The Immortal Conversation: Culture as the Web of Talk

THE IMMORTAL CONVERSATION: CULTURE AS THE WEB OF TALK / Frederick Turner In Virginia Woolf's The Waves we hear the voice of a sort of super-soul, made out of seven individual persons, seven friends. Each contains a complete if blurred image of the other, and the coherent light of Woolf's prose reconstitutes out of them the original shapes of their spiritual identity. The poet John Donne also meditated upon the spiritual union of persons; when love, as he says, "interinanimates two souls, That abler soul which thence doth flow Defects of loneliness controls." Donne had much traffic with nothingness, and it seemed to him that the loneliness of the individual soul is its chief defect; and thus a perfect soul could not be lonely. Since it can find company only among its own kind, and since it is divided from other souls by its embodiment in flesh, the only perfect soul is a composite soul, a unity transcending the separateness of persons, as the unity of a person transcends the variety and perishability of the bodily organs of which that person is made. Unlike the ordinary individual soul, which cannot experience the mechanism by which its components, the physical organs, operate, that new composite soul would be able to know by introspection the operations of its own elements, since its elements would be souls like itself. Since the soul of each friend or lover participates in a super-soul which contains both, its essential identify survives the death of the body it is made up of. Virginia Woolf puts this conception to the severest test in The Waves by having one of those friends, Percival, die, and measuring rather precisely the extent to which his identity is lost from the conversation altogether, or preserved in the shared self-substance of the survivors. She does something of the same in To The Lighthouse; when Lily Briscoe finally finishes her painting, it is with a stroke which describes both the absence and the continued presence of the dead and much-beloved Mrs. Ramsay. Can we imagine that whatever sanity there might have been in Woolf's suicide was some kind of existential test of the same set of ideas? And is she not in some way vindicated in her belief, as she stands before us, almost too beautiful and eccentric for us to see her clearly, but unmistakably there, when we listen to her style: Oh Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then The Missouri Review -227 having gone, come back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any hour of the day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawingroom steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness. And there she is, Mrs. Woolf for us, as Mrs. Ramsay for Lily Briscoe. But to come back from the dead is no easy matter. Hoc opus, hie labor est, says Virgil; this is the work, this is the task. Virgil himself, perhaps, managed that remarkable trick when Dante met him in the dark wood of his mid-life; and Dante in turn, with a Florentine freedom of gesture that he lent to Virgil in his poem, has taken the hand of later poets as various as William Blake and T. S. Eliot. But what is the work, the labor? Now here we must do some very careful thinking, so that we may very well feel in a dark wood ourselves, far away from the light and obviousness to us of Lily Briscoe's and Virginia Woolf's achieved vision. That vision is bought and paid for; let us find out the price. Those friends, first of all. Percival, Mrs. Ramsay, Mrs. Dalloway, have been able to make and...