Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

At 7:10 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, Reynolds Price began breaking down Virginia Woolf’s renowned novel, To The Lighthouse. It’s like this, he said: autobiographical fiction meets stream of consciousness at a beach house in Scotland. Oh yes, and there is this lighthouse. “The lighthouse is dangerous [as a literary device],” he told me. “If [Woolf] had just pressed one gram of excess weight on that image it would have been so corny. You know, ‘There’s a lighthouse! Here comes the beam! Everyone face it and smile!’”

Price and I weren’t even in the same room. He was live in a DukeReads online book club, broadcasted by the University on the video site USTREAM. The DukeReads show, which has aired five times this academic year, pits a Duke professor opposite North Carolina Public Radio personality Frank Stasio for an hour of Q&A on a book of the professor’s choosing. The participants have run the gamut of Duke academia, from Blair Sheppard, the mustachioed Dean of the Fuqua School of Business, to feminist theorist and literary critic Ranjana Khanna, professor of Women’s Studies.  

During the live broadcasts, would-be book-clubbers tune in to watch Stasio and his guest discuss the selection. It’s a free-form conversation and because it’s happening in real time, there is an endearing awkwardness to the thing, which is full of stammered questions, long, pensive pauses and technical snafus. (Twice during his chat with Price, Stasio dropped his microphone and had to halt everything to clip it back on.)

But it was hard to faze Price, the James B. Duke Professor of English, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of no fewer than 38 books. And when he talked about Virginia—as he called her—there was a calm reverence in his tone. “She’s walking this tightrope so delicately yet never signals to you that she’s afraid of what she’s doing,” Price said, discussing Woolf’s stream of consciousness approach in the novel.

To The Lighthouse, a work so dense and beautiful that Price has returned to it several times over the course of his life, is on Price’s top 10 list of favorite novels. As Stasio read passages to him, he closed his eyes, leaning his head on his hands and rocking back and forth as he listened to the words. And then, in a slow, deep voice punctuated by rattling breaths, he slowly unraveled Woolf’s invented universe.  

For readers, he said, this literary landscape can be a difficult one to navigate; Woolf’s books are not for the easily distracted. “[Virginia] keeps trying to tell you quite courteously that you are reading something that deserves your full attention,” he said. And while the paths of her plots and the rise and fall of her characters can be difficult to comprehend, Price reminded us that, whether in life or in fiction, “almost nobody dies when we really want them to.”  

As Price sauntered on through his interpretations of Woolf’s novel, Stasio appealed again and again for audience participation—by e-mail, by Facebook, by Twitter—but the air (or Web) waves remained deathly silent. It was a bit like a large lecture class. We were all listening, but no one wanted to be the first to talk.