Capturing the World in Two Hundred Pages

Although *To the Lighthouse* was at first indecipherable to me, upon further reflection, I realized that, in trying to portray human experience in its entirety, it is a rather amazing work. As was brought up a few times during class, one of the major issues that this work tackles is the limits of human understanding, whether in the academic realm, as seen in Mr. Ramsay's self-effacement regarding his inability to reach R, or in the social realm—how one can achieve a certain unity with and objective understanding of people. A passage on page 51 (Chapter 9 in The Window) illustrates the difficulties that inevitably arise when trying to know someone: "[Lily] imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman [. . .] were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions [. . .] but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers?" (51). Mrs. Ramsay too wonders about this: "How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them?" (24, Chapter 4 in The Window). This is a central question that the text explores and I'm interested in how you think Woolf addresses or resolves this question. The text itself seems to suggest that one cannot truly understand someone without distance and without objectivity, but besides the obvious, what else does the text say about this matter? How do you think the structure of the work and her stylistic choices mirror her views on the limits of understanding? How successful do you think the work is in trying to capture the full range of the human experience? Lastly, do you think that one can ever arrive at a complete understanding of someone else? It seems that in all the relationships in the book, no one arrives at a pure understanding of anyone else—Lily's epiphanous moment at the end ("Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision" (208, last page)) was a bit unconvincing to me if the implication was that Lily arrived at an understanding of Mrs. Ramsay through her art. So, lastly, please give your interpretations of the significance of Lily's painting and whether it seems realistic that art can create the depth of meaning that the text suggests.

Comments

[Christine Yeh]

Sorry, forgot to say that this is my post.

[Annie Tan]

I think Woolf's use of the art is very nicely done there. It's an interesting metaphor like the Lighthouse; it appears wonderful from certain distances and different in other distances. Art's just like a human being, too: it can be interpreted in many different ways. You can't know the art in every way possible, just because there's so many interpretations of one thing. I don't think Lily saw Ramsey for entirely what she was after her death, and I don't think people see others that well either. It's like in the Battlestar Galactica episode (sorry haha) I saw last night: a lot of people tend to remember the better parts of the person after their death; people see what they want to see or will always see the person in a limited way. Even a fifty year sweet little old couple will see one another a certain way, no matter what, I think, even with everything you know about a person. I think it's almost impossible to know a person in every possible angle. You have a limited amount of time to know every person, and there are so many things you look at through your life, too, that it's really hard to see everything. Woolf does it well in her text that you kind of get lost in the life that she describes; it gets kind of hard to focus onto the whole of the book, too.

[Tyler Halpin-Healy]

I think she does it well, half the time I had no idea what was going on, and figuring out relations in this book was a nightmare. But the only problem is that she makes it painfully obvious that we do not know anyone in the book, I felt not familiarity with any character. As such, when one truly does not know another, they are mostly unaware of it. As for the art, art is only what you make of it, a Goya can be a tablecloth, or it can belong in the Prado, but the only people that generally agree on a work of arts significance are those who were schooled to attempt to emulate previous masters. One has to fully understand oneself before they can understand another.

[Karen Woodin]

I agree with what you say about Wolf trying to capture the whole of the human experience. The way I see it, the fact that when we were reading what Wolf was depicting we mostly agreed with her and said: yeah, that's totally what happens to me. For example, how a character's thoughts went back and forth from one thing to another and how the most trivial things incited deep thought and reflection. About Lily's painting, I think it is an element of utmost importance in Wolf's work, because it is a representation of what she herself is trying to do through literature: capturing the moment. And Lily's effort to paint and to fully see and understand Mrs. Ramsey required deep thought and reflection, and even a flash of insight. I think this tells a lot about Wolf's views on artistic creation as a whole: it is not random, yet there is an element of surprise/insight/inspiration in it, although ultimately it requires a deep thought process and a moment when the artist has a flash of clarity.

[Lulu Garcia]

When I first began reading “To the Lighthouse” I thought it would be terribly boring and unrealistic. I found that the opposite was true. I actually really enjoyed reading the book because it reminds me so much of everyday interactions. Virginia Woolf did an excellent job of capturing the reality of human connections, and how we all try to understand the ones we care about, sometimes with success and sometimes with failure. In Lily’s mind her attempt to capture Mrs. Ramsey’s essence was successful, though I’m unsure if it really was. Lily captured Mrs. Ramsey as she knew her, but there were parts of Mrs. Ramsey that no one knew such her private thoughts about the roles of men and women. It’s because of people’s inner thoughts that I’m always unsure how well people can truly know each other.

[Katie Klymko]

I don't know if I would agree that one of the purposes is to capture the full range of human experience-I think it is more an attempt to accurately portray the complexities of human interactions and relationships. I think she does this masterfully. To go back to this idea of distance being necessary for objectivity and being able to truly understand someone (though I don't believe that the message is that we ever can truly understand someone). I have trouble coming up a good analysis of the Lily/Mrs.Ramsey relationship after Mrs. Ramsey's death, but I think we are able to see it a lot more clearly in the Lily/Mr. Ramsey relationship. This is where Woolf says: "so much depends, she thought, upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsey changed as he sailed further and further across the bay." (191) I'm actually changing my mind as I write this-I disagree. I don't think the message is that distance necessarily makes us understand people better, but in a different way, perhaps more sympathetic? In this case, Lily found what she had been unable to conjure earlier-the sympathy for Mr. Ramsey-she wanted to give him what he had been asking for. But she had known what it was before he left-she just couldn't find it in herself to yield. So distance creates sentimentalization? With distance, caring and sympathy overpower other emotions that one might feel with direct interaction? Sentimentalizing the memory of Mrs. Ramsey? She's trying to capture the moment, but with memories, the accuracy of the moment is lost, which I guess is the point. Lily can think of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey differently when they are farther, but less accurately, less objectively.

[Bryan Chiou]

Limits of human understanding.... When I was reading "To the Lighthouse," I more than once wondered about the limits of WOOLF's understanding, which seemed kind of infinite. It made sense that Woolf knew James' perspective and subconcious thoughts towards his father/mother--they were just a different version of hers when she was a kid. But how could Woolf know the subconscious of the father and the mother? She never had kids. How could she, a woman, have thrown so much light on the MALE ego and feelings of inadequacy, and was able to teach ME a couple things about my own male ego?

These were very puzzling to me. The answer I came to was a bit of a cheap one. It pointed to Woolf's genius of observation. Perhaps with Woolf's apparent genius of observation, it was possible to arrive at such understanding of different groups of humankind without having been them.

[Michael Mirochnik]

I have trouble accepting the fact that this novel actual does capture the human experience. Discounting that for the remainder of the comment, one of the main concerns of the novel is the transience of time, and yet the style feels like a capricious form, in which the reader is constantly jumping from the thoughts of one person to those of another. Nevertheless, the book does make a fairly reasonable point about understanding people. It claims that we need distance in order to fully understand an object. This holds true for both Lily and James, who come to see Mrs. Ramsay and the lighthouse in different lights, respectively. Nevertheless, the work acknowledges the fact that it is not possible to form a completely solid human relationship and that sometimes people must make inferences to understand others. For example, Lily imagines what the marital situation between Paul and Minta must be like, upon which she concludes: "And this...is what we call 'knowing' people, 'thinking' of them, 'being fond' of them! Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same" (173).

Woolf delves into this question of how we know other people even further by developing the idea that people are multi-faceted. She asserts that the only way to truly know someone is to consider them from several vantage points. This is a justification for the work as a whole, which portrays each character's stream of consciousness. The above is related to Lily's painting because her art is able to negotiate various value systems--the various vantage points--and to capture a moment in time.