Virginia Woolf for Staying Alive

Virgina Woolf was not an unsuccessful suicide. Yet Veronica Suchodolski argues in PoMo No Mo’: What Virginia Woolf Teaches Us About How to Write Today there is an line of optimism in Woolf's writing. I omit her examination of those stories for a couple of passages that spoke to my own problems and concerns:

"I came to the class as something of a lapsed postmodernist. I’d taken a course in the literary school a few semesters prior and had only recently grown disillusioned with its tenets, the nihilistic rejection of reality and truth that filled me first with existential dread, then a numbing emptiness as I tried to apply it to my own writing. Reading Woolf with this lens, I found her work to present a thorough criticism of the ideas that would characterize postmodernism after her death. It wasn’t just that Woolf was a modernist, embodying the reassertion of reason against a growing alienation that individuals felt in response to advancing industrialization—this modernist aesthetic sets her up in obvious opposition to postmodernism, given that the latter movement grew out of a rejection of their modernist predecessors. Woolf’s work goes beyond this simplistic dichotomy, acknowledging and considering at great length the ideas that would later become postmodernism, but ultimately turning away from them in favor of what Woolf seems to consider the essential truth of being human. That is, the idea that while people’s true selves are masked beneath layers of constructed identities—making meaningful connection almost entirely impossible—the point of life, the beauty in it, is to continue to search for a glimpse at that true self below the surface. For Woolf, this is what makes life worth it all.

I came to a similar conclusion because I failed as a suicide. That I do not attempt suicide again under the embarrassment of my current situation is that I now see any such suicide as succumbing to, validating, the ugliness of nihilism. Again from the essay, a point I wish I had known over a decade ago:

...In To the Lighthouse, Woolf re-emphasizes the beauty in the dogged going-on-ness of life, showing how even in the face of tremendous tragedy life continues as it did before simply because it must....

 sch 

3/5/22