MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
563
such content does not alter radically over the course of her lifetime. Al–
though intended somewhat flippantly, her diary note that
To The Light–
house
contains " all the usual things I try to put in-life , death, etc. " -is
very much to the point and might well have been written about any of her
works . What distinguishes them is less the things themselves than the
different patterns they achieve in each novel , the relationship she fashions
between them. The impulse behind every work is always to find a new
method for rendering her sense of experience : once a form has been fully
worked out, Woolf moves on to a different attempt. Each experiment, she
writes in her diary, is " a shot at my vision-if it's not a catch , it's a cast in
the right direction" - and represents a shot she will not repeat a second
time .
A London day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the passage of ten years
on an island in the Hebrides, the makeshift, harried performance of Miss
La
Trobe's pageant-each constitutes a unique version of Woolfs remark–
ably steady perception of the world. The extraordinary sttuctural diversity of
Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years,
and
Between the Acts
paradoxically attests to the underlying singleness of
purpose Woolf held to throughout her career.
Woolfs own quest as an artist-to create shapes that will make lasting
sense of the fluidity of life- is reflected within her novels by people who are
engaged in the same kind of search. Insofar as it is possible
to
generalize
about the meaning of the human activity in Woolfs fictional world, we can
say that the characters in her novels constantly try, through widely different
means, to establish for themselves from the chaos around them a coherent
grasp of their world. What Woolf attempts to accomplish through her
fiction, Lily Briscoe attempts with her painting, Bernard with his novel,
Miss La Trobe with her pageant. And although these are the specific aes–
thetic endeavors which most closely approximate Woolfs own, the instinct
to bring things together is not limited to painters and writers. Certainly it is
the animating principle behind the soliloquies of all the voices in
The
Waves,
not just Bernard's, and is what impels that superficially least crea–
tive of souls, Clarissa Dalloway, to give her parties. Most memorably, of
course, it is Mrs. Ramsay's particular genius, possessing as she does the
ability
to
" choose out the elements of things and piece them together and
so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of
some
scene, or
meet–
ing of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted
things over which thought lingers and love plays."
The workings of the creative imagination shaping different visions of
order, then, is the single great theme which appears in Woolfs fiction . The
importance of that imagination in her work
comes
directly out of the over–
whelming sense of human isolation in which every novel is steeped. Whether
