It’s taken me a long time to work out what I’m going to do with my book posts and I’ve decided to write about the associations, links and mental tangents the books I’ve been reading have led to.
To the Lighthouse has been my first successful attempt at reading some Woolf, I bought Night and Day a long time ago and could never get past the first few pages, so I was wary but determined with this one. I am not a student of literature, I’m a social scientist and tea lady who likes to read, so I am not coming from an academic standpoint on this, but reading To the Lighthouse I was reminded of a lecture I once heard Will Self give on Radio 3 on the subject of the naturalistic novel and attempts to give a realistic representation of human thought, and after a little digging, I found it here (my favourite bit- ‘My shin is…itchy!’). It really is worth watching but at an hour long I don’t expect you to, so here is a bare bones summary; trying to write human thought as a comprehensible narrative is a daft idea, because for the most part we don’t think in language. He breaks up points by exclaiming ‘What are you thinking, right now?’ and postulates possible answers, some more coherent than others, arguing that the mad-sounding, word salad style answer is only slightly more realistic, and much less pleasant to read. Language is inadequate, and narrative even more so, because the mind does not go along the lines of beginning-middle-end, A to B to C. This is imposed afterwards to retroactively make sense of and present internal experience for inspection. Self suggests that the way we do this has co-evolved with the novel in a transactional modelling of consciousness, that we are what we read, which on a personal level I feel holds ground, mostly from all the times I’ve felt like my life is imitating a Graham Greene novel.
The thing that Self says that strikes me most, is that the ‘realistic’ thought narrative is a collective therapy for author and reader, persuading each other that we all have legible and comprehensible minds. Social psychology was my worst subject at university, but the idea that finally hooked me into it was that there is no true coherent self, no one constant core identity that can be tested and revealed, rather we are all composites of different identities that are pulled out for different contexts and interactions, no one is more tangible than the others, just more commonly used. This is how the average person contains a double helix worth of dualities in attitude and belief, depending on who they are talking to, what they are talking about, and what identity they are using. Case in point; I believe this but I also believe there is a me with persevering qualities, people who know the real me better than others, and for some reason I was still surprised when, having heard Self and studied what I’ve studied, that I read Woolf and thought- Yes. That is my experience of being as well. We have to buy into this idea of ourselves, so I would agree that thought written as narrative is a kind of collective therapy, because without the pretence of a united self, well, we’d crack up.
However, one of the reasons To the Lighthouse is often praised is for the way Woolf wrote the volatile and highly changeable nature of internal attitude and feeling, and I would argue this makes it more representative than other naturalistic attempts at the mind, but it is still a matter of degrees towards the unachievable. Reading the internal thoughts and feelings of Mrs Ramsay and family I was genuinely shocked by how much of it echoed my own experience, and I think that’s the way to admire Woolf, for her achievement in representing the reflective phenomenology of thought. It doesn’t matter to me that the way it appears on the page, or in my memory, isn’t representative of the ‘real’ processes, it matters that that is how the combined effect feels when I think about it. I appreciate Will’s point that it is naive at best to present a narrative as representative when it simply can’t be and I agree, but I think there’s a lot to be said for striving for truth, falling short and creating something worthwhile, as long as the limitations are acknowledged. Something he concedes himself, saying that just because a novel is written using flawed naturalistic assumptions does not mean that it is not a work of genius.
And To the Lighthouse certainly is that. It’s beautiful and haunting and awakens a gnawing fear of the everyday tragedies that time makes of all our lives, and at the same time is not a disheartening read for that, the lyrical prose convince you that the beauty contained in life is worth it all, well it does me anyway. Having devoured this, I am more than willing to give Night and Day another shot, I was hasty before, which isn’t like the real me at all.
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