leaf' (p.171) until the optic nerve could tolerate broad daylight. The subchorus of 'the atheist Tansley' reinforces the paternal chant and is in turn, with severity, countered by the mother's affirmation. The conversation then moves from dispute to reconciliation as Mrs Ramsay and Charles Tansley share their outing until, with the second section, the movement of recoil cyclically begins again: '"No going to the Lighthouse, James"'. The isolation of all dialogue within the text, where background strains forward between all utterances and strives to become foreground makes all speech in "*To the Lighthouse*-"* curiously anonymous, impersonal and free. Utterances in "*To the Lighthouse*-"* seem to float in mid-air and are seldom directly answered, with the effect that they become charged with extra-personal significance. The narrative voice becomes a primary agent of interruption, forcing individual participations apart by obtruding the rich flow of thought-content which motivates, explains, undermines or contradicts what is said. Speech is made to seem a kind of digression from the major business of life: a radical reversal of a traditional emphasis of the novel, where meaning is assumed to be generated by social or personal dialogue. In this novel, speech takes on a ritualistic and static quality. Conversation may go unanswered, and indeed the speaker may not appear to be listening out for an answer at all, abandoning interest in communication as likely to prove abortive, to be re-engrossed in the interior world. Questions may be left in mid-air, as at the end of Part One, Section 13, where Mrs Ramsay's question, '"Did Nancy go with them?"' remains unanswered until Section 15, which consists solely of Prue's words, '"Yes . . . I think Nancy did go with them"'.Equivocation between outer and inner events is also a reflex of Virginia Woolf's fictional manner in "* To the Lighthouse*-"*. Indeed, the technique makes possible an insecurity in...
