Was It a Vision?

Structuring Emptiness in "To the Lighthouse"

Author(s): Sally Minogue
Source: Journal of Modern Literature , Winter, 1997-1998, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1997-
1998), pp. 281-294
Published by: Indiana University Press

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 Was it a Vision?
Structuring Emptiness in
To the Lighthouse

Sally Minogue
Canterbury Christ Church College

1 welve months before starting to write the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse,
Virginia Woolf records in her diary:

London . . . is shot with the accident I saw this morning & a woman crying Oh oh

oh faintly, pinned against the railings with a motor car on top of her. All day I have

heard that voice. I did not go to her help; but then every baker & flowerseller did
that. A great sense of the brutality and wildness of the world remains with
me?there was this woman in brown walking along the pavement?suddenly a red
film car turns a somersault, lands on top of her, & one hears this oh, oh, oh.1

This brief passage shows many characteristic Woolf qualities: impersonality of observation,
quivering sensibility, distaste for the vulgar, and the need to reshape imaginatively through
repetition. Most notable, however, is the sense of the absurd, issuing, along with the almost
comic "oh, oh, oh" as from a cartoon balloon squeezed out between car and railings, and from
the Camus-like flat reductiveness to surface, shapes, colours and sounds. Woolfs ability to
remove herself from the world and see it in its cosmieally comic proportions can chill?as can
her snobbery?but here it is redeemingly shot with her tragic sense of "the brutality and
wildness of the world" within it.

Woolfs diary entry, with its suddenness, its mixture of distress and detachment, and
perhaps most of all its railings, recalls Septimus' suicide in Mrs. Dalloway (the oroofs of

1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vois., ed. Anne O. Bell (The Hogarth Press, 1980), Vol. HI: 1925-1930, p. 6.
All future references are to this edition, this volume, and will be cited parenthetically.

Sally Minogue, "Was it a Vision? Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse," Journal of Modern Literature, XXI,
2 (Winter 1997-98), pp. 281-294. ?Foundation for Modern Literature, 1998.

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282 Journal of Modern Literature

which Woolf had recently reviewed). While the actual death occu
novel (and its immediate aftermath barely a page), its narrative
Clarissa excruciatingly relives it (as it were) on hearing of it during
obligatory touch of bathos enters: "What business had the Bradsh
party?"2 But its inconsiderate intrusion "in the middle of my p
extension of the way in which death has been inconsideratel
consciousness all day. The hidden seduction of "Fear no more . .
into the open, as is the meticulous detail of the plunge onto the r
enactment (both hitherto narratively submerged). Clarissa's long ref
between life and death, as her party eddies around her, brings
annihilation which floods below the thin strip of her existence, y
in order to be freed from that fear which floats always at the edg

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with c

obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chat

preserved. (p. 241)

Woolfs structural deferment enacts Clarissa's own defermentof lo

even when she does so, it is by placing depths and shallows side b
reflections:

It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a

profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dr

Bathos is indeed the key grammatical figure in Mrs. Dalloway, su

irony that constantly undercuts our sympathy for Clarissa and
dimensions of the novel's climax. Only the intensity of those last re
us, finally, clear of deflation, because here Woolf makes clear t
reflects the cosmic irony which places death on a level with ev
emptiness of existence on a par with not being invited to Lady
concatenation, the utter meaninglessness of life is laid bare, but t
massive power which death exerts over life?retains its representat
is central to this: his understanding is not undercut, as Clarissa's is,
grave by its cataclysmic effects on his sanity. Bathos and come
him?witness the aeroplane smoke whose shapes Septimus sees as

one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling th

provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty
Tears ran down his cheeks.

It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia. (p. 27)

2 Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Claire Tomalin (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 241. All future references are to this
ir?n anri \i/ill K/? n'ttf*A r?ar*?nth#?tir?a1I\j
edition and will be cited parenthetically.

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 Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse 283

But here the deflation is poignant, emphasizing the innocence of Septimus' view of th
And if he sees beauty in Creemo advertisements, he also sees the revelatory figure
while both are distortions of reality, their being given equal significance in Sep
understanding comes from the terrible logic of his insanity. What he sees all the
"thing there was that mattered") Clarissa can see only at odd moments, if she is t
living. Life cannot carry on if its emptiness?an emptiness residing in the consta
indifference of death?is fully understood. The structural linking of Septimus wit
thus insists on the seriousness of her glimpses of life's inherent absurdity, for,
moments, she sees what Septimus sees. It also allows the persistent bathos accompanyi
glimpses both to remind us of a shallowness in Clarissa's life which actually protect
to represent the inherent irony of existence, for notions of greater and lesser sig
cannot be properly conceived when the whole is made meaningless by death.

Just as Clarissa Dalloway cannot sustain her inherently contradictory perspectiv

time, neither can Woolf sustain hers artistically. Bathos, after, all depends on a se
some objects and events have greater significance than others, yet its intended effect i
that evaluative distinction. But the structures of narrative, like the structures of gra
syntax, allow linear juxtapositions in which contradictions can be played against eac
perhaps even balanced; Woolf refines and sharpens the play of these structures
readers we are involved in the very conflicts and tensions which she sees as arising ne
from the highly precarious balancing act of living a life while seeing that for what it
precariousness is occasionally expressed directly in Woolf's novels: Clarissa "had a p
sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she al
the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day" (p. 10); Lily B
momentarily steps "off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation. "3 Such
seem to come directly from Woolfs own experience, several times referred
autobiographical and critical writings, and explored more thoroughly than usual in
entry for 11 October 1929:

And it is autumn; & the lights are going up; & Nessa is in Fitzroy Street?in a great
misty room, with flaring gas & unsorted plates and glasses on the floor,?& the
Press is booming?& this celebrity business is quite chronic?& I am richer than I

have ever been?& bought a pair of earrings today?8c for all this, there is vacancy
& silence somewhere in the machine. . . . If I never felt these extraordinarily
pervasive strains?of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort?I should float
down into acquiescence.. . . If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling ofthe
singing ofthe real world, as one is driven by loneliness & silence from the habitable
world. . . . But anvthine is nossible. And this curious steed. life: is genuine?Does

3 To the Lighthouse, ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 244. All future references are t
this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

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284 Journal of Modern Literature

any of this convey what I want to say??But I have not really la

emptiness after all (Diary, p. 260).4

Even here, it is through incongruity that she tries to "lay hands"

perhaps that it is only through the interstices of fullness and va
glimpse of what, by its very nature, she cannot "catch." The fict
interstices are to be found, brilliantly erected, in To the Lighthou
bathos is interwoven grammatically and syntactically into the fict
overwhelmedby the larger structures of parallel and intensified cl
it is given a more grandiose position, but with the power to destroy
It is unsurprising that we find the fictional apotheosis of Woolf
abyss in this, the novel in which she fictionally reaches back to th
and its sudden rupture with her mother's death. That cleft was neve
that constant "vacancy and silence some where in the machine." A
the Lighthouse by her own account "laid" her mother (Diary, p. 2
alleviated her enduring sense of the "brutality and wildnes
characteristically in her autobiographical writing with what iss
whenever she writes about death. The surreal "Oh oh oh" ofthe "b
entry looks like sympathy beside the throwaway, even jolly, diary
friends and acquaintances.5 It needs no psychoanalytic insight to see
of the early deaths of her mother and beloved brother formed a pe
her with her inward anguish (as she calls her state "after Th
something alone," in that same 11 October 1929 entry, explicitl
"vacancy" which she struggles to define).
Indeed, it would be hard to beat Woolf at her own game of se
about her attitude to death she is all too acute:

I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like t
room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips. That is t

on me?no leavetakings, no submission?but someone stepping out in

(Diary, p. 7)

These remarks come in the same entry as the reported car acciden
to the news of Jacques Raverat's death, which, close friend as h
temporal order to the fate of the "brown woman." Her comments h
response to the deaths of others and some notion of her own d
present tense of "I like to go out. . .," which seems to carry an

4 In 1926 alone, coinciding with the writing and revision of To the Lighthouse
several times in her diary (pp. 62, 73, 95, 110, 111, 113).
5 See pp. 173, 181, 314, 322, 334. We can trace a line from these responses strai
which she describes thus: "I noticed that one nurse was sobbing, and a desire to l
myself as I have often done at moments of crisis since 'I feel nothing whatever.'" "A S
of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Triad/Granada, 1976), p. 107.

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 Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse 285

in it).6 The stepping out into the darkness of her suicide may at least have had the consolat
for her that she chose her moment, a last refusal to "doff the cap."
Woolfs inclination to answer death's indifference with her own is, of course, at the sa
time a recognition of its power: human response can make no difference to it. Her fi
attempt to find a formal, structural solution to the problem of expressing this in fiction co
in Jacob's Room, as we learn of Jacob's death on the last page?which also constitutes the
chapter?of the novel.7 But in this attempt at representing death as the arch non sequit
undercutting all that has gone before and making meaningless all that is to come, Woolf
I think, unsuccessful. The intended lacuna, the gap in the narrative, with his death announc
only in the past tense of the words of his friend Bonamy, "'He left everything just as it w
fails to impress, because Jacob himself is like a large gap in the fiction.8 He exists only
a collection of "all sorts of qualities" endowed on him by the observer, qualities which
however, as Woolf immediately avers, "he had not at all" (p. 61). While she may here
trying to foreshadow the emptiness to come, in doing so she fails to persuade the reader
the charm of Jacob's "mystery" (p. 61) (a charm strongly felt by the other characters in
novel). Thus, for us there is no point of contrast for his lack on the final page; someho
Jacob has always been missing. The description of his forever empty room at the end of
novel ("Listless is the air in an empty room. . .," p. 155) gains no significance by his dea
it hangs as a simple repetition of the first description (p. 31), because Jacob has neve
imaginatively occupied the room, or the novel. A clear indicator of this is the complete
of sentimentality of the closing image of Jacob's mother:

"What am I to do with these, Mr Bonamy?"

She held out a pair of Jacob's old shoes. (p. 155)

Pace Sue Roe in her introduction to the Penguin edition (p. xxxviii), this surely does not car
the dead symbolic weight which has been attached to Van Gogh's famous image. But, leac
of sentimentality, it is also without poignancy. For us, Jacob remains a man without qualiti

The specter of sentimentality haunted Woolf in the writing of To the Lighthouse, bot
its start?"this theme may be sentimental; father & mother & child in the garden: the de
the sail to the lighthouse." (Diary, p. 36)?and at its end: "this last lap, in the boat, is har
. . . I am forced to be more direct & more intense . . . & I go in dread of "sentimentalit
Is the whole theme open to that charge?" (pp. 109-10). This is odd, ofa novel so thoroug

6 Her words here, and the understated idea of death as leaving the room, recall Keats's "I can scarcely bid y
goodbye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow." Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats (J
Dent and Sons, 1954), p. 217. But Woolf cannot manage Keats's fine balance?acutely charted by Christop
Ricks?of bathos and pathos, embarrassment and despair; as Ricks says, "It must be the least awkward bow ev
made." Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 218-19.
7 She deals with it thematically rather than structurally in The Voyage Out.
8 Jacob's Room, ed. Sue Roe (Penguin, 1992), p. 155. All future references are to this edition and cit
parenthetically.

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 286 Journal of Modern Literature

stripped of emotionality; but the concern about it, attached perha

source of the material, may explain what issues as extreme rigor
that Diary callousness?in her treatment of death in the novel. In
a far more mature?and a braver?writer than that of Jacob's Ro
solution takes on the full force of the contradiction between an i
significant life and the vacancy created by death. Furthermore,
relation to the subject closest to her own past happiness and its d
character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; &
to put in? life, death." (Diary, p. 18). Fully at home in "my met
more experiment: "this impersonal thing, which I'm dared to do by
time, & the consequent break of unity in my design. That passage ..
A new problem like that breaks fresh ground in ones mind. . .
elated at testing her art, and her theme, to the full.
"That passage," "Time Passes," the second section of To the Lig
the novel's inception as a narrow "corridor" joining "two blocks"?
as if leading from one fictional place to another.9 The notion of
constricting (clear in her childish drawing in the notebook passage)
the initial metaphor of a way through; and her realization that it w
renders it rather as a fissure. Structurally, "Time Passes," contr
suggestion of that verb, is abrupt in its effect on the reader, delibe
has gone before. Woolfs own uncertainty about its effect as
nonsense, is it brilliance?" Diary, p. 76) persisted after its publicat
past tense to write to Vita, "I was doubtful about Time Passes. It
of the Strike: then I re-wrote it: then I thought it impossible as p
have written it as poetry."10 In fact, Woolf is profoundly success
lacuna with Time Passes"?so much so that it threatens to erase th
"Time Passes" has the feel of a brute act, singular, indivisible; but
it is made up of numbered chapters. (Although that seems the wr
called them).11 The progress of these chapters and the successive
place in them are central to the effect of this section. Chapter 1
first reading, acting as a narrative link of a standardly realist sort w
"The Window":

"WELL, we must wait for the future to show," said Mr Bankes, coming in from the
terrace.

"It's almost too dark to see," said Andrew, coming up from the beach.
"One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land," said Prue.

"Do we leave that light burning?" said Lily as they took their coats off indoors.

9 Quoted from Woolfs 'Notes for Writing' in Hermione Lee, 'Introduction to To the Lighthouse', in
Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, ed. Julia Briggs (Virago Press, 1994), p. 161.
10 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., eds. N. Nicolsonand J. Trautmann (The Hogarth Press, 1975-
m, p. 374.
11 She refers to working on the "last chapter" of the novel, "In the Boat" (Diary, p. 106), although this evidently
became the penultimate chapter, 12, in the final version.

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 Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse 287

"No," said Prue, "not if everyone's in."

"Andrew," she called back, "just put out the light in the hall."
One by one the lamps were all extinguished, except that Mr. Carmichael, who liked

to lie awake a little reading Virgil, kept his candle burning rather longer than the

rest. (p. 171)

All of these characters have been left at the end of chapter 18 (the penultimate chapter of
"The Window") in mid-fiction: left by Mrs. Ramsay as she retreats to "the other room" and
the company of her husband, and left by Woolf in order to give over chapter 19 entirely to
Mrs. Ramsay. Now they have to be rescued from their narrative limbo. There is perhaps a
sense that this tidying up of the other characters, their going to bed and putting the lights out,
might properly have belonged to the end of the first "block," from which it has been displaced
in order to close "The Window" with our last view of Mrs. Ramsay (it is, after all, the end
of her). But in its position at the start of "Time Passes," chapter 1 becomes both valedictory
and transitional. The apocalyptic associations of "One by one the lamps were all extinguished"
are veiled by the domestic scene of Mr. Carmichael keeping his light on longer so as to read
his Virgil. But as soon as we read the first sentence of Chapter 2?"So with the lamps all put
out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense
darkness began" (p. 171)?the tones of catastrophe and desolation east their shadow back on
the domestic realism of chapter 1." A bleak significance seeps back in to "we must wait for
the future to show" and "It's almost too dark to see." Like the swift turn of participle in
Keats's "The Eve of St Agnes" ("And they are gone: ay, ages long ago These lovers fled
away into the storm"), which moves us in the one word from the lovers' present ("gone,"
escaped, from Madeline's castle) to their long-dead past ("gone . . . ages long ago"); or the
double-edged repetition of "forlorn" in "Ode to a Nightingale," ejecting us from the
imaginative vision of "faery lands" into the dreary, songless present of the poem's last
verse?so "the flood, the profusion of darkness" (p. 171) released in chapter 2 submerges the
innocent realism of chapter 1 and makes it irretrievably ironic.12 When it later turns out that
we have also seen the end of Prue and Andrew in this short insignificant passage, they too
become victims of the writer's irony, their unawareness, like the reader's own, made to seem
foolish.

The "impersonal thing" which begins its habitation of the house in chapter 2 and is the
architect of this foolishness, had previously been attempted by Woolf, with varying degrees
of success, in Jacob 'sRoom and Mrs. Dalloway. What makes it so powerful in "Time Passes"
is the sense which we have of impersonality strengthening its grip as the section progresses,
to the point that it is difficult to remember that there is a living author behind it. As chapter
2 trivializes the domesticity of chapter 1?for the first but not last time placing the ordinary
mortals of the novel firmly in square brackets?so chapter 3 moves us a stage further, turning
round in the same way on the previous chapter with its still just recognizable "jug and basin,"
"red and yellow roses on the wallpaper," even its "picture on the easel," and mocking it.
Chapter 3 begins:

12 John Keats, Poems, ed. Gerard Bullett (Everyman, 1982), p. 188, p. 190.

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288 Journal of Modern Literature

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when th

so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green

turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succee
winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equall
indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. (pp. 173-74)

If the wandering airs of chapter 2, with their anthropomorphized c

strange dwelling-place of humans, made us as human readers a li
with an announcement of further power, "But what after all is on
of threat hiding in the casual "after all" is by now recognizable to
for a short sleep in chapter 1 which had in chapter 2 become a h
with a possible end in daylight, now in chapter 3 becomes perva
tense, which in chapter 2 is intermittent, now becomes relent
darken"), rendering the darkness constitutive. In this chapter, the
and nature alone remains, but a nature unsustaining, "dumb, indif
any precedent, it is in Hardy, but on Hardy's fictional landscap
traveller, however impotent and abused by a careless universe. Her
we have universe pure and simple, its "clear planets" unencumb
superstition. For here are no humans, only "the hare erect; the wa
revealed for an instant as a sort of titillation, an illusory tempta
external to it, beyond reach. Words and images themselves fail:
we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole o
the clear words of truth" (p. 174). This is a nature which does not
It is not just that such an idea is a fallacy ("no image with semb
promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order an
the compass of the soul"); the wanderer on the sand is mad
existence somehow invisible, leaving no print. "The hand dwin
bellows in his ear" (p. 175). Utterly alone, he seems no longer to
the novel's earlier, and already ironic, meditations on the material
table . . . when you're not there," p. 33) seem risible. The effect
is to make the existence of the kitchen table far more reliable than

The way in which Woolf conveys these deeply unsettling abstr

a matter of form: syntax, grammar, the arrangement of language
the nihilism that the passage conveys. We might then see it as a
Waste Land, finding perfect artistic expression for the breakdown
language to show the final impotence of language, wielding the fu
deny the possibility of the univocal vision. But what makes To the
more ambitious is that it sets this central experimental sectio

13 Thomas Hardy, "The Convergence of the Twain," in The Collected Poem

1965), p. 288.

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 Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse 289

sections which are quite other in their intent and in their technique. The Waste L
allows the reader to succumb to an artistic illusion; constant unsettling is its un
characteristic and becomes its authorial voice. But in the first section of her novel, "The
Window," Woolf creates a fictional world of such power that the reader is, and is surely
intended to be, taken in by it. I mean by that not deceived, except in so far as fiction is always
a deceit, but embraced by, welcomed into. This is not, as some critics have suggested, a world
echoing the certainties of Victorian fiction, to be rounded on by the Modernism of the latter
sections, for in "The Window" Woolf uses to the full the shifts of perspective, the myriad
impressions, the turning inward, the multiplicity of voices which render a highly uncertain
world.14 But in it, Mrs. Ramsay is a creation who exerts her influence not only over the
other characters but over the reader. Much as one might resent her apparent irresistibility,
much as one might mock the fact that her zenith of creativity is a dinner party at which the
triumphant "Daube" has in fact been produced by her cook, she remains the line running
down the center of "The Window," vital to its composition. In that sense, this section does
hark back to a realistic tradition, in that it is representational, just as Lily's paintings are
representational?not in the usual formal sense, but in that they still seek to represent a view
of the experienced world. In Mrs. Ramsay, without letting us forget the shiftingness of
perspective, the uncertainty of subjectivity, the difficulty of grasping the relationship between
the material world and the living perceiving human, Woolf still seeks to offer us a full
experience of the person, the felt self and the observed and experienced "outer" self in one.
In that sense, she is not questioning a common reality in "The Window," she is representing
it, in the person of Mrs. Ramsay.
No doubt Woolf was influenced in the realism by the fact that the model was her mother.
But we must also bear that fact in mind when we meet Mrs. Ramsay's swift despatch at the
author's hands. Just as her life is rendered representationally, so is her death. Indeed, that is
the point of the shift between "The Window" and "Time Passes." Woolf is not playing
fictional games here, or flirting self-reflexively with the nature of artistic illusion; in both
sections, although the techniques differ profoundly, the artistic creation is in the same service,
that of representing experience. It is the experience of life (of which "The Window" is just
one representation) which is made to seem, retrospectively, illusory, by the experience of
death represented in "Time Passes." Woolf seeks to convey the suddenness, the
unpredictability, the resultant savagery of death, but perhaps most of all its devastating effect
on our sense of the life that has gone before. Her narrative solution lies in the perfunctory:

[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning,
but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his
arms out. They remained empty.] (p. 175)

The curt, laconic, parenthetical way in which this death is imparted has been much commented
on. Randall Stevenson is right when he says that it is "one of the most disturbing moments

14 Randall Stevenson, for example, suggests that "'The Window' does end much as a Victorian or Edwardian novel
might." "'But what? Elegy?': Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs. Ramsay," with Jane Goldman, in The
Yearbook of English Studies, XXVI (1996), p. 175.

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290 Journal of Modern Literature

in twentieth-century fiction."15 We have had precious little time

cruel square brackets, their having been used only once pre
Carmichael's going to bed at the end of chapter 2. There they b
dimension in its place, but here they carry the force of the
indifference, her "Oh, by the way." And coming as the bracketedpa
of chapter 3, we are given no internal response to share except the
What the TLS reviewer saw as a siip in the punctuation, Woolf, sure
in the English edition, so that Mr. Ramsay is seen twice in the sam
"(he) stretched his arms out."16 But for the reader, the second tim
are informed by what we have just learnt, that Mrs. Ramsay is de
like Mr. Ramsay, into the realization of Mrs. Ramsay's death; f
vacancy. The matter-of~fact beginning of chapter 4, "So with the
the sense of the authorial voice being glad to get that inconvenient
of the way, in order to push on with the larger matter of "Time
It is this which most disturbs about Mrs. Ramsay's death, t
apparently so lovingly created her in "The Window" now uses a te
robs the reader of what would seem the natural, sympathetic, re
asceticism of the technique itself makes a normal readerly r
parenthesis is central to this, particularly the use of square rather t
has the significant effect of roping off the two sentences in a way
them to retain contact with the flow of the narrative). In a use
extensive use of parenthesis in To the Lighthouse, Hermione Le
about parenthesis being used to provide "the sense of reading t
time." (Diary, p. 106). Lee sees this as a device to promote ambigu
value, and she asks, "What is more important,' the death of Mrs.
fold of a green shawl in an empty room? If the novel makes us thin
at once . . . which takes precedence?"17 It is true that Woolfs stan
the round bracket, endorses its usual structural role of suggesting s
remains continuous with, while yet being distinguished from, that
form, the bracket reminds us that the main clause is of first impor
does not act as a signifier of the comparative value of the stateme
reader to make the decision about the relationship between what i
the brackets, as well as the value of each. The square brackets o
differently. They do not imply a continuum but mark a distinction
mode of narrative, narrative voice. But the clear implication of th
uses in "Time Passes" is that what passes within them is less impo
outside them. They act dismissively, but, because they are mere p
so without calling in too obviously the authorial voice; the shift o
reader. It is not just the square brackets themselves which create

15 Stevenson, p. 174.
16 Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1927, reprinted in Virginia Woolf: To th
cmillan. 1970V
(Macmillan, n. 75. p. 75.
1970),
17 Lee, p. 158

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 Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse 291

being square is crucial to it?but also the difference in tone and content between th
narrative and the bracketed narrative. This is why the vatic voice of chapter 3 is im
It establishes the extremity of the move away from the comforts of the human world
Window." Thus, when we come to the communication of Mrs. Ramsay's death, that
longer carry the weight it would have done in the first section of the novel. Graver
have intervened; the trajectories of planets, the diurnal round, the ebb and flow o
have replaced the printless footfalls of the Ramsay family and friends. And agai
oracular voice is placed the lightness of "Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly t
before."

This somehow strikes us as comic although the development which it informs us of is

inherently tragic. This is, in part, because the authorial voice seems to mock itself here in that
"rather suddenly," recognizing that the death has been unexplained, unprepared for, and
unannounced in the fiction. An eyebrow is cocked at the reader; indeed, there is almost an
archness in the writing. Furthermore, the incongruity between the stumbling Mr.
Ramsay?who has in any event been largely a figure of fun in "The Window"?and the tragic
figure that he should cut, seems to be endorsed by the author, who leaves absolutely no room
for emotion in the sentence. Now, the comic can contain the tragic, and perhaps it does here
once we have had time to recover from the speed with which the death is passed over. Indeed,
like the responses to Septimus' death, the grief for Mrs. Ramsay is deferred rather than
defaced; we will meet it in the third section, "The Lighthouse." But in the process of the
first-time narrative, we are not to know that. One further element in the grammar of the
sentence contributes to its laconic effect. Mrs. Ramsay's death is reported through a perfect
gerund. This participle form cannot be complete in itself but implies a main verb which will
complete the sentence?as in, for example, "Rain having fallen overnight, play could not be
resumed" or "Mrs. Ramsay having died on a Bank Holiday, the funeral could not be arranged
immediately." Thus, the participle form is placed in the subordinate role in the sentence; we
do not focus on it, but wait for the sentence to be completed; only then is the gerund's sense,
or any way its significance, also completed. Indeed it is a curiosity of this form in English that
the auxiliary verb remains continuous while the past participle per natura does not, producing
a contradictory combination (rather like the imperfect tense of the verb, although there the
auxiliary is perfect but the participle continuous). This is naturally particularly striking where
the verb is such a finite one. The effect of "having died" is thus of provisionality,
incompleteness in a matter in which these should be impossible; and that effect is reinforced
by the odd syntax and punctuation. The main verb, "he stretched his arms out," far from
completing the sentence leaves it hanging in space. Mrs. Ramsay having died, there
remains?nothing. Thus, the use of the perfect gerund takes the drama away from the fact of
death, carries our eye syntactically beyond it, and makes it something of importance only in
virtue of the other events that happen as a result of it. And since vacancy happens as a result
of it, the reader is robbed of the satisfaction of the gerund's ever being proper ly completed.
One dimension of this is that the author seems to withdraw herself from responsibility for
"Mrs. Ramsay having died"; it becomes an event that happened in the spaces of the narrative.

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292 Journal of Modern Literature

If such an analysis seems to place too much weight on small s

syntax, we must remind ourselves of how much weight Woolf herse
be seen from her minute and last-minute (up to proof stage) revis
intense style as we find in "Time Passes" we need to apply the stand
prose, as she partly intimated to Vita. Yet what is so interesting
Passes" is the way Woolf so fully exploits the characterizing qu
refined effects: syntax, tense, mood and person of verb, relation
punctuation, paragraphing?all count.
In the larger structure of the novel, however, we can see at wo
much more commonly used in poetry than in prose: zeugma.19 A
mind when we want to illustrate zeugma, because its principal fu
because the compression of the heroic couplet (as well as its prop
to make the contraction of zeugma acceptable. Its comic effect usual
of the great and the trivial together as objects of the one verb
grammatically to the level of trivial, and its emptiness exposed thro
the sentence it occupies. "Or stain her Honour, or her new Broca
of deflation; it pricks die balloon of hypocrisy. Order is vital in z
must precede the trivial, so that it may be tripped up by it an
important Zeugma also has a retrospective effect on the common
allows us to see in the verb both its serious and its comic functions
it governs) at once.
The structure of To the Lighthouse is like a huge zeugma, in w
second term which deflates the "important" first term, "The Win
is Mrs. Ramsay. In "The Window," we see her and her world mag
proportions; she, and to a lesser extent her children, husband a
"Japanese flowers"?given to Woolf by Vita Sackville-West (Diar
immersed in water swell and colour up in a magical way. "The W
its triumphant climax, focusing on Mrs. Ramsay's happiness, in w
those around her inheres: "(Nothing on earth can equal this
formal completeness of the sonnet?and the perfected value of Sh
echo the fulfilment of her life: "And then there it was, suddenly en
beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked ou
here?the sonnet" (p. 163). Even the Modernist uncertainties and u
the narrative technique and provide an insistent note of irony, on
ofthe artistic vision here because they show us a significant lived
of shifting and subjectivity. All of this is felled in "Time Passes."
brief bracketed reference to "Mrs. Ramsay having died," which

18 In her Diary entry for 14 January 1927, she records fmishing To The Lighth
been revising & retyping (some parts 3 times over) & no doubt I should work at it
infers that Woolf made further changes at proof stage and that "the English edit
(Diary, p. 128).

19 Martin Gray in A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Longman, revised edition, 1992

* A figure of speech in which words or phrases with widely different meanings are 'y
by being made syntactically dependenton the same word, often a verb...."

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 Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse 293

retrospectively equates her life with her death. As the second, but grammatically equa
of the stain on Belinda's new brocade devalues the earlier stain on her honor, so th
of Mrs. Ramsay's death robs her earlier life of meaning. Of course, there is a m
between the two structural terms: the whole erection, that big "block," "The Win
balanced by a mere two sentences in brackets (although as we have seen, those two
are given their force by the narrative tone of the whole second section). Nonetheles
perfect keeping with the working of zeugma that such a large fictional structure be p
by such a small one. The narrative smallness accorded to Mrs. Ramsay's death ma
largeness allocated to her life all the more vacuous.
There is more to "Time Passes" than the bracket of Mrs. Ramsay's death, and na
more beyond it. But the same structures are simply repeated, the accumulations of
brackets not so much gathering force from the first most telling death, as being sub
it, just as Prue's and Andrew's lives are subsumed in their mother's in the first sect
novel. However, the effect of the zeugma becomes more shocking as the whole of
World War, with its desolation and destruction, is drawn into the brackets ofthe triv
term of this great sentence structure. Yet, paradoxically, although again in keeping
inverted value structures of zeugma, this does not seem such a lapse compared with th
sudden void in the narrative.

Woolf recognizes this herself in the third section of the novel, in which there is an
attempted resurrection of Mrs. Ramsay, of the life of the first section, albeit through the
second-class, and second-order, auspices of Lily. Lily is second-class because in "The
Window" she is found, by Mrs. Ramsay and by implication Woolf, too, finally wanting, her
artistic ambition placed well behind Mrs. Ramsay's fruition in the value terms of that section.
She is second-order because an artist, trying to represent as the fiction is trying to represent.
Far from placing her "vision" above and beyond the impermanent world (as almost every
reading of the novel concludes), this makes it dependent upon, and so secondary to it. If art
has a permanence which life does not, it is one contingent on the observer, the mortal human.
Lily fully recognizes this, and Mrs. Ramsay reading her Shakespeare sonnet with its suggested
infinite regress (Shakespeare's sequence erecting as it does the permanence of art against the
transitory nature of existence) only confirms it. Shakespeare has to have a reader. Thus, the
resurrection of "The Lighthouse" can only be second-order, artistically erected, after the fell
swoop of "Time Passes." If "Time Passes" is the deflating second term which brings down
"The Window," "The Lighthouse" is the first term in a new sentence. But the reader has
learned her lesson. Expecting the subsequent deflation, she does not get overly excited.
Similarly, the reader learns to read the zeugmas of the Augustan mock heroic; the very
expectation of bathos affects us, and the comedy floods backwards. Thus, Lily's grief about
Mrs. Ramsay has already been undermined for us by the bathetic structure preceding this last
section; we no longer trust the narration when it grows serious.
In this analysis, then, To the Lighthouse can never recover from the laconic shock of "Time
Passes," its undercutting of the human, its depersonalization of what had been so fully, if
fictionally, lived. It is a final paradox that the bathos of that whole section (a larger version
of the bathos of its bracketed parts) is itself dependent on a sort of higher heroic, that of the
oracular, impersonal voice of "Time Passes." The sustaining of such apparent contradictions
is part of the artistic triumph of the novel. When Woolf voices her sense of them

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294 Journal of Modern Literature

autobiographically, they remain as conflicting statements, albeit

Now is life very solid, or very shifting? I am haunted by the tw

This has gone on for ever: will last for ever; goes down to the
world?this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphan

like a cloud on the waves. (Diary, p. 218)

But in To the Lighthouse Woolf has found and perfected techni

balance of those contradictions, making it fully representationa
between life in all its felt beauty and death, which renders it mean
of, indeed as part of, the structures of absurdity on which the nov
"The Lighthouse," has to fall away into irony. When Lily thin
vision," it has to be provisional, not transcendent; it cannot, afte
be the big narrative yes. In that, To the Lighthouse remains a
closure, only a looming vacancy.
There is a human triumph in To the Lighthouse, too. In Novem
"re-doing six pages of Lighthouse daily," Woolf writes in her d
of death; active, positive, like all the rest, exciting; & of great im
(p. 117). While this may be another example of not doffing the cap
felt, one cannot but admire the spirit here. However temporarily,
experience of which was almost a killing blow, and which throu
her with the possibility of self-extinction?into "an experience,"
& of great importance." To Vita, in that same entry, she co
experience I shall never describe.'" In that she is inevitably righ
she offers us an unmatched fictional representation of death?the
to experiencing it.

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