To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

How then did it work out, all this?  How did one judge people, think of them?  How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?  And to those words, what meaning attached, after all?  Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity.

The Ramsay family, along with various hangers on, is visiting their beach home in the north of Scotland.  Their youngest son, James, wants to visit the lighthouse on the island off shore the next day, but his father is convinced it will rain.  This is pretty much the entirety of the plot of the first half of To the Lighthouse, which peers more deeply into the psychology of individual characters than any book I've ever read.  Woolf's style involves jumping from the perspective of one character to another, sometimes flitting through the minds of ten people over the course of a paragraph, sometimes settling down for fifteen or twenty pages of uninterrupted thought which turns out to have taken place in a matter of seconds.  In this way Woolf illuminates the mystery of what goes on in our minds; we barely recognize, much less understand, what lies at the bottom of our psyches.

If what we think and feel is so contradictory, so prone to change, what hope is there for any kind of constancy or permanency, since everything material will pass away as well?  The lighthouse, standing unmoving amid the churning waves, becomes a symbol of this hoped-for constancy.  Perhaps the answer can be found in art, Mrs. Ramsay's guest Lily Briscoe thinks as she labors over her painting of the Ramsay's house:

She looked at her picture.  That would have been the answer, presumably -- how 'you' and 'I' and 'she' pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint  Yet it would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that, it was true.  One might say, even of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it 'remained for ever,' she was going to say, or, for the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint, wordlessly; when, looking at the picture, she was surprised to find she could not see it.

Art is a stab at permanence; though Lily knows that her painting will be tossed away in the attic, there is something in the attempt that unites it the kind of permanence Mrs. Ramsay describes while handing out slices of beef for dinner:

It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby...

No wonder Lily is so upset when another guest, the priggish Charles Tansley, tells her flatly that women can't paint.  But Woolf has sympathy for Tansley, too, and allows the reader to dwell in his perspective for a while.  If nothing else, To the Lighthouse shows that all human feeling has intrinsic value.

The narrative takes a strange turn in the middle with a long section that describes the empty and abandoned house for years--years!--with some of Woolf's most poetic, but inscrutable language.  When the narrative resumes, Mr. Ramsay, Lily, and the children have returned to the house at long last, but without Mrs. Ramsay, who has died.  The loss of her clearly shakes the other characters deeply, as she was beloved by all of them and served as the center of their universe.  Without her, Mr. Ramsay and the children, who are now much older and don't give a rat's ass about the lighthouse, head out on the journey they never made.  Does it matter that they reach the lighthouse, now that Mrs. Ramsay is gone?  It's hard to say.  To the Lighthouse often plays its cards close to its chest.  But, as with Lily's painting, Woolf suggests that it's not the result that matters, but the attempt.

18 Wittgenstein’s Mistress-David Markson

“There is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.” -Leonardo

Allow me to introduce you to the crazy intelligent Kate: as unreliable a narrator as you’ll ever find. She begins her story by acknowledging her search for another living being (the cover holds the first sentence of the novel). Believing she is alone in the world she tells her story of living in museums around the world, traveling to the battlegrounds of ancient Greece, and revisiting locations of personal history. Along the way she leaves messages in the hope that somebody else exists.

The problem for the reader: is she the only living woman, or is she mad? The writing style is stream-of-consciousness, and it’s as good as Joyce on crack. She is sitting at a typewriter, over the span of several months, writing an autobiography. Where a day’s worth of writing ends you have to be told by Kate. She offers that she was mad during many moments of her solitary journey, but her honesty seduces the reader to trust what she is writing now. Much of her surroundings appear tangible: clothes dried in the sun, a jar to fetch water from a stream, a canoe, the beach, and the forest. Many of the objects she describes in her house must be real, an atlas, a painting, and half empty bookshelves:

“There is space. Many of the shelves up here are half empty.
Although doubtless when I say they are half empty I should really be saying they are half filled, since presumably they were totally empty before somebody half filled them.
Then again it is not impossible that they were once filled completely, becoming half empty only when somebody removed half of the books to the basement. I find this second possibility less likely than the first, although it is not utterly beyond consideration.”

These philosophical questions pepper the novel, but Kate seems to have an answer for each of them, and you start to trust and understand her point of view. Logical impossibilities that she answers in her madness:  

“Once, when I was listening to myself read the Greek plays out loud, certain of the lines sounded as if they had been written under the influence of William Shakespeare. One had to be quite perplexed as to how Aeschylus or Euripides might have read Shakespeare...Finally it occurred to me that the translator had no doubt read Shakespeare.”

Her actions also seem quite realistic. She travels around the world in any car that still has gas and a working battery. Early in her search she carries baggage and objects, transferring them each time a car runs out of gas. At one point she drops hundreds of tennis balls down The Spanish Steps. Sounds fun, but  she stops carrying things and begins leaving things, forgetting.

Kate makes countless classic allusions to Greek dramas, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. More of her allusions are to artists and paintings: Van Gogh, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Picasso, De Kooning, Magritte, and El Greco. The facts she presents, alongside possible encounters of individuals that lived in the same town during the same time periods, lose value as she tries to connect the lives of masters, apprentices, students, and offspring. At many points you think she is just showing off her knowledge of obscure details about artists, the name of Rembrandt’s cat for example. But she can’t remember the name of her own cat, and obviously “one does not name a seagull.”

She claims to have lived in the Met, the Tate, and the Louvre. While in these museums she burned frames of paintings to keep warm, but also hung her own paintings between the masters. Kate clearly has knowledge of art history, but she offers small truisms that you believe until you can no longer trust her sanity. The reader’s trust turns to sympathy. And with that sympathy you question everything she says. Kate has some facts, but they are not remembered accurately. According to Kate the following was said by Leonardo, sadly, it was not:

“There is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.” -Michelangelo  

p.s. What happened to 10-17? number 9 was read so long ago and the post so horrible...I'll try to keep up. 

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

"I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

Last year, after several aborted attempts, I finally made it through Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. It took some doing, but by the time I finished it, I was really enjoying Faulkner's mastery of the stream-of-consciousness style and especially his lyrical writing. I intended to follow up with The Sound and the Fury, but then I read Chris's review and, since it sounded approximately 10x more difficult than As I Lay Dying, I wussed out... until now.

The Sound and the Fury may be Faulkner's best known and most critically acclaimed work, and also his most complex, although this is coming before I've read Absolom Absolom. It follows one family, the Compsons, over about a decade. The actual storyline is a dark southern Gothic tale of family, betrayal, incest, and a mentally retarded manchild. So it's basically Anne of Green Gables.

The actual narrative is tough to summarize, and at some points, even to follow--I found out upon reading chapter summaries that I'd completely missed a major event; the book is really more about the characters and the way thy see and interact with one another than a storyline. Each section of the book is narrated by a different character, except the last which has an omniscient third-person narrator. The first section is narrated by Benjy, the aforementioned manchild who has no sense of time or place and whose narration skips from the past to the future without warning. The second is narrated by Quentin Compson, the neurotic, intelligent younger brother, and the third by Jason Compson, the cruel, cynical eldest child who takes an iron fist control over the family after the death of the father. Tying all these disparate narrators together is the enigmatic figure of Caddie Compson. Even with three different perspectives on her, we never get a firm grasp on what she actually is. To Quentin, she represents his repressed incestuous thoughts, but also his need for security and to protect. To Benjy, she is his only steady link to the real, linear world. To Jason, she is a thankless whore whose only contribution to the family was Quentin II, her illegitimate child and the bane of Jason's existence.

The Sound and the Fury is a tough book, both narratively and thematically. The Compson family and their neuroses are fully explored and the story itself is both intense and moving, but the actual heft of the book eludes me. At a base level, it seems to be about family and what constitutes it. Benjy, for example, is a much better brother to Caddie than Jason, and Dilsey, the Compsons' slave, is more of a mother to all the children than their own biological mother. I can't help but feel there's a lot that I'm missing here. Unlike Chris, I did feel myself connected to this band of misfits, but much like Benjy, I can't quite tie it all together.

I'm not sure my review makes it clear how much I enjoyed this book, but I thought it was great, and even enjoyed the Benjy section, which a lot of readers find offputting. Faulkner is a master stylist, and it was worth reading just for that, even if I can't quite figure it all out.