Virginia and Montaigne
The inherent tendency to search for a form which best represents reality is hardly surprising in Woolf given that she was expressly against the distortion of facts and manipulation of information which is one of the fundamental problems that the post-truth world is facing today. To quote from Three Guineas, something that strikingly resonates with the state of affairs in the day today: “if you want to know any fact about politics, you must read at least three different newspapers, compare at least three different versions of the same fact, and come in the end to your own conclusion. . . . In other words, you have to strip each statement of its money motive, of its power motive, of its advertisement motive, of its publicity motive . . . before you make up your mind about which fact of politics to believe.” This Woolf-rant is now sadly the howl of everyone on the left and even the conspiracy theorists. So we can say with certitude that Woolf aspired for truth and a better version of the representation of reality when the genre of novel didn’t seem at all novel enough to manage that just fine.
Methinks that Woolf is Montaigne-like, wanting to be an essayist and her writing bespeaks a tendency to take licenses which is the hallmark of an essay that can go out of the way to include a smorgasbord of things, giving much on the plate for the reader to savour. This links to the idea of truth. The word “truthiness” was popular in 2005 when plays like “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley appeared on Broadway just as the apocalyptic appeal of W.B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming” trended on the social media an in journalism in 2016 in the wake of Trump’s Presidential election. Virginia is very artfully trying to bring home the truth which is kept away from the populace that serves in the military and constitutes the cogs and wheels of the economic machinery. But most importantly, truth is varied, multi-valent and multi-faceted and it needs instantiations and deviations.
Woolf’s Montaigne like angst brings the reader closer to the writer which is something eschewed, deliberately by a modern-day reader that seems to be too busy to give second thought to his first misgivings on reading any opinionated article in the editorials. The intimacy between the reader and the writer turns at once into hostility and the reader opts for something which is byte sized but may be far from reality just to be engaged in the very act of reading. Woolf is special because she subverts the binary of intellect and entertainment through her writing which ironically makes the reader intimate with the reader.