This essay queries the identification of modernist fiction with the development of formal strategies of interiority. Returning to the novel that Auerbach singles out as exemplary of the inward turn, I read To the Lighthouse as a work that does not engage exclusively with problematics of consciousness and memory but is also concerned with the ontological precarity of the object-world. I argue that in the aberrant middle section of the novel, titled “Time Passes,” Woolf develops a practice of writing in absentia—a form of narration that evacuates consciousness, without rising to omniscience. Within this section, Woolf represents a world in which the anthropocentric premises that elsewhere govern the text are suddenly suspended: the active, self-determining, subject and the inert, affectable object cease momentarily to be the primary points of reference for parsing existence. The spectral quality of this narration, which is neither “objective” nor mediated through character, de-stabilizes conventional wisdom about focalization, insofar as the latter relies on distinctions between interiority and exteriority that are organized with reference to the human and its variable epistemological positioning. Inquiring more broadly into the place of things in modern fiction, the essay situates Woolf ’s experiment in relation to contemporaneous developments in philosophy and psychoanalysis. I focus first on how she revises a central conceit of Cambridge Realism—namely, hypothesizing the absence of the perceiver in order to establish objects as “real”; and second, on Walter Benjamin’s evocation of a “language of things,” which illuminates Woolf ’s effort to cultivate a new form of elegy.

本文质疑现代主义小说与内在性形式策略发展的认同。回到奥尔巴赫挑出作为内向转变的典范的小说，我读到了灯塔作为一部不仅仅涉及意识和记忆的问题，而且还关注对象世界的本体论不稳定性的作品。我认为，在小说的异常中间部分，题为“时间流逝”，伍尔夫发展了一种缺席写作的实践——一种疏散意识的叙述形式，没有上升到无所不知。在这一节中，伍尔夫代表了一个世界，在这个世界中，支配文本的其他地方的人类中心论前提突然被暂停：主动的、自我决定的主体和惰性的、可感的客体暂时不再是解析存在的主要参考点。这种叙述的光谱质量，既不是“客观的”，也不是通过人物来调节的，它破坏了关于聚焦的传统智慧，后者依赖于内部性和外部性之间的区别，这些区别是根据人类及其可变的认识论定位来组织的。为了更广泛地探究事物在现代小说中的地位，这篇文章将伍尔夫的实验与同时期的哲学和精神分析发展联系起来。我首先关注的是她如何修正剑桥现实主义的一个核心概念——即假设感知者的缺席以将对象建立为“真实的”；其次，关于沃尔特·本雅明对“事物语言”的唤起，这说明了伍尔夫为培养一种新的挽歌形式所做的努力。这篇文章将伍尔夫的实验与哲学和精神分析的同时代发展联系起来。我首先关注的是她如何修正剑桥现实主义的一个核心概念——即假设感知者的缺席以将对象建立为“真实的”；其次，关于沃尔特·本雅明对“事物语言”的唤起，这说明了伍尔夫为培养一种新的挽歌形式所做的努力。这篇文章将伍尔夫的实验与哲学和精神分析的同时代发展联系起来。我首先关注的是她如何修正剑桥现实主义的一个核心概念——即假设感知者的缺席以将对象建立为“真实的”；其次，关于沃尔特·本雅明对“事物语言”的唤起，这说明了伍尔夫为培养一种新的挽歌形式所做的努力。