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Unity and Fragmentation in Four Novels by Virginia Woolf

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Unity and Fragmentation in Four Novels by Virginia Woolf Unity and Fragmentation in Four Novels by Virginia Woolf Philippe Cygan Thesis submitted towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, September 2010 ABSTRACT Unity and Fragmentation in Four Novels by Virginia Woolf This thesis examines four novels by Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts – for the purposes of, firstly, establishing the specificity of literary language and, secondly, showing that such specificity is a form of access to basic structures of the human condition. I propose a reading of these novels on the basis of a theory of literary language articulated onto a fundamental anthropology. My starting point is a discussion of the tension between a force of unification and one of disintegration in the four novels, because such a tension is a theme of these novels; it is also seen as the spring of the literary experience by theorists such as Paul Ricoeur and Wolfgang Iser, who are the sources of inspiration of this thesis; and most importantly, such a tension is an avatar of aporia, which I consider one of the characteristics of literary language. I define literary language both negatively, along the lines of its demarcation from ordinary communicative language, and positively, in terms of performativity, figurality, fictionality and aporia: language in literature, rather than being a tool of communication, elicits a drift towards performativity of which the symptoms are figures of speech, referential irrelevance and contradictions. Such a theory of literary language is present in Woolf’s four novels, thematically, as a reflection, rudimentary and fragmentary, on artistic practice; it is also present on a formal level, as the active principle of her literary practice. To those strictly literary concerns, I add an existential depth: the specificity of literary language is seen as a mode of access to a fundamental dimension of our human condition. I discuss such a dimension, philosophically, under the name of ‘fundamental anthropology’ with the help of Emmanuel Lévinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I conclude my thesis by showing how, in the context of Woolf’s work, theory of literary language and fundamental anthropology are articulated onto each other. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One Theoretical background 9 Chapter Two Mrs Dalloway: ‘Here was a room; there another’ 45 Chapter Three To the Lighthouse: ‘It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses’ 74 Chapter Four The Waves: ‘Very little is left outside’ 117 Chapter Five Between the Acts: ‘Unity – Disperity’ 170 Conclusion 225 Bibliography 236 1 INTRODUCTION So much has been written about Virginia Woolf. And the sheer diversity of it is baffling: from her mysticism to her feminism, from her encounter with God1 to her writing with her milk,2 via the victim of sexual abuse, the mad woman, the modernist muse and so on. If we believe with Michel Foucault, that what is problematic tends to elicit discourse, excites ‘la volonté de savoir’ (‘the will to power’)3 then Virginia Woolf must be a problematic writer. One cannot help thinking about the four questions people keep asking Hermione Lee: ‘Is it true that she was sexually abused as a child? What was her madness and why did she kill herself? Was Leonard a good or a wicked husband? Wasn’t she the most terrible snob?’4 If, on the contrary, we believe, more traditionally, that what is problematic tends to be repressed, then some of her writing seems to belong to this category. The Waves for instance, as Gillian Beer has suggested. She talks of ‘demurrals and exclusions’ and ‘the relative neglect of The Waves in recent criticism […] several [critics] skirt the problem that the book evidently presents to current thinking by leaving it out altogether.’5 One way or another, it is this problematic aspect of her work I am interested in. I would like to call it the ‘strangeness’ of her writing, in accordance with Joseph Hillis Miller’s use of the term, when he points out that ‘stressing literature’s strangeness is a point of some importance, since much literary study has always had as one of its main functions covering 1 Louise A. Poresky, The Elusive Self: Psyche and Spirit in Virginia Woolf’s Work (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981). 2 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). 3 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976-1984), i, p. 20 (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols, trans. by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981-1982). 4 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), p. 3. 5 Gillian Beer, ‘The Waves: “The Life of Anybody”’, in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 74-91, (p. 80). 2 that strangeness over.’1 What is so strange about Virginia Woolf’s books, that has made them the focus of so much attention or the object of such cursory rejection? How do I define strangeness? Firstly it is a strangeness of language: literature is, fundamentally, nothing but words. And it is a strangeness in the use of language, compared with what we could call our everyday use of language. I will rely on four concepts to circumscribe strangeness. It can be approached in terms of fictionality, performativity, figurality and aporia. I will explain them each in turn in the context of Virginia Woolf’s work, and they all have a critical history. I borrow the term of fictionality from Michael Riffaterre: ‘fiction emphasises the fact of the fictionality of a story.’2 I mean by fictionality elements in Virginia Woolf’s novels that draw attention to the fact that the texts are not ordinary discourse about the world: elements, thematic or formal, like lack of verisimilitude or uniformity of tone that remind the reader that the words she is reading do not refer to the real world but are an invention. Wolfgang Iser talks of ‘the literary text’s disclosure of itself as fiction.’3 Virginia Woolf had a quarrel with realism and realist writers found her books and characters unreal.4 She was trying, in her own avowal, to ‘insubstantise’,5 to abstract. The puzzling way we enter and leave the characters’ consciousness in Mrs Dalloway; the symbolisation of the landscape in To the Lighthouse, the prosopopoeia in ‘Time passes’; the same voice for six characters, male or female, child or adult, in The Waves; the intertextuality of Between the Acts are all ‘indices of fictionality’,6 ways of detracting the reader from the world. There is ‘a convention-governed contract between author and reader indicating that the textual world is to be viewed not as reality but 1 Joseph Hillis Miller, On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 33. 2 Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. xv. 3Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 238. 4 See for instance Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ in The Captain‘s Death Bed (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950), pp. 90-111. 5 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (London: Triad Granada, 1978), p. 63. 6 Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth, p. xv. 3 as if it were reality.’1 The world is made to indicate something else. The strangeness comes from the fact that we are reading about what seem to be real, plausible events, yet we know they are more or less than that, a direction is indicated, away from what they are. We know they are fictional. It seems that the texts lead back to themselves as texts, as invented texts, as acts of writing; what Iser calls ‘the performativity operation of the text as a form of happening.’2 This is my second term: performativity. It seems that what the novels talk about, the world, is less important than what they ‘are’ as written texts. Moments of vision in Woolf’s novels: the climax of Clarissa’s party, when, after hearing about Septimus’s death, she retires into a dark and empty room; Mrs. Ramsay’s visions or Lily’s; the moments of being in The Waves; Miss La Trobe’s moment of inspiration or Old Flimsy’s seeing the carp; all have in common that they are what they talk about: visions. And we could extend this idea to the entire novels: is Mrs Dalloway, as a book, anything else but an inspirational movement that finds its climax in the scene mentioned above? Mrs Dalloway talks about an instance of inspiration and is this instance of inspiration finding its incarnation in the text itself. Susan Dick suggests something similar about The Waves; Virginia Woolf makes: The moment of being and the scene that contains it the central unit of the narrative […] one aspect of the rhythm that replaces the plot is the continual shift of attention inward and outward which builds toward and then away from moments of being.3 The strangeness appears in the collapse of distinctions between form and theme but also between what we could deem the experience of the writer and that of the reader. We have in the text something which is alive that erases the usual positions of a reader reading a text 1 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting, p. 251. 2 Ibid., p. 250. 3 Susan Dick, ‘Literary realism in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. by Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.
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