge, conceivably because it goes beyond how Woolf herself conceptualized her novel. This second aesthetics cracks open the crystal of formalism, hinting at a theory of art’s virtuality that revolves around the blanks of artistic communication. This virtuality (a term I use more or less interchangeably with Louis Marin’s [2001] “blankness” and Wolfgang Iser’s [1978] “negativity”) is the aesthetic counterpart to the gen-erally recognized metaphysical and existential void at the heart of Woolf ’s fiction (see, e.g., Hussey 1986). In the following pages, I will argue that this aesthetics sidesteps the problem of time (a key concern in the formalist framework) with a leap into space. In particular, the virtual space that Lily Briscoe discovers on the “other side” of her canvas enables her (and pos-sibly the novel as a whole) to defuse the anxiety about time expressed by most characters. As we will see, the virtuality of art points to its ability not to achieve permanence (since “the very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare” [Woolf 2000a {1927}: 41]) but to expand and attach meaning to our daily experience.

The Novelist’s Shoulders

I will start my investigation into the double aesthetics of To the Lighthouse by presenting the fundamental conflict (humanity versus nature) in the first section of the novel, “The Window,” and showing how Mrs. Ramsay’s implicit aesthetics is related to it. This conflict is best understood through Lubomír Doležel’s (1998: 32) account of how fictional worlds are con-structed. According to Doležel, the most general model of such a world comprises a set of fictional facts, a natural force or “N-force,” and one or more people. Woolf (2003 [1932]: 52) herself wrote on Robinson Crusoe: “All alone we must climb upon the novelist’s shoulders and gaze through his eyes until we, too, understand in what order he ranges the large common objects upon which novelists are fated to gaze: man and men; behind them Nature; and above them that power which for convenience and brevity we may call God.” Needless to say, there is only a superficial resemblance between Doležel’s and Woolf ’s models. For one thing, God is conspicuously absent in Doležel and the text-as-world metaphor in Woolf. Moreover, it remains unclear whether Woolf saw God as a force internal to the fictional world or as one acting on it from outside and to what extent this force can be equated with the novelist’s own godlike figure. But addressing these problems would take us too far from our object. Let us concentrate on the question she frames: how does the novelist (in our case, Woolf herself ) relate nature, the world, and the people inhabiting it? As we will see, Woolf stages an


opposition between the natural force and humanity. But sometimes (and for reasons to which we will return) this opposition is made less clear by the ambiguity of the natural element. Consider Mrs. Ramsay’s first auditory encounter with the sea:

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. (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 20)

The waves are associated now with a reassuring lullaby, now with a threatening roll of drums that announces the destruction of the island.� Hence the duplicity of the sea: on the one hand, it takes Mrs. Ramsay back, regressively, to her childhood; on the other, it projects her into the future, reminding her of her own mortality. Either way, the sound of the sea appears invariably linked to the sense of the passage of time. Yet there is something more than just personal remembrances or the anticipation of one’s death at stake here: the image of the sea swallowing up the island hints at the time of nature, in comparison to which human life appears as “ephemeral as a rainbow.” Later on, the painter Lily will entertain a similar thought: “Distant views seem to outlast by a million years . . . the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest” (ibid.: 25). For Mrs. Ramsay, the regular beat of the waves predicted (under certain con-ditions) the destruction of the island, whereas for Lily it is the sense of dis-tance that suggests, metonymically, a vast temporal lapse. What is more, Lily imagines an earth “entirely at rest,” free from human beings and their anxieties; she emphasizes the disappearance of the observer, not that of the island. It will be an earth devoid of human gazes, beheld only by the sky. This passage reveals a concern with the conditions of perception, which Woolf expands in the novel’s central section, meaningfully titled “Time Passes.”

3. An image that often echoes in The Waves: “The sea . . . beat like a drum that raises a regi-ment of plumed and turbaned soldiers” (Woolf 2000b [1931]: 82).


Mr. Ramsay seems to share this kind of cosmic imagination. In his medi-tations on human fame, he sees in his mind’s eye a sort of abstract, alle-gorized landscape: “What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare” (ibid.: 41).� Later he will return to the island’s real setting: “That was the country he liked best, over there; those sandhills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. . . . There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you” (ibid.: 76). These quotations foreground a circular and outer temporality, in which humanity vanishes, leaving no traces. Every major character in the novel envisages the island’s engulfment; they do so, however, in accordance with their individual sensibility: Mrs. Ramsay conceives this event as an allusion to the briefness of life’s candle; Lily experiences distance (in space and in time) as a new, “exter-nal” sight that seems to do away with the gazer; Mr. Ramsay is obsessed by the durability of human effort, art (Shakespeare), and of course his own work. However, these fantasies outline an opposition between nature (the sea, the waves as its agents), on the one hand, and humanity, on the other: eventually nature will engulf the humanized world of the island, but there will be no one to witness its final triumph. There are clear indications in this first section of nature’s encroachment on the Ramsays and their house: the towels “gritty with sand from bathing” (ibid.: 12), the furniture that “positively dripped with wet” (ibid.: 31), or—even more significantly—“the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral” prying through the windows at dinner. It is what Woolf (1983, appendix:51) called, in an outline of “Time Passes” that she wrote on a stray paper, “the devouringness of nature.” This phrase could be used to give a tentative answer to the question I framed above: How does the novelist relate humans and nature in the fictional world of To the Lighthouse? But as we will see, the conflict between them is more ambiguous than it initially seems. Now for what I have called Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetics. In the context of the humanity/nature opposition, her housekeeping concerns� acquire new

4. See also this passage, which contains Mr. Ramsay’s usual heroic rhetoric: “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. . . . 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” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 50). For a remarkable reading of Mr. Ramsay’s “heroic” inclinations (and mystifications), see Abel 1989: 56.5. “If they could be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach with them—that would be something” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 32). “That windows should be open, and doors shut—simple as it was, could none of them remember it?” (ibid.: 33).


meaning. We may consider them, with Gaston Bachelard,� a re-creation of the human space of the house against the entropic tendency of the out-side world of nature. She appears almost as a house goddess, assuring her husband that “it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 43–44). Her struggle against nature’s (and time’s) intrusion is also manifested by her wish to bring people together. With her mania for marriage, she fosters Paul and Minta’s union (her efforts with Mr. Bankes and Lily will prove unsuccessful, however). She rejoices at the triumph of her dinner and in particular at Mr. Bankes’s appreciation of her special recipe, the bœuf en daube. The dinner is evidently a key scene in defining Mrs. Ramsay’s function in this section of the novel. When it starts, she takes a look at the dining room and feels, with a twinge, its shabbiness. “Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (ibid.: 91). But her victory comes at last. Here is how Lily describes it: “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 the fluidity out there” (ibid.: 106). The walls that usually separate people from one another crumble under Mrs. Ramsay’s influence; the guests now form a “party,” united against their common enemy. “Inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily” (ibid.). This clear-cut opposition evokes what I have called Woolf ’s formalist aesthetics: Mrs. Ramsay’s victory over “the fluidity out there” crystallizes “like a ruby” (ibid.: 114; see Banfield 2003: 494). That this power of Mrs. Ramsay’s is nothing short of aesthetic Lily will later recognize in this often-quoted passage from the third section: “Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing . . . was struck into stability. Life stands still here, Mrs. Ramsay said” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 176). I will argue that Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetics, apparently so effective in this first section, will be reconsidered and eventually discarded by Lily in her confrontation with the empty canvas of “The Lighthouse” (the last section of the novel). However, the formalist aesthetics already shows signs of fal-

6. “[Household activities] keep vigilant watch over the house, they link its immediate past to its immediate future, they are what maintains it in the security of being. But how can household be made into a creative activity? . . . Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality” (Bachelard 1969: 67–68).


tering in this section. Apparently, the boundary between the natural and the human domain is impervious; it admits no osmotic diffusion. Yet some-times the text seems to imply that nature’s “devouringness” can hardly be understood as a rigid opposition between humanity and nature. This is an obvious simplification, one that (we may argue) goes hand in hand with Mrs. Ramsay’s attempt at protecting the house from the onslaught of the waves. The opposition is already a way of securing all that is human by showing it to be radically distinct from the natural domain. As we will see, however, To the Lighthouse proves all attempts at capturing the world in a nonflexible pattern of thought (be it dualistic or, even more significantly, dialectical) to be illusory. This also warns against such patterns in compre-hending the novel itself. The nature/humankind dualism is first challenged by the scene in which Mrs. Ramsay reads to James the Grimm brothers’ tale titled “The Fisher-man and His Wife” (ibid.: 62–68; for the original text see Grimm and Grimm 2002: 81–89). The text does not appear in the novel except for a few short passages (Mrs. Ramsay’s reading is intermingled with her own stray thoughts). It is the story of a fisherman who compassionately throws back into the sea a magical flounder he has just fished. His overambitious wife, however, suggests that he ask the fish for something in return for his good deed. Her requests are hyperbolical: first to live in a cottage, then in a palace, then to become king, emperor, pope, and finally God. When at last the man tells the flounder that his wife wants to be God, their superb papal church turns into the shack where they lived at the beginning. A few elements in this story hint at the primary narrative of To the Light-house. First, the temporality of the fairy tale is evidently circular, since at the end the couple returns to the shack of the beginning. In context, this circularity could allude to the sea that encircles the island, threatening its inhabitants, bringing to bear on them a nonhuman time dimension. Thus even the fairy tale turns into an ominous anticipation of the island’s destruction. There is apparently no escape from time’s grasp. Moreover, the marital relationship between the two protagonists mir-rors that of the Ramsays. We saw that Mrs. Ramsay appears as an almost godlike figure in her wish to imbue her house with life and reality (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 43), but the tale implicitly suggests the unreasonableness of her ambition. I say “implicitly,” since we glean little of the story itself from To the Lighthouse; yet the fact that in the manuscript version Mrs. Ramsay read another Grimms story to James (“The Three Dwarfs in the Forest,” according to Susan Dick [see Woolf 1983: 72]) shows that Woolf ’s choice was not random. She must have opted for “The Fisherman and His Wife” because it stirred resonances within her own work. But apart from the


motif of the house and the subtle undermining of Mrs. Ramsay’s illusions, the fairy tale read aloud to James in the final version enters the larger semantic network of nature and the sea. In fact, one of the few passages actually quoted from it in To the Lighthouse reads as follows: “Houses and trees toppled over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high as church towers and mountains, and all with white foam at the top” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 67). An important detail that I have intentionally omitted from my summary is that, at every request from the fisherman’s wife, the sea becomes more turbulent. Perhaps it is no accident that these lines precede the expression of the woman’s desire to be God. It is the climax of the story and the turn-ing point of the couple’s fortunes. Above all, that quotation anticipates “Time Passes” and particularly these words: “to pace the beach was impos-sible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken” (ibid.: 146). To put it in Mark Hussey’s (1986: 113) words, the passage from the fairy tale explodes “the illusion [of a] commensurability between man and nature” (see also McLaurin 1973: 196), since nature reacts against humans’ increas-ing ambition to humanize the world. This ambition, not the “devour-ingness” of nature, provoked the conflict, so nature’s encroachment on the house of the Ramsays is actually an act of retaliation: an attempt at reclaiming what once belonged to nature and humans have appropriated for themselves. In a way, then, saving humanity from the waves’ onslaught, as Mrs. Ramsay strives to do, amounts to saving it from itself—from the changes humans have brought about. Accordingly, the opposition between the natural and the human domains is shown to be a fiction maintained by humans to justify their own presence in the natural world. No doubt, these considerations accord with an “ecological” view of Woolf ’s work that has sometimes been proposed. According to Louise Westling (1999: 871), Woolf was able to foresee the tragic consequences of our “destructive technologies,” advancing a radically alternative model: that of an “ecological humanism” centered on the understanding of our “limitations and responsibilities that must humble our species if we are to survive.”

Blackness of What Is outside Us

The Grimms tale read aloud to James seems to point out that the boundary line between nature and humanity was actually drawn by humans driven by ambition. This boundary, however, was already blurred by “the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature” that Mrs. Ramsay perceived in


the waves’ throb. If the sea threatens to swallow up the humanized world, why is its sound sometimes considered soothing? But nature’s kindly face is woven into a semantic network that seems to enfold even humanity, nature’s supposed enemy. Rigid partitions fall apart, as Mrs. Ramsay’s goodnight words to Cam demonstrate: “She could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cam’s mind, and Cam was repeating after her how it was like a mountain, a bird’s nest, a garden, and there were little antelopes, and her eyes were opening and shutting, and Mrs. Ramsay went on saying still more monotonously, and more rhythmically and more nonsensically” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 124–125). The rhythmical nature of Mrs. Ramsay’s phrases conjures up the regu-lar beat of the waves. However soothing this chant might be to the child, there is something disturbing in its nonsensicality; even more so if we read it alongside “Time Passes.” The mention of the antelope, clearly out of context, could resonate with the tendency of the sea to obscure human dis-tinctions: “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’” (ibid.: 137).� As a matter of fact, nature—seen peeping through the win-dows in the dinner scene—has already crept into human minds; or better, it has always been there. This could, at least in part, explain the ineffectiveness of Mrs. Ramsay’s attempts at salvaging the human in the island’s engulfment. Now, if we consider that within the world of To the Lighthouse nature’s “devour-ingness” objectifies the passage of time, we may gain a new insight into Mrs. Ramsay’s formalist aesthetics. It will be evident by now that, in her wish to bring people together, even in her housekeeping concerns, a whole aesthetics is implicit, with the claim that art imposes a shape on the shape-less, making of it “something permanent.” This is perfectly exemplified by her reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet: “How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beauti-ful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here—the sonnet” (ibid.: 131). Before discussing this passage, I will introduce Giovanni Bottiroli’s (2006: 256) distinction among “three styles (or regimes) of thought” or—as he also terms them—three “types of logic” (my translation). Bottiroli builds on various insights from psychoanalysis and metaphor theory. The first of these styles of thought is the confusive, in which there is “total over-

7. Even more explicit in the first draft: “Everything was confused & confounded, there was scarcely any identity left, either of bodies or of thought” (Woolf 1983: 149).


lapping between two isolated terms” (ibid.). For instance, to cite Bottiroli’s example, one may dream of a surgeon-butcher. This figure is neither a very skilled butcher (the meaning of “my butcher is a surgeon”) nor a very sloppy surgeon (“that surgeon is a butcher”): it is both at the same time. This is the style of the waves, since they attempt to erase the boundary between objects and people, engulfing the humanized world into an ocean of indistinctness. In contrast, the separative is characterized by the binary logic of traditional analytic philosophy: it is the style of Mrs. Ramsay’s reading of the sonnet, as we will see in a moment, and it also underlies the whole humanity/nature opposition. The separative, Bottiroli argues, is nonmetaphorical by definition. Finally, we have the distinctive kind, where opposites can overlap “without generating confusion” (ibid.: 257). This is the style of most literary metaphors, in which there is only a partial over-lap between the words involved. (In Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s [2002] terms, a metaphor creates a “blend” that can always be unpacked into the “input spaces” involved.) This threefold distinction could be further reduced, continues Bottiroli (2006: 261), to an opposition between “rigid” styles of thought (the separa-tive and the confusive) and the flexibility of the distinctive. Whereas in the separative and in the confusive there are either two separate entities (a sur-geon and a butcher) or one (the indistinct surgeon-butcher we may dream of ), in the distinctive two entities are at the same time one (“my butcher is a surgeon”). As we will see, the flexible is the mode of Lily’s acrobatics, for she seems to do two things at the same time—reveal the underlying blankness of her canvas by “tunnelling” into it and come to terms with Mrs. Ramsay’s real-world absence—without confusing them. Now, the Shakespearean sonnet is like a “magnet”: decisively it separates all that counts of the past day from the bits and pieces, shedding these and investing the day with absolute meaning. It is yet another shiny crystal supposed to encapsulate life’s “essence”; as such, it gives Mrs. Ramsay an impression of wholeness that is perfectly “satisfying.” But this impression may be just that—a fleeting thought the character clings to. What do we know of this essence after all? Nothing; the text is silent as to its real con-tent. As Bernard acknowledges in the speech concluding The Waves: “Now the meal is finished; we are surrounded by peelings and bread-crumbs. I have tried to break off this bunch and hand it to you; but whether there is substance or truth in it I do not know” (Woolf 2000b [1931]: 221). Time’s leftovers (Mrs. Ramsay’s “odds and ends”) are all that is given to us, all that we have to live by. We should bear in mind Mr. Ramsay’s verdict: “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 41). This sonnet is obviously no exception.


We begin to suspect that Mrs. Ramsay’s reading is somewhat circu-lar: perhaps she self-deludingly reads what she wants to read, jumping to conclusions, imposing her own desire (for well-rounded meaning) on the text. In hermeneutic terms, this would be a totalitarian reading: the rest, the “plurality,” to use Roland Barthes’s famous formula (Barthes 1989 [1971]), is obliterated. Maybe we should listen to Mr. Ramsay, who “won-dered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought” (Woolf: 131). But perhaps he is being unjust to his wife: despite all her self-assuredness, Mrs. Ramsay will soon realize how illusory the aesthetics of crystallization can be. Indeed, as she closes the book she is reading, she lingers on the line “As with your shadows I with these did play” (ibid.: 132). It seems to stir something in her mind; she tries to avert it, but soon the repressed question wells up: “What was the value, the meaning of things?” (ibid.: 133). The essence laid out by the sonnet may be nothing more than a passing shadow, whose very emptiness is revealed as soon as it disappears. In fact, just after this Mrs. Ramsay notices that the “shadow, the thing folding them in was beginning . . . to close round her again” (ibid.). “The shadow, the thing”: language endeavors to name, and consequently to sub-due, the force that threatens human meaning, cracking open the crystal of shape. Again a passage from Bernard’s soliloquy may shed light on these words: “We felt enlarge itself round us the huge blackness of what is out-side us, of what we are not” (Woolf 2000b [1931]: 213). This blackness is “the expanse of the world beyond the human” (Beer 1996: 43), time as a meaningless and obliterating force. The conflict between humanity and nature is thus reformulated as one between meaning and nonmeaning. But in these terms, humanity does not stand a chance: sooner or later mean-ing will be crushed by the sheer weight of nonmeaning, as Mr. Ramsay’s remark on Shakespeare suggests. Something as trivial as a stone one may kick with one’s boot will outlive our best candidate for the “immortality” of art. Moreover, nonmeaning cannot be construed as absolutely external to humans: indeed, as Graham Parkes (1982: 37) contends, the “inhuman chaos of the sea mirrors something deep in the human soul, with which it is connected.” Again, the opposition between nature and humanity is called into question. It could even be argued that humans’ deep fascination for nonmeaning explains why the beat of the waves and Mrs. Ramsay’s good-night words to Cam can be soothing: they are both rhythmical and non-sensical. Another example appears in “The Window” a few pages before the sonnet scene, when Mrs. Ramsay is listening to a poem (Charles Elton’s Luriana Lurilee) rehearsed by her husband. The words “full of trees and changing leaves” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 120) obviously suggest the passage


of time. “She did not know what they meant” (ibid.), we are told: these lines, while written and recited by humans, seem to partake of the mean-inglessness of the waves’ beat. It is no accident, then, that they materialize on the other side of the window from which the “fluidity” peeped in at dinner: “The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were float-ing like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves” (ibid.). The Shakespearean sonnet was read by Mrs. Ramsay as an example of crystallized meaning, and hence it alluded to her hope of preserving life’s essence from the assault of time and the “natural force” embodied by the waves. But in fact, this poem shows that nature has already crept into the human world and that all attempts at distinguishing between the two domains are ultimately biased: the words of the poem float on the other side of the window, thus signaling that no clear line between Mrs. Ramsay’s kingdom and the natural force encroaching on it from the outside can be drawn. This naturalization of the human is perhaps reflected in Mrs. Ramsay’s estranging experience of divided self, which immediately follows: “Like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self ” (ibid.).

Taking Up Her Brush Again

So far I have contended that the first part of To the Lighthouse covertly under-cuts the formalist aesthetics it would seem to spin. In Bernard’s words, “The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst” (Woolf 2000b [1931]: 197). These considerations seem to pave the way for a read-ing of “Time Passes” as a triumph of the natural force. Indeed, it would be tempting to interpret that extraordinary and somewhat baffling section as an entropic deluge of the element we saw “waterily” blurring the outside world in the dinner scene. Says Prue: “One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 137). Yet, I will argue, there is something more to these “stray airs, advance guards of great armies” that “blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them” (ibid.: 140). The deep significance of this section lies in the challenge it poses to the reader: it constructs a fictional world literally perceived by no one; but in doing so it foregrounds the absence of this perceiving consciousness, so that readers are themselves forced to enter the world projected by the text and occupy its central blank. To understand this, we will have to jump to the last sec-tion of To the Lighthouse, the one most directly concerned with aesthetics.


We will come back to “Time Passes” only after establishing the theoretical foundations of what I call the novel’s “second” aesthetics, which Lily enacts in her painting after discarding Mrs. Ramsay’s crystallization metaphor. It is well known that in a drawing Woolf presented “Time Passes,” the middle section of her book, as a corridor.� Thus, she quite literally gave her book a “spatial form”:� two rooms linked by a corridor. Commenting on this visualization of the tripartite structure of the novel, Banfield (2003: 500) has related it to the Cambridge philosophy of time. Unlike Henri Bergson, Cambridge philosophers saw time as made up of discrete units, which, according to Banfield, are identifiable with Woolf ’s “moments of being” (Woolf 1976). Therefore, whereas “The Window” and “The Light-house” (the novel’s first and last sections, respectively) can be considered extended moments of being, “Time Passes” would be an attempt at lend-ing continuity to those self-contained moments by giving them a novelistic form. This is why it can be represented as a corridor. I would tend to agree with this view, except that I prefer to see “Time Passes” as a bidirectional corridor. It does not lead from moment A (“The Window”) to moment B (“The Lighthouse”) but allows for a two-way communication within the novel, so that Woolf ’s second aesthetics (foregrounded in the last section) can be projected onto the other sections as well—and in particular onto “Time Passes.” This is a corridor that, to make sense of the novel as a whole, the reader has virtually to pace back and forth. In a way, Woolf ’s sketch could be seen as a symbol of the virtuality of aesthetic communi-cation and of the feedback process it implies. In Iser’s (1978: 67) transpar-ent formulation, “the reader’s communication with the text is a dynamic process of self-correction, as he formulates signifieds which he must then continually modify . . . meaning gathers meaning in a kind of snowballing process.” This consideration is fundamental to the aesthetics that underlies Lily’s engagement with her painting. Before moving on, I would like to stress that my reading is at odds with the prevalent view of the tripartite structure of the novel as eminently dia-lectic. Such a view can be traced back to a 1955 essay by Norman Fried-man�0 but is still widely represented.�� In general terms, it claims that Lily’s

8. See the author’s sketch in Woolf 1983, appendix:48, with the caption “Two blocks joined by a corridor.”9. Joseph Frank introduced this concept in a 1945 essay; for a more recent discussion see Mitchell 1980.10. Friedman (1955: 63) contended that this novel presents a “double vision” of the world it constructs by striking a “dialectic” balance between opposing perspectives.11. See, e.g., Koppen 2001: 386 (“aesthetic vision does possess an ordering and healing potential, but only as one term in a dialectical relationship”); McLaurin 1973: 182 (Lily’s final vision synthesizes “the short-sight of Mrs. Ramsay and the long-sight of Mr. Ramsay”);


final vision results from a synthesis of Mrs. Ramsay’s creative presence (“The Window”) and her dramatic absence (“Time Passes”). However appealing this explanation might seem, it goes against the aesthetics of virtuality that, in my view, the third part of the novel outlines. W. J. T. Mitchell (1980: 566) writes: “Our distrust of dialectical arguments stems from our sense that their implicit rhetorical space is too predictably sym-metrical, lacking the picturesque surprises and asymmetries that we asso-ciate with truthful complexity. For every verbal tick we encounter a corre-sponding tock.” In fact, not unlike Mrs. Ramsay’s reading of the sonnet, dialectical interpretations attempt to enclose the novel in a crystal—a pre-defined pattern of thought. That reading was dualistic: it opposed life’s “essence” to its “odds and ends” (without further defining either), thus reducing the text to a mirror of the dualism of nature and humanity fore-shadowed in the opening section of the novel. On the other hand, dialectic approaches (e.g., Friedman’s) are tripartite and as such more complete. In a way, they leave behind fewer “odds and ends.” But still, their mechanism of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is too simple to account for the subtlety of Lily’s experience in “The Lighthouse.” Better, then, to approach To the Lighthouse (and in particular its last section) without any theoretical pre-conception and try to see what meaning springs from it. All in all, I cannot but concur with Elizabeth Abel’s (1989: 71) claim that “[Lily’s] painting replays, without resolving, the dialectic of autonomy and continuity” (my emphasis). I will try to argue this case in the following pages. As to Lily’s painting, it is quite clear that it opens a new space in the novel’s fictional world. This pictorial space appears significantly different from the space of the setting, as it is regulated not by natural but by aes-thetic forces. However, we should keep in mind that neither space can be directly presented by the text. Not unlike the fictional landscape of the island, Lily’s painting has no iconic existence—except in the reader’s imagina-tion. This is almost a truism yet one that critics tend to forget when they highlight the supposed superiority of painting to writing for Woolf.�� Lily’s painting and its iconicity are constructed by a verbal narrative, a medium that is both linear and sequential (temporal). This of course applies to all literary descriptions of visual artworks. Even though these paintings are constructed verbally, readers usually create a mental image of them by building on textual information. Mitchell (1994: 83), the “pictorial turn” theorist, has drawn attention to “the inextricable weaving together of rep-resentation and discourse, the imbrications of visual and verbal experi-

and Beer 1996: 41 (“It is tempting . . . to see Lily Briscoe as some sort of Hegelian third term, representing the aesthetic resolution of sexual fracture and contradiction”).12. See Koppen 2001: 387 and Fisher 1993: 93 on this point.


ence.” “All media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes,” he adds (ibid.: 94). What is especially striking about Lily’s painting, however, is that forming a mental image of what her painting looks like is impossible. The painting is almost never directly described—and this of course marks a significant departure from the tradition of ekphrasis. What is described by the text is how Lily relates to the painting while painting it; the picture in itself is never described. This is why Abel (1989: 71), in what is probably the most insightful discussion of Lily’s art, prefers to regard the painting as a “palimpsest,” where pictorial space is rendered through layers (the deeper we delve into the painting, the closer we get to its underlying meaning). Each layer corresponds to a stage of Lily’s relationship with the painting, and this relationship is obviously presented by the text in a narrative form (hence the stages). To appreciate the difference between a described painting and one only referred to by the text, Doležel’s (1998: 136–39) distinction between “inten-sional” and “extensional” aspects of fictional worlds may come in handy. Briefly, these categories (which Doležel borrows, with a good deal of revision, from analytic philosophy) help us separate the exact wording of the text (its “texture”) from the world that it projects and that materializes in the reader’s imagination (see Esrock 1994). Worlds of fiction do possess a degree of autonomy from the texture that projects them: otherwise, how would we be able to summarize and speak of a book we have read with-out remembering, even partially, its linguistic makeup? This autonomy is what Doležel calls their “extension.” But since different texts (for instance, Madame Bovary and a summary we can make of it) share, extensionally speaking, the same fictional world, there must be a way to link the text of Gustave Flaubert’s novel to the unique fictional world it constructs—for, it is assumed, some “global regularities” of the texture affect “the structuring of the fictional world” at the intensional level (Doležel 1998: 139). This link between a texture and the fictional world it constructs is what Doležel calls an “intensional function.” Thus we may say that Lily’s painting is exten-sionally a painting (i.e., a visual artwork), because we know that there is such a painting in the fictional world of To the Lighthouse (it is named by the text). However, we are unable to visualize it, since what the text focuses on is the relationship between Lily and the painting. At the intensional level, then, Lily’s painting is constructed as an interaction that develops in time (and in space too, as we will see that Lily “dips into” her painting). Hence Mitchell’s argument that representation and discourse are woven together is of special relevance to this hybrid object, which should present all the features of a painting (a static, iconic medium) but in fact—unlike all real


paintings—seems to possess a life of its own: it changes with Lily’s attitude toward it. So much for theory (for now). Examining the painter in action, as she dips “into the blue paint,” “into the past there” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 187), will give us an insight into what I have called the “second aesthetics” of the novel. Back to the house of the Ramsays after ten years, Lily cannot elude Mrs. Ramsay’s figure as she takes up her brush again to paint. Now long dead, Mrs. Ramsay provides—as we saw—a complete model of artistic creativity. Lily revaluates this model while she works on her canvas: in fact it is at this point that she draws a parallel between Mrs. Ramsay’s “making of the moment something permanent” and, “in another sphere,” her own painting (ibid.: 176). This thought is elicited by the memory of a scene on the beach with Charles Tansley—a scene of unusual cheerfulness that was fostered (she supposes) by Mrs. Ramsay’s creative presence. That memory “survived, after all these years, complete, so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art” (ibid.: 175). We recognize in these words, pure and simple, Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetics: her attempts at rescuing people and memories from time’s grasp. However, we should not be too hasty in concluding that Lily embraces it, as some have done.�� Or, at most, she could be said to embrace the aesthetics of crystallization temporarily only to reject it after the intermission of chapter 4, set on the boat headed for the lighthouse (the last section of the novel shuttles back and forth between Lily’s painting and Mr. Ramsay’s voyage to the lighthouse with his children, James and Cam). In fact, at the beginning of chapter 5 the painter returns to her memory of the beach scene, asking herself:

Why, after all these years had that survived, ringed round, lit up, visible to the last detail, with all before it blank and all after it blank, for miles and miles? “Is it a boat? Is it a cork?” [Mrs. Ramsay] would say, Lily repeated, turning back, reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. (Ibid.: 186)

In the first paragraph, we have an unmistakable spatialization of mem-ory: its failures are equated with blank spaces, “miles and miles” of empti-ness surrounding a single (yet crystalline) remembrance. The change of perspective is evident and quite typical of what has been labeled “a novel about perspectives” (Ruddick 1977: 16): first, the text confines our attention

13. See, e.g., Ingram 1999: 92: “Like Lily’s vision, Mrs. Ramsay’s is the perfect fulfillment of Woolf ’s organic unity: life and art are brought together as one enduring whole, however temporarily.” Besides, how something could be “enduring” only “temporarily” still remains a mystery to me.


to the memory of the scene in itself; then, that memory is presented as but a tiny speck in an ocean of blankness. We may compare this to a sudden shift in cinematic point of view: in the first shot the scene on the beach was all we could make out (but it was sharp to the least detail), while in the second the camera shows that scene as just a small dot, thus emphasizing what has been lost in the process—what memory cannot recover at all. Even more important, the spatial metaphor could be seen as tracing the contour of an island: those “miles” that encircle the emerged land of memory are, we may imagine, miles of sea. And if we remember how, in the novel’s first section, the characters envisaged the island’s engulfment into the sea, we will understand what this image, when applied to mem-ory, brings in. Perhaps unconsciously (at the moment), Lily is suggesting here that even that one sharp recollection will eventually disappear, swal-lowed up by an ocean of blankness—the inhuman nonmeaning associated with the waves, sea, time. Thus, by spatializing her memory, Lily comes close to acknowledging the limitations of Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetics. It is no chance, then, that the question opening the second paragraph quoted above is voiced by Mrs. Ramsay. She is trying to make out (she is short-sighted) an object floating on the sea. Again, focus depends on distance: be it a boat or a cork, the object is indistinct, as Lily’s memory will be in a short time. In aesthetic terms, trapping life in crystals of form is no way to achieve permanence, since even the most polished art is subject to natural (and irreversible) decay—what Rudolf Arnheim (1971: 28) calls “catabolic effect.” Rather, Lily becomes conscious that the problem of art has to be reformulated within the space of the painting and freed from Mrs. Ramsay’s obsession with permanence (to which the crystallization metaphor is, in this novel at least, inextricably related). Lily’s subsequent “tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 188) allows the painter to recover scraps of her past life (those “odds and ends” that Shakespeare’s sonnet, according to Mrs. Ramsay’s reading, cleared away), significantly altering the image of Mrs. Ramsay that Lily had drawn from her memory of the beach scene. In a way, the space of the canvas functions as a lens; it helps the painter shed new light on her past, including the blankness surrounding that iso-lated memory. Only through this lens is Lily able to distance herself from Mrs. Ramsay and that “mania of hers for marriage” (ibid.: 190). The mar-riage she encouraged between Paul and Minta had gone awry; as for her-self, she “had never married, not even William Bankes. / Mrs. Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived, she would have compelled” (ibid.). Finally, the painter with “little Chinese eyes” and a “small puckered face” can “stand up to Mrs. Ramsay,” triumphing over her (ibid.). But since


Mrs. Ramsay’s wish to bring people together was another aspect of her struggle against time and its devastation, this critique of her implies a refusal of her aesthetic ideal. However, while Lily gives up Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetics, she does not stop thinking about her and her tragic absence. Mrs. Ramsay does play a role in the following pages. In a different theoretical context (psychoanaly-sis and gender studies), Abel (1989: 67) has claimed that, whereas James and Cam repress Mrs. Ramsay’s memory because of their “enclosure in paternal narratives,” Lily comes to terms with her through the space of the canvas. The painter’s brushstrokes, writes Abel (ibid.: 77–78), “do not seal maternal absence, as the language allegorized within the novel does, but enforce a repeated confrontation with it. . . . Every new line generates new spaces in the continuously shifting configuring of absence and presence that compose an art whose modality is space.” Whereas Woolf (1979–85, 3:208) famously claimed that writing this novel “laid [her parents] in [her] mind,” Lily never buries her memory of Mrs. Ramsay; she is forced to con-front her throughout the painting. And yet this confrontation is also a way of self-distancing from her aesthetics, as we have seen. Indeed, by “tun-nelling” into her work, Lily learns that the “centre of complete emptiness” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 194) left by Mrs. Ramsay’s death can be transformed into (or seen as) an enabling condition of art.

Making Up Scenes

As I said earlier, Lily’s artistic gesture has sometimes been understood as a dialectical synthesis. Yet if by synthesis we mean a result that is both “restful” and “satisfying,” as is Mrs. Ramsay’s reading of the sonnet, this is certainly not the case. And in fact, even Lily’s final brushstroke does not appear to conclude much: rather it counts as a realization that art’s true potential lies in its virtuality. Of course, the creation of art is not the same as its reception; and here, clearly enough, we are witnessing someone creating a painting, not view-ing one. However, in the following pages I will argue that there is a struc-tural resemblance between the way we (or possibly I) make sense of To the Lighthouse and the way Lily paints. What is so special about Lily’s art is that, as I have claimed earlier, this is no ordinary painting—or at least we would be hard put to imagine it as one, since we do not know what it depicts. All we know is how the painter interacts with it by way of an immersion in the painting: Lily appears to “dip” (ibid.: 187) or “tunnel” (ibid.: 188) into it, and she later finds herself “half out of the picture” (ibid.: 193). By implying that Lily’s painting is (metaphorically) open, these words


suggest that aesthetic creation explores a larger space than the one we actually see on the canvas. Moreover, Lily’s forward movement in space is tied to a backward movement in time, as her painting enables her to delve into the past, reassessing Mrs. Ramsay’s character in the light of two failed marriages. This retrospect might appear as a formidable achieve-ment, given Lily’s previous admission that the scene on the beach with Tansley and Mrs. Ramsay was a small island in an ocean of blank memory. How does she recover her memory, then? In this passage, she reveals how: “This making up scenes about [Paul and Minta], is what we call ‘knowing’ people, ‘thinking’ of them, ‘being fond’ of them! Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past” (ibid.: 188). Even though this notion of “past” as an invented construct would prob-ably make a standard historian wince, Lily does not seem to have any qualms: the heuristic value of these made-up scenes (“it was what she knew them by”) is more than enough to defend their adoption. These gaps in Lily’s memory are filled in by imagination. In a way, the painter comes close to discovering the function of the blank spaces as “the pivot on which the interaction between text and reader turns” (Iser 1978: 202)—a well-known theory advanced by Roman Ingarden (1973 [1931]) in the 1930s, then enlarged upon by Iser in the 1970s. Iser (1978: 195) contended that “as blanks mark the suspension of connectability between textual segments, they simultaneously form a condition for the connection to be established.” However, he criticized Ingarden for the degree of closure implicit in his aesthetic theory: for Ingarden, the work loses its indeterminacy after its “concretization” (the filling in of the blanks); for Iser (ibid.: 174–79), on the contrary, it is around the text’s uneliminable “negativity” that the interactive process of reading revolves. Of course, Lily is not reading any-thing here, nor is she viewing a painting someone else has made. More-over, these blank spots in Lily’s memory are in themselves more similar to Meir Sternberg’s (1993 [1978]) “gaps” in the narrative reconstruction of past events than to Ingarden’s and Iser’s “blanks.” However, since my focus is on Lily’s aesthetics here, I contend that she may be revealing the creative role played by imagination in both the production and the inter-pretation of aesthetic artifacts—like her painting or like the novel where she is a character. Lily’s aesthetics would then consist in a valorization of the virtuality (Iser’s “negativity”) that, by underlying artworks, bridges the gap between their creators and their interpreters. Interestingly, Cam too, during her voyage to the lighthouse, learns some-thing about the imagination. As the boat sails onward, she gazes fixedly on the island; but being no less shortsighted than her mother, she “could see


nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real; the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the noise of the waves—all this was real” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 181–82). As always in this novel, distance in space becomes metonymy of time’s pastness. Like the scene on the beach (a tiny but distinct speck in Lily’s memory), the boat appears to Cam an island of bracing reality in an ocean of unreality. Little wonder the expedition they would have made ten years earlier, had it been fine, seems almost to be forgotten. In a way, their past lives and identities seem to have been swallowed up by time (and distance), leaving a blank space that Cam attempts to fill in by weaving her “story about escaping from a sinking ship” (ibid.: 207). Her imagination, without a doubt, is influenced by the talk about a boat that had sunk not far from the lighthouse during “a great storm last Christmas” (ibid.: 178) and by her father’s catchphrase, “we perished, each alone.” Thus Cam invents an adventurous complement to their expedition: she does not “want to tell herself seriously a story,” as that would entail a beginning, a middle, and an end—a sense of accomplishment in stark contrast with her own elation “at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there)” (ibid.: 204–5). Cam’s imagination does not fill in every gap in her past, because that would entail exhausting its virtuality (“negativity”). Moreover, Cam is far from fully believing in her adven-ture, since she is perfectly conscious that, on the boat, they are doing “two things at once”: “they were eating their lunch here in the sun and they were also making for safety in a great storm after a shipwreck. Would the water last? Would the provisions last? she asked herself, telling herself a story but knowing at the same time what was the truth” (ibid.: 222). This is an attitude so typical of the reading process (we read, and sus-pend our disbelief in a world, while at the same time remaining aware that we are just reading) that we come to think there is some sort of oblique connection between Cam’s imagination and the book Mr. Ramsay is read-ing absorbedly—a book whose very title is indeterminate.�� To quote Iser (1978: 230) again, the text’s indeterminacy “enables us to transcend that which we are otherwise so inextricably entangled in—our own lives in the midst of the real world. . . . [It] is therefore an enabling structure.” Despite being as shortsighted as her mother, Cam is perhaps a better reader; her

14. “What might be written in the book which had rounded its edges off in his pocket, [Cam] did not know” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 206). According to Lee (2000: xxxvi), who bases her supposition on some additional clues given in the manuscript, it is probably Plato.


act of imagination is, like Lily’s, a recognition of the underlying double-ness of things:�� a doubleness that cannot be resolved, that admits no syn-thesis, but has to be apprehended by some sort of imaginative squint. For this doubleness points to the virtuality through which we, as inhabitants of this world, can make contact with aesthetic artifacts (in Cam’s case, an adventure story) and let them restructure our experience (hence Cam’s feeling of the existential fullness of this expedition).

Into the Picture

With Cam’s help, we have specified some aspects of Lily’s art, to which we may now return. We last saw her “tunnelling her way into the pic-ture,” into a largely made-up past. The painter does think a few pages later that “she was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 215), but this is yet another confirmation of the doubleness from which her art develops. Somehow, we discover she can be inside the painting (shuttling between imagination and memory) and “on a level with ordinary experience” (ibid.: 218) at the same time. Entering the picture is, paradoxically, a way “to get hold of . . . that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself, before it has been made anything” (ibid.: 209), an idea that suggests the obliqueness of artistic creation: the “thing itself ”—our unmediated experience of the world—can only be re-created and infused with meaning through an aesthetic medium. Quite literally, Lily manages to look at the world through her painting and see Mrs. Ramsay’s death in a new light, as an enabling condition of art (more on this soon). There is another problem to address, though. Lily’s painting must be metaphorically “open” for her to tunnel into it, and this openness can be equated with the constitutive dimension of aesthetic artifacts, their virtu-ality or “negativity.” Furthermore, we know that it must be linked to the blanks of aesthetic communication. But—since we are talking of a paint-ing here—at what level do we find these blanks, and how do they work? The difficulty in answering this question stems from the fact that the word “blank” may in itself be somewhat misleading. It is hard to eliminate the simplistic association between the blankness of a text and the actual blank spaces that separate words on a page, but we must do so (as Iser himself pointed out) to understand correctly the notion of blankness, or “nega-tivity,” or virtuality (as I prefer to call it). In most paintings, we do not find

15. James too considers: “So that was the Lighthouse, was it? / No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 202).


any point of indeterminacy in this naive sense—except of course the space outside the frame. Every dot on the pictorial surface presents a determi-nate color, there is no need to “fill in” anything. Where are the blanks, then, in visual artworks? In a remarkable essay, Marin (2001: 377) defined them as “the most general principles of [the possibility of painting] and of its effectiveness as representation . . . its transcendental conditions of visibility.” A blank, for instance, is the “trans-parent plane of the representation” (ibid.: 375) in perspectival painting, where the canvas is meant to resemble a window open onto the world. In other words, the blankness of the picture is the very transparence of the medium. But this transparence, this underlying blankness, is revealed only by occasional opacification of the medium itself. One of Marin’s (ibid.: 378) examples will play a major role in my argument: in perspectival paint-ing “the viewer’s body (and the painter’s)” are reduced “to a theoretical point” in order to emphasize the objectivity of the picture.�� Being entirely transparent (we see through it, but we do not see it), the viewer’s body is absorbed by the blankness of the painting; and yet it is, obviously enough, a necessary condition of its visibility. In some cases, however, the viewer’s body is opacified, as Marin illustrates from a seventeenth-century map, where “at the top of a fictitious hill . . . four little figures in the position of viewers” are introduced. These are, he points out, “the delegates—in the representation—of the subject who is ‘looking at’ the representation” (ibid.: 380); while hinting at the viewer’s body, they make clear that any painting entails its presence (normally blank, transparent, or virtual) within the rep-resentation itself. To sum up, within their respective frameworks, both Marin and Iser have argued that aesthetic artifacts possess a virtual dimension—blankness or negativity—that functions as a condition of their appreciation. This appre-ciation, however, is hardly something we do from the outside; in Kendall Walton’s (1990: 273) words, “If to read a novel or contemplate a painting were merely to stand outside a fictional world pressing one’s nose against the glass and peer in, noticing what is fictional but not fictionally noticing anything, our interest in novels and paintings would indeed be mysteri-ous.” On the contrary, to interact with aesthetic artifacts we need to enter them with a virtual body, by “tunnelling” into their underlying blankness. This brings us back to Lily’s painting. Indeed, this painting appears so

16. Marin builds on Panofsky’s (1997 [1927]) celebrated essay, which draws attention to the doubleness of perspective: on the one hand, it tends to a geometrical and mathematical con-ception of space that abstracts from the conditions of perception (and thus from the presence of a viewer); on the other, it alludes to the subjectivity of vision through the creation of an illusory space.


opaque (in Marin’s sense) that we do not know what it looks like.�� Rather than describing its subject (or, if Lily’s painting is abstract, its composi-tion), the text focuses on how the painter interacts with her work. As we have seen, she accomplishes an almost acrobatic feat by traveling into it. So the underlying blankness of the picture is made totally opaque; even if we do not know much about the painting itself, we gain new insights as to how paintings are viewed (and presumably how all aesthetic artifacts are appreciated). The blankness or negativity is revealed as the dimension on which interpreters project themselves with their virtual bodies. The “blankness at the heart of life” theory is not at all new in Woolf criti-cism. Her novels, writes Hussey (1986: 68), “are about silence, an empty space at the heart of life, but they can only point to it, imply it, shape round it.” In “The Lighthouse” the empty space corresponds to Mrs. Ramsay’s absence. However, the parallel between this existential void and the aes-thetics of virtuality implicit in Lily’s painting is hardly ever drawn (except briefly by Hussey himself ), far less given a theoretical foundation. I would therefore emphasize this parallel in fundamental blankness. Appropriately, Lily finds the “extraordinary unreality” of the house, when abandoned by its realizing presence, Mrs. Ramsay, “frightening” but “also exciting” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 161). This excitement (of creation), I suggest, leads to the idea that art does not just transform real objects and people (the lighthouse associated by some with Lily’s last brushstroke,�� Mrs. Ramsay) according to a formalist aesthetics; it does not just reduce them to shadows “without irreverence,” as the painter elucidates to Mr. Bankes (ibid.: 59). Art is capable of addressing real-world problems, such as Mrs. Ramsay’s tragic absence, and eventually of discovering a “centre of complete empti-ness” (ibid.: 194) in life itself. In turn, art would not be possible without this underlying blankness. Additionally, since the text focuses on how Lily interacts with her paint-ing, her artistic gesture tells us something about how we engage with aes-thetic artifacts: as interpreters, we actively participate in the construction of meaning by rearranging the building blocks provided by the work itself. In other words, we use aesthetic artifacts as playgrounds in which mean-ings can be generated within the constraints put on the work by its cre-

17. We may infer that, unlike Mr. Paunceforte’s pseudo-Impressionist art, Lily’s is in no direct way mimetic (see McLaurin 1973: 191; Stewart 2000). But she does not shun the prob-lem of mimesis either: somehow, as I said, she wants to lay hands on “this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 172) through the virtual space of the canvas.18. See Stewart 2000: 94 for an examination of the main critical positions on Lily’s last brushstroke.


ators. This is how Lily makes sense of Mrs. Ramsay’s death through her engagement with the painting. It is significant, then, that Abel (1989: 70–71) links Lily’s painting with Donald W. Winnicott’s (1971) “transitional phase” in the child’s development, when the border between object and subject appears blurred and the child learns to play. In this passage, for instance, the painter appears absorbed in a game of make-believe: “Moved as she was by some instinctive need of distance and blue, she looked at the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the blue bars of the waves, and stony fields of the purple spaces” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 197). The “playability” of Lily’s painting is precisely its encouragement of an active participation, through “dipping” or “tunnelling,” from the viewer/reader or, in this case, the painter. Hence Lily’s painting comes quite close to the conception developed by Marie-Laure Ryan (2001: 20) of virtual reality “as a metaphor for the full-est artistic experience.” Ryan points out that virtual reality is (yet) more a theoretical model than a technological achievement; it stands for a perfect compresence of immersion and interactivity (hence the alleged “fullness” of the experience itself ). Similarly, Lily’s immersion in the painting increases while she retrieves the past and interacts with it by manipulating it (mne-monically? imaginatively?) with the adroitness one usually shows in han-dling material objects. But in her tightrope-walking manner, she also man-ages to remain—as we have seen—“on a level with ordinary experience,” alert to a hic et nunc that only appears to be at odds with her immersion in the painting but in fact springs from it. Indeed, only through her engage-ment with her painting is Lily able to come to terms with Mrs. Ramsay. What is more, the discovery of the underlying blankness of art casts new light on the blankness perceived “out there,” in the world, as a figure of Mrs. Ramsay’s absence. Indeed, this blankness is in a way generalized as a condition of experience as such. This is the consequence of what Paul Ricoeur (e.g., 1990: 70–71) calls “mimesis3”: the “refiguration” brought about by aesthetic artifacts. All in all, Lily’s aesthetics of virtuality seems to involve an artwork that is at the same time immersive (it can be entered by the user), interactive (it encourages play with meaning), and opaque (in that it draws attention to its own underlying blankness). The novel’s conclusion is an eloquent (if slightly paradoxical) demonstration of this aesthetics: “She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 226).


The first sentences reassert the blankness that is both an exclusion from the existential fullness bestowed by Mrs. Ramsay and an enabling condi-tion of art (the blur visually renders the opacification of the blankness of the canvas, to put it in Marin’s words). In the instant of clear sight it pro-vides, however, the final brushstroke seems to dispel that blur, sealing the painting, labeling it as “done,” “finished.” It could even be read as recogni-tion of the final victory of humanity over the confusive domain of nature. Yet To the Lighthouse does not end with the words “it was done; it was fin-ished”: it goes on, incorporating the painting but not coinciding perfectly with it. Writes Cheryl Mares (1993: 77): “The completed painting, which is never ‘presented,’ is already part of the past; the completed novel, by opening itself up from the inside, as it were, opens onto what is not—or not yet—art. Thus, although Woolf provides us with a sense of an ending, she manages to avoid the suggestion that life can be reified, that it can be contained in a ‘closed object.’” This confirms our suppositions about the painting’s virtuality as the foundation of an aesthetics that opposes (per-haps not too overtly) Mrs. Ramsay’s. Besides, the indeterminacy of Lily’s gesture is evident: what does it finish, exactly? The painting is never given a description, not even a vague one: to the viewer/reader’s mind’s eye, it appears as the very quintessence of indeterminacy. However clear the line drawn on this blurred canvas, there is some irony in its finishing something that the text completely prevents us from imagining. On the contrary, I would say that Lily’s gesture invites the reader to play with the meaning of this brushstroke, this final “vision”—or, even better, acknowledges a her-meneutic engagement that began the moment the reader entered the text but does not end with its actual conclusion. How does this ending tackle the problem of time, central, we remem-ber, to Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetics? She hoped to freeze time in a crystal of essence. But that crystal was shown to be extremely fragile: works of art (Shakespeare), marriages, even the “moments of being” carefully nurtured by Mrs. Ramsay (the dinner scene) were as doomed to the devastations of time as anything else. Lily too seems to be sensitive to the issue of the difficult relationship between time and art: she poses it three times. First, just after she has started painting: “She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then[?]” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 173). A few pages later, while her aesthetics is taking shape, she returns to the problem, with a very similar premise but different conclusions: “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 the actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it


‘remained for ever,’ she was going to say, or, for the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint, wordlessly” (ibid.: 195). “It remained for ever”: is Lily relapsing into Mrs. Ramsay’s illusion? Not at all, because it is the attempt, not the work itself, that remains forever (more on this later); besides, these words appear to the painter “too boast-ful,” too confident in the superiority of humanity. Better, then, to express them without words (notice the barely grammatical construction of the last sentence), better still to hint them. How? Through the painting obviously; again her solution (if it deserves that name) is found through it. Here is the last posing of the problem: “There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter?” (ibid.: 225–26). The negative assertion in the first quotation (“what was the good of doing it then[?]” implies that there is no good at all) has become an almost derisive and “irreverent” (Lily’s word) affirmation of art despite its destruc-tion by time. The problem of time is avoided or sidestepped: art does not lie in the material object but in what it attempts—and what is attempted by viewers/readers every time they approach a work of art. We have seen that, by confronting Mrs. Ramsay’s absence through the painting, Lily became aware of the blankness that underlies both art and life. What art attempts must be, in short, a restructuring of our experience of the real world through the mediation of a fictional world. But since Lily’s art is open-ended, it seems especially prone to being reattempted countless times—and every interpreter will come up with a different refiguration of her experience. Because of its interpretive richness, Lily’s painting is not “a static realization, but a moment of creation that must be recreated by each perceiver,” writes Hussey (1986: 80). Indeed, it could be argued that Lily’s aesthetics comes close to what Mark Johnson (2007: 281) has termed “horizontal transcendence”: thanks to art, we get a chance to “go beyond” our present situation by extending our lives through fictional prostheses, by adding new meanings to our world. But this “transcendence” springs from a recognition of “the inescapability of human finitude” (ibid.) and consequently of the pointlessness of all forms of “vertical” transcendence (such as the belief in the immortality of our souls, of art, or of both). Such pointlessness is signified, in this novel, by Mrs. Ramsay’s death, by the failure of her aesthetics, and by Mr. Ramsay’s crucial insight that “the very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 41). It is tempting to relate Lily’s creative feat to the image of the leap (which occurs more than once in these pages). “No guide, no shelter, but all was


miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?” (ibid.: 195). And this is how the draft version of the novel describes Lily’s first brush-stroke: “The leap must be taken; & the risk run. Her preparations were made; her plate spread; & now with a curious physical sensation of leap-ing, & trying to control her leap, she made the first quick decisive stroke” (Woolf 1983: 256).�� Clearly enough, the leap points to the painter’s immer-sion in her work; but it could also suggest that we, as viewers/readers of her painting, must follow in her footsteps and take the leap ourselves, entering the artwork through its underlying blankness, negativity, or virtuality. This is what Marin meant in the passage about the opacification of the viewer’s body and its role in perceiving artworks. Finally, the leap could be a figure for our “being transported” (see Gerrig 1993: 2–17) to fictional worlds and of their extending our lives. It is suggestive, then, that in his last appear-ance in the novel Mr. Ramsay too is seen leaping and that his children try to fill in the “blank spot” of his attitude: “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,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 224).

Almost One Might Imagine Them

We now turn to the novel’s central section, “Time Passes.” As already noted, since these pages present the decay into which the house of the Ramsays falls during their ten-year absence, it would be fairly easy to read them in the light of the humanity/nature opposition outlined above. I will argue, however, that “Time Passes” is better understood through Lily’s aesthetics and its key concepts (virtuality, immersiveness, interactivity) and in particular through the idea of the interpreter’s transportation to the world constructed by the aesthetic artifact. Indeed, this section appears to be an attempt by Woolf to apply Lily’s aesthetics to a real linguistic construction. What happens here—quite simply—is that, after the departure of the Ramsays, the house is taken over by what Doležel calls “natural force.” The house is penetrated by stray airs, “personifications of the physical forces of nature, indeed, of time itself ” (Banfield 2003: 502), until it is no longer a human place but a “shell on a sandhill” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 149). Nature sets in with its confusive logic: “Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun

19. I have simplified and slightly edited the text of the original holograph draft, too complex (with its erasures and superscribed words) to be written down here.


itself on the faded chintz of the arm chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with glass and wild berries” (ibid.: 150–51). Nature devours the humanized space of the house: wild plants grow on the floor, birds nest freely, the plaster falls. The boundary between the house and the domain of nature (remember the “fluidity” peeping through the windows in the dinner scene) is erased to the point that the real walls are about to crumble: “one feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness” (ibid.: 151). What does “Time Passes” have to add, then, to the opposition already outlined in the first section? The main problem these pages pose, as critics have seen, is one of focalization. Who sees or witnesses the slow decay of the house in this world where not only are humans absent but humanity itself seems to be challenged, since the decay of the house evokes the destruction of the island envisioned by the main characters in “The Window”? Let us consider two authoritative readings of “Time Passes.” J. Hillis Miller (1990: 163) argued that this section appears to be narrated by “lan-guage itself,” a language that is inherently human, as the frequent use of prosopopoeia throughout “Time Passes” proves. In other words, this section allegedly reveals that—no matter what happens in the fictional world—there is no way to remove all human traces from language, which “always reimports some ‘you,’ some ‘I,’ ‘he’ or ‘she’ into whatever is turned into [it]” (ibid.: 164). This line of argument sounds convincing, but its main problem is that Miller seems to reformulate my question about “who sees?” in terms of “voice” (to use Gérard Genette’s [1980] somewhat jaded nar-ratological category). On the other hand, these issues are clearly related: since there appears to be no consciousness internal to the fictional world projected by the text, and thus no witness to its events, no human character could—in principle—narrate them. Another interpretation is Banfield’s (1987: 274) on the “empty deictic center” in the interludes of Woolf ’s The Waves, where she also mentions the similarity to the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse. Briefly, Ban-field claims that these descriptive interludes are built around a deictic cen-ter (a “here” internal to the fictional world), which is, however, left blank by the text. In other words, there seems to be a consciousness perceiving the world from the inside, but in fact there is none, and this absence is foregrounded. Woolf ’s language achieves the epistemological status of a photograph: it is “the only linguistic form permitting . . . the separation of observer and observed and allowing the latter to emerge independent, unobserved” (ibid.: 280). And again: “Woolf means [her] sentences to evoke what she calls elsewhere in the novel ‘the world without a self ’” (ibid.:


275). Obviously enough, Banfield’s argument could be readily applied to “Time Passes.” Moreover, this outline shows that Banfield would frame the problem of “Time Passes,” as I do, in terms of who perceives the narrated events and not of who narrates them (indeed her point would probably be that this section has no narrator at all). Both Miller’s and Banfield’s readings have some limitations. Monika Fludernik (1996: 197), for instance, contended that “Banfield’s ‘empty cen-tre’ sentences include more features of a subjective nature than she allows for”—and this objection would seem to be consistent with Miller’s point that our language is always anthropomorphic. On the other hand, because of his exclusive focus on language, Miller seems to miss what is really going on here: the problem, in my view, is not the language in itself but what the language invites the reader to do. In “Time Passes,” Woolf has taken Lily’s aesthetics literally: this segment, by pointing to an “empty deictic center,” foregrounds (opacifies, Marin would say) the reader’s immersion in the world constructed by text. Just as the painter “tunnels” into her work and by doing so reveals its underlying blankness, so “Time Passes” revolves around a blank: the one occupied by the reader’s virtual body—the probe we send into fictional worlds in order to imagine them. To understand this, we will have to make a detour into Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. It is customary in Woolf studies to apply phenome-nological categories to her work, the critical commonplace being that she conveyed an organicist vision of the world and challenged the traditional (patriarchal) subject/object opposition.�0 This is not incorrect, especially if we notice a certain family resemblance between this opposition and the conflict between humanity and nature—a conflict that Woolf stages but at the same time calls into question. Roger Poole (1982: 198) even claimed that “in Virginia Woolf . . . phenomenology found its novelist.” However, I find these phenomenological interpretations unconvincing when it comes to explaining what “Time Passes” is really about. For instance, Westling (1999: 862) has argued that it “plunges . . . into the very energies flow-ing through the sea of being—the more-than-human Lebenswelt—in which people are no more consequential than brief flashes of light.” Despite the impressive rhetoric of this passage, it seems hardly likely that in this sec-tion Woolf celebrates, as Westling (ibid.) maintains, “human community and its continuity with all the world which sustains it.” Instead, I would suggest going back to Lily’s painting and examining it in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s classic Phenomenology of Perception (2002 [1945]). Randi Koppen (2001: 383) describes Lily’s art as an “aesthetic-

20. See Hussey 1986: 3–20; Doyle 1994; Westling 1999; Koppen 2001.


cognitive project” made possible by the “interaction between the physical object and the body.” And she adds it is “the sense of bodily movement that constitutes the act of painting” (ibid.: 382). We should not forget, however, that the painter’s bodily movements are both physical (e.g., her last brush-stroke) and virtual (her leap, her “tunnelling” into the painting). Therefore, we should expand our notion of the body to include the latter movements as well. As we have seen, Lily’s interaction with the real space of the can-vas (i.e., her painting) enables her to reveal (by making opaque, in Marin’s terms) the virtual space that surrounds artworks. “Virtual” is obviously the key word here; and interestingly enough it also figures in one of Merleau-Ponty’s definitions of the body: “centre d’action virtuelle” (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 127), “centre of potential action” (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945]: 125). When the philosopher defines space as “a certain possession of the world by my body, a certain gearing of my body to the world” (ibid.: 291), it is to that conception of the body that he refers. Thanks to this phenomenological take on the body, we can give a fuller answer to the question: how does Lily enter her painting? By revealing its “transcendental condition” of blankness and dipping into it, we answered. But now we may add: by imaginatively detaching a virtual body from its real counterpart and by projecting the former into the virtual space of the artwork. (The little figures in the map mentioned by Marin were projected into the real space of the artwork and so were actually, not virtually, part of it.) The real space of the canvas, through the virtual space it implies, makes room for the virtual body of the viewer/reader. Moreover, we should bear in mind Merleau-Ponty’s famous slogan that perception is always embodied (see, e.g., ibid.: 235–39); thus to perceive (if only with the mind’s eye) a fictional world, we need to reposition our virtual body into it. This “fictional recentering,” as Ryan (2001: 103–5) has labeled it (but she probably understands it less literally than I do), is made necessary by the very structure of perception; however, there are many devices by which it could be highlighted (opacified) by the text. One of them is used in “Time Passes”: only Fludernik has described this phe-nomenon so far, labeling it “figuralization.” In her words, “the empty cen-tre, if it remains empty, a mere centre of perception, can induce reader identification, allowing a reading of the story through an empathetic pro-jection of the reader into the figure of an observer ‘on the scene’” (Fluder-nik 1996: 198). The place normally occupied by a perceiving conscious-ness (a reflector character or focalizer) is, in the case of figuralization, left empty. But this blank space, foregrounded by the absence of any even potential focalizer in this section, becomes so obtrusive as to encourage


the reader to occupy it himself or herself in mentally representing the fic-tional world. In a way, texts like “Time Passes” could be said to be woven around the invisible body of the reader. Consider this passage: “Almost one might imagine them [certain airs, detached from the body of the wind], as they entered the drawing-room, questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall?” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 138). The opening sentence seems to deploy the strategy David Herman (2002: 311) has called “hypothetical focalization” but with a significant difference: unlike the typical hypothetical focalizer, the “one” referred to in the text does not perceive the airs but imagines them. In standard “direct” hypotheti-cal focalization, the text appeals to a counterfactual or hypothetical focal-izer. Herman’s telling example is this passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”: “Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall” (1982: 233). Here, the emphasis is on hypothetical perception. By contrast, the “one” summoned by Woolf ’s text sees the airs only in the mind’s eye.�� No doubt, it is the reader’s imaginative involvement in the fictional world that is sug-gested here. And—I will repeat it one last time—it is the virtuality (or negativity, blankness) of the text that makes this involvement possible. To conclude, there appears to be a structural similarity between Lily’s immersion in her painting (what I have called the second aesthetics of the novel) and the way readers are encouraged by the text of “Time Passes” to take position within the fictional world it constructs. “Structural” because both Lily’s and the reader’s engagement are based on the virtuality of aes-thetic artifacts—conceived as the condition that enables them to exist as art and take on meanings. I hope that it will be clear by now that if “Time Passes” includes, at the surface level, the binary opposition (nature versus humanity) that underlies Mrs. Ramsay’s aesthetics, this is by no means the only way to read it. Indeed, it is only after Lily’s final brushstroke that the full significance of the central section of the novel is revealed: it is about our imaginative “entanglement” (Iser 1978: 127) in aesthetic arti-facts. Leaping into “Time Passes,” we imitate Lily’s acrobatics: we are pro-jected into a fictional world while just reading a novel; we are inside and outside the text at the same time.

21. There is another passage in “Time Passes” that deals with imagination: “In those mir-rors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy waters, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 144).


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Documents

Caracciolo, Leaping Into Space