But how is it in the life and occupation of the writer? If a writer were to discover that sense of transcendence that he or she had been striving to cause by form, would the discovery satisfy? The experiences of ecstasy and rapture that are related by Virginia Woolf in A Sketch of the Past are natural parallels to the supernatural experiences of Spirit-filling and Spirit-Baptism. They are not wrong, only qualitatively inferior: earthy more than heavenly. She came by them through nature, or by the divine footprint in nature. They are not mystical in a bad sense. When she declares her inability to adequately describe experiences of being (her ecstatic experience and then her experience of rapture) and of non-being (the mundane part of each day), she means that she is unable, especially, to convey experiences of the former category. She acknowledges that Austen, Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy have probably conveyed both. In a chapter called The Stream of Consciousness in Forces of Modern British Literature, William York Tindall speaks of Woolf’s estimate of Joyce and his Ulysses: Joyce reveals the ‘flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain.’ But, according to Tindall, Woolf thinks Joyce’s ‘light is too brilliant, its focus too precise’ (p. 199.) Joyce ‘deals in flow, to be sure,’ continues Tindall in his interpretation of what Woolf thought of Joyce and his craft, “but he lays pipes for it. Avoiding the plumbing, she will make use of his stream” (pp. 199, 200.) Does all of this not tell us, if Tindall is trustworthy, that Woolf granted that the apotheosis had already been achieved by several writers, and that she saw it at least falteringly in Joyce too, except that in his case she resorted to accusing him of faults in order to justify her leaping into his stream to try and complete what she believed he had at least begun to swim in? What is secular redemption through fiction good for since Woolf committed suicide in despair? What actual redemption is there for Virginia Woolf if her suicide led to abiding anguish in hell? She had the impudence (in her essay, I am Christina Rossetti) to criticize the strict faith and pious life of that good Christian poetess; but then she drowned herself in a fit of despair. Virginia Woolf is still remembered and read, but she is not getting anything out of it—not, certainly, the joy of having been redeemed to receive a promise of eternal life, which is precisely the portion bestowed upon the Christian faithful, of whom Christina Rossetti is one. And here is what Virginia Woolf has on earth, according to Byron’s poetic paraphrase of something that Persius wrote: “To have, when the original is dust,/A name, a wretched picture and worse bust.” (D. L. Macdonald, Poor Polidori, p. 158.) Her original frame has gone to dust, and the picture that is usually chosen to represent what she looked like is less than a pretty picture. Polidori, incidentally, is an almost entirely forgotten writer, and another suicide.
