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Reality and Virginia Woolf
Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2003 by Phillips, Brian
In the intimate and disturbing sexual grotesques of the moths, plunging their tongues into the viscous sweetness that will guarantee their deaths, we see the union of Woolf's opposites. The moth-ancient symbol of the soul-is both incandescent and hideously mired in flesh. It contains at once the horror and delight of matter, and the horror and delight of death.
Its greedy mortality is not only a metaphor (as in one sense it is) of sexual awakening; for the moth is also in the position of a consciousness in the world, which, to take in what it wishes to take in, must act to its own annihilation. If these reflections look like pieties, we must also remember the vulgar substance which the moth desires to drink. (And that The Moths was the working title of The Waves.) In this light we may appreciate the accuracy of Woolf's most impressionistic and poetic language-"The train draws across the fields lop-eared with smoke"-which evokes pictures of the world that are instant and exact. We may appreciate her refusal to abandon novelistic detail even in her most transcendent moments-the inscrutable Mr. Carmichael, rising like an ancient pagan god at the end of To the Lighthouse, clutches in his fist a trident which is "only a French novel." We may see in Woolf's grotesque and absurd elements, as in the inwardness of her characters, a difficult flight, not from the world, but to it. Reality is outside, waiting to be written and waiting to be read.
Copyright Hudson Review Autumn 2003
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