564
PARTISAN REVIEW
it is Jacob searching for himself, or Septimus and Rezia unable
to
talk
to
each other, or Giles and Isa struggling in their tempestuous marriage, or
even Mrs. Ramsay, giving of herself to exhaustion, the people in Woolf's
fiction invariably feel cut off, not only from other human beings but from
the world around them as well. The fact of isolation and the possibility of
fleeting transcendence and communion-these are the two poles of Woolf's
fictional universe. Rooted in one , characters can earn, through their own
arduous efforts, brief contact with the other. Scratching out its monotonous
" Unity-Dispersity . .. Un . .. dis," the gramaphone of
Between the Acts
actually lays out the psychic contours of all ofWoolf's mature work. " Scraps,
ortS, and fragments ," as Miss La Trobe's pageant insists, the isolated selves
in Virginia Woolf's world grapple not only with their own inadequacies and
fears but with the uncertainty of personal relationships, the intractableness
of language , the fact of death to achieve their completed visions . The battle
is difficult-filled with the same kind of loneliness and pain Woolf experi–
enced in her own life as she fought her way through the demons of madness
and despair that constantly assailed her to the lucid forms of her fiction–
and the successes transient; but there is nothing else. Whatever the suffering
involved, all the novels from
Mrs. Dalloway
on manage to end on a final
note of affirmation: a party is given, a lighthouse reached, a pageant pro–
duced. Such accomplishments, however trivial they might appear, suggest
the basic commitment to living made by the fiction . As Lily Briscoe under–
stands after she has finished her painting, it does not matter in the least
whether the canvas is ultimately destroyed or rolled up in some dusty attic.
In Woolf's universe to be able to say, "I have had my vision," is the con–
summate human achievement, and Lily's words, which close
To The Light–
house,
speak not only to her particular feat in completing her canvas but to
the successes of the other protagonists as well and finally , of course, to
Woolf herself.
They could not be reasonably applied, however, to Woolf's first two
novels,
The Voyage Out
(1915) and
Night andDay
(1919) . IfD .S. Savage is
perhaps unduly harsh in finding
Night and Day
to be the dullest novel in
the English language, it is nevertheless true that her first two books are not
particularly distinguished. Lacking any kind oHormal originality, both are
lamentably tedious , dragging on far longer than they should in a thoroughly
pedestrian manner.
Although Terence Hewet's notion in
The Voyage Out
that he would
like to write a " novel about silence ," about" the things people don' t say, "
seems to anticipate Woolf's later development, neither of these initial
efforts suggests the unique things
to
come . What they do make clear is how
uncongenial the realistic-or what Woolf might call the Edwardian-
