| Product: |
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf |
| Date: |
25.09.01 (2436 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Well, they reach the Lighthouse, these people, this family, but only at the very end of the book, and with a great deal of time, personality, social interrelation and character in between. Oh, and with a fair bit of symbolism and vision, too, just in case you were wondering.
Anyway, the 'journey' starts when a young boy, James, who is cutting out bits of paper and pasting them in his scrapbook wishes to visit the place. His Mother, Mrs Ramsay, says that, if the weather is fine, he can go. His Father, Mr Ramsay, states that the weather cannot be fine, and that he shall not be able to go.
This is pretty boring, admittedly, but 'To the Lighthouse' does not pretend to be, or want to be a gripping read, full of action and adventure. Quite the opposite. It's a modernist novel, you see. It's one of the first modernist novels, published in 1927, and written by Virginia Woolf, part of the well-known Bloomsbury group, a group of upper-middle class writers, artists and journalists, who were determined to break free of literary and artistic conventions and explore new means of self-expression, and of percieving the world through 'the arts'.
Sound familiar? Well, probably. If you haven't heard of the Bloomsbury group, then you'll have heard of other, similar groups throughout the ages - groups of like-minded souls determined to challenge convention and find different ways of writing books, or painting pictures, or whatever they wanted to do, really. The way I see it is that art, music, and fiction progresses because each generation moves forward/ sideways/ backwards, depending on personal preference, through bouncing off the flaws of the previous generations work. So they were 'different'in their own time, but not really any different, on a wider scale, if that horribly sweeping statement makes any sense at all.
I'm meant to be reviewing a book, I know, not wiffling about arty groups, but, yo
u see; 'To the Lighthouse' is almost impossible to write an op on without looking at a more general picture, because, really, 'To the Lighthouse' is all about this progression. It is considered groundbreaking, and certainly Woolf wanted to break away from writing that was simply plot-driven, and descriptive of 'things' rather than people. She saw many contemporary novelists as limited - burdened by the 'solid, material world'(eat your heart out, HG Wells, you're in the list of Woolf's limited authors, you know).
And so we get "To the Lighthouse", which deals more with people, characters and situations than plot, or things. To describe the people it describes their thoughts and feelings, and the feelings of the other people in the group when they are musing on others, rather than having a single voice of a narrator, or author to give structure, or impose order to the book. So, taking the central character of Mrs Ramsey, we see her through her thoughts, through the thoughts of Lily Briscoe (a modernist painter who is staying with the Ramsey's), her husband, and the other guests of the Ramsey's in their Scottish holiday home. Rather than having 'things' happen to them, rather, we see them happen. Sometimes this technique works, is entertaining, interesting, refreshing, and sometimes it's confusing, pretentious, and dull.
To get some sense of time, and events, Woolf simply divides up the book into three parts. First we get 'The Window', which, pretty much, is devoted to describing the characters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, along with their 'imagery' (oh, yes, there's lots and lots of imagery, and some of it very silly). Mrs Ramsay is pretty much the pivotal character. However, the couple as a whole are pretty much explorations of a previous generation of stereotypes. One of the good things, though, about Woolf's stylistic approach is that we do get to see them as i
ndividuals.
Back to the framework of the novel. After 'The Window' we get 'Time Passes' where, well, Time Passes, and events happen, put down in bland facts. So, here Mrs Ramsay dies, and a World War happens. Things happen, but they aren't described, just stated.
Finally we get 'The Lighthouse' where some of the original party revisit the house, and variously eventually get to visit the Lighthouse, albeit in a state of familial tension, and muse on the passing of Mrs Ramsey. At the very end of the book, Lily Briscoe, an unmarried, 'modernist' painter, at last completes her picture. Yes, it's symbolic. The Lighthouse is reached, a picture is finished, and the book ends with Lily Briscoe's 'vision'.
And Virginia Woolf has completed her vision, and very clever it is, too. The problem I have with it, though, is that I simply don't enjoy reading it. I can appreciate it, and I can see it's 'importance', but I don't actually enjoy it. I find this a bit surprising. I enjoy reading 'Orlando' and I enjoy reading 'Between the Acts'. I even found 'A Room of one's own' pleasant enough to read, but, when it comes to 'To The Lighthouse' - despite it's critically acclaimed, terribly important, revolutionary, etc etc's, and the feeling I should, and... oh well, I just don't like it, I suppose.
There are reasons for this, too. When it works, the book is interesting, but, personally, I don't think it works half as often as it should. I wonder if it's that Woolf is a dry, rather academic author who can't quite pull off this interesting, and intellectual literary trick. When she is trying to be moving, she comes across as wordy. When trying to be poetic, she comes across as pretentious. If you look at 'Ulysses', a book I love, and a similarly 'ground breaking' one, then I think it's Joyce's natural
sense of rhythm and poetry that raises it from the 'interesting' to the 'great'. Woolf, to me, emotionally remains at the 'interesting' stage, even if intellectually, the ideas and motives behind writing this sort of book at the time were 'great'.
It's a clever book. It's a book that explores all sorts of ideas about art, and poetry, and people - and its a book that offers an interesting insight into how people think, or, at least, how a group of pre-war upper-middle class intellectuals think.
Unsurprisingly, it's riddled with class assumptions (our brief glance into the character of a working countrywoman, housekeeper for the Ramsays, reveals her to be a simple kindly soul - no groundbreaking revelations of character there, then). The academic, Charles Tansley, from a working class background, is ridiculed for his worry over material possesions. He's an unlikeable character, yes, but it's partly the way Woolf uses him to portray a 'class' that makes him come across as petty and mean.
Really, and truly, I'd say the redeeming feature of the book, apart from the 'interesting', 'academic' and 'clever' ones, would be the humour. There is humour here. Mr Ramsay is a philosopher, a philosopher of a previous generation (the characters are roughly based on Woolf's own family). He has a 'splendid mind'(bless), which has been sorting things in the fixed manner of an alphabet until he became 'stuck at Q'. I find that quite funny - it does describe logical thinking, or certain sorts of logical thinking awfully well.
Mrs Ramsay's vanities - the way she needs praise from the men around her, and the way she looks to give, all the time, is funny, sometimes, too. Like I said before, she's the pivotal character, really. She's at peace with her world, it makes sense to her, and, after the middle part of the book, the last part is
in some way Lily Briscoe trying to find sense and order in the world - although she finds a different one to Mrs Ramsay's unthinking sense of security.
Aaargh. It's that sort of book. I can't tell you what it's about without going into 'themes', 'imagery', 'biographical perspectives'. Its a book that's 'about' all these things, if it's 'about' anything at all. It is also 'about' people, of course, but, oh dear, if you're anything like me you might find yourself laughing at the bits you aren't meant to laugh at when Woolf tries to do deeply laden emotive poetical language. Well, here's a deeply serious bit:
"Such she (Lily Briscoe) often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her"
Is it me? Is it only me that remains totally unmoved by poor Lily's problems in her artistic vision? It's the 'clasping' and the 'miserable remnant' and the 'pluck' that do it, I think. For a book that is so cerebral in it's central idea, the language used can be as prose-burdened as the Victorian novels Woolf so despised. But, "To the Lighthouse" is, I suppose, Woolf's own artistic vision. It's just that a book has to be more for me than an 'artistic vision' for me to really, properly like it, I suppose. Call me niggly, but I want magic, life, joy, engagement, ohhh, something more than just 'clever'.
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