Department of English

Beyond Vision Eyeless Writing in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Marie-Helen Rosalie Stahl Master Thesis Literature Autumn, 2018 Supervisor: Giles Whiteley

Abstract

In the early 20th century, a “crisis of ocularcentrism” arose in philosophy, replacing the Cartesian epistemological notion of a disembodied mind inspecting the object-world from the outside with an ontological and phenomenological approach to vision and being, embedding humans corporeally in a world exceeding their perceptual horizon (Jay 94). In response, modernist artists abandoned realist and naturalist techniques, rejecting mimetic representation, and experimented with new artistic forms, trying to account for the new complexity of life. In this context, Virginia Woolf wrote her novel The Waves (1931), “an abstract mystical eyeless book” (DIII 203). Despite countless studies on The Waves and vision, its “eyelessness” has never been thoroughly examined before. Since Woolf considered vision and being to be inherently embodied and communal and longed for capturing moments of being, this thesis proposes to unlock Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late corporeal phenomenology. Alongside his concepts of the flesh and chiasm, this thesis claims that eyeless writing is Woolf’s method to go beyond vision in order to reveal the inherent corporeal interconnectedness of all beings in a hidden, visually imperceptible pattern—the eyeless flesh of the world—by creating a narrative that is eyeless in several ways. It is at once eye- and I- less due to lacking a single focalising point and denoting an anonymous visibility enveloping all beings. Rather than being structured by a narrative eye/I, it is governed by the characters’ bodies and their chiasmatic relations with the world. On this basis, emphasising the carnal adherence of all human and non-human beings, their eyeless kinship thus comes to light, creating a nonanthropocentric conception of Being-in-and- of-the-world. In this sense, The Waves uncovers that since the Wesen (essence) of Being lies in the common, visually imperceptible flesh, it can only be reached eyelessly, via the body.

Keywords: Modernism; Virginia Woolf; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; phenomenology; vision; eyeless writing; anti-ocularcentrism; nonanthropocentrism; body

List of Abbreviations

Works by Virginia Woolf

DIII The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1925–1930. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 3, London: Hogarth Press, 1980. DIV The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1931–1935. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press, 1982. EIII The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1919–1924. Edited by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 3, London: Hogarth Press, 1994. EIV The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1925–1928. Edited by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press, 1988. MB Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed., New York: Harcourt Inc., 1985. SE Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. TTL To the Lighthouse. 1927. Edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. W The Waves. 1931. London: Vintage Classics, Penguin Random House, 2000.

Works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

EM “Eye and Mind.” 1960. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson, Northwestern University Press, 1993, pp. 121–149. PP Phenomenology of Perception. 1945. Translated by Donald A. Landes, Routledge, 2012. VI The Visible and the Invisible. 1964. Edited by Claude Lefort, Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Table of Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter I The Dethronement of the Visual Sense…..…...………………………….……..6 Merleau-Ponty’s Subject-Object……………………………..………………12 Approaches to Woolf’s The Waves, Being and Vision………………………..17

Chapter II “Eyeless” and “I-less” Writing—Enveloped by Anonymous Visibility………21 Eyeless Writing as “Bodily” Writing………………………………………....29 Eyeless Percival and the Things in Themselves………………………………38

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...47

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………51

Stahl 1

Introduction

In an interview with the art historian Pierre Cabanne in the late 1960s, the modernist artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) declared that his engagement with art was characterised by an “antiretinal attitude” (Cabanne 43). He stated that “too great an importance [is] given to the retina” (Cabanne 43), rejecting all art, especially impressionism, that was preoccupied with visual appearance (Krauss 124). Instead, Duchamp strove for art that would go “beyond the retina” and reach the “grey matter;” not as a disembodied domain of cognition and reflection, but as inseparable from the body and its physical processes (Krauss 125). While Duchamp was arguably one of the most radical artists of the early 20th century, modernist art and literature in general was shaped by a so-called “anti-ocularcentric discourse,” striving to replace the Cartesian notion of knowing an exterior world through disembodied vision with a more ontological and phenomenological approach to vision, embedding the self corporeally within a world that exceeds its perceptual horizon (Jay 94). Seeking to account for this radically new conception of reality and the self, modernist artists abandoned realist and naturalist techniques that tried to mimetically represent an alleged univocal reality through visual form and objective description (Jay 94). Instead, they experimented with techniques that would account for lived, bodily experience, penetrating external appearances to reach the underlying “core of things” (Ruhrberg et al. 71). As is well established, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was one of the key figures of modernism and continuously experimented with literary techniques in order to account for the enigma of modern life. Like Duchamp, she disdained writing and art that “appeals mainly to the eye” (EIV 244), longing for a new kind of writing that would

Stahl 2 capture “life itself going on” (DIII 229), “these invisible presences” that shape human experience (MB 80), our “feelings and [general] ideas” about the world (EIV 435). Pursuing this goal, Woolf arrived at the climax of her experimentations in writing The Waves (1931), conceived of as “an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem” (DIII 203), combining the abstractness of poetry with the flexibility of prose (DIII 139). In nine episodes alternating with nine interludes, depicting the course of a day from dawn to dusk, The Waves follows the lives of seven characters, recording their thoughts in first-person soliloquies. Owing to the fact that The Waves abandons character-drawing and external description, countless studies have examined the role vision plays in this novel. For instance, material and cultural-historical studies investigate how advances in science and technology influenced Woolf to create a nonanthropocentric narrative in The Waves, and inspired her to develop a “decentred aesthetic vision,” marked by multiple points of view.1 More aesthetic and formalist approaches, on the other hand, have focused instead on Woolf’s use of visual literary devices as a means of producing vision from within the text, rather than describing external reality mimetically, while others have analysed how her narrative technique grants an inner vision to human consciousness.2 However, despite the plethora of studies of The Waves and vision, one aspect remains largely unexplored, namely, its “eyelessness.” In point of fact, there is no in- depth study on eyelessness, but only the odd allusion to the idea peppered in the margins of a few scholarly works. Since the novel uses the term “eyeless” in only one occasion, describing the character Percival after his death, as “abstract [and] eyeless […] in the sky” (W 109), scholars have deduced its meaning primarily from Percival, viewing him either as the epitome of eyelessness in The Waves, like Ariane Mildenberg (119), or as depicting death’s “eyeless hostile presence,” like Gloria Jean Tobin (201). Others draw a connection to its homophone, “I-less.” While Gillian Beer argues that it reflects the novel’s “multiple ‘I’s” (66), Julia Briggs claims that it signifies the characters’ isolation from the I-less interludes, “emptied of human presence” (“Novels” 76). Similarly, Ann Banfield claims that the interludes’ eyeless world, “inaccessible to the senses” and independent of human existence, is juxtaposed with a “sensible” one in The Waves (13). Nevertheless, since those critics engage with eyelessness only peripherally, I would

1 See, for instance, Henry (2003) pp. 93–107, Ettinger (2012) pp. 1–19, Ryan (2013) pp. 171–202. 2 See, for instance, Richter (1970) pp. 83–99, Tobin (1978) pp. 205–243, Ryan (1991) pp. 190–206, Briggs (2005) pp. 238–268, Olk (2013) pp. 155–183.

Stahl 3 argue that their analyses do not account for the complexity and multifacetedness of eyelessness in The Waves, reducing it either to one figure or binding it into a dialectical structure. Striving to express lived “moments of being” in her works (DIII 209) and to reach the “things in themselves” (W 213), Woolf’s philosophy has been related to phenomenology; a practice aiming to describe lived “human experience […] from a concrete first-person point of view,” bracketing out objective reflection in order to get to Edmund Husserl’s famous “things themselves”—the essence or “stuff” of being (Carman 14).3 Focusing either on Woolf’s engagement with consciousness, endured time or Being-in-the-world (Dasein), most critics have applied traditional Husserlian, Bergsonian, or Heideggerian phenomenological approaches. 4 However, early phenomenology neglects the body’s importance in lived experience and maintains a dualism between subject/object, mind/body, whereas Woolf considered being and vision to be inherently embodied and communal. She stated not only that one cannot “separate off from the body [, always] gaze[ing] through it” (EIV 318), but also that all beings are fundamentally interconnected with the world in a “hidden pattern […] behind the cotton wool of daily life” (MB 72). On this basis, this paper proposes to unlock Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology. Accounting for Woolf’s notion of embodiment and intercorporeal connectedness in an invisible common structure of Being, this approach complicates standard approaches to the novel which rest either on the above-mentioned phenomenological approaches or psychoanalysis, feminism, and more recently, post- Bergsonian traditions.5 Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was the first phenomenologist to claim that “the body is the vehicle of being in the world,” making it the centre of subjectivity (PP 84). However, it is in his later work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), that he undermines Cartesian dualism by establishing a common ground of Being in a position which may be characterised itself as a part of that general movement of anti-ocularcentrism that

3 For an overview on the relation between phenomenology and modernism see Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg (2010). 4 For Husserlian studies see Hough (2002), Najafi (2014) pp. 436–442, Strehle (2015), pp. 81–91; for Bergsonian studies see Gillies (1996) pp. 107–132, Armstrong (2005) pp. 90–114, Mattison (2011) pp. 71–77; for Heideggerian studies see Henke (1989) pp. 461–472, Simone (2017) pp. 25–63. 5 For psychoanalytical studies see Ferrer (1990) pp. 65–96, Ryan (1991) pp. 190–206, Snider (1991) pp. 87–106; for feminist studies see Minow-Pinkney (1987) ch. 6, Beer (1996) pp. 74–91, Goldman (1998) ch. 14; for post-Bergsonian studies see Ryan (2013) pp. 171–202, Skeet (2013) 475–495, Jobst (2016) pp. 55–67.

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Martin Jay has spoken about. Merleau-Ponty argues that Martin Heidegger’s Being-in- the-world depends on “my body [being] of the same flesh as the world” (VI 248). This flesh is the general, anonymous “element” of Being rather than a “substance” (VI 139). In this common flesh, selves, others and the world are already primordially interweaved with each other through chiasmatic relations, in which every being is at once a sensible and a sentient, continuously reversing roles as corporeal perceiver/seer and being- perceived/visible (VI 136). In this sense, Merleau-Ponty created a “subject-object,” revealing that all beings share the carnal, invisible structure of the flesh of visibility (VI 137). Also, Merleau-Ponty’s term “sensible sentient” (VI 173) indicates his kinship with anti-ocularcentrism’s quest to undermine vision’s primacy among the senses (Jay 111), signifying that since being is corporeal, it is consequently omnisensual (VI 256). In addition, being corporeally embedded in the world, sense perception is necessarily restricted, meaning that the anonymous visibility, surrounding every subject-object, lies partly beyond its perceptual horizon (VI 142, 148). Lastly, he claims that just as the flesh is visibility’s invisible “inner framework,” every sensible sentient has an invisible “inexhaustible depth,” where its Wesen (essence) lies (VI 143), so that every being is “more than [its] being-perceived” (VI 135). In this way, Merleau-Ponty abolishes the dialectic of subject/object, self/world, visibility and invisibility, turning them instead into each other’s “obverse and reverse” (VI 138), grounded in the common flesh of Being. Some scholars have already pointed out the closeness of thought between Woolf and Merleau-Ponty, arguing, for instance, that Woolf’s characters all “live their bodies” in different degrees of “embodiment” (Hussey 5). However, so far, scholars have either utilised Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology or focused on other works than The Waves. 6 Moreover, none of them draw a connection to Woolf’s eyeless writing. Only Ariane Mildenberg, referred to earlier, mentions the term in her Merleau- Pontian study of The Waves (119). However, while she discusses the characters’ embeddedness in the common flesh, she does not analyse how Woolf’s eyeless writing enables her to reveal this primordial connectedness with the world, reducing eyeleness instead to the figure of Percival. In contradistinction to Mildenberg, Tobin, Beer, Briggs and Banfield, some of the few scholars to refer to eyelessness, I will demonstrate that the idea neither signifies one character or presence in The Waves, nor belongs to a

6 See, for instance, Hussey (1986) pp. 3–20, Doyle (1994) pp. 42–71, Westling (1999) pp. 855–875.

Stahl 5 dialectic structure, in which an I/eye-less world opposes a sensible one. Instead, taking Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology as a lens, I claim that eyeless writing is Woolf’s means to go beyond vision in order to unlock and reveal the inherent corporeal interconnectedness of all beings in a hidden, visually imperceptible pattern—the eyeless flesh of the world—by creating a narrative that is eye/I-less, being devoid of a single focalising point, and instead governed by the characters’ bodies and the intercorporeal, chiasmatic structure of human and no-human relations, in which all beings are equal, co-existing subject-objects. Since Woolf’s eyeless writing has never been explored in this way before, this thesis will provide important new insights into research on The Waves and Woolf’s ideas on being and vision, revealing that her main artistic ambitions and philosophical conceptions combine and culminate in eyelessness. Woolf seeks to produce writing that goes beyond the retina, to create a method that accounts for the notion that vision and being are inherently embodied, to reach the “hidden pattern” behind life by which all sensible sentients are inherently corporeally interconnected with each other, and in effect, to make apparent the “things themselves” residing in-the-visible. In this sense, analysing Woolf’s eyeless writing alongside Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology, this thesis seeks to coalesce material and cultural-historical approaches to Woolf’s writing with formalist and aesthetic ones, demonstrating how Woolf’s eyeless writing as a method produces a non-dialectical, nonanthropocentric conception of Being-in-and-of-the-world in The Waves. The thesis consists of two chapters, each divided into three subsections. The first chapter commences with considering the historical and cultural background of Woolf’s eyeless writing, before explaining Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology in relation to his predecessors Husserl and Heidegger, and concluding with an overview of previous approaches to The Waves, vision and being. The second chapter analyses Woolf’s eyeless writing, moving from a macroscopic to a microscopic view: from the novel’s structure, to the body and finally to the “things themselves.” In the first subsection, I will examine the novel’s structure, narrative technique and literary devices, demonstrating, firstly, that all beings in The Waves are immersed in an anonymous, eye/I-less visibility depicted in the interludes, and secondly, that The Waves is eye/I-less on the whole in that it undermines the Cartesian notion of a single, univocal, autonomous subject. Following this, the focus shifts to the body, arguing that eyeless writing, in fact, resembles a kind of “bodily” writing, signified by a narrative

Stahl 6 that is itself carnal, being governed not by single consciousnesses but by the chiasmatic, carnal structure of relationships between corporeal beings, interconnected in the eyeless flesh of the world. Lastly, Percival’s eyelessness and the revelation of the “things in themselves” take centrestage. As mentioned earlier, Percival is predominantly viewed as representing eyelessness in The Waves since it is him who is tied to the only occasion in the novel in which the term “eyeless” appears. However, I will show that Percival does not resemble eyelessness himself, but rather turns eyeless through the loss of his body in death, becoming part of the eye/I-less anonymous visibility surrounding all characters. Secondly, I will demonstrate that Percival’s death reveals the futility of trying to impose an order on life and the ways in which this shows that it is only in lived, bodily moments of being, in which all human and non-human beings peacefully coexist and are allowed to just be, that the “things in themselves” can be encountered and the eyeless kinship of all beings comes to light. Throughout this thesis, I engage not only with other scholarly voices on The Waves, but continuously refer to Woolf’s own philosophical writings in her diaries and essays, considering her as a philosopher herself. On this basis, this thesis will now set out to show that eyeless writing, similar to Duchamp’s anti-retinal art, was Woolf’s method to surmount the primacy of the visual in her writing. It enabled her to go beyond vision and explore the Wesen of Being, laying bare our inherent, corporeal interconnectedness in the eyeless flesh of the world. In other worlds, since the essence of Being lies beyond our visual grasp, it can only be reached eyelessly, via the body.

Chapter I

The Dethronement of the Visual Sense Between 1900–1918, the social and political climate of Europe was unstable. Major breakthroughs in physics, as well as technological innovations, reinforced this sense of instability even further. Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum (1900), on which Niels Bohr’s atom and quantum theory was based (1913), as well as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (1905, 1915), radically changed our conceptions of the self, generating a rethinking and renegotiation of human beings’ position in the world. As Holly Henry notes in Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003), scientific discoveries resulted in a “sense of insignificance and ephemerality of humans on the cosmological scale” and together with the political and social changes effected a “modernist human

Stahl 7 decentring and re-scaling” (3). Woolf herself in “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927) called for new ways of literary and artistic expression, capable of capturing modern life, “for it is an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves” (EIV 429). Bohr’s “indeterminacy principle” in quantum-physics revealed that human beings are merely a part of a whole in which they are embedded and with which they share the same matter since “spatially separate particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities but rather are part of the same phenomena […], it is not that there are x number of atoms that belong to a hand and y number of atoms that belong to a coffee mug”—rather, the interface between human and material matter is ontologically and visually indeterminate (Barad qtd. in Ryan, Materiality 176). As such, it became apparent that our environment is not entirely visually perceivable, nor graspable for us, rendering an all-encompassing point of view impossible. Those drastic changes in the conception of the self and vision were accompanied by a radical questioning of the dominant epistemologies at the time, which, as Jay claims, led to a “crisis of ocularcentrism” in philosophy. This crisis is characterised by the undermining of the dominant “Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime” (Jay 101) and the aim to replace it with alternate conceptions that “[explore] the embodied and culturally mediated character of sight” as it was now experienced by the modern human being (Jay 94). Apart from the unstable political and social sphere and the discoveries in physics, technological innovations such as the stereoscope further fuelled the anti- ocularcentric discourse (Jay 95). In fact, the development from the camera obscura to the stereoscope, albeit at a time somewhat earlier, serves well to exemplify this conceptual shift, the camera obscura representing the Cartesian spectatorial epistemology and the stereoscope representing the shift to the modern ontological mode of vision. As Jonathan Crary argues, in the camera obscura (dating back to the late 1500s), an “isolated [and] enclosed” observer with a monocular point of view in the subject-position, looks through a peephole onto the exterior object-world (38–39). Crucially, vision is decorporealised in this process as it is not the physical eye producing the image but the mechanical process of the camera obscura (Crary 39). In this sense, one can speak of a “[rationalisation] of sight” in Cartesianism, inspecting the exterior world with a disembodied mind (Jay 33). This exterior world was believed to be univocal due to “the divinely insured congruence between […] ideas and the world of extended matter,” rendering individual perspective irrelevant (Jay 113). Thus, the

Stahl 8 camera obscura represents Cartesian dialectical thinking between subject/object, mind/body, and corresponds with its aspiration to “found human knowledge on a purely objective view of the world” (Crary 48). However, with the invention of the stereoscope in 1838 by Charles Wheatstone, vision increasingly lost its position as “a privileged form of knowing,” but itself turned into the object of study to interrogate the physiology of human vision (Crary 70). Since stereoscopic vision is binocular, it showed that the human organism synthesises two slightly disparate images into one unitary three- dimensional image (Crary 120), demonstrating that it is “the body of the viewer” that is “the active producer of optical experience” (Krauss 133). Hence, in contrast to the incorporeal, monocular, objective, atemporal view of the camera obscura, the stereoscope revealed that vision is inherently binocular, subjective, temporal and embodied (Crary 70). It is in this sense that Jay claims that the crisis of ocularcentrism was characterised by a “return of the body” in philosophy (95), replacing Cartesian perspectivalism and the belief in unmediated perception with approaches that focus on the immediate bodily experience of Being-in-the-world. According to Jay, “the initial frontal attack on ocularcentrism” was Henri Bergson’s concept of “durée” (1889)—the lived subjective experience of time—valued over objective, measurable time (Jay 110). Bergson argued that objective, measurable time always implies a “visual image in space” (qtd. in Jay 115), whereas durée is irreducible to a number and thus “not easily available to vision” (Jay 115). Bergson claimed that rather than identifying with exterior world’s objective time, one should focus on durée since only “the formless flow of time” allows us to transcend ocularcentrism and arrive at immediate lived experience (Jay 117). Importantly, according to Bergson, experienced time and lived experience in general are mediated through the acting body as “the ground of all our perception” (Jay 113). A sense of Being-in-the-world can only be grasped if one returns to a primordial state in which consciousness and the body, mind and matter, are interweaved rather than divided and where the senses are not disparate but a holistic unity (Jay 113). Thus, it is crucial to note that the anti-ocularcentric discourse does not abandon vision but dethrones it from its primacy among the senses and stresses the senses’ entanglement in lived bodily experience. The human being is no longer seen as autonomous and separate from its environment but as embedded within it. In other words, the Cartesian epistemological mode of vision, also defined as “assertoric,” and characterised by a spectatorial distance, “abstracted, monocular, inflexible, unmoving, rigid, ego-logical and

Stahl 9 exclusionary,” is replaced by an ontological mode of vision, also called “aletheic gaze […], multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary [and] horizonal” (Jay 164).7 All of the above-mentioned political, scientific, technological and philosophical developments also resonated with literature and the arts and led to the efflorescence of new artistic and literary forms of expression in the early 20th century, known as modernism. In her essay “Character in Fiction” (1924), Woolf famously states, “[o]n or about 1910 human character changed,” referring to a shift in human relations between “masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children” due to the demise of, first, the Victorian and then the Edwardian era (SE 38–39). However, it is well-established that Woolf’s remark also alludes to the first post-impressionist exhibition in London in 1910, curated by her close friends and fellow Bloomsburians, Roger Fry, Desmond McCarthy and Clive Bell (Goldman 38). One of the key figures of this exhibition was the French post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), who greatly influenced the aesthetics of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.8 Cézanne’s art marks the shift from impressionism to post-impressionism; he critiqued the impressionist belief in unmediated perception and its focus on surface appearances, producing “art for the eye” (Jay 98). Instead, like Bergson, Cézanne focused on lived perspective and its rootedness in an experience where the senses are merged rather than separated (Jay 98). In this he also rejected the realist and naturalist ideal of mimetic representation grounded in Cartesianism, in favour for multiple perspectives, representing a complex rather than univocal, objective reality (Ryan, Vanishing 93). This is a point which Merleau-Ponty himself made in “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), writing that Cézanne detected “that lived perspective […] is not a geometric or photographic one” (64). Instead, Cézanne wanted to paint “a world perceptually [organised] by our bodily involvement in it,” bringing sensations on the canvas that would place the spectator, the painting and the painter in a dialogue with each other (Carman 184). Cézanne strove to surmount the distance between the viewer and the viewed, the dualism of subject and object, and the differentiation of the senses, since it would only then be possible to recapture “the very moment when the world was new”—

7 The distinction between the two modes of vision refers to Heidegger’s phenomenology, which will be discussed in subsection three of this chapter. 8 For a discussion on Cézanne and the Bloomsbury Group see Uhlmann et al. (2009), pp. xi–xxi.

Stahl 10 a primordial reality (Jay 98).9 However, in order to do so Cézanne believed in the “logic of sensation,” postulating that the myriad sensations perceived first need to be organised by the artist’s mind in order to then create a unified whole on the canvas (Uhlmann et al. x–xi). Partly due to the significance of the mind in Cézanne’s aesthetics, literature on modernism and the Bloomsbury Group tends to focus on their preoccupation with the mind and consciousness, with Fry often considered a key figure.10 In his essay “The Artist’s Vision” (1920), Fry relied on Cézanne’s logic of sensation to claim that the artist’s “detached and impassioned vision” is superior to ordinary vision, since only it allows a disinterested contemplation of the “chaotic” sensations perceived, and permits them to be organised into an “aesthetic unity” (33). While the early Woolf strove to explore the “dark places of psychology,” as she noted in “Modern Fiction” (1919; SE 11), I argue that the later Woolf increasingly warded off from this path, turning towards a more phenomenological stance, viewing vision as inherently embodied. In “On Being Ill” (1926), written not long before The Waves, she states that literature “does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind” and not with the body, whereas “the very opposite is true” (EIV 317–318). The mind “cannot separate off from the body” but always “[gazes] through [it]” (EIV 318). Due to her believe in embodied vision, Woolf also rejected Fry’s notion of the artist’s disinterested vision, arguing instead that the artist is always inextricably implicated in his/her work (Henry, Discourse 100–101). Consequently, Woolf also rejected a privileging of a particular point of view since for her, the world “is variable and complex and infinitely mysterious” (EIV 76). In “Montaigne” (1925), she states that “no one has any clear knowledge,” either of one’s own self or of the world around us (EIV 78). It is the enigma of “life itself going on” that Woolf wants to explore and that becomes the subject of inquiry in The Waves (DIII 229). In “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927) Woolf, without explicitly stating it, already constructs the literary form of The Waves: “a playpoem” (DIII 203). She postulates that this new hybrid form, combining the abstractness and exaltation of poetry, the flexibility and ordinariness of prose, and the drama of a play (EIV 435–437), will be more capable of accounting for “[l]ife [, which] is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it”

9 This refers to Husserl’s “epochê,” in which the “natural attitude” is replaced with a “phenomenological” one in order to reveal “the ‘essence’ of things lying on the other side of our concrete fact-world” (Mildenberg 4). For further explanation, see “Theoretical Background.” 10 See, for instance, Banfield (2000) pp. 245–293, or Uhlmann (2010) pp. 58–73.

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(EIV 439). It will capture what so far “escaped the novelist” but is essentially shaping human lived experience of Being-in-the-world, namely, the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of [color], the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine. (EIV 439) In other words, The Waves as a playpoem will be “an abstract mystical eyeless book” (DIII 203). It will illustrate the intangible, visually imperceptible complexity of life, “the outline rather than the detail,” and the broader relations of humans to “general ideas” (EIV 435). Woolf develops these ideas further in her diary, writing that in The Waves “I want […] to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea” (DIII 209). In tune with anti- ocularcentrism’s turn towards lived embodied experience, Woolf aimed to capture the moment as it is immediately and corporeally perceived and does not distinguish between exterior and interior, subject and object. Instead, “some combination of [the inner and the outer] ought to be possible” (DIII 209), in the moment of being as an amalgamation of all: thought, sensation and the alleged outside world, “the voice of the sea.” This sense of human interconnectedness and embeddedness within the world echoes Woolf’s famous remark in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939): “that behind the cotton wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art” (MB 72). Moreover, in her diary entry she writes further that she rejects the “appalling business of the realist” as the latter includes “things that don’t belong to the moment” (DIII 209)—the “superfluous” or “useless details,” as Roland Barthes will later argue, that create the “reality effect” of realism (140, 143). And it is precisely that—just an effect—since, as Woolf states, the realist’s writing is “false, unreal [and] merely conventional” (DIII 209). Woolf’s critique of realism is paralleled in what she defines to be “bad writing” in her essay “Pictures” (1925), also reminiscing of Cézanne’s critique of impressionism. Woolf claims that bad writing is such that “appeals mainly to the eye” (EIV 243), and instead praises writers like “Proust, Flaubert, Hardy and Conrad,” for in their works,

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[t]he whole scene, however solidly and pictorially build up, is always dominated by an emotion which has nothing to do with the eye. But it is the eye that has fertilized their thought; it is the eye, in Proust above all, that has come to the help of the other senses, combined with them, and produced effects of extreme beauty and of a subtlety hitherto unknown. (EIV 244) Rather than focusing on outer appearances, it is the invisible but perceivable essence lying beneath them—what Rhoda in Woolf’s The Waves also terms as “the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing” (107)—that needs to be the centre of writing. The eye supplies the entry point but it is only in unison with the other senses that “hitherto unknown” beauties are uncovered. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty states that “[n]o one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible” in his eponymous work (VI 149). In conclusion, anti-ocularcentrism stems from the realisation that it is the entire being, with mind and body merged, that perceives its environment with which it is irrevocably interconnected, rather than a disembodied mind that inspects an objective, exterior world through monocular, disembodied and disinterested vision. Vision is, thus, not abandoned but dethroned from its primacy among the senses, re-united with them and lodged in the body. By understanding that omniscience and objectivity are impossibilities, life’s intangibility and enigma become the subject of inquiry in philosophy, literature and the arts.

Merleau-Ponty’s Subject-Object Woolf’s fascination with lived, bodily moments of being as uncovering the unconscious “hidden pattern” behind the surface of daily life (MB 72), signifies a close kinship with phenomenological thought. In fact, phenomenology is a method or practice that strives to describe basic, human, lived experience of being from an immediate first-person point of view, rejecting the detached third-person perspective of scientific inquiry that applies judgement and preconceived categories to phenomena (Carman 14). Husserl, known as the father of phenomenology, famously argued that in order to get to “the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), the “natural attitude,” meaning presuppositions and expectations, needs to be reduced to a “phenomenological” one, a “primordial dimension of,” or a “pre-reflective” experience (Mildenberg 3–4). Through this “transcendental reduction,” called “epochê,” one reaches the immanent contents “of [pure] consciousness” (noema), of “transcendental subjectivity,” where the external world, its essence or phenomena, is experienced (Carman 41). His student Heidegger,

Stahl 13 on the other hand, showed that there is no separation of consciousness and the world in our lived experience of it, since being is always Being-in-the-world (Dasein), always inextricably embedded (Carman 75, my emphasis). Hence, in general, phenomenology longs to describe the “of-ness or ‘aboutness’ of experience,” drawing on Franz Brentano’s notion of “intentionality” as the directedness of consciousness toward something (Carman 74). Whereas Husserl located intentionality in consciousness, Heidegger placed it in Being-in-the-world. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty marks the first phenomenologist to replace the human intellect as the locus of subjectivity (intentionality) with the lived body as the conscious subject of experience. Since Woolf believed in embodied vision, as demonstrated previously, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology caters best to unlocking the issue of eyelessness in The Waves. His corporeal phenomenology fully embraces anti-ocularcentrism’s return to the body and entirely renegotiates the notions of visibility and invisibility. In his last essay “Eye and Mind” (1960), Merleau-Ponty states that “[the body] is caught in the fabric of the world” (125); “I do not see [the world] according to its exterior envelope; I live it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is around me, not in front of me” (138). Indebted to Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty asserts that it is only possible to perceive the world because we are in it corporeally. Thus, Merleau-Ponty rejected the mind-body distinction of his predecessors, first and foremost Husserl’s. Husserl saw the human as a “psycho-physical unity” of a “bodily […] [and] a transcendental ego,” and claimed that it is only due to this unity that one can “apperceive” others as minds as well, hidden behind the visible appearance of their bodies (Carman 138). In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty there is, firstly, no mind-body distinction at work in the “most basic experience of ourselves and others” (Carman 149), and secondly, the body is not just an appendix of the self but, in fact, is the self (VI 244–245). In his posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible (1964), Merleau-Ponty draws heavily on Husserlian phenomenological notions of the lived body (Leib) and the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Husserl argued that one can only become aware of the material body (Körper) as a lived body (Leib) through touch, not sight, since only touch has a “double aspect,” meaning that I can touch myself touching and thereby experience “my own bodiliness [Leiblichkeit]” (Carman, 128). The lived body is tied to Husserl’s “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) as the “‘concrete world of everyday

Stahl 14 experience’” (qtd. in Mildenberg 21), in which not only physical (e.g. human) but also cultural and historical objects, as well as social institutions, are “braided” or “interwoven” with each other (Verflechtung) (Lawlor x). Merleau-Ponty takes up this double-touch experience as a characteristic of the lived body; however, rather than prioritising touch, he extends the structure of the double-touch not only to all senses but also to the world as a whole. It is in this fashion that Merleau-Ponty develops his key concepts of flesh and chiasm in connection to the visible and the invisible. As a crucial advancement in his thought, he claims that Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world depends on our being of the world, meaning that “my body is made of the same flesh as the world” (VI 248). Merleau-Ponty borrows from Husserl’s Verflechtung (braiding) in defining the structure of the flesh as chiasmatic, meaning that the relationship between body and world is no longer one of stimulus and response but one in which they are “interweaved” into a single fabric (flesh). As Mildenberg notes, the direct translation “braiding” describes the chiasm of the flesh much more accurately than “interweaving” (1). Whereas weaving entails separate “warp threads and weft threads,” in braiding, each thread fulfills both functions, so that through a “zigzagging [motion] […] the warp becomes weft and vice versa” (1). This crisscross pattern (chiasm) lies at the heart of the experience of Being-in-and-of-the-world. Taking artists as an example, Merleau-Ponty writes, “many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things” and as such, he argues that there is not only a reversibility of touch (Husserl’s double- touch) but also of vision, and even an intertwining of them since “vision is a palpation with the look” (VI 134): There is a circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold of the touching; there is a circle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is not without visible existence; there is even an inscription of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible—and the converse. (VI 143) Importantly, he adds in his working notes that this reversibility of the seeing and the visible is inherent to all senses (VI 256), and their intertwining also means that neither of them is prior to the others. By uncovering the body’s “prereflective […] unity” (VI 141), being a “sensible sentient,” being at once perceived and perceiver, Merleau-Ponty replaced the Cartesian subject with a subject-object, grounded on the notion of intercorporeality (flesh) between body and world (VI 137). This synergy of sensible and sentient not only occurs in a single body but also between different organisms, since for Merleau-Ponty sensibility is grounded on a “carnal adherence” between

Stahl 15 subject-objects rather than on “belongingness to one same consciousness” (VI 142). However, this does not mean that Merleau-Ponty falls into monist thinking. Rather, the chiasmatic structure of the flesh entails a paradox of “envelopment and distance, […] of unity at distance or sameness with difference” (Johnson 47 f.). Being of the same flesh means being simultaneously distanced from and interweaved with the world, which is, however, according to Merleau-Ponty, not a contradiction but the “means of communication” between, for instance, the seer and the thing (VI 135). Consequently, the flesh is not matter or substance but the primordial ground of all Being, a “general thing” (VI 139), through which it is made possible to encounter and inhabit the world. In Carman’s words, “[t]o see the world, we must already be in a kind of [unconscious] bodily communion with it” (VI 124). As such, it is the body that upholds consciousness and not vice versa (VI 141), and thus, it is “the body and it alone […] that can bring us to the things themselves” (VI 136). They cannot be found in Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity but only in the prereflective flesh of the world, which we normally take for granted. Furthermore, as his eponymous work suggests, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of visibility and invisibility is integral to his corporeal philosophy. He writes that perception of the world is only possible because the body is in and of the visible (VI 134 f.); in fact, “[t]o have a body […] is to be visible” (VI 189) and is to be enveloped by the visible (VI 271). The common flesh of the world is the flesh of visibility, the “prephenomenal being” that makes perception possible (Carman 124). As such, the body is only a “variant” of the carnal world, the flesh of visibility, “a prototype of Being,” and shares with all other visibles its chiasmatic structure (VI 136). Hence, visibility and its flesh are both anonymous entities that envelop the world and constitute a space that exceeds what I can immediately see or touch (VI 143). Already in the chiasmatic experience of sensing and being sensed it becomes apparent that each subject-object is more than its “being-perceived” (VI 135). That is the case because things (Sachen) in order to exist cannot just be their surface appearance but they, as well as any other subject-object, have depth (VI 136). In fact, according to Merleau- Ponty, the visible is “a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscole borne by a wave of Being” (VI 136). Merleau-Ponty’s notion of depth draws on a horizonal structure of Being that develops both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of it further. As Merleau-Ponty points out, for Husserl the horizon is “a system of ‘potentiality of consciousness’”

Stahl 16 gazing onto the world (VI 149), whereas for Heidegger, “‘world is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject […]’” (qtd. in Jay 163). Heidegger claimed that an all-seeing view is impossible to attain since every individual is immersed in a visual field, not located outside of it, and her/his horizon is limited to what lies within her/his field of vision (Jay 173). This is also reflected in Heidegger’s preference of the ontological, embedded or “aletheic gaze” over epistemological “assertoric,” disinterested vision referred to previously (Jay 164). Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, connects the horizon to depth and flesh, stating that “it has meaning only in the Umwelt (environment) of a carnal subject, as Offenheit [openness], as Verborgenheit [invsibility/hiddenness] of Being” (VI 185). While every subject-object has its own depth, its “interior horizon,” it is also “caught up, included within” the depth of the flesh of visibility in general, the “exterior horizon” (VI 148– 149). Thus, those horizons are not opposites but they open up onto each other and “by encroachment” complete each other in the flesh’s chiasmatic structure (VI 202). Lastly, then, the visible is not all there is but like the sentient is the obverse of the sensible and vice versa, the invisible is the obverse of the visible. In fact, “the visible is pregnant with the invisible, […] to comprehend fully the visible relations […] one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible” (VI 216). The invisible is the visible’s “lining and its depth” (VI 149), it is its “non-figurative inner framework” (VI 257), it is its “Wesen” (essence) (VI 247) and therefore not its counterpart as it would be in Cartesian dualism. The relation between visibility and invisibility is then like the relation between “sound and meaning, speech and what it means to say”—they are each inscribed in each other without a question of priority (VI 145). Therefore, Merleau- Ponty also claims that literature, music and the arts are an exploration of the invisible (VI 149)—they lay bare the invisible in-the-visible. In this way, Merleau-Ponty, drawing on both Husserl and Heidegger, altered their philosophies by anchoring consciousness in the body and the body in the world. He collapsed dualist thinking between mind/body, self/world and visibility/invisibility by demonstrating that they share a carnal structure of reversibility, the flesh of visibility, in which they are embedded. In sympathy with a broader shift towards anti- ocularcentrism, Merleau-Ponty lodges lived experience of the world in the body and stresses the intertwinement of the senses in the engagement with the world, which always remains partly invisible to us. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology suits the purpose of my thesis, since I argue that Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves,

Stahl 17 abandoning a single subject-position and anchoring the characters in their intercorporeally connected bodies, explores and uncovers a common, anonymous Being, in which all subject-objects are grounded, being of the same flesh.

Approaches to Woolf’s The Waves, Being and Vision Previous research on Woolf’s The Waves, Being and vision has broadly fallen into three categories: material and cultural-historical approaches that focus on science’s impact on Woolf’s writing; aesthetic and formalist approaches that examine Woolf’s aesthetic vision; and phenomenological approaches that analyse her engagement with human’s experience of Being-in-the-world. Derek Ryan in Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory (2013) and Henry in Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003), both analyse how advances in the sciences and technologies in the early 20th century influenced Woolf’s writing of The Waves. Even though Ryan focuses on Bohr’s quantum and atom theory and Henry on advances in astronomy, they arrive at a similar conclusion, namely, that Woolf deconstructs human beings’ alleged superior position in the world in The Waves, depicting characters that are embedded in a world over which they do not have dominion. Ryan argues in this respect that the human and non-human relationships in The Waves can be seen in connection to Bohr’s indeterminacy principle, revealing, as noted earlier, that “edges or boundaries [between all agents] are not determinate either ontologically or visually” (176). He claims that the characters negotiate their positions through a kind of “intra-action,” trying to distance themselves from each other but always perceiving a deep sense of entanglement, recognising the essence of quantum physics: “‘[W]e are part of that nature we seek to understand’” (Barad qtd. in Ryan 174). Henry, on the other hand, connects Woolf’s nonanthropocentric layout of The Waves not only to Woolf’s development of a “decentred aesthetic vision” but also to her rejection of Fry’s “aesthetic unity,” inspired by astronomy and inventions such as the stereoscope (107). Referring to Woolf’s declaration that The Waves ought to be a “playpoem,” Henry defines it to be the peak of Woolf’s experimentation with not only different styles but also multiple perspectives, denying the possibility of the privileging of a particular point of view and accounting for the restrictions of human vision on the world and themselves (105–107). Both, Ryan’s and Henry’s analyses, convincingly examine the characters’ inherent embeddedness in their environment as agents sharing equal agency with all other human and non-human agents in the world. While this

Stahl 18 implicitly speaks to my Merleau-Pontian approach and the concept of flesh and the visible, both neglect a discussion of the body as the centre of lived experience. Moreover, Ryan does not explore the importance of vision and the senses at all concerning human and non-human relations in The Waves, and despite Henry’s examination of Woolf’s decentred vision, she leaves Woolf’s eyeless writing untouched. More formalist examinations of Woolf’s aesthetics in The Waves can be found in the works of Claudia Olk, Banfield and Tobin. While my analysis also involves an examination of Woolf’s use of literary devices regarding a common ground interconnecting the characters with each other and the world, Olk’s, Banfield’s and Tobin’s studies present an entirely different understanding of The Waves. Both Olk and Banfield argue that The Waves is structured by a dialectic of subject and object, interior and exterior, invisible form and visible surface. Olk claims that those binary pairs are “[organising] paradox[es] [in] Woolf’s aesthetics” (167) and asserts that Woolf’s use of visual literary devices becomes both “a mode of production” (15) and a way of negotiating the relation between the characters as autonomous individuals and their surroundings (7). However, despite Olk’s formalist analysis of vision and even visibility and invisibility in The Waves, she does not connect her findings to Woolf’s eyeless writing, mentioning the term only twice (128, 165). In contrast, Banfield in The Phantom Table (2000) establishes a connection to eyelessness and claims that it was influenced by Fry, valuing post-impressionist emphasis on “design” over impressionist focus on “vision” (“art for the eye”) (248). This distinction, argues Banfield, is tied to a dualism between a “sensible world” against an eyeless world, “inaccessible to the senses” (13). Tobin in her doctoral dissertation “Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and The Years as Novel of Vision and Novel of Fact” (1973) also remains within a dialectical mode of thinking but goes even further, stating that The Waves is a drama centring on the “hostile relationship of eternal opposition” between humans, nature and a transcendental, disembodied “eyeless presence,” representing the hostile forces of life and death (204). However, rather than presupposing an a priori existence of the above- mentioned binary oppositions, by taking Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal philosophy as a lens, my analysis will remain closer to nonanthropocentric approaches, revealing the intercorporeality of human existence. Thereby, I will read The Waves as an optimistic engagement with Being, and eyeless writing as a positive exploration of Being’s invisible depth, inhabiting rather than opposing all beings.

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As implied by the studies of Ryan and Henry discussed above, critics have registered Woolf’s move towards a more ontological and phenomenological thinking, especially in The Waves. Nevertheless, phenomenological studies of the novel are scarce and predominantly use Husserlian or Heideggerian philosophy, disregarding an analysis of vision and corporeality. Sheridan Hough (2002), for instance, ties Woolf’s declaration to “think of things in themselves” in “A Room of One’s Own” to Husserl’s “things in themselves” (41–42). Referring to Husserl’s epochê, Hough argues that Woolf’s “androgynous view” produces a phenomenological “presuppositionlessness (Voraussetzungslosigkeit)” (45), enabling her to describe the world as it manifests itself in consciousness in The Waves (51). Emma Simone and Suzette Henke, on the other hand, take a Heideggerian approach. Henke’s article on “Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: A Phenomenological Reading” (1989) is the earliest and, until recently, the only in- depth phenomenological study of The Waves published, and Simone’s Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study” (2017), traces similarities between several of Woolf’s works and Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger states that in perceiving the world there is never “a process of returning […] to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness […]; even in perceiving […] that Dasein which knows remains outside,” remains in the world (qtd. in Simone 31). Regarding The Waves, Simone predominantly analysis the characters’ interpersonal relations as oscillating between detachment and connectedness in relation to Heidegger’s claim that “Being-in is Being-with Others” (39). She contends that the characters in their “average everyday mode of Being-with” do not experience connectedness but isolation (44–45). Henke’s analysis of The Waves is similarly pessimistic. Reminiscent of Tobin’s study, she examines the novel’s “mystical” aspect, presenting life as an ongoing “wave-like” fight “against hostile forces,” in relation to Heidegger’s remarks on “dread” (463). Henke argues that in order to perceive “the world seen without a self” Bernard strips off his identity and experiences “dread” in the face of “nothingness” (465), allowing him eventually to reach a mystic experience of “the miraculous ground of being” (467). Referring to Heidegger, Henke claims that Bernard thereby reaches an “existential authenticity,” “an impassioned freedom towards death” as the moment when self and nature merge (470). However, since Husserl and Heidegger do not recognise the importance of the lived body in humans’ experience of Being-in-the-world, Hough, Simone and Henke all miss the characters’

Stahl 20 bodily interconnectedness with themselves and their environment, characterised by interdependency rather than hostility. As demonstrated in the previous subsection, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal philosophy accounts for this gap, which is why I consider it to be most suitable for unlocking The Waves’ eyelessness. The only phenomenological study that takes a similar approach to mine is Mildenberg’s monograph Modernism and Phenomenology (2017). Utilising Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in analysing The Waves, Mildenberg shifts the focus to the body-in-the-world in which consciousness emerges rather than vice versa (10). Mildenberg shows that The Waves is inherently “non-dialectical” (113), arguing along Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of flesh and chiasm that there is a “‘double-touch’ experience” at the centre of the novel through which The Waves unfolds, being “‘not concerned with the single life […], but with lives together’” (Woolf qtd. in Mildenberg 116). Mildenberg also briefly discusses the issue of eyelessness but claims that it refers to “the mute and ‘eyeless’ figure of Percival” (119). In contrast, my analysis will focus entirely on eyelessness in The Waves and will reveal that while Percival is one of its manifestations, “eyelessness” is not restricted to one character or presence but refers to multiple aspects of the novel. In conclusion, whereas the material and cultural-historical approaches to The Waves implicitly speak to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh and the visible, they nevertheless do not entail a discussion of intercorporeality. Furthermore, while the studies on Woolf’s aesthetic vision entail an analysis of the visual literary devices she uses in order to establish interpersonal relations, they remain within dualist thinking, viewing eyelessness as the dark and hostile counterpart of the sensible world. Finally, since the majority of phenomenological studies apply Husserlian and Heideggerian philosophy, they not only miss the bodily interconnectedness of self and world in The Waves but also a discussion of the senses’ entanglement in lived bodily experience. Hence, by unlocking eyelessness in The Waves with the help of Merleau-Ponty’s late corporeal philosophy, I will fill an important gap in research, tying Woolf’s The Waves to her ideas on Being and vision.

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Chapter II

“Eyeless” and “I-less” Writing —Enveloped by Anonymous Visibility In her diary on June 18th, 1927, Woolf ponders about The Waves, here still preliminarily called “The Moths,” developing her “play-poem idea [further]: the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night&c, all flowing together” (DIII 139). In The Waves, Woolf was preoccupied with exploring the fundamental grounds of human existence rather than the subject matter of realist or naturalist fiction, the mimetic attempt to represent reality through character-drawing and a coherent plot, structured according to the succession of events, but which thereby failed to capture the complexity of life. Writing The Waves meant going against literary conventions, producing arguably Woolf’s most formally experimental novel. In nine episodes, The Waves illustrates the life of seven characters—three women, Rhoda, Jinny and Susan, and four men, Percival, Bernard, Louis and Neville— from early childhood until late adult life, each recording their sensations, experiences and thoughts in present tense soliloquies. In the middle of the novel Percival, the only character whose voice is never heard, dies in India, reducing the group to six. The nine episodes alternate with nine interludes written in italics and past tense, tracing the course of the sun from sunrise to sunset on the shore and the sea in the absence of human consciousness, symbolically paralleling the characters’ different stages in life. As such, Woolf writes that The Waves is structured according to “a rhythm not […] a plot” (DIII 316), in which the interludes serve to be both a “bridge & also […] a background” to the characters’ lives (DIII 285). In this sense, they do not represent a separate world, autonomous from human beings or any kind of sentient being, but they depict something akin to Merleau-Ponty’s visible world, enveloping and framing the characters’ lives. The first interlude illustrates how [t]he light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. (4) In this ekphrastic description, the sunlight illuminates the visible world, awaking it from its slumber. The sunlight is personified and vivifies not only the birds, chirping their morning tunes, but also shines on the white blind of a bedroom window, implicitly waking its human residents, whose presence is further alluded to via the image of a

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“finger-print[-shaped] shadow” cast by the sun. The first episode, following this interlude begins, “I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.” […] “I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.” […] “Stones are cold to my feet,” said Neville. “I feel each one, round and pointed, separately.” […] “Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,” said Susan. “Look at the house,” said Jinny, “with all its windows white with blinds.” (4–5) This passage amounts to a series of similar remarks of the characters, recording their perception of dawn standing together in a garden. Whereas the interludes and the episodes are formally separated parts, I argue that they are interconnected with each other since the visible world of the interludes is inhabited by the characters. In other words, the characters live in and corporeally perceive the visible world described in the interludes, which recalls Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh of visibility as the “dimensionality of Being, […] as universal, [wherefore] everything […] is necessarily enveloped in it” (VI 257). This general visibility described in the interlude is not limited to what the eye sees but is open to all senses simultaneously. Hence, rather than depicting Husserl’s “double-touch,” this scene depicts Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility or chiasm inherent to all senses. While the characters are at once sentients, hearing the birds’ singing, touching the cold stones and seeing a ring of light, they are also immersed in the fabric of the world as sensibles, being touched by the stones, object to the ring of light quivering above them as well as the being-perceived of the birds surrounding them. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “[e]very vision takes place in a tactile space” and vice versa (VI 134). No point of view is elevated over another, just like no perceptual sense is granted primacy over the others; rather as Woolf states in “Sketch of the Past” (1939), “what was seen would at the same time be heard […]—sounds indistinguishable from sights. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of […] first impressions” (MB 66). Each character’s individual description stands simultaneously on its own but also merges with the others into a larger picture, constituting the characters’ immediate, embodied, collective experience of dawn in the garden. As a result, the relation between the visible world presented in the interlude and the characters’ perceptual experience of it in the episode exemplifies what Merleau-Ponty writes about the relationship between sense experience, the sensible and the sentient:

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[E]ach monocular vision, each touching with one sole hand has its own visible, its tactile, each is bound to every other vision, to every other touch; it is bound in such a way as to make up with them the experience of one sole body before one sole world […] [,] the little private world of each is not juxtaposed to the world of all the others, but surrounded by it, levied off from it, and all together are a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general. (VI 142) In the passage of The Waves cited above, not only is each character a sentient perceiving the sole world, but due to their collective sensuous experience, they, in fact, together form into a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general—the visible world presented in the interludes. This is possible because, rather than being isolated from each other as individual consciousnesses, the characters are interconnected with each other and their environment in a primordial, corporeal way, due to them being subject-objects or sensibles and sentients simultaneously (VI 142). They can only perceive because they themselves are perceivable, because the body is in and of the world (VI 134–135), or as Louis remarks, because they are “rooted to the middle of the earth” (W 7). Furthermore, while the structure of the episode in the previous excerpt reminds the reader of dialogue, the characters do not actually respond to each other directly. Instead, like a choir, each has its voice and together they form a chorus. Thus, the characters are not only interconnected with each other in their carnal adherence, their common, invisible flesh, but also formally and structurally in the text. Through anaphora (“I see,” “I hear”) and parallelism, their utterances structurally mirror and complement each other, which also serves to create a communal sensuous experience formally, as well as in terms of its content. Moreover, this excerpt also serves to exemplify Woolf’s “play-poem”-style. Rather than recording their perceptions in present progressive, the common tense of conversation, the characters utter them in simple present tense, more often utilised in poetry (Briggs, “Novels” 77). In fact, Stephen J. Miko defines this technique as “a kind of suspended present tense [reducing] existence to a moment perpetually,” thus giving the characters’ immediate, embodied “moment of being” without reflection or judgment (69). Bracketing both the characters’ presuppositions and the mimetic representation of things, their immediate perception of life itself, as Woolf described it, is in focus, namely, “the power of music [, the birds singing], the stimulus of sight [, light and shadow], [and] the effect […] of the shape of trees or the play of colour” (EIV 439). Hence, I argue that the suspended present tense is one manifestation of eyeless writing in The Waves, producing a kind of phenomenological reduction in itself, making the characters’ invisible impressions

Stahl 24 visible. Michel Henry makes a similar point in his analysis of Kandinsky’s abstract art, claiming that Kandinsky liberated colors and forms from what they represent externally, instead reducing them to their impressions (82–84), expressing their “invisible tonalities and forces” (Davidson xi–xii). Thereby, like Woolf’s The Waves, Kandinsky’s art radiates “a feeling of life,” “the phenomenology of the invisible,” from the canvas (Davidson xi–xii). In Woolf’s words, through the abandonment of “writing [that] appeals mainly to the eye” in favor of eyelessness, “we are made to appreciate the forms, the colours, the very fibre and texture of [things]” (EIV 244). On this basis, while Merleau-Ponty only praises Proust for “fixing the relation between the visible and the invisible,” I argue that Woolf as well succeeded in this with her eyeless writing in The Waves, “describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, [the visible surface] [but] that is its lining and its depth” (VI 149). Furthermore, while the speed and flexibility of their dialogue reminds of prose, the characters’ descriptions are poetic due to their richness in literary devices. Bernard’s alliterated imagery of a “loop of light,” Rhoda’s onomatopoeic imitation of the birds chirping, and Jinny’s alliterated description of the windows covered with blinds in wave-like iambic intonation, all reinforce the sensuousness of the scene, making it even corporeally perceivable for the reader. To compare this effect again with abstract art, the invisible feeling of life radiating from the canvas (here, the characters’ sense perceptions) is, thus, repeated contemporaneously by the spectator, or concerning The Waves by the reader, establishing a “shared feeling” (Davidson xii). Thus, as Woolf noted about her “playpoem,” it is not concerned with fiction’s “fact-recording power,” but with poetry’s vivid and close expression of “feelings and [general] ideas of […] characters” (EIV 435). In one sense, the characters are only able to experience immediately the general dimensionality of Being, the visible world, due to the interludes’ particular general narrative style. Such a generality has been defined as “impersonal” (Banfield 385), reminding us of Woolf’s comment on the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse (1927) in her diary: “I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing—I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to” (DIII 76). The style of “Time Passes” and the interludes of The Waves is strikingly similar, seen for instance in the following passage: “[t]he place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter

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[…]” (TTL 113). Like the interludes of The Waves, passages such as these seem to be narrated from an observational distance, giving a seemingly omniscient view of the visible world. However, there is no third-person or first-person narrator present, no individual consciousness. The interludes lack a single pair of eyes, a focalising point— they are not only “eyeless” but also its homophone, “I-less.”11 In fact, I claim that it is precisely due to the interlude’s eye/I-lessness that the visible world described resembles the general Being, a Sensible in general, Merleau-Ponty writes about. It is an “anonymous visibility [that] inhabits [all characters], a vision in general” (VI 142), rather than an eyeless world isolating (Briggs, “Novels” 67) or opposing them (Banfield 13). Thereby, Woolf created an eye/I-less “background” that allows the characters the kind of lived experience Merleau-Ponty wants to return to in his phenomenology, namely, an omnisensual, corporeal experience of a prereflective reality, where subject and object are not yet distinguished (VI 130). Thus, the characters are able to experience the visible world immediately and unfiltered because it is not already mediated through the subjectivity of a narrative eye. Instead, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, their “[bodies] stand before the world and the world upright before [them], and between them there is a relation […] of embrace” (VI 271). However, it is crucial to point out that this eye/I-less style of the interludes does not, in fact, produce an omniscient point of view as one might be led to believe. Instead, even in the interludes, the possibility of an all-seeing perspective is undermined. The interludes demonstrate what Banfield defines to be “the condition of seeing, to have a partial view” (343). For instance, according to Olk, the third interlude presents a “microcosm of possible viewpoints,” alternating between a “panoramic view of the sea and sky” (163)—"[t]he sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore” (W 50)— and a “bird’s eye view” (Olk 164) of the same birds “that had sung […] in the dawn on that tree” (W 51). Those birds glance around, “aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular. Perhaps it was a snail shell […]. Or perhaps they saw the splendor of the flowers […]. Or they fixed their gaze on the small bright apple leaves […]” (W 51). The repetitive use of the suggestive word “perhaps” signifies that even the eye/I-less perspective of the interludes is not omniscient. Since birds are not

11 A similar argument has been made by Beer (1996) and Briggs (2000). While Beer’s feminist reading asserts that “multiple I’s” draw in and out of a communal, androgynous “we” (66), Briggs argues that the interludes’ I-lessness results in an isolation of the characters from nature (76). My Merleau-Pontian approach, however, stresses all beings’ primordial interconnectedness and embeddedness in an eye/I- less visibility surrounding them.

Stahl 26 things (Dinge) but subject-objects themselves, they are also “beings in depth,” not pierceable by the eyes (VI 136). Hence, neither of the viewpoints is granted primacy or omniscience, and secondly, they are not contesting views but entangled with each other in the flesh of visibility. Just as the birds are part of the sea and the sky, the sea and the sky are part of the birds; given that the birds are subjects-objects with depth, “there is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other” (VI 138). Furthermore, Woolf writes in “Montaigne,” that “‘perhaps’ and ‘I think’ [exemplify] all of those words which qualify the rash assumptions of human ignorance” (EIV 75). They emphasise, in this passage, that in contradistinction to Cartesianism’s belief, no perspective can ever produce all-encompassing knowledge of the world. Instead, eye/I-lessness accounts for the modern, anti-ocularcentric conception that it is impossible to know the world entirely and that not only humans but also non-human agents have a life of their own,12 since, according to Merleau-Ponty, every sensible sentient is “more than their being- perceived” (VI 135). In fact, Woolf’s depiction of human and non-human agents having not only equal agency in the world but also being of the same flesh, recalls Ryan’s pusthumanist analysis of The Waves, claiming in reference to Bohr’s indeterminacy principle that there is no ontological or visually perceivable boundary between them (Materiality 175–176). Thus, the eye/I-less interludes reflect Woolf’s previously mentioned attitude towards life being “variable [,] complex and infinitely mysterious” (EIV 76). This having been said, it is important to note that not only do the interludes depict eye/I-lessness, but as Woolf herself claimed, the entire book is meant to be “eyeless” (DIII 209). As I demonstrated earlier, the first-person suspended present tense soliloquies exemplify Woolf’s eyeless writing, bringing forth the characters’ invisible impressions of the visible world. However, this is just one aspect of the episodes’ eyelessness. The fact that they are structured like dialogue, indicated by the insertions “Bernard said,” “Jinny said,” again suggests some kind of narrative instance; however, they only serve to signal whose voice is rendered as there is no other voice or eye present other than the characters’ in the entire novel. Hence, like the interludes, the episodes are eye/I-less since there is no conventional omniscient third-person narration

12 Bill Brown (1999) famously made a similar claim, but concerning Woolf’s engagement with material objects rather than non-human animate agents (i.e. birds). He argues that she undermines the privilege of the human subject and liberates objects from their subservience to human beings, demonstrating that they have agency as well (7).

Stahl 27 at work, no single subject position that binds everything together, creating a univocal, coherent reality in the text. Rather, reminiscing of the anti-ocularcentric aletheic mode of vision as “multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary [and] horizonal” (Jay 164), the characters, as Henry notes, together produce an assemblage of “a multiplicity of perspectives” (Discourse 106). Returning to the metaphor of the characters’ voices merging into a chorus, Bernard thinks, “while I hear one or two distinct melodies, such as Louis sings, or Neville, I am also drawn irresistibly to the sound of the chorus” (176). Thus, neither of the characters’ voices/melodies or points of view is prioritised but rather the realist or naturalist focus on a single, autonomous subject is replaced with an emphasis on community to which each character contributes equally and in which each is embedded in a relation that can neither be grasped with the eye nor by a single I. Their partial views demonstrate that the characters’ knowledge of themselves and the world “is always local, contingent, and situated” (Henry, Discourse 106), being inherently tied to their bodies and thus limited in their perceptual horizons; as Jinny notes, “I can imagine nothing beyond the circle cast by my body” (91). Recalling Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the subject-object’s “Umwelt (environment)” as both openness and invisibility/hiddenness of Being (VI 185), Bernard notes that “[c]ertain things lie beyond my scope” (132). Hence, while the characters’ multiple perspectives merge into one collective immediate experience of the visible world, as the previously cited excerpt exemplifies, not only the environment in which they are embedded but also the characters themselves remain partly fragmented and enigmatic, even to themselves. Aiming to explore the enigmatic, invisible relations and ideas of people and the world in The Waves, Woolf’s narrative discloses “very little about the houses, incomes [and] occupations of its characters” (EIV 435). In fact, according to Pamela L. Caughie, it would be more accurate to call them “speakers” rather than “characters” since they are neither “located in any specific local setting or geographical space,” nor “individuated by physical details” (345), which would only scratch on the surface of people and phenomena. The characters themselves reflect Woolf’s struggles as an author, repeatedly making the experience that fact and mimetic representation fail to capture phenomena or someone’s (own) identity. Jinny, for instance, tries to “catch” the identity of “that man there, by the cabinet” by accumulating facts about him, but eventually realises that they do not surmount to a “substance” (W 123–125). Therefore, she then “drop[s] all these facts,” concluding that she cannot tell “if life is this or that”

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(125). Bernard, the writer of the group, is concerned with story-making and, thus, also with character-drawing. Like Jinny, he finds that facts do not capture the complexity of things and people, observing that “beyond [facts] all is darkness and conjecture” (102)—a hidden depth that escapes objective description. Thus, trying to describe his friends in their absence, Bernard applies poetic imagery instead: “I see Louis, stone- carved, sculpturesque; Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal; Jinny, dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the nymph of the fountain always wet” (82). On a meta-level, then, Bernard mirrors what Woolf does in The Waves. He is not applying the “fact-recording power […] of fiction” but the abstractness of poetry, giving “the outline rather than the detail” of his friends (EIV 435), rendering “in a very few strokes [their] essentials” (DIII 300). He is trying to capture their abstract Wesen (essence) eyelessly, trying to reach the “inexhaustible depth” underneath their surface appearances (VI 143). As Henry notes concerning Kandinsky’s abstract art, a turn towards abstractness is a turn away from a mimetic representation of the external, visible manifestation of phenomena (Invisible 6) (here, away from surface appearances) in order to reach and make visible a phenomenon’s invisible dimension—“how it is felt” (Davidson x)—which is internal to it, or in Merleau-Ponty’s words, resides in-the-visible (VI 257). Thus, since the subject matter of The Waves is not accessible to the eye, exploring the abstract Wesen of people and the world, as well as their relations to each other and to general ideas, it has to be approached eyelessly, through abstract poetic images. All in all, there is no single subject or focalising point that orders The Waves’ narrative but, as Henry argues, its “ordering function […] is decentered or dispersed” (Discourse 103). The narrative resists Fry’s notion of aesthetic objectivity—the possibility that an artist, author or narrator can step back from the piece of art/writing to produce an aesthetic unity out of her/his detached view (Fry 33). Thereby, The Waves’ I/eye-lessness disputes the idea of the Cartesian subject autonomous from its environment, inspecting it as well as others from a distance, and depicts interconnected characters. An omniscient narrator or a dominant focalising point in the narrative would instead presume that it is possible to impose an order on the world, to make it transparent, coherent and tangible. However, humans do not steer the current but are flowing within it, like in the city’s “heterogeneous crowd [,] [where they are] going to be buffeted; to be flung up, and flung down […] like a ship on the sea” (W 125).

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As an attempt to account for the decentring generated by scientific developments, the narrative of The Waves is not mediated by a narrator governing the continuous stream of “human thought [,] the ship, the night&c, all flowing together,” to repeat Woolf’s diary entry (DIII 139), but it arises out of the text itself, out of what Merleau-Ponty calls “the schemata of Being, […] its ebb and flow, its growth, its upheavals, its turbulence” (EM 123). As such, life itself is presented as what Woolf terms in “Modern Novels” (1919), “the semitransparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (EIII 33; my emphasis). In other words, the general eye/I-less visible, in which we are enveloped, is simultaneously open to and hidden from us due to not only “extending further than the things I touch and see at present” (VI 143), but also being the “surface of a depth,” within which the invisible, abstract Wesen of things lies (VI 136), which can only be disclosed eyelessly.

Eyeless Writing as “Bodily” Writing After his first read of The Waves, the novelist and Bloomsburian E. M. Forster wrote a letter to Woolf on October 23, 1931, praising the novel’s poetic and philosophical profoundness. Trying to describe the “mystery throbbing under it,” he writes the world is incomprehensible and must remain so to us animalcules [….]. But what are we? Waves, yes? but [sic] waves in the sea part of the sea inseparable from the sea bound too [sic]each of us to be this wave and not that […] but able and increasingly able as we get older to perceive that the other waves have their life too and that while we are clashing with them we are somehow they. (Forster 192) Woolf was delighted by Forster’s letter, as it affirmed that her new playpoem form had led her on the right path (DIV 52–53). As the previously analysed scene of dawn in the garden exemplifies, the characters’ individual perceptions complement each other and form into a collective immediate description of it. However, as Forster observes, The Waves does not always depict an unquestioned unity of the characters, a calm sea, but also depicts the waves “clashing”—the discord that also belongs to the schemata of Being, as noted previously (EM 123). All characters strive to capture their own identities against that of the others, asking themselves repeatedly “[w]ho am I?” (W 58, 69, 83, 166). In their clashing, however, the characters do not achieve a sense of a univocal self, but, as my analysis will uncover, they find that they are multiplicitous and variable, being fundamentally interlaced with each other in their bodies, challenging the Cartesian notion of an autonomous subject.

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In the third interlude, for instance, Neville states “I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am” (58). Neville longs to pin down his identity, to make it measurable, which implies a possibility of objectively inspecting one’s own identity from a scientific distance, computing a clear-cut, unambiguous core, immune to change and unique for every individual. However, in point of fact, the opposite is the case: shortly after, Neville not only feels that he cannot capture his identity but he also experiences that his unidentifiable sense of himself is suddenly changing: Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet the figure who is coming and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance of a friend. […] [H]ow painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody—with whom?— with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I? (58) Neville does not experience this change to his sense of self through Bernard as an enrichment but rather as further confusion and even a distortion of his self. The fact that he feels his self curiously flowing together with Bernard’s challenges his world- view, believing that “there is an order in this world; [that] there are distinctions” (13). It is a lucky coincidence that it is Bernard who is approaching Neville, since Neville believes that Bernard with his artistic genius is able to “describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence” (25). Bernard then tries to “create” Neville, noting that Neville aspires to be a poet and longs to be a lover, but also tries to capture more abstractly how Neville is felt; thus, Bernard is not “fixing remorselessly upon a single object,” as Neville would (59–60). Neville again feels like his self is being distorted, stating that “I am one person—myself” (61). He distances himself strongly from Bernard, who believes himself to be a second Byron, and tells him “this is not Byron; that is you” (61). Bernard, on the other hand, feels repulsed by Neville’s reduction of himself, thinking “[t]o be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange” (62). Instead, Bernard perceives himself as “I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am this, that and the other. […] For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs” (62–63); rather, “I am […] complex and many” (53), always changing depending on who and what one is surrounded by (56). Hence, in contradistinction to Neville, Bernard embraces the fact that it is impossible to capture one’s identity as it is in constant flux, interacting with and ever-

Stahl 31 changing according to one’s encounters. Neville experiences how his body, being immersed in the visible as a visible itself, approaches what he sees and thereby “opens onto the world” (EM 124). Due to both Bernard and Neville at once seeing and being seen, they are in a state of what Merleau-Ponty terms Ineinander (in-each-other) and Einfühlung (“quasi-reflection”), each encroaching upon and mixing with the other (VI 245). This process of encroachment (chiasm) is the structure of the flesh common to all subject-objects. As explained earlier, the flesh is not a “substance” but the sensibility of things, the anonymous texture and general intercorporeal “element of Being,” through which we are already preconsciously and primordially connected with the world and others in our ability to sense and be sensed (VI 139, 143). As a result, since both Neville and Bernard are sensible sentients, they are already in an unconscious communion with each other through the flesh of the world (VI 142), so that Neville senses Bernard before even seeing him clearly. However, since Neville mentally refuses this process, he experiences it like a violent force working upon him, unable to control this intercorporeal process. In fact, since consciousness is grounded in the body, the body’s “movement is not a decision by the mind […]; but my body moves itself” (EM 124). The body is the self (VI 244–245), emerging out of this chiasmatic intertwining as a self by “inherence of the seer in the seen, the toucher in the touched, the feeler in the felt—a self […] that is caught up in things” (EM 124). It suggests the idea of a Neville mixed with Bernard and vice versa. Thus, the self is complex and multifaceted, as Bernard perceives and embraces it, rather than measurable and static, as Neville would have it, desiring order. It is on these grounds that I argue that The Waves’ eye/I-lessness undermines the Cartesian conception of I/eye presuming a singular, static and sealed off identity and a singular, disembodied view on the world, by depicting characters that are multiple, variable, embodied and interlaced with other human and non-human beings. The Waves is not narrated by a single I/eye but by intercorporeally connected bodies, perceiving the world omnisensually, so that eyeless writing resembles “bodily” writing. This intercorporeality is acutely experienced by Jinny, who is, like Bernard, profoundly aware of her embodied being. She perceives the world as “a great society of bodies” (W 44) where “our bodies communicate” with each other through their sensibility (W 71). In the third episode, Jinny is dancing and experiences in “the current of the dance” the curious wonder of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world:

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[W]e are swept now into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us together, and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. (72–73) The dancers touching each other touching are intercorporeally embedded in the common flesh of the world, in the “it [holding] us together.” However, while the bodies are enveloped by the flesh due to their carnal adherence of touching and being touched, they each remain simultaneously distinct, one “hard” and the other “flowing.” This is the case because flesh and reversibility express at once envelopment and distance (VI 135), or in Johnson’s words, “unity at a distance or sameness with difference” (47–48). According to Mildenberg, the doubleness of being subject-object means that one is located “at once apart from other sensible beings as a seeing/sensing subject and among them as a seen/sensed ‘thing’” (115). However, this paradox inherent to the flesh’s chiasmatic structure is not an obstacle between the embodied self and the world but it is their “means of communication” (VI 135). In this sense, Jinny feels inherently connected with the other dancers, her “peers,” thinking “I am one of you. This is my world” (W 73), being one variant of the flesh, the carnal “prototype of Being” (VI 136). Nevertheless, like Bernard and Neville, Jinny also has the urge to differentiate herself from her friends. In the second episode, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda try to demarcate themselves from each other via visual appearances. However, the narrative’s structure reveals their prereflective and invisible carnal adherence. “[Going] upstairs” to change clothes, they pass a looking-glass and Susan sees herself “with Jinny in front and Rhoda lagging behind. Jinny dances. […] Miss Perry’s dark eyes smoulder with admiration, for Jinny” (27–28). Later on, Susan thinks, “I do not want, as Jinny wants, to be admired. I want to give and be given” (37). Right after this, Jinny’s soliloquy starts, and she sees herself in the mirror, thinking “I see myself entire. I see my body and head in one now, for […] they are one […]. I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness” (28). This soliloquy is followed by Rhoda’s, who is also looking at herself thinking, “I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. […] They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it” (29). Whereas Olk does not analyse this particular scene, it illustrates that she is correct in asserting that in The Waves “processes of vision, of seeing and observing” become crucial in the establishment of relationships between the characters (166). However, since Olk misses

Stahl 33 the reversibility of the senses, the doubleness of the self, she claims that those processes construct a dialectic between each character as autonomous self against her/his surroundings (166). Instead I argue that sense perception turns into a narrative device in The Waves, interlacing the characters with each other, instigating the transition from a perceiving character to the character perceived, reversing their relation: Susan sees Rhoda and Jinny; Jinny sees Susan and Rhoda; Rhoda sees Susan and Jinny; each thinks about themselves in comparison to the others. Each character’s soliloquy is initiated via an intercorporeal process with the others and the visible world, whether it be seeing, hearing, or thinking about others/the visible world, illustrating “that one must see or feel in some way in order to think, that every thought known to us occurs to a flesh” (VI 146). As a result, The Waves’ underlying structure or invisible form is itself carnal, being governed by the characters’ corporeal chiasmatic relations with each other and their environment. While Olk claims that “invisible form” is the opposite of “visible surface” in The Waves (163), I argue that it resembles the “hidden pattern” behind the daily life (MB 72); the common flesh uniting humans and the world, whose very structure is chiasmatic. It is on this basis that I claim again that eyeless writing manifests itself as “bodily” writing in The Waves, since an all-seeing, disembodied narratorial instance is replaced by a carnal narrative structure, flowing via the characters’ bodies. Although Mildenberg does not, regarding the reversibility of sense perceptions, draw a connection to The Waves’ eyelessness, she acutely observes that a “‘double- touch’ experience” lies at the novel’s centre, simultaneously intertwining and distancing the characters with/from the world they inhabit (116). The flesh, being a mirror phenomenon, is an “extension of my relation with my body” (VI 255), and in the double-touch, or rather double-sensation experience, the sensible and the sentient “reciprocate one another” (VI 139). Susan, Jinny and Rhoda all being seen by each other, or seeing themselves in the mirror, which amounts to the same, complete their visible body via encroachment (VI 202), since it is not possible to see oneself seeing; both, “my eyes” and my movement “are invisible to me” (VI 254). As Merleau-Ponty notes, “[t]here is no coinciding of the seer with the visible. But each borrows from the other, takes from or encroaches upon the other, intersects with the other, is in chiasm with the other [,] […] in the sense of Uebertragung (transmission), encroachment” (VI 261). Thus, as noted previously, the characters are selves by inherence (EM 124), trying to define themselves via what the others are and are not; they only come to a sense of themselves in the first place through their surroundings. Nevertheless, since this self by

Stahl 34 inherence constantly changes, it always remains partly enigmatic, as Woolf observes in “Montaigne” when writing about a spectator “gazing into [a painting’s] depth,” but, as in human encounters, “seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is that they see” (EIV 71). In fact, Bernard observes, “[t]o be myself […] I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is myself” (W 81). However, there does appear to be one character who is an exception to this idea, namely Rhoda. As the previously analysed scene of the three girls seeing themselves in the mirror suggests, Rhoda feels inherently disembodied. She perceives the others as embedded in the world, as “they are here [in] the real world [, and] I am not here,” “[they] have faces [whereas] I have no face” (29), “they live wholly [and] indivisibly” (92) and “I am nobody” (22). She “wish[es] above all things to have lodgement” and to “touch something hard […] and so draw myself […] into my body safely” (112). Merleau-Ponty already noted in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) that, since “the body is our anchorage in the world,” it is also “our general means of having a world” (146–147). However, Rhoda lacks a connection with her body and is therefore isolated from the others and the world, with the exception of the two dinner scenes. Scholars have argued that Rhoda suffers from depression or melancholia, 13 and studies on depression and Merleau-Ponty argue that depression is signified by a “disturbance of embodiment,” where the body does not “giv[e] access to the world” anymore (Fuchs and Schlimme 573).14 She feels that “all palpable forms of life have failed me” (W 112) (all senses, since life occurs in a “tactile space” [VI 134]), and being thus disconnected from her body and the world, she eventually commits suicide. Hence, The Waves demonstrates that it is only possible to gain a sense of oneself via our lodgement in the body and intercorporeality with others, which is why it is not narrated by a single, disembodied and detached I, but is instead narrated eye/I-lessly, via the characters’ interconnected bodies. Nevertheless, it is due to both the characters’ attempts to differentiate themselves and the fact that they speak in separate soliloquies that scholars such as Olk, Banfield, Tobin and Simone argue for a dialectic in The Waves between self/other and exterior/interior. While they do acknowledge that the characters also move towards

13 See, for instance, and Lee (2005), ch. 5, Paccaud-Huguet (2006), pp. 30–33. 14 On Merleau-Ponty and depression, see Gilbert (2014), pp. 129–182, and Ratcliffe (2015), pp. 75–99.

Stahl 35 each other, “oscillating between detachment and connectedness” (Simone 44), in a structural ebb and flow of “approximation and withdrawal” (Olk 167), they do not question those binary oppositions but view them as pregiven, which is why, for these critics, the characters are always drawn into isolation. I have already demonstrated that each character, being inherently embodied, is interlaced with all other characters’ selves due to the flesh’s reversibility. However, it is not until the fourth episode, where they all gather for a farewell dinner for Percival, who is leaving for India, that their inherent integration really becomes apparent. The six characters arrive one after each other at the dinner, all anticipating Percival’s arrival. Each time a character enters, the others record her/his entry and experience a change of the room and the relations between them. For instance, when Jinny enters, Susan observes how Jinny’s presence “seems to centre everything […]. Now she sees us, and moves, and all the rays ripple and flow and waver over us, bringing in new tides of sensation. We change” (W 85). This effect of each body entering demonstrates that since the body is a part of the visible (“to have a body is […] to be visible” [VI 189]), the “moving body makes a difference in the visible world” (EM 124); its movement inscribes the body into the world it inhabits (VI 133). Woolf herself notes in “Montaigne” that “movement and change are the essence of our being” (EIV 75), a point picked up on in the figure of Bernard, whose “character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide and is not mine, as yours are […] [, it is] made and remade continually” (W 94). When Percival arrives and completes the group, the final and most significant change occurs. The group is “drawn into […] communion,” and Louis notes, [i]t is Percival […], who makes us aware that these attempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that,’ which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false. […] We have tried to accentuate differences. […] But there is a chain whirling round, round, in a steel- blue circle beneath. (97) Shortly before, this inherent interconnectedness in which the seven are grounded is put into a poetic image by Bernard, thinking “[t]here is a red carnation in that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves—a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution” (89). Whereas Henke argues for a dialectic between self and other in the dinner scene, in which the characters experience their “self dissolve [into] a non- self,” threatening their existence as autonomous beings (464), I argue with Ryan and

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Mildenberg that “life itself” as it is presented in The Waves, is “fundamentally communal” (Ryan, Materiality 194) and “non-dialectical” (Mildenberg 113). As noted previously, Ryan analyses The Waves along with Barad’s concept of “intra-action” (174). Intra-action is tied to Bohr’s indeterminacy principle, based on the notion that there is no “ontologically pre-determined separation” of phenomena, i.e. human or non-human entities (Ryan 177), so that they are “entangled in ‘the ongoing reconfigurations of the world’” (Barad qtd. in Ryan 174). Rather than presupposing that the agents involved exist prior to their interaction, ontological intra-action postulates that agents only emerge as distinct through intra-action, for “agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (Barad qtd. in Ryan 174). Although Ryan does not utilise a Merleau-Pontian approach, I argue that, firstly, the kinship of agents, whether human or non-human, as the ground of intra- action, is what Merleau-Ponty terms the common flesh of Being, and secondly, that their “mutual entanglement” signifies the flesh’s chiasmatic structure, their simultaneous envelopment and distance. In The Waves, the characters try to differentiate themselves, to establish distinct identities, but realise in their communion that there is a “circle beneath” (W 97), or as Woolf notes herself, “some invisible rope [by which] we are bound” (DIV 11–12), namely, the flesh of the world, which binds them together, recalling the relation of reversibility between “sensible [and] sentient” as being “two segments of one sole circular course” (VI 138). Their selves do not dissolve into a non-self, each being a petal of the whole flower, which is why the realisation that each is part of the other, that they are one but many, is experienced as comforting rather than threatening. As such, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the “cohesion” of seer and visible “prevails over every momentary discordance,” since their being is constituted of a common element, the flesh of all Being (VI 140). In this sense, Bernard’s poetic image of the seven-sided flower metaphorically anchors the characters in a common flesh. Recalling Woolf’s rejection of writing that appeals mainly to the eye, she argues that a writer should not only “describe […] carnations […], so that we can see them,” since every scene, “however solidly and pictorially build up, is always dominated by an emotion which has nothing to do with the eye. But it is the eye that has fertilized their thought” (EIV 244). The carnation is not meant to primarily appeal to the visual sense but it is utilised as an access point to the sevens’ deeper relations, symbolising the characters’ corporeal, eyeless unity. In this sense, etymological reasons support that Woolf may have picked the “carnation”

Stahl 37 as her chosen flower carefully; it incarnates the group, since it signifies polysemously the “crimson [red] carnation flower” (OED: “carnation,” n. 2.1b) and “the colour of human ‘flesh’ or skin” (OED: “carnation,” n. 2.1a). The flower’s seven sides, the seven characters, are not entirely congruent but are all constituted of and united in the same flesh, in the flower’s pistil in which they coalesce. Each character/petal, each eye/I, contributes its features to the wholeness of the flower, but not as autonomous, sealed off eyes/Is but as entangled beings, interlaced and crossed over with each other in their chiasmatic relations.15 As such, Bernard states in the last episode “it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs” (W 199). This shows that, recalling Forster’s letter to Woolf, each character is “increasingly able as [she/he] get[s] older to perceive that the other waves have their life too and that while [they] are clashing with them [they] are somehow they” (Forster 192). Therefore, one can in fact speak of an ebb and flow of connectedness and isolation (or envelopment and distance) as Olk (167) and Simone (44) do; however, this dynamic is non-dialectical, signifying the chiasmatic structure—the obverse and reverse of one texture—of the flesh, the fundamental element of Being (VI 141). In addition, as Ryan correctly notes, not only do the characters intra-act with each other, but non-human agents are also part of their communion (Materiality 186). All sitting together, Neville notes, “surrounded, lit up, many coloured; all things—hands, curtains, knives and forks, other people dining—run into each other” (W 96). This illumination, “the light [displaying] the world […], and [us] too” is also mirrored in the fourth interlude, where the sun has almost reached its climax and falls “inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence” (77). The moment of communion at the zenith of their lives enlightens the characters, illuminates their entanglement in Woolf’s “hidden pattern behind the cotton wool,” which is “not lived consciously” but primordially connects all human beings with the world as a work of art—as part of it (MB 72). This hidden pattern is the eyeless flesh of the world, in which all human and

15 Ryan makes a similar point, however, not via Merleau-Ponty but via Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of “assembleges” in Thousand Plateaus (1980), where they claim that each of The Waves’ characters “with his or her name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity […]. Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its edge, and crosses over into the others” (278). Proceeding from that, Ryan claims that the “multiplicitous intra-actions [in The Waves] [create] assembleges which include nonhuman as well as human agents” (Materiality 186).

Stahl 38 non-human agents are primordially rooted, recalling phenomenology’s prereflective reality, where both the senses and subject and object are not yet differentiated (VI 130). As we have seen, for Forster, The Waves lays bare that human beings are only “animalcules,” to whom the world will consequently always remain intangible (Forster 129). It speaks to humans’ decentring and rescaling in anti-ocularcentrism (Henry, Discourse 7). By interrogating the abstract, invisible “depths of the world,” Woolf interrogates “the depths of the self” (EM 54). The Waves demonstrates that it is impossible to render the experience of a single I/eye since every self only becomes a self via its bodily encounter with the visible world and other sensible sentients, crossing over in each other. Since our environment and encounters always change, the self is in constant flux and is never complete. Abandoning mimetic representation of reality with its emphasis on visual appearances, The Waves’ eye/I-lessness unveils this underlying, invisible relation between humans and their environment as one of intrinsic embeddedness in the common flesh of the world. As such, eye/I-lessness in The Waves signifies not only the inexistence of a single focalising point, but also resembles a kind of “bodily” writing. That is, since one can only encounter and inhabit a world through the body, The Waves’ literary world is also only disclosed to the reader through the characters’ bodies. Secondly, each character in the novel is presented as multiplicitous, as carrying the other characters and her/his surroundings with her/him, thus, undermining the Cartesian notion of a single and static I. Each I/eye is simultaneously distinct, or “clashing,” and structurally identical with the others—enveloped and distanced, so that, in Bernard’s words, “[w]e exist not only separately but in undifferentiated blobs of matter” (W 176), constituted of the same flesh. Thirdly and finally, since double-sensation turns into a narrative device in The Waves, the narrative is guided by the characters’ bodies, their chiasmatic relations, rather than by an individual consciousness. The Waves’ structure is therefore itself carnal, being constituted of the eyeless flesh of its literary world. As such, Woolf herself writes about The Waves in her diary, “the book itself is alive” (DIII 298).

Eyeless Percival and the Things in Themselves As we have seen, Mildenberg connects eyelessness not to The Waves and its narrative style as a whole, but rather ties it to a single being in The Waves; Percival. But as we have also seen, eyelessness has different facets in The Waves and not only one. In this

Stahl 39 sense, while I agree with Mildenberg that Percival is a manifestation of eyelessness in The Waves, he is one among many. Mildenberg argues that Percival is neither a character nor a presence in The Waves, but a “mute and ‘eyeless’ figure,” whose voice is never rendered, coming only into existence through the other six characters’ descriptions of him (119). He is perceived by the others as “remote from us all,” as “some mediaeval commander” (W 24–25), and as their “hero” and “captain” (W 86–87). On this basis, scholars have established that Percival is the centre of the group, gravitating towards him as if he were a magnet.16 In this line of thought, Mildenberg claims that it is Percival, who with his arrival at the farewell dinner reveals “the common ground of the [group], the flesh of the world” (119). However, Woolf rejected the privileging of a particular point of view or character (Henry, Discourse 105). By reading the text phenomenologically, we see that Percival needs to be read from a more nuanced perspective. On these grounds, I argue for a decentring of Percival’s position, stressing again the characters’ interconnectedness, before I will move to his eyelessness. Recalling my analysis in the previous subsection, Louis observes that “it is Percival,” who lays bare that all attempts to construct autonomous identities are false (W 97). Completing the group with his arrival, the six do in fact perceive Percival as inducing the revelation of their inherent connectedness. But whereas Mildenberg argues that Percival is the ultimate “core” of the group, “in which the acts and the expressions of the others are anchored” (119), I disagree. Percival does at once take a special role in his muteness and the others’ admiration of him (Miko 81), but is nevertheless, as I argue, embedded in the group without taking an elevated position. Shortly before the seven-sided carnation forms, Bernard observes [w]e are drawn into this communion by some deep, some common emotion. […] Shall we say ‘love of Percival’ because Percival is going to India? No, that is too small, too particular a name. We cannot attach the width and spread of our feelings to so small a mark. We have come together […] to make one thing […] seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in that vase. (89) Percival is the reason for their communion but it is the seven-sided carnation created out of it as their symbol of unity that endows this gathering with significance. The carnation makes visible, “seen by many eyes simultaneously,” the inherent

16 See, for instance, Olk (2014) p. 178, Briggs (2000) p. 78, Miko (1988), p. 81.

Stahl 40 interconnectedness of the characters in the common flesh of Being. This eyeless interconnectedness, lying in Being’s inexhaustible depth, is made visible by each character’s “body like a lantern,” as Jinny remarks (91); it is through their “hands touch[ing]” that “nothing remains unlit” (99). Hence, it is not only each body, each “eye,” that contributes equally to the making visible of the seven-sided flower, but it is in the bodies’ encroachment with each other that their common flesh comes to light. Percival does not have a special power that reveals their interconnectedness, but was the last piece of the puzzle missing until he arrived. It needed the corporeal completeness of the group for the common flesh to become visible. In this sense, Percival is not the group’s/carnations’ core or pistil, but he is one petal equally coexisting with the others. This harmonious unity of the group, however, is momentarily shattered. In the beginning of the fifth episode, Neville declares that Percival has died by falling from a horse in India, which makes the others suddenly acutely aware of their ephemerality (W 106). I argue that since Percival was part of each character’s corporeal self, a part of each character has died with Percival, leaving each to reconfigure their sense of self. Neville suddenly feels detached from his surroundings, thinking “[w]e are infinitely abject, shuffling past with our eyes shut” (107). After Percival’s death, Neville no longer sees meaning in a life with others, asking “[w]hy meet and resume? Why […] make up other combinations with other people? From this moment I am solitary” (107). Mourning his friend, Neville longs for isolation, since every new union with someone is doomed to end in death again. For Bernard, on the other hand, Percival dies when his son is born. He is devastated, thinking “[s]uch is the incomprehensible combination, […] the complexity of things, that I […] do not know which is sorrow, which joy. My son is born; Percival is dead” (108). Bernard experiences the incomprehensible enigma of the cycle of life and death, mirrored in the waves perpetually falling, withdrawing and falling again in the preceding interlude (106). Then, Bernard “look[s] at the world that Percival sees no longer,” which goes on relentlessly “as a thing in which I have no part, since he sees it no longer” (108). Like Neville, through Percival’s death, Bernard feels detached from the world, which moves on while he is in a moment of stasis, overwhelmed by his emotions: I remember, as a boy, his curious air of detachment. […] I say, addressing what is abstract, facing me eyeless at the end of the avenue, in the sky, ‘Is this the utmost you can do?’ […]. You have done your utmost, I say, addressing that blank and brutal face (for he was twenty-

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five and should have lived to be eighty) without avail. I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care. (109) It is with his death that Percival is no longer only “mute” but also turns “eyeless,” which is why Mildenberg attaches this attribute solely to him (119). Mildenberg does not, however, thoroughly analyse Percival’s eyelessness but merely refers to the above cited passage. I argue that since Percival is no longer able to see or otherwise perceive the world—to encounter and be immersed in it with his living body—he has turned “abstract [and] eyeless,” facing Bernard like a phantom “in the sky” (W 109). Later, in episode nine, Bernard recalls a moment in his life when he felt detached from his self, stating that he was “[a] man without a self. […] A dead man. […] How can [one] proceed […] without a self, weightless and visionless [...]?” (205–206). Bernard implies that death is the absence of a self and, as shown in subsection two, one only comes to a sense of self through the body. Consequently, Percival being dead, no longer has a body or a self and is, thus, “weightless and visionless”—an eye/I-less, abstract phantom wavering in the sky. In contrast, being alive, one cannot “separate off from the body [but always] gaze[s] through it” (EIV 318). Having left his body in death, Percival is no longer a sentient, and thus, cannot behold the world anymore, which reminds us of To the Lighthouse’s “Time Passes” again, in which life in the absence of human consciousness is described as “beholding nothing, eyeless” (110). While I disagree with Banfield’s dialectical analysis of The Waves, contraposing an eyeless world with a sensible one (13), I agree with her stating that “eyelessness is linked to abstractness, […] to what does not need the human to persist in existing” (212). As shown in subsection one, the eye/I-less anonymous background of The Waves’ interludes, paralleled in the narrative style of “Time Passes,” surrounds the characters and always lies partly beyond their perceptual grasp, since we “live [the world] from the inside” (EM 138). In this sense, the vast, anonymous visibility surrounding all beings does not have to be seen to exist, rather it exists beyond human perception. It is on this basis that I argue that Percival, losing his body and his self in death, thus, merges with the “Sensible in general” (VI 124), the anonymous visibility’s eye/I-lessness, beholding nothing, turning eye/I-less himself. As a result, encountering Percival’s eyeless and blank-faced phantom, Bernard is scared, but rather than succumbing to sorrow, he swears to himself and Percival that he will not “weep away [his] life,” that he will make Percival’s “meaningless death” meaningful by carrying Percival with him in his life (W 109). Bernard addresses

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Percival a last time, saying “[y]ou have gone across the court, further and further, drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But […] something of you remains” (109). Writing about the phantom limb syndrome, Merleau-Ponty states that “[w]e do not understand the absence or death of a friend until the moment we expect a reply from him and feel that there will no longer be one” (PP 82–83). Percival is still perceived by the other characters as if a part of him remains, since he was a part of their bodies formed in their preconscious union in the flesh, but the fact that he is addressed “without avail” makes his death reality (W 109). Their bodily sense of self and of their group has been involuntarily changed by his loss and now has to adjust itself to “new worldly conditions” (Carman 102). As previously hinted at, the group’s sense of interconnectedness is only momentarily shattered by Percival’s death. Not only are they able to reassemble again and reconfigure their sense of self, but Percival’s death has also given the other characters a new, more profound understanding of life and of themselves as ephemeral beings. In the sixth episode, Louis observes “Percival has died. Susan has children, Neville mounts rapidly to the conspicuous heights. Life passes. […] Meeting and parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns” (120). Now being “past thirty” (124), Percival’s death has become a part of the course of the six’s lives. Just as their communion at the farewell-dinner revealed that it is false to speak of separate, sealed off identities, Percival’s meaningless death has laid bare that life “wavers […] in uncertainty” (130). It is pointless to “impose [an] arbitrary design” on life since, as Bernard notes, “I am […] involved in the general sequence when one thing follows another […]. I [am] surrounded, included and taking part” (134), recalling Heidegger’s claim that the “[w]orld is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject […]’” (qtd. in Jay 163). As I will demonstrate, it is due to this new-found acute awareness of their fundamental embeddedness in the uncontrollable general sequence of life, that an encounter with the “things in themselves” becomes possible. Firstly, however, I will show how the group finds back together and how eyeless, abstract form again becomes an access point to their underlying essential feeling of communion. In the eighth episode, the six meet for a dinner at Hampton Court (150). Whereas at Percival’s farewell dinner, they felt love, this time, their common emotion is “[s]orrow” (151). Nevertheless, despite Percival’s absence, the six perceive their inherent interconnectedness in their common flesh:

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‘A square is stood upon the oblong’ [, said Rhoda,] ‘and we say, “This is our dwelling place. The structure is now visible. Very little is left outside.’ ‘The […] red carnation that stood in the vase […] when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.’ ‘A mysterious illumination,’ said Louis, ‘visible against those yew trees.’ […] ‘Marriage, death, travel, friendship,’ said Bernard; ‘town and country; children and all that; […] a many-faceted flower. […] One life.’ (164) Percival’s death brings the characters together again, creating in their sorrow a “dwelling-place;” a comforting, homely space, where Rhoda for once “has no anxiety” (164). Rhoda’s description reminds us of episode five, where she thinks “‘[l]ike’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? […] Percival, by his death, […] let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. […] a perfect dwelling-place” (115). Like the painter Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse, who, drawing a portrait of Mrs Ramsay and her son, does not want to “[make] an attempt at likeness” and therefore draws a “triangular purple shape,” trying to capture their “sense” through shape, shadow, light and color (45), Rhoda wants to get to the essence underneath the surface of the sensible that cannot be captured by analogy and simile. Just like the abstract Wesen of each character lies in its hidden depth, as shown in subsection one, the Wesen of their communal experience, perceived as a dwelling-place, is not visually perceivable. Consequently, Rhoda cannot describe it mimetically but only eyelessly and abstractly. As Henry notes, “[t]he disappearance of the object in geometrical abstraction is […] the bringing to light of its essence” (Invisible 14), and as Merleau-Ponty observes, “the essence […] is an inner framework, it is not above the sensible worlds, it is beneath, or in its depth,” its invisibility (VI 220). Banfield claims that Woolf’s writing illuminates an eyeless world “inaccessible to the senses” opposing a “sensible world” (13). Instead, I argue, Rhoda’s eyeless description of the scene making the “structure” of the dwelling-place “visible” (W 164), reveals that visible surface and invisible depth are not opposites of each other. Rather, the invisible depth where the essence of things resides is each visible’s/sensible’s lining, its obverse in-the-visible (VI 149). It is in their eyelessly felt dwelling-place, then, that the essence of their communal being is again made visible, resembled by the abstract image of the, at first, seven and now six-sided carnation—their common flesh of Being, “the steel-blue circle beneath” (97), anchoring them in the world. Aside from the previously analysed

Stahl 44 symbolism of the carnation, this second dinner scene is given another symbolic meaning via the “yew trees.” In the context of this symbol for “renewal and rebirth” (Hageneder 14), the characters’ bodily sense of self has adjusted to the “new worldly conditions” without Percival (Carman 102). While the seven-sided flower was shattered momentarily, the characters have now recreated themselves into a six-sided flower, “one life” (W 164). Nevertheless, Percival has grown into the flower as well, his death and their memories of him inscribed into the six character’s bodily beings, just like their children and the environment they live in. Whereas Tobin argues that the characters are in a perpetual struggle with death, resembled by Percival’s eyelessness (Tobin 203– 204), in fact, they accept death as being an inevitable part of their lives and common being. In 1932, Woolf mourns the death of her own friend Goldswirthy Lowes Dickinson and, like the six characters in The Waves, finds that all humans are “in the midst of some vast operation: of the splendor of this undertaking—life: of being capable of dying: an immensity surrounds us” (DIV 120); namely the eye/I-less, anonymous visibility. Finally, in the ninth and last episode the novel reaches its climax in Bernard summing up the lives of the characters. Being now, due to Percival’s death, acutely aware of humans’ ephemerality and embeddedness in an uncontrollable cycle of life, Bernard ceases to try to impose an order on the world. As I will demonstrate, it is on this basis that Bernard, in a peaceful moment of corporeal, co-existential being, encounters the “things in themselves.” Firstly, however, it is crucial to note that Bernard, like Percival, is not given an elevated position in the novel, despite him narrating the entire last episode. Rather, it is meant to be “a gigantic conversation” (DIII 285), in which, as Mildenberg rightly argues, “Bernard’s voice and those of the other five merge [into] one ‘gigantic voice’” (116), telling their story to an invisible listener in a restaurant. In this sense, the story Bernard is telling is not his but theirs, “[f]or this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am […], Bernard or Neville, Louise, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda” (W 202), again stressing their intercorporeality. Since Bernard is “sum[ming] up” (170), this episode is the only one predominantly written in past tense, except for when he is addressing his listener in the present or ponders about his current existence. Trying to recapture the groups’ eyeless sense of interconnectedness, Bernard repeatedly finds that it is “impossible to order [the six] rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole—[…] like music. What a symphony with its concord and its discord, and its tunes on top and its

Stahl 45 complicated bass beneath” (184). As Merleau-Ponty claims, “music [like literature] […] [is] the exploration of an invisible” (VI 149). Bernard wants to get to the meaning behind the sound, to the “mute perception” of the groups’ essence (VI 155), again via eyeless, abstract form, avoiding mimetic representation. However, Bernard does not succeed in recapturing the sense of their common ground as they experienced it in the dinner scenes—he cannot find it in the past. As Woolf writes, “[t]he past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. […] [I]t is then that I am living most fully in the present. […] But to feel [it] peace is necessary” (MB 98). As discussed in subsection one, it is in the suspended present tense, Woolf’s eye/I-less method functioning like a phenomenological reduction, that the invisible depth of Being becomes visible. Interrupting his story-telling Bernard says “[l]et me touch the table— so—and thus recover my sense of the moment” (W 192). Touching the table, being touched himself, he feels grounded with his body in the present again. Eventually, the listener leaves Bernard to himself (212). Now, there is no “need of […] phrases anymore,” Bernard finds, relieved that he can stop trying to put the complexity of life into inadequate words (213). In the absence of a listener, he can just be and corporeally perceive his environment in peace, the six others’ lives and pasts inscribed in him. In this peaceful moment of being, he experiences his own kind of phenomenological reduction, thinking to “sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee-cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself” (213). Hough, taking a Husserlian approach, argues that the “things themselves” only manifest themselves in the immanent contents of consciousness, since “‘the world is nothing other than what I am aware of’” (Husserl qtd. in Hough 50). However, Husserlian phenomenology neglects the significance of the lived body. Instead, I argue that just like in the dinner scenes, where “the moment was all; the moment was enough” (200), it is in anti- ocularcentrism’s ontological lived, acute, bodily experience of being-in-and-of-the- world where the eyeless common ground of Being is felt, since it can only be perceived corporeally. As Merleau-Ponty writes, [i]t is the body and it alone […] that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves […] beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that […] would coexist with them in the same world. (VI 136) [They] offer themselves therefore only to someone who wishes not to have them but […], to let them be and to witness their continued being. (VI 101)

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Bernard, being “most fully in the present” (MB 98), experiences phenomenology’s prereflective reality, where the synergy of subject and object comes to light (VI 130). Aware of humans’ embeddedness and ephemerality, Bernard ceases to try to impose his “arbitrary design” on the world (W 134) and merely coexists with his surroundings, lets the things be in themselves (VI 101). In this sense, both the dinner scenes and this last scene of Bernard coexisting with material objects are moments of communal being where the inherent kinship between agents, whether human or non-human, is revealed. In those scenes, the experience of “some invisible rope [by which] we are bound” (DIV 11–12) is not forcedly evoked but arises out of the peaceful coexistence of agents sharing a carnal adherence. The parallelism of “things in themselves, myself being myself” signifies this eyeless structural kinship between Bernard and material objects (W 213), the “hidden pattern” connecting all beings (MB 72), demonstrating again, as in subsection two, that non-human agents are also part of the flesh’s chiasm (VI 215). Just as the seven/six characters are simultaneously enveloped in the common flesh of Being as sensibles (metaphorically in the carnation’s pistil), and distanced from each other as sentients (the carnation’s different petals), so are Bernard and the “things” at once enveloped in the flesh of Being, as beings with depth, and distanced from each other through the “thickness of the look” (VI 135). In other words, all agents are simultaneously of the same flesh and always “more than their being-perceived,” partly intangible to each other (VI 135). As a result, I claim that The Waves again emphasises the non-dialectical structure of Being, in contradistinction to the majority of criticism on the novel (Banfield, Henke, Olk, Simone and Tobin). This last scene demonstrates that it is precisely in peaceful, lived, bodily, co-existential moments of being—of Merleau-Ponty’s Ineinander (in-each-other) (VI 245)—that the “things in themselves” but also “myself being myself” unfold. When all agents’ equal agency and their right to exist in themselves as subject-objects is respected, the eyeless, primordial, intercorporeal ground of Being—that we are all in and of the same flesh—becomes visible. On this basis, all agents are anchored in what Bernard terms “the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again,” of which death is the inevitable but nevertheless terrifying end (W 214). Concluding, Percival resembles indeed another manifestation of eyelessness in The Waves. However, Percival is not the epitome of eyelessness, turning only eyeless in his death. He becomes part of the general, anonymous visibility in the interludes’ eye/I-less background—the Sensible in general, exceeding the perceptual horizon of

Stahl 47 each subject-object. I have shown in subsection one that all characters are immersed in this general visibility, but that they are not congruent with it, encountering it as sensible sentients, being simultaneously enveloped and distanced from the world and each other. However, since Percival is dead and no longer anchored in his living body, he is not a sentient anymore, but only a being perceived—abstract and I/eye-less, beholding nothing. In effect, Percival’s eyelessness due to the detachment from his body in death, again, reinforces my claim that The Waves resembles anti-ocularcentrism’s conception of Being-in-the-world as inherently embodied. In addition, my analysis has shown that it is also only in anti-ocularcentrism’s ontological lived, bodily experience of the world—in peaceful, intercorporeal, co-existential moments of being—that the eyeless ground of Being, our common flesh, comes to light. Since The Waves is concerned with reaching this common, essential but hidden structure of Being, its narrative cannot utilise conventional mimetic representation relying on visual appearances. Instead, as I argue, it is The Waves’ “abstract [and] eyeless” method (DIII 203) and its lodgement in the characters’ bodies, that enables an exploration of the “thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing” (W 107). The abstract Wesen (essence) of all Being lies within its inner framework, in the invisible of the visible, the eyeless common flesh. Lying beyond vision, it can thus only be reached via eyeless and bodily writing as well as abstract form.

Conclusion

Writing about her idea of a new novel-form, which eventually turned into The Waves’ playpoem, Woolf concludes in “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927) that “this unnamed variety of the novel will be written standing back from life, because in that way a larger view is to be obtained of some important features of it,” which her predecessors with their realist techniques had so far escaped (EIV 438). As we have seen, seeking to capture her characters’ “feelings and [general] ideas,” the visually imperceptible “outline rather than the detail” of life itself (EIV 435), Woolf abandoned conventional narrative techniques, such as character-drawing, fact-recording and mimetic representation. Instead, she strove to replace it with a new kind of writing that would account for the complexity of modern life, shaped by the decentring of the human subject as embedded in a world that exceeds its perceptual horizon. Informed by the philosophical, scientific and technological developments at the time, Woolf’s

Stahl 48 struggle with the visual sense was symptomatic of the modernist, anti-ocularcentric Zeitgeist and culminated in her arguably most experimental work: The Waves, her “abstract mystical eyeless book” (DIII 203). As I have shown, The Waves’ eyelessness has never been subject to an in-depth study before so that analyses of it scratched merely on its surface, restricting its meaning either to Percival and/or death’s hostile presence in the novel, or binding it into a dualistic structure, contraposing an eyeless world with a sensible one. However, especially the later Woolf increasingly rejected dialectical modes of thinking, seeking to overcome mind/body, human/non-human and self/world distinctions in her writings, laying bare their social constructedness by producing narratives that blur boundaries by letting everything “flow together” (DIII 139), are anchored in the characters’ bodies and reveal the inherent connectedness of all beings “in the world as a work of art” (MB 72). Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology accounts for Woolf’s modern, at that time radically new and forward-thinking conceptions of reality, being and the self, as he demonstrated that all beings are corporeally grounded in a common flesh—the common ground of Being, or the “hidden pattern” Woolf is striving to reach in her writing (MB 72). On this basis, by taking a Merleau-Pontian approach, I was able to reveal that Woolf’s eyelessness undermines rather than maintains not only Cartesianism’s dualistic mode of thinking, but also its notion of an autonomous, univocal and disembodied self, inspecting the world from the outside. My analysis has uncovered that eyelessness is Woolf’s method to go beyond vision and capture Being’s eyeless flesh, its non-figurative inner framework lying in-the-visible, rather than opposing the visible/sensible world (VI 257). As my three analytical subsections in chapter two have laid bare, moving from a macroscopic to a microscopic view, Woolf’s eyeless method shows itself in multiple, interconnected aspects of the novel, permeating it on several levels. In the first subsection, I have examined The Waves’ formal structure, narrative technique and literary devices and demonstrated that not only the interludes but the novel on its whole is eye/I-less in terms of lacking a single subject position and a focalising point, undermining the notion of an omniscient point of view. In this sense, while Briggs, Beer and Banfield are correct in asserting that eyeless also implies its homophone “I- less,” this eye/I-lessness, however, signifies neither an isolation of the characters from the novel’s interludes, devoid of human existence, nor a dialectic between a sensible and an eyeless world. Instead, I have shown, regarding the interludes, that this eye/I-

Stahl 49 lessness resembles Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous visibility, the Sensible in general, in which all beings are immersed and connected as sensible sentients. Concerning the episodes, I have revealed that apart from being eye/I-less in the sense of giving multiple, equal points of view, the novel’s suspended present tense is another manifestation of eyelessness. It produces a phenomenological reduction in itself, making the immediate, visually imperceptible impressions of the characters in lived, bodily moments of being visible instead of rendering their reflection or contemplation on what things might represent. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty’s prereflective reality, in which subject/object, self/world as well as the senses have not yet been divided, comes apparent. In the second subsection, the body became the focus of analysis, elucidating that the characters are not only formally interconnected both with each other and the anonymous visibility, but are interconnected as intercorporeal beings. It demonstrated that the characters are presented in the novel as corporeal selves, who come to a sense of self through encountering others and their environment, challenging the Cartesian notion of the disembodied, univocal subject autonomous from its environment. As my analysis has revealed, The Waves eye/I-lessness shows itself therefore also in the characters being selves by inherence, interlaced with each other, multiplicitious and in constant flux. Communal, intercorporeal, lived moments of Being-in-and-of-the-world and eyeless writing in the form of abstract poetic images unlock the hidden Wesen of Being, uncovering that the characters are different petals of one flower, not entirely coherent as beings in depth but grounded in the common, eyeless flesh of Being due to their carnal adherence as sensible sentients. Thus, the characters experience that it is pointless to strive for a sense of a univocal, static identity and eventually find comfort in the realisation of being one but many. In this sense, I have shown that eyeless writing resembles “bodily” writing as The Waves is not structured by individual, autonomous consciousnesses but governed by the chiasmatic relationships of the characters with each other and the world so that the novel’s structure is itself carnal. In the last subsection, the focus shifted to Percival and the “things in themselves.” Arguing that Percival merges with the eye/I-less anonymous visibility of the interludes in his death, losing his body and thus his self, he is discussed in the very end, showing that he is just one manifestation of eyelessness rather than its epitome. In this sense, my phenomenological analysis of Percival has shown that while most scholars view him as the centre of the novel, he has to be examined from a more nuanced perspective, being one equally coexisting part of their seven-sided flower,

Stahl 50 rather than inhabiting an elevated position. Lastly, I have demonstrated that Percival’s death makes the other characters aware of their ephemerality and embeddedness in a general sequence of life lying beyond their control. On this basis, Bernard ceases to impose an order on life and is thereby able to encounter the “things in themselves” in the last episode (W 213). In a lived, bodily, moment of peaceful, co-existential being, letting the things and himself merely be, their eyeless kinship comes to light. As such, the novel concludes on a clearly nonanthropocentric and non-dialectical note, laying bare the interconnectedness of all beings in an eyeless inner framework, the “hidden pattern” of life, or the common flesh of Being. All in all, eyeless writing is Woolf’s method to surmount the primacy of the visual in narrative, enabling her to unlock and reveal this “hidden pattern” connecting all beings with each other and the world. My analysis has revealed that for both Woolf and Merleau-Ponty it is only the body that can lead us to the things themselves, being primordially interweaved with them as beings with depth, sharing a carnal adherence. Since this carnal adherence lies beyond visual perception, it can only be captured eyelessly, through abstract poetic images and in omnisensual experiences of lived, bodily moments of being, in which phenomena coexist, having equal agency. I have drawn parallels to eyelessness in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; however, due to the limited scope of this thesis, I was not able to follow this line of inquiry further than just pointing out similarities. On this basis, it would be interesting to trace Woolf’s eyeless writing in several of her works, examining how and where this method emerges and whether it takes different shapes in different novels. Finally, I would like to conclude by quoting a passage from Woolf’s “Sketch of a Past” (1939), taking up the flower- motive present in The Waves, signifying all beings’ rootedness in a “steel-blue circle beneath” (W 97), in the common, eyeless flesh or ground of Being: I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; ‘That is the whole,’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. (MB 71)

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