Essay: "To the Lighthouse" and "The Trial" ...
By Eric Shapiro - Goldsmith's University of London - Spring 2011 - The Art of the Novel
The Human Mind as God and the Architect of Meaning in To the Lighthouse and The Trial
Although he was certainly generalizing, George Lukacs was nonetheless onto something when he described the novel as “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Many writers, particularly Modernists, defied the assumption that the world is governed by certain indisputable laws set forth by a perfect, omniscient being. Casting aside the rigid limitations of such a worldview, Modernist fiction instead focused on a far more malleable architect of reality: the human mind. No longer was it possible for the reader to render definitive judgments of narrative and characters based on a defined way of looking at the world.
On the contrary, understanding the contents of a novel as the unique interpretation of one or more quirky human brains makes it impossible to arrive at an “accurate” picture of what has transpired. Replacing the moral laws of god with the subjective, sometimes-inconsistent worldviews of human beings introduced an infinite range of possibilities for the novel form. While Modernist writers did not necessarily dismiss the concept of universal standards outright, they implied that many of the preconceptions human beings have about the world, Judeo-Christian and otherwise, are worthy of interrogation.
On its surface, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse chronicles a pedestrian experience: a family takes visits their summer home along with several friends and acquaintances. Not much “happens,” in a traditional narrative sense, over the course of the novel. Woolf tellingly chooses gloss over the few events that convention has taught readers to identify as significant in a work of fiction. This is because To the Lighthouse is only passingly concerned with the external lives of its characters.
The bulk of the novel is devoted to characters’ internal lives, as they struggle to come to terms with the lack of any concrete framework by which to interpret reality. Woolf offers a compelling commentary on how every human mind digests and makes sense of the perplexing world around it. In the absence of a God and/or any absolute rules, every individual must come to terms with his or her own existence. The manner in which one chooses to do so has a profound impact not only on their personal contentment, but also on their relationships with others.
If there is no God, it follows that there is also no afterlife. Therefore, the characters in To the Lighthouse seek to reconcile their limited time on earth with their intense desire to achieve some form of permanence. The means of striving for this permanence is a reflection of their internal proclivities. Woolf does not make any judgment as to what method is right or wrong in an absolute sense. However, she does portray the effects of various methods and mindsets on characters’ sense of fulfillment in life, as well as how others receive them.
Being a man of great intellect, Mr. Ramsay attempts to make his mark through his writings on philosophy. He is tortured by a persistent feeling that he will not be remembered after he dies, which interferes with is capacity to enjoy life in the moment and causes him to seek constant praise from others in order to sustain his anemic ego. His relationship with his wife, Mrs. Ramsay, is in part based on her eagerness to assuage his insecurities to validate her own self-worth.
However, this tendency to be self-deprecating in order to elicit assurance of his brilliance is not always well received. Mr. Ramsay’s practical mindset makes him unable to take pleasure in non-tangible things. The absence of belief in any universal source of recognition (one that god or religion could provide), combined with an inability to seek fulfillment in social interaction or aesthetic beauty, dooms Ramsey to a degree of unhappiness. He is smart enough to realize that he cannot attain true permanence through others’ praise, and he is unable to fully shake the feeling of insignificance. That said, he takes a certain comfort in expressing his problems and the problems of the world in philosophical terms. By reducing emotions and intangible concepts to well-defined theories, he makes them less threatening. Without any inherent or purpose, Mr. Ramsey constructs profound, but ultimately manufactured philosophical concepts that provide him with comfort.
Mrs. Ramsey is not an intellectual like her husband, instead viewing the world in more emotional terms. Whereas Mr. Ramsay looks for fulfillment in his reputation as a philosopher, Mrs. Ramsay finds meaning in social structure and interaction. She likes to see herself as a source of stability and emotional sustenance for her family and friends. She measures her own self-worth on her capacity to support others. She is ostensibly less selfish and more empathetic than Mr. Ramsay, and as a result she is better liked. The male characters in particular feel that they are in love with Mrs. Ramsay because, in addition to her physical beauty, she consistently showers them with the praise that they need to suppress their own insecurity. However, Mrs. Ramsey acknowledges that her motives are not entirely selfless in that she expects recognition, perhaps even adulation in return for spending her entirely life devoted to other people.
Mrs. Ramsey values herself for the important role she plays in an artificial social structure. According to this structure, gender roles are of paramount importance. Therefore, she disapproves of Lily Briscoe’s unwillingness to get married and fulfill her feminine role of sustaining a husband and caring for children. Mrs. Ramsay is perhaps, on some level, jealous of Lily’s independence, as she herself is unable to recognize her own identity.
Rather than fulfilling any ambitions of her own, Mrs. Ramsay achieves some level of satisfaction by creating memorable experiences for others. Haunted by a sense of loneliness stemming from the isolation of each individual human consciousness, her ultimate goal is to forge connections, however fleeting, between other people. In doing so, she creates a powerful memory that transcends the ephemeral. As a superb hostess and socially intelligent woman, she is able to create such a moment at the dinner table that will persist for as long as her family and guests are alive. Despite her premature death, Mrs. Ramsey remains a strong presence for the entirety of To the Lighthouse, suggesting that she has succeeding in achieving a certain form of life after death, namely through the imprint she has left on others.
Lily Briscoe represents a much different kind of woman. She is unwilling to subscribe to the gender roles forced on her by society. Fiercely independent, she rejects Mrs. Ramsay’s advice to get married. As she and potential suitor William Banks watch the Ramsay children play catch, she imagines herself and her companion as a generic married couple observing their children. Despite doubts, exacerbated by Tansley, about women’s artistic capabilities, she chooses not to enter into the domestic sphere and instead to paint.
Lily is fully devoted to her artistic pursuits and does not want to be distracted by the responsibilities of family life. While Mr. And Mrs. Ramsay respectively seek to achieve immortality through philosophy and social interaction, Lilly attempts to do so through her art. As a painter, Lily is devoted to recording the world as she sees it to capture the essence of a moment. Also, like Mrs. Ramsay, she seeks to bridge the gap between human consciousnesses, to achieve a certain unity, through painting. Also, in preserving her vision of a brief moment in time, she too attains a form if immortality.
As mentioned before, Woolf never endorses a particular means of achieving permanence, nor does she even suggest that doing so is possible and/or a worthy ambition. Ultimately though, her characters’ success or failure is not the main question. Far more important is how the characters’ quest for permanence impacts their enjoyment of life and colors their interactions with others.
It is more plausible to infer that, to Woolf, no mindset or method of attaining permanence is without its flaws. Each of the three characters discussed above is left unsatisfied with their life in some way. Whether this implies that it is impossible to find complete fulfillment in life or whether it is merely wrong to rely on a fixed way of seeking fulfillment at the exclusion of others is subject to interpretation. Although it is of course always dubious to seek insight into a text by referring to the life of its author, it is tempting to consider whether Woolf’s suicide has some bearing on this question. Regardless, there are undeniably moments in To The Lighthouse where characters do achieve a sense of eternity and, consequently, a taste of the contentment that immortality provides.
Franz Kafka is a much different kind of writer than Virginia Woolf. The latter is concerned with observing the consciousnesses of different people, showcasing a diverse array of worldviews that often contradict each other. In The Lighthouse suggests that bridging the gap between human minds can foster a feeling of unity. In exploring the inner thoughts of multiple characters and reconciling them at specific moments, Woolf accomplishes this in her writing, much as her characters do in their own varying ways (philosophy, socializing, art).
Kafka’s writing, on the other hand, is extremely insular. In The Trial, he retains a focus on Josef K., a protagonist plagued as much by his own demons as by the forces of a mysterious bureaucracy bent on convicting him of some unnamed crime. There is little to suggest that any other individual human consciousness exists besides the neurotic mind of K. All of the other “characters,” if you can even refer to them as such, seem to exist solely in relation to the protagonist. These characters fade in and out of the narrative like figures in a nightmare. All of them, even the ostensibly benevolent ones, have a sinister aura about them; it is as if they are all aware of something that K. and the reader are not. However, at other times they seem to be just as oblivious as K. to the true nature of “the court” and its laws.
K. is a man of above average intelligence. He proves to be quite articulate at his hearing, something that he does not hesitate to take credit for. He has also apparently achieved a prestigious position at the bank where he works at an unusually young age. Nevertheless, K.’s intellectual capacities are lacking in one key area: self-insight. He is always ready to caste blame on other people for his predicament, but never once does he consider the possibility that he is in fact guilty of something. Although the nature of K.’s crime remains unclear, the reader gets the impression that it is somehow tied to his stubborn refusal to engage in any form of introspection.
From the beginning of The Trial, K. is determined to maintain a sense of normalcy in the face of increasingly bizarre developments. His consciousness engages in a war with reality that he is utterly convinced that he will win. K. is not willing to consider the disturbing possibility that he cannot exonerate himself through conventional means. While it easy to sympathize with K. early on, particularly at the beginning of the novel when three men stand ready to accuse him of a crime just as he wakes up in the morning, his continual efforts to impose normalcy grow progressively more absurd and frustrating as the narrative progresses.
K. alternately pretends that his trial is of no consequence and digs his whole deeper by impetuously refusing to cooperate with those that seem willing to help him. This absurdity peaks when, as his sentencing grows closer, he goes into work as if everything is normal. K. seems torn between denial and stubbornness, two traits that continually sabotage his effort to clear his name. After a while, the reader wants to see him get punished for his close-mindedness, although being stabbed in the heart is perhaps a bit severe.
As mentioned before, none of the characters in The Trial bear much resemblance to actual people. The closest thing to another character is “the court,” the unidentified bureaucracy that has accused K. of a crime. The individuals affiliated with the court are merely peaces of a much larger design. The court painter Titorelli revels to K. that the various representatives of the court that he has encountered have no real power beyond dragging out legal proceedings. Furthermore, no one knows who makes the law, or even what the law is. The heads of the courts remain unrevealed, but their influence is felt throughout the novel. In the absence of God, the laws of the court are absolute. In the dystopian world that K. inhabits, there is no sense of morality; in its place is the seemingly arbitrary law of a power that is never defined and is clearly not accountable to the people. In this way, the court serves as the antagonist of The Trial.
Despite the unfairness (one cannot say injustice, since justice is determined by the court) of K.s punishment, it is difficult to feel sorry for him. As mentioned before, he is totally unable to think outside the box when the situation clearly demands it. Perhaps doing so would not save his life, but it would make him more sympathetic. Instead, he is arrogant and impulsive, devoting more effort to gratifying his sexual urges than clearing his name. Furthermore, he never considers his own complicity in the society that the court represents in its worst (possibly inevitable) form.
By the time K realizes the serious threat posed by the court, it is too late for him to do anything about it. In addition, K. in many ways buys into the norms set by the court. He too is an anonymous member of a bureaucracy (the bank) and does not seem concerned about anything other than furthering his career. This is not to say he is equivalent to the court; he does display traces of humanity, such as when he feels guilty about men being whipped due to a complaint he lodged against them. Nevertheless, he is not entirely a victim. In buying into the norms of an inhuman, bureaucratic society, he is somewhat to blame for his own demise
Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka present two vastly different views of a society without God or inherent meaning. The formers’ view, while certainly far from optimistic, allows for some sense of hope in the capacity for individuals to develop their own worldviews and connect with each other in rare moments of unity. The world portrayed by Kafka, on the contrary, is entirely bleak. In the absence of universal or divine meaning, the all-powerful court, a manifestation of mankind’s worst instincts, rules according to its own unfair, inscrutable laws. The architects and precise nature of these laws are never revealed, but their effect is apparent: an amoral, unthinking society subject to an unaccountable bureaucracy. Ultimately, Woolf leaves open the possibility that human consciousness is capable of transcending the isolation of a world without inherent meaning, while Kafka implies that such an absence of meaning, or at least the absence of belief in some meaning, will deprive us of our humanity.
The Human Mind as God and the Architect of Meaning in To the Lighthouse and The Trial
Although he was certainly generalizing, George Lukacs was nonetheless onto something when he described the novel as “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Many writers, particularly Modernists, defied the assumption that the world is governed by certain indisputable laws set forth by a perfect, omniscient being. Casting aside the rigid limitations of such a worldview, Modernist fiction instead focused on a far more malleable architect of reality: the human mind. No longer was it possible for the reader to render definitive judgments of narrative and characters based on a defined way of looking at the world.
On the contrary, understanding the contents of a novel as the unique interpretation of one or more quirky human brains makes it impossible to arrive at an “accurate” picture of what has transpired. Replacing the moral laws of god with the subjective, sometimes-inconsistent worldviews of human beings introduced an infinite range of possibilities for the novel form. While Modernist writers did not necessarily dismiss the concept of universal standards outright, they implied that many of the preconceptions human beings have about the world, Judeo-Christian and otherwise, are worthy of interrogation.
On its surface, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse chronicles a pedestrian experience: a family takes visits their summer home along with several friends and acquaintances. Not much “happens,” in a traditional narrative sense, over the course of the novel. Woolf tellingly chooses gloss over the few events that convention has taught readers to identify as significant in a work of fiction. This is because To the Lighthouse is only passingly concerned with the external lives of its characters.
The bulk of the novel is devoted to characters’ internal lives, as they struggle to come to terms with the lack of any concrete framework by which to interpret reality. Woolf offers a compelling commentary on how every human mind digests and makes sense of the perplexing world around it. In the absence of a God and/or any absolute rules, every individual must come to terms with his or her own existence. The manner in which one chooses to do so has a profound impact not only on their personal contentment, but also on their relationships with others.
If there is no God, it follows that there is also no afterlife. Therefore, the characters in To the Lighthouse seek to reconcile their limited time on earth with their intense desire to achieve some form of permanence. The means of striving for this permanence is a reflection of their internal proclivities. Woolf does not make any judgment as to what method is right or wrong in an absolute sense. However, she does portray the effects of various methods and mindsets on characters’ sense of fulfillment in life, as well as how others receive them.
Being a man of great intellect, Mr. Ramsay attempts to make his mark through his writings on philosophy. He is tortured by a persistent feeling that he will not be remembered after he dies, which interferes with is capacity to enjoy life in the moment and causes him to seek constant praise from others in order to sustain his anemic ego. His relationship with his wife, Mrs. Ramsay, is in part based on her eagerness to assuage his insecurities to validate her own self-worth.
However, this tendency to be self-deprecating in order to elicit assurance of his brilliance is not always well received. Mr. Ramsay’s practical mindset makes him unable to take pleasure in non-tangible things. The absence of belief in any universal source of recognition (one that god or religion could provide), combined with an inability to seek fulfillment in social interaction or aesthetic beauty, dooms Ramsey to a degree of unhappiness. He is smart enough to realize that he cannot attain true permanence through others’ praise, and he is unable to fully shake the feeling of insignificance. That said, he takes a certain comfort in expressing his problems and the problems of the world in philosophical terms. By reducing emotions and intangible concepts to well-defined theories, he makes them less threatening. Without any inherent or purpose, Mr. Ramsey constructs profound, but ultimately manufactured philosophical concepts that provide him with comfort.
Mrs. Ramsey is not an intellectual like her husband, instead viewing the world in more emotional terms. Whereas Mr. Ramsay looks for fulfillment in his reputation as a philosopher, Mrs. Ramsay finds meaning in social structure and interaction. She likes to see herself as a source of stability and emotional sustenance for her family and friends. She measures her own self-worth on her capacity to support others. She is ostensibly less selfish and more empathetic than Mr. Ramsay, and as a result she is better liked. The male characters in particular feel that they are in love with Mrs. Ramsay because, in addition to her physical beauty, she consistently showers them with the praise that they need to suppress their own insecurity. However, Mrs. Ramsey acknowledges that her motives are not entirely selfless in that she expects recognition, perhaps even adulation in return for spending her entirely life devoted to other people.
Mrs. Ramsey values herself for the important role she plays in an artificial social structure. According to this structure, gender roles are of paramount importance. Therefore, she disapproves of Lily Briscoe’s unwillingness to get married and fulfill her feminine role of sustaining a husband and caring for children. Mrs. Ramsay is perhaps, on some level, jealous of Lily’s independence, as she herself is unable to recognize her own identity.
Rather than fulfilling any ambitions of her own, Mrs. Ramsay achieves some level of satisfaction by creating memorable experiences for others. Haunted by a sense of loneliness stemming from the isolation of each individual human consciousness, her ultimate goal is to forge connections, however fleeting, between other people. In doing so, she creates a powerful memory that transcends the ephemeral. As a superb hostess and socially intelligent woman, she is able to create such a moment at the dinner table that will persist for as long as her family and guests are alive. Despite her premature death, Mrs. Ramsey remains a strong presence for the entirety of To the Lighthouse, suggesting that she has succeeding in achieving a certain form of life after death, namely through the imprint she has left on others.
Lily Briscoe represents a much different kind of woman. She is unwilling to subscribe to the gender roles forced on her by society. Fiercely independent, she rejects Mrs. Ramsay’s advice to get married. As she and potential suitor William Banks watch the Ramsay children play catch, she imagines herself and her companion as a generic married couple observing their children. Despite doubts, exacerbated by Tansley, about women’s artistic capabilities, she chooses not to enter into the domestic sphere and instead to paint.
Lily is fully devoted to her artistic pursuits and does not want to be distracted by the responsibilities of family life. While Mr. And Mrs. Ramsay respectively seek to achieve immortality through philosophy and social interaction, Lilly attempts to do so through her art. As a painter, Lily is devoted to recording the world as she sees it to capture the essence of a moment. Also, like Mrs. Ramsay, she seeks to bridge the gap between human consciousnesses, to achieve a certain unity, through painting. Also, in preserving her vision of a brief moment in time, she too attains a form if immortality.
As mentioned before, Woolf never endorses a particular means of achieving permanence, nor does she even suggest that doing so is possible and/or a worthy ambition. Ultimately though, her characters’ success or failure is not the main question. Far more important is how the characters’ quest for permanence impacts their enjoyment of life and colors their interactions with others.
It is more plausible to infer that, to Woolf, no mindset or method of attaining permanence is without its flaws. Each of the three characters discussed above is left unsatisfied with their life in some way. Whether this implies that it is impossible to find complete fulfillment in life or whether it is merely wrong to rely on a fixed way of seeking fulfillment at the exclusion of others is subject to interpretation. Although it is of course always dubious to seek insight into a text by referring to the life of its author, it is tempting to consider whether Woolf’s suicide has some bearing on this question. Regardless, there are undeniably moments in To The Lighthouse where characters do achieve a sense of eternity and, consequently, a taste of the contentment that immortality provides.
Franz Kafka is a much different kind of writer than Virginia Woolf. The latter is concerned with observing the consciousnesses of different people, showcasing a diverse array of worldviews that often contradict each other. In The Lighthouse suggests that bridging the gap between human minds can foster a feeling of unity. In exploring the inner thoughts of multiple characters and reconciling them at specific moments, Woolf accomplishes this in her writing, much as her characters do in their own varying ways (philosophy, socializing, art).
Kafka’s writing, on the other hand, is extremely insular. In The Trial, he retains a focus on Josef K., a protagonist plagued as much by his own demons as by the forces of a mysterious bureaucracy bent on convicting him of some unnamed crime. There is little to suggest that any other individual human consciousness exists besides the neurotic mind of K. All of the other “characters,” if you can even refer to them as such, seem to exist solely in relation to the protagonist. These characters fade in and out of the narrative like figures in a nightmare. All of them, even the ostensibly benevolent ones, have a sinister aura about them; it is as if they are all aware of something that K. and the reader are not. However, at other times they seem to be just as oblivious as K. to the true nature of “the court” and its laws.
K. is a man of above average intelligence. He proves to be quite articulate at his hearing, something that he does not hesitate to take credit for. He has also apparently achieved a prestigious position at the bank where he works at an unusually young age. Nevertheless, K.’s intellectual capacities are lacking in one key area: self-insight. He is always ready to caste blame on other people for his predicament, but never once does he consider the possibility that he is in fact guilty of something. Although the nature of K.’s crime remains unclear, the reader gets the impression that it is somehow tied to his stubborn refusal to engage in any form of introspection.
From the beginning of The Trial, K. is determined to maintain a sense of normalcy in the face of increasingly bizarre developments. His consciousness engages in a war with reality that he is utterly convinced that he will win. K. is not willing to consider the disturbing possibility that he cannot exonerate himself through conventional means. While it easy to sympathize with K. early on, particularly at the beginning of the novel when three men stand ready to accuse him of a crime just as he wakes up in the morning, his continual efforts to impose normalcy grow progressively more absurd and frustrating as the narrative progresses.
K. alternately pretends that his trial is of no consequence and digs his whole deeper by impetuously refusing to cooperate with those that seem willing to help him. This absurdity peaks when, as his sentencing grows closer, he goes into work as if everything is normal. K. seems torn between denial and stubbornness, two traits that continually sabotage his effort to clear his name. After a while, the reader wants to see him get punished for his close-mindedness, although being stabbed in the heart is perhaps a bit severe.
As mentioned before, none of the characters in The Trial bear much resemblance to actual people. The closest thing to another character is “the court,” the unidentified bureaucracy that has accused K. of a crime. The individuals affiliated with the court are merely peaces of a much larger design. The court painter Titorelli revels to K. that the various representatives of the court that he has encountered have no real power beyond dragging out legal proceedings. Furthermore, no one knows who makes the law, or even what the law is. The heads of the courts remain unrevealed, but their influence is felt throughout the novel. In the absence of God, the laws of the court are absolute. In the dystopian world that K. inhabits, there is no sense of morality; in its place is the seemingly arbitrary law of a power that is never defined and is clearly not accountable to the people. In this way, the court serves as the antagonist of The Trial.
Despite the unfairness (one cannot say injustice, since justice is determined by the court) of K.s punishment, it is difficult to feel sorry for him. As mentioned before, he is totally unable to think outside the box when the situation clearly demands it. Perhaps doing so would not save his life, but it would make him more sympathetic. Instead, he is arrogant and impulsive, devoting more effort to gratifying his sexual urges than clearing his name. Furthermore, he never considers his own complicity in the society that the court represents in its worst (possibly inevitable) form.
By the time K realizes the serious threat posed by the court, it is too late for him to do anything about it. In addition, K. in many ways buys into the norms set by the court. He too is an anonymous member of a bureaucracy (the bank) and does not seem concerned about anything other than furthering his career. This is not to say he is equivalent to the court; he does display traces of humanity, such as when he feels guilty about men being whipped due to a complaint he lodged against them. Nevertheless, he is not entirely a victim. In buying into the norms of an inhuman, bureaucratic society, he is somewhat to blame for his own demise
Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka present two vastly different views of a society without God or inherent meaning. The formers’ view, while certainly far from optimistic, allows for some sense of hope in the capacity for individuals to develop their own worldviews and connect with each other in rare moments of unity. The world portrayed by Kafka, on the contrary, is entirely bleak. In the absence of universal or divine meaning, the all-powerful court, a manifestation of mankind’s worst instincts, rules according to its own unfair, inscrutable laws. The architects and precise nature of these laws are never revealed, but their effect is apparent: an amoral, unthinking society subject to an unaccountable bureaucracy. Ultimately, Woolf leaves open the possibility that human consciousness is capable of transcending the isolation of a world without inherent meaning, while Kafka implies that such an absence of meaning, or at least the absence of belief in some meaning, will deprive us of our humanity.