To the Lighthouse and Art
February 16, 2009 kclovinlife
A “Need of Distance and Blue”: Space, Color, and Creativity in To the Lighthouse
Full citation
Stewart, Jack. “A ‘Need of Distance and Blue’: Space, Color, and Creativity in To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 46 (2000): 78-99. Academic Search Premier. Neil Hellman, Albany. 12 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/441934>.
“She wanted to make the novel more like a work of art, while catching the movement of life itself” (79).
In this article Stewart focuses on relating “…Woolf’s poetics of space to the psychodynamics of creativity.”(80) His approach is “pluralistic, borrowing from formalism, feminism, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. These critical perspectives supplement each other and enable me to draw fuller analogies between fiction, painting, and music…I focus chiefly on textural and structural, spatial and formal elements in Woolf’s style.” (80) Stewart uses the text from To the Lighthouse along with other critics to make his argument of Woolf using Lily Briscole and her painting to convey her issues with writing and being a novelist. He also focuses on the color blue and distance in the novel.
The color blue is used in the novel to convey different meanings and express feelings. “In To the Lighthouse,‘first, the pulse of color flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam’ (36). Optically, blue opens a space for perception and meditation; as a substantive, the word blue conveys a substance (atmosphere or pigment) as well as inviting an imaginative response” (81). Stewart gos on to talk about how Lily feels an “instinctive need of distance and blue” (Woolf 279) “as she struggles to give plastic form to memories and sensations” (81).
Stewart talks about Mr. Ramsay “alphabet” working vertically in his brain and Lily contrasts him with her horizontal “scattered (polyphonic) type of attention that Lily practices in front of her easel” (83). “Splicing voyage and painting together in a structural rhythm that implies their interaction, Woolf links points in space by an invisible line stretching elastically from immediate foreground to distant background. The two movements intersect rhythmically until they converge at the moment the boat arrives at the lighthouse and Lily draws her final line” (83). Stewart also talks about how “distance conveys perspective, proportion, outline, desire, and direction; it is also a symbol of being” (83).
Stewart continues to express the meanings of “distance and blue throughout the article. he says “Lily’s visual thinking and her more conscious reflections about the effects of distance are steeped in the blue aura that is the medium of spiritual vision” (93).
This article was not easy for me to understand so it would be hard to just right a few points about questions I had. The author uses his own perspective to along with others to show how To the Lighthouse is a book that can be closely related to art through the aspects of distance, blue, and space. I think that it will bring some interesting things to discuss in class, just going back to the quotes he uses from the book and examining them along with Stewart.
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