Woolf espoused the "idea of a real world behind the habitable world," Wood tells us. Postmodern thinkers of the last quarter century have turned away from this modernist idea of reality. Thus, Wood's insight into Woolf gives us a useful foil for understanding postmodernism.
Victorian Platonists like Virginia's father, Leslie Stephen, did not believe in God, but they believed in "the Good." This, Wood explains, was "an invisible order behind the world of appearances." (We think of our quintessential modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, in his constant rage for order.)
Virginia Woolf followed her father in disbelieving in God. Yet, says Wood, she constantly sought "to find a meaning behind 'life.'" She too believed that there was a "real world behind the apparent world." However, Wood explains that her belief differed from that of her father. It was not "the Good" but "intrinsic, indescribable. And most importantly, it cannot be reached through philosophical reasoning, but only lunged at every so often by that faculty that Plato somewhat despised: the imagination."
Wood thereby differentiates Woolf from mere aesthetes, who satisfied themselves with art for art's sake. She thought that in her periods of mania she "saw through to some kind of truth while ill." This stood in place of religious insight. Yet she could never go beyond artistic expression; she could never clarify the invisible order through philosophy. Since it was inapprehensible in any direct way, she sought the truth of the "real" world behind the apparent world through art. But she knew all the while that art would not allow her to see it.
Wood commends Virginia Woolf's "contradictory belief, that truth can be looked for but truth cannot be seen, and that art is the greatest way of giving form to this contradiction."
Here, then, is Wood's useful explanation of the basic modernist concept of artistic expression. We find that it explains the New Criticism, that quintessential modernist critical strategy. As students we had to spend our days pondering over the "levels of meaning" in poems poor and powerful. We read the most worldly novels and poems of the first three quarters of the twentieth century to find the celebration of both the sacred vision and the Enlightenment insight. Looking for "levels of meaning" often seemed like graduate school foppery; but by doing so we were validating--consciously or not--a two-fold order of reality, the apparent and the invisible real to which the apparent was somehow connected. The nature of that connection, however, remained for us, as for Virginia Woolf, mysterious.
Postmodernist thinkers have laid to rest the mysterious connection of two worlds, two dimensions. They teach us that it exists only in our formulations, in our sentences, not in some permanent arrangement between the physical and the metaphysical.
"One sees a fin passing far out," Virginia Woolf wrote. It was something representing for her the mystery in the universe. From a postmodern perspective, the fin belongs to a fish that became exinct.
Wood's insightful review of Lee's book has stimulated us to wonder about the connection between modern and postmodern frames of mind.
From one viewpoint, her "fin" represented a futile grasping, an attempt to hold onto a two-world vision. That vision was already receding from western consciousness, never to be revitalized. The "fin" meant nothing if it did not mean the old religion. And Woolf was unable to say it was the old religion. It looks as if the modernist Virginia Woolf was expressing a last gasp as she tried and failed to hold onto a two-world view.
From a different point of view, the modernist Virginia Woolf left the old two-world view behind. Her "fin" was "far out" and soon to be out of sight for good. Its imminent disappearance foreshadowed a postmodern way of thinking. Woolf's art was focused on this palpable world. The connections to a metaphysical world were dim, distant, and less and less interesting. She was moving toward a new way of thinking but simply was not yet able to jettison finally the husks, the cultural baggage, of an invisible order behind appearances. From this perspective, the postmodernists, coming on in the seventies, would complete the job started by Woolf and her kind of modernists.
From either point of view, Woolfian modernism, as Wood explains it for us here, gives us a valuable criticial concept against which postmodernist thinking stands out more clearly and understandably.
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