O Künstlerroman e a artista em (de)formação em Ao farol, de Virginia Woolf (1927)

Abstract

The article focuses onVirginia Woolf’s novel To the lighthouse, regarding the trajectory of a character, the artist Lily Briscoe, and its possible dialogues with the Künstlerroman genre. I explore the “artist's novel” category throughout the analysis not as a narrative program that ends in a typologizing phantasmagoria of its meaning, but as a novelistic form that can offer keys to critical readings for Lily's trajectory. I explore the interpretive hypothesis: the artist as a character, who spends the entire novel with a conflict that revolves around not being able to finish a painting she aims to create, only manages to find an outcome to overcome this drama not only when the painting ends, but also when the character herself crosses the principles that guided her aesthetic learning to achieve recognition. Her narrative leads to the end of a search for a legacy for her artistic work, focusing on her own self-realization, in the words of Adorno (2003), shutting herself in a subjectivist dissolution, so recurrent in the 20th century novel. In other words, Lily completes her artist narrative with a completely hypostatized subjectivism, rather than being guided by whatever emancipatory experience an emphasis on her own Bildung might give her. The post-World War I trauma will make her adherent to and regulated by (as Regulierung) by social institutions.