MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
561
one should
not
expect from a Woolf novel. Other attempts to state posi–
tively what she wants her fiction to achieve are no more successful:
That
is
one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; and got
there to a consciousness of what I call 'reality': a thing I see before me,
something abstract but residing in the downs or sky . . . in which I shall
rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this
is the most necessary thing to me; that which I seek. But who knows–
once one takes a pen and writes? .. . Now perhaps this is my gift: this
perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people. I think it may be
rare to have so acute a sense of something like that-but again , who
knows? I would like to express it too.
The reality Woolf wants her fiction to express cannot easily be formu–
lated apart from the particular way it inheres in each novel.
It
is not a sub–
stantive vision of the sort
J.
Hillis Miller, in his
Poets of Reality ,
finds in
Conrad's fiction, whose "aim is to make the truth of life, something dif–
ferent from any impression or quality, momentarily visible. Not colors or
light but the darkness behind them is the true reality." Woolfs reality has
nothing to do with stripping away illusion or penetrating surface phenom–
ena to unearth the grim darkness beneath, but resides in a form which
makes comprehensible the way the various impressions and colors and dark–
ness together constitute the texture of human life.
It
is something which is
communicated emotionally rather than intellectually: " When we speak of
form," Woolf writes, " we mean that certain emotions have been placed in
the right relations to each other; then that the novelist is able to dispose
these emotions and make them tell by methods which he inherits, bends to
his purpose, models anew or even invents for himself." Endlessly evolving
new techniques to dispose these emotions, Woolf succeeds in making out of
the chaos and disharmony she found in the world marvelously coherent
shapes.
The center of a Woolf novel, then , does not reside in any of those
several themes frequently singled out for critical investigation-the work–
ings of consciousness, the perception of time, the quality of personal rela–
tionships-but in her effort to orchestrate these in such a way as to make us
feel how together they constitute part of the experience of living. The quest
is always for the form that will embody Woolfs sense of what that experi–
ence is . From
Jacob's Room
to
Between the Acts,
everyone of Woolfs
novels originated not with any notion of theme or character but with some
notion of the form the novel might take. As she indicates in her diary,
Jacob 's Room
developed out of three short pieces she was working on even as
she was struggling through to the end of her second novel,
Night andDay:
