What is ‘rhythm’? It is neither a ‘thing’ (a material object) nor necessarily related to a human action. We usually think about rhythms in time, but the term need not be temporal. The OED gives one of the definitions as ‘Regularity in the repetition in time or space of an action, process, feature, condition, event, etc’ (my emphasis), as in this quotation found in an article from Nature in 1881: “That the chief novelty is an absolute rhythm in the spectrum; instead of lines irregularly distributed over the spectrum, we have groups which are beautifully rhythmic in their structure”. Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis uses the idea of rhythm to understand social spaces and everyday life, and Michel Serres entertains an extended meditation on rhythm, meaning and movement in Genesis.
Furthermore, the term has senses both natural (the intervals of a heartbeat or of waves lapping on a shore) and cultural (the rhythm of a piece of music or of a spoken sentence), and also has a verbal sense (‘to set to verse’ or ‘to make rhythmical’, according to the OED). In relation to this latter meaning, the OED provides a quotation from Woolf herself. In a diary entry from 1922 she writes of the modernist poet T. S. Eliot that “Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it.”[1]
So what, then, is rhythm? Here is one attempt at a rough and ready umbrella definition. Rhythm is the creation or modulation of structure; it introduces a play between regularity and irregularity, between repetition and difference, between pattern and chaos, between monotone and white noise. Rhythm, to short circuit a long argument, is meaning.
So what of rhythm in To the Lighthouse? Perhaps the most striking rhythms within the world of the text are those of the waves on the shore. In one passage beautiful for its own rhythmicity Mrs. Ramsay apprehends
the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you–I am your support…
These are the same waves that “like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life”. Here the notional division between natural and cultural rhythms is effaced as we slide from the insistent lapping of the waves into what Mrs. Ramsay later strains to hear:
One moment more, with her head raised, she listened, as if she waited for some habitual sound, some regular mechanical sound; and then, hearing something rhythmical, half said, half chanted, beginning in the garden, as her husband beat up and down the terrace, something between a croak and a song,
At one point during an excruciating dinner party Mrs. Ramsay summons up the energy to lubricate the social wheels by
giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking–one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a news-paper.
Life is a series of concentric and inter-related rhythms. Nested rhythms of the waves and tides, rhythms of language and song, rhythms of the weather, inextricable rhythms of nature and culture.
Then there are the rhythms of Woolf’s language, the perfectly weighted and effortless symmetrical clauses that pepper her prose. Here is one at random: “with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair”. Four anapaests lapping like waves on a shore. There are other textual rhythms in the novel, both within and between chapters and within and between sections. Rhythms of time, of place, of the repetition of certain words and the return to certain motifs or conceits. A ‘rhythmanalytical’ reading of To the Lighthouse would make for a promising research essay.
[1] Woolf, it appears from the OED, in responsible for inventing eight new words (‘irreticence’, ‘nibful’, ‘road-running’, ‘tweeze’, ‘vagulate’, ‘vagulous’, ‘veneartingly’, and the splendid ‘scrolloping’, which means that which is ‘characterized by or possessing heavy, florid, ornament’).
