TABLES IN TREES: REALISM IN "TO THE LIGHTHOUSE"

Toward the beginning of To the Lighthouse, young James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from an illustrated catalogue, endows one of the pictures with all the "heavenly bliss" he feels as his mother speaks.1 As the child is father to the man, moments like these are the proto? types of the Woolfian epiphany or spot of time: the moment when some consciousness?either dramatized within the text or implied by the text? transcends its usual limitations by transcending the usual appearances of the world. C?zanne once made a famous remark that painting from nature is not copying the object but realizing one's sensations. For that reason, as Robert Hughes points out, Cezanne's goal became "presence, not illusion": "The fruit in the great still-lives of Cezanne's late years ... are so weight? ed with pictorial decision?their rosy surfaces filled, as it were, with thought? that they seem twice as solid as real fruit.2 For Virginia Woolf, similarly, writing from nature is realizing certain psychological states?states of desire, dependency, and conflict?that may be particularly acute in the sensitized artist but that are common to others. To read Woolf is to realize how the res of traditional realism is weighted with individual needs and decisions?a kind of cross-hatching that is the "real" subject of Woolf 's novels. When Lily Briscoe, the amateur artist in To the Lighthouse, wants to understand what Mr. Ramsay's books are about, one of Mr. Ramsay's sons says, "Subject and object and the nature of reality." He then illustrates this notion by instructing Lily, "Think of a table . . . when you're not there" (p. 38). When Lily tries to imagine this reality, however, she imagines a kind of beached animal: the kitchen table stuck "in the fork of a pear tree ... its four legs in air" (p. 38). In addition, as Avrom Fleishman points out, it is a dining table "that structures relationships in the major scene of part I."3 Closer to Woolf 's notion of realism, then, is the observation Lily makes about Charles Tansley, one of Mr. Ramsay's students: "His subject