The World Without a Self

The World Without a Self Virginia Woolf and the Novel by fames Naremore New Haven and London, Yale University Press, r973 Copyright © z973 by Ya/,e University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress catalog card number: 72-9z3z5 International standard book number: o-300-oz594-z Designed by Sally Sullivan and set in Unotype Granjon type, Printed in the United States of America by The Colonial Press Inc., Clinton, Massachusetts. Published in Great Britain, Europe, and Africa by Yale University Press, Ltd., London. Distributed in Canada by McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal; in Latin America by Kaiman & Polan, Inc., New York City; in Austra/,asia and Southeast Asia by John Wiley & Sons Austra/,asia Pty. Ltd., Sydney; in India by UBS Publishers' Distributors Pvt., Ltd., Delhi; in .fapan by .fohn Weatherhill, Inc., Tokyo. For Rita and Jay What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, one with the object one adored? Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse "How describe the world seen without a self?" Bernard in The Waves Contents Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction 1 2 A Passage from The Voyage Out 5 3 The Artist as Lover: The Voyage Out Continued 30 4 Virginia W 001£ and the Stream of Consciousness 60 5 Mrs. Dal.loway 77 6 To the Lighthouse rr2 7 The Waves 151 8 Orlando and the "New Biography" 190 9 The "Orts and Fr-agments" in Between the Acts 219 ro Conclusion 240 ·Bibliography 249 Index 255 Acknowledgments Portions of this book have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and in The Ball State University Forum. I am grateful to the· editors for permission to republish. I wish to thank Indiana University for a grant that enabled me to complete the manuscript. Individuals have also helped: Paul Wiley, who interested me in writing about Virginia Woolf; L. S. Dembo and Bernard Benstock, who gave me en couragement; Mark Spilka, who read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions; and Jennifer Alkire, my editor at Yale, who did her work brilliantly. I Introduction Virginia Woolf's fiction beautifully evokes her cultivated, slightly effete life among the haute bourgeoise of post-Edward ian England. And yet, for all the recognizable Bloomsbury in fluence, her novels contain other, stranger characteristics. There is first her extraordinary sensitivity: like Mary Carmichael, the writer she describes in A Room of One's Own, her imagination "responded to an almost imperceptible touch on it. It feasted, like a plant newly stood in the air on every sight and sound that came its way . • . her pages were full of that curious sexual quality that comes only when sex is unconscious of itself." 1 Whether unconscious or not, a highly sensitive, "curious sexual quality" is present everywhere in Mrs. Woolf's novels. It is re flected not only in the tales themselves, but in the ebb and flow of her prose rhythms, in her frequent references to acute pleas ure .or pain stimulated by the plainest domestic events, and in her loving attention to flowers, moths, and watery places. This vaguely erotic sensibility may be responsible for other distinctive traits-the remarkable moments of ecstasy that her characters I •. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), pp. 139-40. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to this edition. 2 The World Without a Self . feel, the frequent hints of fear, the preoccupation with brooding, dreamy experiences, rather like self-hypnosis. Whatever the cause, the naturally elegant milieu of her novels is often suffused with an atmosphere that is anything but comfortable and fa miliar. Her attraction to a watery element gives her writing another of its unusual attributes. Reading her, one sometimes has the impression of being immersed in a constantly moving liquid, immersed so deeply that the people and things in her books become muffled and indistinct, like blurred and ghostly shad ows. At these times, Virginia Woolf seems less "a plant newly stood in the air" than an exotic undersea flora. Indeed, hers is the preeminent example in English literature of what the French critic Gaston Bachelard calls "the material imagination of water." Such a characteristic of her mature fiction is pre cisely described in a later passage from A Room of One's Own, where, looking out her window, she detects "a signal pointing to a force in things which one had overlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them along" (p. 144). At its extreme, this invisible river combines with the sleepy, hypnotic moods and the moments of exhilaration and fear to produce the strangest feeling of all: both the author and her characters appear on the verge of dissolving, or sinking for ever into what Mrs. Ramsay famously calls a "wedge-shaped core of darkness." In the book that follows, I have tried to examine these idio syncratic qualities of Virginia Woolf's fiction in some detail, and to suggest what it means to imagine life as she did. I have wanted to convey the unusual ~'world" of her novels, if we understand world to mean not just the physical trappings of her vision, but her way of seeing. It may be, as the late William Troy once suggested, that her whole approach to fiction comes down ultimately to a problem of style. Certainly her best known Introduction 3 statements about wntmg-essays like "Modern Fiction" and "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"-indicate that the kind of things she wanted to express required a special attention to form, so that if we want to understand her, we must always return to the unusual manner of her writing and her celebrated technical experiments. But instead of relating these matters to familiar critical themes such as Mrs. Woolf's interest in time or psychology, I have wanted to connect them with other issues which are at least equally important, namely the erotic and visionary character of her novels, and her fascination with death. /3, My discussion is organized around six texts which represent both a cross section of Mrs. Woolf's work and her most signifi~ .' cant achievement. The texts are arranged chronologically, ex-r cept for Orlando, which I have moved out of place because its comedy, its prose style, and its overt preoccupation with Eng lish history seemed to make it a proper companion for Between the Acts. Normally, each chapter begins with observations about style and technique; again the treatment of Orlando is an exception, since I wanted to comment on Mrs. Woolf's interest in biography. I felt that this somewhat neglected, ostensibly quite different side of her personality was deeply related to the same issues I have treated elsewhere. A glance at the table of contents will show that I devote more space to The Voyage Out than to any of the later novels, but then Virginia Woolf herself seems to justify such a practice when she says in her essays that an author's first book is likely to be the least "guarded" and the most revealing. I move slowly and freely at first, trying to illus trate the apparently native aspects of her work, and setting down general arguments which can be seen to apply through out. When I come to the later writings, I give somewhat less attention to small details of the prose, and spend more time with the techniques which are generally known as "stream of con sciousness" or "interior monologue." I have taken pains to 4 The World Without a Self show the limitations of such terminology, and to demonstrate the special character of Mrsi. Woolf's experiments. Throughout, I have been aware\that the peculiarity of Vir ginia Woolf's fiction is determined in large part by a number of historical facts, not the least being that she spent much of her life in a state of mind near madness and suicide.2 Though grant ing the existence of these facts; I have been more interested in the implications of Mrs. Woolf's writing than in its ultimate causes. I have wanted to indicate the consistency of her mind, as well as her struggle to shape the novel into a form that would render an order of experience it had not dealt with 'be fore. Everywhere Virginia Woolf's fiction implies her need for a union with what she sometimes called "reality." I hope to show that she attained this union, but that her attitude toward it was mixed, a commingling of love and sadness, fascination and terror. 2. A great deal of new information is made available in Quentin Bell's biography, Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1972). Bell's work appeared just as this study was going to press. 2 A Passage from The Voyage Out The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical ( if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

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