Trying to Imagine Post-Pandemic Life? Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison Can Help.

By Michelle Orange May 8, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET A lesser mystery of the pandemic: how to square the rise in total book sales (roughly 10 percent in 2020) and the number of readers (roughly all of them) who over that same period described the struggle to conquer a single paragraph, much less all, of “Middlemarch.” A year of dread, loss and social tumult has stretched at both ends the extent to which taking a new book in hand constitutes an act of hope. If the ability to immerse oneself in another world has wavered, it would appear that the will to do so endures, bound up, for now, in the piles of un- and half-read books fortifying our respective holding cells.

Release from those cells will depend on more than data, the vectors whose rise and fall continue to redraw the boundaries of our lives. It will rest, finally, on our capacity to imagine the world we actually want to re-enter. It will require the kind of sustained attention, in other words, for which reading makes excellent practice.

Early this spring, wary and disoriented despite the vaccine at work in my system, I sought a book to help me navigate the strange, bardo-like moment in which disaster and its aftermath begin to overlap. “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf’s 1927 masterpiece, was the one that kept coming to mind — specifically its experimental middle section, “Time Passes.” Parsed into 10 “chapters,” with its swirling rhythms, involuted structure and flights into abstraction, “Time Passes” presents an especial challenge to the pre-post-pandemic brain. I hoped to find in Woolf’s evocation of grief as a disruption of one’s sense of time not a solution but the solace of a riddle’s key connections laid bare.

Nine years after the end of World War I, which left 40 million people dead or wounded, and seven since a global flu pandemic killed at least that many, Woolf sought to mark the unmaking of the world as she knew it, and, with her depiction of the Ramsay family and the various artists and scholars in their midst, tell a new kind of story about grief and restoration. She envisioned the structure with a line drawing: two blocks, the before and after, connected by a thin corridor. “I am making up ‘To the Lighthouse’ — the sea is to be heard all through it,” Woolf wrote in her diary. “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ A new — by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” Dislodging elegy from its poetic traditions and long history of men memorializing other men, Woolf set out to explore its terms within a more expansive, narrative form.

In the novel’s first section we meet the Ramsays — 50-year-old Mrs. Ramsay, a Victorian ideal of privilege and womanly self-sacrifice, based on Woolf’s own mother; Mr. Ramsay, her crusty philosopher husband; and their eight children — at the family’s seaside idyll, surrounded by guests, servants and hangers-on. Woolf veers in and out of the minds of her characters, charting their impressions of one another across a single day and evening. The “action” is minimal: A visit to the nearby lighthouse is scrapped, two members of the party become engaged and a splendid meal is served. At dinner, Lily Briscoe, a youngish, unmarried artist with a fixation on Mrs. Ramsay, glimpses a way forward for the painting that taunted her all afternoon.

And then, well, time passes. Ten years, in fact, in which the Ramsays do not return to their house on the coast, which is battered and reclaimed by nature: “Night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together … until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.” What is treasured and beautiful blows apart, such that “it seems impossible … we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth.” Woolf tucks into parentheticals the sudden deaths of Mrs. Ramsay (a flu, perhaps), her daughter (childbirth) and her son (the war). Only the old poet Mr. Carmichael appears to have thrived; his new collection does very well. “The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.”

Woolf wrote “Time Passes” during the May 1926 general strike that brought England to a standstill. She wanted, she wrote in an outline, to convey the “gradual dissolution of everything … contrasted with the permanence of — what?” If not permanence, Woolf finds in nature a fruitful tension between destruction and endurance, sorrow and consolation. She contrasts close description of its ravages with the “strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare … that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules.” This is elegy as a study in ambivalence, the attempt to reconcile innate disparities; Woolf depicts mourning as both alinear and a process to be worked through over time.

In the last section Mr. Ramsay and his two youngest children return at last to the seaside home, as does Lily Briscoe. The Ramsays finally make their voyage to the lighthouse, and Lily attempts to finish the painting begun 10 years before. The work finds her tunneling into the past, determined to marry what was with what is; wretched loss and the abundance that remains. Like Mrs. Ramsay, she seeks to make of the moment something permanent. It is her willingness to confront “this other thing, this truth, this reality” that restores her creative rhythm.

Published 60 years after “To the Lighthouse” and set several decades earlier, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” the novel to which I turned next, extends Woolf’s notion of trauma and grief as problems of memory and of time. If, as the critic Peter Knox-Shaw has noted, tragedy charts “the ‘darkening slope’ toward death” and elegy the ascent away from it, Morrison’s story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, suggests the ways catastrophe and its reckoning are doomed to intermix.

Like “To the Lighthouse,” “Beloved” focuses on a physical place: 124, the number of the house where Sethe and her four children find a measure of freedom with her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and which becomes a site of torment, confinement and isolation. The killing of Sethe’s baby daughter — which transforms 124 from a vibrant, communal space into a haunted crypt — compounds her struggle to exist in time. For her, “the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.” Sethe’s attempt to live only in the present exhausts her, making memory toxic and healing impossible. That this is the very design of enslavement and dehumanization creates at the center of “Beloved” a pumping heart of rage and longing; in broadening the purview of elegy, Morrison reveals its limitations.

The trauma “Beloved” depicts is both collective and individual, focused on a woman whose pursuit of healing locks her “in a love that wore everybody out.” Just as Sethe’s surviving daughter, Denver, must find a way out of 124, Sethe must find more than pain in her “rememory,” and let the world back in. “Sethe, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody,” Paul D, a friend from the Kentucky estate where they were enslaved, tells her. “We need some kind of tomorrow.”

Thinking of that tomorrow, and of the contemporary writing that might serve as a portal to whatever’s next, I am reminded of nature’s teeming presence in Woolf’s and Morrison’s modern elegies. Essential to their portraits of human devastation is a sense of its place in a larger order, one that balances beauty and brutality. As we emerge from a scale of loss unknown for generations, along with the dead, our relationship to the planet stands in urgent need of mourning — and remaking. Elegy, a form that seeks to reunify what has been blown apart, may help us do that work. As Helen Macdonald wrote in her essay collection “Vesper Flights” (2020), we need science to help us grasp the age of extinction we are living through, “but we need literature, too; we need to communicate what the losses mean.”

With her genre-fluid approach to nonfiction, Macdonald is among the many writers attempting just that, reminding us of nature as it was, while casting an eye to what can still be. What, in fact, must be: Talk of unity between human populations, after all, is pointless without a parallel reckoning, a striving toward the renewal on which all earthly life depends