My thoughts on Auerbach's The Brown Stocking

I find this reading the most interesting of the three, especially the point that Auerbach makes about the fusing of interior and exterior occurances such that to understand the "real" Mrs Ramsay for example, we need this multitude of various parrallel and co-existing thoughts and consciousness of others around her. What intrigues me further is the idea that we not only have these multiple, interjecting or intersecting, shifting streams of consciousness, but we also have varied narrative voices speaking to us in the course of the novel. We have the voice that ceases to be authoratative, not possessing any objective information on the characters, and as doubtful and as hesitant as we readers may be, and whose "narration of objective facts has completely vanished"(534). Auerbach associates this voice to that which is highly lyrical, "poetic and non-real"(532). Then this voice at some instances is altered where we hear the objective speaker, where more earthly matters are spoken about.

After reading this, it ocurred to me that perhaps Woolf employed this technique very consciously so as to break down the notion of the authoratative, objective narrative voice. Gikandi speaks of the White-Other binary in Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference, where he says there is no desire or "incentive" to know the Other if not for the fact that it leads to the understanding of the civilised white self. This White self in any text could be seen as the author, or the narrative voice, while the characters dependent upon this voiceso that theymay be heard form the Other group. And in presenting a narrative voice that is so extremely volatile, shifting and doubtful, and perhaps even almost afraid to define and pin down her own characters, Woolf manages to restore some depth that seems unknowable even to the author, to her characters and thus to The Other. And as Auerbach suggests, this could be Woolf's "attitude toward the reality of the world he represents"(535)- the need to establish an equally unobjective(for the lack of a better word) authoratarian voice.