Reality and Virginia Woolf

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2003 by Phillips, Brian

Woolf's method of character-creating is, of course, her distinctive innovation as a writer. It is why we read her books, and why some people prefer not to read her books. For the fragmentary, free-floating method she uses in all her mature novels (The Years is a partial exception) can be both exhilarating and frustrating; it reverses a habitual process in the reader's imagination, and forces the reader to build the idea of a character from the inside out.

Woolf's odd attentive prose, which never portrays thought directly, but rather acts as a kind of ambiguous indirect discourse moving with the turns of thought, requires an extraordinary act of sympathy on the part of the reader, who is called on to construct a human being around a fleeting vision of consciousness. It would be wrong to say that a conventional novelist asks us to know his characters and Woolf asks us to become her characters, because we never really inhabit the mind of a character in Woolf; we merely observe it intimately, conscious all the while that we are watching someone else. A more conventional novelist-Tolstoy, say-introduces us to his characters, tells us what they look like, shows us what they do, perhaps inflects his prose to give us a sense of their moods or what they think, a sense just as we might have if we were in a room with them, and could receive all the silent hints from looks and acts that come to us more directly in real life than in the novel; we imagine knowing Oblonsky just as we might know a person in real life, and Oblonsky becomes "real" to us because we can imagine him as someone in the world, roughly as we imagine an absent acquaintance. The way we know a Woolf character is very different from this. While always keeping separate from the character, we know more about the progress of her thoughts, more about her inner life, than we could ever perceive about someone in real life, and we are required, with the advantage and the burden of that knowledge, to supply from our own imaginations more about the external person than we would ever have to supply in real life. We cannot imagine Mrs. Ramsay as someone in the world, because we have seen Mrs. Ramsay in a way we could never see anyone. And yet, somehow, Mrs. Ramsay seems real to us. The imagination turns out not to be restricted by experience. Woolf's achievement, in part, is to have discovered a new capability of the imagination. We are able to move through the storm of shifting subjectivities in The Waves or To the Lighthouse and understand that the world may be like that. And we are able-this is partly how we know the world may be like that-to withdraw, and to watch Mrs. Ramsay holding the partly knitted stocking against James's little leg to see if it is the right size. We are able to take pleasure in the sight. The physical detail both reveals character and places us in the world. We never go unmoored into purely abstract consciousness.