[Macalister’s Fish] / "To the Lighthouse"

Item

Title
[Macalister’s Fish] / "To the Lighthouse"
Creator
Lapointe, Faith
Date Created
November 2024
Description
This lino printed fish with pieces cut out is overlaid on a printed quote from To The Lighthouse and attached with embroidery thread and tape. Woolf, in her novel, mentions a fish whose body was “mutilated” and “thrown back into the sea,” and this mention of the fish highlights the relationship between social relations and embodiment (Woolf 243). The cuts in the fish allow for viewers to peer through at the underlying quote, seeing a potential answer to the proposed question, “What is the meaning of life?” – a question that guides the characters in the novel. This project does not allow viewers to perceive Woolf’s tentative answer; rather, it prompts viewers to consider the question themselves and participate in the discourse Woolf posits in her novel.
My chosen text for this class was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, a novel published in 1927 at the Woolfs’ Hogarth printing press in London. The original 3000 copies printed sold out in a month, and the novel gained vast critical attention at the time, as it still does today, nearly a century after its original publication (Siguardson). As Margaret Drabble puts it, To the Lighthouse is “a book which transcends time” (Drabble qtd in Mills 158). To the Lighthouse explores topics such as knowledge, meaning, and the functions of art. The novel’s characters frequently attempt to interact with their social discourses (using different media to create knowledge and meaning), such as Mr. Ramsay undergoing a metaphysical philosophy project, Mrs Ramsay designing domestic spaces, and Lily Briscoe creating a painting. Ultimately, the characters are all trying to find meaning by undertaking their respective projects.
For my project, I chose to incorporate a lino print of a fish with a copy of a typeset quote from To the Lighthouse that prompts the question “What is the meaning of life?” (Woolf 218). I cut holes in the fish print to overlay it on the quote and then joined these pieces using embroidery thread and tape. The holes in the fish print allow the viewer to peer through the print at Woolf’s answer to the preliminary question (“What is the meaning of life?”). Just as the characters explore this question through art, the viewer may do so as well.

The main aspect of this project is the lino print of a fish. Lino (short for “linoleum”) is a material made from linseed oil and was originally used to make floor coverings and wallpaper (Gorse). Lino’s smooth texture lends itself well to carving for relief printing. Though it is unclear when it began to be used for printing, lino print art began to appear in America around the beginning of the twentieth century (“Linocut”), coinciding with the time that Woolf was writing and publishing.

When originally making my lino print of the fish, I kept in mind ideas regarding the nature of representation and art’s effectiveness in showing something’s essence. Due to time and skill restraints while carving my lino block, I created a print that was hardly a realistic depiction of a fish. Instead, the result was an image of a highly stylized fish. Woolf notes the artistic technique of showing something by approximation rather than replication by commenting on Lily’s painting that “the picture was not of [the Ramsays] ... in his sense. There were other senses too in which one might reverence them” (Woolf 72–73; emphasis added). Jean Mills notes that this sentimentthat something may be shown accurately without being realistic—applies to Woolf’s prose as well. Of the novel’s primary reception, she notes that Woolf was criticized for her lack of “realistic vigor,” as the experimental prose styles paradigmatic of Modernism vary drastically from the literary realism of the nineteenth century, although this feature ended up being one of Woolf’s paradigmatic literary contributions (Mills 159). Just as Woolf’s “uniquely reflective impressionism” contributes to the aesthetic quality of her work, the non-realistic portrayal of the fish in my lino print contributes to its overall aesthetic value (Mills 159). The benefit of non-realistic art is that it focuses on showing the subject’s essence, or the impact it has on viewers, rather than simply showing how it appears visually.

When I began the carving, I did have an idea in mind of how I wanted the fish to look. But as I continued, I felt more drawn to free-hand parts of the design to create a more erratic texture. Seonaid Robertson notes, in her description of lino printing, that “To transfer a work originally planned ... is to introduce an unnecessary complication in the process of understanding lino. Just as play with clay, the fondling, handling, squeezing, without trying to make anything, and the feeling for the possibilities of the material ... [is] the foundation of lino printing” (171). The lino itself, with its smooth texture, afforded such effortless carving. I use the term “afford” here in relation to the word “affordance,” which is “a term used to describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” (Levine 6). This free-feeling process reminded me of Woolf’s impressionistic and dynamic prose, with rhythmic and repetitive language patterns. An example of this style can be found in a passage about Lily: “being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone under” (Woolf 202). The clauses in this sentence are written with a parallel structure: each follows the noun with an active, present-tense verb. The words themselves are linked through assonance (“mind” and “rising”) and sibilance (“rising ... sea, the taste and smell that places have”), and the effect is that the sentence swells until it falls with a deviation from this pattern: “she had lost herself and gone under” (202). The effect of carving the lino block felt somewhat similar to reading this passage with its assonance and sibilance due to the rhythmic pattern of it.

Further, the invasive nature of the carving made me consider how violence, in the novel, is a paradoxical form of construction. I had considered this idea when first creating my lino print, and this observation was augmented when I used my print for decollage. My design of a fish in brackets was based on a quote near the end of the novel that reads, “[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea]” (Woolf 243). When I first read the novel, this quote struck me, and I allocated much of my intellectual energy to working with it. I concluded that, as people interact with their environment because of their embodiment, violence to someone’s body inherently changes that person’s view of themself. I had seen this idea as a destructive force. However, with the lino carving, the cutting of the block is a way of creating a new piece of art, which led me to see how violence to the body in Woolf’s novel could also be a way of constructing new identities. The invasive nature of carving highlighted how violence, either to an object (such as a lino block) or a living being (such as a fish), could be a form of construction. The process of creating this lino block challenged my previous opinion and illuminated a new outlook on the text: that a change in embodiment can be constructive rather than destructive. Using this existing medium to create a new project—my decollage—augmented this observation and highlighted the relationship between embodiment and meaning. To create this project, I cut holes into the lino print and my typeset print to allow the underlying text to peer through. The term “decollage” means “to unstick,” and it consists of tearing away pieces of paper to reveal what is underneath (What Is Décollage?). This culmination involves both major interests of the novel I had in mind throughout the course: the search for meaning in life and the nature of representation.

My chosen quote begins with the question “What is the meaning of life?” and the holes cut in the fish print allow for the viewer to peer at the tentative answer Woolf gives, while also obstructing it, leaving the viewer to answer the question themself. The additional destruction of the fish allows for an exploration of meaning or an answer to the proposed question. The quote that lies under this fish reads as follows:

What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. (Woolf 218)

People's answers to the prompted question, “what is the meaning of life,” will be deeply enmeshed with social discourses and people’s understandings of their place in the world. Bittel, Leong, and von Oertzen note that “the making and keeping of knowledge was never just about words or writing, but inseparable from material and social practices …paper ... was enmeshed with social constructions” (12). For this final project, the way that paper interacts with other pieces of paper directly interacts with the production of knowledge by prompting reflection.

Further, this quote emphasises the importance of small gestures in everyday life that work together to create a composite meaning (such as with social relationships), contesting the idea that there is one true objective meaning of life. To illustrate this claim, I wove the fish print and the printed quote together with embroidery thread, weaving the strands between each other as I worked around the page. Just as the characters gain meaning in their lives by participating in a social setting, the embroidery thread gives the project an overall sense of ‘togetherness”. Jean Mills cites a contemporary critic of Woolf who claimed that, in Woolf’s novel, “we feel the minute texture of [the characters’] lives with their own vivid senses,” saying how the connections made by Woolf’s characters can extend to the reader in an affective, tangible sense (Mills 161; emphasis added). Additionally, Woolf allegedly based To the Lighthouse on E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910), which opens with an epigraph reading, “Only connect” (Forster; Hoffman). Just as Woolf reworks an existing narrative to create her novel exploring meaning and connection, this project reworks existing media (the lino print and typeset quote) to explore meaning and connection
In producing my materials over the semester, I was able to challenge my past views on To the Lighthouse and gain a deeper appreciation for Woolf’s formal techniques. My final project—a decollage involving lino print, a typeset quote, and embroidery weaving—involves these past materials (the lino print and the typeset quote). Due to this re-using of materials, some of my final observations reverberated from when I first created them. However, putting the materials and previous observations into conversation with one another allowed me to explore and deepen my understanding of Woolf’s major themes by seeing how they operate alongside each other, even if they appear at separate moments in the novel.
References
Bittel, Carla, et al. “INTRODUCTION: Paper, Gender, and the History of Knowledge.” Working with Paper, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.

Forster, E.M.. Howards End. Penguin Books, 1967
Gorse, Christopher. “Linoleum.” A Dictionary of Construction, Surveying, and Civil Engineering, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2020.

Hoffman, Michael J., and Ann Ter Haar. “‘Whose Books Once Influenced Mine’: The Relationship between E. M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 45, no. 1, 1999, pp. 46–64. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/441663. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

Levine, Caroline. “INTRODUCTION: The Affordances of Form.” Forms, STU-Student edition,
Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400852604-003.

“Linocut Artists and History — Linocut Artist | Boarding All Rows.” Linocut Artist | Boarding All Rows, www.boardingallrows.com/history-of-lino-printing-and-famous-linocut-artists.

“Linocut.” Wikipedia, 12 Oct. 2024 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linocut#:~:text=%22Linole um%20art%22%20was%20first%20displayed,the%20Brooklyn%20Museum%20in%201949.

Mills, Jean. "To the Lighthouse: The Critical Heritage." The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse, Cambridge. Edited by Allison Pease. Cambridge University Press, 2015. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/books/lighthouse-critical-heritage/docview/2137995244/se-2.

Robertson, Seonaid. “Lino Pictures and Fabric Printing.” Creative Crafts in Education. Routledge, 1952 https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.4324/9780429401145-13.

Sigurdson, Norm. “Today in Literary History – May 5, 1927 – Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ Is Published.” Bookworm Norm, 5 May 2019, booknormblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/today-in-literary-history-may-5-1927-virginia-woolfs-to-the-lighthouse-is-published.

What Is Décollage? | A Guide to Art Terminology. avantarte.com/glossary/decollage.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford World’s Classics. 1992.
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