Proustian Reminiscence in To the Lighthouse

Abstract

Proustian Reminiscence in To the Lighthouse Yuko Rojas Several recent critics have interpreted the attempts of Modernist authors to escape from the distinction between philosophical abstraction and direct representation of material facts as implying that studying these authors in relation to the philosophy of their own or earlier periods cannot greatly illuminate the distinctive qualities of their works. In a recent essay, for example, Michael Lackey argues that the distrust of philosophy implied in Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, and her implicit preference for psychology, renders philosophical approaches to her fiction largely unproductive (83–91). Lackey, indeed, goes so far as to argue that the insensitivity of Mr. Ramsay and other philosophers portrayed by Woolf demonstrates her participation in a larger “literary modernist assault on philosophy,” and that, while sharing the emphasis on objectivity found in critics such as T.E. Hulme, she differs from Hulme in emphasizing that this objectivity should have a primarily psychological focus (78, 95).1 Such arguments, however, avoid making the distinction between studying fiction as philosophy, and studying the ways in which fiction itself pursues, or portrays its protagonists as pursuing aesthetic, intellectual, or emotional objectives analogous to those pursued and described by many of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To explore Woolf’s relation to the philosophical traditions of idealism, phenomenology, or Bergsonian thought, therefore, is not to imply that her fiction seeks to dramatize these theories, but rather to explore the ways in which her writing itself and the experiences of her characters express aesthetic and intellectual aims or concerns expressed in different ways by many philosophers of the preceding century (see also Landy 5–14 and Hughes 159). [End Page 451] In particular, Woolf’s evocation of the ways in which the recollecting mind both shapes and is shaped by the objects it recalls (a phenomenon also highlighted by Gilles Deleuze in the context of the work of Marcel Proust) bears important resemblances to the numerous attempts of philosophers from Schelling to Bergson to explain the relation between subjective consciousness and objective or scientific truth. Proust’s own philosophical interests have been documented by several critics, such as Joshua Landy, who notes his familiarity with the work of Schopenhauer and Bergson, as well as (to a lesser extent) with that of Schelling and Nietzsche (5–8). The question of whether or not Woolf shared Proust’s knowledge of philosophy is not, however, a principal concern of this essay. Rather, I will explore the ways in which both her own process of writing and the recollective and creative processes she portrays—particularly in her depiction of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse—involve an interaction of external or concrete with subjective elements paralleling that implied in the recollective process of Proust’s narrator, and of a kind that—intentionally or otherwise—recalls the theories of consciousness and creativity developed by several of the philosophers I have mentioned. Rather than presenting the view of “Woolf as philosopher,” therefore, this essay presents a partly philosophical approach to understanding Woolf’s aesthetic and its relation to that of Proust. Woolf’s familiarity with and enthusiasm for Proust’s writing are well known, and several critics have studied her works in relation to the concept of Proustian space, which is defined by Georges Poulet as “an aesthetic space, where, in ordering themselves, moments and places form the work of art” (Proustian Space 4; see also McArthur 331–32). As Poulet points out, Proustian space is discontinuous in the sense of being in many different places, and the fragments of remembered and present space are united through memory, where the continuity lies. A similar phenomenon is familiar from Woolf’s works—that is, the way in which the minds of her characters move non-chronologically from one place to another, unifying past and present through their recollections. Poulet contrasts Proust’s emphasis on the unifying function of memory with Spinoza’s view of the perceptual world as what he calls “God or Nature” (deus sive natura)—a single substance that from one point of view is God and from another is nature (see Hampshire 26...