568
PARTISAN REVIEW
praised, never bore myself an instant" -were prophetic about the course all
of her fiction was to follow . The process of formal exploration, haltingly
begun
inJacob's Room,
continues until her death in 1941.
It
is an open–
ended search, each new novel struggling with formal problems totally alien
to everything preceding it. For too long it has been a critical commonplace
to see
The Waves
as the teleological fulfillment of Woolf's genius. Such a
view not only leaves critics hard pressed to explain what came
after-The
Years
and
Between the Acts-it
seriously distorts the nature of what came
before. For Woolf's novels do not follow a linear path, the discoveries of
one leading to the production of the next, but rather consitute a series of
discrete forays in altogether different directions into unknown territory.
The
Waves
no more represents a culmination of her work than does
Orlando
or
To The Lighthouse.
Perhaps the most misguided enterprise on which she
embarked was
The Years,
but even this was a failure of an experimental sort,
not, as frequently thought, a renunciation of experiment . Moving from the
sustained internality of
The Waves
to
the strict " externality" of
The Years,
from the novel of vision to the novel of fact, was as daring an innovation for
Woolf as was the extraordinary conception of
The Waves
itself. What
matters in each novel is that Woolf was able to force herself' 'to break every
mould and find a fresh form of being, that is of expression, for everything I
feel or
think."
Just as
The Waves
is
an entirely different book from
Orlando,
published three years earlier, so with
The Years,
Woolf comments in her
diary, "I am breaking the mould made by
The Waves."
Common to all her novels is the attempt to create a texture for them
of the sort Lily Briscoe seeks for her painting: " Beautiful and bright it
should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into
another like the colours on a butterfly's wings; but beneath the fabric must
be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle
with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of
horses." The centrality of such a conception for Woolf is also suggested, in
language strikingly similar to Lily's, by a 1925 diary entry. Musing on the
greatness of Proust, Woolf praises him for qualities she unmistakably
wanted to achieve in her own work: "The thing about Proust is his com–
bination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out
those butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as
evanescent as a butterfly's bloom."
The delicacy of her sensibility, of course, is granted her even by her
most vehement detractors; indeed, it is frequently used as a reason for dis–
missing her as a serious artist, on the grounds that her exquisiteness (the
epithet most generally attached
to
her) leads only to sterile exercises in
preciosity . In fact, highly patterned and sensitive though the surface of her
