Reality and Virginia Woolf

The great contradiction in Woolf's method is that her portrayal of the inner lives of characters, by showing that all experience is individually conditioned and that every object is seen differently by everyone who looks, implies that the subjective is inescapable, even as her primary act as a writer is to claim objective knowledge of the workings of other people's minds. To extend herself into her characters she must escape her own personality, but the result of the extension is to question whether such an escape is possible. The contradiction may be resolved, perhaps, by pointing out that Woolf's characters are not real people, but only inventions of her own subjective consciousness, and hence mere demonstrations. But to collapse the categories in this way, to yield everything to the subjective, is to ignore an urgency that is always present in her work, from the method of her fiction to the obsession with memoir in the essays. For her characters, like their writer, are constantly trying to get beyond their own minds, to know something real about each other and about the world. Hence (to take only To the Lighthouse] Mr. Ramsay's metaphysics, Lily Briscoe's painting, Mrs. Ramsay's close and sympathetic attention to the needs of other people. Woolf's characters are always trying to look into each other the way we are looking into them. Woolf's mystical impulse is often noted; her occasional apprehensions of a pattern behind reality, typically coming before or after times of mental instability, her sense that her episodes of madness were in some way transcendental (a whirring of wings in the brain, she called it, and said that it had done for her instead of religion), and her famous comment about "the mystical side of this solitude"-"how it is not oneself but something in the universe one's left with"; "One sees a fin passing far out"-have made the mystical undercurrent a commonplace in thinking about Woolf. But mysticism can be thought about in stages. The first stage may be not to transcend the world, but simply to reach it, to get beyond the self in discovering the real world. In "The Mark on the Wall," the 1917 story in which Woolf began to develop some of her new ideas about fiction, the narrator sees a speck on the wall that she has not noticed before, and spends several pages essentially free associating as she tries to guess what the mark might be. The mark becomes an emblem for the susceptibility of reality to the subjective consciousness; and yet at the end of the story, before discovering what the mark really is, the narrator reflects that she likes to look at it, because it is a real thing, something separate from herself:

Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of.

She is always trying to be sure. She is always trying to unravel what Coleridge called the "intimate coalition" of subject and object. Hence the emphasis on communication in her books, and the emphasis on artistic inspiration as a flash of objective vision. She is always trying to get beyond herself. Woolf's notion of diffuse impersonality is not merely a theoretical condition for artistic creativity; it is the beginning of a mystical idea, an attempt to escape the cell of self-knowledge, a longing for real things.