MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
569
novels is, there is nothing exquisite in the least about her fiction. From the
bewildered Mrs. Flanders, standing dumbly inJacob's room after his death,
holding out his shoes, to the curtain rising at the end of
Between the Acts
on
the confrontation between Isa and Giles, her work deals with enduring
human concerns without solace of illusion or sentimentality. Woolf looks
unflinchingly at a work that offers very little in the way of easy gratification.
Death and the anguish of isolation are the inescapable pressures felt
in
every book; it is always in the face of these that her characters attempt to
fashion their precarious visions of order, and their fleeting successes never
obscure our sense of the difficulty of the battle or the knowledge that the
dangers remain. In affirming the possibility of order, she never falsifies the
chaos threatening it. "Nothing was ever one thing,"
To The Lighthouse
in–
sists, and James's discovery as he nears the lighthouse that is not just the
"silvery, misty-looking tower" that gleamed at him when he was a child,
but also something stark, solid, and forbidding is precisely the kind of com–
plex view Woolf holds to throughout her life.
Despite her tough-mindedness and complexity, it is still not clear that
Woolf will ever quite luxuriate in the unquestioned eminence accorded a
Contad or aJoyce or a Faulkner. As long as the cult of Bloomsbury worship
flourishes, of course, Woolfs reputation will continue to grow. But even
Bloomsbury's mythic stature will one day erode and we will once again have
to confront an enigmatic writer whose novels lack the narrative interest and
overt social and psychological concerns of the other great twentieth-century
writers. Such a confrontation will always be difficult for a large number of
readers. Woolf's uncompromising effort to convey "the exact shapes my
brain holds" is an enterprise whose basically subjective character has fre–
quently been thought to ensure its ultimate insignificance . As I have tried to
indicate, however, the explicitly personal nature of her attempt is neither
precious nor self-indulgent. Developing out of Woolf's urgent need to get
to the heart of the reality she felt was somehow available to her, the novels
are at the same time informed by a strict artistic integrity which prevents
them from degenerating into the narrowly private. In rendering that vision
of reality, Woolf provides us with a rich variety of compelling shapes that
speak in immediate ways to all of us. What Woolf needs is a criticism which,
eschewing the temptations of the modish and the topical, will explore the
different ways these potent shapes function . Only then will she have earned
that satisfaction she briefly grants Miss La Trobe: "Hadn't she, for twenty–
five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was relief from agony .
for one moment . . . one moment .. ,
