Sunshine Recorder

$Many Minds, One Story Virginia Woolf’s mental illness may have ultimately defined her craft—one that rejected convention in a decades-long attempt to portray the very character of consciousness. Recently I read Woolf’s entire oeuvre chronologically and noted opposition throughout: tensions between public and private; alienation versus belonging; nature versus man-made artifice; inner time versus the imposed timekeeping of Big Ben’s hours. In The Waves, Woolf actually refracts six separate consciousnesses into one mind, the biographer Bernard. She also liked ambiguity, something she borrowed from Russian writers such as Chekhov and Dostoevsky. When the text allows for alternate readings, she declines to take sides. Could such opposing attitudes reflect Woolf’s own considerable ambivalence? Do the author’s real-life equivocations echo in the indecisiveness of her fictional characters and her inconclusive plot arcs? In her diaries, Woolf regularly described a recurrent “madness,” referring to the disruptive mood swings that plagued her career and ultimately led to her suicide. As a doctor who has studied neurological disorders for 35 years, I recognize such periodic and cyclical fluctuations as manic–depressive illness, or bipolar affective disorder. Woolf plays creatively with two prime forces behind her bifurcated self: a fragile sense of ego in relation to those of her parents (portrayed by Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay), and self-doubt as an artist (Woolf herself as portrayed by Lily Briscoe). The structures of Woolf’s novels themselves differ dramatically. It’s nearly impossible to fit them into a coherent attitude one might call Woolf’s theory of art, and judging by the diverse Woolf scholarship that exists instead of a consensus, I am not alone. And that might be the point: Woolf could not piece herself together when unpredictable mental illness fragmented her world. “Virginia could be a very enchanting person,” said Vogue editor Madge Garland, “but there were times when I felt that she was more nearly enchanted.” When depressed, Woolf took to bed and withdrew, viewing the world as meaningless and without hope. On the upswing to mania she wrote at breakneck speed, the words seeming to compose themselves. Because the distorted thinking of bipolar individuals persists even when they are neutrally poised between mania and depression, Woolf read meaning and portent into events that were likely coincidental. This tendency may be one reason Woolf’s novels are strewn with odd, minute details that lure readers to hunt for significance in them. … What if instead one took a biological perspective and asked how the distorted perceptions and self-absorption typical of bipolar individuals might have colored the thinking of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated authors? Such a mind makes it hard to see objectively, let alone distinguish facts from its projections. Though Woolf confused subject and object most often during manic upswings, she also did so to varying degrees all the time. From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention and hones her technique in a lifelong experiment to portray consciousness and the character of thought. Her ideas about the unreliability of language were prescient given what science now knows: that the very structure of human brains allows language to introspect only a fraction of consciousness.$

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Many Minds, One Story

Virginia Woolf’s mental illness may have ultimately defined her craft—one that rejected convention in a decades-long attempt to portray the very character of consciousness.

Recently I read Woolf’s entire oeuvre chronologically and noted opposition throughout: tensions between public and private; alienation versus belonging; nature versus man-made artifice; inner time versus the imposed timekeeping of Big Ben’s hours. In The Waves, Woolf actually refracts six separate consciousnesses into one mind, the biographer Bernard. She also liked ambiguity, something she borrowed from Russian writers such as Chekhov and Dostoevsky. When the text allows for alternate readings, she declines to take sides.

Could such opposing attitudes reflect Woolf’s own considerable ambivalence? Do the author’s real-life equivocations echo in the indecisiveness of her fictional characters and her inconclusive plot arcs? In her diaries, Woolf regularly described a recurrent “madness,” referring to the disruptive mood swings that plagued her career and ultimately led to her suicide. As a doctor who has studied neurological disorders for 35 years, I recognize such periodic and cyclical fluctuations as manic–depressive illness, or bipolar affective disorder.

Woolf plays creatively with two prime forces behind her bifurcated self: a fragile sense of ego in relation to those of her parents (portrayed by Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay), and self-doubt as an artist (Woolf herself as portrayed by Lily Briscoe). The structures of Woolf’s novels themselves differ dramatically. It’s nearly impossible to fit them into a coherent attitude one might call Woolf’s theory of art, and judging by the diverse Woolf scholarship that exists instead of a consensus, I am not alone.

And that might be the point: Woolf could not piece herself together when unpredictable mental illness fragmented her world. “Virginia could be a very enchanting person,” said Vogue editor Madge Garland, “but there were times when I felt that she was more nearly enchanted.” When depressed, Woolf took to bed and withdrew, viewing the world as meaningless and without hope. On the upswing to mania she wrote at breakneck speed, the words seeming to compose themselves.

Because the distorted thinking of bipolar individuals persists even when they are neutrally poised between mania and depression, Woolf read meaning and portent into events that were likely coincidental. This tendency may be one reason Woolf’s novels are strewn with odd, minute details that lure readers to hunt for significance in them.

…

What if instead one took a biological perspective and asked how the distorted perceptions and self-absorption typical of bipolar individuals might have colored the thinking of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated authors? Such a mind makes it hard to see objectively, let alone distinguish facts from its projections. Though Woolf confused subject and object most often during manic upswings, she also did so to varying degrees all the time.

From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention and hones her technique in a lifelong experiment to portray consciousness and the character of thought. Her ideas about the unreliability of language were prescient given what science now knows: that the very structure of human brains allows language to introspect only a fraction of consciousness.