Using the rising and setting of the sun or sea waves as a metaphor for a person's life, and describing the process of a person's life from birth to death, is not surprising to those who generally have a certain literary quality.However, in a long work, the rhythm that makes the text itself run, the rhythm that makes the emotions, consciousness, thoughts, and speeches of the characters pulse, all fluctuate with the rhythm of the rising and setting of the sun or sea waves. Relaxation, birth and death, so as to form a perfect and harmonious correspondence, is very incredible and unimaginable.This incredible and unimaginable thing happened in the works created by the British female writer Virginia Woolf in the last century.E. Foster, a British writer who was contemporary with Woolf, once praised the writing of this work just right, saying it: "If it is a little less, it will lose its poetic flavor; if it is a little more, it will fall. Into the abyss of the palace of art, it becomes dull and pretentious." Indeed, the complex and profound content, the exquisite and unique structure, and the perfect artistic skills are all integrated in this experimental work, which makes it a well-deserved title. become Woolf's most perfect creation.

It is a highly poetic, abstract and stylized experimental work.It doesn't strictly have a story, nor does it have strictly character-packed characters.It correlates all the years of life with the time structure of a day.From the perspective of text composition, it is like a musical work composed of nine movements; each movement is divided into an introduction part and a body part.Each introductory section is an exquisite prose poem, according to the different positions of the sun in the sky at different stages of the day-from the sun at dawn, the sun is rising, to the sun rising and shining in the sky, to the west of the sun. Slanting, falling, sinking, respectively describe the various changes of the same scene in different time periods.The scenery is composed of: the rays of the sun moving in different positions, a house by the sea, the ebb and flow of the sea tide, the different states of birds and flowers at different time periods, and the changes of various objects in the room as the light changes. various forms, etc.While the descriptions of the various changes in the scenery are full of musical variations, they are also like impressionistic paintings full of changes. They constitute the most vivid and poetic part of the whole work.

The main text following each introduction is the momentary inner monologue of the six characters at different stages of their lives—from childhood, schooldays, youth, middle age, to old age.These are six formal characters without surnames, they are Bernard, Susan, Neville, Jenny, Louise and Rhoda.Except for the last part of the work, which is the monologue of the old Bernard facing a diner, summarizing the lives of the six people, the first eight parts of the text are all the moments of the six characters alternately. Monologue composed.The content of each text part and the tone of the introduction part form a mutual mapping relationship.When the morning light is twilight and the sun is rising, the birds in the garden sing a monotonous song, and the consciousness and speech of the six children in their childhood are as simple and jumpy as the monotonous bird song.When the sun rises, the sun casts wider and wider spots of light, and the consciousness of the six children in the school age is also growing, and they begin to make initial reflections on everything around them.As the sun has risen and the six characters have entered their youth, their consciousnesses, their emotions, are all brightened and complicated like the waves and the scenery on the shore.As the rising sun looks vertically over the rolling sea, the sunlight penetrates the room like sharp wedges, and the consciousness of the individuality of the six characters finally takes shape and emerges; Going to India for a farewell party, this farewell party is actually a coming-of-age ceremony.After the sun rises to the mid-heaven, the scenery under the sun has no secrets, and all are clearly and nuancedly exposed; correspondingly, the six mature characters begin to hear the message of death—their mutual friend Percival Died in India, the world and life began to cast a shadow.Then, as the afternoon sun slanted down, the tide left patches of water on the shore, where stranded fish flapped their tails, and the six characters, just entering middle age, tried to go beyond themselves and seek love .As the sun sinks lower and lower, and the flowers in the garden begin to wither, the six characters become aware of the irreversible passage of time, of life's limitations.When the sun went down, the day shattered like a hard rock, and the harvested crops were left with only pieces of stubble, and the shadows on the coast began to spread. It was almost dusk, and the six people who had gone through vicissitudes of life gathered together again. Together, recall the course of their lives filled with despair and disillusionment.After the sun has completely set and the tide of darkness submerges everything, the only surviving character, Bernard, faces the course of his life that is about to end, and begins to summarize his life and his friend's life.Afterwards, all that could be heard was "the sound of the waves crashing on the shore".This is a very vivid summary.This ebb and flow image of waves constitutes an eternal symbol of human life, consciousness, and feelings.

In the main text, the monologues of the six characters are like the six parts of a movement, which are presented alternately in turn. Sometimes they are independent of each other, and sometimes they have some counterpoint relationship.These six characters describe their life experience from childhood to old age in stylized monologue language according to the movement of the sun and the rise and fall of ocean waves.What the six voices present are not specific and real personal sounds, but refined to a very pure and abstract level, a silent sound far away from the original life.Not only that, but there is basically no dialogue between the six voices.Moreover, in the same chapter, the monologues of the six voices are not carried out at the same time level, but progressively show the progress of time, life, and life.That is to say, the evolution of time and the changes in life are all presented with their instant monologues one after another.When the six characters are children, time and life are clear and concise; as they grow older, from youth to middle age to old age, time and life lose their grasp like the world of adults. order.This change is clearly reflected in their respective speech styles, because their monologues have become more and more complex as they grow older-from the simple jumping words in the early days, to the young and middle-aged 1. More and more complicated words in the old age-sentence patterns change from short to long, from simple to complex.With these changes, the outlines of the characters of the six characters gradually change from blurred to relatively clear and full.However, the six characters do not have distinct and vivid personalities in the whole work, and each of them has stylized, abstract, and typified personality traits.For example, Bernard is like a writer who loves life. He believes in the power of words and likes to describe the world with various rhetoric; Neville advocates the spirit of rationality and pursues rigorous knowledge; Influenced by tradition, she has a strong aggressiveness; Susan despises the city and yearns for nature, like a good wife and mother; Jenny yearns for social life and has a keen sense of the body; Rhoda is shy and mysterious, and she always says she has no face , trying to forget his own existence, and stare at the world on the other side.The six characters seem to represent different aspects of human life.What unites the six characters is a mysterious character who is always silent, but always exists in everyone's consciousness and monologue like a shadow. This is their common friend Percival-a British fifteen-year-old The character of the same name as the knight in search of the Holy Grail in The Death of King Arthur by the century writer Sir Thomas Malory.Percival is their hero, the yardstick by which they measure the meaning of life; at the same time, for each of them, Percival is a different person, representing their respective secret desires.

Of the six characters who engage in momentary internal monologues, Bernard is the only one who is vividly remembered from beginning to end.As a child, Bernard once said: "We merged into each other through rhetoric. Our boundaries are blurred. We form an ethereal kingdom." In college, he used to identify himself at various stages. Various characters, such as Hamlet, Shelley, one of the protagonists in Dostoevsky's novels, and Byron.He believed in the magic of words all his life, and he kept various notes throughout his life.Through the weaving of words, he ties the lives of others together like a spider's web.Especially in the last chapter of the book, the concluding monologue of the aging and lonely Bernard can be called a novel that can be written independently and compresses the density to the extreme.The artistic height achieved in this part, the complexity and richness of life it reveals, is comparable to that great work to a certain extent.The lives of all the characters who have appeared before are all woven together through Bernard's long monologue at the last moment of his life.Not only that, but his summary also played a role in making the whole structure achieve the most perfect balance.

Published in 1931, a year when Virginia Woolf was approaching fifty, a time when creativity was at its peak.Prior to this, she had accumulated rich experience on the road of novel experimentation; her creative and unique voice in novel creation had also made her one of the main figures in the modernist literary movement.Her first experimental novel, Jacob's Room, was published in 1922.It was a year of special significance to the modernist literary movement.In that year, the poet Eliot published his long poem, the novelist Joyce published his novel, and Proust on the other side of the English Channel passed away.The major literary events that happened in that year naturally had a profound impact on Woolf's literary concepts.As far as personal literary writing is concerned, Woolf said that in "Jacob's Room" "I (at the age of forty) discovered how to speak with my own voice".In the face of Joyce's novel, which destructively subverted the entire nineteenth-century novel style, she clearly realized that it was an unforgettable sudden upheaval for the innovation of novel art—— Infinitely daring, terrible disaster".But she wasn't blindly sure of it.She thinks that Joyce still follows the path of the previous novels to a certain extent, because all the novel artistic methods used by Joyce are nothing more than expressing the social life of Dublin at the beginning of the century.For the art of novels, she has her own unique insights. She wants to find her own way and persistently follow a unique creative path, that is, to fully display the inner world of individuals in a tunnel-digging way.Woolf's quest is in a way very pure.She has a skeptical attitude towards the external real world, and what she is interested in is a so-called "inner reality", which is all kinds of things accumulated in the depths of people's hearts and constantly emerging on the level of consciousness. feeling impression.In her view, a person's existence is like an organ that experiences sensations. From a person's birth to death, he is under the impact of sensory experience all the time.In that famous literary manifesto, "On the Modern Novel" (1919), she wrote:

"The mind receives thousands of impressions—trivial, strange, fleeting, or etched on the mind with sharp steel knives. They come from all directions, like countless atoms in different places. Constant showers... Life is not a pair of symmetrically fitted glasses; life is a bright halo, life is a translucent envelope that is consistent with our consciousness and surrounds us. Is it not the task of the novelist to put into words the varied, ineffable, indefinable inner spirit-however perverted and complex it may appear-with as little foreign impurity as possible? "...let us record the atoms in the order in which they have fallen upon men's minds; let us trace the pattern, however incoherent and inconsistent it may appear to be; A situation or a detail leaves its mark on the mind."

"Jacob's Room" is Woolf's initial attempt to make the above-mentioned ideal of writing come true, and there are many scenes and feeling descriptions full of impressionism.The novel is not very mature in art, but Woolf has explored the possibility of creating a new novel from the attempt of this novel.This possibility was fully realized in her two subsequent novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927).These are two rigorous modernist novels in the British style, and two works occupy an important position in the stream of consciousness novels.In these two novels, Woolf skillfully employs stream-of-consciousness novel techniques such as internal monologue, sensory analysis, interlacing of subjective and objective time, and symbolism. Like "Mrs. Dalloway", everything that happened in the novel was compressed into a short period of fifteen hours from nine o'clock in the morning to the early morning of the next day, showing the inner activities of an upper-class woman during this period , and through the interlacing of internal time and external time, it clearly shows her inner life experience from the age of eighteen to fifty-two. "To the Lighthouse" is more compact and poetic in terms of structure in addition to skillful use of stream-of-consciousness techniques.The novel adopts a three-part musical structure, the first part "Window" takes Mrs Ramsay as the central figure, and shows the life of a September afternoon and evening through the window of her soul (the theme in the music) ; the second part "the passage of time" is based on the theme of time and the passage of life, the vicissitudes of life, many characters in the first part of the novel have passed away (the subtitle in the music); the third part "Lighthouse" uses the dead Ram The theme of Madam Qi's spiritual light eternally exists in the hearts of the living (a variation of the theme in the music).Woolf adopts this exquisite structure with strong symbolic meaning, on the one hand, for the innovation of the novel’s external form, and on the other hand, which is also a very important aspect, obviously to communicate with the characters in the novel about life, death, The almost abstract introspection and contemplation of time and other life issues achieve a certain artistic balance.If in "Mrs. Dalloway", Woolf is still trying to express the protagonist's inner life experience through various stream-of-consciousness techniques, then in "To the Lighthouse", she is obviously not satisfied with this kind of expression. In a condensed and poetic form of structure, she began to avoid those specific details of life as much as possible, trying to write a life in a general sense—an abstract, contemplative life—in which there is a sense of Reflections on life issues such as life, time, pain, hope, and death.It can be said that Woolf began to go beyond the description of purely personal inner experience, and turned to the exploration of the abstract nature of life experience.However, in "To the Lighthouse", the description of the abstract essence of life is still limited by the description of specific characters.It was not until the time of writing that Woolf basically got rid of the shackles of this limitation and carried out all-round experiments at will.

Woolf belongs to the kind of writer who well combines the study of novel art with novel creation.She wrote a large number of work reviews in her life, including studies on both classical literature and modern works.In her 1927 essay on the theory of fiction, "The Narrow Bridge of Art" (originally titled "Poetry, Fiction, and the Future"), Woolf studied Elizabethan poetic drama, Romantic England, Romantic poetry and the stylistically stunning Tristram Shandy (a novel by the eighteenth-century English writer Lawrence Sterne) described her ideal novel.She believes that the gluttonous novel will devour many literary forms:

"It will be written in prose, but a prose that has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have a certain condensedness of poetry, but more of the banality of prose. It will have drama, but it will not be drama. It will be read, not performed. It does not matter what name we shall call it. What matters is that we see this novel work emerging on the horizon...   "The main difference between it and the novel with which we are presently familiar is that it will step back from life and stand a little further. It will, like poetry, provide only the outlines of life rather than its details. It will be used sparingly as one of the hallmarks of the novel. It will tell us very little about the housing, income, occupations, etc. of its characters; It will express the thoughts and feelings of the characters closely and vividly, however, only from a different angle. It will not be like the novels so far, which mainly describe the interaction between people. relationship, and their common activity; it will express the individual psyche and the general relation of ideas, and the inner monologue of the characters in their silent state."

It took four years from the initial gestation to the final completion, and to some extent, it was created following this ideal of novel writing.This work is like a writing adventure.It allows pure poetic monologue fragments to be generated freely and freely like countless endless waves, without any explanation.It revolutionized fiction writing so that it completely transcended the form of fiction and became non-fiction.It completely breaks the closed structure of traditional novels, and it does not have the central protagonist in traditional novels.It makes the inner monologues of the six characters go back and forth like seasons and waves, and there is no objective and real description about these characters; The mouthpiece of the essence of life. In order to make the work reach the height of pure poetry, Woolf, as always, attaches great importance to the excavation and description of special moments in life.She believes: "Every moment is the center of a large number of unexpected sensations." (See "The Narrow Bridge of Art") In her creation diary about, she once wrote: "I have an idea, All I am doing now is saturating every atom. I want to remove all useless, lifeless or superfluous descriptions, and go all out to express that moment, no matter what it contains. For example, that moment is a combination of thoughts, feelings and the breath of the sea." Therefore, in the novel, each character's monologue is presented as a monologue about the momentary feelings of life.These moments of feeling have a huge impact in the lives of each character.They are magnified and displayed with the nuances of a scientific anatomy.This makes it a work that reveals the deep inner meaning of moments in life.At the same time, Woolf endows the momentary monologues of each character with dramatic power, making their respective monologues appear as independent voices, describing different life experiences from different perspectives.In this regard, Woolf wrote in her creative diary: "I think it is being transformed into a series of dramatic monologues. The key is to make them appear and disappear in a balanced manner with the rhythm of the waves." That is to say, the process of placing characters in the sea In the background, the rhythm of the waves is used to give the work an overall aesthetic feeling, that is, with the rhythm of the waves, the purely poetic description and the dramatic monologue are integrated into an organic artistic whole. That is, a work that integrates various literary forms such as poetry, drama, and even music into novel writing.Faced with such a work, many people say it is a poetic novel.But some people are aware of its dramatic features. For example, the French writer Moloya lamented in his review of Woolf's works: "It has become a long poem. Six characters speak in changing lines, and the middle Insert some lyrical meditations. Is it poetry? More correctly, an oratorio. Six soloists take turns in a flowery monologue, singing their ideas of time and death". Aiming at such a creative form demonstrated by Woolf, E. Foster once made a very accurate summary, which we can borrow as the end of this article.Forster said in a speech entitled "Virginia Woolf": "She belonged to the world of poetry, but was obsessed with another world, she always stretched out from her enchanted tree of poetry. out of her arms, grabbing bits and pieces from the rushing streams of everyday life, and out of those bits she creates novels.... And that's her problem: she's a poet, and she wants to write A work that comes as close as possible to a novel."