VIRGINIA WOOLF

[] I am a natural coiner of words, a blower of bubbles through one thing and another. And, striking off these observations spontaneously I elaborate myself; differentiate myself and, listening to the voice that says as I stroll past Look! Take note of that! I conceive myself called upon to provide, some winters night, a meaning for all my observations a line that runs from one to another, a summing up that completes. (The Waves, 86)

The closer Virginia Woolf tries to come to life and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves [her]1, the clearer it becomes that the inherited novelistic conventions are no longer satisfactory and should be discarded as they are too restrictive for her artistic purpose. The movement of Woolfs narrative away from realism is so radical at times that the reader will find it extremely difficult to put up with what has been often, though rather vaguely, termed Woolfs modernist experiment. In the writers incontestably modernist novels, it seems that the relationship with the real in strict realist terms has been suspended. The reader seems to be given little chance of building his perception of the new artistic offer on the solid ground of the conventions he may be familiar with. If most modernists benefited by their readers knowledge either of the world or of the conventional fictionalising devices, Woolf apparently chose to make no concession to her readers sense of intellectual comfort. Her plunge into what she saw as the essence of life is sometimes even more abrupt than Joyces from a narrative point of view. She confronts her reader with a world of fragments, decomposed furthermore into an infinity of other fragments by their being perceived from a multitude of
1

Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 199.

viewpoints. What the reader feels he gets by means of the narrative is a destabilised universe, devoid of any cohering force, existing in and through the perceiving subject. The previously stable and unitary perspective becomes relative and multiple. Yet the main characteristic of Woolfs work is its structural quality. It is out of the innumerable atoms that wholeness is reconstructed and it is through art that completeness is reached. Knowing and reconstructing reality through art is the solution of coherence Woolf proposes for a dismembering system. Her proposal constitutes itself into an implicit challenge launched to readers on whose involved contribution to meaning creation coherence depends. If this overall evaluation holds good for Woolfs work as a whole, there is a clear difference in the readers, especially students, attitude and response to Woolfs modernist novels, those qualified of vision in order to be kept distinct from those of fact. We shall base our analysis on two of these novels, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, which seem to encourage such difference of response and we shall try to understand what it is in the making of these novels that could account for such disparity of views. We shall try to make out why most readers find it comfortable to move on with the reading of To the Lighthouse and to accept, more or less easily, its narrative formula, while they are puzzled by the formal disconnectedness of The Waves, which requires effort to come to terms with and generates reluctance to read it. The preference for the former and the reservations about the latter are all the more surprising if we consider the way in which the two novels begin.
Yes, of course, if its fine tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay, But youll have to be up with the lark, she added. (To the Lighthouse, 219)

Without any preamble, conventionally expected to provide at least minimal information on place, time or character, To the Lighthouse opens abruptly onto Mrs. Ramsay and her affirmative answer to a question assumed to have been formulated before the novel began. All that the reader gets, by way of introduction to the fictional world, is the continuation of a dialogue about whose interlocutors he does not know anything. Mrs. Ramsays name

comes to us via an omniscient narrator whose contribution is reduced to a minimum. She is just a name. She has no face, no personality. We could say that, when she is introduced to the reader, she does not even have an identity of her own. There is no first name to individualise her. She seems to be wholly dependent on her condition as a married woman. The identity of Mrs. Ramsays interlocutor, linguistically marked by you in the dialogue, is revealed only later on. Moreover, the certainty conveyed by the adverb yes, reinforced by of course, in answer to an unexpressed question is quickly undermined by the conditional clause if its fine tomorrow. Thus, the beginning of a novel that the readers find easy to cope with is not generous at all as regards the information conveyed to the reader on its opening. There is nothing from his knowledge of how a fictional world could come into being through conventions that the reader can recover when he starts reading To the Lighthouse. The only thing the reader can be sure of is that To the Lighthouse is still a novel. He can visually appreciate it as a fairly extended piece of writing in prose and he can be almost certain, given its beginning, that it deals with entities endowed with anthropomorphic qualities, identifiable as characters. Yet, considering the protean quality of the novel as a genre, it is very difficult for the readers of To the Lighthouse to predict how a novel begun in the way in which it was would evolve. Surprisingly, the beginning of The Waves seems to be more in line with the realist conventions of novel writing and, for this reason, more reassuring for the reader. It offers a description of the natural landscape, expected to function as a background against which the characters should be introduced.
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. (The Waves, 3)

The reader cannot help noticing the highly poetic language of the text, but he is offered, however, a moment of time to rely on, the daybreak, and the image of a place acceptable as part of a setting, the seashore. Yet, in spite of the formal differences between the ways in which To the Lighthouse and The Waves begin, which certainly create different horizons of expectations on the part of the readers, the progress of the two novels confirms to a large extent the readers intuition and their different reactions. Like all the other modernist novelists, Woolf created expectations and challenged them. The more original and unexpected the narrative formula she wanted to propose was, the better rooted in the solid conventions of realism it was supposed to be for it to be at least considered, if not accepted, by readers. Or, Woolfs formal experiment has been, more often than not, taken for granted. It was so obvious that little consideration has been given to the conventional scaffold on which it was built. At the time when it was proposed, it was seen as a more appropriate narrative solution, given the growing awareness that what was called life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we [the novelists] provide.2 The world of external events was considered to be less important than the same reality subjectively perceived by and reflected in the individual consciousness. This is an issue on which consensus had been reached both by the modernist novelists and by the reading public. It was equally agreed that the conventions of novel writing inherited from the realists were no longer satisfactory, which is not to say that they were, for this reason, bad in themselves. The invention of techniques able not only to investigate the mind, but also to make the mental processes visible and bring them to the fore became a necessity for those novelists who, even if they did not call themselves modernists, felt they were different from the materialists. The only problem was that, if they wanted their writings to be understood as novels and not as something else, they had to keep the novel as a genre within limits still recognisable by the readers trained at the school of realism. No matter how keen on demonstrating the potentiality of fiction, through technique, to probe deep into human consciousness the modernists may have been, they could not
2

Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 198.

afford to ignore the relationship that fiction established with the real and, more importantly, the sense readers made of this relationship. Both To the Lighthouse and The Waves deal with fairly similar issues in modern(ist) terms: the modern individuals quest for identity and integrity, the definition of the self in relation to him/herself and to the other, the possibility to reach wholeness through fusing the masculine and the feminine, the function of art and the condition of the artist within the modern framework. Both make the trivial and the evanescent alike the proper stuff of fiction. Both attempt to demonstrate that literature is a form of knowledge, thus capable of revealing deep aspects of the human being, always transgressing the level of the visible and the superficial. Both have the same degree of indeterminacy that facilitates the readers movement from the particular to the general, by expanding the temporal into the timeless or incorporating the timeless into the temporal. And yet they are so different in their appeal to the reader. The difference between To the Lighthouse and The Waves does not necessarily reside in what they mean, but mainly in how they mean and in how prepared, or trained, the reader is to include the new form within his existing knowledge. The difference largely depends on Woolfs use of the various modes of expressing consciousness and her decision to take advantage or not of the novel conventions the reader is familiar with. To the Lighthouse deludes the reader into thinking that the novel is constructed according to the solid novelistic conventions he had been used to. The division of the novel into three well-delimited parts, The Window, Time Passes and The Lighthouse, creates the illusion of a plot progressing chronologically from one mid-September day, when the Ramsay family and their guests spend their holiday on an island in the Hebrides, through the ten years during which the Ramsays house remains deserted, to the reunion of some of the original company in the same place. Yet nothing significant happens in terms of external events. It may be argued that the effect of chronology is created when, in Time Passes, Prues marriage and death in childbirth, Andrews death in war and Mr. Carmichaels publishing a volume of poems are explicitly referred to. However, these events are deliberately bracketed. They are considered irrelevant and remote from what the essence of

life is, which is indicated by the rumour-like quality of the information. Three of these pieces of news neutrally given, as if in passing, originate in a highly unreliable and indefinite collective consciousness, which raises questions about their truth and validity.
[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her fathers arm, was given in marriage that May. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added, how beautiful she looked!] (364) [Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. They said nobody deserved happiness more.] (365) [Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.] (367)

The reference to Andrew, though apparently coming from the same source, is not clearly assigned to a source consciousness, but it is infused with subjectivity, becoming thus an implicit commentary on the war and its effects.
[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.] (366)

Mrs. Ramsays death is not presented in brackets. The information about it as an external event is placed in Mrs. McNabs mind, from whose thoughts about Mrs. Ramsay the reader starts recreating Mrs. Ramsays identity. This points to Woolfs philosophy of life, according to which death is just a scarcely noticed incident unable to affect the integrity of the image an individual being has in the others minds.
[] they had left clothes in all the bedrooms. What was she to do with them? They had the moth in them Mrs. Ramsays things. Poor lady! She would never want them again. She was dead, they said; years ago, in London. There was the old grey cloak she wore gardening (Mrs. McNab

fingered it). She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds) she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. (369)

What is significant to notice in relation with this passage is that, although the reader feels that what he has access to is Mrs. McNabs mind, he is also aware of the fact that Mrs. McNabs thoughts are not rendered in her own idiom. They are presented under the mask of an impersonal narrators words. The use of the narrated monologue certainly creates empathy, as it gives the reader a sense of his being inside the characters mind. From a narrative point of view, the use of the same technique creates ambiguity, as the reader is uncertain about the source of the passage. The ambiguity has, however, a beneficial effect, as it results in continuity at the level of the narrative text. The reader moves in and out of the characters mind, but he does not perceive this movement as abrupt, as it generally happens when the quoted interior monologue is used. Moreover, the presence of the third-person pronouns and the use of the past as the basic tense of the narration create a sense of continuity between the inner and the outer reality. It is mainly because of the ambiguity generating continuity between the external and the mental landscapes that Woolf often resorted to the narrated monologue in To the Lighthouse. This method enabled her to free her reader from the too obtrusive control on the part of the omniscient narrator and yet to keep the narrative under the ordering power of a narrative instance on whose presence much of the readers orientation depended. In spite of its seemingly abrupt beginning, the novels entry into the characters inner life and its revealing of the characters mental mechanisms is gradual. The narrative moves from one centre of consciousness to another, which could have produced an effect of randomness and disconnectedness but for the veiled and yet decisive presence of the impersonal narrator. However, the narrators voice is not annoyingly audible. The narrator may be even said to give up the privilege of omniscience. It becomes one among the other voices, all equal in intensity, in a narrative characterised by a multiplicity of points of view.

One reason why To the Lighthouse is perceived as more coherent than The Waves is that the various techniques used to express the inside of the figural consciousness are artfully combined and always embedded in the impersonal narrators framing speech. This narrative strategy enables a free movement in and out of the mind, without creating an effect of randomness and disjointedness. Moreover, the passage from speech to thought is always natural due to the same unobtrusive narrators presence. Even when the characters thoughts are rendered in quoted interior monologue, the separation between the outer and the inner world inevitably suggested by the distinctiveness of the narrators and the characters voices is solved by formally giving up the quotation marks. The following excerpt from the novel is illuminating in this respect and the strategy used in it coincides with the overall narrative strategy of the novel. What should be noted is that what keeps such technically different narrative instances together in Woolfs case is the narrators presence, on the one hand, and the existence of one single centre of consciousness in one paragraph, on the other.
But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table and looking at the plates making white circles on it. William, sit by me, she said. Lily, she said, wearily, over there. They had that Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle she, only this an infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end, was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or any affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy there and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it. Its all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one after another, Charles Tansley Sit there, please, she said Augustus Carmichael and sat down. And meanwhile she waited, passively, for someone to answer her, for something to happen. But this is not a thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says. (310)

Mrs. Ramsay is the central character of To the Lighthouse. Yet, from a narrative point of view, she is one voice and one consciousness within the texture of the interacting consciousnesses in The Window. She is endowed with a special gift for making things and people cohere, but she really becomes central and indispensable to the perception of the novel as unitary only after her bodily disappearance. Mrs. Ramsays identity is artistically achieved only through her being recreated in the other characters minds, by recollection. For Virginia Woolf, life fully depends on the subjective perception. Reality exists for her only to the extent to which it is filtered and recreated mentally, and artistically. By subtly investigating the fictional mind and discreetly bringing it to the fore, by insisting on the continuity between the inner reality and the outer reality, Woolf attempts to prepare her readers for a new type of literature that will assert its freedom in relation with the outer reality. She will demonstrate through her work the validity of James statement, a paradox for most readers that It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.3 This may also give us an indication of why To the Lighthouse appeals to readers more than The Waves. The novel is perceived as holding together because of a subtly, yet elaborately devised structure. With the modernists, structure, as the sum total of individual elements involved in the making of a novel, produces the effect of totality and wholeness. Character, theme, narrative technique and symbolic texture, in their interrelation, compensate for the absence of the organising power of plot. And yet much of the readers sense of structure depended on the existence of a plot and the organisation of novels in chapters and sections. Intent on attracting her readers into the intellectual interaction that her narrative experiment presupposed, Woolf organised To the Lighthouse in such a way that she simultaneously confirmed and challenged expectations. The effect the novel produces on the readers largely depends on Woolfs decision to build her new narrative method by incorporating and reprocessing the inherited conventions. To the Lighthouse is a representation of a fragmented reality. Yet it also asserts itself, in the twentieth-century readers consciousness, as the only solution to fragmentariness. Lily Briscoe, standing
3

quoted in Christopher Gillie, op. cit., 1.

for the condition of the artist in To the Lighthouse, is privileged to get a sense of the wholeness underlying all existence through her memories of Mrs. Ramsay. Through art, Lily Briscoe is capable of reconstructing the whole out of the infinity of subjective fragments and perceptions which reality is.
Like a work of art, she repeated, looking from her canvas to the drawingroom steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illumination, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together, Mrs Ramsay saying Life stand still here; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) this was of the nature of revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said. Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay! she repeated. She owed this revelation to her. (397)

The Waves is an expression of Woolfs decision to depart radically from the narrative conventions of the nineteenth century. She wrote the novel as if in answer to the question she formulated in relation to it in her Diary: [] and several problems cry out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick.4 In an attempt to show that consciousness is all that matters, that reality is nothing but a subjective recreation, that it is through the art of writing that the real gets meaning, Woolf wrote a novel whose technique takes it out of or beyond the

Leonard Woolf, ed., op. cit., 146.

recognisable limits of the genre. The Waves is offered to the readers as a novel, but it comes closer to a poem, or to drama, being in fact a unique experiment of a play-poem-novel. No matter how narrative in aspect the interludes preceding each chapter may be, the readers did not fail to see in The Waves something totally different from what they had been used to. Focusing on the lives of the six individuals, Bernard, Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Jinny and Susan, The Waves encourages an interpretation according to which the novel is a Bildungsroman following the characters development from childhood to adulthood. It presents the life of the six characters, three boys and three girls, through a series of dramatic soliloquies, in Woolfs words.5 For the sake of orientation, the characters thoughts, revealed through speech, are introduced by an impersonal narrators minimal interventions such as Bernard said or Rhoda said. Though the characters seem to dialogise, as this is what the reader would expect characters to do, at least occasionally, in novels and this is what the verb say may be taken to point to, the six characters words do not indicate the existence of coherent communicative situations. These imply the presence of a speaker I and a hearer you in verbal exchange at a given point in time now and space here. Or Woolf is very explicit that this is not how things stand in The Waves.
Now they have all gone, said Louis. I am alone. They have gone into the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among flowers. It is very early, before lessons. Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. (7)

Louis, just like any other characters words, cannot be interpreted as quoted interior monologue either, as it is not the reproduction of the characters mental idiom. Besides, [] from start to finish, [Woolfs soliloquies] convey the idea that they are subject to poetic license6 applied even in the case of the perception verbs see, hear verbalised and vocalised in a manner which contradicts all rules of verisimilitude. For these reasons, it is impossible to distinguish between the characters monologues, which makes us reach the
5

Soliloquy is a dramatic speech uttered by a character while alone on stage through which his/ her inner thoughts and feelings are revealed to the audience. 6 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 265.

conclusion that, if it werent for the almost unnoticed narratorial intrusions, the novel could be seen as an extended autonomous monologue. The interior monologue is conventionally embedded in a third-person context and this is, as a matter of fact, the only formal concession Woolf makes to any novelistic conventions in The Waves. Yet the narrator keeps aloof from the narrative. He contributes to its progress neither temporally, nor spatially. Time becomes totally dependent on the characters subjectivity and his/ her articulation of thoughts. In the absence of the narrators guiding, any characters monologue can easily melt into any other characters monologue because they are all cast in a uniform idiom, which varies neither laterally (from one character to another), nor temporally (from childhood to maturity), thereby dispelling all sense of psychological verisimilitude.7 The Waves is a novel with six characters, and the seventh absent one, Percival, and one single voice. Yet the monologic pattern of the novel does not convey a sense of unity and coherence, as we would expect. It rather imposes, because of the multiplication of the single voice into the soliloquies assigned to the six different centres of consciousness, a reading of identity as one and multiple, in constant search for a meaning. Consequently, The Waves offers the image of reality split in a multitude of fragments, decomposed in their turn into a multitude of subjective perceptions and ultimately recreated, actually or potentially, from them. The reader seems to be invited to look for the structural quality of The Waves in the presence of the interludes that precede the nine unnumbered parts of the novel. Formulated in the voice of a depersonalised narrator, with a clear omniscient propensity, these passages describe constantly the shifting patterns of light and water passing from dawn to dusk, spring to winter, across the globe.8 Put together, these passages would provide the reader with a cohesive piece of writing on whose proper understanding he could build the interpretation of the novel as a whole. But Woolf does not piece the interludes together. Moreover, she graphically opts for a different font type for these natural descriptions, which enhances furthermore the effect of disconnectedness created by the novel.

7 8

Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 264. Kate Flint, Introduction to Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1992) ix.

To the Lighthouse had dealt with ideas fairly similar to those expressed in The Waves, representative of Woolfs philosophy of life and conception of art. But the narrative strategy Woolf used in To the Lighthouse created the illusion of a meaningful world, in which the self exists in communion with self and other. Besides, the techniques used to express the mental produced an effect of continuity between the outer and the inner world. It is precisely the illusion of continuity that the presence of the interludes printed in different fonts destroys. The external world is even visually kept distinct from the world of thought, feeling and emotion. What expectations the reader may have had on starting to read the novel, they are severely challenged by the way in which Woolf constructed the novel. Percival is the great absent who functions as a focal point for the other characters, just like Mrs. Ramsay in the final part of To the Lighthouse, The Lighthouse. Yet Mrs. Ramsay, who is capable of making people and things cohere, remains complete and meaningful in the other characters mind. Unlike her, Percival is an expression of the modern doubt and instability, both because of and in spite of his name, which inevitably reminds of the medieval knight and of an older stable value system in contrast with the modern one. Percival is at the same time referred to as some medieval commander (26), meaning which is undermined by Bernards considering Percival, a ridiculous name (116). Therefore, contrary to expectations, the world of Woolfs The Waves denies the existence of ordering principles and resists structuring. This view of life conveyed through a hybrid strategy (dramatic, poetic or narrative?) could be only disconcerting to readers, even to those familiarised with the modernist techniques. If The Waves is seen as an extended autonomous monologue, the question that logically arises is whose voice the reader hears. Since all the characters relate in one way or another to words and Bernard is the natural coiner of words in the novel, we may assume that the voice we hear is Bernards, multiplied endlessly in the other characters soliloquies. Yet, if we consider the novels technique, through which Woolf reduced the whole universe to one single mind and one single voice, as well as Woolfs anxieties about herself, as a writer, and about the art of writing, it is not too daring to assert that The

Waves is a self-reflexive piece of literature, which turns upon itself and proposes art as the only solution to a meaningless world. The Waves can be read, this enterprise being equally challenging and rewarding, both as a novel which displays the intriguing techniques of modernism and as one which draws the readers attention to the illusional character of art, by focusing on the mechanisms whereby fiction comes into existence. As we have tried to demonstrate, if the novel is analysed on the basis of its technique, i.e. an extended autonomous monologue, subsuming the six individual characters soliloquies, The Waves can hardly be said to display any features of a communication act. The characters, although interrelated, lack the force or are unwilling to communicate with one other. Yet, we could say that the novel as such is an act of communication between the producer of the text and its audience, the writer constantly drawing the readers attention to the fictional character of fiction, involving, thus, the reader in the process of meaning creation. Bernard may be seen as Woolfs spokesman for a new conception of literature, he is the image of the modern creator in the novel. Through Bernard, Woolf tackles most of the relevant issues pertaining to her art. If The Waves is finally perceived as a structure in spite of its obvious formal disconnectedness, it is because the art of writing and the creative effort are central to the novel. In a universe whose most obvious features are fragmentation and relativity, language and the narrative act, as a highly subjective activity, become the ordering principles.
And now, said Neville, let Bernard begin. Let him burble on, telling us stories, while we lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence. Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story. (27)

Bernard is the one who is fully aware of the ordering capacity of language. He understands that by talking he can impose coherence upon the incoherent material he seeks knowledge into. The narrative is seen as means of giving meaning to a dismembering and sometimes overwhelming reality. We

can identify in Bernard both the writers and the readers condition, who are inextricably linked in the process of meaning creation, and especially in the making of the fictional world. Language also offers the possibility to reconcile the disconnected elements of ones identity.
Wait though, Neville; let me talk. The bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan; image on top of image. I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining together one thing to another. I will tell you the story of the doctor. (36)

It seems that all the characters in The Waves relate themselves in one way or another to words, i.e. to language, and its potentialities to create a stable image of a fluctuating self and reality. It is through words that they grasp the meaning of a reality which otherwise menaces to push them into nothingness. Literature, conventionally conceived of as a mirror held to reality, can no longer satisfy the modernist writers intention to probe the depths of the human nature. Therefore, the literary work, by its technique, should be turned into an instrument flexibly used to analyse both the individuals relations to the real world and his/her inner self. This idea is apparent in Rhodas investigating her faceless self, which is nothing but a multiple-faced identity.
Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. [] whereas I sit and change and am seen through in a second. [] Therefore I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. (31)

Nevilles and Bernards counterpoint soliloquies echo Woolfs concern with the correct relationship established between life and art, between reality and literature, also voicing the postmodernist worry that the existing words are not capable of expressing the complexity of the world and the human nature.

The work of art is the result of the interaction between the object and the perceiving subject. It is a record of the atoms as they fall upon the mind, in the order in which they fall9 and it is also seen, up to a point, as the only means to pattern the apparently disconnected material. The work of art is capable of fusing the timeless and the temporal, by incorporating the ephemeral into the eternal. And yet the literary work, as form and content in their union, is never perfect. Its methods should be subject to constant reformulation if it is to become a satisfactory form of knowledge.
In a world which contains the present moment, said Neville, why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure.(60) versus I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I have observed. (62)

Interested in redefining the concept of reality, in order to identify the form most able to render it, the modernist writer places herself at odds with her predecessors over those aspects of reality she should give prominence to in her work. As the narrative focuses on the inner self of the character, probing the human mind, the exterior occurrences become less relevant. This is not to say that they are totally ignored or rejected, but they are given less importance as compared to the same occurrences filtered through and accounted for by the thinking mind. The immediate consequence of this change of interest is that the subjective time replaces the objective one. The mind is capable of uniting past and future, by living in a continuous present. Thus, the fleeting moment and the contingent represent the basis of a new view of chronology. We witness an arrest of time, the characters being conceived both in terms of time suspension and time passing. The modern mentality implies an intermingling of the timeless and the temporal.
[] silence closes over our transient passage. This I say is the present moment, this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached. (48)
9

Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 199.

[] But we against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough. (213-214)

Jinnys incapability of following any word through its changes, [] any thought from present to past (30) is indicative of the inappropriateness of the conventional forms when the intricacies of the human mind and its perceptions of an entangled and relative reality should be expressed. The main condition of existence of the modernist writer is impersonality. The writer assumes a role in the narrative under the form of a literary construct, which is the narrator, effacing his personality and feelings to the benefit of the coming into being of the fictional world. Paradoxically, however, the work of art enables the artist to be all the more present as he depersonalises himself in the process of creation.
[] when [] I try to break off, here at this table, what I call my life, it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis: or how to distinguish my life from theirs. (212)

Bernard stands for the God-like presence of the literary work. He seems to hold a position that Woolf apparently criticised and rejected when she qualified writers such as Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells as materialists. Bernards story in Nevilles terms could be equated to the plot Woolf considered unnecessary and consequently sacrificed. This notwithstanding, on a closer analysis of the Woolfian text, the following quotation summarises Woolfs narrative option, which implies a multiplicity of voices, while subtly preserving at the same time the auctorial presence, not as an intrusion, but as a way of guiding the readers interpretations. In addition, it evinces the writers contribution to the making of the fictional world, a world which exists in its own right, although it uses reality as its material.

He began it when he rolled his bread into pellets as a child. One pellet was a man, one was a woman. We are all pellets. We are all phrases in Bernards story, things he writes down in his notebook under A or B. He tells our story with extraordinary understanding, except of what we most feel. For he does not need us. He is never at our mercy. (51)

Bernards characterising himself is a hint at the writers necessary adoption of a technique involving a multiplicity of voices, among which the writers is one, equal yet distinct. I am not one and simple, but complex and many. (56) The condition of the modern poet is marked by an obvious duplicity. In My Heart Laid Bare, Baudelaire considered that The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being, at will, both himself and other people. Like a wandering soul seeking a body, he can enter, whenever he wishes, into anybodys personality.10 The same duplicity of the modern creator is apparent in Bernards definition of his own condition. I am not part of the street no, I observe the street. One splits off, therefore. (86) The creators identity shapes itself in the process of writing. The work of art comes into being due to the writers ability to observe and record the subjective response to the objective world, under the form of disparate impressions. Yet it gets completeness only through the reader, who may impose coherence upon the disconnected parts. But even more importantly, it is only in the relation with the reader, with the other, that the producer justifies his existence through the text.
[] I am a natural coiner of words, a blower of bubbles through one thing and another. And, striking off these observations spontaneously I elaborate myself; differentiate myself and [] I conceive myself called upon to provide, some winters night, a meaning for all my observations a line that runs from one to another, a summing up that completes. [] I make my phrase and run off with it to some furnished room where it will be lit by dozens of candles. [] To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other peoples eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self. (86-87)
10

quoted in Peter Nicholls, op. cit., 17.

The modernist novelists believed in the capacity of literature to constitute itself into a permanently perfectible form of knowledge. It is for this reason that they constantly devised and re-devised techniques that enabled them to probe deeper and deeper into the unknown. For them, writing becomes an epistemological problem. With each new method, they pushed the limits of the knowable further11, until they had to acknowledge the fact that they had reached meaninglessness. They became thus skeptical about the existence of an ultimate meaning underlying the existent. They reverted to the hard materiality of things. In the absence of a meaning to look for in reality, literature starts turning upon itself self-reflexively. Bernard voices the doubts and skepticism of the modernist creator both about the ordering power of literature and about its potential as a form of knowledge.
There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are for ever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But as I put down my glass I remember: I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends to-night. I am Bernard, myself. (88)

From within a modernist novel par excellence, Virginia Woolf offers a postmodernist solution to the modern writer who, aware of the limits of his knowledge through literature, dissatisfied with the nature of words, confronted with a destabilised self, chooses to remain silent. This simultaneously means seeing the modernist writer in his attempt to move beyond the dead end of modernism and acknowledging the creators position as an ordering force.

But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words.(221) Bernards power fails him and there is no longer any sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of string and falls silent [](28)
11

see Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York and London: Methuen, 1987)

The background against which Virginia Woolf created generated a selfconsciousness about art, and the processes whereby it is created.12 All twentieth-century writers have to admit that their condition of modernity resides in the scrutinising of the nature and validity of existing fictional forms, indirectly installing language, style, and fictional technique as subjects of the novel.13 Through Bernard, Woolf draws the readers attention to the fictional character of her art, pointing to the autonomy of the literary act. She also asserts her artistic position, and, as a matter of fact, that of all modernist writers, as an investigator of previously unexplored zones of human existence. For this, she would need a language capable of unveiling the ineffable of life, which she seems unable to find. That is why she expresses her dissatisfaction with the imperfect language she had to use in order to present the complexity of a reality she sometimes felt as overwhelming and difficult to account for. Her discontent makes her look for a solution that the postmodernist writers were often tempted to offer, that of a literature of silence, made of innocent words, words that are equally well suited to the material and the spiritual.
Now to sum up, said Bernard. Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. [] The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. [] But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story and there are so many, and so many stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and none of them are true. [] How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon halfsheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. (183)

12 13

Randall Stevenson, op. cit., 241. Ibid., 242.