Leaping into Space: The Two Aesthetics of To the Lighthouse

Marco Caracciolo
University of Bologna, Comparative Literature

This essay argues against the prevalent view of the aesthetics implicit in Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse. It is an aesthetics of closure, an attempt to make of the moment something permanent (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 176), which is usually associated (as are Woolf s own theoretical statements) with the novel. This formalism, no doubt related to Roger Frys art criticism, takes fictional shape in the character of Mrs. Ramsay. In fact, it is by bringing life to a standstill, enclosing it in crystalline moments of being (Woolf 1976), that Mrs. Ramsay struggles against the grasp of time. However, this aesthetics is shown to be illusory and self-deceptive: the very opposition between humanity and nature stems from the human desire to comprehend and thus reduce to reason (and language) what the text constructs as irreducible. Mrs. Ramsays aesthetics gives way to the aesthetics of virtuality enacted by Lily Briscoes painting. Only by reformulating the problem of time in spatial terms can Lily overthrow the limitations of the formalist framework: her arta hybrid image/texthinges on the blanks of aesthetic communication (which I define by reference to the work of Wolfgang Iser and Louis Marin). Lilys painting qualifies as the only viable alternative to Mrs. Ramsays self-contained crystals of shape. Finally, I show how Woolf herself tried to (p)reenact Lilys painting in the central section of the novel, Time Passes. Apparently built on the humanity/nature opposition, this baffling segment revolves in fact around a blank (the absence of any perceiving consciousness internal to the fictional world) and encourages the reader
Abstract

My thanks to Federico Bertoni for his continued support and to Donata Meneghelli for her remarks on an earlier version of this essay. I would also like to thank the referees of Poetics Today for their close reading of this text and their perceptive comments. Poetics Today 31:2 (Summer 2010) doi 10.1215/03335372-2009-020 2010 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

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to fill it in by imaginatively moving into the fictional world with a virtual body (as defined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Maybe the idea is to think of time differently, she says after a while. Stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up. Make a still life thats living, not painted. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

Beyond the Crystallization Metaphor

Art discloses . . . beauty in conferring a timeless form on times passing: so Ann Banfield (2003: 511) concludes her investigation on the influence that Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore had on the philosophy of time implicit in Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse. Be it historically true or not (and it probably is, given the sophistication of Banfields arguments), I will take that view as a starting point for my own reading of To the Lighthouse. The idea that art structures an unstructured reality, making of it something permanent (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 176), is as old as the hills and has been duly applied to Woolf s work. No doubt Woolf herself espoused it, perhaps through the mediation of Roger Frys (1926; 1960 [1920]) formalist aesthetics, which seems so central to most readings of the novel, including Woolf s own: One stable moment vanquishes chaos. But this I said in The Lighthouse, she wrote in her Diary (197985, 3:141). Banfield (2003: 49297) draws attention to the crystallization metaphor that Woolf frequently employed to indicate arts flawless and clear-cut result. Consider just one example from To the Lighthouse: There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, [Mrs. Ramsay] meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 114). The crystal, Banfield (2003: 496) points out, stands for the whole chemistry of a formalist aesthetic, one that, like science, aims to make apparent the underlying pattern, the logic, the geometry of its objects. Naturally, Frys name turns up again, along with those of Leslie Stephen and Russell: they all usedin different contextsthe crystallization metaphor. Denying the centrality of this aesthetics in Woolf s work, and particularly in To the Lighthouse, would be pointless. Yet I believe that Woolf s novel outlines (perhaps less visibly) a second aesthetics, which critics seem
1. See, e.g., Hussey 1986: 126: It is . . . timelessness that Lily Briscoe attempts to capture in her painting, through the recreation of her own past as a work of art. 2. See, e.g., McLaurin 1973: 1725; Stewart 2000: 78. According to Stewart, Frys formalism gave Woolf [the] shaping principles of her novel.

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reluctant to acknowledge, conceivably because it goes beyond how Woolf herself conceptualized her novel. This second aesthetics cracks open the crystal of formalism, hinting at a theory of arts virtuality that revolves around the blanks of artistic communication. This virtuality (a term I use more or less interchangeably with Louis Marins [2001] blankness and Wolfgang Isers [1978] negativity) is the aesthetic counterpart to the generally recognized metaphysical and existential void at the heart of Woolf s fiction (see, e.g., Hussey 1986). In the following pages, I will argue that this aesthetics sidesteps the problem of time (a key concern in the formalist framework) with a leap into space. In particular, the virtual space that Lily Briscoe discovers on the other side of her canvas enables her (and possibly the novel as a whole) to defuse the anxiety about time expressed by most characters. As we will see, the virtuality of art points to its ability not to achieve permanence (since the very stone one kicks with ones boot will outlast Shakespeare [Woolf 2000a {1927}: 41]) but to expand and attach meaning to our daily experience.
The Novelists Shoulders

I will start my investigation into the double aesthetics of To the Lighthouse by presenting the fundamental conflict (humanity versus nature) in the first section of the novel, The Window, and showing how Mrs. Ramsays implicit aesthetics is related to it. This conflict is best understood through Lubomr Doleels (1998: 32) account of how fictional worlds are constructed. According to Doleel, the most general model of such a world comprises a set of fictional facts, a natural force or N-force, and one or more people. Woolf (2003 [1932]: 52) herself wrote on Robinson Crusoe: All alone we must climb upon the novelists shoulders and gaze through his eyes until we, too, understand in what order he ranges the large common objects upon which novelists are fated to gaze: man and men; behind them Nature; and above them that power which for convenience and brevity we may call God. Needless to say, there is only a superficial resemblance between Doleels and Woolf s models. For one thing, God is conspicuously absent in Doleel and the text-as-world metaphor in Woolf. Moreover, it remains unclear whether Woolf saw God as a force internal to the fictional world or as one acting on it from outside and to what extent this force can be equated with the novelists own godlike figure. But addressing these problems would take us too far from our object. Let us concentrate on the question she frames: how does the novelist (in our case, Woolf herself ) relate nature, the world, and the people inhabiting it? As we will see, Woolf stages an

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opposition between the natural force and humanity. But sometimes (and for reasons to which we will return) this opposition is made less clear by the ambiguity of the natural element. Consider Mrs. Ramsays first auditory encounter with the sea:
The monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, I am guarding youI am your support, but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbowthis sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror. (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 20)

The waves are associated now with a reassuring lullaby, now with a threatening roll of drums that announces the destruction of the island. Hence the duplicity of the sea: on the one hand, it takes Mrs. Ramsay back, regressively, to her childhood; on the other, it projects her into the future, reminding her of her own mortality. Either way, the sound of the sea appears invariably linked to the sense of the passage of time. Yet there is something more than just personal remembrances or the anticipation of ones death at stake here: the image of the sea swallowing up the island hints at the time of nature, in comparison to which human life appears as ephemeral as a rainbow. Later on, the painter Lily will entertain a similar thought: Distant views seem to outlast by a million years . . . the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest (ibid.: 25). For Mrs. Ramsay, the regular beat of the waves predicted (under certain conditions) the destruction of the island, whereas for Lily it is the sense of distance that suggests, metonymically, a vast temporal lapse. What is more, Lily imagines an earth entirely at rest, free from human beings and their anxieties; she emphasizes the disappearance of the observer, not that of the island. It will be an earth devoid of human gazes, beheld only by the sky. This passage reveals a concern with the conditions of perception, which Woolf expands in the novels central section, meaningfully titled Time Passes.
3. An image that often echoes in The Waves: The sea . . . beat like a drum that raises a regiment of plumed and turbaned soldiers (Woolf 2000b [1931]: 82).

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Mr. Ramsay seems to share this kind of cosmic imagination. In his meditations on human fame, he sees in his minds eye a sort of abstract, allegorized landscape: What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with ones boot will outlast Shakespeare (ibid.: 41). Later he will return to the islands real setting: That was the country he liked best, over there; those sandhills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. . . . There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you (ibid.: 76). These quotations foreground a circular and outer temporality, in which humanity vanishes, leaving no traces. Every major character in the novel envisages the islands engulfment; they do so, however, in accordance with their individual sensibility: Mrs. Ramsay conceives this event as an allusion to the briefness of lifes candle; Lily experiences distance (in space and in time) as a new, external sight that seems to do away with the gazer; Mr. Ramsay is obsessed by the durability of human effort, art (Shakespeare), and of course his own work. However, these fantasies outline an opposition between nature (the sea, the waves as its agents), on the one hand, and humanity, on the other: eventually nature will engulf the humanized world of the island, but there will be no one to witness its final triumph. There are clear indications in this first section of natures encroachment on the Ramsays and their house: the towels gritty with sand from bathing (ibid.: 12), the furniture that positively dripped with wet (ibid.: 31), oreven more significantlythe flowing, the fleeting, the spectral prying through the windows at dinner. It is what Woolf (1983, appendix:51) called, in an outline of Time Passes that she wrote on a stray paper, the devouringness of nature. This phrase could be used to give a tentative answer to the question I framed above: How does the novelist relate humans and nature in the fictional world of To the Lighthouse? But as we will see, the conflict between them is more ambiguous than it initially seems. Now for what I have called Mrs. Ramsays aesthetics. In the context of the humanity/nature opposition, her housekeeping concerns acquire new
4. See also this passage, which contains Mr. Ramsays usual heroic rhetoric: It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. . . . To stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 50). For a remarkable reading of Mr. Ramsays heroic inclinations (and mystifications), see Abel 1989: 56. 5. If they could be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach with themthat would be something (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 32). That windows should be open, and doors shut simple as it was, could none of them remember it? (ibid.: 33).

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meaning. We may consider them, with Gaston Bachelard, a re-creation of the human space of the house against the entropic tendency of the outside world of nature. She appears almost as a house goddess, assuring her husband that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 4344). Her struggle against natures (and times) intrusion is also manifested by her wish to bring people together. With her mania for marriage, she fosters Paul and Mintas union (her efforts with Mr. Bankes and Lily will prove unsuccessful, however). She rejoices at the triumph of her dinner and in particular at Mr. Bankess appreciation of her special recipe, the buf en daube. The dinner is evidently a key scene in defining Mrs. Ramsays function in this section of the novel. When it starts, she takes a look at the dining room and feels, with a twinge, its shabbiness. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her (ibid.: 91). But her victory comes at last. Here is how Lily describes it: Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against the fluidity out there (ibid.: 106). The walls that usually separate people from one another crumble under Mrs. Ramsays influence; the guests now form a party, united against their common enemy. Inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily (ibid.). This clear-cut opposition evokes what I have called Woolf s formalist aesthetics: Mrs. Ramsays victory over the fluidity out there crystallizes like a ruby (ibid.: 114; see Banfield 2003: 494). That this power of Mrs. Ramsays is nothing short of aesthetic Lily will later recognize in this often-quoted passage from the third section: Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make something permanent)this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing . . . was struck into stability. Life stands still here, Mrs. Ramsay said (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 176). I will argue that Mrs. Ramsays aesthetics, apparently so effective in this first section, will be reconsidered and eventually discarded by Lily in her confrontation with the empty canvas of The Lighthouse (the last section of the novel). However, the formalist aesthetics already shows signs of fal6. [Household activities] keep vigilant watch over the house, they link its immediate past to its immediate future, they are what maintains it in the security of being. But how can household be made into a creative activity? . . . Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality (Bachelard 1969: 6768).

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tering in this section. Apparently, the boundary between the natural and the human domain is impervious; it admits no osmotic diffusion. Yet sometimes the text seems to imply that natures devouringness can hardly be understood as a rigid opposition between humanity and nature. This is an obvious simplification, one that (we may argue) goes hand in hand with Mrs. Ramsays attempt at protecting the house from the onslaught of the waves. The opposition is already a way of securing all that is human by showing it to be radically distinct from the natural domain. As we will see, however, To the Lighthouse proves all attempts at capturing the world in a nonflexible pattern of thought (be it dualistic or, even more significantly, dialectical) to be illusory. This also warns against such patterns in comprehending the novel itself. The nature/humankind dualism is first challenged by the scene in which Mrs. Ramsay reads to James the Grimm brothers tale titled The Fisherman and His Wife (ibid.: 6268; for the original text see Grimm and Grimm 2002: 8189). The text does not appear in the novel except for a few short passages (Mrs. Ramsays reading is intermingled with her own stray thoughts). It is the story of a fisherman who compassionately throws back into the sea a magical flounder he has just fished. His overambitious wife, however, suggests that he ask the fish for something in return for his good deed. Her requests are hyperbolical: first to live in a cottage, then in a palace, then to become king, emperor, pope, and finally God. When at last the man tells the flounder that his wife wants to be God, their superb papal church turns into the shack where they lived at the beginning. A few elements in this story hint at the primary narrative of To the Lighthouse. First, the temporality of the fairy tale is evidently circular, since at the end the couple returns to the shack of the beginning. In context, this circularity could allude to the sea that encircles the island, threatening its inhabitants, bringing to bear on them a nonhuman time dimension. Thus even the fairy tale turns into an ominous anticipation of the islands destruction. There is apparently no escape from times grasp. Moreover, the marital relationship between the two protagonists mirrors that of the Ramsays. We saw that Mrs. Ramsay appears as an almost godlike figure in her wish to imbue her house with life and reality (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 43), but the tale implicitly suggests the unreasonableness of her ambition. I say implicitly, since we glean little of the story itself from To the Lighthouse; yet the fact that in the manuscript version Mrs. Ramsay read another Grimms story to James (The Three Dwarfs in the Forest, according to Susan Dick [see Woolf 1983: 72]) shows that Woolf s choice was not random. She must have opted for The Fisherman and His Wife because it stirred resonances within her own work. But apart from the

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motif of the house and the subtle undermining of Mrs. Ramsays illusions, the fairy tale read aloud to James in the final version enters the larger semantic network of nature and the sea. In fact, one of the few passages actually quoted from it in To the Lighthouse reads as follows: Houses and trees toppled over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high as church towers and mountains, and all with white foam at the top (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 67). An important detail that I have intentionally omitted from my summary is that, at every request from the fishermans wife, the sea becomes more turbulent. Perhaps it is no accident that these lines precede the expression of the womans desire to be God. It is the climax of the story and the turning point of the couples fortunes. Above all, that quotation anticipates Time Passes and particularly these words: to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken (ibid.: 146). To put it in Mark Husseys (1986: 113) words, the passage from the fairy tale explodes the illusion [of a] commensurability between man and nature (see also McLaurin 1973: 196), since nature reacts against humans increasing ambition to humanize the world. This ambition, not the devouringness of nature, provoked the conflict, so natures encroachment on the house of the Ramsays is actually an act of retaliation: an attempt at reclaiming what once belonged to nature and humans have appropriated for themselves. In a way, then, saving humanity from the waves onslaught, as Mrs. Ramsay strives to do, amounts to saving it from itselffrom the changes humans have brought about. Accordingly, the opposition between the natural and the human domains is shown to be a fiction maintained by humans to justify their own presence in the natural world. No doubt, these considerations accord with an ecological view of Woolf s work that has sometimes been proposed. According to Louise Westling (1999: 871), Woolf was able to foresee the tragic consequences of our destructive technologies, advancing a radically alternative model: that of an ecological humanism centered on the understanding of our limitations and responsibilities that must humble our species if we are to survive.
Blackness of What Is outside Us

The Grimms tale read aloud to James seems to point out that the boundary line between nature and humanity was actually drawn by humans driven by ambition. This boundary, however, was already blurred by the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature that Mrs. Ramsay perceived in

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the waves throb. If the sea threatens to swallow up the humanized world, why is its sound sometimes considered soothing? But natures kindly face is woven into a semantic network that seems to enfold even humanity, natures supposed enemy. Rigid partitions fall apart, as Mrs. Ramsays goodnight words to Cam demonstrate: She could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cams mind, and Cam was repeating after her how it was like a mountain, a birds nest, a garden, and there were little antelopes, and her eyes were opening and shutting, and Mrs. Ramsay went on saying still more monotonously, and more rhythmically and more nonsensically (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 124125). The rhythmical nature of Mrs. Ramsays phrases conjures up the regular beat of the waves. However soothing this chant might be to the child, there is something disturbing in its nonsensicality; even more so if we read it alongside Time Passes. The mention of the antelope, clearly out of context, could resonate with the tendency of the sea to obscure human distinctions: Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say This is he or This is she (ibid.: 137). As a matter of fact, natureseen peeping through the windows in the dinner scenehas already crept into human minds; or better, it has always been there. This could, at least in part, explain the ineffectiveness of Mrs. Ramsays attempts at salvaging the human in the islands engulfment. Now, if we consider that within the world of To the Lighthouse natures devouringness objectifies the passage of time, we may gain a new insight into Mrs. Ramsays formalist aesthetics. It will be evident by now that, in her wish to bring people together, even in her housekeeping concerns, a whole aesthetics is implicit, with the claim that art imposes a shape on the shapeless, making of it something permanent. This is perfectly exemplified by her reading of Shakespeares sonnet: How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded herethe sonnet (ibid.: 131). Before discussing this passage, I will introduce Giovanni Bottirolis (2006: 256) distinction among three styles (or regimes) of thought or as he also terms themthree types of logic (my translation). Bottiroli builds on various insights from psychoanalysis and metaphor theory. The first of these styles of thought is the confusive, in which there is total over7. Even more explicit in the first draft: Everything was confused & confounded, there was scarcely any identity left, either of bodies or of thought (Woolf 1983: 149).

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lapping between two isolated terms (ibid.). For instance, to cite Bottirolis example, one may dream of a surgeon-butcher. This figure is neither a very skilled butcher (the meaning of my butcher is a surgeon) nor a very sloppy surgeon (that surgeon is a butcher): it is both at the same time. This is the style of the waves, since they attempt to erase the boundary between objects and people, engulfing the humanized world into an ocean of indistinctness. In contrast, the separative is characterized by the binary logic of traditional analytic philosophy: it is the style of Mrs. Ramsays reading of the sonnet, as we will see in a moment, and it also underlies the whole humanity/nature opposition. The separative, Bottiroli argues, is nonmetaphorical by definition. Finally, we have the distinctive kind, where opposites can overlap without generating confusion (ibid.: 257). This is the style of most literary metaphors, in which there is only a partial overlap between the words involved. (In Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turners [2002] terms, a metaphor creates a blend that can always be unpacked into the input spaces involved.) This threefold distinction could be further reduced, continues Bottiroli (2006: 261), to an opposition between rigid styles of thought (the separative and the confusive) and the flexibility of the distinctive. Whereas in the separative and in the confusive there are either two separate entities (a surgeon and a butcher) or one (the indistinct surgeon-butcher we may dream of ), in the distinctive two entities are at the same time one (my butcher is a surgeon). As we will see, the flexible is the mode of Lilys acrobatics, for she seems to do two things at the same timereveal the underlying blankness of her canvas by tunnelling into it and come to terms with Mrs. Ramsays real-world absencewithout confusing them. Now, the Shakespearean sonnet is like a magnet: decisively it separates all that counts of the past day from the bits and pieces, shedding these and investing the day with absolute meaning. It is yet another shiny crystal supposed to encapsulate lifes essence; as such, it gives Mrs. Ramsay an impression of wholeness that is perfectly satisfying. But this impression may be just thata fleeting thought the character clings to. What do we know of this essence after all? Nothing; the text is silent as to its real content. As Bernard acknowledges in the speech concluding The Waves: Now the meal is finished; we are surrounded by peelings and bread-crumbs. I have tried to break off this bunch and hand it to you; but whether there is substance or truth in it I do not know (Woolf 2000b [1931]: 221). Times leftovers (Mrs. Ramsays odds and ends) are all that is given to us, all that we have to live by. We should bear in mind Mr. Ramsays verdict: The very stone one kicks with ones boot will outlast Shakespeare (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 41). This sonnet is obviously no exception.

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We begin to suspect that Mrs. Ramsays reading is somewhat circular: perhaps she self-deludingly reads what she wants to read, jumping to conclusions, imposing her own desire (for well-rounded meaning) on the text. In hermeneutic terms, this would be a totalitarian reading: the rest, the plurality, to use Roland Barthess famous formula (Barthes 1989 [1971]), is obliterated. Maybe we should listen to Mr. Ramsay, who wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought (Woolf: 131). But perhaps he is being unjust to his wife: despite all her selfassuredness, Mrs. Ramsay will soon realize how illusory the aesthetics of crystallization can be. Indeed, as she closes the book she is reading, she lingers on the line As with your shadows I with these did play (ibid.: 132). It seems to stir something in her mind; she tries to avert it, but soon the repressed question wells up: What was the value, the meaning of things? (ibid.: 133). The essence laid out by the sonnet may be nothing more than a passing shadow, whose very emptiness is revealed as soon as it disappears. In fact, just after this Mrs. Ramsay notices that the shadow, the thing folding them in was beginning . . . to close round her again (ibid.). The shadow, the thing: language endeavors to name, and consequently to subdue, the force that threatens human meaning, cracking open the crystal of shape. Again a passage from Bernards soliloquy may shed light on these words: We felt enlarge itself round us the huge blackness of what is outside us, of what we are not (Woolf 2000b [1931]: 213). This blackness is the expanse of the world beyond the human (Beer 1996: 43), time as a meaningless and obliterating force. The conflict between humanity and nature is thus reformulated as one between meaning and nonmeaning. But in these terms, humanity does not stand a chance: sooner or later meaning will be crushed by the sheer weight of nonmeaning, as Mr. Ramsays remark on Shakespeare suggests. Something as trivial as a stone one may kick with ones boot will outlive our best candidate for the immortality of art. Moreover, nonmeaning cannot be construed as absolutely external to humans: indeed, as Graham Parkes (1982: 37) contends, the inhuman chaos of the sea mirrors something deep in the human soul, with which it is connected. Again, the opposition between nature and humanity is called into question. It could even be argued that humans deep fascination for nonmeaning explains why the beat of the waves and Mrs. Ramsays goodnight words to Cam can be soothing: they are both rhythmical and nonsensical. Another example appears in The Window a few pages before the sonnet scene, when Mrs. Ramsay is listening to a poem (Charles Eltons Luriana Lurilee) rehearsed by her husband. The words full of trees and changing leaves (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 120) obviously suggest the passage

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of time. She did not know what they meant (ibid.), we are told: these lines, while written and recited by humans, seem to partake of the meaninglessness of the waves beat. It is no accident, then, that they materialize on the other side of the window from which the fluidity peeped in at dinner: The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves (ibid.). The Shakespearean sonnet was read by Mrs. Ramsay as an example of crystallized meaning, and hence it alluded to her hope of preserving lifes essence from the assault of time and the natural force embodied by the waves. But in fact, this poem shows that nature has already crept into the human world and that all attempts at distinguishing between the two domains are ultimately biased: the words of the poem float on the other side of the window, thus signaling that no clear line between Mrs. Ramsays kingdom and the natural force encroaching on it from the outside can be drawn. This naturalization of the human is perhaps reflected in Mrs. Ramsays estranging experience of divided self, which immediately follows: Like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self (ibid.).
Taking Up Her Brush Again

So far I have contended that the first part of To the Lighthouse covertly undercuts the formalist aesthetics it would seem to spin. In Bernards words, The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst (Woolf 2000b [1931]: 197). These considerations seem to pave the way for a reading of Time Passes as a triumph of the natural force. Indeed, it would be tempting to interpret that extraordinary and somewhat baffling section as an entropic deluge of the element we saw waterily blurring the outside world in the dinner scene. Says Prue: One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 137). Yet, I will argue, there is something more to these stray airs, advance guards of great armies that blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them (ibid.: 140). The deep significance of this section lies in the challenge it poses to the reader: it constructs a fictional world literally perceived by no one; but in doing so it foregrounds the absence of this perceiving consciousness, so that readers are themselves forced to enter the world projected by the text and occupy its central blank. To understand this, we will have to jump to the last section of To the Lighthouse, the one most directly concerned with aesthetics.

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We will come back to Time Passes only after establishing the theoretical foundations of what I call the novels second aesthetics, which Lily enacts in her painting after discarding Mrs. Ramsays crystallization metaphor. It is well known that in a drawing Woolf presented Time Passes, the middle section of her book, as a corridor. Thus, she quite literally gave her book a spatial form: two rooms linked by a corridor. Commenting on this visualization of the tripartite structure of the novel, Banfield (2003: 500) has related it to the Cambridge philosophy of time. Unlike Henri Bergson, Cambridge philosophers saw time as made up of discrete units, which, according to Banfield, are identifiable with Woolf s moments of being (Woolf 1976). Therefore, whereas The Window and The Lighthouse (the novels first and last sections, respectively) can be considered extended moments of being, Time Passes would be an attempt at lending continuity to those self-contained moments by giving them a novelistic form. This is why it can be represented as a corridor. I would tend to agree with this view, except that I prefer to see Time Passes as a bidirectional corridor. It does not lead from moment A (The Window) to moment B (The Lighthouse) but allows for a two-way communication within the novel, so that Woolf s second aesthetics (foregrounded in the last section) can be projected onto the other sections as welland in particular onto Time Passes. This is a corridor that, to make sense of the novel as a whole, the reader has virtually to pace back and forth. In a way, Woolf s sketch could be seen as a symbol of the virtuality of aesthetic communication and of the feedback process it implies. In Isers (1978: 67) transparent formulation, the readers communication with the text is a dynamic process of self-correction, as he formulates signifieds which he must then continually modify . . . meaning gathers meaning in a kind of snowballing process. This consideration is fundamental to the aesthetics that underlies Lilys engagement with her painting. Before moving on, I would like to stress that my reading is at odds with the prevalent view of the tripartite structure of the novel as eminently dialectic. Such a view can be traced back to a 1955 essay by Norman Friedman0 but is still widely represented. In general terms, it claims that Lilys
8. See the authors sketch in Woolf 1983, appendix:48, with the caption Two blocks joined by a corridor. 9. Joseph Frank introduced this concept in a 1945 essay; for a more recent discussion see Mitchell 1980. 10. Friedman (1955: 63) contended that this novel presents a double vision of the world it constructs by striking a dialectic balance between opposing perspectives. 11. See, e.g., Koppen 2001: 386 (aesthetic vision does possess an ordering and healing potential, but only as one term in a dialectical relationship); McLaurin 1973: 182 (Lilys final vision synthesizes the short-sight of Mrs. Ramsay and the long-sight of Mr. Ramsay);

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final vision results from a synthesis of Mrs. Ramsays creative presence (The Window) and her dramatic absence (Time Passes). However appealing this explanation might seem, it goes against the aesthetics of virtuality that, in my view, the third part of the novel outlines. W. J. T. Mitchell (1980: 566) writes: Our distrust of dialectical arguments stems from our sense that their implicit rhetorical space is too predictably symmetrical, lacking the picturesque surprises and asymmetries that we associate with truthful complexity. For every verbal tick we encounter a corresponding tock. In fact, not unlike Mrs. Ramsays reading of the sonnet, dialectical interpretations attempt to enclose the novel in a crystala predefined pattern of thought. That reading was dualistic: it opposed lifes essence to its odds and ends (without further defining either), thus reducing the text to a mirror of the dualism of nature and humanity foreshadowed in the opening section of the novel. On the other hand, dialectic approaches (e.g., Friedmans) are tripartite and as such more complete. In a way, they leave behind fewer odds and ends. But still, their mechanism of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is too simple to account for the subtlety of Lilys experience in The Lighthouse. Better, then, to approach To the Lighthouse (and in particular its last section) without any theoretical preconception and try to see what meaning springs from it. All in all, I cannot but concur with Elizabeth Abels (1989: 71) claim that [Lilys] painting replays, without resolving, the dialectic of autonomy and continuity (my emphasis). I will try to argue this case in the following pages. As to Lilys painting, it is quite clear that it opens a new space in the novels fictional world. This pictorial space appears significantly different from the space of the setting, as it is regulated not by natural but by aesthetic forces. However, we should keep in mind that neither space can be directly presented by the text. Not unlike the fictional landscape of the island, Lilys painting has no iconic existenceexcept in the readers imagination. This is almost a truism yet one that critics tend to forget when they highlight the supposed superiority of painting to writing for Woolf. Lilys painting and its iconicity are constructed by a verbal narrative, a medium that is both linear and sequential (temporal). This of course applies to all literary descriptions of visual artworks. Even though these paintings are constructed verbally, readers usually create a mental image of them by building on textual information. Mitchell (1994: 83), the pictorial turn theorist, has drawn attention to the inextricable weaving together of representation and discourse, the imbrications of visual and verbal experiand Beer 1996: 41 (It is tempting . . . to see Lily Briscoe as some sort of Hegelian third term, representing the aesthetic resolution of sexual fracture and contradiction). 12. See Koppen 2001: 387 and Fisher 1993: 93 on this point.

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ence. All media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes, he adds (ibid.: 94). What is especially striking about Lilys painting, however, is that forming a mental image of what her painting looks like is impossible. The painting is almost never directly describedand this of course marks a significant departure from the tradition of ekphrasis. What is described by the text is how Lily relates to the painting while painting it; the picture in itself is never described. This is why Abel (1989: 71), in what is probably the most insightful discussion of Lilys art, prefers to regard the painting as a palimpsest, where pictorial space is rendered through layers (the deeper we delve into the painting, the closer we get to its underlying meaning). Each layer corresponds to a stage of Lilys relationship with the painting, and this relationship is obviously presented by the text in a narrative form (hence the stages). To appreciate the difference between a described painting and one only referred to by the text, Doleels (1998: 13639) distinction between intensional and extensional aspects of fictional worlds may come in handy. Briefly, these categories (which Doleel borrows, with a good deal of revision, from analytic philosophy) help us separate the exact wording of the text (its texture) from the world that it projects and that materializes in the readers imagination (see Esrock 1994). Worlds of fiction do possess a degree of autonomy from the texture that projects them: otherwise, how would we be able to summarize and speak of a book we have read without remembering, even partially, its linguistic makeup? This autonomy is what Doleel calls their extension. But since different texts (for instance, Madame Bovary and a summary we can make of it) share, extensionally speaking, the same fictional world, there must be a way to link the text of Gustave Flauberts novel to the unique fictional world it constructsfor, it is assumed, some global regularities of the texture affect the structuring of the fictional world at the intensional level (Doleel 1998: 139). This link between a texture and the fictional world it constructs is what Doleel calls an intensional function. Thus we may say that Lilys painting is extensionally a painting (i.e., a visual artwork), because we know that there is such a painting in the fictional world of To the Lighthouse (it is named by the text). However, we are unable to visualize it, since what the text focuses on is the relationship between Lily and the painting. At the intensional level, then, Lilys painting is constructed as an interaction that develops in time (and in space too, as we will see that Lily dips into her painting). Hence Mitchells argument that representation and discourse are woven together is of special relevance to this hybrid object, which should present all the features of a painting (a static, iconic medium) but in factunlike all real

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paintingsseems to possess a life of its own: it changes with Lilys attitude toward it. So much for theory (for now). Examining the painter in action, as she dips into the blue paint, into the past there (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 187), will give us an insight into what I have called the second aesthetics of the novel. Back to the house of the Ramsays after ten years, Lily cannot elude Mrs. Ramsays figure as she takes up her brush again to paint. Now long dead, Mrs. Ramsay providesas we sawa complete model of artistic creativity. Lily revaluates this model while she works on her canvas: in fact it is at this point that she draws a parallel between Mrs. Ramsays making of the moment something permanent and, in another sphere, her own painting (ibid.: 176). This thought is elicited by the memory of a scene on the beach with Charles Tansleya scene of unusual cheerfulness that was fostered (she supposes) by Mrs. Ramsays creative presence. That memory survived, after all these years, complete, so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art (ibid.: 175). We recognize in these words, pure and simple, Mrs. Ramsays aesthetics: her attempts at rescuing people and memories from times grasp. However, we should not be too hasty in concluding that Lily embraces it, as some have done. Or, at most, she could be said to embrace the aesthetics of crystallization temporarily only to reject it after the intermission of chapter 4, set on the boat headed for the lighthouse (the last section of the novel shuttles back and forth between Lilys painting and Mr. Ramsays voyage to the lighthouse with his children, James and Cam). In fact, at the beginning of chapter 5 the painter returns to her memory of the beach scene, asking herself:
Why, after all these years had that survived, ringed round, lit up, visible to the last detail, with all before it blank and all after it blank, for miles and miles? Is it a boat? Is it a cork? [Mrs. Ramsay] would say, Lily repeated, turning back, reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. (Ibid.: 186)

In the first paragraph, we have an unmistakable spatialization of memory: its failures are equated with blank spaces, miles and miles of emptiness surrounding a single (yet crystalline) remembrance. The change of perspective is evident and quite typical of what has been labeled a novel about perspectives (Ruddick 1977: 16): first, the text confines our attention
13. See, e.g., Ingram 1999: 92: Like Lilys vision, Mrs. Ramsays is the perfect fulfillment of Woolf s organic unity: life and art are brought together as one enduring whole, however temporarily. Besides, how something could be enduring only temporarily still remains a mystery to me.

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to the memory of the scene in itself; then, that memory is presented as but a tiny speck in an ocean of blankness. We may compare this to a sudden shift in cinematic point of view: in the first shot the scene on the beach was all we could make out (but it was sharp to the least detail), while in the second the camera shows that scene as just a small dot, thus emphasizing what has been lost in the processwhat memory cannot recover at all. Even more important, the spatial metaphor could be seen as tracing the contour of an island: those miles that encircle the emerged land of memory are, we may imagine, miles of sea. And if we remember how, in the novels first section, the characters envisaged the islands engulfment into the sea, we will understand what this image, when applied to memory, brings in. Perhaps unconsciously (at the moment), Lily is suggesting here that even that one sharp recollection will eventually disappear, swallowed up by an ocean of blanknessthe inhuman nonmeaning associated with the waves, sea, time. Thus, by spatializing her memory, Lily comes close to acknowledging the limitations of Mrs. Ramsays aesthetics. It is no chance, then, that the question opening the second paragraph quoted above is voiced by Mrs. Ramsay. She is trying to make out (she is shortsighted) an object floating on the sea. Again, focus depends on distance: be it a boat or a cork, the object is indistinct, as Lilys memory will be in a short time. In aesthetic terms, trapping life in crystals of form is no way to achieve permanence, since even the most polished art is subject to natural (and irreversible) decaywhat Rudolf Arnheim (1971: 28) calls catabolic effect. Rather, Lily becomes conscious that the problem of art has to be reformulated within the space of the painting and freed from Mrs. Ramsays obsession with permanence (to which the crystallization metaphor is, in this novel at least, inextricably related). Lilys subsequent tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 188) allows the painter to recover scraps of her past life (those odds and ends that Shakespeares sonnet, according to Mrs. Ramsays reading, cleared away), significantly altering the image of Mrs. Ramsay that Lily had drawn from her memory of the beach scene. In a way, the space of the canvas functions as a lens; it helps the painter shed new light on her past, including the blankness surrounding that isolated memory. Only through this lens is Lily able to distance herself from Mrs. Ramsay and that mania of hers for marriage (ibid.: 190). The marriage she encouraged between Paul and Minta had gone awry; as for herself, she had never married, not even William Bankes. / Mrs. Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived, she would have compelled (ibid.). Finally, the painter with little Chinese eyes and a small puckered face can stand up to Mrs. Ramsay, triumphing over her (ibid.). But since

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Mrs. Ramsays wish to bring people together was another aspect of her struggle against time and its devastation, this critique of her implies a refusal of her aesthetic ideal. However, while Lily gives up Mrs. Ramsays aesthetics, she does not stop thinking about her and her tragic absence. Mrs. Ramsay does play a role in the following pages. In a different theoretical context (psychoanalysis and gender studies), Abel (1989: 67) has claimed that, whereas James and Cam repress Mrs. Ramsays memory because of their enclosure in paternal narratives, Lily comes to terms with her through the space of the canvas. The painters brushstrokes, writes Abel (ibid.: 7778), do not seal maternal absence, as the language allegorized within the novel does, but enforce a repeated confrontation with it. . . . Every new line generates new spaces in the continuously shifting configuring of absence and presence that compose an art whose modality is space. Whereas Woolf (197985, 3:208) famously claimed that writing this novel laid [her parents] in [her] mind, Lily never buries her memory of Mrs. Ramsay; she is forced to confront her throughout the painting. And yet this confrontation is also a way of self-distancing from her aesthetics, as we have seen. Indeed, by tunnelling into her work, Lily learns that the centre of complete emptiness (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 194) left by Mrs. Ramsays death can be transformed into (or seen as) an enabling condition of art.
Making Up Scenes

As I said earlier, Lilys artistic gesture has sometimes been understood as a dialectical synthesis. Yet if by synthesis we mean a result that is both restful and satisfying, as is Mrs. Ramsays reading of the sonnet, this is certainly not the case. And in fact, even Lilys final brushstroke does not appear to conclude much: rather it counts as a realization that arts true potential lies in its virtuality. Of course, the creation of art is not the same as its reception; and here, clearly enough, we are witnessing someone creating a painting, not viewing one. However, in the following pages I will argue that there is a structural resemblance between the way we (or possibly I) make sense of To the Lighthouse and the way Lily paints. What is so special about Lilys art is that, as I have claimed earlier, this is no ordinary paintingor at least we would be hard put to imagine it as one, since we do not know what it depicts. All we know is how the painter interacts with it by way of an immersion in the painting: Lily appears to dip (ibid.: 187) or tunnel (ibid.: 188) into it, and she later finds herself half out of the picture (ibid.: 193). By implying that Lilys painting is (metaphorically) open, these words

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suggest that aesthetic creation explores a larger space than the one we actually see on the canvas. Moreover, Lilys forward movement in space is tied to a backward movement in time, as her painting enables her to delve into the past, reassessing Mrs. Ramsays character in the light of two failed marriages. This retrospect might appear as a formidable achievement, given Lilys previous admission that the scene on the beach with Tansley and Mrs. Ramsay was a small island in an ocean of blank memory. How does she recover her memory, then? In this passage, she reveals how: This making up scenes about [Paul and Minta], is what we call knowing people, thinking of them, being fond of them! Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past (ibid.: 188). Even though this notion of past as an invented construct would probably make a standard historian wince, Lily does not seem to have any qualms: the heuristic value of these made-up scenes (it was what she knew them by) is more than enough to defend their adoption. These gaps in Lilys memory are filled in by imagination. In a way, the painter comes close to discovering the function of the blank spaces as the pivot on which the interaction between text and reader turns (Iser 1978: 202)a wellknown theory advanced by Roman Ingarden (1973 [1931]) in the 1930s, then enlarged upon by Iser in the 1970s. Iser (1978: 195) contended that as blanks mark the suspension of connectability between textual segments, they simultaneously form a condition for the connection to be established. However, he criticized Ingarden for the degree of closure implicit in his aesthetic theory: for Ingarden, the work loses its indeterminacy after its concretization (the filling in of the blanks); for Iser (ibid.: 17479), on the contrary, it is around the texts uneliminable negativity that the interactive process of reading revolves. Of course, Lily is not reading anything here, nor is she viewing a painting someone else has made. Moreover, these blank spots in Lilys memory are in themselves more similar to Meir Sternbergs (1993 [1978]) gaps in the narrative reconstruction of past events than to Ingardens and Isers blanks. However, since my focus is on Lilys aesthetics here, I contend that she may be revealing the creative role played by imagination in both the production and the interpretation of aesthetic artifactslike her painting or like the novel where she is a character. Lilys aesthetics would then consist in a valorization of the virtuality (Isers negativity) that, by underlying artworks, bridges the gap between their creators and their interpreters. Interestingly, Cam too, during her voyage to the lighthouse, learns something about the imagination. As the boat sails onward, she gazes fixedly on the island; but being no less shortsighted than her mother, she could see

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nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real; the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the noise of the wavesall this was real (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 18182). As always in this novel, distance in space becomes metonymy of times pastness. Like the scene on the beach (a tiny but distinct speck in Lilys memory), the boat appears to Cam an island of bracing reality in an ocean of unreality. Little wonder the expedition they would have made ten years earlier, had it been fine, seems almost to be forgotten. In a way, their past lives and identities seem to have been swallowed up by time (and distance), leaving a blank space that Cam attempts to fill in by weaving her story about escaping from a sinking ship (ibid.: 207). Her imagination, without a doubt, is influenced by the talk about a boat that had sunk not far from the lighthouse during a great storm last Christmas (ibid.: 178) and by her fathers catchphrase, we perished, each alone. Thus Cam invents an adventurous complement to their expedition: she does not want to tell herself seriously a story, as that would entail a beginning, a middle, and an enda sense of accomplishment in stark contrast with her own elation at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there) (ibid.: 2045). Cams imagination does not fill in every gap in her past, because that would entail exhausting its virtuality (negativity). Moreover, Cam is far from fully believing in her adventure, since she is perfectly conscious that, on the boat, they are doing two things at once: they were eating their lunch here in the sun and they were also making for safety in a great storm after a shipwreck. Would the water last? Would the provisions last? she asked herself, telling herself a story but knowing at the same time what was the truth (ibid.: 222). This is an attitude so typical of the reading process (we read, and suspend our disbelief in a world, while at the same time remaining aware that we are just reading) that we come to think there is some sort of oblique connection between Cams imagination and the book Mr. Ramsay is reading absorbedlya book whose very title is indeterminate. To quote Iser (1978: 230) again, the texts indeterminacy enables us to transcend that which we are otherwise so inextricably entangled inour own lives in the midst of the real world. . . . [It] is therefore an enabling structure. Despite being as shortsighted as her mother, Cam is perhaps a better reader; her
14. What might be written in the book which had rounded its edges off in his pocket, [Cam] did not know (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 206). According to Lee (2000: xxxvi), who bases her supposition on some additional clues given in the manuscript, it is probably Plato.

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act of imagination is, like Lilys, a recognition of the underlying doubleness of things: a doubleness that cannot be resolved, that admits no synthesis, but has to be apprehended by some sort of imaginative squint. For this doubleness points to the virtuality through which we, as inhabitants of this world, can make contact with aesthetic artifacts (in Cams case, an adventure story) and let them restructure our experience (hence Cams feeling of the existential fullness of this expedition).
Into the Picture

With Cams help, we have specified some aspects of Lilys art, to which we may now return. We last saw her tunnelling her way into the picture, into a largely made-up past. The painter does think a few pages later that she was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 215), but this is yet another confirmation of the doubleness from which her art develops. Somehow, we discover she can be inside the painting (shuttling between imagination and memory) and on a level with ordinary experience (ibid.: 218) at the same time. Entering the picture is, paradoxically, a way to get hold of . . . that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself, before it has been made anything (ibid.: 209), an idea that suggests the obliqueness of artistic creation: the thing itself our unmediated experience of the worldcan only be re-created and infused with meaning through an aesthetic medium. Quite literally, Lily manages to look at the world through her painting and see Mrs. Ramsays death in a new light, as an enabling condition of art (more on this soon). There is another problem to address, though. Lilys painting must be metaphorically open for her to tunnel into it, and this openness can be equated with the constitutive dimension of aesthetic artifacts, their virtuality or negativity. Furthermore, we know that it must be linked to the blanks of aesthetic communication. Butsince we are talking of a painting hereat what level do we find these blanks, and how do they work? The difficulty in answering this question stems from the fact that the word blank may in itself be somewhat misleading. It is hard to eliminate the simplistic association between the blankness of a text and the actual blank spaces that separate words on a page, but we must do so (as Iser himself pointed out) to understand correctly the notion of blankness, or negativity, or virtuality (as I prefer to call it). In most paintings, we do not find
15. James too considers: So that was the Lighthouse, was it? / No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 202).

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any point of indeterminacy in this naive senseexcept of course the space outside the frame. Every dot on the pictorial surface presents a determinate color, there is no need to fill in anything. Where are the blanks, then, in visual artworks? In a remarkable essay, Marin (2001: 377) defined them as the most general principles of [the possibility of painting] and of its effectiveness as representation . . . its transcendental conditions of visibility. A blank, for instance, is the transparent plane of the representation (ibid.: 375) in perspectival painting, where the canvas is meant to resemble a window open onto the world. In other words, the blankness of the picture is the very transparence of the medium. But this transparence, this underlying blankness, is revealed only by occasional opacification of the medium itself. One of Marins (ibid.: 378) examples will play a major role in my argument: in perspectival painting the viewers body (and the painters) are reduced to a theoretical point in order to emphasize the objectivity of the picture. Being entirely transparent (we see through it, but we do not see it), the viewers body is absorbed by the blankness of the painting; and yet it is, obviously enough, a necessary condition of its visibility. In some cases, however, the viewers body is opacified, as Marin illustrates from a seventeenth-century map, where at the top of a fictitious hill . . . four little figures in the position of viewers are introduced. These are, he points out, the delegatesin the representationof the subject who is looking at the representation (ibid.: 380); while hinting at the viewers body, they make clear that any painting entails its presence (normally blank, transparent, or virtual) within the representation itself. To sum up, within their respective frameworks, both Marin and Iser have argued that aesthetic artifacts possess a virtual dimensionblankness or negativitythat functions as a condition of their appreciation. This appreciation, however, is hardly something we do from the outside; in Kendall Waltons (1990: 273) words, If to read a novel or contemplate a painting were merely to stand outside a fictional world pressing ones nose against the glass and peer in, noticing what is fictional but not fictionally noticing anything, our interest in novels and paintings would indeed be mysterious. On the contrary, to interact with aesthetic artifacts we need to enter them with a virtual body, by tunnelling into their underlying blankness. This brings us back to Lilys painting. Indeed, this painting appears so
16. Marin builds on Panofskys (1997 [1927]) celebrated essay, which draws attention to the doubleness of perspective: on the one hand, it tends to a geometrical and mathematical conception of space that abstracts from the conditions of perception (and thus from the presence of a viewer); on the other, it alludes to the subjectivity of vision through the creation of an illusory space.

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opaque (in Marins sense) that we do not know what it looks like. Rather than describing its subject (or, if Lilys painting is abstract, its composition), the text focuses on how the painter interacts with her work. As we have seen, she accomplishes an almost acrobatic feat by traveling into it. So the underlying blankness of the picture is made totally opaque; even if we do not know much about the painting itself, we gain new insights as to how paintings are viewed (and presumably how all aesthetic artifacts are appreciated). The blankness or negativity is revealed as the dimension on which interpreters project themselves with their virtual bodies. The blankness at the heart of life theory is not at all new in Woolf criticism. Her novels, writes Hussey (1986: 68), are about silence, an empty space at the heart of life, but they can only point to it, imply it, shape round it. In The Lighthouse the empty space corresponds to Mrs. Ramsays absence. However, the parallel between this existential void and the aesthetics of virtuality implicit in Lilys painting is hardly ever drawn (except briefly by Hussey himself ), far less given a theoretical foundation. I would therefore emphasize this parallel in fundamental blankness. Appropriately, Lily finds the extraordinary unreality of the house, when abandoned by its realizing presence, Mrs. Ramsay, frightening but also exciting (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 161). This excitement (of creation), I suggest, leads to the idea that art does not just transform real objects and people (the lighthouse associated by some with Lilys last brushstroke, Mrs. Ramsay) according to a formalist aesthetics; it does not just reduce them to shadows without irreverence, as the painter elucidates to Mr. Bankes (ibid.: 59). Art is capable of addressing real-world problems, such as Mrs. Ramsays tragic absence, and eventually of discovering a centre of complete emptiness (ibid.: 194) in life itself. In turn, art would not be possible without this underlying blankness. Additionally, since the text focuses on how Lily interacts with her painting, her artistic gesture tells us something about how we engage with aesthetic artifacts: as interpreters, we actively participate in the construction of meaning by rearranging the building blocks provided by the work itself. In other words, we use aesthetic artifacts as playgrounds in which meanings can be generated within the constraints put on the work by its cre17. We may infer that, unlike Mr. Pauncefortes pseudo-Impressionist art, Lilys is in no direct way mimetic (see McLaurin 1973: 191; Stewart 2000). But she does not shun the problem of mimesis either: somehow, as I said, she wants to lay hands on this formidable ancient enemy of hersthis other thing, this truth, this reality (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 172) through the virtual space of the canvas. 18. See Stewart 2000: 94 for an examination of the main critical positions on Lilys last brushstroke.

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ators. This is how Lily makes sense of Mrs. Ramsays death through her engagement with the painting. It is significant, then, that Abel (1989: 70 71) links Lilys painting with Donald W. Winnicotts (1971) transitional phase in the childs development, when the border between object and subject appears blurred and the child learns to play. In this passage, for instance, the painter appears absorbed in a game of make-believe: Moved as she was by some instinctive need of distance and blue, she looked at the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the blue bars of the waves, and stony fields of the purple spaces (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 197). The playability of Lilys painting is precisely its encouragement of an active participation, through dipping or tunnelling, from the viewer/reader or, in this case, the painter. Hence Lilys painting comes quite close to the conception developed by Marie-Laure Ryan (2001: 20) of virtual reality as a metaphor for the fullest artistic experience. Ryan points out that virtual reality is (yet) more a theoretical model than a technological achievement; it stands for a perfect compresence of immersion and interactivity (hence the alleged fullness of the experience itself ). Similarly, Lilys immersion in the painting increases while she retrieves the past and interacts with it by manipulating it (mnemonically? imaginatively?) with the adroitness one usually shows in handling material objects. But in her tightrope-walking manner, she also manages to remainas we have seenon a level with ordinary experience, alert to a hic et nunc that only appears to be at odds with her immersion in the painting but in fact springs from it. Indeed, only through her engagement with her painting is Lily able to come to terms with Mrs. Ramsay. What is more, the discovery of the underlying blankness of art casts new light on the blankness perceived out there, in the world, as a figure of Mrs. Ramsays absence. Indeed, this blankness is in a way generalized as a condition of experience as such. This is the consequence of what Paul Ricoeur (e.g., 1990: 7071) calls mimesis3: the refiguration brought about by aesthetic artifacts. All in all, Lilys aesthetics of virtuality seems to involve an artwork that is at the same time immersive (it can be entered by the user), interactive (it encourages play with meaning), and opaque (in that it draws attention to its own underlying blankness). The novels conclusion is an eloquent (if slightly paradoxical) demonstration of this aesthetics: She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 226).

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The first sentences reassert the blankness that is both an exclusion from the existential fullness bestowed by Mrs. Ramsay and an enabling condition of art (the blur visually renders the opacification of the blankness of the canvas, to put it in Marins words). In the instant of clear sight it provides, however, the final brushstroke seems to dispel that blur, sealing the painting, labeling it as done, finished. It could even be read as recognition of the final victory of humanity over the confusive domain of nature. Yet To the Lighthouse does not end with the words it was done; it was finished: it goes on, incorporating the painting but not coinciding perfectly with it. Writes Cheryl Mares (1993: 77): The completed painting, which is never presented, is already part of the past; the completed novel, by opening itself up from the inside, as it were, opens onto what is notor not yetart. Thus, although Woolf provides us with a sense of an ending, she manages to avoid the suggestion that life can be reified, that it can be contained in a closed object. This confirms our suppositions about the paintings virtuality as the foundation of an aesthetics that opposes (perhaps not too overtly) Mrs. Ramsays. Besides, the indeterminacy of Lilys gesture is evident: what does it finish, exactly? The painting is never given a description, not even a vague one: to the viewer/readers minds eye, it appears as the very quintessence of indeterminacy. However clear the line drawn on this blurred canvas, there is some irony in its finishing something that the text completely prevents us from imagining. On the contrary, I would say that Lilys gesture invites the reader to play with the meaning of this brushstroke, this final visionor, even better, acknowledges a hermeneutic engagement that began the moment the reader entered the text but does not end with its actual conclusion. How does this ending tackle the problem of time, central, we remember, to Mrs. Ramsays aesthetics? She hoped to freeze time in a crystal of essence. But that crystal was shown to be extremely fragile: works of art (Shakespeare), marriages, even the moments of being carefully nurtured by Mrs. Ramsay (the dinner scene) were as doomed to the devastations of time as anything else. Lily too seems to be sensitive to the issue of the difficult relationship between time and art: she poses it three times. First, just after she has started painting: She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then[?] (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 173). A few pages later, while her aesthetics is taking shape, she returns to the problem, with a very similar premise but different conclusions: Yet it would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even of this scrawl, not of the actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it

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remained for ever, she was going to say, or, for the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint, wordlessly (ibid.: 195). It remained for ever: is Lily relapsing into Mrs. Ramsays illusion? Not at all, because it is the attempt, not the work itself, that remains forever (more on this later); besides, these words appear to the painter too boastful, too confident in the superiority of humanity. Better, then, to express them without words (notice the barely grammatical construction of the last sentence), better still to hint them. How? Through the painting obviously; again her solution (if it deserves that name) is found through it. Here is the last posing of the problem: There it washer picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? (ibid.: 22526). The negative assertion in the first quotation (what was the good of doing it then[?] implies that there is no good at all) has become an almost derisive and irreverent (Lilys word) affirmation of art despite its destruction by time. The problem of time is avoided or sidestepped: art does not lie in the material object but in what it attemptsand what is attempted by viewers/readers every time they approach a work of art. We have seen that, by confronting Mrs. Ramsays absence through the painting, Lily became aware of the blankness that underlies both art and life. What art attempts must be, in short, a restructuring of our experience of the real world through the mediation of a fictional world. But since Lilys art is open-ended, it seems especially prone to being reattempted countless timesand every interpreter will come up with a different refiguration of her experience. Because of its interpretive richness, Lilys painting is not a static realization, but a moment of creation that must be recreated by each perceiver, writes Hussey (1986: 80). Indeed, it could be argued that Lilys aesthetics comes close to what Mark Johnson (2007: 281) has termed horizontal transcendence: thanks to art, we get a chance to go beyond our present situation by extending our lives through fictional prostheses, by adding new meanings to our world. But this transcendence springs from a recognition of the inescapability of human finitude (ibid.) and consequently of the pointlessness of all forms of vertical transcendence (such as the belief in the immortality of our souls, of art, or of both). Such pointlessness is signified, in this novel, by Mrs. Ramsays death, by the failure of her aesthetics, and by Mr. Ramsays crucial insight that the very stone one kicks with ones boot will outlast Shakespeare (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 41). It is tempting to relate Lilys creative feat to the image of the leap (which occurs more than once in these pages). No guide, no shelter, but all was

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miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? (ibid.: 195). And this is how the draft version of the novel describes Lilys first brushstroke: The leap must be taken; & the risk run. Her preparations were made; her plate spread; & now with a curious physical sensation of leaping, & trying to control her leap, she made the first quick decisive stroke (Woolf 1983: 256). Clearly enough, the leap points to the painters immersion in her work; but it could also suggest that we, as viewers/readers of her painting, must follow in her footsteps and take the leap ourselves, entering the artwork through its underlying blankness, negativity, or virtuality. This is what Marin meant in the passage about the opacification of the viewers body and its role in perceiving artworks. Finally, the leap could be a figure for our being transported (see Gerrig 1993: 217) to fictional worlds and of their extending our lives. It is suggestive, then, that in his last appearance in the novel Mr. Ramsay too is seen leaping and that his children try to fill in the blank spot of his attitude: He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, There is no God, and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 224).
Almost One Might Imagine Them

We now turn to the novels central section, Time Passes. As already noted, since these pages present the decay into which the house of the Ramsays falls during their ten-year absence, it would be fairly easy to read them in the light of the humanity/nature opposition outlined above. I will argue, however, that Time Passes is better understood through Lilys aesthetics and its key concepts (virtuality, immersiveness, interactivity) and in particular through the idea of the interpreters transportation to the world constructed by the aesthetic artifact. Indeed, this section appears to be an attempt by Woolf to apply Lilys aesthetics to a real linguistic construction. What happens herequite simplyis that, after the departure of the Ramsays, the house is taken over by what Doleel calls natural force. The house is penetrated by stray airs, personifications of the physical forces of nature, indeed, of time itself (Banfield 2003: 502), until it is no longer a human place but a shell on a sandhill (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 149). Nature sets in with its confusive logic: Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun
19. I have simplified and slightly edited the text of the original holograph draft, too complex (with its erasures and superscribed words) to be written down here.

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itself on the faded chintz of the arm chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with glass and wild berries (ibid.: 15051). Nature devours the humanized space of the house: wild plants grow on the floor, birds nest freely, the plaster falls. The boundary between the house and the domain of nature (remember the fluidity peeping through the windows in the dinner scene) is erased to the point that the real walls are about to crumble: one feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness (ibid.: 151). What does Time Passes have to add, then, to the opposition already outlined in the first section? The main problem these pages pose, as critics have seen, is one of focalization. Who sees or witnesses the slow decay of the house in this world where not only are humans absent but humanity itself seems to be challenged, since the decay of the house evokes the destruction of the island envisioned by the main characters in The Window? Let us consider two authoritative readings of Time Passes. J. Hillis Miller (1990: 163) argued that this section appears to be narrated by language itself, a language that is inherently human, as the frequent use of prosopopoeia throughout Time Passes proves. In other words, this section allegedly reveals thatno matter what happens in the fictional worldthere is no way to remove all human traces from language, which always reimports some you, some I, he or she into whatever is turned into [it] (ibid.: 164). This line of argument sounds convincing, but its main problem is that Miller seems to reformulate my question about who sees? in terms of voice (to use Grard Genettes [1980] somewhat jaded narratological category). On the other hand, these issues are clearly related: since there appears to be no consciousness internal to the fictional world projected by the text, and thus no witness to its events, no human character couldin principlenarrate them. Another interpretation is Banfields (1987: 274) on the empty deictic center in the interludes of Woolf s The Waves, where she also mentions the similarity to the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse. Briefly, Banfield claims that these descriptive interludes are built around a deictic center (a here internal to the fictional world), which is, however, left blank by the text. In other words, there seems to be a consciousness perceiving the world from the inside, but in fact there is none, and this absence is foregrounded. Woolf s language achieves the epistemological status of a photograph: it is the only linguistic form permitting . . . the separation of observer and observed and allowing the latter to emerge independent, unobserved (ibid.: 280). And again: Woolf means [her] sentences to evoke what she calls elsewhere in the novel the world without a self (ibid.:

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275). Obviously enough, Banfields argument could be readily applied to Time Passes. Moreover, this outline shows that Banfield would frame the problem of Time Passes, as I do, in terms of who perceives the narrated events and not of who narrates them (indeed her point would probably be that this section has no narrator at all). Both Millers and Banfields readings have some limitations. Monika Fludernik (1996: 197), for instance, contended that Banfields empty centre sentences include more features of a subjective nature than she allows forand this objection would seem to be consistent with Millers point that our language is always anthropomorphic. On the other hand, because of his exclusive focus on language, Miller seems to miss what is really going on here: the problem, in my view, is not the language in itself but what the language invites the reader to do. In Time Passes, Woolf has taken Lilys aesthetics literally: this segment, by pointing to an empty deictic center, foregrounds (opacifies, Marin would say) the readers immersion in the world constructed by text. Just as the painter tunnels into her work and by doing so reveals its underlying blankness, so Time Passes revolves around a blank: the one occupied by the readers virtual bodythe probe we send into fictional worlds in order to imagine them. To understand this, we will have to make a detour into Maurice MerleauPontys phenomenology. It is customary in Woolf studies to apply phenomenological categories to her work, the critical commonplace being that she conveyed an organicist vision of the world and challenged the traditional (patriarchal) subject/object opposition.0 This is not incorrect, especially if we notice a certain family resemblance between this opposition and the conflict between humanity and naturea conflict that Woolf stages but at the same time calls into question. Roger Poole (1982: 198) even claimed that in Virginia Woolf . . . phenomenology found its novelist. However, I find these phenomenological interpretations unconvincing when it comes to explaining what Time Passes is really about. For instance, Westling (1999: 862) has argued that it plunges . . . into the very energies flowing through the sea of beingthe more-than-human Lebensweltin which people are no more consequential than brief flashes of light. Despite the impressive rhetoric of this passage, it seems hardly likely that in this section Woolf celebrates, as Westling (ibid.) maintains, human community and its continuity with all the world which sustains it. Instead, I would suggest going back to Lilys painting and examining it in the light of Merleau-Pontys classic Phenomenology of Perception (2002 [1945]). Randi Koppen (2001: 383) describes Lilys art as an aesthetic20. See Hussey 1986: 320; Doyle 1994; Westling 1999; Koppen 2001.

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cognitive project made possible by the interaction between the physical object and the body. And she adds it is the sense of bodily movement that constitutes the act of painting (ibid.: 382). We should not forget, however, that the painters bodily movements are both physical (e.g., her last brushstroke) and virtual (her leap, her tunnelling into the painting). Therefore, we should expand our notion of the body to include the latter movements as well. As we have seen, Lilys interaction with the real space of the canvas (i.e., her painting) enables her to reveal (by making opaque, in Marins terms) the virtual space that surrounds artworks. Virtual is obviously the key word here; and interestingly enough it also figures in one of MerleauPontys definitions of the body: centre daction virtuelle (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 127), centre of potential action (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945]: 125). When the philosopher defines space as a certain possession of the world by my body, a certain gearing of my body to the world (ibid.: 291), it is to that conception of the body that he refers. Thanks to this phenomenological take on the body, we can give a fuller answer to the question: how does Lily enter her painting? By revealing its transcendental condition of blankness and dipping into it, we answered. But now we may add: by imaginatively detaching a virtual body from its real counterpart and by projecting the former into the virtual space of the artwork. (The little figures in the map mentioned by Marin were projected into the real space of the artwork and so were actually, not virtually, part of it.) The real space of the canvas, through the virtual space it implies, makes room for the virtual body of the viewer/reader. Moreover, we should bear in mind Merleau-Pontys famous slogan that perception is always embodied (see, e.g., ibid.: 23539); thus to perceive (if only with the minds eye) a fictional world, we need to reposition our virtual body into it. This fictional recentering, as Ryan (2001: 1035) has labeled it (but she probably understands it less literally than I do), is made necessary by the very structure of perception; however, there are many devices by which it could be highlighted (opacified) by the text. One of them is used in Time Passes: only Fludernik has described this phenomenon so far, labeling it figuralization. In her words, the empty centre, if it remains empty, a mere centre of perception, can induce reader identification, allowing a reading of the story through an empathetic projection of the reader into the figure of an observer on the scene (Fludernik 1996: 198). The place normally occupied by a perceiving consciousness (a reflector character or focalizer) is, in the case of figuralization, left empty. But this blank space, foregrounded by the absence of any even potential focalizer in this section, becomes so obtrusive as to encourage

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the reader to occupy it himself or herself in mentally representing the fictional world. In a way, texts like Time Passes could be said to be woven around the invisible body of the reader. Consider this passage: Almost one might imagine them [certain airs, detached from the body of the wind], as they entered the drawing-room, questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 138). The opening sentence seems to deploy the strategy David Herman (2002: 311) has called hypothetical focalization but with a significant difference: unlike the typical hypothetical focalizer, the one referred to in the text does not perceive the airs but imagines them. In standard direct hypothetical focalization, the text appeals to a counterfactual or hypothetical focalizer. Hermans telling example is this passage from Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of the House of Usher: Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall (1982: 233). Here, the emphasis is on hypothetical perception. By contrast, the one summoned by Woolf s text sees the airs only in the minds eye. No doubt, it is the readers imaginative involvement in the fictional world that is suggested here. AndI will repeat it one last timeit is the virtuality (or negativity, blankness) of the text that makes this involvement possible. To conclude, there appears to be a structural similarity between Lilys immersion in her painting (what I have called the second aesthetics of the novel) and the way readers are encouraged by the text of Time Passes to take position within the fictional world it constructs. Structural because both Lilys and the readers engagement are based on the virtuality of aesthetic artifactsconceived as the condition that enables them to exist as art and take on meanings. I hope that it will be clear by now that if Time Passes includes, at the surface level, the binary opposition (nature versus humanity) that underlies Mrs. Ramsays aesthetics, this is by no means the only way to read it. Indeed, it is only after Lilys final brushstroke that the full significance of the central section of the novel is revealed: it is about our imaginative entanglement (Iser 1978: 127) in aesthetic artifacts. Leaping into Time Passes, we imitate Lilys acrobatics: we are projected into a fictional world while just reading a novel; we are inside and outside the text at the same time.
21. There is another passage in Time Passes that deals with imagination: In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy waters, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 144).

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