A. Introduction
The intellectual hero of the last module was Max Weber. Why? Because Max Weber: 1) understood that the world of scientific rationalism (positivism) could never encompass a human reality that was subjective and a social world that was inter-subjective. Neither logic nor the realistic investigation of our illogical imaginations could make sense of human life by themselves or in isolation. It was necessary not only to recognize that human understanding would always be inherently subjective, but also to affirm that this subjective reality could be made comprehensible by rational investigation. Weber and some of his contemporaries attempted to balance the rational and emotional sides of human nature.
The literary hero of the last module was the great novelist Dostoyevsky. In works like The Brothers Karamazov and Notes From the Underground, Dostoyevsky explored the inner reality of human beings with an accuracy that had never before been attempted. In the process, he showed how human beings were propelled by their instincts and emotions. Human values were forged in an emotional cauldron that could not be avoided, even if people tried to lock themselves away in a monastery like Alyosha. But that did not make human ethics meaningless or relativistic. Dostoyevsky saw the human mind (the only true reality) as a battle between reason and emotion, good and evil, light and darkness. By following the promptings of conscience and seeking a balance between intellect and feeling, the brothers Karamozov were able to achieve redemption.
The intellectual world of Weber and the literary/ethical world of Dostoyevsky were characterized by acute tension. That tension was mirrored in the consciousness of Western civilization generally, especially in the period between the 1890s and the 1930s. It was a highly precarious balancing act. The best social thinkers and literary writers of the early twentieth century “were obliged to walk the edge of a razor.” The formerly universal confidence in reason and ethics was reduced, hedged in by the new psychological understanding of the sub-consciousness and a new history that questioned the existence of absolute human facts.
Cultural tensions are hard to sustain, even among those whose job it is to understand and articulate complexities. If you have had a difficult time understanding the subtleties of European consciousness in the period between 1890 and 1930, then you will appreciate how difficult it was for these ideas to maintain a foothold in Western culture. There was always the temptation for Western writers to veer off to one side or another. Those who continued to advocate realism were inclined to explore the human mind – the ultimate reality – without the ethical shackles of good or evil. Others went in a different direction, to produce literature that was fantastical – that relied entirely on the imagination, without any need of a foundation in reality. Some favoured an imagined reality of the past; for the first time since the Romantics, nostalgia for things past became a cultural movement. Those who believed in reason could take a number of paths. Some still clung to a positivist belief in reason and progress. Others adopted the new approach developed by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein that came to be known as logical positivism. A logical positivist approach limited philosophy and science to a very limited number of certain rational propositions (often expressed in mathematical form) and suggested that even to discuss other issues was as silly as it was unscientific. “Whereof one cannot speak,” said Wittgenstein, “thereof one must be silent.”
B. Cultural Relativism
Perhaps the most identifiable cultural thread that began to penetrate Western thinking from the beginning of the twentieth century, and probably the one that you are most familiar with, was cultural and ethical relativism. The crisis of Western consciousness significantly eroded the confidence that Europeans had in their civilization and values. In this climate, it became more common for people to consider these values to be relative to a particular time and place.
Relativistic thinking could take pessimistic and optimistic forms. On the one hand, if values were impermanent and transitory, this allowed individuals a great deal of freedom to do things like: 1) shake off the authoritarian values of their society; 2) enjoy the moment; 3) create and adopt new values in the way that one would fashions. Instead of continuing to privilege a canon like classical music or European literature, one could now legitimately espouse jazz and popular music or explore the literature of other non-Western civilizations. There is no doubt that many found the new cultural freedom exhilarating.
Another, and more characteristic approach at the deep level of European culture, was a sense of meaningless and hopelessness. T.S. Eliot’s poetry, with its cultural wasteland and hollow men with heads filled with straw epitomize the sense of loss that many writers felt as the old verities were eroded. This cultural despair or sadness was most prevalent among German academics and intellectuals, but it also found a home in popular culture across Europe during the twentieth-century. Indeed, the feeling that the world had changed for the worse – so different from the widespread positivism of the nineteenth century – permeated European society at many levels and helps to explain the widespread euphoria that greeted the outbreak of World War I. The feeling that war would purify society and rid the west of cultural tension was naïve, but it reflected a heartfelt desire to escape from a world where everything had become relative.
Today, you and I are much more comfortable with relativism that the writers of the early twentieth century were, although I dare say many of you will be disturbed at the relativistic thinking and tendency to privilege ambiguity in modern cultural studies at this University. Part of the reason we are more comfortable with relativism is that we are more accustomed to rapid change than the people living a century ago. The changes that took place during the early twentieth century were much more rapid than any that had occurred earlier in history. These were years of considerable unrest and civil conflict in most European countries. From 1905 on, the balance of power in Europe was threatened by one diplomatic crisis after another. In 1905, and again in 1918, Russia experienced a revolution that transformed an entire society and brought into question the liberal values of freedom and debate. Socialist movements, based upon economic conflict rather than rational discussion, consequently gained momentum across Europe The rise of imperialism allowed people to view different cultures with radically different non-European values. The abuses and criticism of colonialism showed that many sacred European beliefs were little more than tools of class and cultural oppression. In the economic domain, technological development and urbanization, began to transform a still predominantly agricultural society of like-minded neighbours into a much more alienated and diverse grouping of individuals.
And yet, none of these events alone explains the sadness that settled into European life – at many levels – during the early twentieth-century. The lament was a cultural one. Everywhere, people were searching for ideals that they could believe in. There was a universal sense of a lack of direction that accompanied the new relativism. The level of uncertainty was so intense that many yearned for something to happen, for a goal or a leader that they could follow. The need was such that, when World War I broke out, there was an “intoxicating sense of physical and spiritual liberation”. Similarly, the attraction of Fascism between the wars cannot be explained solely by factors like economic depression. The Fascists had a cult-like appeal for those who were searching for some meaning in a seemingly meaningless and relativistic world.
C. The Privatization of Literature
Throughout the twentieth-century, there were writers who carried on the European tradition of searching for the links between the rational and the irrational sides of human nature. For all the problems that rationalism and realism had inflicted on Western culture, many writers still searched for an ideal and rational humanity in the labyrinth of human emotion. However, the early twentieth century was the period when imaginative literature began to set itself a new path by separating itself from cultural and social thought. What is more, the new realistic literature of the twentieth century also divorced itself from its traditional ethical function. By the First World War, Dostoyevsky’s description of the soul as a spiritual/ethical battlefield had become decidedly old fashioned.
The ethical function of imaginative literature was not totally eclipsed but was watered down into something much more trivial than Dostoyevsky’s eternal questions. In Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past, for example, we discover a typically sad European writer attempting to reconnect by memory with the warm and affectionate feelings of a childhood in which he was shielded from the unpleasantness of an ugly world. In writers like Proust, ethics is reduced to the recognition that, despite all the meaninglessness and brutality of modern life, kindness and human feeling still survive. Needless to say, this ethical germ is totally dwarfed by the Christian, Humanist or Enlightened conceptions of moral persons in either a spiritual or earthly brotherhood. For some modern writers, who feel unabashed scorn for their fellow men, even this small remembrance of an ethical universe may be lacking.
The imagined world of modern literature is highly private and relativistic. In some writers, these characteristics were pushed to an extreme. For example, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) describes a group of individuals, each of who have their own private logic that is incompatible with the internal logic of the other characters. Not only do these individuals have a different and opposing reality from one another, but also their own sense of reality continually varies from day to day. Each of them creates a fragile private universe that they constantly need to maintain in order to give their lives a meaning. Even in the face of massive contradictions, they continue to deny logic and reason in order to sustain “the passionate conviction of individual truths.”
Pirandello completely explodes the rational world by showing what happens to someone who has his/her imagined world taken away. The protagonist of his play Naked, for example, loses all her dignity and respectability and asks to be left to die. This and other characters may live in inter-subjective universes, and they certainly want to be socially respectable, but the best they can do is “maintain some semblance of ordered existence.” Ultimately, Pirandello suggests, we are alone in the universe. He even deprives his actors of a coherent self that they can cling to. This unsentimental and realistic writer not only has exposed logic as a trick of the imagination, but also the self as a shifting entity devoid of serious meaning. All that’s left is their longing to rejoin humanity in a world where real human communication is impossible.
The privatization of literature took a separate path from intellectual life generally. During the 1930s, a younger generation of intellectuals began to reject the increasingly subjective universe that European thought had created. Rather than returning to the balancing act of Max Weber, many called for a return to the rationalistic ideals of the Enlightenment or pointed to a new tradition of engaged relationism and pragmatism. In the process, writers such as Julien Benda were willing to ignore the subtleties and complexities of several generations of intellectual development in the West and to attempt a new and more optimistic, if somewhat less idealistic, approach to the European search for certainty. In this environment, the concept of the unattached and contemplative intellectual fell out of favour.
The impact of these cultural developments on imaginative literature was negligible. Why? Writers, especially novelists, had by now discovered a new subjective reality that provided much greater scope for realistic exploration and technical innovation. For the novelist, the private world of the individual offered an uncharted domain. In order to explore that domain of consciousness to any considerable extent, the author had to abandon any traditional role as the narrator of objective facts. The critical issue for the modern writer centers on the imperative of realistic characterization. Regardless or not of whether an objective reality exists, realistic characters can only be developed fully if the writer takes the road interior.
The novel was developed in order to explore the individual and the self. For at least three centuries, the individual was the focal point of European culture. For most of this time, the individual was presumed to be rational and linked to a mechanical universe governed by the laws of cause and effect. Human nature and nature were linked in a progressive movement towards a rationale and humane society. When human reason was exploded, particularly after the 1890s, the imaginative writer could not easily turn back the literary clock. The individual and the self now had become the shrine at which most imaginative literature worshipped. Given a choice between giving up the individual and exploring the subjective reality of the self, most writers opted for the latter. In the process, they continued to affirm the cultural hegemony of the self (possibly the divided, confused or deluded self), even in a world where the independent thinking individual was an anachronism.
D. The Existential Self
The one area where philosophy and literature did come together for a time was a highly influential movement called existentialism. Existentialism began between the two world wars and became very fashionable after World War II. The most fascinating thing about this marriage of philosophy and literature was its highly artificial and arranged character. Existentialism is not so much modern philosophy as a series of ethical propositions framed in philosophical terms. Existential literature is not so much modern literature as an attempt to describe and resolve the dilemma of the self in a meaningless world. Existential literature and philosophy are beset with problems when taken in isolation, but, when taken together, they become a powerful and enduring cultural force.
For our purposes, existentialism reflected the “disintegration and dissolution of external realities” much more than it advanced a recognizably modern and realistic exploration of human consciousness. Because its main focus was ethical and philosophical, it did not contribute to a literary methodology for exploring consciousness. The closest that existentialism came to even suggesting such a methodology was Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of bad faith. However, the possibilities for literary realism inherent in such concepts as self-deceit and bad faith were effectively nullified by Sartre’s attempt to develop a humanistic ethics based on authenticity, integrity and responsibility. No modern literary explorer of human consciousness would allow herself to restricted by such an agenda.
Many of the key existentialist writings were not composed by individuals who would have called themselves existentialists. But these writings are touchstones because they symbolize the revolt against reason that triggered the exploration of the self and its subconscious. Dostoyevsky, in particular, brilliantly described the existential condition of the underground man in his classic Notes From the Underground. The underground man, faced with the negation of human life and human civilization, retreats into his individual consciousness. The primary reality for Dostoyevsky’s underground man is subjective and autobiographical. The only thing that the underground man can know with any certainty is himself as pure consciousness.
This extreme consciousness of self, however, leads the underground man so deeply into his inner world that society becomes completely secondary. Despite any self-loathing that comes from exploring ones passions and motives, the underground man is rarely inclined to embrace the real life of society. Real life in the world is no longer natural for him, because he knows that it consists of social conventions and artificial roles that mask man’s true identity as a thinking but not completely rational animal. Ultimately, only the consciousness of self is real in a chaotic and meaningless world.
For Dostoyevsky, the dilemma of the underground man was a modern problem to be solved by spiritual faith. For many writers after Dostoyevsky, however, the religious solution was unacceptable and the fundamental existential question remained unresolved. That existential question — how are we to comprehend human nature in an irrational world — is answered by the practice of the underground man. The underground man looks at life with clear eyes and accepts it for precisely what it is, in all its horror. This means being willing to adopt an introspective approach and to walk on the path interior. The existentialist man looks deeply within himself in order to understand his own nature. The existentialist/underground approach means advocating psychological rather than social realism. Only by intensely examining one’s inner consciousness, without shunning the nausea that regularly occurs, are we practicing psychological realism.
When Socrates advised his followers to get to know themselves, he meant that they should use their reason. When Dostoyevsky’s underground man gets to know himself, we are exposed to raw nerves. Psychological realism illuminates human beings as egotistical, spiteful and petty creatures. Existential psychology cannot fail to expose human dread and human guilt.
We need to distinguish this introspective/psychological approach from much of what passes for clinical psychology. The latter is a set of cause and effect abstractions that can never realistically capture the complexity of the individual. Dostoyevsky’s underground man caricatures the science of psychology in the following way:
“Possibly,” you will add on your own account with a grin, “people will not understand it either who have never received a slap in the face,” and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too, perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and so I speak as one who knows. I bet you are thinking that. But set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the face, though it is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you think about it.
Academic psychology, therefore, is just another rationalistic system that obscures the complex reality of the individual, primarily by trying to blame an individual’s pain on his or her past experiences. But the real individual can only be known by affirming all the suffering, dread, and extreme states of mind that are contained within human consciousness.
That is precisely why existentialist anti-heroes like the underground man can only be understood in terms of his own highly personal experience. This extreme emphasis on the subjective world of the individual – as the most meaningful way of understanding the human condition – is a fundamental characteristic of existentialism. But this introspective approach is not confined to those who call themselves existentialists. It has found its way into modern art and literature generally, wherein the individual headspace now has become the supreme reality.
Existentialism had a major influence on the development of psychological realism in art and literature. Ironically, the existentialists themselves have not explored the path interior to anywhere near the extent that might be expected. Ultimately, existentialism is weighted down by its concern to establish an ethical framework for living in a meaningless world. In a world that is not intrinsically moral, the existentialist challenges humans to create their own ethical meaning for life. This moral belief can be expressed negatively or positively. In The Rebel, the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus argues that the existentialist man or woman must attempt to avoid ethical systems or extreme actions. Every ethical action is an individual choice, for which the individual has to accept full responsibility. Friedrich Nietzsche wanted to create a new ethical paradigm that went beyond traditional notions of good and evil in order to affirm human creativity and an intense identification with life. Camus was concerned about the negatives associated with wrong behaviour; Nietzsche wanted to give modern life a new and more positive direction.
Existential ethical frameworks are guides to action in a problematic world. The difficulty lies in the fact that existential ethics continually runs up against the brick wall of human nature. The introspective approach shows that man does not operate in accord with moral absolutes, but is a contradictory creature, full of all sorts of opposing elements that can be most accurately described in a stream of consciousness. The best that existentialist ethics can do is to offer tentative suggestions that seem to accord with some of the more desirable features of our nature.
Without diminishing the importance of the existentialist ethical agenda, it clearly limits the freedom of writers to realistically explore consciousness. When a writer is continually striving to affix an ethical meaning to live, no matter how tentative, he or she is taking a distinctly different route from someone who is interested in describing the interior reality in all its complexity. Thus, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous novel The Wall, the tension revolves around different approaches to dealing with death and the destruction of one’s personal universe. If one fights against death emotionally and irrationally, like the character Juan, one practices a form of self-deceit. If one faces his or her demise maturely, like the character Ibbieta, such an individual can maintain personal integrity, even in a meaningless world.
Despite the fact that the ethical elements in The Wall are muted, nevertheless they get in the way of the realistic representation of reality. Writers like Sartre and Camus have such a need to affirm humanist values in a Godless world, that they cannot easily develop new techniques for examining consciousness. Sartre moved from literature and the imaginative construction of reality into philosophy in order to work out his ethical agenda. Other writers, however, who were eager to describe the horrors of consciousness, or who were willing to settle for a mildly sympathetic rendering of individuals experiencing the pain and confusion of existence, were able to develop much more sophisticated techniques for representing consciousness.
E. Literary Subjectivists
In the most technically advanced modern writing, objective reality almost disappears. The narrator is interested only in reflecting on “the consciousness of the dramatis personae.” In other words, the best modern novelists explore the subjective reality of their characters. Often, there isn’t even an objective reality outside of the novel to which we can clearly point in order to compare or contrast that reality with the psychological reality of the characters. Any external realities that we find are usually reference points that have impacted upon their minds.
The narrator now relinquishes the role of storyteller or arbiter of the drama. The author appears to merely eavesdrop on his or her characters. When an authorial voice appears, it is never authoritative or judgmental, but more typically doubting and questioning. The author’s attitude towards his or her subject matter has changed. Whereas earlier authors – such as Dickens, Balzac or even Dostoyevsky — interpreted the “actions, situations, and characters” of their subjects, many modern novelists are concerned “to render the flow and the play of consciousness adrift in the current of changing impressions.
Another major difference characteristic of this new approach is that the world described by these authors is that all the characters relate to one another subjectively. Everyone in the novel – not simply the individualistic hero or underground man inhabits the world of his or her own consciousness. Characters relate to one another through a “multiperson representation of consciousness”; the entire world of these novels in inter-subjective. Because the reality being described is inter-subjective, it is not bound by time and space. Minds can wander over an entire lifetime in a matter of seconds. Someone can wander through a myriad of mental associations in the time it takes to change the sheets or measure a stocking. The wandering itself can be random and dreamlike, since it is not subject to the external world where events are contingent upon one another
Measuring a stocking may sound like a trivial exercise, but another characteristic of modern writers is that they focus on the ordinary events of life. In their attempt to render or mirror consciousness, modern authors have no need of exterior events or even dramatic tensions. The point of literary departure is “nothing but an occasion” that can be as simple as seeing whether a stocking fits. The important thing is not the event that triggers the wandering of consciousness, which can be entirely accidental, but what is released in consciousness when it begins to wander.
For many modern writers, Proust in particular, the most important wanderings of consciousness are triggered by seemingly insignificant occurrences. Something relatively small – a smell or a touch – can unleash an entire world of one’s childhood. That private and personal world has more significance for the individual than political events, economic transformations, or anything that will occur later in one’s life. These memories are the “layers” through which the present is filtered. They are inherently subjective; but this subjectivity is more real for the individual than any external fact.
Just because these memories are confined to the consciousness of the individual does not make them any the less complex. The individual’s subjective reality is constantly shifting, depending on the particular perspective adopted. Thus, it is difficult to pin down anything like a character. Moreover, as others, including the author, comment from their own subjective vantage point, personality becomes measured on a continuum. This ambiguity and fragmentation of personality makes it very difficult for the reader to follow a “definite thread of action” or to identify completely with any of the dramatis personae.
The best modern authors want to break away from chronological order, objective reality, or dramatic twists of plot for a very good reason. Any of these traditional approaches to novel writing will only serve to distract the reader from the most important task – i.e. opening up the play of consciousness. Modern authors, and indeed many modern academics, seek to escape the tyranny of “great exterior turning points and blows of fate” in order to yield more “decisive information concerning the subject.” Thus, not only modern novelists, but modern historians will focus on a seemingly trivial event, like the killing of a few cats in seventeenth century France, in order to see what it reveals about the mentalité of ordinary people living at the time.
The new subject matter of the modern novelist is our own self, and the new techniques that writers and scholars use to get at the self are:
- describing the individual stream of consciousness;
- representing multipersonal and inter-subjective consciousness;
- disintegrating the continuity of external events;
- continually shifting personal and narrator viewpoints;
- rendering time and duration subjectively;
- ignoring any attempts at completeness or describing a whole;
- focusing on random, trivial, and accidental moments;
- presenting life as a continuum, where the observer can step in at any time;
- documenting a random reality that is hazy, vague and bereft of anything but subjective meaning;
- privileging the reality of everyday life.
What is particularly interesting about these techniques is their universality. Of course, not every writer has adopted these modern motifs. But a large number of modern writers certainly have, some great like James Joyce and some merely competent. Certainly most modern writers who have striven to gain a reputation have used at least a few of them.
F. The Brown Stocking
One great modern writer who uses most of these techniques is Virginia Woolf. In her novel To The Lighthouse (1927), Woolf provides her readers with a clinic on how to write in the form of random realism. This classic passage is taken from section 5 of the opening chapter entitled “The Window”, sometimes called “The Brown Stocking” because the central character is knitting a brown stocking that she will take for the children who live at the Lighthouse. The central character is Mrs. Ramsay. She’s knitting in a room with her son, who she uses to measure the length of the stocking. Her son wants to go to the lighthouse desperately, but he’s concerned because they wont go if the weather is bad. Mrs. Ramsay is annoyed at her husband who has unnecessarily upset the boy by saying that the weather “won’t be fine.”
Obviously, the event and the activities are entirely insignificant in the great scheme of things, but they are the occasion of Mrs. Ramsay wandering into a stream of consciousness. The only external realities we know are that Mrs. Ramsay is the wife of a London professor. She’s sitting in a room in a summerhouse in the Hebrides and there are also a number of houseguests around. The main events that occur are Mrs. Ramsay consoling her son James; making James stand still while she measures the sock against his leg; James being a bit fidgety; Mrs. Ramsay discovering that the stocking is too short. In these brief moments, however, a major inner process occurs in Mrs. Ramsay’s mind. In addition, incorporating other people’s subjective realities creates an entire inter-subjective world. Finally, the author interjects, not to judge or to evaluate, but merely as another subjective observer of a subjective world.
There hardly exists any real exterior world outside of the subjective reality of the characters. Mrs. Ramsay begins thinking about the shabby furniture in the room and wonders whether or not she should improve it. But this merely triggers a host of other associations, including ruminations on the children’s messy hobbies or the tragedy of a Swiss maid who is melancholic for home and her dying father. Instead of these mental pictures leading to a plan or purposeful action, the only thing they lead to is personal “exasperation”. This allows the author to intrude without any introduction whatsoever, as though none was necessary, and as though the traditional conventions of narrator and subject could be ignored. The author is going to say that Mrs. Ramsay looked very sad. But clearly this is just a subjective impression, and only one among many in the passage.
This intervention only becomes meaningful as the personality of Mrs. Ramsay unfolds. But it is a highly complex personality. We only get glimpses of and insights into Mrs. Ramsay as a formerly beautiful and highly intelligent person who seems to have a sense of regret. There is elegant simplicity and genuineness to this character, but ultimately she is intangible. We don’t really get to know her. Even as her mind wanders, and the author introduces the subjective evaluations of Mrs. Ramsay by others who admire or admired her, we still don’t get any line on the sadness in Mrs. Ramsay’s still beautiful face. All we ever get to know is that there is something strange, fascinating and deep about her.
Mrs. Ramsay doesn’t even know herself, apart from some insights gleaned from others. Like many people, she spends most of her life engaged in trivial everyday tasks that allow her to hide from who she is. Mr. Bankes, who thinks her one of the most beautiful and fascinating people he’s ever met, also gives up trying to figure out this enigmatic character. Even her obvious love, mixed with temporary irritation, for her son James is anything but “natural and simple”. She clearly is not a symbol of motherly love. Ultimately, her motives are unknowable. Her individual consciousness is hazy and indeterminate. The intervening author does not know her, nor do the other “people” who have attempted to “discover” the real Mrs. Ramsay.
Woolf plays with time in her attempt to create random realism. Twice, she measures the stocking against James’ leg. Those actions are described tersely and briefly, because they are of no great importance. In between, her mind wanders through an inter-subjective universe. This journey is full of interludes and containing something very modern – the flash back. The nature of the journey is entirely uneventful; it is a natural and purposeless description of the free flow of consciousness. There is no external reality holding any of these subjective wanderings together, only the vague notion of a sad and slightly mysterious lady.
Of course, the lady herself is interesting to us. But we need to be clear what we mean by interesting. She is no longer so beautiful that she can play the role of a goddess. While intelligent, her mind is confined mostly to everyday things. She has no dramatic role to play; she is not a model or an example. She’s really not much different from many everyday people, whose lives and dreams may have gone in different directions. But even that we don’t really know. Sure, Mrs. Ramsay is a bit of an enigma, but only in the sense that her sadness attracts our sympathy. But even our sympathy is limited because she is not a traditional everyman with whom we can identify.
And yet, this person holds the serious reader’s complete attention because we get a fleeting glimpse into the depths of her consciousness. We are aware of gaining some genuine insights into the deeper subjective reality of Mrs. Ramsay. Somehow, we don’t feel cheated that our own subjective impression of Mrs. Ramsay is still very partial and confused. For us moderns, who are comfortable with ambiguity, this trip into Mrs. Ramsay’s consciousness seems more satisfying that Dostoyevsky’s much more definitive exploration of the soul of his characters. The realities of the modern world are gray, and Dostoyevsky, for all his complexity, strives for a black and white understanding that eludes us.
Dostoyevsky struggled to provide his readers with meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. He discovered a higher reality in the human soul and he pioneered the technique of psychological realism to explore its internal battle between light and darkness. Modern European authors don’t have the same need for closure or completeness that Dostoyevsky evidenced in The Brothers Karamazov. We moderns are much more accepting of the enigma that is consciousness. All that is left of the anguished revolt against the centuries old alliance of reason and realism is a lingering sadness. That sadness is perfectly exhibited in the character, or rather the person, since she does not have a definitive character, of Mrs. Ramsay. The famous intellectual and professor of romantic languages, Erich Auerbach, describes it perfectly:
We never come to learn what Mrs. Ramsay’s situation really is. Only the sadness, the vanity of her beauty and vital force emerge from the depths of secrecy. Even when we have read the whole novel, the meaning of the relationship between the planned trip to the lighthouse and the actual trip many years later remains unexpressed, enigmatic, only dimly to be conjectured… It is one of the few books of this type which are filled with good and genuine love but also, in its feminine way, with irony, amorphous sadness, and doubt of life. Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking! Aspects of the occurrence come to the fore, and links to other occurrences, which, before this time, had hardly been sensed, which had never been clearly seen and attended to, and yet they are determining factors in our real lives. What takes place here in Virginia Woolf’s novel is precisely what was attempted everywhere in works of this kind (although not everywhere with the same insight and mastery) – that is, to put the emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself. And in the process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice.