The philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’

Last year on the LRB's Close Readings podcast, Jonathan Ray and James Wood discussed philosophical style in the work of writers from Sren Kierkegaard to Iris Murdoch. Today we're bringing you one of the most popular episodes of Conversations in Philosophy on Virginia Woolf, in which James and Jonathan consider to the Lighthouse as a philosophical novel. You can listen to the full series now and to all our other series covering literature, philosophy and history from ancient Greece to the present day, including James Wood's new series on realism on the Close Readings podcast. And for April only, you can get 50% off a 12 month subscription if you use the code WULFF at checkout. This offer is only available through the link in the description and not if you subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts.

0:00

Hello and welcome to Conversations in Philosophy, a close reading series from the London Review of Books. I'm James Wood, staff writer at the New Yorker and occasional contributor to the lrb, and I'm joined as ever, by Jonathan Ray, philosopher and regular contributor for the London Review of Books.

0:48

Hello, James.

1:07

Hello, Jonathan. So today we are discussing in our last session of what's been a wonderful series for both of us, at least I speak for myself. We're discussing Virginia Woolf's novel of 1927, to the Lighthouse. It's interesting to go back and look at Wolf's diaries at the time that she was writing to the Lighthouse. She'd had a nervous breakdown in 1926. It was a period of great strain and she tentatively seems to be aware of having pulled something off, something magnificent off as she finishes to the Lighthouse. But it's all uncertain and provisional and she hands it to Leonard as ever, and needs Leonard's, her husband's imprimatur in some way to reassure her that, that. That she's really achieved something. So here she is writing this beautiful novel which is, as many of our listeners will know, a deeply autobiographical one, though it's nominally set in the Isle of Skye. Just most of those details actually, actually, if you know the Hebrides are completely inaccurate. It's really set in St. Ives, at the summer house that Virginia Woolf's family went to summer after summer when Virginia was. Was small, was. It was a girl and then a teenager. And it's a portrait profoundly of her mother and her father, Mrs. Ramsey, some kind of Victorian domestic goddess, brilliant hostess, tender mother, intense, marrier of people. Mrs. Ramsey's always wanting to marry people off and Mr. Ramsey, a philosopher. I, Jonathan, can. Can provide the details, but it would seem to be that he's Some kind of logician or. Or works on epistemology, subject and object and the nature of reality, with maybe a few equations in there, P's and Q's and the like. But as most people recognize, and certainly as Virginia's sister Vanessa recognized, it's a deep portrait, really, of Leslie Stephen, Virginia's father, who was not a philosopher, but a Victorian man of letters, a biographer. He wrote a biography of George Eliot, a book about Hobbes. He was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. And the first section, it's divided into three sections. The first section of about 100 pages is this extraordinary family portrait. A summer house full of children. A hard working, industrious, rather straining patriarch who sits in his room and works on philosophy and then comes out every so often to tyrannize and. And yell bits of Tennyson at his kids or just wander around the garden yelling, Tennyson. And the mother who broods over. Over her brood, precisely. There's then a middle section, a famous middle section of about 20 pages, which describes the same summer house during the First World War as it's uninhabited, the family has gone away, people are dying, war is being fought, and the house almost disappears. The house almost turns to dust and. And rubble, but is finally recovered. And then the third section brings back a smaller group of characters. No Mrs. Ramsay, now who has died, but Mr. Ramsey and a couple of teenage children, Cam and James, and crucially, Lily Briscoe, the painter who was there at the beginning, at the beginning of the novel, trying to paint Mrs. Ramsay, a portrait of Mrs. Ramsey, and who in the third section comes back after the First World War with the now widowed Mr. Ramsay and resumes her painting of Mrs. Ramsay, though Mrs. Ramsay is now dead, a ghost. That's really the setup of the. Of the. The writing of the novel and what the novel's about and it and its wonderful tripartite form. Family. Time passes, the house in the middle, and family again, but under reduced circumstances. And the beginning and completion of the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay ending with this most beautiful of lines. It always seems to me pretty much the best way you could end any novel, which is Lily Briscoe putting down her brush and saying, I've had my vision, Jonathan.

1:08

Yes, indeed. And I think actually, Lily Briscoe, it's very interesting, I think, in a way she's. I mean, she's a painter and not a writer, but she talks about her painting in much the way, the same way that Virginia Welf talked about her writing. And she says, you know, she Says she can't think about what she's looking at unless she has a brush in her hand. And I think the same way Virginia Woolf couldn't think what to say unless she had a pen in her hand. She was a very act. I mean, the artistic act was part of the way of living and understanding the life around you. Another thing to say is that it is indeed a portrait of this family, the Ramses. But in a way, it's so beautifully done in some ways, especially in the middle section, it's a portrait of a house because it doesn't want you, but it pulls back from just focusing on characters. Virginia Woolf, you know, didn't like characters in the well, or didn't want to produce characters in the way that Dickens produced characters because she was so interested in the way that people's lives are entwined with each other and the ways in which, you know, the way one person is affected by what they think someone else is doing in another room and another person is doing down on the beach. And so, in a way, it is a picture of. It's an account of a house and a garden and the people who are brought together by it. And especially Mrs. Ramsay, who is the kind of comper, the conductor who makes it all work. And that's why the first section, which has this massive, beautiful set piece of a dinner party, is. Is somewhat harmonious. And when they come back 10 years later, there's been a war and there have been deaths, including the death of Mrs. Ramsey. Everything's out of joint. It doesn't really work anymore. But nevertheless, under those circumstances, Lily Briscoe is at last able to finish her picture. But there's a sort of problem with the book, which is that the pictures of the account of the two parents, Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay, they're so vivid, especially the account of Mr. Ramsey, that it's possible to come away with a feeling that this is a book about a character, Mr. Ramsey. And indeed, Mr. Ramsey does come across a bit as a comic character. It's a sort of satire. It's a somewhat hostile satire. And it's true. You mentioned what Virginia Woolf wrote while she was writing the book, and she did say to her sister Vanessa that the center of it is going to be Father. Father's character. Father's character. Done complete. And in a way, that's true. You can read the book as a satire on an elderly gentleman in his 60s who is obsessed with his writing and incredibly vain. I'm the only person he really likes is this young man tansley who everybody else in the family dislikes. And the reason he likes Tansley is that Tansley thinks that he, Mr. Ramsey, is the greatest metaphysician of our time. And Ramsay returns the compliment by saying that he's the ablest young man of his generation, which he likes to think because he thinks so well of him. And the whole thing is. I mean, it is quite a funny portrait of a conceited old fool. Well, not quite a fool, but it's very satirical about the philosophy. You mentioned it. He's written this book, which his son explains as being about subject and object and the nature of reality. He's trying to explain it to Lily Briscoe, the painter, and she's completely puzzled. And he says, well, put it like this. It's about what the table's like. What were the kitchen tables like when you're not there? Which she doesn't find particularly convincing. And then whenever she tries to think of it, she has this image, I mean, I always painted, of a kitchen table stuck in a pear tree.

6:10

Yes, it does.

10:19

And it all absolutely makes no sense. And I think it is. Well, for one thing, as you said, it's not exactly a portrait of Mr. Ramsey, because the whole time frame, the deaths of. The death of the mother and so is shifted forward 20 years so that the First World War intervenes. And then, as you said, Mr. Rat. Well, he was a bit of a philosopher. He did well. He wrote about philosophy. He was deeply. He wanted. His big favorites were John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin, and he thought he could bring them together in a book which he did indeed publish, called the Science of Ethics. And it's a dreadful book. I mean, it's the opposite of. Because he wants to believe in Darwin, he wants to believe in Mill, So he has to believe that Darwin and Mill fit together and that somehow evolution by natural selection leads to a conviction that the good lies in the greatest happiness of the greatest number. And it's a complete. Henry Sidgwick, who was the kind of dean of Cambridge philosophers, the dean of professors of philosophy at the end of the 19th century, did write a review of it, and they were sort of friends. And so Sidrick may have pulled his punches a bit, but only a bit. And I thought he has a wonderful phrase for Leslie Stevens, philosophizing. He says it's just. What is it? A shortcut to optimism, which is. I mean, given that philosophy ought to be about, you know, being aware of all the difficulties in every thing that you say. I think Leslie Stephen was incapable of recognizing Any difficulties in what he wanted to say. And in that respect he was a, you know, a non. Philosopher. I quite like this expression. He was a philosophaster, a pseudo philosopher and he couldn't. Well, but he knew it and I think, I mean I've read a bit about him and he does seem to me that he was. He had quite a lot going for him actually. He was fantastically industrious, like his daughter Virginia. He just wrote every day, he wrote all the time. And he wrote for money. He needed to make the money. And one of his books was called Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking. And you can see once you know anything about Virginia Woolf, you think anybody who advertises themselves as exponents of free thinking and plain speaking is liable to be the very. Because as soon as you say I am speaking plainly that should set off alarm bells in listeners minds that of course it is a virtue to speak plainly, but it's not up to you to judge whether you've succeeded in speaking plainly. And. But he did. He was the first person to publish anything by Thomas Hardy. And Hardy was grateful to him always for that. And there's a wonderful. I came across this letter he wrote to William James which I found very endearing. He said I go on writing as a habitual drunkard goes on drinking. And then when he published his last book, which was incredibly boring, it was 1200 pages on the history of English utilitarianism, he knew, he was tired of it and he knew, I mean, rather like his daughter, as soon as he published something, he thought it was dreadful. And he said that what he really ought to do is to write a good slashing review of it. So I think the real Leslie Stephen had much more sense of humor about himself than Virginia Woolf did. And I think in some ways it's a pity that the book lends itself to a reading where it is a satire at the expense of a typical philosopher. Which certainly wouldn't have been Virginia Woolf's intention because she knew and respected philosophy much more than that. But it is definitely an act of Oedipal revenge against the father whom in so many ways as she must have known she resembled very closely.

10:21

Yes, and I agree with that. I think one of the things that. That among others, that. That softens some of the satire which is undoubtedly there felt by Lily, felt at different times by. By Mrs. Ramsey and by the. By James and Cam very much so almost violently in the third section. But what was one of the things I think that softens the brunt of that satire is this lovely portrait of the self sufficiency of the marriage that Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsey also feels Mr. Ramsey to be something of a Victorian tyrant and patriarch, but also knows how a. How to give him what he needs and wants. He's extremely needy and demanding, as Leslie Steven was, and also in that marital way, knows how to get what she needs from. From. From Mr. Ramsey. Sometimes it's just escape from him, but at other times it's something more tender. There's that lovely thing about when they're walking in the garden and Wolf just says something like, you know, they were talking about Andrew, their brilliant son, who's a mathematician. And Wolf says something like, Mr. Ramsey believed in scholarships. And Mrs. Ramsey. Mrs. Ramsey liked that Mr. Ramsey believed in scholarships, and Mr. Ramsey liked that Mrs. Ramsey didn't believe in scholarships. It's lovely. The marriage works. It's not a tragic marriage, as so many 19th century novels had been. It's a marriage that works. It's full of children. This is something that both Mr. Tansley, who seems on the path to childlessness, and Mr. Banks, the zoologist, who is childless, and of course, Lily Briscoe also, they feel quite painfully, enviously, this great welter of children that surround Mr. And Mrs. Ramsay. But, yeah, you're absolutely right. We can't deny the. We can't deny the. The satire. It comes out beautifully in that famous section about Mr. Ramsey trying to work his way through the Alphabet. And he. And he's. He's stopped at the letter Q. And. And Woolf does this wonderful thing where she'll go into Mr. Ramsey's consciousness, so she'll become Mr. Ramsay for a paragraph, and she'll say, you know, many philosophers had got to, you know, or not many. A few philosophers and thinkers had got to the. To let the letter Q. Only a few in the whole of England. And that was an achievement. But to get beyond Q. How do you get beyond Q? And then she'll pull away and start doing Wolfian, anti patriarchal, anti Victorian satire. And she. She does this sort of thing where she says, you know, qualities that would have allowed an Arctic explorer to lead his men to the Pole were drawn upon by Mr. Ramsay. And once more he girded his loins. You know, there's this kind of. Yeah, always that playfulness, but also the. But. But also crucially the. The perspective. So that sometimes she's inside Mr. Ramsey with. With his vanity and his striving, and then she can move outside and. And poke at him a little bit and not Least through this. Through this. Funny, but also not. Not entirely. Not. Not wholly funny. Also quite moving idea of the. Of the. Of the plodding thinker who's trying desperately to get through the letters of the Alphabet, but who fears that he may not get all the way and also fears that perhaps he doesn't have that thing. She says he doesn't have that thing that the inspired have. The inspired who lump all the letters together in one flash. I always love that because we can think of various. That could be. That could be.

14:31

He was no Nietzsche.

19:01

Right. It could be Nietzsche. Or it could be, if we think more locally, in Cambridge terms, it could be someone like Wittgenstein who doesn't have to plodd, but who just comes up with some extraordinary aphorism that explodes everything. Or, of course, it can be a different mode altogether. You. You. You were saying earlier, Jonathan, that the. You know, the. How the novel itself does philosophy. This. This lumping all the letters together in one flash is of course, an artistic mode. Instead of logically working your way through subject and object and reality, maybe you fuse everything like a painter, like a musician, like a writer, and you achieve. You achieve knowledge and comprehension that way.

19:02

And you avoid pedantry. I mean, Mr. Tansley is a very nice sort of pendant to this portrait. Mr. Tansley, the atheist who the children hate. He keeps being. He keeps trying to correct Mrs. Ramsey, who has a tendency to exaggerate in conversation. She says, oh, you know the waves this morning, they were like mountains. And Tansley says, well, no, but it was a little rough. And then he said. And she said, oh, Mr. Tansley, you must be soaked through. And she says, no, just a little damp. And you know that that's how he's going to write his philosophy too. It's just never. He's in such fear of saying anything that might be criticized that he can't really get around to saying anything at all. And that is a disease to which philosophers, I think, are prone to.

19:50

Yes. And you were saying the wonderful thing about how it's a novel about a house. It absolutely is. There is the house in the middle of the book, in this section. Time passes with no one in it. And even when it's a novel about a house, it seems to me it's also a novel that is being a philosophical novel. Because if we go back to the very definition that you mentioned, which probably is slightly condescending, when Andrew says to Lily, you know, Lillian in. In. In her. What Wolf calls vagueness, sort of says, heavens, you know, What. What does he spend all day thinking about? And Andrew says, subject, object, the nature of reality. And clearly, Lily Briscoe sort of, you know, recoils slightly. What the hell is that? And then it's. It's a wonderful bit of novelizing, actually, because she. Wolf doesn't have to say it, but we can intuit that Andrew, in his male confidence and entitlement, can't help but reach for some sort of domestic analogy and says, okay, I'll put it in your terms. Think of it as a kitchen table when you're not there. And then Lily, in Wolfian mode, satirizes that and replies by taking the image and putting the table halfway up the. Up the tree. But then also the novel replies too, because what is that middle section? Time passes but an exercise in thinking about a house when you're not there? It is actually a kind of. It is. It is a novelization of philosophy, of the kind of philosophy that Andrew says Mr. Ramsey does.

20:37

Very interesting. Yeah, that's true.

22:19

It's. I'm. I'm sorry. Whenever I read it and reread it, I'm trying to think. This is, in its way, in its novelistic way. This is an intensely, of course, philosophical novel, perhaps. Perhaps the most philosophical novel. It doesn't look like, shall we say, you know, it doesn't look like Thomas Mann, to refer to, you know, if we think of the Magic Mountain, written around the same time. And it doesn't look like, say, Daniel Deronda with its discussions of Spinoza and so on. It. It. It almost gets by. This is how novelistic it is. It almost gets by without mentioning of a philosopher at all. I mean, there are names mentioned, the sort of dusty Victorian names like Croom and so on, and maybe Sidric. Indeed.

22:22

But.

23:15

But it could get by without. Without a single mention of an actual philosopher. And yet, in its very marrow, it is intensely philosophical because it turns out that it's full of people thinking. There's Mr. Ramsey doing official, authorized thought, which is universally sanctioned. And sanctioned, of course, by the culture that he can do as a man. And then there's the thinking that Mrs. Ramsey and Lily do for long stretches of the novel, which is unauthorized thinking. I mean, if we think. Just say, in that first section of Mrs. Ramsey, she spends a lot of time sitting, looking at the lighthouse, which she loves and which she's attached to. And she thinks almost mystically about the lighthouse. The beats of the lighthouse. That's my beat. And in, say, a passage of two or three pages should be moving between what we would think of as essentially philosophical thinking. There were the eternal problems. Suffering, death, the poor, or why bring children into the world if they didn't ask for it? And it's full of suffering? Why do we have to watch them grow up? Lilly does a version of this in part three. You know, why is life so short? Can't we just. Can't I just stand with Mr. Carmichael, the poet, and complain about the shortness and brevity and incomprehensible possibility of existence? What does it mean? Thinks Lilly. But of course, they're doing their version of philosophy, which is both the essential and eternal questions. Death, suffering, the poor, the meaning of life, and of course, everything else too. You know, what will James grow up to be? Which daughter of mine will make the best marriage? It'll cost £50 to mend the. To fix the greenhouse and so on. The. The world just comes in and. And. And occupies philosophical thinking so that it's very hard to make a distinction between the purely philosophical essential questions and the lived inhabited ones. They're all the same.

23:15

Yes, indeed. And I think maybe that gets us onto what ought to be our next topic, perhaps, which is the style in which the book is written. And I guess one obvious thing about Virginia Woolf is that she does write the most beautiful sentences. I mean, they just always land perfectly. I've been. You never get one of these sentences where you first start reading it one way and then you think, oh, that wasn't a noun, it's a verb, and I don't know. And the rhythm. And she kind of proves what perhaps we ought already to know, that English prose is an art of rhythm just as much as English poetry is. And I think that if she did nothing else but write beautiful sentences, we would praise her for it. But she does so much more because she knew that style was, if you like, the center of what novels are about. And she thought that novels were philosophical enterprises because they were attempts to understand what it means to live a human life. And she thought that. Well, as early she. Throughout her life, she made notes on what it meant to write. And there's one from 1908 where she said that she was hoping to revolutionize the novel so as to capture multitudes of things at present fugitive. And I think the multitudes of things you've already talked about. You know, Mrs. Ramsey's thinking about the kids, thinking about her husband, thinking about Mr. Tansley, thinking about how much it's going to cost to mend the greenhouse and all these things going on at once. And that's In a way that's. Virginia Woolf was constantly looking. Looking for ways of representing that sort of simultaneous complexity of every moment of human life. And one of her models was music. Music is about weaving classical music, where there's more than one line of music and they get woven together. And that was a sort of example to her of how the novel should be reimagined. Weaving, you know, the string section and the wind section and the brass section all playing together. But doing an opera where of course, you know, you get ensembles where different. Several singers are singing, but they're singing different lines, probably at cross purposes, but it's one piece of music that's a wonderful emblem for human life as she wants to be able to make novels represent it. And Wagner she was. I don't know if this lasted to the end of her life, but as a young woman, she was a Wagner Buffalo. You know, as a teenager, going to. Going to the entire ring cycle at Covent Garden in 1900 and then taking herself to Bayreuth, you know, the temple of Wagnerism in 1909, and listening to Parsifal over and over again. And she wrote a wonderful little. You know, she was trying to make money at the time. She got an article into the Times about what she called impressions at Bayreuth. And she has this wonderful. It's very interesting about the place and the wonderful passion of all the other members of the audience who all know what's going on. And she says that the music of Parsifal has reached a place not yet visited by sound. And I think that makes it. I mean, the sound world of Parsifal is notoriously very strange, but it also is a matter of knitting together different themes, different thoughts, different characters. And, you know, Wagner's orchestration and his writing for voices does all this. And I think that was an emblem for her of what, you know, she hadn't yet written a novel, but. But bringing. She wanted to. Investigate bits of experience that hadn't yet been visited by the novel. And I think her basic idea was that you need to show that at any moment of human experience contains multitudes. And she wanted to, you know, orchestrate. And in some of her early works, she used a technique known as stream of consciousness, but first person stream of consciousness. But in fact, she didn't stick with that. In fact, every novel she wrote. I'm not sure how many there were. There were a dozen. Weather is written in a different style, a different. She uses a different technique. She never repeats herself. It's. But still it's always a matter of. Well, to be technical. She makes a lot of use of, well, what's called indirect speech, which is. As opposed to direct quotation, in particular. Free indirect speech.

25:35

Yes.

30:37

Where you cannot tell where the. Where the character's thoughts end and the narrator's thoughts begin. They're blended together. And there's also something that she has about how every moment of someone's existence also involves the past. And she talks about the necessity of tunneling. Tunneling back so that you can see how you know, the way you are today is partly to do with the dreams you had last night. Maybe it's to do with some humiliation that you suffered when you were 13. And then she sometimes says it might be something to do with something that had happened to you a thousand years before you were born. All these. All this stuff. It's her job to. To. To. To orchestrate that. And I. Can I give you a. A brief example from. I've mentioned the. The Dinner party marathon in the first section of to the lighthouse. And Mrs. Ramsey. Well, really her servant, the cook. But Mrs. Ramsay has produced a knockout dish, the bourfondo, the French beef stew.

30:37

Yes.

31:48

And she says to the guests at the dinner table, it is a French recipe of my grandmother's, said Mrs. Ramsay. Of course, it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination. They agreed. It is putting cabbages in water and roasting meat till it's like leather. And you. I mean, the first sentence it says, said Mrs. Ramsey. But the rest are just ideas that are floating around the dinner table. And to say, Mr. Tansley said this. And Mr. Ramsay says that it wouldn't capture it because she wants to capture the way that the consciousness is sort of unmoored from individuals. It's a party unmoored.

31:48

And sort of passing between characters, too.

32:29

Yes. And floating above them. And. And there's a tendency, I think, so Mr. Tansley, to come back to him. He thought that the purpose of every sentence is to pin something down. And for Virginia Woolf, the purpose of a sentence is to let things float. And I would also say, I think she belongs in the pantheon of philosophers for her ways of thinking about what it is to. To lead a life and several things about. I mean, in the first place, one thing that she shares with most other philosophers who are worth reading is a teenage revolt against an intellectual father figure. And there aren't many philosophers who don't have that in their past. And it. And it sort of makes sense because if philosophy is anything, it's about saying, I've been taught to believe all these things. I'm supposed to take them for granted, but I refuse to. Right. I'm going to excavate them and see if they're really worth believing. I'm going to pick up, pull them up by the roots and see what the roots look like. Of course, that may kill them, but nevertheless, I insist on doing it. And the other thing is her love of difficulty. She doesn't. A lot of her writing reminds me of a wonderful phrase that Wittgenstein used with his students, which was back to the rough ground. If there's something which you find easy to talk about, don't waste your time with it. Get to something that's really hard. And she wrote accordingly. I mean, she makes it difficult for the reader. And that's exactly what philosophy books are supposed to do. And she hated the kind of criticism which praises the book, which would have praised Gworthy and Bennett and so on for writing books that are a good read or a consolation or a page turner. I mean, those would seem to have been exactly the opposite of what a book, what it's the duty of a book to do. The duty of a book is to upset you. And that, again, reminds me of something of Wittgenstein. She says, if a philosophy book is any good, then you will want to throw it across the room because it's going to challenge you. It's asking you to let go of the banisters, which you cling to for safer. Or it's having to let go of Mum and Dad and Nurse and try and really think something out for yourself. Also, it's interesting, we keep coming back to a sketch of the past. I think that deserves a program in itself, actually a sketch of the past. She claimed to have what I might call a philosophy, a constant idea that behind the cotton wool, that's to say, the muffled way in which we don't really understand what we're doing from moment to moment in our lives. Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern, and that all human beings are connected through this pattern. And in one of her early books, Night and Day, which I think this was 1919, she speaks of the faintly lit darkness of another mind stirring with shapes so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes and moving away again into darkness. There's something. There's something nocturnal about the inside of other people's minds, but also of your own mind. And then she praises Dostoevsky, who was in some ways her literary hero. I think Dostoevsky for evoking the dim and populous world of the mind's consciousness, where desires and impulses are moving blindly beneath the sod. And she added that this is the exact opposite of the method adopted by most of our novelists. And in 1923, she spoke of a discovery. My discovery. I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters, and this gives them humanity, humor and depth. And then there's the tunneling process by which I tell the past by installments, all these caves. And I think it's perfectly clear where the obsession with caves comes from. It's Plato's Republic. Plato's Republic, which has this famous, memorable, beautiful sort of allegory that human beings are like prisoners chained to the walls of a cave, and all they can see is the shadows cast on the wall by a flickering fire. And they take that for reality. And that. And I think that she was. She took that very seriously. That. That.

32:31

That's what.

37:29

That's what Plato is, right? That's what human life is like. You can't. You can't capture it. If you. You know, if you try to shine a bright light on it, then you've destroyed it. It's like, oh, this. There's a wonderful phrase of William James who says. Who talks about people who think they can find out what dark is like, darkness is like, by switching on the light. And I think she, too, is saying, you have to. You have to feel your way around in the dark. And as you've already mentioned, James, she did learn Greek as a teenager very seriously, and she worked through Sophocles and Euripides, but I think mainly Plato, Plato's Dialogues. And I think it was one of the great literary experiences of her life. She said she could never get over the indomitable honesty of Socrates, who, of course, appears in practically all Plato's dialogues. And she was enough of a Greek scholar to be asked to review works on ancient Greek philosophy for the Times Literary Supplement. But she was appalled by the appropriation of Plato by young men of her generation who got fed it at Eton and Harrow and Oxford and Cambridge and imagined that they understood. And also, this has a connection with the Great War, where so many educated men went into battle with copies of Homer in their pocket and imagined they were bloody Achilles. I mean, it was. And she hated that. And Jacob's Room, this early novel, is partly about such a young man who has done. You know, he's got his. Got a degree at Cambridge, and so he thinks he's good at Greek, and his friends think they're good At Greek. And it seemed to them, she says, that they had read every book in the world and that civilizations stood around them like flowers for the picking. They were just, you know, I mean, we still know this about public school, Oxford and Cambridge, people in England who have this quite unwarranted confidence in their intellectual command of.

37:30

One of them was Prime Minister, I believe.

39:52

I think you might say that. And she talks about Jacob and his friends running down Haverstock Hill five o' clock one morning, rather drunk and imagining that it was the road to the Acropolis and that when Socrates saw them coming, he would bestir himself and call them my fine fellows. And she thinks this is completely wrong. They never thought what Plato and Socrates were really like. Well, of course, we don't really know. So many documents of ancient Greek culture have been lost that it's. That it's easy for us, which she includes herself in this, to allow our imaginations to run wild and yes, treat Plato as they do, as someone who might have learned Greek with them at Harrow and reading into the ancient Greeks, not what they have, but what we lack. I know she didn't like the idea of sentences that hit the nail on the head, but she did sometimes write such sentences. And there's. And so then there's this about the time that she published Jacob's Room, she also published this wonderful essay called On Not Knowing Greek.

39:55

Oh, yeah.

41:17

Which you might, you know, if you know a little bit about Virginia Woolshire, you might think she's going to say, oh, I'm so sad because as a woman I've never learned Greek properly. Not at all. It's that she knows Greek much better than these public school boys from Oxford and Cambridge. And what she knows is that it is foolish and vain. I'm quoting her again. It is foolish and vain to talk of knowing Greek. We don't know how the words sounded or where they would have laughed. And she says that's the. One of the most important things to. In NOAA culture, you know, which bits they would find funny that when we read Plato, we really don't know. But she does find that Plato, you know, more than Sophocles and Euripides, does give you an idea of what the private life of the Greeks was like. And she says the point of his dialogues is that you should read them as stories about parties. Which, of course, you know, she was. She became a huge specialist in stories about parties. Plato presents Socrates presiding over parties just as she presents, you know, Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay presiding over theirs and guiding the conversation. I mean, I think Socrates was a bit more prescriptive than Virginia Woolf's hostesses, but still not dominating, but guiding for what matters, says Virginia Woolf. Again, what matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it. All this flows over the arguments of Plato. Laughter and movement, people getting up and going out. Truth, it seems, is various to be pursued with all our faculties. Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine? It is not to the clustered disciplinarian that we ought to turn, but to the well sunned nature who practices the art of living to the greatest advantage. That's what I mean. That plus you know, the cave, Plato's cave and Plato's parties I think are a huge presence in, in her writing. And I and there have been some, some books and articles which have been argued that, you know, you should see. Virginia Woolf was essentially a Platonist. I don't know if that's an exaggeration, but I certainly think there's some, some kind of truth in that.

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Thank you for listening to this extended extract from Conversations in Philosophy. You can listen to the full series now and to all our other series covering literature, philosophy and history from ancient Greece to the present day, including James Wood's new series on realism on the Close Readings podcast. And for April only, you can get 50% off a 12 month subscription if you use the code WULFF at checkout. This offer is only available through the link in the description and not if you subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts.

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