Listening to To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf and the Language of Music

According to David Lodge “Virginia Woolf exemplifies very clearly a tendency among modernist writers to develop from a metonymic (realist) to a metaphoric (symbolist) representation of experience” more specifically, Woolf’s writing aspires, in Lodge's view, to “the condition of lyrical poetry”. If for Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite “poetry is a form of music” then Woolf’s most intense work - To the Lighthouse (1927) - must be considered not just as a lyrical novel, but also as a musical work which mixes many different styles and musical forms. The novel’s central section ‘Time Passes’ establishes Woolf as an extraordinary composer and performer. The section displays an extraordinary sense of the musical with its perfect and intense structure and its focus on interacting sounds and rhythms. Woolf’s prose indeed is based on a constant translation of the musical into the literary; in this process the reader becomes a listener and a performer herself and the very act of reading a concert in which the novel resonates of a multiplicity of voices, noises and discourses.