The Making of Memories, Landres

Landres

March 2, 2021

The Making of Memories

To the Lighthouse is evidently composed in steam-of-consciousness(es) narration, yet it can also read like a memory or an anecdote. Most quotations in the book are indirect—often disorientingly so. These quotations arise as if one were vaguely recalling what was said on an occasion, or retelling their memory of that occasion to someone else. Quotations are embedded in prosaic descriptions of the character’s thoughts and undistinguished from them. For example, “She was quite ready to take his word for it, she said” (To the Lighthouse, 32). This sentence has the form of a direct quotation, except it doesn’t have quotation marks, isn’t offset in its own paragraph, and uses past tense and consistent third-person nouns. The quotation is presented as though it were being thought, not said. That quotations are being remembered or retold by the narrator speaks to the book’s theme of preservation, which is primarily taken up in the form of inquiries regarding what will be remembered in the course of life.

Woolf describes the turbulence of life’s periodicity as alternately exalting and anguishing. So characters often wish for a counterbalance of stability and relief. This fixture in “The Mark on the Wall” is the mark and in “Kew Gardens”(for the narrator) is the snail. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay is able to curate a fixture of harmony and union out of the dinner with her family and guests, to which she may refer in the future as to a node eternally fixed in her mind and, she believes, in the minds of others (105). 

Earlier in the chapter Mrs. Ramsay describes a similar node, this one having been preserved in her mind for twenty years: her evening with the Mannings, which she “could remember as if it were yesterday[…] [n]ever should she forget” (87):

And it was still going on, Mrs. Ramsay mused, gliding like a ghost among the chairs and tables of that drawing-room on the banks of the Thames where she had been so very, very cold twenty years ago; but now she went among them like a ghost; and it fascinated her, as if, while she had changed, that particular day, now become very still and beautiful, had remained there, all these years. (87)

The events of this evening are still ongoing. Although Mrs. Ramsay cannot prevent the onslaught of time from ravaging herself (she, compared with this evening in memory, has become a ghost), she may return to this evening, which has remained unchanged in her mind. Although the aspect of life and one’s feelings and relations toward others are constantly changing, good moments of harmonious unity are set and preserved. They are preserved both as an indelible and unfading keepsake and, perhaps, as testaments the beautiful union with others that is possible (for Mrs. Ramsay begins the evening with her memory of the evening with the Mannings before she exerts herself in the curation of another harmonious node). That the book is written in the style of a memory, however, casts doubt on the immutability and fixatity of only harmonious occasions. It doesn’t seem like harmony, exactly, is the criterion for the permanence of a memory.

 

Comments

  1. Ms. BucherMarch 11, 2021 at 10:38 PM

    Ms. Landres, your comments on the flow of Woolf’s language has made me wonder whether most of us actually think/feel/react/reflect/absorb our inner and outer worlds this way as well. In half sentences, with repeating focus, then distraction to another clip of memory, then other ripple’s in our mind, in our bodies. Her brilliance is the awareness of this meshing together of internal/external lives, and how each of us in our own way, has a dramatic (and banal) story unfolding all the time.

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  2. Krishnan VenkateshMarch 20, 2021 at 10:39 PM

    Very interesting, Ms. Landres and Ms. Bucher. What do you think is the force of the "as if" in this paragraph? We talked briefly last semester in class about the nonexistence of "memory." There is no such "thing," no such receptacle for the imprints of our experience; instead, what we call memory is an ever-changing compound of bits of remembered experience boiling in a vat of imagination. What does it say about Mrs. R that she thinks about experience in this way, and is she right?

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