“She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”
When we reach this last sentence that closes Virginia Woolf’s novel, we have completed a true reading experience. We have moved from faith to disbelief, from certainty to confusion. Why can’t a contemporary sensibility read these novels anymore?
I have looked at some reviews on social media. Many of them insist that they found it tedious, long, uneventful, more thought and rambling than clear direction. Others return to the need to delve into Woolf’s complex family world to gain a better understanding of the novel. I was spellbound and bored, I loved it and hated it like a very Proustian particle derived from my reading experience. And so I reached the end.
There is a parricidal speech by one of the sons that would help us with this last point (I refer you to chapter 9 of the last part, it is not a short passage). For Cynthia Ozick, Virginia Woolf was simply mad. But the great critic of her time, Cyril Connolly, saw in this “her most radiant book” (whatever that means), saved by its “essential boundless desolation.”
Virginia Woolf was convinced of the need to transform the way we read: we do not read to accumulate knowledge, erudition undermines the passion for reading. She said that the only sure way to decide whether a novel is good or bad is simply to observe our own feelings when we reach the last page.
And once again, at the heart of her novels is the inner gaze, the journey into dimly lit rooms with candelabra and old paintings, and curtains drawn perpetually. It is as if Virginia Woolf were saying to us: there was life here, there is life here.
I bought the edition of To the Lighthouse that I read in Mexico on one of my many pre-pandemic trips. It was published by Mirlo, in the Tinta Viva series by Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 2016. The translation into Spanish is by Marina Mena. To the Lighthouse first appeared in 1927, the same year as Time Regained, Being and Time, The Wood of the Night, and Steppenwolf.
[Cover image: Gisèle Freund, 1965.
Desk used by V. Woolf at Monk’s House, East Sussex]
