Virginia Woolf and the Power of Story by Linda Nicole Blair

Author:Linda Nicole Blair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2017-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Although further discussion of Myth goes beyond the scope of my book, it is important in closing this section to understand that it adds an important dimension to the argument that Story may have been adaptive for human survival. Although ancient storytelling humans could hardly have dreamed of such an advanced civilization as London in the 1920s, the links between them and their prodigious ancestors were initiated by the stories they told so many thousands of years ago, as Armstrong and others have explained. Seeking explanations for natural phenomena, trying to understand death, or even recognizing the pattern of seasons, all laid the groundwork for human social and cultural advances, enabling them to survive in a harsh environment. Stories that bind communities together are powerful, but those that add ritual to Story are even more so, for good as well as for evil. In Mrs. Dalloway, we recognize the basic human impulse to understand the world and to establish meaningful relationships in the face of a loss of meaningful ritual. The words of the old woman singing in the park have become unintelligible to the modern ear, although they once held meaning. In the end, Clarissa chooses to embody her boon of life, while Septimus chose a different path, seeking instead a physical re-embodiment of transcendence.

Lehrer argues that Woolf intuitively understood what many psychologists and neuroscientists know to be true about the way our minds operate—that our “selves” emerge from the “fragments” of daily experience.45 Her illness informed her literary style, he says, giving us a glimpse not only into the inner workings of the mentally ill individual but, I would add, into human consciousness in general, into the continuous struggle we all experience as we try to navigate everyday reality. “The self,” Lehrer states, “emerges from the chaos of consciousness.”46 Woolf’s “Self” is laid bare in her writings, and in reading her stories, we are faced with ourselves in the here and now. In the next section of this chapter, we will see this theory come to life when the villagers at the pageant in Between the Acts are faced with reflections of themselves before they were prepared to respond. Research reveals the ways in which our brains have evolved to take on more and more complex tasks. The world has become its own Rubik’s cube of sorts, a puzzle of numerous knots and endless conundrums. The species that can unravel these increasingly complex knots, as well as create more complex ways of being and moving in the world, will survive. If we can learn to cooperate, our chances of survival will increase exponentially. The reverse is also frighteningly true: the adverse effects of the complex brain are also a huge risk to our survival. We may dream of fabulous ideas for all kinds of innovations in technology and culture, but then become trapped by their outcomes and consequences. Between the Acts, written during the beginning of World War II and the bombings of the English coast, presents us

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