Letteratura inglese A

Part I: Overview and Macro-Analysis

Part I covers one single day, from morning to late evening.

As a first step, it is important to pay attention to how the narrative structure is organised. It is useful, in this sense, to bear in mind Auerbach's analysis, as well as Woolf's essays that we have read and what she wrote about her composition of the novel.

Elements to take into account:

• How are the 19 sections of Part I organised?
• What are the implications of the fact that they strongly vary in length?

Part I is the longest of the three parts of the novel: Part II, which covers 10 years is much shorter, and Part III, covering again one single day, longer than Part II but shorter than Part I. What are the implications of this narrative organisation bearing in mind how Woolf intended to portray human experience and its relationship with time?

The Textual Analysis

Steps for the analysis:

1. We consider the incipit in reference to Herman's description of the process of accommodation into the

fictional world by the reader. What are the cues provided by the incipit for the reader's deictic shift (ref. to deictics signalling time, space and point of view)?

In what order and what ways are characters introduced?

In terms of tone: the rhetorical analysis allows you to understand how Woolf's writing tends to recreate rather than describe the moment, and the character's sensations. It is important to pay attention to lexical choices and figures of speech establishing that effect as well as to syntax and rhythm (ref. for instance the long sentence "Since he belonged...fringed with joy": how the structure of the sentence, syntax, punctuation, lexical choices recreate the perception of time of which the sentence speaks?)

How do we see things? Through which perspective? We need to pay attention to the various techniques employed and to the (often imperceptible) shift from one to another. At the beginning we have the impression of being in the context of a traditional

In this narrative, the author explores different techniques of representation of consciousness. Initially, the story is told in third person, with a combination of dialogue and description. However, as the narrative progresses, a shift occurs, indicating a change in the narrative technique. The author, Virginia Woolf, is known for her skillful blending and shifting between different techniques of representation of consciousness.

According to scholars Cohn and Banfield, Woolf's use of psycho-narration and narrated monologue (also known as free indirect speech) is particularly noteworthy. These techniques are often intertwined, making it difficult to distinguish one from the other. Woolf also introduces innovative features, such as the use of parentheses in psycho-narration.

The narrated monologue itself is an ambiguous form, as it combines elements of third-person narration with cues in the language employed. These cues include mental associations and other linguistic devices that provide insight into the character's thoughts and emotions.

The types of images, the register and form of language, the lexicon) leading us to believe that we are inside the character's perspective, or into a perspective "shared" (Auerbach) by the character and the narrator in third person.

Cultural references

In reference to Mr. Ramsay's philosophical work: "subject and object and the nature of reality" [...] "think of the kitchen table then", he told her "when you're not there".

Scholars have underlined how this reference points to the philosophy of perception of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, who, as former Cambridge Apostles, gravitated around the Bloomsbury Group. Both philosophers' work refuted Idealism and proposed the so-called philosophy of sense-data.

You can find an overview of the philosophy of sense-data at the following link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/#RussSensData

In the entry on Russell you'll find the specific example given by the philosopher.

which directly connects with the passage in the novel: "Russell argues for the existence of sense data with a version of the Argument from Perceptual Variation, which, for shape, runs as follows (1912 [1997: 10-11]):

In looking at a table, what we see varies in shape as we move.

The real table does not vary in shape.

Hence, what we see is not the real table."

In Russell's examples there is also reference to the colour white, which recurs in the perception of Lily Briscoe and her elaboration of her picture: "According to Russell, repeated sensations allow us to become acquainted with sensory universals: When we see a white patch, we are acquainted, in the first instance, with the particular patch; but by seeing many white patches, we easily learn to abstract the whiteness which they all have in common, and in learning to do this we are learning to be acquainted with whiteness. (1912 [1997: 101]) Having acquaintance with universals such as whiteness, we can make judgments."

that yield knowledge by description of the properties of things. These are judgments of fact about sense data, which establish truths.

The influence that Cambridge philosophy and Post-Impressionist aesthetic theory had on Woolf is extensively explored in Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table. Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism, Cambridge UP, 2000.

Mr. Paunceforte. The imaginary painter - who was already referred to in section I - embodies the Impressionist tradition ("to see everything pale, elegant, semi-transparent"). Lily's (Post-Impressionist) painting is founded on a conception overcoming both the preceding realist tradition and the Impressionist one, which is contemporary to her. Lily conceives a picture which, like with Impressionism, questions the tenets of realism by starting from subjective perception ("since she saw them like that), but transfigures such subjective vision and renders it symbolic via a (Post-Impressionist) focus on geometrical

forms ("then beneath the colour there was the shape"). 13/01/2022

[Process of accommodation: it is the way we operate the shift from our here and now to the here and now of the world of fiction. Experimental novel actually makes that shift more complex because they don't give us directly the cues. We have to retrieve them obliquely. The axis along which narrations develop are time, place and point of view: these are the three things we retrieve as we enter a novel.]

Section 1

We understand that these people are by the sea. This is a holiday house, so probably it is summer. This is not clearly said until much later. In section 4 shift to Lily Briscoe who speaks to William Bankes (they are guests, introduced indirectly) and here there is the first indication of time of the year: it's cold, it's a season of transformation, it's the "middle of September, and past six in the evening". This gives a different nuance to the context of To the Lighthouse:

it’s the end of summer, so we can better understand why James wants to go to the lighthouse because this should be the last trip of the season. In this modern novel this crucial information of time is not put at the beginning of the novel and it is given indirectly, following an observation by Lily Briscoe. This is what happens for time, now we will see what happens in terms of characters and space.

Incipit in medias res. Characters are presented indirectly, beginning with a dialogue (so we think about a traditional novel), the “of course” gives us the idea that this is a conversation which is continuing (so it is not how a conventional novel would act) and refers to a previous line spoken by someone else that we don’t have in the novel, this is not the first line of the dialogue. Mrs Ramsay (1 character presented) is introduced through her voice, we will get to know her only later and through her thoughts. Although we don’t know anything about we quite soon enter.

Into her perspective. In terms of how the characters appear in the novel, after the voice of Mrs Ramsay, the focus shifts to James. He is introduced first of all in terms of the relationship he has with the first character that spoke, so her mother: "said [...] to her son", the name of James comes much later, literary encapsulated into the structure of sentences – paragraph in which mixture of past and future references, then "James Ramsay", then setting (on the floor cutting pictures), then feelings (at first positive, "joy and bliss").

A Sketch of the Past: Ref. to what we read in stress on the memory of the childhood, when our perceptions are amplified, metaphor of childhood being as a space of a cathedral (all things seem big and amplified). What we notice in James's reaction is the amplification of emotions and particularly the two extremes of emotions: intense joy (when the mother talks about the trip to the lighthouse) to the point that

what hewas doing in that moment (cutting the pictures out the catalogue) transfixed themoment (what he was doing was normal but it became special) vs. extreme rage (laterwhen his father speaks). James is so upset with the father for demolishing thisprospect of going to the lighthouse that he would have killed the father (as said by thenarrator). Ref. to Edipe complex: difficult and conflictual relation with the father (vs.close relation with the mother) – along the novel there are a lot of references to theTo the Lighthouseaspects that push away Mr Ramsay from his children and his wife. isautobiographical, Mrs Ramsay=Woolf’s mother and Mr Ramsay=Woolf’s father (seenalso in philosophical references). If the perspective is focused on childhood perceptionobviously of this scene we don’t get an objective perspective, but things are insteadtold via the mediation of feelings and thoughts of the characters experiencing them.Novel with focus on recreation of reality,

Seen not from an objective point of view but through how it is perceived and re-elaborated by the mind of a person. We don't hear James' voice but we follow his feelings, although they are conveyed by the narrator in third person. We actually see him through the gaze of his mother. The description of James is not given from an external perspective; we know him through his perceptions and feelings. Although the voice remains the narrator's in third person, we see James from the point of view of his mother. At first, the focus is on perceptions, sensations, and experiences, and then on language ("private code, secret language"). This first scene on the focus on James condenses the key elements of "To the Lighthouse," which are precisely perceptions (ref. moments of being, memory) and language (how to convey them). With language, we refer to every form of language; in fact, the language on which the novel will focus is the artistic one, which hides the artistic process of Woolf.