ABSTRACT
When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself ‘ and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity.(David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature)1 Father’s birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; - inconceivable. I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently.(Virginia Woolf, Diary, 28 November 1928)2
Several of Virginia Woolf’s books compose themselves about an absence: Jacob’s absence from his room, Mrs Ramsay’s in the second half of To the Lighthouse, and in The Waves Percival’s in India and in death. Absence gives predominance to memory and to imagination. Absence may blur the distinction between those who are dead and those who are away. In one sense, everything is absent in fiction, since nothing can be physically there. Fiction blurs the distinction between recall and reading. It creates a form of immediate memory for the reader.Writing about Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher he most admired, Leslie Stephen glosses his position thus: The whole history of philosophical thought is but a history of
attempts to separate the object and the subject, and each new attempt implies that the previous line of separation was erroneously drawn or partly ‘fictitious’, (p. 48)3
In To the Lighthouse the fictitiousness of the separation between object and subject, the question of where to draw the line, is passionately explored, not only by the painter, Lily Briscoe, but by the entire narrative process. It is through Lily that the philosophical and artistic problem is most directly expressed and the connection between Mr Ramsay and Hume first mooted. Near the beginning of the book, Lily asks Andrew what his father’s books are about. ‘Subject and object and the nature of reality,’ Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. ‘Think of a kitchen table then,’ he told her, ‘when you’re not there.’ (p. 40)*
In the book’s last paragraph, remembering Mrs Ramsay, looking at the empty steps, Lily at last solves the problem of the masses in her picture to her own satisfaction: She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre, (p. 320) The separation of the object and the subject, and the drawing of a line less erroneous, less ‘fictitious’, than in previous attempts, defines the nature of elegy in this work. Virginia Woolf attempts to honour her obligations to family history and yet freely to dispose that history. In the course of doing so, she brings into question our reliance on symbols to confer value.
