Virginia Woolf

The Argument

Virginia Woolf invented the literary techniques — stream of consciousness, the moment of being, the sustained interior monologue — that made the interior life speakable in fiction, and she did so in a completely secular framework that was nevertheless haunted by the transcendence she could not believe in. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves — these are novels about the search for moments of connection, of meaning, of something that exceeds the ordinary flow of time, in a world that provides no metaphysical grounding for such moments.

The moments of being that Woolf described — sudden apprehensions of significance, of pattern, of a reality beneath the surface of ordinary life — are in form indistinguishable from what the mystical tradition calls contemplative experience. She took them seriously. She built her aesthetic theory around them. But she could not tell you what they were moments of, because she had removed the theological framework that would have allowed her to name the source.

For literary apologetics, Woolf is the figure of the secular mystic — the writer whose sensitivity to the transcendent dimension of ordinary experience exceeded what her secular framework could account for. Her work is evidence that the hunger for what the tradition calls God does not disappear when the tradition is abandoned. It goes underground and surfaces as aesthetic experience, as moments of being, as the sense that behind the cotton wool of daily life there is a pattern.