The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf
Philosophiae Doctores
A. O. Frank
The Philosophy of
Virginia Woolf
A philosophical reading of the mature novels
AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ, BUDAPEST
ISBN 963 05 7850 6
ISSN 1587-7930
© A. O. Frank, 2001
Published by Akadémiai Kiadó
P.O. Box 245, H-1519 Budapest, Hungary
www.akkrt.hu
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means or transmitted or
translated into machine language without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed in Hungary
to the memory of my father
in whose library
I first read Virginia Woolf
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first and profoundest goes to Peter Meikle. My second, still very profound, to
Péter Balassa who taught me how to read a book. The monastic routine of Oxford
University working through tutorials with Kate Flint and Christopher Butler has been
helpful in providing structure and discipline. Also extremely supportive have been Péter
Dávidházi, Ágnes Bécsy and Gábor Romhányi Török with encouragement and
professional assistance. Aladár Sarbu has been a most conscientious supervisor. I must
thank Graham Clarke from Essex University for helping me acquire English
translations of German texts. And finally, the Soros Foundation both for the visiting
studentship to Oxford and for the Doctoral Grant without which this work would have
been extremely difficult to complete.
CONTENTS
Chapter I. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 11
Chapter II. Truth ....................................................................................................................... 23
Chapter III. Salvation ................................................................................................................ 38
Chapter IV. Life ........................................................................................................................ 58
Chapter V. Knowledge .............................................................................................................. 77
Chapter VI. Art ......................................................................................................................... 95
Chapter VII. Incongruity ........................................................................................................... 130
Chapter VIII. Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 158
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 161
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
‘How should one read a book?’
The first thing that needs to be laid down is that the following is a text about ideas. It
is a reading of Virginia Woolf’s successful mature novels, by which I mean To the
Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts, based on the assumption that by the time
she was writing these, Woolf had formulated, and inscribed in the novels, a consistent
and distilled body of ideas which invite a philosophical understanding.This is far from
claiming that her novels were conceived as lyrical orchestrations of hard and dry
analytic thought. Woolf’s thinking truly and originally worked in the medium of her
poetic prose or private shorthand but this was a far more precise and speculative
medium than is generally assumed. My aim in this text is to identify the main ideas that
inform and organise Woolf’s later texts, to analyse them and to provide the background
and ramifications of these ideas in that particular stream of the European philosophical
tradition in which I have found them to lie. I believe that for a thought to be properly
thought out, it needs to be thought out philosophically. This does not reveal an intention
to violate and pin down Woolf’s meaning, the following is not going to be a crude
philosophical paraphrase of sensitively formulated ideas dragged down from the
inconclusive ethereal medium of the aesthetic sphere. I would instead like to give an
extra dimension to these thoughts by providing the philosophical associations which
they provoke. The aim is, in other words, to establish the philosophical meaning of the
mature novels of Virginia Woolf.
By background I do not mean the background to Woolf’s writing or thinking – but
the background to the thought itself. In other words this is distinctly not a source and
influence study. Those have been numerous but apart from a few exceptions they tend
not to bring to the surface the meaning and the unity of the ideas in Virginia Woolf’s
work. Perhaps this is not their aim or their function, but it is my interest here. Therefore
I am not engaging in a refutation of or a polemic with the source and influence studies,
as that would splinter and deflect the train of argument. Sources and influences are not
seen here as the only power that generates and organises a person’s ideas and the
appearance of these in the literary text. The exciting question is always how the sources
and influences interact with the individual intellect and on the other hand how the
intellect and artistic talent of a person provide a sense where ideas live an almost
independent life. This text was written with the working assumption that ideas have their
own destiny, they move from one time to another, from one place to the next, they alter
and they age, they cross and affect each other. It is in this autonomous fashion that they
combine to make up the coherent sense of a literary text.
Biography is likewise far from my interest here. Virginia Woolf’s work is eminently
suitable for a reading which concentrates on the texts. She strove, always, for aesthetic
purity and I believe it is more than a matter of honour and good grace to look in the
direction she would have us look when we behold her life’s work – it is probable that
11
that is the direction where the most is to be found. She believed that personal life-matter,
i.e. biography, should only find its way into fiction after a long process of
transubstantiation, during which all that is not universal and all that does not yield to the
structure and spirit of the work is to be burnt out of it. She worked very hard to produce
texts, autonomous, meaningful, well-crafted literary texts which are capable of speaking
for themselves and it is this treatment that I aim to accord to her works – those three
which most successfully accomplish the aim and lend themselves to the treatment.
This is not to say that her readings, her biography, her friends’ thoughts and works
and lives did not contribute to the novels. They provided a great deal of their raw
material in one way or another, but these ways, for some reason have been granted much
more far-reaching research than the ideas in the texts. Perhaps it was hoped that the
recapitulation of that process would be the winding path to track down the meaning of
the works. I prefer to give authors the benefit of the doubt and assume that in a
successful work of art the meaning is in the text. It is probable that the impulse behind
the biographical or source and influence type investigations is a result of the pressure to
prove, to pin the result down to causatory facts as tightly as possible. I aim to assure the
same degree of credit to my reading but with different guarantees. On the one hand this
is to arise from reading the texts most thoroughly, relying as you can only rely in Woolf,
on the letter of the text, on the necessity with which each word and sentence is placed
just where it is, the choice of every object and image, every change and every scene to
make up the code through which meaning speaks. But by the letter of the text I also
mean the information that is concealed in units larger than the word or the sentence –
Woolf very consciously constructed the smaller and larger units of her texts as well as
the dynamisms which overarch entire novels.
To highlight the ideas in Woolf’s texts I shall present examples which are in a
relation of family resemblance to these in the Wittgenstinian sense. They precede or
follow, they mark the previous or afterlife of the Woolfian idea or are simply similar but
more spaciously and explicitly elaborated, and thus well-suited to explicate its
significance and also to illustrate the fact that if the idea is there in her work it is not
spoken into empty space but is being thought throughout the Continent and throughout
the era. Virginia Woolf is an exemplary case of the way in which philosophy is best
adapted to be present in art. Not only do we find in her work a lack of jargon and
references, we are also spared the sight of such half digested lumps of philosophy as
deface, for example, some of D. H. Lawrence’s work, or those not entirely convincing
orchestrations of borrowed ideas which give a flat ring to some of Pater’s short stories
(e.g. Imaginary Portraits). I see in Woolf’s work the perfect aesthetic integration of
abstract complexity. It is rather paradoxical that it was this seamless incorporation that
has prevented her work from being accorded the adequate philosophically pre-disposed
reading that it warrants. Indeed, the basic interpretative situation in which Woolf’s
successful mature novels find themselves is highly paradoxical. These are texts which
clearly cry out for a philosophical reading yet they just as clearly render such a reading
unlikely, difficult and vulnerable. They could not be further from an essay novel
conceived, let us say, after Musil’s fashion. They exhibit no traces of formal
philosophical training, as indeed Woolf had had none. Yet they are built up from and
organised around a continued investigation into questions regarding truth, language, art,
history, evolution and the meaning of human life. They display an ostentatious ignorance
and in the same breath they valorise attitudes of dilettantism and ironically use an
12
outsider’s stance to embarrass professional philosophy with pseudo-naive questions.
They examine the field spreading from political action through attitudes in
philosophising to poetic language and they see this field as continuous but treacherous,
one where lines can be drawn from one margin to the other but where these lines can no
way be kept straight.
The three novels in question have been chosen as alone ‘mature’ and ‘successful’
from this angle, that it is in these that the technique Woolf developed, mastered and
brought to perfection combines with the maturity of thought regarding a particular set of
problems which had been her food for thought from the earliest years and that in these
she occupies the sphere which both stylistically and intellectually appears her own. In
these she is at her height in competency, originality and sensitivity. I believe that the
succession of the earlier novels is a fascinating object of study for anyone who wishes to
observe the way in which a literary talent departs from a tradition and, parallelly to
perfecting her own skills, re-invents the rules and tools of the craft in which she is
working. In these novels she polishes her style, learns her use of the sentence, the
paragraph, the passage, she develops her sense for structure and at the same time learns
what lies at the quick of the novelistic art, those new ways and devices of capturing and
presenting experience which did the most to force a refashioning of the mindset of the
modern author and reader. Naturally, Woolf was interested in the problems with which
we are here concerned from the earliest times onwards and there are traces of this in the
early writings. In these whirls and simmers a great quantity of ideas which only
concentrate into a few intensive centres of investigation after Mrs Dalloway. It would be
easy to point out in that novel how William Bradshaw’s rigid notions of normalcy feed
partly on a particular idea, or rather ethos, of science and partly on a social bedding
which renders this notion of science far from innocent and makes psychiatric practice
articulate the view of life and mental illness which that social structure compulsorily
entails. This would in turn be opposed to a chaotic, horrific cosmology represented by
Septimus Warren Smith which vision, in theory, can withstand and even uproot
Bradshaw’s view of the world but in practice has no weapon or even shield against its
superior might. It succumbs to the cruelty and disorder which manifest themselves even
through the very lies of order and proportion. But I do not believe that such an
interpretation can account for more than a certain portion of Mrs Dalloway, I do not
believe that it was written with this question in focus, or that the ideas contained in this
question are fully thought out and brought to a conclusion.
The three novels we are dealing with hang together organically by virtue of their
concentrated engagement with a philosophical problematic through a line of
transformations which this undergoes in the texts, as well as by a whole series of
creative motifs, convictions and doubts recurring in varied or confirmed forms. The
philosophical agenda consists partly of questions of an epistemological nature
contrasting the role and competency of reason and the nature of truth. These, in turn, are
tied into an equally weighty ontological and existential concern. They also engage in a
wider commentary regarding the relative positions of philosophy and art and their
responsibility in accommodating truth, while at the same time, perhaps surprisingly, they
feed back into questions relating to history and within that even to topical British and
European social reality.
What I shall present here is a philosophical reading. I shall examine the treatment of
these ideas in the three novels, not as a body of work yielding a single monolithic
13
statement, but as a mobile unit which cannot be viewed from all perspectives at the same
time. I shall progress not chronologically, from novel to novel, but thematically, by reexamining the same texts in the course of discussing theoretical areas that they
themselves mark out, or in comparative conversation with various other texts, including
some of Woolf’s essays, Three Guineas, as well as a number of philosophical texts
extending from Montaigne to Derrida. Often the central ideas will be established
through close reading exercises, followed by the exploration of kindred ideas in the
relevant philosophical texts. The interpretative field between the Woolfian texts and
their philosophical analysis is also continuous and treacherous. I shall tread this field
cautiously. It should be in harmony with the epistemological stance of the works
themselves if I do not inscribe to them definitive static and universal truths but try in
good grace to discontinue my theorising at the point where it would begin to violate the
ambiguity or subtlety of the texts. Virginia Woolf as literary matter, as a subject of
critical debate, tends to resist definitive answers and schematic simplifications, anyway.
With her, only the most complex and considered answers prove good enough, witness
the fate of the typically recurrent, regrettably profane, ‘Woolf questions’ such as
whether she was or was not an anti-Semite, a homosexual or a snob, whether or not she
cared for politics, the working classes and real life (the last three usually equated),1 or
whether she liked or disliked, did or did not have sex. I would prefer, in an old
fashioned way, to concentrate on what she wished us to read – the books.
Yet what I am going to present is a reading, therefore it will necessarily contain
affirmative sentences about the meaning of particular works of art. This brings with it a
whole host of problems. It involves a set of undeniable underlying assumptions which
will provide excellent targets for criticism. There is, however, no such thing as a text
without underlying assumptions, in fact it is probable that no text can be without some
unexamined underlying assumptions. We are all subjects to a cultural legacy, an age and
its beliefs and values, or at least the axes of thought it propagates, no matter how many
layers of reflection and transformation come between us and these. What we accept,
what we negate and what we ignore all define us. Therefore even if I attempt to vivisect
some of my own critical prejudices, foremost among them that a reading of a work of art
is possible, there will be others which, true to the nature of underlying assumptions, can
engender debates leading to the very antinomies that mark the edge of the continent of
thought.
The theoretical roots of this work lie not so much in one of the recent schools of
literary criticism as in a school of thought which makes art as well as historiography, the
law and, ultimately, all texts its subject matter but speaks the language of philosophy,
and this is hermeneutics. If I attempt to outline my theoretical position at the outset of
this work I have to say that I partly lean on the authority of H.-G. Gadamer without
charging him with any of the responsibility entailed by my practices. Yet the concrete
reading experience and its fundamental meaning-attributing disposition doubtlessly owe
a great deal to the hermeneutic spirit. The idea that our task is to read precisely and look
1
How much more informative is a subtler observation like that by Alex Zwerdling when he says, ‘She
often voices uneasiness about how little we know concerning the lives of the powerless’, and here my
attention goes to ‘powerless’ as a choice of word which allows us to think equally of all those whom age,
gender, class or plain historical oblivion puts almost beyond reach. (Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the
Real World. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1986. 197.)
14
for meaning with humility, to re-build and integrate with our historical and individual
horizon the meaning of the text is at the basis of the following investigations. A
fundamental readerly benevolence, advancing the unit of meaning and giving the text the
benefit of the doubt, the running ahead and checking back of the interpreting mind, the
reliance on the text to provide its own terms of interpretation are all part of the
hermeneutic readerly habitus. The idea that ultimately meaning is always philosophical,
that literary understanding takes place in conversation with the philosophical tradition
which both in its successes and its failures most acutely articulates the sustaining ideas
of an age is also derived from Gadamer’s work. Heidegger’s claim that truth is not a
static entity but something that ‘happens’ or ‘takes place’ and that the phenomenological
structure of the work of art renders it the most adequate scene for this ‘taking place’,
thus making art the par excellence seat of truth, is an indispensable conviction at the
bottom of all interpreting work as well as a cornerstone of Gadamer’s aesthetics.
When I say that a reading is possible I naturally do not mean that a verifiable,
definitive and exhaustive paraphrase of a work of art is possible or even desirable. But a
relatively simple practical recognition must be admitted, somewhat in the vein of ‘all
texts will have unexamined underlying assumptions’. This is that as long as there are
works of art and we read them, our reading will yield readings and these readings will
imply that we believe that the particular work of art means this, and this much rather
than that. In other words, so long as we read, we shall betray a conviction, and we might
just as well openly admit to it, that works of art do contain more of less unified and
definitive sets of meaning, so that perpetrators of one or other of these interpretations
will consider their own reading more or less right and those of others, unless it is a plain
matter of totally different angles, more or less wrong. Other ways of dealing with literary
texts are of course possible and widely practised. But it is probable that a wellestablished and sensitive reading will always yield more intellectual satisfaction than
critical practices which beat round the bush in their fear of making value-statements,
meaning-statements or quality-statements. As a vehicle of getting to the meaning of the
text the examination of the mechanics of literary texts, of their imagery, rhetorical
arsenal, taxonomic exercises are absolutely vital, indispensable as the first half of the
job, without them all philosophical analysis is unfounded, all theorising is the building
of castles in the air. But the grassroots work, the workshop job, and especially the
research into biographical background and sexuo-psychological investigations remain
sterile and futile waste-production or a distasteful prying into the private lives of
Famous People, a perverted romantic residue unless they are guided by the question as
to what end those particular means in the work were employed or in what way the
discovered background information can lead back to the understanding of the text itself.
In other words, we falsify the nature of the literary work of art if we shyly turn away
from the naked fact that it, the literary text, is carried by language and language is there
to mediate meaning. And, perhaps most importantly, by eschewing the search for
meaning we betray an old conviction which has been at the root of literary scholarship
so long that it is now practically forgotten, even its denial having gone out of fashion.
This is the belief that we practice our scholarship in order to understand the text, so that
we may prize out of it all the wisdom it can yield, because we strive to enrich and
improve our existence and the existence of those we teach. Ideally and originally,
interpretation is but a stage in a perpetual accumulation of wisdom as a means of
ongoing personality growth.
15
Admittedly, the way in which and the degree to which meaning is clearly inscribed
and intentionally controlled in a literary text varies widely from text to text, from author
to author, and it is the task of analysis to establish that mode and to respect that degree. I
shall try to point out the signs that led me to believe that Woolf’s above mentioned
works consciously address the problems and contain the answers that I claim. Since in
these three novels the level of textual control regarding the questions in case is, as I
allege, relatively high, the form of analysis applied here might not be equally applicable
to texts by Hemingway or Shakespeare. A certain varying degree of philosophical
analysis is possible with regard to any work of art, but this will usually take the form of
uncovering unconscious foundations or unearthing scraps of philosophical systems or
notions integrated unawares in the tissue of the work.2 This is not the same as the
author’s reply given after active consideration to certain questions which, however, he or
she may or may not have recognised as philosophical. Philosophy as a mind-set, as a
body of background knowledge and as a collection of intellectual tools can be used in
dealing with almost any matter. But the subject matter often does not itself speak this
language but speaks another. In Woolf’s case however, at least in these three novels, the
text voluntarily answers questions asked in this particular idiom of thought. This is why
it is not altogether inappropriate to talk, although never quite un-metaphorically, of the
philosophy of Virginia Woolf whereas it might be more advisable just to talk of the
philosophy in or behind Hemingway or Shakespeare. Ultimately, meaning is always
philosophical. But not all works of art accomplish the philosophical evaluation of their
own consequences within themselves, not all literature raises its own meaning to the
level of philosophy. Woolf in these three novels does and this is one of the points I set
out to show.
What I present here is a fractured and incomplete reading. Even if a relatively
coherent body of meaning can be recognised in Woolf’s or in any other literary text, a
reading will usually concentrate on one particular aspect or stratum of the entire work.
Out of all the layers that compose the geology of the work, autobiography, existential
concerns, creative self-reflection, social commentary, morality or language, only one or
two are sampled, followed and analysed, yet in the text these layers might sometimes run
thicker and sometimes thinner, sometimes they will totally disappear and at others any of
them might crumble and powder and mingle out of recognition with the others.
I do not wish to declare any of the main strands of Woolf-reading invalid,
misconceived or irrelevant. The biographical or the psycho-analytic approach to To the
Lighthouse could in no way be denied their due, the interest of some of Woolf’s texts for
the feminist movement is evident and even deliberate. Poetical beauty, pictorial values
and social documentary are all present in the works, nor can these factors be ignored in
the analysis of the theoretical purport of the books. Neither beauty, nor language, nor
social background are external attachments to some abstract theoretical statement, like
decorations on a Christmas tree. In Woolf, as in all good literature, only the knowledge
of the whole text makes up even the meaning of a segment. The richness of interaction
between part and whole is inexhaustible, the paraphrase can never be without loss. This
2
In ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ Eliot analyses the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays
contain, use or do not use philosophy and thus provides useful matter for thought regarding the ways in which
philosophy can be present in the work of art. (‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (1927). Eliot, T. S.
Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. 126–141.)
16
is why any reading must be incomplete and fractured. It is also this that makes the text a
work of art: that it talks about a woman knitting a brown stocking and, while betraying
incompetence in matters of knitting, it gives a sense of truth and appropriacy in so many
ways and provides material for thought in such a wide range of areas. Analyses of any
one of these areas will necessarily cripple the experience of the whole text and to make
it complete and lustrous again one can but go back and read the book another time.
Having thus conjured up the old debate between the romantic primacy of art and the
rationalist primacy of analysis, and argued the side of the former, now the latter must be
credited with this, that on each reading it is possible for the book to gain new richness
from the subtlety and complexity of understanding, from the new rounds of theory that
the reader has run between two readings. In this sense the avoidance of paraphrase is as
harmful and hypocritical as its practice is heretical or blasphemous. My practical vision
of the way the present text will be used is also based on this idea. It is a vision whereby
after previous readings of Virginia Woolf the reader of this text will indulge with
hermeneutic benevolence in my analyses and philosophical associations and assimilate
such of them as their memory of the texts allows. Then upon next reading he or she will
not only check these ideas against the text but, hopefully, find that the novels offer
another full-range, living, genuine reading experience – one that has been enriched with
the reverberations of particular newly discovered ideas in those texts, one in which a few
emphases have shifted, a new network of understanding been introduced and a few
motifs gained a meaning where the text had hitherto been flat and soundless.
The question whether a hierarchy exists between the various strata of meaning in the
work of art has already been hinted at. If we maintain that meaning is always, ultimately,
philosophical, the use of philosophical questions as an organising force in a set of
works, their manifestation as a solid and distinct layer, ought surely to grant them a
certain form of primacy. As we have already noted, it seems that in Woolf almost all
elements, linguistic and narrative, beautiful and biographical, can be enlisted in creating
philosophical meaning. At this point, of course, the question becomes unavoidable, as to
what we mean by philosophy or philosophical meaning. I shall not answer this here:
questions regarding the function and range of philosophy will form one of the main lines
of analysis in the following work.
What can already be laid down is that throughout this reading I am going to rely on a
mutually illuminative relationship existing between philosophy and literature. In this
case I quite simply refer to the use of texts from the philosophical canon, works that
Woolf never read, by Nietzsche, Heidegger or even Gadamer. It is not the
correspondence between one or two elements of Woolf’s thought and that of, say,
Nietzsche which justifies my bringing them together. There are doubtless other sources
where odd connections could be found, there have been atheistic philosophers, there
have been cosmologies of disorder in plenty. The decisive argument is the affinity
between the two thought structures as wholes, the way in which their ontologies,
epistemologies and existential conclusions hang together and follow from each other.
Even that loose philosophical genealogy on which I rely for my sources of correlations,
ie. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer but also Derrida and also Wittgenstein, is held
together by a structure of ideas which are coherently detected in Woolf’s mature
thought. The aim is to place Woolf’s thought into that context of ideas with which it
seems involuntarily to communicate.
17
The involvement of philosophical texts, as well as the entire enterprise of providing
an analysis of certain works by Woolf using philosophical terminology, might seem
provocative and unjustified to an English-speaking or British-trained audience. The
reason for this, however, lies in the nature of British culture itself – in the philosophical
tenets that lie at its base and determine its intellectual climate, including most
unconsciously and widely accepted attitudes to art and reason. It is one of the aims of
this analysis to criticise and relativise the rule of these principles and to show that there
exists another position from which the non-use of philosophical terminology in relation
to these novels, the lack of serious analysis of a number of their aspects, seems just as
startling and inexplicable. This marks another way in which it is encoded in the nature of
Woolf’s mature novels that they should fall into a cultural and interpretative trap, into a
position which ensures that they should not fully be granted their due understanding
within their home sphere. They contain the critique of an epistemological paradigm
which is partially defined by its very disinclination to seek or accept novels as a source
of commentary regarding its own activity.
Accordingly, the few signals pointing to the necessity of a philosophical reading
have come from people who, themselves speaking from characteristically marginal
positions compared to mainstream English Literature teaching, understood this trap
clearly. It was in France and in French that Tony Inglis gave a lecture in 1977 which was
reprinted as still topical in the early 1990’s.3 Here Inglis criticises British culture in an
attempt to account for deficiencies in Virginia Woolf’s appreciation. He questions
whether these are not to be retraced to ‘that central feature of modern English literary
and artistic life, the imperfect assimilation of – and indeed the strong resistance to –
modernist art in English culture.’ Inglis says,
[t]he distinctive weakness of current Woolf criticism is this: the various crude
objections already rehearsed [the lack of significant content, lack of convincing
characters etc.] don’t seem in fact to have been killed. [...] Something so widespread
must be a response to a climate and a context rather than a matter of limitation or
idiosyncrasy in particular critics.
[...T]he long deafness of English philosophers to the Continent and a reactionary
vulgarisation in literary criticism in recent years have been parochial and restrictive
in their effects.
The cultural history I have in mind is roughly this: modernist art is above all
epistemological both in the shift in sensibility in which it originates and in the
tendencies which it displays and most characteristically develops. Embodying a
reaction against the empirical certainties and linear logic of the mid-nineteenth
century, from the standpoint of the very unstable blend of freedom and limitation,
power and impotence characteristic of twentieth-century experience, it replaces God
by a felt absence, syntax by discrete images, historical progress by repetition, the
proscenium arch by the open space amid the audience, and so on.4
3
Inglis, Tony. ‘Virginia Woolf and English Culture’. First published in Guiguet, Jean, ed. Virginia Woolf
et le groupe de Bloomsbury. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977. 10/18 series. 219–241. First published
in English in Bowlby, Rachel, ed. Virginia Woolf. London, 1993.
4
Bowlby. Virginia Woolf. 55.
18
By referring to the epistemological nature of the modern novel, Inglis marks out the
main direction for the reading he would welcome. In clearly programmatic language he
calls on future critics of Woolf to ‘throw away their long-maintained discretion and
draw, publicly and overtly, the conclusion they seem to be withholding’. He calls for
an overdue adjustment and clarification in the relation between the ethical and
the epistemological aspects of the novel. The reigning view in England – that the
ethical is primary, the epistemological almost nowhere – flatters the plain-man
traditionalists in British culture, and keeps the world of appearances safe and
comfortable at the cost of undervaluing Woolf, Sartre and Kafka, partly misreading
Lawrence, and being not good at dealing with Beckett or indeed with French
literature since Proust. Woolf, properly read could help us towards a more balanced
view that these two aspects of the novel vitally interpenetrate one another.5
Inglis implies that only the new reading he urges would disperse that most
persistently recurring charge against Woolf, the ‘lack of significant content’. That telltale equation by Inglis of significant content with a philosophical understanding, which
is so essential to us, is far from self-evident. It is, however, in this sense that we are
going to think of philosophy in this work, i.e. with the conviction that it is something
vital and close-to-the-flesh, that in it something invaluable is at stake. This vindication
of importance, as we shall see, can be derived from Woolf herself, primarily from To the
Lighthouse, but the seat of this importance is not necessarily the same as professional or
academic philosophy.
Clearly, it is an attribute of the culture which is being questioned in Woolf’s works
to deny the very connection between literature and philosophy which is by now so
commonplace in at least some compartments of Continental thinking. (Significantly,
Inglis, in another connection but in the same essay, quotes Walter Benjamin, the critic
and philosopher who did so much in his analysis of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften to elaborate and canonise this relationship between philosophy and
literature.) The way in which the link between philosophy and literature, or art in
general, is taken for granted in much of Continental academic life, goes back to a long
tradition in the development of Continental philosophy and an equally long division
between the latter and British thought. The attention granted to the truth value of art
originated in classic German idealism and subsequent romantic hermeneutics and
analyses like the current one necessarily have a root in this intellectual background.
Thus it is not surprising that an attempt at a philosophical reading of Virginia Woolf
should come from outside the British intellectual sphere of influence. Furthermore, here
we find another reason why Woolf had to deal with philosophical questions from a
position of the ostensible dilettante and outsider.
Another text I wish briefly to refer to as a kind of antecedent to the forthcoming
work is Michéle Barrett’s ‘Introduction’ to her collection of Woolf’s essays.6 The main
significance of this text is in establishing an attitude, in presenting a sample for a
sensitive and complex reading of Woolf which remains close to the text but at the same
5
Bowlby. Virginia Woolf. 57–58.
Barrett, Michéle, ed. Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing: Her Essays, Assessments and Arguments.
London, 1979.
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time cuts diagonally across its strata in order to highlight the connection between
Woolf’s abstract thought and the commitment to reality implied by that thought. At the
outset of her analysis Barrett includes the following quote, ‘“I doubt,” writes G. S.
Fraser in his study of The Modern Writer and His World (Penguin, 1970), “from her
own writings, whether Mrs Woolf was any more capable of following an abstract
philosophical argument than Clarissa Dalloway.”’7 Barrett’s introduction represents a
milestone in Woolf appreciation because it credits her with abstract thought at all, and
also as it echoes Tony Inglis in equating abstract thought with social commitment and
relevance, i.e. implies the important opinion that an abstract philosophical thought can in
itself be of value to society. Although her text concentrates on a particular area, that of
women and writing, Barrett is eager to demonstrate that at a certain depth in Woolf’s
work there lies a sustained and coherent stratum of theoretical concern, of social as well
as literary criticism. What I wish to show is that interpenetrating or underlying this layer
there lies another, a continuous layer of thought one step closer to philosophical
abstraction and refinement. Barrett herself alludes to this when she points out that the
level which Woolf considered of real importance was not pitched by social and political
thought so much as by ‘the wider questions which the poet tries to solve – of our destiny
and the meaning of life.’
Barrett’s Introduction is also exemplary in the way in which it handles the
connection between the fictional and non-fictional works. It reflects an understanding of
Woolf’s conviction that works of art are determined by aesthetic criteria and are a
medium with its own very specific phenomenal and cognitive characteristics. Barrett
seems to accept that, rather than being restrictive, this affords a very special complexity
and depth of insight into problems which occur in a different light in polemical works.
She seems to find, however, nothing heretical in recognising in the works of fiction the
re-occurrence of the same ideas and discussing them in the light of the understanding
offered by the works of fiction.
Barrett raises a number of the crucial questions and arguments that we shall be
discussing later on, among them the problem of outsiderism, or the early recognition in
Woolf’s works of the connection between aggression in the private sphere and attitudes
of political aggression. She points to Woolf’s awareness of the question as to whether
women have an inherently different language, style or type of experience to offer from
that represented by men.
One strand of the wide, that is to say popular, view on the question of Virginia
Woolf and philosophy is reflected in D. S. Thatcher’s sweeping statement which he
makes in his book on Nietzsche’s influence in England around the early part of the 20th
century.8 In this work he lumps the Bloomsbury group together as ‘an élite assembly of
Whig aristocrats who took their cue, not from Nietzsche, but from G. E. Moore and his
Pateresque philosophy of the exquisite sensation.’ The general prejudice which this, as
well as G. S. Fraser’s above quoted remark, reflects would disallow the association of
Virginia Woolf’s art with Nietzschean ideas. It springs from that attitude which likes to
derive the appreciation of authors’ works from their social milieu and from a widely
generalised representation of the views held in their circle. If, however, this prejudice is
7
Barrett. Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing: Her Essays, Assessments and Arguments. 2.
Thatcher, D. S. Nietzsche in England 1890–1914, The Growth of a Reputation. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1970. 266.
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as blind as the generalisation involved in stamping that incurably middle-class, Jewish
‘lefty’ Leonard Woolf as an aristocrat or detecting the inspiration of the ‘exquisite
sensation’ in Keynsian economics, then our surprise might decrease at an association
between Woolf and Nietzsche. In fact if, as I suspect, Woolf’s discontents with
philosophy arose from negative impressions gained from her dealings with the
philosophers belonging to her circle of acquaintance (and why should we assume that
‘influence’ is always imitation or persuasion) then we can hardly be surprised to find
these dissatisfactions arranged along similar lines as Nietzsche’s own critique. At any
rate, the ‘Pateresque philosophy of the exquisite sensation’ marks one of the usual
directions of misguided pseudo-philosophical Woolf reading. It is doubtless that Woolf
read a great deal of Pater and was at one phase of her life, immersed in his intellectual
sphere. Ideas like the effect of fleeting sensations and impressions or the notion of the
privileged moment also clearly show an affinity. Pater’s ‘prejudice that the only history
worth reciting is the history of someone’s consciousness, the succession of a hero’s
mental and spiritual states’9 most definitely found its place in Woolf’s creative arsenal.
Less obvious recurrences of a largely unacknowledged discipleship have also been
unearthed.10 But what matters to us is that the mature Woolf’s overall intellectual
attitude is sharply opposed to Pater’s. I shall return to this question in Chapter IV. I am
hoping to show in the following work just how far Woolf is from being an ‘aesthete’ in
the usual British sense of the word which itself is greatly removed from the original
German understanding of the term Ästetik. To abandon engagement with reality, to give
up on an understanding of the nature of life including its social aspects and the
possibilities of its betterment, to make ‘experience itself’ an end or to use art for escapist
purposes and to grant through it a priority to pleasure over cognition, to romanticist
sensualism over a cerebral, rational impulse is the opposite of all her intellectual and
creative ambitions. To explain away the novels of Virginia Woolf as the outcome of the
single impulse to favour beauty, sensation and transience over the more solid stuff of
thought not only reveals very loose reading but is also an unsatisfactory hypothesis for
explaining a whole cycle of modernist novels. It is probably much more true to say that
in her work various types of rationality, the competence of different modes of
understanding and some vital existential questions are at stake.
Another customary manoeuvre in critical readings of Virginia Woolf is to hint at a
philosophical relevance and then exhaust this by mentioning her engagement with flow
and transience and the ‘myriad of impressions’ that shower the ‘ordinary mind on an
ordinary day.’11 But there is more to it than that. Woolf was an author who put much
tight and concentrated work into the notional as well as the compositional and stylistic
perfection of her work. Thus nearly every sentence in the prose can be accounted for
either by its structural-narrative function or its biographical-thematic content or the job
it does in developing some of the abstract concerns of the work or usually by a
combination of these functions. The aesthetic turn in modern philosophy as it is
described by Gadamer in Truth and Method, whereby art offers an appropriate medium
9
Donoghue, Denis. Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls. New York: Knopf, 1995. 188.
Meisel, Perry. The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1980.
11
Woolf, Virginia. ‘Modern Fiction’. The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, Selected Essays. Ed. Bowlby,
R. Vol. 2. London, 1993. 8.
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of understanding for problems that discursive, methodical philosophy of the SocraticCartesian paradigm has failed to answer, offers a position which comes much closer to a
description of Woolf’s own intellectual stance. This is so even if this stance was
developed in relative isolation and seems to be at odds with the philosophical influences
which are supposed to have surrounded her. It relies on her own internal symbol systems
and uses the means of poetic prose rather than of philosophical argumentation. Yet it is
possible to show the consistency of philosophical engagement in this poetic usage and it
is this that I set out to do in this work.
The reading I am presenting here progresses by a series of circumnavigations of
particular ideas. The organising principle is provided by the ideas themselves and not by
the individual novels. This means that the same novel, or even the same passage,
character or motif, might be discussed from a variety of angles while the three novels
and the other texts discussed become connected by threads of recurring problems. In the
process of analysis certain philosophical preferences, stances or value judgements will
inevitably gain dominance. Their dominance is ensured by the text but they are
welcomed, emphasised or analysed because I actually agree with them or consider them
more correct than others. In the following work I do not try to support illusions of an
impersonal critic free of a personal stylistic or intellectual identity or value system. I
believe that hypocrisy of this kind is not only hopelessly unconvincing but also
intellectually harmful. In this sense the following text is also inevitably a philosophical
tract of a kind.
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