‘Books—books—books,’ said Helen, in her absent-minded way. ‘More new books—I wonder what you find in them …’

*

‘Novels,’ [Rachel] repeated. ‘Why do you write novels? You ought to write music. Music, you see’—she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her face—’music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there’s so much’—she paused for an expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth—scratching on the match-box’.

*

What novels do you write?’ [Rachel] asked.

‘I want to write a novel about Silence,’ [Hewet] said; ‘the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.’ He sighed. ‘However, you don’t care,’ he continued. He looked at her almost severely. ‘Nobody cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing, felt about it, made it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people,’ he indicated the hotel, ‘are always wanting something they can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn’t want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.’

I haven’t read all that many books by Zadie Smith (or Virginia Woolf, or George Eliot or EM Forster), but I’ve always semi-entertained a notion that Zadie Smith is (somehow) the reincarnation of three particular souls: those of EM Forster, George Eliot, and: Virginia Woolf. What’s more, after reading The Voyage Out, I am more than ready to double-down on that semi-insane idea…

…aaand then to move ever-so-smartly on!

You know what, though? At 450-whatever pages, this, VW’s first outing, is a tad padded out, but one can imagine that, as with Zadie Smith’s own debut novel (which is of similar…heft), it marked a decided entry into a very small club, as both of those writers came to their first novel apparently fully-formed, like Athena outta da head of Zeus.

And, you know, when Ms. Woolf’s story focuses on the main, more central protagonists, the above statement rings true, to my own inner doubter, at least.

There is an élan or life force or something that pulses through the protags (whenever Rachel or the ‘Hs’, Hewet or Hirst or Helen, are centre-staged). But, with the supporting cast, I do feel that she could have trimmed a number of pages down because (to me) she just doesn’t seem to feel all George Eliot/demiurgically compassionating over these people the ways Zadie Smith does in White Teeth. Nor does she ever-so-economically completely capture them on her canvas with those brief, deft strokes required by an ensemble-cast novel such as this. I may well change my mind on that shot from the hip, but Zadie’s is the better debut (only) in that regard.

But, man! When Woolf is on, she is really on, and you do get a sense that this is a world-historical talent in the making. And her central story becomes incredibly poignant by the time we reach the ‘tell-tale compression of these pages’ stage.

Thematically, one could discuss the masculine-feminist nexus at some length, for example, and that is a small part of what I am writing about here, but mainly I’m interested in the so many discussions of, or allusions to, or even castaway glances at, books, at reading and (especially) writing in this novel.

Very early on, the bright-blank-slate who is Rachel is described as coming of age, ‘growing’-up, only fitfully, and rather unsuccessfully, in her forbears’ (if not forerunners?) midst:

She was of course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was for her health; as a girl and a young woman was for what it seems almost crude to call her morals. Until quite lately she had been completely ignorant that for women such things existed. She groped for knowledge in old books, and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not naturally care for books and thus never troubled her head about the censorship which was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father.

And though it is tempting to see Rachel as an author-surrogate (especially, and appropriately, I think, as a proto-, tyro artist attempting to find her way in and through her chosen form, music), as a reader she is decidedly not Virginia Woolf, in either her experiences, or (such as they are, given how little she has read) her tastes.

Here she is being quizzed by Mrs. Dalloway about some books lying around in her berth on the…voyage out:

Wuthering Heights! Ah—that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontës! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austen.’

Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.

‘Jane Austen? I don’t like Jane Austen,’ said Rachel.

‘You monster!’ Clarissa exclaimed. ‘I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?’

‘She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait,’ Rachel floundered.

‘Ah—-I see what you mean. But I don’t agree. And you won’t when you’re older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over him in the garden.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy and calumny and hate and pain—

you remember?

Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.

How divine!—and yet what nonsense!’ She looked lightly round the room. ‘I always think it’s living, not dying, that counts…’

What’s most interesting is that this is the first bit of evidence in the novel of its essential structure—that of the psychomachia (loosely, the artist’s oblique, yet totalizing, wrestling/arguing/struggling with discrete aspects of herself) rather than what it appears to be on the surface, the novel of education (Bildungsroman) or its sub-genre, ‘portrait of the artist as a young so-and-so’ (Künstlerroman).

Also in this novel is St. John Hirst, possibly a Lytton Strachey analogue, who perversely tries to get to know Rachel (as just about everyone else does in this novel, too) by thrusting books upon her—in this case, a book which he himself is currently reading…and which Woolf perfectly captures on the page, in a most Oxbridge Male ‘clear views and certain’ kind of way:

Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously, in the shade of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs. Deep in an armchair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of Rome by candle-light. As he read he knocked the ash automatically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered his capacious brow and went marching through his brain in order..

(After being interrupted by his best friend and Rachel’s paramour-to-be, Hewet, Hirst then ‘safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph’ in his Venus Flytrap-like ‘buffer’ the way stereotypical husbands everywhere do, when correctly accused by their wives of not listening, but only hearing…)

As for the male novelist/suitor, Hewet, his task is not to rush towards, or even reach, ‘judgments’ (BTW: see below), but to explore that which he does not (and may never, quite) know:

I’m not like Hirst,’ said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively; ‘I don’t see circles of chalk between people’s feet. I sometimes wish I did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One can’t come to any decision at all; one’s less and less capable of making judgements. D’you find that? And then one never knows what anyone feels. We’re all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know’.

Earlier, Hewet had read Hirst a poem (Thomas Hardy’s ‘He Abjures Love’ (1883)) which goes a long way to express the real strengths and sharp limitations of such a male readerly mind as his own:

I speak as one who plumbs

Life’s dim profound,

One who at length can sound

Clear views and certain.

But—after love what comes?

A scene that lours,

A few sad vacant hours,

And then, the Curtain.

Contrast that with Hirst’s own attempt at poetry, which is but an extension of his even more stereotypically ‘masculine’, abstract, and philosophical mind:

[…] he had written twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing was that he’d practically proved the fact that God did exist. He did not see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder what would happen if God did exist—‘an old gentleman in a beard and a long blue dressing-gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he’s bound to be? Can you suggest a rhyme? God, rod, sod—all used; any others?’

Rachel, on the other hand, reads (and reads her world) in quite a different way from Hirst, but one which is also not quite identical with novelist-as-observer Hewet, for she is still more open and open-ended than he, like someone determined to remain one of David Bowie’s ‘Absolute Beginners’, say, one who, lacking an over-developed ego, is capable a kind of ‘radical empathy’ with the text…

[…] she was sitting alone, sunk in an armchair, reading a brightly-covered red volume lettered on the back Works of Henrik Ibsen. Music was open on the piano, and books of music rose in two jagged pillars on the floor; but for the moment music was deserted. Far from looking bored or absent-minded, her eyes were concentrated almost sternly upon the page, and from her breathing, which was slow but repressed, it could be seen that her whole body was constrained by the working of her mind. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world. ‘What I want to know,’ she said aloud, ‘is this: What is the truth? What’s the truth of it all?’ She was speaking partly as herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read. The landscape outside, because she had seen nothing but print for the space of two hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear, but although there were men on the hill washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid, for the moment she herself was the most vivid thing in it—an heroic statue in the middle of the foreground, dominating the view. Ibsen’s plays always left her in that condition. She acted them for days at a time, greatly to Helen’s amusement; and then it would be Meredith’s turn and she became Diana of the Crossways. But Helen was aware that it was not all acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in the human being. (emphasis added)

…which one could contrast with the method of St. John Hirst above (reaching for those ‘clear views and certain’ about the work, the kind which ‘go marching through his brain in order’ rather than grapple, or live, with the manifold complexities the work of art presents)

Notice that Rachel’s quest to know is inseparable from her need to live out, or at least live with the text: as a budding artist, Rachel displays that creative capacity to become, for a short time, the very work that she is reading.

—as in the book Criticism and Truth, where author Jonathan Kramnick writes that

One learns something about the world through a physical and creative encounter with it. The process is physical because it involves a whole body reaching out to pieces of an environment that already have a certain heft or structure. It is creative because something is made from that environment, which is then altered and adjusted in turn. “Learning is inseparable from doing,” each “embedded in the context of practical engagement with the world” (416). The weaver doesn’t apply an already-formed idea to string, like a signet on wax. Rather, the movement of her fingers “carries its own intentionality, quite apart from any designs or plans that it may be supposed to implement.”

If Rachel’s raison d’être is the exploratory, whole-self encounter-seeking method of the artist, Hirst’s method is the critic’s—or a certain kind of critic’s, at least.

Andrea Long Chu, in the epilogue to her recent book, Authority, argues that that the critic’s job is to read, like Hirst seems to (for his own inner complexities are revealed by the close of the book), primarily from an emotional remove: criticism is ultimately about exercising judgment…

We may also ask the critic for charisma, for sophistication, for a fine way with words, and above all for the ability to make the work of art intelligible while preserving its integrity. She must be able to turn the meaning of a whole Hitchcock picture into a tiny reel of microfilm that we may slip furtively into our pockets. At the same time, we are not content to let the critic offer her mere opinion, since we are perfectly capable of those ourselves, nor do we wish for her to reminisce, however artfully, on her impressions of the work. We are not asking for another aesthetic experience; we are asking for a judgment.

…and ‘the good critic’, she writes, ‘urges us to form our political beliefs the way we might contemplate a work of art—that is, from a safe distance’ (emphasis added).

If this novel is a psychomachia, however, then this distance/empathy (critic/artist, male/female) distinction fades into the background, revealing The Voyage Out less as some kind of polemical novel (one featuring an intellectual or political debate, along the lines of, say, the arguments between Bernard Marx and Mustapha Mond in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or between Winston and O’Brien in George Orwell’s <Nineteen Eighty-Four) and more of an ambiguous, oblique exploration of those only-hinted-at, obscure boundaries that the writer feels compelled to temporarily manifest for herself, wondering about the very nature of those boundaries (which perhaps may or may not even exist), the veiled outlines of which the artist feels compelled to feel out— be they artificial (historically, socially encoded) or natural, and which may or not yet bleed into one another, be ever-qualified by some capacity of ‘porousness’, or even mystery….

Please forgive two more (related) digressions. The first is from Gabriel Josipovici’s 2015 collection of essays, The Teller and the Tale…

…specifically from an essay titled ‘When I Begin I Have Already Begun’, which is about precisely such porousness vis-a-vis the ‘western’ individual self as we have come to know it, and what modern artists might learn from medieval writers such as Dante:

Traditional societies have a strong sense of the porousness of individuals, of how we each of us merge into others and into the community at large. It is the [classic, realist] novel which sets up the individual as a closed vessel against society and makes a fetish of individual freedom […] [but] our lives are, not as Balzac and Stendhal depict it. Dickens is a fascinating case, for it is clear – from his early embracing of the rigours of serial publication to his later public readings, from his powerful sense of childhood terrors as infecting the later life to his attempts, almost single-handedly, to give a meaning to Christmas for his age – that he hungered for a more inclusive form of narration, for a closer contact between himself and his audience; that the effect was often merely sentimental suggests partly that the age was inimical to such efforts and partly that he perhaps did not have the imagination to make the radical breaks with the form that were required.

Virginia Woolf, as a modernist, is seeking in her art some way to explore what novelists before her could not yet grapple with, those mysteries of self-and-other which are grounded in a still greater mystery, the relation of self to oneself. And in this first novel, the aspects of self which the artist-critic must draw on, and protect, protect from the moribund morays and social conventions (those belonging to The Voyage Out’s wealthy, older Edwardians, which the young-Georgians-all-at-sea chafe at, somewhat, on this tropical holiday of theirs—all of which forms Woolf’s cast and setting and context for this psychomachia) which Woolf proceeds to lay bare, examine, relativize, to show how they have come up short, not only because of this new age which has just dawned on them all…

—‘On or about December 1910 human nature changed’ (cf. ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’)

…but also because these people have internally ossified, their beliefs become reified, naturalized to an extent that they are only visible to the reader when Virginia Woolf displaces them from their ‘natural habitat’—and become only visible to her, as an artist, not through the distant lens of the critic, but via an incarnate, in-habiting of them as people, people different from, but somehow still connected to, those aspects of herself which she has not heretofore imaginatively explored, or lived through….

Here’s the second, ‘promised’ digression, from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own “I” ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Let’s use that ‘trap’ as a synonym for ‘modernity”: this makes the artist’s psychomachia less the struggle of the isolated individual to live in the world as seen by Balzac, etc., and more of a porous inquiry, by a socially-embedded (and, quite possibly, -constructed) multivalent person who is puzzled by, and tries to live within, if not resolve, that tension between (i) seeking above all to understand, comprehend (Compréhension, to grasp, seize, comprise; Verstanden, support, basis, to step under—to have a place to stand), while also (ii) adhering to Keats’s dictum of ‘Negative Capability’…

[…]at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. (Keats, in a letter to brothers George and Thomas, 1817)

…which, 100 years later, for those moderns1 of early modernism, cannot but be connected to what Gabriel Josipovici describes above—how do we remain ourselves, more-and-less connected to these others, in such changing times?

Politics and polemics in this view (Woolf’s view, not everywhere coextensive with my own) might have their place in social life (in one’s journalism and activism, say), but that place is not quite in the novel, if Woolf’s depiction of suffragism and assorted other political views in The Voyage Out are to be taken at face value, at least. Or, not for Rachel, whose artistic life is about to be cut short even as it is only beginning. The muscles which the critic must build up are different from those of the tyro artist: here she is, Rachel, looking down on two of her books

lying there, so square in the grass, a tall stem bending over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon, while the mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun. With a feeling that to open and read would certainly be a surprising experience, she turned the historian’s page […] Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful—Arabia Felix—Aethiopia. But those were not more noble than the others, hardy barbarians, forests, and morasses. They seemed to drive roads back to the very beginning of the world, on either side of which the populations of all times and countries stood in avenues, and by passing down them all knowledge would be hers, and the book of the world turned back to the very first page. Such was her excitement at the possibilities of knowledge now opening before her that she ceased to read, and a breeze turning the page, the covers of Gibbon gently ruffled and closed together. She then rose again and walked on. Slowly her mind became less confused and sought the origins of her exaltation, which were twofold and could be limited by an effort to the persons of Mr Hirst and Mr Hewet. Any clear analysis of them was impossible owing to the haze of wonder in which they were enveloped. She could not reason about them as about people whose feelings went by the same rule as her own did, and her mind dwelt on them with a kind of physical pleasure such as is caused by the contemplation of bright things hanging in the sun. From them all life seemed to radiate; the very words of books were steeped in radiance. (Emphasis added)

Beauty, for Aquinas, conveys a sense of wholeness, harmony, and radiance. The experience of it, Plato said (I think, re: the Good, before he banished the artists from his Republic), is the first clue—but to what? For Plato, it is indeed the moral-epistemic Good, but Virginia Woolf seems to be saying here that, for the artist, it is not that which she seeks (or, at least, primarily seeks), but that sense of exalted radiance which imbues an otherwise chaotic life with meaning, however temporarily: beauty is a clue something, sure, but not to some objective-correlative of Eliot’s, exactly (some ‘that which’ to hold on to, somehow), but rather a direction-in-the-wind, a whither which she simply needs must chase, chase after, in search of she knows-not-yet-what—but that itch in her fingers is what leads her on, participates in some process which promises…some kind of wholeness, however contingent and provisional, that the to-be-finished work of art might yet capture (who knows?), and which, as she sets out on her maiden voyage on HMS Tableau Vivant, lies ever, but especially now, in front of her.

For Woolf (this novel seems to say, to me), that sense of wholeness must include Rachel’s own open-minded quest for it, certainly; yet, it must also include Hirst’s desire for clarity and order as well as Hewet’s need to abandon, no, revolutionize the ossified world of his forerunners, to make it new.

Simultaneously, though (or paradoxically, perhaps), it must also include some critical-sympathy with the lives of her forbears and elders. This first novel of Woolf’s does not entirely jettison the past the way that, say, modern architecture will. Furthermore, modernism here is not yet entirely of the priestly, hermetic sect, or anti-demotic. Rather, The Voyage Out maintains that neither can we ignore the commonness of life earthiness of direct, lived experience, of the ordinary—as exemplified by Rachel’s care for the lives of such otherwise invisible people, as her aunts’:

[…] the methods by which she had reached her present position seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that she had not known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living. Perhaps, then, everyone really knew as she knew now where they were going; and things formed themselves into a pattern not only for her, but for them, and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning. When she looked back she could see that a meaning of some kind was apparent in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit of the Dalloways whom she would never see again […]. (Emphasis added)

This attitude, or need to find meaning whare such a thing may not easily be found, is also seen even in that somewhat more remote corner of the psychomachia here, in haute bourgeois art-adjacent connoisseur Mrs Flushing, and her desire to rescue or preserve something from the chaos:

When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and began beating the back of a chair with them. She was like a wounded animal. She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with death, as if it were a living creature.. She refused to relinquish her friends to death. She would not submit to dark and nothingness. (Emphasis Added)

Above all, though, the artist’s quest must include that open-endedness to life and her own art, which she will navigate together with those other mysterious, treasured, or inadequate aspects of herself, as she moves forward into that art which, though her untimely death, Rachel herself is, alas, denied, but exemplifies so well:

[…] on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling […]

‘She seems vague, but she’s a will of her own’ [….]

1

As an advisor once said to me, if the British society of Romanticism scholars cannot agree on a definition of Romanticism, what hope is there for the ‘Modern’…but in this particular context, that, as practicing novelists, both Josipovici and Kundera see the wider ‘modern’ as beginning with Rabelais and Cervantes, vs. literary scholars dating Modern-ism aas beginning with Beaudelair, or Woolf, etc., etc. etc….