On a Sentence of Virginia Woolf

One way not–at all necessarily the best–to approach a question of style is to look at a passage in detail. In the case of one sentence from To the Lighthouse, this method has seemed to me surprisingly fruitful. For I think in that one sentence, can be seen in terms of syntax the play of forces which the whole novel addresses–and perhaps in this microcosm of style, the question and its possible resolution find their best expression.

Here is the sentence I have in mind in its context (the italics are mine). Mr. Ramsay is approaching Lily Briscoe:

…looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical, he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely, for only so could she keeps steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up and saw them, what she called “being in love” flooded them. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And what was even more exciting, she felt, too as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled in hold like a wave which bore one up with it and threw went down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

The sentence, very simply has, the structural form of the wave which it describes. And that form is composed of three elements–the gathering, the culmination, and the shattering. These have their syntactical counterparts: the “gathering” in loose, subordinate structures; the “culmination” in the principle, actual predication, and the “shattering” in an afterthought. It is the gathering phase which is so characteristic of Virginia Woolf, and lets us know, if we were to read only this sentence in isolation, that it was her style we were meeting. For this is her scene-painting (and, at the same time, Lilly Briscoe’s balancing, composing of elements). First of all, it is the question of feeling and seeing, the seeing being subordinate to the feeling–leading to it, opening the way to it. The seeing is expressed in timeless present participles: “…Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in and the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending…” If we had not felt the universality of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s moving and sitting, it is immediately suggested to us by the assimilation of these two images to those of nature, which will continue, timelessly, through the awful passage of the second part of the novel, and on beyond, beyond the novel, beyond the author…down “that long gallery” which of Virginia Woolf keeps so steadily in view, through devices like this.

“She felt”–the author tells us “as she saw…”. What does the seeing have to do with the feeling? We aren’t told: we, too, have to see, and to feel. The link is not one of predication, but of implication, or perhaps we should say, intuition. The two verbs are,  through the subordinating “as”, simply set side-by-side, and in turn, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are rather painted as bearing, retreating, sitting, adjectivally, than Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and to be in fact simply doing those things. These syntactic structures, essentially appositional, might be called “paratactic”, if indicative predication is the backbone of the “syntactic” structure of a sentence. In this sense, acute parataxis is the key to this very Woolfian sentence, and the clue to Virginia Woolf’s style, and thesis, in general.

The shift from “gathering”–from the anticipation in which the wave forms up –to “culmination”, in which it manifests itself in its form and action–comes here with the insertion of the content of Lily’s present thought: “…how life became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it…”

The case is not simple, certainly, for the verbs I want to emphasize as predications are in fact subordinated in adjectival clauses in the midst of a metaphor. But they are nonetheless strong predications, and having waited for them, we feel their assertive power. Moreover, we realize that we are moving from the synoptic reflections of Lilly’s thought to the fact which is before her: she is watching the wave do just what the sentence asserts at this point. From the timeless participles, we have come to the act of the very moment. If we doubted that, the question is resolved by the “there”: “And threw one down with it, there…”. This there is not just a place (on the beach), but an index pointing to this very moment, this very place. In the wave of the sentence, then, time has gathered to the predication. It tells us a great deal about the subjectivity a Virginia Woolf’s writing that this is not a simple objective predication, but that Lily imputes to this act her own presence: she sees it as as a transitive–it bears her up and throws her down.

Final phase, the scattering, is no less significant for the fact that it occurs in two short anapestic phrases: “… with a dash on the beach”. For in those phrases, in their simplicity, is all the finality of passage and ruin which the sentence itself, the wave, has briefly challenged.

The two great formal phases of the sentence, then, are the paratactic in the syntactic–the last phase, the afterthought, demands no form. Now these two syntactic forms, which together become “curled and whole”, correspond I think evidently to Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay. That is, parataxis is the feminine counterpart of syntax; syntaxis is masculine assertion. The intuitive link is feminine; simple predication, the act, is masculine. These two elements of the integral sentence are figured, within this sentence, not only by the two modes of motion of the wave before us, but by the participles with which Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay are painted: she is “sitting”–timelessly gathering–while he is “bearing down” and “retreating”, timelessly acting. In the mode of timelessness, she is paratactic intuition (“the window makes her a vision, a painting); he is a predication, syntactic.

Virginia Woolf’s sentence, then, marries parataxis and syntaxis: intuition and predication, timelessness and the moment this is the excitement of “being in love”, the same problem of composition which Lilly works out in her painting. It is a “universe”, as she sees. She also sees that it is as “unreal” as it is “penetrating and exciting”–that is, we do not see in Mrs. Ramsay simply a marriage and a universe, but it’s shattering –the “dash on the beach” of the second third part of the novel. Yes you have seen the wave in all its three phases, in this one sentence, is to have the grasped even the passage in a certain timelessness–whole, even to the shattering, is the “wave”.

I would like to contrast this wave-image of the marriage of intuition and predication, with Plato’s account of logos in the Theaetetus. First of all, we must note that the Theaetetus is itself a work of striking imagery, yet the resolution of the question of knowledge isn’t terms of predication–the marriage of the noun and the verb. In the metaphoric universe of Plato, stasis is figured by Parmenides and the Eleatics; the dissolution of motion and time is that of Heraclitus and the ionic East. In Athens, to which all the world is drawn, the two meet: it is the place of discourse. “Knowledge”, then, is known to us in the passage of logos, though we look to that knowledge which is beyond passage and beyond logos. Plato see the sentence (in our Latin, the sententia, the thought) in terms of an ephemeral union of rest and motion in logos, the reconciliation of being an nonbeing in becoming.

I think Virginia Wolf’s proposition is genuinely different: her two phrases of the wave include another factor. Plato’s unity is that of syntax; this is the masculine image of thought. The parataxis which is not only an integral component of thought for Virginia Woolf, but the overarching mode of the whole novel, and of all her work, is the feminine strength behind, and underlying, masculine thought. In her work, it is primary; it embraces thought–and only parataxis takes us from the brutality of logos to the vision and peace–however momentary or illusory–of the wave.

As I suggested, the Theaetetus itself is a model of paratactic suggestion: Theaetetus as a person, can We first meet probably at the verge of death, is an image of that smooth flow which is learning through logos, the marriage of motion and rest. Plato is by no means obtuse with respect to the power of poesis. But his perception of its role is different: it is inherently secondary. Virginia Woolf is saying that it is primary, and we do not leave it behind to achieve the highest we can know if thought. Where Plato assembles saw as logos through the union of verb and noun in syntaxis, Virginia Woolf assembles the wave as the union of parataxis and syntaxis, intuition and logos, with intuition as primary and embracing, the principle of her inclusive sentence. If Plato’s is a masculine view of the liberal arts, hers is primarily feminine, and sees the wave-sentence as the marriage of the feminine and masculine in a very different perception of liberation.

If St. Johns, in turn, is inescapably platonic, Virginia Woolf is, her gentle mockery of Mr. Ramsay pacing with his student, suggesting a very different view of the liberal college. One which has admitted the feminine, not in name only.

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To draw a political corollary: nations, with their political forms and constitutions, are masculine conceptions, syntactic structures and the mode of Mr. Ramsay. What is the political projection of the gathering phase of the Wolfian sentence? That is, what is the missing feminine mode politics, the unsung ground of human society? It must lie in the paratactic structures, but what are those? I think we need them informal mode of coalition, grouping, networking –those most of social action which take shape organically and through living interaction, rather than through the deliberations of the constitutional convention. They are also subjective–i. e., their principal is in the feeling in response to which they come into being–rather than objective in the mode of law. They are immediately responsive to the ebb and flow of human need.

Trotsky paints his picture of the October Revolution in these terms come and the vehicle of social drama he is describing is the local group, the Soviet. Is looking at paratactic structures, and in contrasting them with bourgeois formalism, and the unseeing quality of formal minds he is nonetheless able to respect, he contrasts the subjectivity of the revolution, with the objective formalism of an empty skeleton of government. His history, in turn, he believes has its validity precisely because it is subjective, the work of the author of the events themselves, and not objective, as bourgeois history is supposed to be. His work is not one of factual predication simply– history is not finally a question of facts–but deeply confused with subjective intuition, which it is the art of the historian to convey to his reader.

This would be, then, paratactic history– and of a history of a paratactic sequence of events. The October Revolution, according to Trotsky, is in effect a revolution of parataxis (the Soviets, the people spontaneously grouped) against syntaxis (the formal government, the lawyers). And if parataxis is the feminine principle in thought…? Then the Russian Revolution was the uprising of something feminine against the blind forms of the masculine tradition. Its life was crashed in the victory of a masculine, syntactic bureaucracy over the spontaneity and life of the Soviet paratactic experience. If there is any truth to this intellectual goose-chase, it ought to be revealed and the comparison of the styles of Virginia Woolf and Leon Trotsky. And I do believe, some resonance might be found between these two, unlikely as the thought may seem!

But that is a question for another time.

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