Virginia Woolf’s Technique of Novel Writing

Between the Realist Convention and the Modernist Innovation

 

Lector dr. Anca Mihaela DOBRINESCU
Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploieşti

 

The paper tries to demonstrate that the closer Virginia Woolf tries to come to life, the clearer it becomes that the inherited novelistic conventions are no longer satisfactory and should be discarded as they are too restrictive for her artistic purpose. Yet most of the challenge Woolf’s novels represent to their readers largely depends on Woolf’s knowing how to skilfully turn to the best account these same conventions and reprocess them into her modernist experiment. By focusing on two of the writer’s novels, “To the Lighthouse” and “The Waves”, we shall try to identify some of the features of Woolf’s technique of novel writing, which may also account for the different way in which readers generally interpret and respond to the proposed experiment. 

 

The closer Virginia Woolf tries to come to life and “to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves [her]” , the clearer it becomes that the inherited novelistic conventions are no longer satisfactory and should be discarded as they are too restrictive for her artistic purpose. The movement of Woolf’s narrative away from realism is so radical at times that the reader will find it extremely difficult to put up with what has been often, though rather vaguely, termed ‘Woolf’s modernist experiment’. In the writer’s incontestably modernist novels, it seems that the relationship with the real in strict realist terms has been suspended. The reader seems to be given little chance of building his perception of the new artistic offer on the solid ground of the conventions he may be familiar with. If most modernists benefited from their readers’ knowledge either of the world or of the conventional fictionalising devices, Woolf apparently chose to make no concession to her readers’ sense of intellectual comfort. Her plunge into what she saw as the essence of life is sometimes even more abrupt than Joyce’s from a narrative point of view. She confronts her reader with a world of fragments, decomposed furthermore into an infinity of other fragments by their being perceived from a multitude of viewpoints. What the reader feels he gets by means of the narrative is a destabilised universe, devoid of any cohering force, existing in and through the perceiving subject. The previously stable and unitary perspective becomes relative and multiple. Yet the main characteristic of Woolf’s work is its structural quality. It is out of the innumerable atoms that wholeness is reconstructed and it is through art that completeness is reached. Knowing and reconstructing reality through art is the solution of coherence Woolf proposes for a dismembering system. Her proposal constitutes itself into an implicit challenge launched to readers on whose involved contribution to meaning creation coherence depends. 
If this overall evaluation holds good for Woolf’s work as a whole, there is a clear difference in the readers’ attitude and response to Woolf’s modernist novels, those qualified ‘of vision’ in order to be kept distinct from those ‘of fact’.  We shall base our analysis on two of these novels, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, which seem to encourage such difference of response and we shall try to understand what it is in the making of these novels that could account for such disparity of

 

views. We shall try to make out why most readers find it comfortable to move on with the reading of To the Lighthouse and to accept, more or less easily, its narrative formula, while they are puzzled by the formal disconnectedness of The Waves, which requires effort to come to terms with and generates reluctance to read it. The preference for the former and the reservations about the latter are all the more surprising if we consider the way in which the two novels begin.

‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay, ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added. (To the Lighthouse, 219)

Without any preamble, conventionally expected to provide at least minimal information on place, time or character, To the Lighthouse opens abruptly onto Mrs. Ramsay and her affirmative answer to a question assumed to have been formulated before the novel began. All that the reader gets, by way of introduction to the fictional world, is the continuation of a dialogue about whose interlocutors he does not know anything. Mrs. Ramsay’s name comes to us via an omniscient narrator whose contribution is reduced to a minimum. She is just a name. She has no face, no personality. We could say that, when she is introduced to the reader, she does not even have an identity of her own. There is no first name to individualise her. She seems to be wholly dependent on her condition as a married woman. The identity of Mrs. Ramsay’s interlocutor, linguistically marked by ‘you’ in the dialogue, is revealed only later on. Moreover, the certainty conveyed by the adverb ‘yes’, reinforced by ‘of course’, in answer to an unexpressed question is quickly undermined by the conditional clause ‘if it’s fine tomorrow’.
Thus, the beginning of a novel that the readers find easy to cope with is not generous at all as regards the information conveyed to the reader on its opening. There is nothing from his knowledge of how a fictional world could come into being through conventions that the reader can recover when he starts reading To the Lighthouse. The only thing the reader can be sure of is that To the Lighthouse is still a novel.  He can visually appreciate it as a fairly extended piece of writing in prose and he can be almost certain, given its beginning, that it deals with entities endowed with anthropomorphic qualities, identifiable as characters. Yet, considering the protean quality of the novel as a genre, it is very difficult for the readers of To the Lighthouse to predict how a novel begun in the way in which it was would evolve.
Surprisingly, the beginning of The Waves seems to be more in line with the realist conventions of novel writing and, for this reason, more reassuring for the reader. It offers a description of the natural landscape, expected to function as a background against which the characters should be introduced.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. (The Waves, 3)

The reader cannot help noticing the highly poetic language of the text, but he is offered, however, a moment of time to rely on, the daybreak, and the image of a place acceptable as part of a setting, the seashore.
Yet, in spite of the formal differences between the ways in which To the Lighthouse and The Waves begin, which certainly create different horizons of expectations on the part of the readers, the progress of the two novels confirms to a large extent the readers’ intuition and their different reactions. Like all the other modernist novelists, Woolf created expectations and challenged them. The more original and unexpected the narrative formula she wanted to propose was, the better rooted in the solid conventions of realism it was supposed to be for it to be at least considered, if not accepted, by readers. Or, Woolf’s formal experiment has been, more often than not, taken for granted. It was so obvious that little consideration has been given to the conventional scaffold on which it was built. At the time when it was proposed, it was seen as a more appropriate narrative solution, given the growing awareness that what was called “life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we [the novelists] provide.” The world of external events was considered to be less important than the same reality subjectively perceived by and reflected in the individual consciousness. This is an issue on which consensus had been reached both by the modernist novelists and by the reading public. It was equally agreed that the conventions of novel writing inherited from the realists were no longer satisfactory, which is not to say that they were, for this reason, bad in themselves. The invention of techniques able not only to investigate the mind, but also to make the mental processes visible and bring them to the fore became a necessity for those novelists who, even if they did not call themselves modernists, felt they were different from the ‘materialists’. The only problem was that, if they wanted their writings to be understood as novels and not as something else, they had to keep the novel as a genre within limits still recognisable by the readers trained at the school of realism. No matter how keen on demonstrating the potentiality of fiction, through technique, to probe deep into human consciousness the modernists may have been, they could not afford to ignore the relationship that fiction established with the real and, more importantly, the sense readers made of this relationship.
Both To the Lighthouse and The Waves deal with fairly similar issues in modern(ist) terms: the modern individual’s quest for identity and integrity, the definition of the self in relation to him/herself and to the other, the possibility to reach wholeness through fusing the masculine and the feminine, the function of art and the condition of the artist within the modern framework. Both make the trivial and the evanescent alike the proper stuff of fiction. Both attempt to demonstrate that literature is a form of knowledge, thus capable of revealing deep aspects of the human being, always transgressing the level of the visible and the superficial. Both have the same degree of indeterminacy that facilitates the reader’s movement from the particular to the general, by expanding the temporal into the timeless or incorporating the timeless into the temporal. And yet they are so different in their appeal to the reader.
The difference between To the Lighthouse and The Waves does not necessarily reside in what they mean, but mainly in how they mean and in how prepared, or trained, the reader is to include the new form within his existing knowledge. The difference largely depends on Woolf’s use of the various modes of expressing consciousness and her decision to take advantage or not of the novel conventions the reader is familiar with.
To the Lighthouse deludes the reader into thinking that the novel is constructed according to the solid novelistic conventions he had been used to. The division of the novel into three well-delimited parts, ‘The Window’, ‘Time Passes’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, creates the illusion of a plot progressing chronologically from one mid-September day, when the Ramsay family and their guests spend their holiday on an island in the Hebrides, through the ten years during which the Ramsays’ house remains deserted, to the reunion of some of the original company in the same place. Yet nothing significant happens in terms of external events. It may be argued that the effect of chronology is created when, in ‘Time Passes’, Prue’s marriage and death in childbirth, Andrew’s death in war and Mr. Carmichael’s publishing a volume of poems are explicitly referred to. However, these events are deliberately bracketed. They are considered irrelevant and remote from what the essence of life is, which is indicated by the rumour-like quality of the information. Three of these pieces of news neutrally given, as if in passing, originate in a highly unreliable and indefinite collective consciousness, which raises questions about their truth and validity.

[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father’s arm, was given in marriage that May. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added, how beautiful she looked!] (364)
[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. They said nobody deserved happiness more.] (365)
[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.] (367)

The reference to Andrew, though apparently coming from the same source, is not clearly assigned to a source consciousness, but it is infused with subjectivity, becoming thus an implicit commentary on the war and its effects.

[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.] (366)

Mrs. Ramsay’s death is not presented in brackets. The information about it as an external event is placed in Mrs. McNab’s mind, from whose thoughts about Mrs. Ramsay the reader starts recreating Mrs. Ramsay’s identity. This points to Woolf’s philosophy of life, according to which death is just a scarcely noticed incident unable to affect the integrity of the image an individual being has in the others’ minds.

[…] they had left clothes in all the bedrooms. What was she to do with them? They had the moth in them – Mrs. Ramsay’s things. Poor lady! She would never want them again. She was dead, they said; years ago, in London. There was the old grey cloak she wore gardening (Mrs. McNab fingered it). She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds) – she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. (369)

What is significant to notice in relation with this passage is that, although the reader feels that what he has access to is Mrs. McNab’s mind, he is also aware of the fact that Mrs. McNab’s thoughts are not rendered in her own idiom. They are presented under the mask of an impersonal narrator’s words. The use of the narrated monologue certainly creates empathy, as it gives the reader a sense of his being inside the character’s mind. From a narrative point of view, the use of the same technique creates ambiguity, as the reader is uncertain about the source of the passage. The ambiguity has, however, a beneficial effect, as it results in continuity at the level of the narrative text. The reader moves in and out of the character’s mind, but he does not perceive this movement as abrupt, as it generally happens when the quoted interior monologue is used. Moreover, the presence of the third-person pronouns and the use of the past as the basic tense of the narration create a sense of continuity between the inner and the outer reality.
In spite of its seemingly abrupt beginning, the novel’s entry into the character’s inner life and its revealing of the character’s mental mechanisms is gradual. The narrative moves from one centre of consciousness to another, which could have produced an effect of randomness and disconnectedness but for the veiled and yet decisive presence of the impersonal narrator. However, the narrator’s voice is not annoyingly audible. The narrator may be even said to give up the privilege of omniscience.  It becomes one among the other voices, all equal in intensity, in a narrative characterised by a multiplicity of points of view. 
One reason why To the Lighthouse is perceived as more coherent than The Waves is that the various techniques used to express the inside of the figural consciousness are artfully combined and always embedded in the impersonal narrator’s framing speech. This narrative strategy enables a free movement in and out of the mind, without creating an effect of randomness and disjointedness. Moreover, the passage from speech to thought is always natural due to the same unobtrusive narrator’s presence. Even when the character’s thoughts are rendered in quoted interior monologue, the separation between the outer and the inner world inevitably suggested by the distinctiveness of the narrator’s and the character’s voices is solved by formally giving up the quotation marks. The following excerpt from the novel is illuminating in this respect and the strategy used in it coincides with the overall narrative strategy of the novel. What should be noted is that what keeps such technically different narrative instances together in Woolf’s case is the narrator’s presence, on the one hand, and the existence of one single centre of consciousness in one paragraph, on the other.

But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table and looking at the plates making white circles on it. ‘William, sit by me,’ she said. ‘Lily,’ she said, wearily, ‘over there.’ They had that – Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle – she, only this – an infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end, was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or any affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy – there – and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it. It’s all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one after another, Charles Tansley – ‘Sit there, please,’ she said – Augustus Carmichael – and sat down. And meanwhile she waited, passively, for someone to answer her, for something to happen. But this is not a thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says. (To the Lighthouse, 310)

Intent on attracting her readers into the intellectual interaction that her narrative experiment presupposed, Woolf organised To the Lighthouse in such a way that she simultaneously confirmed and challenged expectations. The effect the novel produces on the readers largely depends on Woolf’s decision to build her new narrative method by incorporating and reprocessing the inherited conventions. To the Lighthouse is a representation of a fragmented reality. Yet it also asserts itself, in the twentieth-century readers’ consciousness, as the only solution to fragmentariness. Lily Briscoe, standing for the condition of the artist in To the Lighthouse, is privileged to get a sense of the wholeness underlying all existence through her memories of Mrs. Ramsay. Through art, Lily Briscoe is capable of reconstructing the whole out of the infinity of subjective fragments and perceptions which reality is.
The Waves is an expression of Woolf’s decision to depart radically from the narrative conventions of the nineteenth century. She wrote the novel as if in answer to the question she formulated in relation to it in her Diary: “[…] and several problems cry out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick.” In an attempt to show that consciousness is all that matters, that reality is nothing but a subjective recreation, that it is through the art of writing that the real gets meaning, Woolf wrote a novel whose technique takes it out of or beyond the
recognisable limits of the genre. The Waves is offered to the readers as a novel, but it comes closer to a poem, or to drama, being in fact a unique experiment of a “play-poem-novel”. No matter how narrative in aspect the interludes preceding each chapter may be, the readers did not fail to see in The Waves something totally different from what they had been used to.
Focusing on the lives of the six individuals, Bernard, Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Jinny and Susan, The Waves encourages an interpretation according to which the novel is a Bildungsroman following the characters’ development from childhood to adulthood. It presents the life of the six characters, three boys and three girls, through ‘a series of dramatic soliloquies’, in Woolf’s words. For the sake of orientation, the characters’ thoughts, revealed through speech, are introduced by an impersonal narrator’s minimal interventions such as ‘Bernard said’ or Rhoda said’. Though the characters seem to dialogise, as this is what the reader would expect characters to do, at least occasionally, in novels and this is what the verb ‘say’ may be taken to point to, the six characters’ words do not indicate the existence of coherent communicative situations. These imply the presence of a speaker ‘I’ and a hearer ‘you’ in verbal exchange at a given point in time ‘now’ and space ‘here’. Or Woolf is very explicit that this is not how things stand in The Waves.

‘Now they have all gone,’ said Louis. ‘I am alone. They have gone into the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among flowers. It is very early, before lessons. Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins.’ (The Waves,7)

Louis’, just like any other character’s words, cannot be interpreted as quoted interior monologue either, as it is not the reproduction of the character’s mental idiom. Besides, “[…] from start to finish, [Woolf’s soliloquies] convey the idea that they are subject to poetic license” applied even in the case of the perception verbs ‘see’, ‘hear’ verbalised and vocalised in a manner which contradicts all rules of verisimilitude. For these reasons, it is impossible to distinguish between the characters’ monologues, which makes us reach the conclusion that, if it weren’t for the almost unnoticed narratorial intrusions, the novel could be seen as an extended autonomous monologue. The interior monologue is conventionally embedded in a third-person context and this is, as a matter of fact, the only formal concession Woolf makes to any novelistic conventions in The Waves. Yet the narrator keeps aloof from the narrative. He contributes to its progress neither temporally, nor spatially. Time becomes totally dependent on the character’s subjectivity and his/ her articulation of thoughts. In the absence of the narrator’s guiding, any character’s monologue can easily melt into any other character’s monologue because “they are all cast in a uniform idiom, which varies neither laterally (from one character to another), nor temporally (from childhood to maturity), thereby dispelling all sense of psychological verisimilitude.” The Waves is a novel with six characters, and the seventh absent one, Percival, and one single voice. Yet the monologic pattern of the novel does not convey a sense of unity and coherence, as we would expect. It rather imposes, because of the multiplication of the single voice into the soliloquies assigned to the six different centres of consciousness, a reading of identity as one and multiple, in constant search for a meaning. Consequently, The Waves offers the image of reality split in a multitude of fragments, decomposed in their turn into a multitude of subjective perceptions and ultimately recreated, actually or potentially, from them.
The reader seems to be invited to look for the structural quality of The Waves in the presence of the interludes that precede the nine unnumbered parts of the novel. Formulated in the voice of a depersonalised narrator, with a clear omniscient propensity, these passages “describe constantly the shifting patterns of light and water passing from dawn to dusk, spring to winter, across the globe.”   Put together, these passages would provide the reader with a cohesive piece of writing on whose proper understanding he could build the interpretation of the novel as a whole. But Woolf does not piece the interludes together. Moreover, she graphically opts for a different font type for these natural descriptions, which enhances furthermore the effect of disconnectedness created by the novel.
To the Lighthouse had dealt with ideas fairly similar to those expressed in The Waves, representative of Woolf’s philosophy of life and conception of art. But the narrative strategy Woolf used in To the Lighthouse created the illusion of a meaningful world, in which the self exists in communion with self and other. Besides, the techniques used to express the mental produced an effect of continuity between the outer and the inner world.
It is precisely the illusion of continuity that the presence of the interludes printed in different fonts destroys. The external world is even visually kept distinct from the world of thought, feeling and emotion. What expectations the reader may have had on starting to read the novel, they are severely challenged by the way in which Woolf constructed the novel. Therefore, contrary to expectations, the world of Woolf’s The Waves denies the existence of ordering principles and resists structuring.
This view of life conveyed through a hybrid strategy (dramatic, poetic or narrative?) could be only disconcerting to readers, even to those familiarised with the modernist techniques.
If The Waves is seen as an extended autonomous monologue, the question that logically arises is whose voice the reader hears. Since all the characters relate in one way or another to words and Bernard is ‘the natural coiner of words’ in the novel, we may assume that the voice we hear is Bernard’s, multiplied endlessly in the other characters’ soliloquies. Yet, if we consider the novel’s technique, through which Woolf reduced the whole universe to one single mind and one single voice, as well as Woolf’s anxieties about herself, as a writer, and about the art of writing, it is not too daring to assert that The Waves is a self-reflexive piece of literature, which turns upon itself and proposes art as the only solution to a meaningless world. The Waves can be read, this enterprise being equally challenging and rewarding, both as a novel which displays the intriguing techniques of modernism and as one which draws the reader’s attention to the illusional character of art, by focusing on the mechanisms whereby fiction comes into existence.
As we have tried to demonstrate, if the novel is analysed on the basis of its technique, i.e. an extended autonomous monologue, subsuming the six individual characters’ soliloquies, The Waves can hardly be said to display any features of a communication act. The characters, although interrelated, lack the force or are unwilling to communicate with one other. Yet, we could say that the novel as such is an act of communication between the producer of the text and its audience, the writer constantly drawing the reader’s attention to the fictional character of fiction, involving, thus, the reader in the process of meaning creation.

 

Bibliography:

1. Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse in Three Great Novels. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,
The Waves. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992.
2. Woolf, Virginia, The Waves. Harmondsworth. Penguin Books, 1992.   
3. Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
4. Flint, Kate, ‘Introduction’ to Virginia Woolf, The Waves. Harmondsworth:  Penguin Books,
1992.
5. Woolf, Leonard, ed., A Writer’s Diary, Being Extracts from the Diary of V. Woolf. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1954.
6. Woolf, Virginia, ‘Modern Fiction’ in The Idea of Literature. The Foundations of English
Criticism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979.