Comparing Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Kawabata's Snow Country

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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Kawabata's Snow Country

Virginia Woolf's claim that plot is banished in modern fiction is a misleading tenet of Modernism. The plot is not eliminated so much as mapped out onto a more local level, most obviously with the epic structural comparison in Ulysses. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf's strategy of indirect discourse borrows much from Impressionism in its exploration of the ways painting can freeze a moment and make it timeless. In Kawabata's Snow Country, the story of Yoko and her family and its relationship to the rest of the novel corresponds with an even more modern medium, film, and its superimposition of contradictory image.

Lily Briscoe's metaphor stabilize the chaotic reality around her, order them into a visible representation, and make them timeless. She shares these goals with the Impressionists, for whom moments of being (as Woolf calls them elsewhere) are also "illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark" (161). The instantaneity of this image, and its reliance on light, is crucial for To the Lighthouse; through the single match Lily, and Woolf, light forest fires. Other parts of the narrative clarify and become resonant through specific moments of consciousness; one character's thoughts feed into another's, the narrative voice filters through everyone else's, and the reader sees, as Lily does, the "X-ray photograph" (91) of everyone's desires and fears. The plot is compromised in these scenes, or in the throwaway line in "Time Passes" that parenthetically tells us that Mrs. Ramsay died last night. But just as this remark is framed by brackets, so does each moment of being frame something else, a larger context the singular...

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...raps the sounds around each other, showing that language, even at its most freeing, is still confining. But the image is enough, and through this the Milky Way creates an anti-gravity field that lifts the characters out of their bodies: "The limitless depth of the Milky Way pulled his gaze up into it" (165). It is in this non-Newtonian manner that Kawabata directs our attention to the plot outline of his novel. We may focus on one moment, but it is infinitely refracted throughout the text, and at each moment we linger on the image, the reflected image, or the idea of the image; the plot is always there, but not always the primary image.

Works Cited:

Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. Berkley Publishing Corporation: New York, NY 1956.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Introduction by D.M. Hoare, Ph.D. London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1960

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