Frank’s Comments (group member since Oct 30, 2019)

Frank’s comments from the A Season for Woolfs: A Virginia Woolf Reading Challenge group.

Hi. Since Stephen & I aren’t able to attend tonight, I still wanted to make some kind of contribution to the group, so I’m posting my thoughts here. Since starting To the Lighthouse I’ve been noticing all kinds of tangential references to subjects and objects. During Week 1, we read this passage:

Whenever she [Lily] "thought of his [Mr. Ramsay’s] work" she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his father's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of reality," [my emphasis] Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "when you're not there."

At first, I thought Woolf was setting up Mr. Ramsay’s work to be akin to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary theorist who also worked on the subject of subjectivity and objectivity, but it’s unlikely she would’ve known about his work. Instead, I think she’s drawing on Henri Bergson’s work. Bergon was a French Jewish philosopher who was much more well known in the early 20th century, so Woolf would’ve easily encountered his ideas, which also were about subjects and objects as well as perception and memory (and the perception of memory).

Basically there was an impasse in philosophy during the 19th century between two schools of thought: materialism and idealism (they go by several other names, such as positivism and Platonism, etc.). In very brief terms, materialists held that things had physical reality regardless of whether a mind perceived them. Idealists thought that only human perception (or thoughts) were real, and that there was no guarantee that anything “outside of the mind” had any reality. Along comes Bergson (and a few others, like Edmund Husserl) who basically create a compromise position between the two: I know that this table is real because it adheres to what we humans mean with our ideas of “real” and “table.” It helps to bridge the gap between thought and things, between things and our perceptions of those things.

Woolf is very much conversant with Bergon’s philosophy. She has Mr. Ramsay’s work be about "subject and object and the nature of reality," but she also has Mrs. Ramsay do all the difficult lifting of that work. It’s Mrs. Ramsay who thinks through all the nuances of subjectivity and objectivity.

Along with subject/object is another dimension of active/passive, which is brought up several times in regards to lots of things, including the lighthouse. At times, Mrs. Ramsay see the lighthouse sends out its light. At other times, she “reflects” the light of the lighthouse. And still other times, she becomes (as if) the light itself, like in Section 11:

Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at--that light, for example. And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that--"Children don't forget, children don't forget"--which she would repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the Lord.

And she gets instantly annoyed with herself for that last sentence that comes from outside her own mind:

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.

Here you have the whole subject/object, perception/memory problem being worked out. On top of that, you have the modernist wordplay: a rose (flower), rose (verb) from the lake, and then there’s the daughter Rose. Later at the dinner table (what was to always remind Lily of Mr. Ramsay’s work), they recite poems with the repeated phrase “Chinese rose,” which also merges Lily (another flower, but with “Chinese eyes”) with the daughter Rose.

All of these things (subject/object, active/passive, wholes/parts, singularities/mergings, memory/perception, echo/reflection) are even more fleshed out in the parts of the book we read for this week. I’m curious to see what Woolf does with it in the rest of the book.

If you’re interested in Bergson, I’d recommend this section from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/be....