Reality and Representation - Part 2

 

In my last blog-post I compared Tolstoy and Woolf in how they represent “reality”. I suggested that Tolstoy does not reflect experience, but instead represents the external “reality” which experience is directed toward, whereas Woolf reflects experience directly. I claimed that Tolstoy is “realistic” if you assume a discoverable external reality, whereas Woolf is realistic if you do not.

The case, however, is more complicated than this (as Mr. Fleishman pointed out in his comment to my previous post). Woolf’s narrative is not solipsistic. There are genuine relations to nature and between characters; there is shared experience and a shared reality. Tolstoy, conversely, does not ignore the psychological aspect and employs the subjective lens of characters. Are Tolstoy and Woolf then following the same assumptions about representing reality? Would they agree that external reality is that which our experience is geared towards but that our experience in itself deserves consideration as well as internal reality? Do they differ only in emphasis?

I believe that there remains a fundamental difference between their approaches. In literarily representing external reality Tolstoy mirrors the general outward trajectory of experience: when we read the description of a town and its people, this feels natural in how it mirrors our minds grasping what is around them. By contrast, Woolf's reflection of internal reality creates a new type of experience from that which it represents. It directs experience upon itself and thus rather than representing simple experience, represents reflective experience. Reflection is a distinct type of experience. It is what we do when we step back and ponder what is going on. Thus, in reflecting the inner experience itself, Woolf is representing the activity of reflection. Tolstoy and Woolf then are not representing reality in different ways, or emphasizing different aspects of reality, but are representing distinctly different parts of reality: simple experience and reflective experience.

Yet, let us consider what we do when we read. Whether or not something represents simple experience or reflective experience, by reading it we reflect on it. There is some literature that only attempts to be an escape, an alternate reality, but neither Tolstoy nor Woolf fall under this category. Even when Tolstoy simply represents outwards reality, this is done so that the reader can reflect on it, and is aided by the narrator, who guides the reader with purely reflective passages. There would again seem to be less of a difference between Tolstoy and Woolf. Both represent reality and reflect upon their created reality. Woolf does it all at once, whereas Tolstoy separates representational and reflective passages.

We may then wonder what the effect of presenting simple experience and reflection together or separate is. Is one of these options truer to experience than the other? The more I investigate the differences between Tolstoy and Woolf the more that I see that these differences are not simple and reveal increasingly subtle questions about reality and representation.

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshMarch 27, 2021 at 11:36 AM

    Great points here. I think you're right. Tolstoy's characters have dreams and visions too, and often these permeate their waking consciousness, so it can be hard to separate consciousness from objective event -- even in some sequences like the hunt scene, which appear to be pure narrative but are in fact colored by some point of view. Woolf's narrative is often characterized by sudden changes of focus, or irrational associations. It would be fruitful to compare two passages.

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