Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (60 page)

But there is only one of her, and there are so many who want to possess her heart and favor. Woolf understands the emotional dynamics of family, the fierce competition between children and spouse to be tended to, recognized, loved by the mother. I am thinking especially of the scene when Mrs. Ramsay, reading to her son James, finds herself “stormed” by her needy and despotic husband. Woolf’s signature is to be seen in the stunning metaphors that deliver the violence and splendor of this moment: she pours into the air “a rain of energy, a column of spray,” she is “burning and illuminating,” “and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.” Think back to Shakespeare’s lyrical account of Romeo and Juliet’s youthful passion and then contrast it to Woolf; you will see how this entire scenario is one of maturity and its conflicts, of the emotional vehemence resulting from the warring needs of loved ones, loved for many, many years, and it results in a supreme portrait of female power. She is the life source.

This sequence is followed by Mrs. Ramsay’s further imaginings, further gifts, entailing the transformation of existing domestic life into something overflowing with fertility (kitchen, drawing room, bedrooms, nurseries), and it closes with something akin to sexual exhaustion as the male takes his leave and the woman folds herself together, petal after petal, still holding her son and his book of fairy tales, while there “throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation.”
The rapture of successful creation
. It is Woolf’s genius to show us the vibrant, even ecstatic, underlay of docile appearances, so that the spectacle of a man, woman, and child “doing” virtually nothing becomes a spectacle filled with exotic color and sexual tumult and ecstatic interaction. These rapturous passages coexist with others that are gentler, wryer, but no less exquisite and eye-opening in their rendition of mature love: we see the Ramsays walk together, each locked (as we all are) in his or her own mind and sensations, yet reaching out to each other, making small talk, making large talk, sometimes making no talk at all but still together, interacting. And always it is Mrs. Ramsay who initiates, nourishes, sustains, and completes these transactions, these transfusions.

This novel takes us into the bedroom once or twice, but never to witness any conjugal intimacy. One hallucinatory (orgasmic) sequence depicts the light of the lighthouse caressing Mrs. Ramsay “as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight,” putting us on notice that ecstasy has many forms and venues, that it may connect us to the cosmos as well as to our lovers. Yet loving is also lower to the ground, more democratic, more spread out, than we often imagine. After all, its arena, its sphere of operation, is limitless; love’s theater has many players and many places in it, each demanding its due. We find it, for instance, at the dinner table (!), as Mrs. Ramsay seeks to bring not only food but heat and life to her family and guests. (Here, too, ask yourself if young love could be found in such precincts—if young love would even recognize a dinner table as a site of intense emotion.) Once again it is written with a keenness and reach that astound, as we watch Mrs. Ramsay take in the scene of inert matter and infuse it with life, with her life:

Enduring love is the daily effort to convert insentience into sentience, silence into language, indifference into interest, lumps of flesh into people sharing food, wine, and conversation around a table. Not quite the fare for immortal romances, rarely touted as glamorous or attention-getting, this labor is nonetheless a fundamental exercise of the human heart, required countless times in a life in the service of the human family. The service of the family: not the gratification of lover or spouse. Mothers do this. For better or for worse, this has been women’s work for much of history.
To the Lighthouse
makes us see that the most mundane tasks are the material of heroism and of poetry.

It is interesting to note that Woolf has inserted some sexual interest into her dinner scene, since a young couple, Paul and Minta, are among the guests and Mrs. Ramsay has helped give the young man the confidence to declare his feelings to the girl, who has accepted him, all of which confers on this scene a pagan feeling of passion’s rites. Marriage is in the air. But I’d argue that the deeper and more seminal act of love is the mother’s, is performed by the woman bringing these people together, so that the little miracle of “merging and flowing and creating” takes place. Yet Woolf’s references to pulse, watch, and weak flame tell us that making life is never far from losing life, that a day will come when Mother disappears, when the spark goes out. And it will.

Readers of the novel are aware that the great matriarch comes in for considerable “in-house” criticism: from some of the guests, above all from the infatuated but critical Lily Briscoe, who wonders if loving too much didn’t finally kill the woman who did it. Mrs. Ramsay’s mantra “Marry, marry!” does not fully pass the test of time, as the collapse of Paul and Minta’s marriage will demonstrate. All this is true. But it seems to me that the greatest threat to Mrs. Ramsay as mature love goddess comes from within, as if Woolf understood that we are not constituted to create a “rain of energy, a column of spray,” an endless pouring out of fecundity, all the days of our lives. No person, no woman, can do this. Not because it is too exhausting and life-sapping (which it is) but because one is also, inevitably and responsibly, oneself, because one’s life has its indwelling needs and integrity, on the far side of all social giving, on the far side of loving. Few writers, I think, are capable of this insight, which speaks to the demands of self versus our love for others, and in a passage of great beauty and daring, Woolf sketches out the astonishing but invisible life of self that the mother both leads and follows. The child has been put down, and we read:

This sequence continues into ever murkier territory, as the emancipated self leaves its corporeal base and flows out into the world, becoming the things it sees and touches, leaving even “I” far behind, as residue, as trompe l’oeil (for, had you looked at Mrs. Ramsay at that moment, in full “flight,” you would have seen only a woman continuing to knit).

This celebrated passage challenges and complicates my argument for Mrs. Ramsay as a mature, loving woman. Love acquires, in my view, more rather than less significance when we realize it must coexist with so much else in life, including one’s obligations to self. Remember, again, her philosopher husband, the man who meditates exploratory voyages of pure thinking, and say to yourself: this woman, who infuses the world with warmth, travels farther inwardly than he ever does or will, yet is never paid for it, recognized for it. Is it possible that her almost infinite sense of private, even anonymous, freedom exists in perfect harmony with her virtually infinite sense of human responsibility and love? Does one feed the other?

Mrs. Ramsay’s psychic “outing,” her unchartable journey into distant territories (people as well as things and places), confers an almost cosmic reach to this seemingly domestic novel and thereby stands in contrast to the grueling descent into chaos we saw in Maarten’s final days. There is a splendid sense of emotional and psychic elasticity in Woolf, of our being more far-flung and expansive creatures than you might think, more exploratory and questing, less bounded. Again I say: such virtues are unimaginable in the young, are the prize of age, but age understood as open vistas and large dominions. There is also something wonderful in gauging Mrs. Ramsay’s reach and authority. There is a reason one sees her as the novel’s earth goddess, for Woolf is showing us that this woman’s everyday acts of body and mind—the
boeuf en daube
at dinner and the wedge-shaped core of darkness when alone—are manifestations of a
power
we must see as godlike. Her husband is the salaried professor, but she is the life-giving mother, the older woman who long ago birthed her children and still continues to be the pulse of the family. The novel hallows her reign, her regime, her regal being.

But the watch and the pulse will stop. She will die. And the last third of the novel will consist in the efforts, ten years later, of her family and Lily Briscoe to bring her back to life. The novel is justly famous for its two versions of retrieval. Mr. Ramsay will at long last take his two now-grown children to the lighthouse, bringing parcels for those islanded there, as if to make good on his dead wife’s desire. And Lily Briscoe will complete her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, but she will do so only by dint of love and immersion into the depths of the past, into the still-living, unbearably painful memory of Mrs. Ramsay, alive in Lily’s feelings even if dead on the earth. Art is made of blood, not paint. These are the contracts of love—husband and figurative daughter paying homage to the wife and mother—and they parallel the no-less-vital contract we witnessed at the dinner table when Mrs. Ramsay chose, as she never failed to choose, to do the “merging and flowing and creating” that life requires of its finest, perhaps of us all.

A portrait of old age? Yes and no. We never know how or why or even exactly when she died. But die eventually she must, and die she does, following time’s law, carrying out nature’s irreversible plot. Yet, as we saw, art, memory, and love resurrect what can be resurrected. There is something elemental and shocking about Woolf’s plot:
the mother lives on
. So many of our texts—and so much of our thinking—privileges private actors and individual doing, all of which stops at death.
To the Lighthouse
suggests otherwise. Mrs. Ramsay is demiurgic. She is an energy system, and—long dead—she impacts on, indeed empowers others. Our entire model of temporal law, of waxing and waning, of rise and fall, even of growing up and growing old, is upended by this luminous story of love’s power beyond the grave. Woolf seems to be saying that love is fertile beyond our wildest imaginings, that its
harvest
takes place most fully
d’outre-tombe
, in the feelings, deeds, and lives of those we’ve nurtured and touched. This mature woman, who gifted her husband and children and still others with her light and heat and radiance, shines still, like a beacon in the surrounding sea, like a lighthouse that never goes out. It is hard not to be moved by the portrait of a loving dead woman created by her grown-up daughter: we see this in the novel, as Lily completes her picture and has her vision, and we see this outside the novel in the achievement of Virginia Woolf, who birthed in literature the story of the woman who birthed her in life. Given the amount of conflict and friction and outright war that we’ve seen between the young and the old, this image of generational harmony and mutual sustenance is deeply satisfying.

One fine day, proud Lear stopped being king; not much later, he was mad. Ibsen’s stubborn Solness was obliged ultimately to yield the stage to the young, but he died doing it. Willy Loman faced the collapse of his role and his dreams, and it killed him. The story of obsolescence is hardwired into the story of aging, and it does not, as it were, stale or wither, even if the environment and some of the givens change. Further, the shock of discovering that one has outlived one’s purpose, overstayed one’s time, or simply failed to exit the stage in seemly fashion, would appear to be a shock that can come to us well before we reach Willy Loman’s fatigued state. It can happen while we think we are in full swing, going great guns, without any inkling that the bell is ready to toll for us, to tell us the party is over. Can wisdom be made of this? A low-to-the-ground, nonvisionary wisdom that might reinsert the old back into the march of the living? Are there late lessons that are truly redemptive?

All this is what we encounter in the depiction of David Lurie’s adventures and trials, as seen in the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee’s remarkable narrative
Disgrace
. This slim volume is deceptively straightforward, because its issues tend to reverberate far beyond the page, echoing for us today’s still-unresolved problems of race, power, and white privilege as well as the necessity of “making friends with dying.” Indeed, I firmly believe that Coetzee’s novel of 1999 can be credibly and creditably compared to Shakespeare’s
King Lear
. Once again, the kingdom is to be divvied up, once again the prerogatives of the seemingly powerful are to be chastened and checked, once again the story of fathers and daughters comes to stand for intergenerational murk and power sharing, and once again the overt saga of the high and mighty gestures toward the untold narratives of the weak and despised. Beyond even Shakespeare, Coetzee wants to graph what Lear would learn on the heath: the story of the “bare, forked” creature, understood at last as nonmetaphor, as the animals with whom we share the planet.