By Dennis Kersten
When writing about Dante, T.S. Eliot once remarked that “genuine poetry is communicated before it is understood”. You probably have fridge magnets of it now, and while I don’t like Eliot’s “genuine”, I was reminded of his line when I was blown away by “Alalgura VI” (1992), a painting by Australian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. It made total sense to me, instantly, but it didn’t give me any clue as to why it had such an impact. It was a kind of love-at-first-sight experience: the one thing that feels so right in a world gone crazy. Surely, Eliot’s statement is applicable to art in general, painting included. Though I sometimes wonder if art can communicate in ways that make understanding wholly irrelevant. Like love, indeed.
How odd when similar things happen with art works I’ve seen, heard or read many times before. Like Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden album when I bought it on vinyl for the first time. But also Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a novel I thought I knew well enough. Both hit me again recently, which made me feel quite emotional, too. Who knows, maybe I’m just going through a midlife crisis. (Ah, good. If I’m halfway through, I will apparently live to be 92.)
I read Woolf again to be able to better understand a book I was planning on reviewing before lockdown struck: Katherine Smyth’s All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf (2019), a memoir I was going to read alongside David James’s academic study of literary consolation, Discrepant Solace (2019). Smyth’s debut book tells the story of her life so far, from her Rhode Island childhood to the aftermath of the death of her alcoholic father. One of its key themes is the question how a favourite novel – To the Lighthouse – may provide the language for the often traumatic experiences Smyth describes, especially in relation to her father’s deterioration and later illness. Reflections on consolation establish a binding thread in a generically complex book, which calls for a closer look at Smyth’s quest for the consolation of literature with the help of David James’s state-of-the-art research.
Back to The Lighthouse
Set in the early-twentieth century, Woolf’s fifth novel tells the story of how the Ramsay family spend their holidays on the Isle of Skye, in the company of friends like painter Lily Briscoe and the young couple Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle. It begins with a scene in which Mr Ramsay berates his wife for promising James, their youngest son, a trip to the nearby lighthouse when the weather is making a turn for the worse. The Ramsays entertain their guests with dinner parties, among other things, but there are tensions between Mr and Mrs R. as well as between their friends. In the middle part of the novel, Mrs Ramsay and two of her eight children die, one as a casualty of the First World War. The concluding part, which takes place ten years after the first, sees the family reunite on Skye. James Ramsay gets to sail to the nearby lighthouse at last and Lily completes the painting she started in the novel’s early chapters.
While preparing my review of All the Lives We Ever Lived I was thinking if Smyth’s attraction to To the Lighthouse could be explained by its metafictionality, which might be of special interest to life-writers. From its opening pages onwards, the novel probes the nature of art itself – for example, in passages in which characters like Lily think about the capacity of painting to give access to “wisdom”, “knowledge”, “truth”, or a one-ness with others that is all communication-before-understanding. Lily is fascinated by Mrs Ramsay and how she appears to be at peace with her life despite a visibly tense marriage, the more so while many other people present wrestle with confinement in one way or another (Charles Tansley, an admirer of Mr Ramsay, tells her that women can’t paint). She hopes to capture in art what she “sees”, as she refers to it, while observing Mrs Ramsay, her family and their visitors: the “essence” of other human beings and their relations with each other.
Lily’s ruminations on painting resemble those of an author like Woolf herself. And it’s hard to escape the supposition that if she had been a writer of fiction she would have produced a book like To the Lighthouse, with its shifting perspectives and innovative use of focalization. In the novel, the Ramsays’ holiday home comes to life especially in chapters that describe how Mrs Ramsay experiences it inwardly (as in chapter 5 of “The Window”, the first part of the novel). How different this is in sections focalized around her husband’s consciousness: he is considering the Questions of Life, but he doesn’t really take notice of his wife, his children or much of the drama in which they’re all involved. Ironically, Mr Ramsay may be a celebrated “metaphysician” among his student-disciples, but he does not really think that deeply – unless he’s reflecting on Shakespeare, Thomas Carlyle or his own reputation. He doesn’t “see”, because he doesn’t feel, Lily would say. She understands that he’s “afraid to own his feelings” (50-1) for fear of being seen for what he probably is, a mediocre academic who hasn’t fulfilled the promise of his early career.
As an artist, Lily wishes she could be one with her subjects like you would if you loved them – thus, beyond the type of philosophizing that distracts Mr Ramsay from seeing life properly. She asks herself if “loving, as people called it, [could] make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head against Mrs Ramsay’s knee” (57). She wonders if she’s in love with Mrs R. and if artistic vision could be as sharp as love, going straight to the essence of others without having to consult a Great Man or two first.
I can imagine why Smyth would be fascinated with To the Lighthouse. Of all of Woolf’s novels, it may also be my own favourite (ask me again tomorrow, however, and I might choose Orlando – no, Jacob’s Room). But I can also understand why a novel that thematizes the above would be the perfect main intertext of a solace-seeking memoir that inevitably struggles to find form for Smyth’s subject matter.
Discrepant Solace
Discrepant Solace (2019) by David James, an authority in the fields of the legacy of literary Modernism and “uplit”, presents the first in-depth analysis of “a peculiarly prevalent phenomenon for contemporary writing” (35): the way in which consolation “as an affective state [is] staged by the formal components of literary works themselves” (7). James is interested in how the forms of present-day novels and memoirs about painful life experiences force readers to examine solace without offering easy escape routes from those experiences through the aestheticizing of trauma. James argues that, in early-twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing, solace is actually “discrepant” and undeserving of the “hazy reputation” of consolation in art in general (9). The way in which “discrepant solace brings together narratives that twin the aesthetic conundrum surrounding how writing consoles with the ethical one of whether consolation is desirable at all” (7) is even more of an issue in memoir, James contends (7 and 10) – something to bear in mind while scrutinizing Smyth’s book. Historicizing the phenomenon in literature, he points to the “modernist genesis” of discrepant solace (51) and suggests that it’s tempting “to see the heightened reflexivity of [its] articulation as a recent strategy belonging to texts that are working through postmodernism’s numerous afterlives” (24). But more about that later…
To the Lighthouse is actually one of the first literary texts James discusses. His analysis of discrepant solace in Woolf prefaces a close reading of Ian McEwan’s more recent novel Atonement (2001), an example of a contemporary fiction processing the legacy of Modernism. He argues that the celebration of twentieth-century literary Modernism’s “criticality” (i.e. its power to unsettle and subvert) is rooted in criticism’s traditionally hostile view of literature as a medium of consolation. Arguments along these lines by, to name but a few, Herbert Marcuse, Neil Lazarus and Tyrus Miller, “rehearse the assumption that as soon as literature consoles it immediately compromises its own capacity for critique” (45). James warns against the type of binary thinking that sees “disconsolation” as “the only alternative to consolation” (45) and offers his detailed reading of To the Lighthouse as evidence of how Woolf “doesn’t treat consolation uncritically” (46). “For what we witness in To the Lighthouse”, he says, “is neither the outright refutation of solace with a force that ‘engenders disconsolation,’ in Lazarus’s phrase, nor a plea to transcend history’s harm through ‘the admirable design of words,’ to recall Miller’s” (47).
James writes that in Woolf’s novel style does not smooth over trauma and pain (for example, by providing comfort in the shape of a false sense of wholeness), but its restless syntax and rhythm do not combine to simply deny its readers the easy comfort of an aesthetically pleasing form either. As he shows, modernist writing like or inspired by Woolf’s rather forces its readers to reflect on the very nature of consolation as well as on the question how art may offer solace in the first place:
“the recognition (…) of consolation’s unsustainability is something [Woolf’s and McEwan’s] fictions transport in compelling forms that refuse to deliver the redemptions of pristine design. Only by this refusal, these novelists suggest, can literature articulate what [Philip] Tomlinson termed the ‘better-founded solace’ that comes (…) ‘from looking squarely at the worst’” (56).
The Novel and the Memoir
The paratexts of Smyth’s All the Lives We Ever Lived already signal the memoir’s reliance on earlier books: its main title is a phrase from a poem cited by Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, while its dustjacket clearly references Vanessa Bell’s designs for the first editions of her sister’s novels and other writing. In addition, immediately after the dedication to her mother, Smyth includes a quote from Woolf’s novel as motto. Tellingly, it is a passage (from chapter 7, in the third part of the novel) in which Lily sees Mrs Ramsay disappear from view: “It was strange how clearly she saw her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinths or lilies, she vanished”.
In many other places, too, To the Lighthouse supplies Smyth with the language and form she needs to be able to write about her childhood and parents. In some cases, she literally lets Woolf’s characters speak for her, especially where she’s interpreting the meaning of things that happened to her in the past. Interestingly, Smyth quite often quotes Lily in these instances:
My father took the Laser [a sailing boat] on my return. He always left the basin, and sometimes I would stand on the float, still in my life jacket, watching the white sail grow fainter and fainter (“So much depends,” thinks Lily, watching from the lawn as the dull speck that is the Ramsay’s sailboat recedes into the bay, “upon distance”; so much depends upon “whether people are near us of far from us.”). (81)
Even as a child I had looked at this picture with interest, feeling a kind of condescending sorrow for the old man from my grandmother’s other life who had had the bad luck to die. (“Oh, the dead!” thinks Lily, “one pitied them, one brushed aside, one had even a little contempt for them.”). (116)
Woolf’s novel also hands Smyth frames with which to order her own experiences – most notably when it comes to her parents’ relationship. However, she does not schematically project the story of the Ramsays onto her own family’s situation. She reflects on the similarities between her parents’ marriage and that of the Ramsays, but she makes comparisons with that of Paul and Minta in other places as well. Mrs Ramsay features heavily in sections about Smyth’s relationship with her own mother, but when her father dies of cancer, he suddenly becomes the Mrs Ramsay of Smyth’s book. In this respect, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a challenging read: by continuously drawing attention to its form (including the ways in which it makes use of its intertextual relation with Woolf), the memoir highlights the complexity of seeking solace in literary writing.
Halfway through her book (in chapter 18), Smyth recognizes that her parents’ marriage can only be done justice in fiction, or in life-writing that takes a fictional text as its main frame of reference. As Smyth suggests but never explicitly states, the solace of fiction is not in the answers it offers to life’s biggest questions, but in the many perspectives on those it presents. Because fiction is inconclusive by nature, it can only ever be indirectly applicable to readers’ lives. Indeed, as All the Lives We Ever Lived so compellingly shows, a novel’s “indirection” allows readers to compare their own situations with those of fictional characters without offering definitive conclusions.
The same can be said for life-writing so inextricably linked with fiction, especially if it is fiction by Woolf, whose work, Smyth observes, “is characterized by inconclusiveness” (120). Reading Woolf helps Smyth understand that grief need not be what it is popularly understood to feel or look like (255). But the realization that solace may be “discrepant” might actually be consoling in itself:
“[T]here are… readers for whom Woolf’s nuanced portrayal of loss – which acknowledges the frustration, inconstancy, and even tedium of grief in addition to its horror – provides not just a welcome challenge to the prevailing wisdom but also a vital consolation” (255).
New Registers of Feeling and Thinking
What would David James make of All the Lives We Ever Lived, which, of course, documents another reader’s search for consolation in To the Lighthouse – precisely the kind of text he would have studied if he had focused on reader responses to discrepant solace in Woolfian modernist fiction? Its form might further complicate matters: combining autobiography, biography and literary criticism, Smyth’s memoir raises the question whose pain and redemption we’re talking about when discussing the work of consolation in literature. Is it the author’s, as is most likely in the case of a memoir (which is not to say, of course, that the fiction of To the Lighthouse may not be a processing Virginia Woolf’s own feelings of loss and mourning)? Or is it a fictional character’s, like Lily Briscoe trying to cope with the death of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse? What about readers who seek solace personally and perhaps identify with the suffering of the subjects of life-writing and fiction? A book about the solace of fiction like Smyth’s might console yet other readers. As Radhika Jones writes in her New York Times review of All the Lives We Ever Lived: “I suspect [Smyth’s] book could itself become solace for people navigating their way through the complexities of grief for their fallen idols”.
James’s book is an important publication, not only in the sense that he spends ample time on the intricate interplay of all of these levels of consolation, or because he connects at least three areas of research in refreshingly new ways: contemporary fiction, life-writing and the “post-postmodern”. He also convincingly shows how present-day literature’s discrepant solace finds a precedent in early-twentieth-century Modernism, thus enlarging our understanding of the extent to which contemporary, post-postmodern culture can be seen to work through the legacies of earlier aesthetic regimes and sensibilities. In fact, James’s perceptive analysis of contemporary literature’s exploration of misunderstood or less celebrated aspects of Modernism bears great significance for the discussion of what academics have labelled “Metamodernism”, the structure of feeling that is said to have replaced Postmodernism as a cultural dominant.
Like scholars working in that field, he acknowledges the emergence of new “registers of feeling” that “at once disobey the commodifying, banalizing logic of postmodern pastiche and contravene the equally flattening, bureaucratized logic of neoliberal rationality” (224). However, he refrains from using the “Metamodernism” term: “If the postmodern model no longer fits certain limbs of affective experience in literature now, then the understandable appetite for replacement labels seems less important than recognizing that writers’ unexpected kinships possess aesthetic, philosophical, and political valences that exceed compartmentalization” (224). Future research will shed more light on how the particular needs and concerns of early-twenty-first-century authors like Smyth inform their reinterpretations of twentieth-century Modernism and, so, give shape to post-millennial art and culture.
The Consolation of Inconclusiveness
All the Lives We Ever Lived is, then, as much a book about the consolation of literature as an example of a text that offers a version of solace itself. It’s certainly not an easy read, let alone a book that dispels trauma by turning a troubling life narrative into a perfectly formed, redemptive story. Indeed, as its subtitle indicates, it’s about Katherine Smyth seeking instead of finding solace. But precisely as a result, her memoir is an unforgettable reminder of the power of literature as a medium of discrepant solace. Reading it with David James’s main arguments in mind, I felt compelled to ask myself how books console me personally – a question that, post-lockdown, seems to increasingly occupy others as well (see, for example, Michael Ignatieff’s On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times (2021), but also Laura de Jong’s 2023 series of author interviews about literary consolation for de Volkskrant newspaper).
Of course, I’m a different To the Lighthouse reader than both Smyth and James, but it could very well be that the new impression the novel’s made on me is, in fact, related to the solace issue that James so insightfully analyzes. I certainly find hope in the potential of both fiction and life-writing to continuously generate alternative meanings and acquire new relevance to readers already familiar with certain texts. Their lack of wholeness, closure or soothing answers to unsettling questions holds a promise (i.e. of future meaning and relevance), which also positively affects my experience of reality. Because even when its promise may never be fulfilled, literature encourages me to imagine real life as something that can and always will evolve. Thanks to great books like Woolf’s, I now see the world around me as inconclusive in the most optimistic sense of the word. And after reading Smyth and James, I’d like to think that if fiction has any responsibility towards reality, it’s not to faithfully represent what already is, but to show what could also be. Literature will always keep communicating, and there is real solace in that kind of generosity. Or that’s what I think. And if I’m wrong, I have at least another 46 years to find out.
Works Cited
James, David. Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation. Oxford UP, 2019.
Jones, Radhika. “A Grieving Woman’s Eloquent Homage to Virginia Woolf.” The New York Times, 11 Feb. 2019. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/books/review/katharine-smyth-all-lives-we-ever-lived.html.
Smyth, Katherine. All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf. Atlantic Books, 2019.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Vintage Classics, 2016.
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