Literature can give life to the enormous building of remembrance, Marcel Proust
In her autobiographical novel “To the Lighthouse,” Virgina Woolf is a house, a haunted mansion inhabited by ghosts. She is not a solid construction: her bricks are made of time. The spectra that build her can only be trapped in memory. To do so, Woolf chooses an idyllic afternoon in a country home in England, but the mood is the place. We only “are” internally. Her house has no windows. Life is a completely subjective experience. Even nature is only a reflection of us.
Woolf, like the Ramsey’s house, only comes to life in the presence of others. Her walls are mute witnesses of the pointless doings of men. The ghosts that she lodges are elusive, evasive, flighty, unattainable. Their selves go from one thought to the other, from here to there, up and down from one feeling to the next. Like the breeze and waves that frame the action, the self flows at the rhythm of time. It is a restless bee that moves from flower to flower. It feeds with the pollen of others; it only IS in the presence of others.
Unlike Nietzsche who claimed his own authorship, Woolf gives it to others. It’s the others that sculpt us The Self can only go as far as the others allow. They elongate or constrict us. James’s spirits are high when his mother predicts a trip to the lighthouse, and they are crushed when Mr. Ramsey says it won’t happen. Charles Tansley “revives” when Mrs. Ramsey tells him a confidence. He needs others to take notice of him in order to BE. There is no division between self and others, they permeate us. The self is not autonomous. Minta knows she is beautiful only by the reaction of others.
In solitude .Mrs. Ramsey finds that “it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep.” Mr. Ramsey cannot suffer in silence. He needs others to witness his misery. “Alone, perished,” Lily Briscoe hears him saying. Unlike Emerson, who looks to transcend the self through nature, with Woolf it is the others that help us escape from the self. In “To the Lighthouse,” we find other exits from us. Daydreaming for Mrs. Ramsey, reading Scott, for Mr. Ramsey.
With Woolf, the self becomes also the “other.” As foreign to us as to others. It is not unified. It changes from mood to mood, from thought to thought. Lily Briscoe thinks of William Banks: “You are the finer human being I know,” but simultaneously remembers how he: “… objected to dogs on chairs.” “How do we then judge people, think of them?” The self is at the mercy of its thoughts
“What does it all mean?," the characters ask. Woolf seems to be present in that question. We left the self with Nietzsche, being “like a lake that ceasing to permit itself to flow off will form a dam that will rise higher and higher.” With Woolf it flows. But to flow it must have a direction: to marriage, to the letter Z, to a dissertation… to the lighthouse. None of the characters will make it, at least, not as they planned, but it is their purposes that make them BE. They look for a center, and flow towards it. Woolf also begins to take action in the last part of the book.
In “The Lighthouse,” Woolf converges with Lily Briscoe, who finds that a brush is “the only dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos.” Like Nietzsche, she finds in art the best answer to life. Woolf captures her center with words. At first, her mother is the center. All the characters gravitate around her. In this petrified moment, Mrs. Ramsey represents everything she must’ve been to Woolf. She traps her mother with her pen. “To the Lighthouse” is a moment stolen from eternity.
Later, like Lily, she must change the center. Woolf moves it from Mrs. Ramsey, to herself. She finally finds her own center, her own voice. As an artist she traps the grain of sand while it is still dry before the wave of life strikes it one afternoon in September. Just a few hours to catch the self at the moment of being. An elusive vision, a mirage, but it is hers forever.
