Our Toil Respite Only: Woolf, Diamond, and the Difficulty of Reality*

There is nothing…that answers, or bears on, the problems of life. But the very fact that in these books, as we may imagine them, there are answers to every imaginable question can help us to transform our own desire for an answer to the problem of life.

(Cora Diamond, “Introduction to ‘Having a Rough Story About What Moral Philosophy Is’” 129)

In The Phantom Table, Ann Banfield examines Virginia Woolf’s preoccupation—and that of Bloomsbury more generally—with the epistemological questions raised in Cambridge philosophy during the first quarter of the 20^th century. The era that provides the context for her inquiry is one Banfield places “squarely within the period of Russell, which ends with Wittgenstein’s ascendancy.” And yet, she continues, “this does not prevent the Tractatus [Logico-Philosophicus] from playing a role in our reconstruction of Bloomsbury’s intellectual world,” since its “conceptions, language and dominant metaphors find their counterparts in Woolf, not because she came under its influence, but because she shared its ways of thinking” (9).

Banfield astutely posits these shared ways of thinking (the result of fortuitous, perhaps zeitgeistig philosophical kinship rather than any direct mutual influence), and then lets them rest without pursuing them further. Such concerns, after all, fall outside the purview of her work in that book on Woolf’s engagement with Russell, Moore and Fry, and the philosophical background of Bloomsbury. But accounting for salient affinities between the author of the Tractatus and his high-modernist literary contemporaries, especially Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, and Musil, has figured centrally in my own efforts to reframe understandings of the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for studies in modernism more generally.¹

In this essay, my endeavors to bring out the shared ways of thinking Banfield points to are based not on direct parallel readings of Wittgenstein and Woolf, nor indeed on any full reading of the Tractatus. Instead, I read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse together with philosopher Cora Diamond’s writing on literature and moral life, writing that is nonetheless deeply marked by her inheritance from Wittgenstein. I first attend to Woolf’s commitment (one I argue she shares with Wittgenstein) to grappling with what I take to be signature issues of modernism: question, quest, and a longing for vision or revised understanding as a way of confronting the difficulty of reality. I then probe Woolf’s engagement with these issues by reading her novel in light of Diamond’s essay “The Difficulty of Philosophy and the Difficulty of Reality.” Diamond’s keen insights about literature’s capacity for ethical instruction, and her discussion in that essay of the experience of an ordinary sublime so painful or astonishing that it resists our understanding and categories of thought, illuminate a new philosophical context in which to understand more clearly and profoundly the stakes and aims of Woolf’s novel.²

Reading Woolf alongside Diamond also prompts us to recognize important ways in which matters that lie at the heart of To the Lighthouse intersect with the Wittgensteinian preoccupations that inform Diamond’s own thinking—concerns about the ethics of difficulty; skepticism about what other people think and feel; the search for communicative and existential clarity; the capacity of literature and fairy tale to convey a sense of beauty or of the “terrible” in the world; the status of expressions of our ethical experience as necessarily nonsensical; a longing for the sense of wholeness, transformative understanding, wonder, safety, and peace to stave off illusion or despair.³ One important subsidiary effect of looking at Woolf and Diamond together is that doing so also allows us to make significant oblique connections between Woolf’s thinking and Wittgenstein’s, connections that continue to bring into focus the philosophical sympathies that attest to the mutual relevance of their peculiar brands of modernism.

I begin by locating the source of the connections among Woolf, Diamond, and Wittgenstein in their shared focus on difficulty, question and quest because as I see it, if, as Banfield asserts, Wittgenstein’s dominant philosophical conceptions and metaphors find counterparts in Woolf...