Re-reading Virginia Woolf or the Invisible Edifice of Narrative

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. – Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

                The benefit of having a squirrel-like attitude towards possessions is finding forgotten nuts of the literary variety come spring. Last week as I was scanning my bookshelves looking for something to read, there it was, on the bottom shelf in the hall, right next to some hardcover editions of early Cormac McCarthy novels and my set of Proust—a battered old paperback copy (probably picked up off the street) of Jacob’s Room and The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I have been vaguely contemplating re-reading her because I’m pretty sure I didn’t get it the first time. All that I possessed from my first reading was  a vague mental picture of women on a ship, seen though some kind of gauzy film that obscured precise outlines and definitions.

 As I started Jacob’s Room this time, I noticed the poetic way Woolf fills in the story quickly. A young man is growing up, goes to college, and is trying to find his true place in the world. A typical coming of age story, right? Familiar, predictable even.  So I started to wonder about what story she was trying to tell. What made it possible for her to write a novel is this genre, usually so personal, without it being about herself?

                And then—one of those aha moments. Anyone can slip into this kind of narrative, using her own imagination, bits and pieces of the lives of people she knows, and possibly a bit of wishful thinking about the life she would have liked to live. We, her readers, enter into the narrative without needing to know these details. We all already know the story. A few short descriptions—a certain type of hat, how the women are dressed at a party, what kind of beverages are served when—and we fill in the appropriate time period, social class, geographic location, and all the other narrative variations that make one story differ from another.

                There are two reasons, I think for this innate understanding of narrative structure. The first one is obvious. We know the story because we’ve seen, read, heard it before. We are all schooled, either formally, or by our own experiences, or both, in how a story works. In Woolf’s case, according to her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, she had the run of the family library at an early age. She was considered too delicate for advanced schooling, but since she came from one of the most artistic and literary families of her time, she probably learned more from staying home. By the time she started to write, she had read the great English literary figures who had gone before her. Indeed, it had always been the family’s assumption that she would be a writer.

                But I believe there is a deeper reason that Woolf and other authors like her can build a story with just a few words or phrases. It is because we, her readers, live in our own narrative world so completely that we recognize the trajectory of other lives, even in fiction. Think of all of the coming-of-age novels you have read, even the ones forced on you in high school or college. The plots are all the same—the protagonist (sometimes the author, thinly veiled) escapes from some horrific childhood trauma, or just the loneliness of being misunderstood, into the outside world where, after many wryly humorous adventures, he or she finds something meaningful that helps them go on living. Now read a memoir of anyone’s young life, or write your own. Same story! And we never tire of reading these stories, just as we never tire of living them.

                The owner of the metaphysical book store where I used to work has a standard comment whenever anyone complained about life. He would listen to the whole sad story—overdue bills, bad weather, not enough hours in the day—and then reply that, whatever it was, it had to beat the alternative. Maybe that’s why we can’t wait to tell each other our stories, as mundane and, at the same time filled with pain as they may be. The sound of our own voices, or the scratch of pen across paper (I don’t know about the tap of keys because I don’t write that way, nor do I know the feel of moving text with my finger) reminds us that we are alive, when it just as easily could be otherwise.