Beginning, Plot, Sequence, Closure:
Teaching To the Lighthouse

Narrative theory is extremely useful in teaching modernist fiction; its revival in the beginning of the twentieth century may be a direct response to the practices of modernist fiction. One of the most important components of narrative theory is what I call narrative dynamics, or the related issues of presentation of the story from the choice of beginning point, through the arrangement of linear and nonlinear sequences of events, to the function of the ending. Each aspect of the dynamics produces a distinctive teaching opportunity and (it is hoped) a different kind of knowledge. A focus on beginnings, narrative middles, and endings allows one to cover every narrative form, engage in productive dialogues with a host of earlier narrative theorists from Aristotle to Henry James (the latter always a great source of impressive epigrams), and draw on the students’ own experience and judgments. In addition, many trenchant observations can be culled from the narrative theory written by modern writers like James, Edith Wharton, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf.
Readings in narrative theory generally help students get the fullest experience from the more confusing or complex texts of the twentieth century. For the purposes of this discussion, I will invoke Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a work that shows how helpful every aspect of narrative analysis can be. (For those who prefer a shorter text, I can recommend Maurice Blanchot’s “The Madness of the Day,” Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings,” or Jeanette Winterson’s “The Poetics of Sex”.)
Some undergraduates are surprised to learn that the author has to select the point at which to begin her novel, and amazed to learn that this choice can have repercussions that directly affect what is to come. Woolf’s beginning, “‘Yes, of course, if its fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs Ramsey. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added,” perfectly fulfills Horace’s injunction to start in medias res. At the same time, it eludes Aristotle’s notion of a story being an organic whole with a starting point that does not itself follow anything by causal necessity (7.3). There is clearly plenty of relevant backstory which we will never learn, though we can make a number of plausible inferences. What is at stake in beginnings is readily disclosed by comparing this one to the opening sequences of other works like The Mayor of Casterbridge (“One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village if Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot”), “Notes From the Underground” (“I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. No, I am not a pleasant man at all. I believe there is something wrong with my liver. However, I don’t know a damn thing about my liver”), Beckett’s “The Calmative” (“I don’t know when I died. It always seemed to me that I died old, about ninet years old, and what years, and that my body bore it out, from head to foot”), and Midnight’s Children (“I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947." Woolf goes on to thematize beginnings much later in To the Lighthouse as Lily Briscoe works up the nerve to start her painting: “One line placed on the canvass committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions” (157); we then discuss (with the help of Edward Said) what some of these decisions might be. I often add the biographical facts that Mrs Dalloway, the novel Woolf had written just before To the Lighthouse, had proven excruciatingly difficult to begin and only commenced properly after numerous false starts, while To the Lighthouse flowed quickly and magisterially from first to last.
Texts of high modernism are often extremely useful for discussing the basic elements of plot, if only because they frequently distort, attenuate, or seem to lack them altogether. In fact, an effective essay assignment is the question “What exactly happens in To the Lighthouse?” Here I warn them away from extending the old witticism about Waiting for Godot, a play in which “nothing happens, twice.” Most of this work seems to be what is popularly called “plotless,” that is, devoid of standard elements of intrigue or, for many, obvious human interest. I ask the students to determine what constitutes a good plot, and a minimal plot. I then ask whether any of those elements are gender bound. (They are.)
We trace together the numerous challenges to reception, paragraph by paragraph, then page by page and section by section. James Phelan’s work on narrative progression is especially useful in giving undergraduates a solid handle on the instabilities occuring in the story between characters and created by situations, and the tensions created by the discourse though instabilities of value, knowledge, and expectation between the narrator and the authorial audience. Students are able to how exactly how they are surprised by the text and to determine the assumptions that allowed them to become surprised. We go on to talk about the work’s dubious teleologies and attenuated causal trajectory, and ask what its mean for Woolf to represent her plot with the curious geometrical shape of a fluffy H? That is, what does it say about this novel and what does it say about the concept of plot?
We go on to read Nancy K. Miller on plots and plausibilities in women’s fiction and, looking ahead to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, talk about the “marriage plot”: that discloses that almost every female protagonist in world literature before 1960 ends up either married, dead, or in painful isolation. I ask the class to think of any counterexamples. The very few that emerge are always revealing (Euripides’ Medea, the wife of Bath, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Helen Schlegel in Howards End and, of course, Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse). In some cases this discussion changes students’ entire approach to reading fiction.
Many students love Peter Brooks’ treatment of plot in a narrative as an analogue of human sexual experience and of the general trajectory of all life forms that conclude in the final release of death. To the Lighthouse of course does not quite fit this pattern well at all; the major deaths occur in the middle of the book; the major personal and interpersonal issues are not resolved at all; and Mrs Ramsey personality and influence lives on many years after her actual demise. This engenders discussions of the modernist difference as well as a feminist difference in narrative construction. Lily Briscoe does not receive a substantial answer to the question of the meaning of life. “”The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one” (161). This leads seamlessly to Susan Winnett’s wonderful critique of Brooks’ relentlessly androcentric model and assumptions, and to speculation on what a theory of plot based on human rather than male sexuality might be like.
We might also note that Woolf’s is an ideal text to illustrate Genette’s categories of order (the unmarked slip into the past in the description of Mrs Ramsey’s trip into town with Charles Tansley at the beginning of the book), duration (the “Time Passes” section), and frequency (the repeated accounts of Ramsey declaiming Tennyson) as well as to see how such a work might play with or transcend these categories. We discuss Woolf’s creation of simultaneity within a narrative as well as her production of an accelerated version of linearity (one which she would go on to parody in Orlando, a text that has a differential chronology: 350 years pass while Orlando and a few of her friends only age a few decades).
Closure is in many respects the perfect subject of narrative theory for undergraduates, even the most ardently antitheoretical: everyone has at one time or another been disappointed by an ending in a novel or a film. I ask the students to reflect on the reasons why they have experienced this disappointment, and they are nearly always able to give reasons for it. In doing so, they are doing narrative theory, and have been all their adult lives, rather like M Jourdan discovering that he has always been speaking in prose. We then discuss which options are most suitable for which kind of narrative: a decisive conclusion that wraps up all the loose ends is most appropriate for a tragedy, though it may be much less important for a picaresque novel or many kinds of comedy. And for a serial fiction like a roman fleuve, an ongoing television drama like The Sopranos, or a soap opera, it may be undesirable or largely impossible, as Robyn Warhol points out in her masterful study of the genre.
Before the students have finished reading To the Lighthouse, I usually ask them to write up a scenario that discloses how they think the novel will (or should) end. I collect these but do not grade them, and pass them back once we reach the actual ending of the book. This allows the students to compare their possible endings—some of which are delightfully outrageous—with the one that Woolf finally decided on. We then discuss the consequences of her choice, both what it does and what it refuses to do. Here I introduce the terms “completeness” and “closure” as articulated by David Richter. In this text we clearly see a typical modernist strategy (which Woolf herself theorizes in her discussion of Chekhov in “The Russian Point of View”): the major conflicts between the characters subside briefly, but remain unresolved and the final fates of all are largely left up in the air; nevertheless, an unambiguous aesthetic closure is attained as Lily’s vision and her painting are completed as the boat is landing on the island after a ten year gap between intention and action—during which time the original motivation was forgotten.
Just before this point Lily has a realization concerning the meaning of life and the children in the boat come to a brief uneasy peace with their father. They soften while he is reading, an event that mirrors the peaceful act of reading done by his wife and himself at the end of part one. This time there is a difference: we see the father turning the ever diminishing number of pages in his volume as we readers do the same to the book in our hands, thus reeacting his completion of his reading as the boat completes its journey. Likewise the attainment of Lily’s completed vision and artwork takes place simultaneously with our reception of the final words of the text. It is as if author, character, and reader are united in unprecedented act of fusion. We go on to read D. A. Miller, Peter Rabinowitz, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Russell Reising on the subject and debate the relative strengths of each position, paying particular attention to Reising’s critiques of Miller and Barbara Herrnstein Smith and discussing which theory most adequately encompasses their reading of Woolf. The end result is that students can become theoretically informed, sophisticated readers of difficult texts, and can carry that knowledge on to the interpretation of other narratives they go on to experience.

Works Cited:

Brian Richardson, ed. Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Ohio State University Press, 2002.
Virginai Woolf, To the Lighthouse, HBJ, 1981.

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