The Body in Metaphor and Writing the Unwritten Experience: A critical analysis of Virginia Woolf and a collection of original poetry
Tanya Thaweeskulchai
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
August 2018
Contents
Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Publications, performances and presentations arising from the thesis iv Introduction 1 Part I— Figuring the body in metaphor: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and The Waves 20 Chapter I—Expressing abjection through metaphors about the body in Mrs Dalloway 21 I—Corporeality and consciousness, and the expression of bodily experience 21 II—Metaphors about the body and the experience of abjection 26 III—Metaphor and engulfment 35 IV—Recuperation of one’s sense of self 39 Chapter II—Expressing negative moments of being through metaphors that produce force in The Waves 45 I—The force of language in The Waves 45 II—The construction of metaphoric environment through repetition 62 Part II— The body in a metaphoric environment: A poetry collection— Maps and Black-feathered Stones 93 The Laughter and the Crow (A Salivating Monstrous Plant) 94 I—And the laughter of a transparent, flickering boy 95 II—The breaking of the crow 103 III—Paper collection, the fox spirit and the calligrapher 131 IV—Into the ants’ nest 140 V—What threatening gestures, this building of myself 157 Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits 165 I—Familial and valedictory thoughts 166 II—Throned, a swaggering thing 195 Conclusion 214 Bibliography 219
i
Abstract
This thesis investigates the ways in which the body and metaphor are involved in the expression of experiences which are often difficult to articulate and with which, according to Virginia Woolf, literature has largely failed to engage. Female bodily experience, for instance, has been suppressed as a result of censorship by society and by the self. The aim of this thesis is to explore how certain metaphors are able to express powerful bodily experiences which have often remained unwritten and which literal language cannot accurately portray. To do this, the thesis presents a critical analysis of two of Woolf’s novels alongside an original collection of poetry. Woolf’s middle fiction departs from the conventions of the realist novel, and in Mrs Dalloway (1925) this experimentation takes the form of free indirect discourse in conjunction with highly figurative language. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I examine the ways in which Mrs Dalloway deploys metaphors about the body to express the dissolution of boundaries between the corporeal and consciousness, and so to express experiences that destabilise character subjectivity. In The Waves (1931), Woolf pushes the use of metaphor even further, such that the demarcation of the corporeal and consciousness is even more tenuous. In reading The Waves I use José Gil’s theory of force to conceptualise metaphors that bring the body into the expression of powerful experience, often bodily but not always. I conclude that the repetition of these metaphors generates a metaphoric environment that expresses a complex combination of bodily and emotional experiences which cannot be accurately articulated through literal language. The collection of poetry provides a different method of exploring the idea of a metaphoric environment, of how the body can be figured in and by such an environment, and of how it can be written. This creative work builds on the critical chapters to experiment with how the body—physical, abstract, human and non-human—can be written such that bodily and emotional experiences that are difficult to articulate can be expressed. The poetry collection, called Maps and Black-feathered Stones, comprises two parts: ‘The Laughter and the Crow’, published in 2017 by Cordite as A Salivating Monstrous Plant, and ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits.’
ii
Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been possible without the help of so many. I would like to thank, first of all, my supervisors, Sean Pryor and Stephen Muecke for their patience, knowledge and faith in the project. For morning group writing sessions, feedback and incredible emotional support, thank you Lisa Dowdall, Alyssa Critchley, Rosanna Gonsalves, Sarah McCleod, Lucy Watson, Mif Hudson and Chris Oakey. Additional thanks to Maria White for trips to the library, ordering books and printing this thesis, and to Helen Rydstrand for her proofreading and hand-holding. Thank you Melanie Robson, Sameera Durrani, Jessica Ford, Shaun Bell, Phoebe Macrossan, Klara Bruveris and Jayne Chapman for their support and feedback, home- cooked meals and hilarious rounds of Cards Against Humanity during writing retreats. Thanks to fellow occupants of Webster 311L past and present for their encouragement, lunch talks, chocolate and late night company: Tera Bok, Holly Champion, Genevieve Dashwood, Laura Lotti, Miri Jassy, Brooke Boland, Sarah Pope, Christian Gelder, Chris Oakey, Kate Sumner, Kate Montague, Stefan Solomon, Andrew McNicol and Hannah Walker, Rose Arong and Daniel Hempel. Thank you academics for feedback as either readers during the Annual Progress Reviews, Postgraduate coordinators or Learning Centre staff: Stephanie Bishop, John Attridge, Mark Steven, Meg Mumford, Dorottya Fabian, Chris Danta, Dominic Fitzsimmons and Shivaun Weybury. Thank you to Andrew Murpie for discussions on José Gil. I’ve also been very fortunate to have received an incredible amount of support for my creative work—thank you to: my editor, Kent MacCarter who published A Salivating Monstrous Plant and provided invaluable feedback; Amy Ireland; the Shopfront community and mentors who gave me the opportunity and support to put together a performance of ‘The Laughter and the Crow’ during the ArtsLab residency in 2012: Michael Pigott, Ava Karuso, Pollyanna Nowicki, Sepy Baghaei, Khat Reid, Yana Taylor, Victoria Hunt, Annette Teoseriero, Margot Politis, Caitlin Newton-Head, Howard Matthew and Kevin Ng. Many thanks as well to the Gut Art Space community for their encouragement and for giving me a platform to perform ‘Limbs.’ Thank you to my family, and to Mary Jurek, Allison Cahill, Mark Stewart, Jemma Doley, Jamie Oberg and Soo Jin Hanna Kim for their unwavering support over the years. iii
Publications, performances and presentations arising from the thesis
Creative Writing and Performance
2017 A Salivating Monstrous Plant—Poetry book published by Cordite Books
2015 ‘Limbs’ (Performance of a section of ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits’)—Writer, director and performer, Gut Art Space
2012 ‘The Laughter and the Crow’—Artist-in-residence: writer, director, performer, Shopfront Contemporary Arts and Performance
Conference Papers
2015 ‘Image and Landscape: intertwining two collections of prose poems, “The Laughter and the Crow” and “Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits,”’ Literary Studies Convention, University of Wollongong
2015 ‘Metaphorical corporeality in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and the problem of articulation among women writers,’ Annual Virginia Woolf Conference: Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries, Bloomsberg University of Pennsylvania, USA
2015 ‘The sublime as language function: the pear tree in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss,”’ Katherine Mansfield Postgraduate Day, UNSW
2013 ‘Gesturing and the disruption of spatio-temporal proxemics in Mrs Dalloway’ & ‘“The Laughter and the Crow”: an excerpt of prose poems,’ UNSW Postgraduate Conference: Cultures of Change
2012 ‘Gesturing speechlessness in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,’ UNSW Postgraduate Conference: Making Tracks
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Introduction
In her fiction and in her essays, Virginia Woolf was preoccupied with expressing everyday experience.1 The often quoted passage from ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921)—
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.2
—seems to imply that what matters most in everyday experience is the mind: consciousness is the receptacle that holds and processes this experience. However, there are multiple occasions in Woolf’s writing that challenge this notion, suggesting instead that Woolf aspires for modern fiction to express the everyday through bodily experience.3
In 1928, for example, Woolf writes in her diary about planning The Waves (1931), which was then titled The Moth:
The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is 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. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.4
The reference to ‘thought’ matches the emphasis in ‘Modern Fiction’ on consciousness;
‘sensation,’ on the other hand, suggests something more, something affective or bodily.
And while Woolf’s novels do sometimes represent characters ‘getting on from lunch to
1 The everyday is a growing focus in Woolf studies: see for example Lorraine Sim, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); Bryony Randall, ‘Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and the Everyday,’ Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 26, no. 3 (2015): 173-193; Maud Ellmann, ‘Everyday War: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf in World War II,’ Novel 50, no. 1 (2017): 77-96. 2 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9. 3 Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’ in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101-110; Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’ in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 140-145. 4 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1925-1930 (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), 209- 210. 1 dinner,’ her novels, particularly Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Waves, are inundated with moments that have been ‘saturated,’ stripped of ‘waste’ and ‘deadness’—moments that are accurate expressions of experience that cannot be achieved with the common understanding of body and mind. It seems no accident that, in addition to thought and sensation, such moments must involve the metaphorical ‘voice of the sea.’ I argue that such scenes, especially in Mrs Dalloway and The Waves, represent the ‘combination’ of thought and sensation through a particular kind of language: figurative language.
Woolf is by no means the only modernist writer who explores the Cartesian dualism of body and mind; many of Woolf’s contemporaries also deal with issues relating to the body in their work, such as Djuna Barnes, Olive Moore, W. B. Yeats, D. H.
Lawrence, James Joyce and Jean Rhys, among others.5 But what is peculiar to Woolf’s fiction is that she uses figurative language to express experiences that challenge the separation of body and mind through the destabilisation of character subjectivity. This destabilisation shifts the focus away from the story event, and instead gives more weight to the rendering of character psychology and the emotional and bodily experiences of characters. While Mrs Dalloway and The Waves tell stories of a certain kind, each having something like a beginning, middle and end, both works constantly transgress the conventional plot structures of the novel as a genre. This is largely done through experiments with narration in Mrs Dalloway, and through experiments with poetic language in The Waves, though there are overlaps between the two. While Woolf’s earlier novels contain Woolf’s signature style, they lean more heavily towards the realist genre.
Wave metaphors are present throughout Woolf’s oeuvre, for instance, but they are not characterised by extensive use of body metaphors and metaphors about the body. Such
5 Charis Charalampous has investigated this mind-body question in the literature of early modernist writers. See Charis Charalampous, Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2016). 2 metaphors are pervasive in Mrs Dalloway and, even more so, in The Waves, and in both works they serve to dissolve boundaries between the subject and his or her environment.
This thesis investigates the significance of the body in the interaction between body and consciousness, as part of experiences that often remain unwritten and are difficult to express. These experiences may be part of the everyday, but they are not always. In this context, this thesis makes two central arguments. First, I argue that Woolf does not privilege mind over body, and instead that Woolf’s figurative language, in particular her use of metaphors about the body, rejects that Cartesian dualism, representing a dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness. Second,
I argue that Woolf’s metaphors that allow her ‘to give the moment whole,’ to express those moments of being for which her fiction is so famous, and that these are always and irreducibly bodily. I will be dealing in particular with two of Woolf’s most experimental novels, Mrs Dalloway and The Waves. But to make this argument, we need first to consider Woolf’s complicated attitude towards the body and her theories about the representation of the body in writing.
Representing the body in writing
Woolf’s work provides conflicting representations of and arguments about the body. On occasion, she deals very directly with the meaning of actual bodies, as for instance when she argues in ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ (1925) that Shakespeare’s plays are better read than seen on stage. As Steven D. Putzel puts it, Woolf argues here that Shakespeare’s plays are ‘better understood by leaving out the actual body than having the body, with all
3 its associations and movements visible to the eye.’6 Putzel also reminds us that, in the essay ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’(1927), Woolf imagines a kind of fiction which would
‘be dramatic, and yet not a play.’7 Putzel argues that this desire to maintain the dramatic but dispense with acting, and with the bodies of actors in particular, demonstrates her general unease towards the body.8 Woolf makes the same argument again in her review of T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935): ‘with live bodies on stage, his words thin out. No rhetoric will save them.’9
This unease about the body is particularly pronounced when, shifting from actual bodies on stage to bodies in texts, Woolf approaches the problem of expressing the bodily experience and subjectivity of women. Woolf is renowned for her significant contribution to the progress of the suffragettes’ movement and her advocacy of female writers; her fiction, in particular, is understood to be a celebration of female consciousness and a subversion of the disparagement of female subjectivity. However, Patricia Moran has shown persuasively that, when Woolf employs metaphors of embodiment to address the questions of body image and sexuality, and with the intention of contesting patriarchal
‘devaluations’ of the female body, these metaphors are nevertheless also ‘infused with revulsion for the female body’s materiality.’10 For Moran, these metaphors betray a deep- seated and internalised sexism.11 Although Woolf advocates for the writing of female body and experience, and although A Room of One’s Own (1929) champions the work of women writers,12 Moran has noted that in that essay, Woolf,
6 Steven D. Putzel, Virginia Woolf and the Theater (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 2011), 116. 7 Putzel, Virginia Woolf and the Theater, 4. 8 Putzel, Virginia Woolf and the Theater, 11. 9 Putzel, Virginia Woolf and the Theater, 136. 10 Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 3. 11 Moran, Word of Mouth, 3. 12 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 4
unconsciously concurs with sexological claims: not only does Woolf persistently image women’s writing as watery and diffuse, thus echoing sexologists’ claims that women’s writing betrays the negative effects of female biology; she also worries that women’s books suffer from a mysterious ‘flaw in the centre,’ a structural weakness that inscribes the ‘flaw in the centre’ sexologists claimed deformed the female body.13
The female body is conceived as flawed, and women’s writing is limited by the body and its sex. That this flaw ‘deform[s]’ the body gestures to the monstrous. This thesis will discuss the relationship between the monstrous and the female body in relation to Mrs
Dalloway.
However, though Woolf may sometimes evoke negative representations of the female body, and sometimes avoid dealing directly with the physical body, she does attend in detail to the bodily experience of eating in a way that, as Lisa Angelella has argued, comes to represent a form of female empowerment.14 Angelella proposes that female hunger and appetite are essential to Woolf’s modernist aesthetic, which emphasises ‘the mundane and the sensual.’15 It is through eating that female characters
‘take a desiring and interactive position towards their worlds’:16 eating ‘mobilises desires, pleasures and psychological processes which exist outside of the regulation of social etiquette.’17 For other critics, this positive representation of women’s bodies and bodily experience extends beyond the culinary. Renée Dickinson argues that the imagery Woolf uses to represent Clarissa Dalloway’s body provides new ways to construct female subjectivity, in particular by providing an alternative to seeing women only as the products of their physical, geographical and national identities.18 And yet, as Dickinson
13 Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 16. For more information, see Chapter 3 of this book. 14 Lisa Angelella, ‘The Meat of Movement,’ Woolf Studies Annual 17 (2011): 174. 15 Angelella, ‘The Meat of Movement,’ 174. 16 Angelella, ‘The Meat of Movement,’ 174. 17 Angelella, ‘The Meat of Movement,’ 175. 18 Renée Dickinson, Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel: The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1. 5 notes, the portrayal of Clarissa’s subjectivity is conflicted: ‘But often now this body she wore […] with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all.’19 The metaphor here is typically ambiguous. It seems on the one hand to separate internal self and external body and yet, on the other hand, if the body is clothing, the self which wears this clothing is itself a body. Clarissa’s conflicted subjectivity is thus intimately tied up with her bodily experience.
The complexity of Woolf’s figurative language here reminds us that, despite the unease she displayed towards the body in certain situations, and towards the female body in particular, Woolf’s commitment to expressing bodily experience had a profound influence on her fiction. In the essay ‘On Being Ill’ (1926), Woolf notes that literature has too often focused on themes of love and war, at the expense of ordinary bodily experiences such as illness.20 As Leena Kore-Schröder has argued, Woolf’s injunction to write the body challenges the earlier critical assumption that her work privileges consciousness over corporeality.21 But critical attempts to see Woolf writing the body by analysing her narrative techniques sometimes tend to reinstate a Cartesian duality. By focusing on Woolf’s experiments with stream of consciousness, for instance, critics have been led to argue that, though ‘consciousness may arise from within, it is not contained within the corporeal body.’22 In this thesis, I argue that, by turning from narrative techniques to figuration, we can see Woolf’s writing performing a much more radical investigation of the necessary intertwining of corporeality and consciousness.
19 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited 1996), 8; quoted in Dickinson, Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel, 26. 20 Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ 101. 21 Leena Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body: Corporeality, Metaphor, and the I n-between,’ Virginia Woolf Bulletin 3 (January 2000): 15. 22 Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press 1998), 174, as quoted in Dickinson, Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel, 7. 6
Though Woolf’s novels explore corporeality and consciousness in different ways, one common thread is that these explorations often involve exchange between, or the overlapping of, separate characters’ subjectivities. One way to understand this is to say that the relation between body and mind is social. Shannon Forbes has addressed the social aspect of identity in her investigation of the separation of Clarissa’s fragmented self and the role she takes on as Mrs Richard Dalloway.23 So, too, Cristina Delgado Garcia examines the tension between the desire of characters in Mrs Dalloway for ‘self- definition’ and their ‘desire to communicate with other individuals.’24 But other critics have emphasised the role the body plays in these problems. Daniel Wanczyk, for instance, argues that, during Miss La Trobe’s play in Between the Acts, characters’ consciousnesses are represented through the physical act of fidgeting, and that this ‘collective’ fidget is a fidgeting ‘against collectivism, against identification.’25 For Wanczyk, the act of fidgeting questions both individualism and collectivity. Implied here is that the construction of self-hood is contingent and malleable; one’s identity is negotiated, not through verbal communication, but through bodily interaction with other individuals and with the social order at large. As will be discussed later in the thesis, the construction of character subjectivities in The Waves is negotiated in a different manner: through metaphors and speech rather than physical action. Subjectivities, in this case, are also malleable and this contributes to the unique way in which The Waves expresses the bodily experience of its characters.
23 Shannon Forbes, ‘Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian “Self” in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway,’ The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 38, no. 1 (2005): 39. 24 Cristina Delgado Garcia, ‘Decentering Discourse, Self-Centred Politics: Radicalism and the Self in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,’ Atlantis 32, no. 1 (2010): 17. 25 Daniel Wanczyk, ‘So They Fidgeted: The Modernist Twitch of Between the Acts,’ Woolf Studies Annual 17 (2011): 110. Emphasis in original. 7
Finally, because this thesis argues that figurative language is essential to Woolf’s capacity to write bodily experience, the origin or ownership of metaphors in Woolf’s texts is an important problem. When we read, for instance, that Clarissa wears her body, as though the ordinary, external body were clothing worn by a second, internal body,
Woolf’s free indirect discourse makes it clear that the metaphor is Clarissa’s. But the situation is not always this clear. J. Hillis Miller has recently suggested that ‘The Waves presupposes a vast impersonal memory bank that stores everything that has ever happened, every thought or feeling of every person.’ And though this memory bank allows access to the ‘characters’ interiorities,’ the thoughts and feelings which it stores
‘are always already turned into appropriate language, complete with figures of speech for sensations and feelings that cannot be said literally.’26 That is to say, the metaphors seem impersonal, independent of the individuals who voice them.
When discussing The Waves, the connection between body and consciousness and the conflicted representation of the body become even more important because Woolf’s construction of subjectivity leans towards metaphoric representation. This raises the question of the way in which Woolf undoes the binary opposition between body and consciousness, and the way in which this leads to fluid subjectivities of characters.
Michael Weinman explores this further through his concept of intersubjectivity, based on his interpretation of The Waves. This ‘intersubjectivity’ refers to a lack of separation of characters’ subjectivities, such that the attribution of the speaking ‘I’ to a particular subject is problematised.27 Weinman moves the discussion further towards the body in his analysis of speech acts and performativity. Speech is integral to The Waves, since the
26 J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Waves as Exploration of (An)aesthetic of Absence,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 83, no. 3 (2014): 668. 27 Michael Weinman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves (Plymouth: Lexington Books 2012), 132. Weinman’s interpretation supports and builds on Keith M. Booker’s work. See Keith M. Booker, Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Fiction (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 43. 8 novel is narrated (excepting the interludes) through soliloquies in a way that complicates the use of first-person and third-person narrations. More importantly, these soliloquies are highly stylised, in a manner very different from everyday speech.28 In Chapter II, I will discuss how Weinman’s intersubjectivity (in which I argue that the breakdown of boundaries between the body and consciousness occurs) plays a part in the employment of metaphors that bring the body into the language used to express characters’ experience.
Bodily experience, abjection and Woolf’s moments of being
In the readings of Mrs Dalloway and The Waves that follow, I focus in particular on how figurative language allows Woolf to express two related kinds of bodily experience: those which form part of Woolf’s ‘moments of being’, and those which involve abjection.
Lorraine Sim has written especially well of how these moments of being can involve
‘physical passivity’ and a ‘sense of helplessness.’29 The passivity and helplessness are produced, in turn, by an ‘inability to understand what these various events signify, or [an] inability to cope with the meanings they do signify.’30 Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is helpful here, for as she conceives of it, abjection means the dissolution of the boundaries that demarcate the subject.31
How to represent such experiences? Many have suggested that the representation of the female subject and body in Woolf’s novels makes this a complex task. In her intertextual reading of Woolf and Kristeva, Miglena Nikolchina examines the horror and violence with which female subjectivity is conventionally described: the authoritarian
28 Jane Goldman, ‘From Mrs Dalloway to The Waves: New Elegy and Lyric Experimentalism,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Sellers, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2010. 29 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 154. Sim separates moments of being into positive and negative groups, and the latter is the focus of this thesis. Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 141. 30 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 154. 31 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 10. 9 language which reduces women’s issues to the mundane.32 Similarly, Chlöe Taylor’s
Kristevan reading of The Waves examines how Woolf’s female characters are unable to access language in the same way that male characters do. Taylor observes that Kristeva’s understanding of women as writers and sexual beings, especially in About Chinese
Women (1977), is problematic as it is often rooted in the ‘melancholic’ and is
‘disturbing.’33 Female sexuality is most often depressive, according to Kristeva;34 in female characters’ attempts to use symbolic language, they are ‘more prone to insanity’ and suicide than men.35 In her notes, Taylor also mentions that Judith Butler is one of the harshest critics of About Chinese Women, and that Lisa Lowe criticises Kristeva for her
‘orientalism’ and ‘deluded exaggeration.’36 Butler argues that in her analysis of women’s relationship to ‘patriarchal law,’ Kristeva presents women as unable to resist, or subscribing to, the very system that Kristeva opposes.37 In light of this, Taylor acknowledges that Kristeva’s About Chinese Women might not be completely applicable to The Waves, but argues that it is useful in exploring their ‘shared understanding of gender,’ which helps the investigation of figurative language, character and plot in the novel.38 I further Taylor’s argument by contending that Woolf’s novel critiques those patriarchal systems which make certain kinds of language more accessible to male subjects, and that the employment of metaphors in The Waves does ameliorate this
32 Miglena Nikolchina, Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (New York: Other Press, 2004), 2-3. 33 Chlöe Taylor, ‘Kristevan Themes in The Waves,’ Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 3 (Spring 2006), 61. 34 Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (New York: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1986), 28-29 in Taylor, ‘Kristevan Themes in The Waves,’ 61. 35 Taylor, ‘Kristevan Themes in The Waves,’ 61. The phrase ‘prone to insanity’ that Taylor quotes comes from Kelly Oliver’s Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993), 63. 36 Taylor, ‘Kristevan Themes in The Waves,’ 75. Taylor quotes the phrase, ‘deluded exaggeration,’ from Lowe’s chapter, ‘Des Chinoises: Orientalism, Psychoanalysis, and Feminine Writing,’ Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver. (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 156. 37 Judith Butler, ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,’ Hypatia 3, no. 3 (Winter 1989):117. 38 Taylor, ‘Kristevan Themes in The Waves,’ 61. 10 problem. Finally, Kore-Schröder’s analysis of Woolf’s ‘A Sketch in the Past’ shows how metaphor allows Woolf to express experiences of abjection or moments of being, precisely because such experiences and moments involve the dissolution of boundaries, and because figurative language makes meaning a matter of ‘both/and’ rather than of
‘either/or.’39 In Woolf’s fiction, therefore, metaphor reconfigures Cartesian opposition as mutuality: corporeality and consciousness become intertwined, inseparable. The framing of the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness as an expression of the experience of abjection is key to this thesis. It provides a way to bring male subjects into the thesis’s discussion of the relationship between expression and bodily experience.
This thesis builds on the work of these critics by analysing how metaphors about the body provide Woolf, if not always her characters, with a language for bodily experience. (For the purposes of this thesis, metaphors and similes are considered to be the same, insofar as their substitution of a tenor with a vehicle depends upon a logic of similarity.) In this, I aim in particular to contribute to critical efforts to examine Woolf’s construction of the female body and subjectivity. However, I also explore how this metaphorical language is pertinent to male characters (keeping in mind the different implications for the female and male subject because of the patriarchal system). Due to the scope of the thesis, the theoretical chapters do not engage with feminist theories in detail. However, I further explore the issues of the female body and subjectivity in relation to the problem of expression in the creative work.
Force and the expression of experience
In order to elucidate the experience of abjection and its effects on character subjectivity in The Waves, I start this section with Judith Butler’s concept of force that is produced
39 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 18. 11 through speech. Michael Weinman has used Butler’s theory of performativity, which deals with force, to analyse The Waves. Butler argues that illocutionary speech acts produce forces that exceed the moment of their utterance. That is to say, the speech act does more than what the speaker intends.40 For Weinman, force helps us to see how, in
The Waves, our ‘sense of self, and even our bodily integrity and inviolability,’ are
precariously open, at all times, to being interpellated—that is, to being ‘recognized’ into existence, through the speech of those upon whom we rely for our social standing, as something very much other than what we might have thought ourselves to be.41
That our bodily integrity is open to interpellation suggests that our identities can be compromised by language: the self we encounter in interpellation may contradict our own sense of self. Moreover, the force of speech acts has the potential to produce abjection: as Butler argues, ‘the address constitutes a being within the possible circuit of recognition and accordingly, outside of it, in abjection.’42 While Butler’s concept of force sheds light on the effect of abjection on character subjectivity, there is still a need for a theory that is more productive for the investigation of how metaphors in The Waves bring the body into the expression of characters’ emotional experience. This type of emotional experience may not be presented in an explicitly bodily manner. In this endeavour, the connection between the body and expression is crucial, and that is not the main concern of Butler's concept of force. Furthermore, Butler’s theory focuses on speech acts rather than metaphor as a type of language that produces force, and it will be useful to find a complementary theory to elucidate the relationship between force and metaphor when discussing The Waves.
40 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 41 Weinman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves, 4. Emphasis in original. 42 Butler, Excitable Speech, 5. 12
To think through the relationship between force and metaphor more directly, it is helpful to turn to the work of José Gil. In Metamorphoses of the Body (1998), Gil investigates the relationship between force and power, focusing in particular on how force and power interact in the rites and the political and judicial processes of tribal societies.
Building on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gil defines force as the effects of signification. Stating his intention to focus on the ‘practical effects’ of signs, rather than on their meanings, Gil aims
to ask what forces they draw on or shore up, and through which mechanisms they are likely to trigger certain effects; to cease interrogating the semantic change of forces, but rather, to interrogate the energetic power of signs.43
Not only do forces have their ‘own reality,’ they also ‘function in their own right.’
Moreover, both metaphor and the body are essential to this conception of force. The importance of metaphor comes from its symbolism, which allows for new meaning to emerge, in addition to that of the signifier and the signified. Gil explains the workings of metaphor using the following example:
When a Melanesian says, ‘See these arms,...they are water’ in order to show that his child’s arms are like shoots of a tree ‘first watery, then, after a time, woody and hard,’ […] he assumes, of course, a symbolic relation between man and tree. In the metaphor, the signifiers swap, and the signified, while remaining the same, steps aside because a new meaning comes forward. Linguists say that there is an intersection of statements, or rather ‘semic intersection,’ according to structural linguists. Now metaphor is at the heart of symbolic thought. If one signifier can be replaced by another (‘arm’ by ‘new shoot’), it is because there is an operator capable of carrying out the substitution.44
At the same time, Gil explains, the body is necessary for the ‘semic intersection’ to occur, for the signifier and the signified to be at work, while lending itself as a platform for
43 José Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, trans. Stephen Muecke (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), xii. 44 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 113. Unconventional punctuation is original. 13 metaphoric meaning to be made outside the signifier and the signified. Though the body is the instrument with which meaning is formed, it is not reducible to semiosis. Later in the same paragraph, Gil writes,
The zone where metaphoric meaning is born evokes a domain outside the semantic field: it is the body […] that will provide it. Then signifiers and signifieds will no longer be relevant; there will be something else that is not directly concerned with signs, but rather with the possibility of their interconnection.45
That the body is the instrument with which metaphoric meaning is formed suggests an intertwining of force, body and metaphor. The body used in the construction of metaphor becomes more than part of an act of signification: it complicates the act of signification itself. As will be discussed in relation to The Waves, it is through this complication that metaphors produce force. Throughout this thesis, I will show how the employment of metaphor that produces force brings the body into the expression of emotional experience that might not seem to be bodily.
The production of force as part of acts of signification can convey common everyday experience that stands out in its intense emotional quality and its impact on the subject, such as those of the moments of being. The unique characteristics of this type of everyday experience echo the characteristics Gil attributes to performance. In the article,
‘Paradoxical Body’ (2006), Gil develops his exploration of force in relation to the body in dance and performance. A body’s movements are also acts of signification; a dance or theatre performance may be choreographed for particular effects, but ultimately, the production of effects may not coincide with the choreographed performance itself. In the space where a performance is taking place, Gil argues, forces are created. Objects in this space take on varied emotional qualities depending on the actor’s body. The space that
45 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 114. 14 the body occupies is the space of the body: ‘the skin is extending itself into space; it is skin becoming space—thus the extreme proximity between body and things.’46 And just as in Metamorphoses, Gil’s discussion of dance and performance situates force in the realm of metaphor, highlighting the breakdown of boundaries between the body and the environment. This type of signification does not express experience in the sense of perception or sensation, but of the lived experience as a whole.47 This in turn will help us to understand how, especially in The Waves, Woolf’s metaphors that produce force bring the body into the expression of the experience of moments of being. The relationship between body, metaphor and expression differs in Mrs Dalloway and The Waves. In Mrs
Dalloway, there is an explicit connection between the bodily and the mental and emotional experiences that are part of abjection. In The Waves, this relationship is more complex: certain metaphors—those that produce force—are used to bring the body into the discussion about emotion present in the experience of abjection. In the first part of
Chapter II, I argue that while many metaphors in The Waves do not contain the body as their tenor or vehicle, these metaphors that produce force incorporate the bodily experience of the characters in the expression of abjection and negative moments of being. Through employment of the metaphors that produce force, the sense of the lived body, the state of the body as a unitary being, can be expressed.48 The lived body encapsulates the integration of the corporeal, consciousness and the emotional. After this,
I will discuss how a metaphoric environment is constructed through the repetition of metaphors that produce force, as well as other metaphors that do not produce force, but share a tenor or vehicle with metaphors that do. The lived body both comprises the metaphoric environment and structures it. That is, it is a point of reference that dictates
46 José Gil, ‘Paradoxical Body,’ trans. André Lepecki, The Drama Review 50, no. 4 (T192) (2006), 22. 47 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 116-117; Gil, ‘Paradoxical Body,’ 22. 48 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 116-117. 15 which metaphors are part of the environment. The metaphoric environment highlights a more nuanced relationship between body and consciousness: the overlaps between them that do not privilege either, and that shed light on how emotional experiences—as part of
Woolf’s moments of being, as presented in The Waves—involve the body.
Expressing bodily experience and the lived body through my creative work
This thesis is separated into two parts, which form two approaches to answering the same research questions. First, the critical component investigates Woolf’s mid-career fiction in terms of metaphor and the body. Second, the creative work explores these same problems in a collection of poetry, Maps and Black-feathered Stones, which itself consists of two parts: ‘The Laughter and the Crow’ (revised and published as A Salivating
Monstrous Plant in 2017) and ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits’ (unpublished).
There is a large volume of poetry which deals with the body: Yalonda J. D. Green deals with embodied subjectivities in her practice-based PhD thesis, That Terrifying
Center: Poetry, Language, and Embodied Subjectivities (2011),49 and Jon Mukand writes poetry about illness and the body in Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry
(1994).50 Well-known poets who engage with such issues include Arthur Rimbaud, Mina
Loy, Margaret Atwood and Adrienne Rich. With the exception of Loy, each of these poets explores the body and lived experience, but none conveys the destabilisation of subjectivity and the experience of abjection. While Loy does, Woolf’s work is a more productive choice, allowing for both comparison and contrast, since Woolf’s narrative fiction moves towards non-narrative poetry, and in my work non-narrative poetry moves towards narrative fiction. It may nevertheless seem odd to juxtapose a critical component
49 Yalonda J. D. Green, ‘That Terrifying Center: Poetry, Language, and Embodied Subjectivities’ (PhD diss., University of Louisville, 2011). 50 Jon Mukand, Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994). 16 about a novelist and a creative component consisting of a collection of poetry. Mrs
Dalloway, The Waves and Maps and Black-feathered Stones straddle the genres of prose and poetry. Woolf is known for her use of poetic prose, which presents narrative events in a way that challenges genre norms. The breakdown of corporeality and consciousness is most evident in Woolf’s work in metaphors that bring the body into the expression of experience, shown through the intersubjectivity of characters and extensive repetition.
Similarly, my creative work does not sit easily within the genre of poetry; it contains narrative threads that are necessary for a cohesive employment of repeated metaphors in a metaphoric environment. The collection of prose poems thus explores the significance of metaphor, while providing a visible narrative thread to construct intersubjectivities.
The resulting repetition in this instance creates a metaphoric environment which pushes the use of metaphor further, beyond the conventions of fiction or poetry. In this way, the critical and creative methodologies are tied together by their focus on metaphors working with and against narrative. In Chapter I of the critical component, I focus on Mrs
Dalloway, using Kristeva’s theory of abjection to elucidate Woolf’s examination of types of bodily experience that is difficult to articulate. In this novel, characters’ experiences of abjection are expressed through metaphors that portray the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness and the consequent destabilisation of character subjectivity. In Chapter II, I move to discussing The Waves, analysing how metaphors that produce force are able to bring the body into the expression of characters’ emotions.
I argue that this novel’s repetition of metaphors that produce force and other associated metaphors comprise a metaphoric environment that articulates the sense of a lived body.
The collection of poetry, Maps and Black-feathered Stones, further explores the idea of a metaphoric environment: ways that it can be written and how the body— physical, abstract, human and non-human—can exist in it. There are two parts in the
17 creative work. The first, ‘The Laughter and the Crow,’ revised and published as a book called A Salivating Monstrous Plant (see List of publications, above), follows a plant that crawls across a flooding city, crossing paths with a crow and a translucent boy who never stops laughing. The second part, ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits’ revolves around a woman who, living alone in a house filled with her family members’ self- portraits, struggles to distinguish between the present and the past. The poetry started as an investigation of the difficulty in expressing bodily experience. In writing it, I came to experiment with ways in which, moving beyond communication, the body might be integrated into metaphor. Excerpts from both ‘The Laughter and the Crow’ and ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits’ were presented as short performance-art pieces, the first as part of an arts residency with Shopfront Performance Arts Co-op,51 and the second with an independent art gallery and performance space called Gut Art Space.52 These performances further enabled the examination of the relationship between the body, consciousness and metaphor. Both in performance and on the page, the poetry attempts to find a more embodied mode of expression. It is also an attempt to attenuate the distinction between the performative body and the textual body. Given Woolf’s aversion to bodies on stage, it seemed especially useful to explore what an actual body on stage would contribute to the work, and how this might affect the writing process in turn.
Sections of ‘The Laughter and the Crow’ were first written before the performance piece was drafted. After the performance, I used the experience to build and sustain metaphors in the textual version of the work.
‘The Laughter and the Crow’ is a solo performance with a single body on stage
(with me as the performer) who speaks. Props include electrical cables and a wooden box,
51 Shopfront Performance Arts Co-op is a theatre located in Carlton, Sydney. For more information, see, http://shopfront.org.au/. 52 Gut Art Space was an artist-run venue in Camperdown, Sydney. It was active from 2015 to 2016. 18 objects that are not present in the poetry. The performer wears a black costume with a collared shirt though, again, this does not reflect the subject in the poetry. The performance of ‘The Laughter and the Crow’ includes choreographed movements and task-based actions: moving with the cables across the theatre wall and collecting cables from the floor to wrap and heap on the performer. ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of
Portraits’ (the performance version is titled Limbs) is also a performance with a single body on stage, but the actions devised for Limbs would be more accurately described as improvisations based on a score, including physical actions that are impossible to perform: ‘Pulling self from the beneath ground.’ Some of the scored actions, for instance, require objects, though the performance has no props: ‘Collecting pieces, assembling.’
Despite their differences, the poetry and the performance are attempts to engage the same narrative bodily experience that involve the abject, negative moments of being and the use of metaphors that might be able to accurately express such experience.
19
Part I— Figuring the body in metaphor: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and The Waves
20
Chapter I—Expressing abjection through metaphors about the body in Mrs Dalloway
I—Corporeality and consciousness, and the expression of bodily experience
Woolf’s fascination with recording the ‘myriad impressions’ of the ‘mind’1 is often interpreted as a perpetuation of the Cartesian dualism that privileges mind over body.2
This may partly result from Woolf’s attempt to write psychological novels, and in particular her use of techniques such as free indirect discourse to do so. James Harker, however, argues that there has been a shift in the critical discussion of Woolf’s work, from a concern with her ‘inward’ examination of characters’ thoughts to her ‘outward’ focus on the material, outside world.3 This shift has seen an investigation of characters’ interactions with the external world, and of Woolf’s attempts to convey consciousness using figurative language, a language which frequently brings the external to bear on the internal. The concern with exteriority and interiority also helps us understand connections between figurative language and the representation of corporeality. Kore-Schröder argues that Woolf’s writing provides a pointed re-interpretation of the relationship between body and mind, and that her use of metaphors counteracts the way in which a focus on consciousness can efface the body.4 It is this preoccupation with the mind-body duality that informs my investigation of Woolf’s use of metaphors in Mrs Dalloway.
I argue that particular metaphors about the body reveal the ways in which Woolf refuses to privilege either the mind or the body. These metaphors dissolve the boundaries between corporeality and consciousness, and this dissolution expresses a destabilisation of subjectivity. The blurring of corporeality and consciousness is especially important for
1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9. 2 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 1-2. 3 James Harker, ‘Misperceiving Woolf,’ Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 2 (Winter 2011), 1-2. 4 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 15. 21 an understanding of Woolf’s struggle to articulate certain kinds of experience: illness, trauma and other situations that cause feelings of ‘sadness, despair and horror.’5 These
‘visceral responses,’ according to Kore-Schröder, leave the body ‘paralysed’ and ‘the mind depressed and sickened by the powers of horror.’6 The phrase ‘powers of horror’ refers to Kristeva’s theory of abjection, defined as a dissolution of the borders that demarcate the identity of the subject, instigated by intense negative feelings such as terror, horror, or disgust,7 and Kore-Schröder astutely adds sadness and despair to the list.8 Kore-
Schröder cites two examples of abjection from ‘A Sketch of the Past’: Woolf’s physical fight with her brother Thoby, and her learning of a man’s suicide.9 Kore-Schröder further explains that moments of abjection are not wholly determined by external events. Instead, such moments emerge from Woolf’s own responses to the experience, responses from both ‘within and without her own self.’10 These experiences lead to the
self-realisation that those aspects of the body which are socially considered disgusting, taboo, even horrifying—bodily functions, emissions, the body-as- corpse—can never be entirely expelled or kept at bay, but rather continually threaten the margins of identity, pulling that identity in in-betweenness.11
Moreover, as Kore-Schröder goes on to explain, this abjection is central to Woolf’s figurative language: ‘Woolf identifies these abject moments as the necessary base of her compulsion to write, for even as the borders collapse, the very action of displacement and condensation becomes the energy of metaphor itself.’12 Building on Kore-Schröder’s
5 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 19. 6 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 19. 7 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. These emotions are also strongly implied in the following sentence: ‘Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you’ (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4). 8 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the body,’ 19. 9 Virginia Woolf. ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Shulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), 71. 10 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 19. 11 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 19. 12 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 19-20. 22 work, I argue that Woolf’s metaphors about the body, whether offered by the narrator or focalised through a character, parallel characters’ experiences of abjection by portraying the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness.
It seems, then, that for Woolf, abjection is necessarily connected to bodily experience, and that this experience cannot be successfully conveyed through literal language. It is thus by analysing metaphors of the body that we can best come to understand Woolf’s representation of the destabilisation of subjectivity. In this chapter, I first examine how Woolf’s unease towards the body affects the way she writes, and how this provides an important context for analysing Mrs Dalloway. Here I show how Woolf’s desire to focus on the body and her contention that the body is as important as consciousness to the portrayal of the subject’s experience are complicated by her unease towards the body and by societal censorship of female bodily experience. I then discuss the ways in which Woolf uses metaphors about the body to express experiences of abjection and, in particular, the destabilisation of subjectivity. At the same time, however,
Woolf’s metaphors convey the process by which characters re-establish their sense of self, and it is to this I turn in conclusion.
To begin, let us consider the way in which Woolf describes bodily experience, and the relationship between corporeality and consciousness, in ‘On being Ill’ (1930):
All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for an instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record.13
13 Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ 101. Kimberly Engdahl Coates productively discusses the connection between illness and aesthetic experience in Woolf’s work. See Kimberly Engdahl Coates, ‘Exposing the “Nerves of 23
This passage seems to separate body, creature and soul. Here, the body ‘intervenes’ in the everyday occurrence, in contrast to the usual literary representation of the body as ‘a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.’ In a conventional dualism, that is to say, the body ‘is null, and negligible and non-existent.’ In contrast, Woolf’s essay adds a third term, the ‘creature,’ which like the soul resides in the body. However, the creature cannot ‘separate’ from the body and must experience the sensations the body experiences. This suggests that the body mediates the perceptions of the creature, emphasising the active role the body has in the experiences of the subject. As the passage continues, it forges a contradictory relationship between the creature, the body and the soul. First, creature and soul are conflated, which implies that the soul is able to experience physical sensations that the body does. Second, the creature is equated to the soul that escapes the body when it ‘smashes itself to smithereens.’ Before death, then, corporeality and consciousness are inextricable.
While Woolf thus has a clear interest in bodily experience, she also feels a certain unease towards the body. In a second essay, ‘On Not Knowing Greek,’ Woolf expresses a desire to separate the body from language. As discussed in the Introduction, she argues, for example, that Shakespeare’s later plays are better read than seen: they are better understood by ‘leaving out the actual body than by having the body, with all its associations and movements, visible to the eye.’14 Woolf’s comment comes from the observation that Shakespeare’s later plays have more poetry than action, which leads to the impression that the actors’ bodies and bodily movements are disruptive to the audience’s enjoyment of the words of the play. Here, Woolf’s criticism could be taken to pertain only to the dramatic form, and so it might first appear that her comment is
Language”: Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness,’ Literature and Medicine 21, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 242-263. 14 Virginia Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek,’ in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 46. 24 irrelevant to her attitude towards the body in general. A reflection on Paul Hookham and
Edward Ferris’s play, The Cup and the Lip, complicates this conclusion, however. Woolf writes: ‘Indeed, we get the impression that the drama was written primarily for the stage and that the authors have not considered how crudely their work reads in the paler light of the study.’15 There seems to be a double standard here. Woolf suggests that staging plays should be restricted to those containing action. And yet, plays that are written ‘for the stage’ are still criticised for failing to impress outside their primary function of being performed. Woolf complains that the presence of physical bodies negatively impacts the language of plays that have more poetry than action. And yet, a play that is focused on external action is still expected to achieve something beyond its appropriateness for the stage.
Consequently, Woolf’s attitude to the body is not only complex, but contradictory.
On the one hand, the body should not be dissociated or removed from language in general and from literature in particular. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s language would suffer with actual bodies on stage. This instability in her conceptualisation of the connection between body and language is, in turn, crucial to Woolf’s own struggle to write the body.
Finally, Woolf’s desire to focus on bodily experience is complicated by societal control. In a third essay, ‘Professions for Women,’ Woolf examines experiences that are not socially acceptable to express, particularly those of the female body:
The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. [...] The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish
15 Virginia Woolf, ‘Poetic Drama,’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume I: 1904-1912, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 100, quoted in Putzel, Virginia Woolf and the Theater, 115. 25
slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say.16
For Woolf, that is, some things are ‘unfitting’ for the girl to say ‘as a woman,’ and so this seeming self-censorship is actually determined by societal expectations. These censored subjects are, moreover, the most important for one’s writing: ‘the largest fish.’ Earlier in the essay, Woolf remarks that ‘you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex.’17 To have a mind of one’s own is to be able to use one’s imagination to write ‘about the body, about the passions,’ which censorship suppresses. In the context of a literary climate which only allows male writers to write about such subjects, and in the broader context of a society which strictly controls women’s bodily freedoms, it is crucial for a woman writer to tell ‘the truth about [her] own experience as a body.’18 It is in this context that metaphors about the body are useful.
II—Metaphors about the body and the experience of abjection
In this section, I turn to Woolf’s use of metaphors about the body in Mrs Dalloway, and to how these metaphors represent the experience of abjection. For Kristeva, abjection challenges the stability of the subject, disregarding ‘borders, positions, rules.’19 Abjection
16 Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women,’ 143. Moran has investigated the relationship between self- censorship, bodily shame and female sexuality in Woolf’s writing. This can be found in Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, 70. 17 Woolf, ‘Professions for Women,’ 142. 18 Woolf, ‘Professions for Women,’ 144. 19 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 26 constantly ‘disturbs identity, system and order.’20 As Barbara Creed notes, ‘the abject threatens life.’21 For Kristeva, abjection is ‘where meaning collapses.’22 I build on these ideas to argue that in Mrs Dalloway, abjection destabilises subjectivity, in particular by breaking down the boundaries between corporeality and consciousness.
This is true for both Clarissa and Septimus, who both struggle to maintain their sense of self, though they experience abjection in very different ways. It is important to note, however, that not every experience of abjection involves the dissolution of corporeality and consciousness, nor does every experience of abjection require figurative language. Take, for example, Miss Kilman’s relationship with Elizabeth. Two passages are especially telling. First:
How nice it must be, she said, in the country, struggling, as Mr. Whittaker had told her, with that violent grudge against the world which had scorned her, sneered at her, cast her off, beginning with this indignity—the infliction of her unlovable body which people could not bear to see.
And a little later:
She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and forever and then die; that was all she wanted. But to sit here, unable to think of anything to say; to see Elizabeth turning against her; to be felt repulsive even by her—it was too much; she could not stand it. The thick fingers curled inwards.23
Miss Kilman believes that she is ‘repulsive’ to Elizabeth; she is disgusted with her own body. As Moran argues, Miss Kilman’s body is thus presented as monstrous and ungainly according to the usual social expectations and desires.24 The word ‘infliction’ conveys this sense of external judgment, of an imposition. Paradoxically, it is as if having an
20 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 21 Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,’ Screen 27, no. 1 (January 1986): 46. 22 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 23 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 96. 24 Moran, Word of Mouth, 80. 27
‘unlovable body’ does physical harm to Miss Kilman, to a body within that body. Finally, the passage begins with a metaphor—‘She was about to split asunder, she felt’—but the description of repulsion rapidly becomes literal: ‘to be felt repulsive even by her—it was too much; she could not stand it.’
Horror and disgust, here, produce emotional pain: ‘The agony was so horrific.’
Moran also notes that Miss Kilman is the abject that threatens Elizabeth’s autonomy: ‘If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and forever and then die; that was all she wanted.’25 But though Miss Kilman experiences a destabilisation of her subjectivity in the threat of being ‘split asunder,’ and so has an experience of abjection, corporeality and consciousness remain securely separated.
While the emotions Miss Kilman experiences in her interaction with Elizabeth approach abjection, Clarissa’s hatred for Miss Kilman, itself a form of abjection, explicitly involves a dissolution of the boundaries between corporeality and consciousness. Clarissa’s body is also presented as abject, but in this case Woolf turns to metaphors which forcefully convey that experience, and in particular which express the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness which sometimes accompanies a destabilisation of subjectivity. Take, for example, the following passage:
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf- encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love! this hatred!26
25 Moran, Word of Mouth, 83. 26 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 9. 28
The hatred ‘stirring’ in Clarissa causes her physical pain, and to express this experience
Woolf likens the hatred to a monster. The monster threatens Clarissa’s identity—‘never to be content quite, or quite secure’—and causes her to question her life, the life she has built with Richard Dalloway. This is in direct contrast with other moments in the novel, when Clarissa conceives of herself as someone who is content and loves life, and often this contentedness is conveyed by figuring Clarissa as a harmonious part of nature, rather than as someone whose sense of self (the ‘leaf-encumbered forest’) is threatened.27
In the passage about hatred as a brutal monster, the dissolution of corporeality and consciousness is shown through using a metaphor about an emotion in conjunction with metaphors about the environment. This is not a metaphor about the body, but a metaphor that describes an emotion causing physical pain. In particular, the metaphor of the monster brings with it a metaphorical space, where one can ‘hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest.’ This removes Clarissa from the ordinary, diegetic world of the novel, and places her instead in a setting fitting for a fantastical monster. The monster is at once ‘in’ Clarissa and in that forest, and Clarissa herself is, paradoxically, ‘in’ the forest within her. At the same time, the monster is hatred, an emotion, which has physical effects. Elisa Kay Sparks has observed that there is an established connection between the body and Woolf’s oft-used imagery of the forest, but that Woolf also ties the image of the forest to the mind.28 I would further add that the imagery of the forest in this example expresses physical pain. The ‘twigs cracking’ and the ‘hooves planted down’ occur in a metaphorical setting through which Clarissa’s pain
27 For another example see Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 7: ‘But everyone remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. […] she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.’ 28 Elisa Kay Sparks, ‘“Whose Woods These Are”: Virginia Woolf and the Primeval Forests of the Mind,’ in Pamela L. Caughie and Diana L. Swanson, eds, Virginia Woolf: Writing the World (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2015), 176. 29 is conveyed. This further emphasises that hatred—the ‘brute’ ‘stirring’—causes her to feel ‘scraped’ and ‘hurt in her spine.’ This connection between hatred and physical pain shows the blurring of emotional and bodily experiences. Most importantly, Woolf’s figurative language thus shows how, in Clarissa’s experience of abjection, corporeality and consciousness are blurred and confused, and it does so in a fashion very different from the literal formulation of Miss Kilman’s experience: ‘to be felt repulsive even by her—it was too much; she could not stand it.’ In the case of Clarissa, figurative language reveals an experience of abjection with new impact and clarity. In this way, one important effect of Woolf’s figurative language is a destabilisation of the space in which the subject is positioned.
It is worth noting that metaphors are more frequently used to describe Clarissa’s experience of abjection than Miss Kilman’s. The difference between their experiences lies in the fact that Miss Kilman’s destabilised subjectivity is not augmented by conflicting multiple selves in her identity. In contrast, Clarissa’s experience of abjection and of the destabilisation of subjectivity are complicated by the construction of multiple selves for her character. According to Candis E. Bond, the construction of multiple selves in Mrs Dalloway is shown through the intrusion of characters’ memories into the present moment. As Bond shows, Woolf uses ‘scenic memories’ to ‘destabilize spatio-temporal categories and represent the female subject as multiple.’29
Whereas Bond focuses on the past and on scenic memories, I am concerned with how the ‘construction of female subject as multiple’ can be both problematic and useful for Clarissa in her struggle with her roles in a patriarchal society. The destabilisation of
29 Candis E. Bond, ‘Remapping Female Subjectivity in Mrs. Dalloway: Scenic Memory and Woolf’s “Bye- Street” Aesthetic,’ Woolf Studies Annual 23 (2017): 69. In particular, Bond focuses on the way in which scenic memories intrude upon present moments. The past is a space underneath the ‘surface’ of present spaces in the ‘depths’ of consciousness (65). This connects past and present spaces: Clarissa belongs in both the past and the present; she is integral to both categories (74). 30
Clarissa’s subjectivity is made even more fraught when, in order to embody the perfect hostess, Clarissa deliberately represses other aspects of herself. Laurence Scott calls this a ‘containment of [Clarissa’s] multitudinous and “incompatible” facets of self.’30 The conflicting roles to which Clarissa sometimes conforms and which she sometimes rejects bring to light the way in which Woolf ‘deconstruct[s] how patriarchal ideology has shaped
Clarissa’s identity.’31 Even more telling is McGuigan’s argument that Septimus’ death allows Clarissa to understand that she too has been made to behave ‘as she does,’ that she too makes herself ‘a willing participant’ in society’s problematic expectations.32 Yet the productive complication of Clarissa’s subjectivity is shown in the way she resists patriarchy: her insistence on not being cast into the fixed role of the Angel in the House,33 and in general her need for independence.34
In comparison to Clarissa, Miss Kilman has a more stable social role. Miss Kilman does not change in her role despite her experience of abjection: she is an unmarried intellectual woman who is not deemed attractive by society, and she has no financial means compared to the Dalloways.35 As Reginald Abbott notes, Miss Kilman is kept apart from society: ‘she becomes an innocent bystander knocked down by the parade that trumpets her “outsiderness,” her inability to participate in or be a spectator of any of
30 Laurence Scott, ‘Petrified Mermaids: Transcendence and Female Subjectivity in the Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and André Breton’s Nadja,’ Textual Practice 28, no. 1 (2014): 130. 31 Bond, ‘Female Subjectivity in Mrs Dalloway,’ 72. 32 John McGuigan, ‘The Unwitting Anarchism of Mrs. Dalloway,’ Woolf Studies Annual 19 (2013): 136. It is important to note, as well, that at the end of the novel, Clarissa returns to her party in her socially approved roles, despite her earlier refusal to be categorised only in relation to others. See, also, Merry M. Pawlowski, Introduction (2003), in Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, xix. Pawlowski interprets the novel’s conclusion as a ‘resolved’ feminine version of ‘Joyce’s Odyssean wanderings’ and as a parallel to Eliot’s The Waste Land through its ‘echoes of death and resurrection.’ 33 Mitchell A. Leaska explains that the Angel in the House celebrates an ideal marriage and presents a strong demarcation of gendered roles, particularly that of the wife and mother. See Mitchell A. Leaska, The Virginia Woolf Reader (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 276. 34 Bond observes that the conflict between multiple selves is shown through Clarissa’s adolescent attraction to Sally Seton and her marriage to Richard. See Bond, ‘Remapping Female Subjectivity in Mrs. Dalloway,’ 73. 35 Miss Kilman is never mentioned by her first name, Doris, but always by her title, which sets her apart from the other characters. 31 society’s spectacles.’36 And, as Roslyn Buff and Robert C. Hauhart observe in their discussion of Abbott’s work, this results in Miss Kilman’s resentment towards Clarissa.37
Buff and Hauhart quote Mrs Dalloway: ‘There rose in [Miss Kilman] an overmastering desire to overcome [Clarissa]; to unmask her.’38 The word ‘unmask’ returns us to the notion of Clarissa’s multiple selves—here, Miss Kilman intuits the different roles Clarissa performs, even though Miss Kilman is only privy to the socially acceptable ones Clarissa presents to others. Compared to Miss Kilman, it is Clarissa’s subjectivity that is precarious and conflicted: she simultaneously desires to fit in and to be independent of societal constraints. Further, Clarissa’s life and identity are threatened by her feeling of hatred; confronting what Miss Kilman represents, Clarissa questions the authenticity of her ‘being loved’ and having a ‘delightful home.’ Because of Clarissa's multiple selves, the destabilisation of her subjectivity is more pronounced.
Now, I want to show how the destabilisation of subjectivity, expressed through metaphor, complicates the portrayal of a character’s position in space. This spatial effect depends, in turn, on those metaphors which show the breakdown of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness. We can better see a destabilisation of the space in which the subject is positioned by turning from Clarissa to Septimus. As a result of Septimus’ traumatic participation in the Great War, he struggles with an unnamed mental illness resembling Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Moran has noted that Septimus’ war experience leads to ‘the rejection of the body’:39 ‘he could not taste’ and ‘he could not feel.’40 In this way, Septimus experiences ‘distress about living within the confines of the
36 Reginald Abbott, ‘What Miss Kilman’s Petticoat Means: Virginia Woolf, Shopping, and Spectacle,’ MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (1992): 207. 37 Roslyn Buff and Robert C. Hauhart, ‘A Different Path: Elizabeth and Big Ben in Mrs. Dalloway,’ The Explicator 76, no. 1 (2018): 50. 38 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 91. 39 Moran, Word of Mouth, 79. 40 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 65. 32 body.’41 Moreover, this illness involves hallucinations which one might associate with abjection: ‘the flesh was melted off the world,’ or the ‘horrible, terrible [event of] see[ing] a dog become a man.’42 Moreover, these hallucinations often involve a bodily experience.
When a dog sniffs Septimus’ trousers, it provokes a physical response, ‘he start[s] in an agony of fear.’43 Consider, as well, the following passage, which describes Septimus in the midst of a hallucinatory episode:
He lay back in his chair, exhausted but upheld. He lay resting, waiting, before he again interpreted, with effort, with agony, to mankind. He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music should be visible was a discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy’s piping (That’s an old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered) which, as the boy stood still came bubbling from his pipe, and then, as he climbed higher, made its exquisite plaint while the traffic passed beneath. This boy’s elegy is played among the traffic, thought Septimus. Now he withdraws up into the snows, and roses hang about him—the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself. The music stopped. He has his penny, he reasoned it out, and has gone on to the next public-house.44 The description of the environment here shows how precarious is the distinction between the metaphorical and literal spaces. The passage starts in the literal space, with Septimus in his room in his chair. This then quickly becomes metaphorical: ‘He lay very high, on the back of the world.’ In this metaphorical space, Septimus is surrounded by nature: ‘The earth thrilled beneath him,’ and ‘their stiff leaves rustled by his head.’ In a further
41 Moran, Word of Mouth, 79. 42 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 51. 43 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 51. 44 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 51. 33 destabilisation of the literal and the metaphorical, Septimus’ body and the natural environment are then merged: ‘Red flowers grew through his flesh.’
Septimus’ relationship with the natural environment, in particular during his hallucinations, has been compellingly analysed by Janet Wilson. Discussing a passage which occurs early in the novel, Wilson shows how ‘the swaying elm trees and moving leaves interpellate’ Septimus: ‘he speaks their language and his body is converted into their idiom.’45 Even as Septimus’ hallucination implies a break with reality, the distinction between the ‘real’, physical world and the ‘imaginary’ world of consciousness is blurred. The same is true of the passage just quoted, in which Septimus lies back in his chair. Septimus’ body is joined to the physical world through metaphors which collapse the distinction between the diegetic space and the space of hallucination. After red flowers have grown through Septimus’ flesh, we read: ‘Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock.’ The seemingly minor adverbial qualification, ‘up here,’ positions those metaphorical rocks in the real room that Septimus is in. As the passage continues, the real and the unreal are conflated beyond the room, too: ‘Now he withdraws up into the snows, and roses hang about him—the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself.’ Woolf’s careful spatial positioning here has Septimus continually switching back and forth between here and there, the real and the imagined. In this way,
Septimus’ mental state is portrayed through a complicated combination of metaphors about the body and metaphors about the environment. Woolf’s figurative language points directly to the destabilisation of Septimus’ subjectivity.
45 Janet Wilson, ‘Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and the Nature Goddess Tradition,’ Literature & Aesthetics 27, no. 1 (2017): 24. 34
III—Metaphor and engulfment
We can extend this analysis of metaphor and the body in Mrs Dalloway by turning from abjection to the related concept of engulfment. Moran derives the idea of engulfment from
Kristeva: like abjection, engulfment involves the dissolution of borders that demarcate the identity of the subject, propelled by fear, horror, or disgust. But engulfment is in particular the subsuming of one subject into another, and in this it is distinct from abjection. In abjection, the ‘I’ is expelled, so that the identity of the subject is put into question. In engulfment, the ‘I’ has instead been taken into the engulfing subject. For
Moran, engulfment ‘makes language impossible’ as the object of desire is subsumed into the possessive subject.46 That is to say, the engulfed subject is no longer an independent subject with access to speech. Moran focuses on female subjects, but one of the most telling examples of engulfment in Mrs Dalloway is Septimus’ relationship with Sir
Bradshaw.
Woolf describes the threat for Septimus of being engulfed by Sir Bradshaw through the figure of the Goddess of Conversion:
Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own. This lady too (Rezia Warren Smith divined it) had her dwelling in Sir William’s heart, though concealed, as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self sacrifice. How he would work—how toil to raise funds, propagate reforms, initiate institutions! But conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will. For example, Lady Bradshaw.47
46 Moran, Word of Mouth, 83. 47 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 74-75. 35
A personification of Sir Bradshaw’s intentions, of his desire for ‘power,’ the Goddess of
Conversion thus inspires feelings of horror and disgust. Woolf’s figurative language has the Goddess ‘feast[ing] most subtly on the human will’; the Goddess ‘loves blood.’48 The metaphorical action of consuming someone’s blood, representative of her or his life force, presents Sir Bradshaw’s intentions as monstrous, as vampiric.49 Feasting on her victims’ wills, the Goddess figures Sir Bradshaw’s values and desires for those around him. In particular, the phrase ‘feasts most subtly on the human will’ echoes the description of
Lady Bradshaw succumbing to her husband’s directives.
Conversely, Sir Bradshaw also represents society’s own fear of engulfment, of being engulfed by the views Septimus advocates in his ill state. For Sir Bradshaw,
Septimus threatens the very identity of England.50 This in turns leads Sir Bradshaw to act in such a way that Septimus himself is threatened with engulfment. It is essential,
Bradshaw believes, that the ‘unsocial impulses’ of his patients,
bred more than anything by lack of good blood, were held in control. And then stole out from her hiding-place and mounted on her throne that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. It was this combination of decision and humanity that endeared Sir William so greatly to the relations of his victims. 51
48 The figure of the Goddess is also used to represent the non-abject female subject. For instance, Scott has analysed the sea goddess in Woolf’s work (‘Petrified Mermaids’). 49 Moran has discussed the bodily act of eating through the lens of abjection and female bodies (Word of Mouth, 80). Shirley Neuman also notes that the ‘the repulsive brute, with the blood red nostrils,’ a descriptor referring to Dr Holmes, conveys Septimus seeing the horror and feeling that the world and human nature are repulsive. See: Shirley Neuman, ‘Heart of Darkness, Virginia Woolf and the Spectre of Domination,’ in Virginia Woolf, New Critical Essays, eds. Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (London: Vision Press, 1983), 68. 50 Rory Ryan, ‘Peculiarly Festooned with Prepositions: Aspects of liminality in Mrs Dalloway,’ Journal of Literary Studies 17 (2007): 66. 51 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 75. 36
Here, the reference to ‘these unsocial impulses’ is focalised through Sir Bradshaw. That these impulses are said to have been ‘bred more than anything by lack of good blood’ demonstrates the doctor’s concern for a traditional, aristocratic social order. The narration then separates itself from Sir Bradshaw, describing from without his ‘lust to override opposition’—a lust which finds its clearest manifestation, in the novel, in the desire to override Septimus’ will and, ultimately, his identity. Because Sir Bradshaw feels threatened by Septimus, he insists that Septimus needs to be silenced and that he should not be allowed to ‘propagate his views.’52 The words ‘swooped’ and ‘devoured’ portray
Bradshaw as a predator, while Septimus becomes one of the ‘people’ he has ‘shut up.’ In this way, Septimus is threatened by the monster, Sir Bradshaw, who desires to subsume
Septimus’ subjectivity and to force Septimus to adhere to his own interpretation of the rules of society.53
In turn, Clarissa faces the threat of engulfment when she tries to re-imagine
Septimus’ death. Moreover, Woolf represents this act of imagination as a bodily experience, and she does so using metaphor:
He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it?54
Though the scene described only occurs in Clarissa’s mind, delivered through Woolf’s free indirect discourse, Clarissa’s body is engaged with her imagination, and this bodily experience requires metaphor to be expressed: ‘her body went through it first, […] her
52 Ryan, ‘Peculiarly Festooned with Prepositions,’ 66. 53 Septimus also refuses Sir Bradshaw his full authority, by addressing him only as Bradshaw in his mind. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 107. 54 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 133. 37 dress flamed, her body burnt.’ The narration of Clarissa’s thoughts is focalised through
Septimus: the phrase ‘Up had flashed the ground’ suggests that Clarissa was there at that specific time; that she experienced death through Septimus’ eyes. So, too, despite the third-person pronoun, the repetition of ‘thud’ suggests that Clarissa is re-living the experience in the moment of imagining it. The dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness produced by this combination of free indirect discourse and metaphor means that Clarissa risks being engulfed by Septimus—or by her idea of
Septimus, since after all Clarissa does not know what Septimus’ experience was actually like. The phrase ‘So she saw it’ acknowledges as much: this is how she sees it, not how
Septimus saw it.55 The passage represents an act of imaginative identification: ‘She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.’56 And that act, reflecting the destabilisation of Clarissa’s subjectivity, and involving both the body and the mind, relies on its expression in figurative language. However, as these metaphors are a part of Clarissa’s active imagination of an external event, their function is complicated.
That it is an act of imagination blurs the distinction between metaphor and conscious thought, and this underscores Clarissa’s ignorance of the difference in her social status and Septimus’.57
55 It can be argued that Clarissa’s sense of connection to Septimus through her preoccupation with death is a result of a larger cultural issue, one of a society dealing with the shock and aftermath of war. For further discussion, see Anna Jones Abramson, ‘Beyond the Modernist Shock: Virginia Woolf’s Absorbing Atmosphere,’ Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 4 (Summer 2015), 44. 56 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 135. 57 There has been much discussion of how society’s rejection of Septimus’ homosexuality—and often his own denial of it—has exacerbated his mental health issues. Moran has drawn our attention to the following sentences in Mrs Dalloway: ‘Love between man and women was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end.’ Kristin Czarnecki in particular has connected the issue of Septimus’ homosexuality to his recovery from war trauma. See Kristin Czarnecki, ‘Melted Flesh and Tangled Threads: War Trauma and Modes of Healing in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,’ Woolf Studies Annual 21 (2015), 57. See, also, Suzette A. Henke, ‘Mrs Dalloway: the Communion of Saints’, in Jane Marcus ed., New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (London: Palgrave Macmillan 1981) 125-47; Susan Bennett Smith, ‘Reinventing Grief Work: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Representations of Mourning in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,’ Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 4 (1995), 310-327. And although Clarissa is limited by the feminine roles that comes with her status, they are part of a lifestyle she has chosen for herself, a choice that is not made available to Septimus. Being Richard’s wife gives Clarissa a sense of safety, so that in her moment of crisis, she may 38
IV—Recuperation of one’s sense of self
The threat of engulfment thus often points to the threat of death, and this is especially true for Clarissa in her relationship with Septimus. When Clarissa thinks to herself that ‘She had escaped,’ and then reflects that ‘that young man had killed himself,’ there remains the risk that she, too, may yet not escape.58 Critics have long recognised Clarissa’s connection to death. Engaging with earlier Woolf scholarship which interprets Mrs
Dalloway as a ‘bipartite rendering of Clarissa/Septimus’ struggle to remain sane,’ Jesse
Wolfe observes that ‘a death wish circulates through’ Clarissa as a result of her illness and of living in a society confronted with the high mortality of war.59 Despite Woolf’s conception of Clarissa as the binary opposite of Septimus, so that Clarissa sees ‘the truth’ while Septimus sees the ‘insane truth,’60 Wolfe persuasively argues that Clarissa is threatened by ‘disintegration’ of the mind, much like Septimus.61 For Septimus, this
‘disintegration’ of the mind and the threat of the abject and engulfment lead to suicide.
However, while Woolf employs metaphors about the body to describe experiences of abjection and engulfment, she also employs figurative language to portray the subsequent recovery of a character’s sense of self. Creed’s reading of Kristeva offers a
‘crouch like a bird and gradually revive.’ Clarissa could have ‘perished’ but she did not; in contrast, Septimus had ‘killed himself.’ (135) This is a fraught situation, however. Clarissa’s mental state, and by extension, her fear of aging, are partly shaped by doubts surrounding her marriage to Richard and her fear that she has not achieved anything of value in her life. See Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 134, for one such example. 58 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 134. 59 Jesse Wolfe, ‘The Sane Woman in the Attic: Sexuality and Self-Authorship in Mrs. Dalloway,’ MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 1 (2005): 53. 60 Virginia Woolf, The Hours: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Helen Wussow (New York: Pace University Press 1997), 412, quoted in Christine Froula, ‘Mrs. Dalloway’s Postwar Elegy: Women, War, and the Art of Mourning,’ Modernism/modernity 9, no. 1 (2002): 131. 61 Wolfe, ‘The Sane Woman in the Attic,’ 37. Pawlowski notes that Woolf’s construction of Clarissa’s and Septimus’ interdependent relationship is informed by death: Septimus is Clarissa’s ‘pale, and dying, shadow.’ Having made Clarissa the protagonist, Woolf is ‘free to transfer the death she had planned for [Clarissa] to Septimus, thereby sacrificing male for female development’. See Pawlowski, ‘Introduction,’ xi. 39 way to understand this connection between destabilised subjectivity and subjectivity stabilised again: ‘Although the subject must exclude the abject, it must, nevertheless, be tolerated, for that which threatens to destroy life also helps define life.’62 This is apparent in, for example, the way Clarissa manages her apprehension and fear of life by repeatedly reminding herself of a line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun.’63
To take a specific example, when Clarissa retreats from her party into an empty room, Woolf describes her recovery from fear and hopelessness, feelings that are associated with abjection, with a telling metaphor:
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror, the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it to one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished. She had escaped. But that young man had killed himself.64 The feelings of ‘terror,’ of ‘an awful fear’ and the sense of an ‘overwhelming incapacity’ characterise the experience of abjection. Unlike Septimus, who ‘had killed himself,’
Clarissa has ‘escaped’ death, and this escape is illustrated figuratively, through the metaphor of the bird. Woolf’s modal ‘could’—‘so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive’—shows that Clarissa has the opportunity and ability to rest. As Clarissa is returned to herself, the metaphor of the bird then gives way to a second metaphor, that of making a fire, but the metaphors are linked. The phrase ‘send roaring up that immeasurable delight’ suggests as well the movement of a bird taking flight, while the phrase ‘rubbing stick to stick’ suggests the movement of branches as a bird perches on
62 Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-feminine,’ 46. 63 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 7. This quote is first introduced when Clarissa recalls reading Cymbeline. 64 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 134. 40 them. In the rest of this section, I want to ask how such metaphors, expressing the stabilisation of characters’ subjectivities, do so through that same blurring of corporeality and consciousness which characterises abjection. In particular, I show that metaphors about the body are used in conjunction with metaphors about time to describe both
Clarissa’s experience of abjection and her recovery of self.
The following passage shows a moment in which Clarissa tries to maintain her sense of self; she is at her dressing table, preparing for her party:
Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there—the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.65 The metaphorical description of Clarissa’s fear, the ‘icy claws’ that ‘had had the chance to fix in her,’ recalls the metaphor of the monster in the leaf-encumbered forest, the hatred which destabilises her subjectivity. This in turn brings to mind Clarissa’s preoccupation with death and the perpetual threat it presents to her sense of self, which, as discussed earlier, is a key aspect of Clarissa’s experience of abjection. Earlier in the novel we are told that ‘she always had the feeling that it is very, very dangerous to live even one day.’66
In the quoted passage, Clarissa’s fear is emphasised through the upsetting of linear temporality. Though listed in their usual order, the months of June, July, and August are
‘untouched,’ suggesting that they have not been experienced by Clarissa, and yet ‘Each
65 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 27. 66 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 6. For further discussion of this example in relation to the pervasive social atmosphere in the wake of the Great War, see Abramson, ‘Beyond Modernist Shock.’ 41 still remained almost whole,’ implying in contrast that each has already begun. Moreover, the narrowing of whole months to ‘the moment of this June morning’ shows the focusing of time as a continuum, of past, present, and future, to the instant of the present.67
Clarissa’s evaluation of her life emphasises her fear of aging and her awareness of her own mortality, but the phrase ‘She was not old yet,’ focalised through Clarissa, represents her resistance of abjection.
Woolf describes her protagonist’s effort to negotiate a stable sense of self by combining figurative language with Clarissa’s embodied experience of time and space.
In a broader analysis of Clarissa’s relationship to time and space as she walks through
London, Paul Tolliver Brown observes that
For Clarissa, space is not static but dynamic, and although she seems to be the only one to notice it, the setting throughout the novel appears highly elastic. This apparent elasticity reflects Woolf’s deliberate decision to entangle her characters’ sense of spatiality with their sense of temporality.68
To see how this is true in the passage which begins with Clarissa laying down her brooch, we need to examine how metaphors about time and the environment elucidate Clarissa’s state of mind, while simultaneously maintaining attention on her bodily experience.
When Clarissa ‘plunge[s] into the very heart of the moment’ and ‘transfixe[s] it,’
Woolf interrupts the metaphor with the physical action of Clarissa crossing over to the dressing table. Instead of simply describing that physical action, however, she puts it in parentheses, so that the emphasis remains on Clarissa’s thoughts and the physical action remains secondary. Moreover, the description of Clarissa transfixing the moment,
‘there—,’ specifies a space in the metaphorical realm, while ‘this June morning’ is literal,
67 Bond has analysed the way in which the construction of spatio-temporality in Mrs Dalloway portrays multiple selves for female subjectivity. See Bond, ‘Remapping Female Subjectivity,’ 63-82. 68 Paul Tolliver Brown, ‘The Spatiotemporal Topography of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Capturing Britain’s Transition to a Relative Modernity,’ Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 24. 42 referring to the temporality of the ordinary real world. That is to say, a metaphorical action
(‘plunged’) and spatial specification (‘there—’) are positioned in the actual present time of ‘this June morning.’ The convergence of present, past and future coincides with the gradual subordination of physical movements and the foregrounding of consciousness.
The foregrounding of consciousness might make the body appear to be less important. However, the parallel established between Clarissa’s metaphorical actions and the body’s movements elucidates her recuperation of a sense of self. As Clarissa moves across the room, she gradually moves from a state of self-estrangement to a refamiliarization with herself. Distance is thus essential to the shift in Clarissa’s framing of her identity, and that distance is made literal in Clarissa’s movement through space, a movement which is recapitulated in the final sentence of the paragraph. Clarissa first puts down her brooch, an accessory which is part of the social mask one wears in the company of others, the mask of ‘the woman who was that very night to give a party.’ As Clarissa walks to the dressing-table, she can then see from afar her reflection: having seen herself at a distance, she refers to herself in a formal address: ‘of Clarissa Dalloway.’ Finally, when she looks into the mirror she is able to see everything afresh, to assemble all the fragments of her identity for herself, and so the final sentence and the paragraph concludes with a simple reflexive pronoun: ‘of herself.’ The closer Clarissa moves to the mirror, the more familiar her reference to herself. Most importantly, the alignment of action and thought, of corporeality and consciousness, and of metaphorical action with literal action, reflects Clarissa’s restabilisation of her subjectivity.
In this chapter, I have argued that in order to write about bodily experience in a way that challenges the binary opposition of the mind and body, Woolf uses metaphors about the body that dissolve the boundaries of corporeality and consciousness. Woolf’s
43 difficulty in writing about such experiences was motivated partly by her own unease towards the body and partly by societal censorship. This blurring of corporeality and consciousness also expresses a destabilisation of subjectivity, and so allows Woolf to analyse and represent her characters’ struggles with identity. In particular, Woolf addresses her characters’ experiences of abjection and engulfment by employing metaphors about the body. At the same time, metaphors about the body are crucial to the representation of the re-stabilisation of subjectivity.
The dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness often results in an integration of the subject with the environment, as well as upsetting conventional conceptions of time and space. At the same time, Woolf’s figurative language expresses her characters’ experiences of recovery, and this recovery necessarily involves both body and mind. I have shown how in this way, moreover, Woolf’s metaphors about the body thus resist the Cartesian dualism once found by so much scholarship on Woolf’s fiction. In the next chapter, I will explore the ways in which metaphors that produce force bring the body into the expression of characters’ emotions and their experience of negative moments of being, thereby articulating the sense of a lived body.
44
Chapter II—Expressing negative moments of being through metaphors that produce force in The Waves
I—The force of language in The Waves
Woolf’s preoccupation with the relationship between corporeality and consciousness, and with the expression of bodily experience, develops in The Waves.1 In the previous chapter,
I argued that certain metaphors in Mrs Dalloway express bodily experiences that are difficult to articulate through literal language. These metaphors do so by showing the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness. Metaphors in The
Waves express bodily experience by showing not only the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness, but the dissolution of boundaries between characters’ subjectivities as well. In these particular metaphors, the body is used in the process of metaphorisation, such that they show the effects of bodily experiences on characters’ subjectivities.
For Maureen Chun, The Waves seeks to express experience via its formal experimentation, at the levels of image and of narrative. The ‘circulat[ion]’ of ‘images’ between the interludes and soliloquies, Chun argues, shows how Woolf ‘attempted to frame sensations, perceptions, and consciousness itself as physical phenomena in the real
1 Much work has been done on expression in The Waves, such as Stella McNichol, Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction (London: Routledge, 2018); Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Of particular interest to this chapter is Jason Skeet’s engagement with Daniel Ferrer’s work. Skeet summarises Ferrer’s argument about The Waves, saying that the aestheticized structure of the novel’s characters is not a narration of scenic dialogue but of ‘other ways of being,’ where the use of first-person point of view in the present tense creates distance for the character commonly expected from the third-person narration. See: Jason Skeet, ‘Netting Fins: A Deleuzian Exploration of Linguistic Invention in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,’ Deleuze Studies 7, no. 4, (2013): 483, referring to, Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, (New York: Routledge, 1990), 66. Skeet further reinterprets Ferrer’s observation in the terms of Deleuzian philosophy: the shifting distances between the characters and their interspersing voices are unfixed to a delineated space or subject, thus allowing language to move in intervals, between fixed points of view: ‘Although speech marks separate each voice, they are permeable, so that utterances leak into others through the repetition of language and grammatical structures across different speakers.’ See Skeet, ‘Netting Fins,’ 483. 45 world.’2 Furthermore, this ‘consciousness consists of the entire spectrum of experience between insensibility and conscious thought, in which a revelation may be at once conception and shock, thought and sensation.’3 And for Chun, this means that the problem of expression is yet more pressing in The Waves than it had been in Mrs Dalloway. The mantra ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ is a ‘touchstone in the face of the very dangers and fears [it] bespeak[s],’ but the ‘meaning of The Waves as a novel is the story of our permanently secret, speechless selves.’4 The difficulty, then, is how to capture in language this ‘speechless’ experience.
Further, there seem to be more severe consequences for the subjects experiencing particularly difficult emotions in The Waves. Gillian Beer’s discussion of wave metaphors provides evidence for this. First, Beer notes Woolf’s framing of waves (in the years before she wrote The Waves) to mean ‘the intensification of life,’5 quoting Woolf: ‘I note the strength and vividness of feelings which suddenly break & foam away.’6 This in itself points to the intensity of experience, but more telling is Beer’s other observation: ‘At other times the wave is an intrusive energy, annihilating identity.’7 This ‘intrusive energy’ which ‘annihilat[es] identity’, a kind of ‘speechless’ experience especially prevalent in
The Waves, is the focus of this chapter.
2 Maureen Chun, ‘Between Sensation and Sign: The Secret Language of The Waves,’ Journal of Modern Literature 36, no.1, (Fall 2012): 54. For more on perception in Woolf’s work, see Louise Westling, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World,’ New Literary History 30, no. 4, 1999. In this article, Westling applies the separation of the subject and object, drawn from the model of Cartesian dualism, to the issue of bodily perception and the nature of reality. 3 Chun, ‘Between Sensation and Sign,’ 54. The inherent connection between corporeality and consciousness within perception is also analysed by Anthony Uhlmann, who investigates aesthetic works that are concerned with perception. Here, perception not only pertains to internal modes of thought, but also to external modes, such as sensation, viewpoints, and the interactions between them. Uhlmann argues that aesthetics is not only concerned with the sensible, but with thinking itself, and that aesthetics provides a platform for logic and sensation to be considered together. Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 2. 4 Chun, ‘Between Sensation and Sign,’ 68. 5 Gillian Beer, ‘Introduction,’ in Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Vintage, 2004), xiii. 6 Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 3: 1925-1930, 156. 7 Beer, ‘Introduction,’ xiii. 46
Perhaps ‘annihilates’ is too strong a term for our discussion of bodily and emotional experience and its impact on character subjectivities. However, Beer sheds light on the emotional qualities that define The Waves. These emotions are of the intensity that comprises ‘speechless’ experience, of a kind that provokes physical sensations. This experience is in turn part of ‘moments of being’ that are difficult to articulate, leaving characters to question the capacity of language for expression.
Woolf details the shock of sensations one struggles to articulate in ‘A Sketch of the Past.’ These moments of sensation may be positive, including experiences of rapture and of a sense of unity in the world, and they may be negative, include experiences of despair, alienation and horror. Together, these are examples of those ‘moments of being’ commonly compared to the epiphany in broader modernist scholarship.8 As mentioned earlier, Sim highlights that these experiences are bodily, as well as intellectual and emotional.9 Indeed, the intensity of such experiences is such that they physically paralyse the individual.10 In one example, Woolf describes a lack of physical control when one cannot escape from despair: there is an emotional and bodily experience of feeling
‘dragged down.’11 In another example, describing the moment she learnt that Mr Valpy, a man who had stayed at St Ives, had killed himself, Woolf writes:
The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr Valpy’s suicide. I could not pass it. […] I seemed to be dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralysed.12
8 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 137. In a different context, Uhlmann draws attention to sensations as part of the moments of being. Specifically, Uhlmann refers to one’s experience in engaging with works of art, and to the elusive exercise of communicating the non-linguistic experiencing of sensation through a tangible medium. See chapter five of Uhlmann’s Thinking in Literature, 83-113. 9 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 141. 10 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Shulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), 71. 11 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 71. 12 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 71. 47
Though there might not be a clear physical source, as with an illness, the experience of being ‘dragged down’ and ‘paralysed’ has, as Sim notes, ‘the intense physicality’ of shocks that Woolf associates with pain.13
According to Sim, this loss of control over one’s body is produced by cognitive trauma. Woolf has described this experience of negative moments of being as feeling paralysed, suspended, unreal, distant; it is an experience that involves a sense of physical passivity and helplessness.14 Sim argues that these bodily experiences, for Woolf, are produced by her ‘inability to understand what […] various events signify, or her inability to cope with the meanings they do signify.’15 As Sim notes, when Woolf writes in ‘A
Sketch of the Past’ that ‘Everything became unreal; I was suspended,’16 her response is expressed through a body that becomes temporarily still. This is further emphasised later in the passage: ‘I could not step over the puddle’; ‘[it was] as if I was passive under some sledge-hammer blow […] so that I huddled up at the end of my bath, motionless.’17 The problem, then, is an ‘excess of meaning’ which, ‘left unanalysed, is likened to external, physical threats that inflict pain and constraint upon [one’s] body.’18 For Woolf, writing ameliorates this trauma and its consequent paralysis and incomprehension. Expression, and in particular the process of reasoning, lessen the ‘sledge-hammer force of the blow’ of those negative moments of being.19 As Sim notes, writing is for Woolf a way to find
‘the right relations between things,’ as she makes sense of her experience of moments of being, and this process ‘is physical as well as conceptual.’20
13 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 150. 14 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 78. 15 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 154. 16 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 78, also quoted by Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 153. 17 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 78, also quoted by Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 154. 18 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 154. 19 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,” 72. 20 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 159. 48
In this chapter, I argue that certain metaphors in The Waves are able to express the experience of ‘moments of being’, and that this depends in part upon the metaphors’ repetition, circulating independently from the subjectivities of individual characters. In expressing bodily experiences, the particular metaphors in question use the body as an instrument in the process of metaphor construction. At the same time, the repetition of these metaphors across both the soliloquies and the interludes creates an environment that broadens the scope of language to express bodily experience.21
If writing offered Woolf a way to cope with the bodily experiences which accompany trauma, the characters in The Waves question their ability to express such experiences. Bernard, for instance, is known by his friends as a storyteller who often
‘makes phrases.’ Of all the novel’s characters, Bernard is the one most invested in language and its use for expression.22 However, despite his skill with language, Bernard believes there are certain experiences that, unlike everyday experiences of perception and sensation, cannot be expressed through well-constructed sentences. Bernard thus suggests a need for a different type of language to communicate these experiences accurately:
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably.23
This passage shows Bernard’s concern about language’s capacity for expression. The passage also suggests the belief that some experiences—such as moments of humiliation
21 Jane Garrity has astutely argued that the term soliloquy is a ‘misnomer,’ for the characters’ speech is ‘highly stylized, deeply metaphoric, and resistant to individuation, often dissolving distinctions through the literal repetition of phrases.’ Further, the characters’ language is ‘simple but not colloquial and often contains emotionally heightened language that suggests an entirely different register—namely, Woolf’s desire to capture ‘unreality; things oddly proportioned’ (D 3.236) while simultaneously foregrounding the idea that subjectivity is dispersed, multiple, and decentered.’ See Jane Garrity, ‘Global Objects in The Waves,’ in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Schiff Berman (Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016), 136. 22 Woolf, The Waves, 7. 23 Woolf, The Waves, 159. 49 and triumph—are particularly difficult to express. In the following sections, I will discuss how extreme emotions such as these can be expressed through metaphors that produce force, such that the body is part of the expression of characters’ emotional experience.
The example below does not contain metaphors that produce force, but it is helpful in examining how the experience of extreme emotions can be coupled with the difficulty of articulation. Late in the novel, Rhoda says:
Now light falls on them again. They have faces. They become Susan and Bernard, Jinny and Neville, people we know. Now what a shrinkage takes place! Now what a shrivelling, what a humiliation! The old shivers run through me, hatred and terror, as I feel myself grappled to one spot by these hooks they cast on us; these greetings, recognitions, pluckings of the finger and searchings of the eyes. Yet they have only to speak, and their first words, with the remembered tone and the perpetual deviation from what one expects, and their hands moving and making a thousand past days rise again in the darkness, shake my purpose.24 The ‘humiliation’ is coupled with shivers; these, as physical responses, are in turn identified with ‘hatred’ and ‘terror,’ emotional or mental experiences; and these in turn cast hooks on Rhoda, ‘grappl[ing]’ her ‘to one spot.’ This suggests that Rhoda is experiencing a negative moment of being, with its paralysis of the body, and that she struggles to articulate such experience through language.
In Chloë Taylor’s Kristevan reading of The Waves, she investigates Kristeva’s claims that female subjects cannot access language in the same way that the male subjects do, since language belonging to the patriarchal system is only made available to the male subject.25 While, as discussed in the Introduction, Kristeva’s representation of the female subject and her conceptualisation of the relationship between female subjectivity and patriarchal language are problematic,26 Taylor’s reading of The Waves highlights the
24 Woolf, The Waves, 154-155. 25 Taylor, ‘Kristevan Themes in The Waves,’ 58-59. 26 Taylor, ‘Kristevan Themes in The Waves,’ 61. See also Butler, ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,’ 117. 50 alienation Rhoda feels towards her body and towards language. Part of Rhoda’s unease towards language is its threat of nothingness, and here, I take the threat of nothingness to refer to the possibility that language has no meaning and so is not fit to be used for expression. This threat of nothingness resonates with Weinman’s observation that, for
Rhoda, the attempt to construct her world and her individuality through language results in ‘no thing’. For Rhoda, language is ‘“like” and “like” and “like”’—it is always an approximation, never actually expressing what she wants to say.27 For this reason, language cannot help Rhoda establish her sense of self, or her sense of being embodied in the physical world.28 If Rhoda cannot access language, (a lack Rhoda perceives as ‘no thing,’ which contributes to her feeling of having ‘no face’), this leads to the feeling of being unreal, the questioning of her identity.
Thus, there is a disconnect between Woolf’s personal and her characters’ attitudes towards expression. Woolf’s postulation that writing is a way to ameliorate negative experiences leads Sim to observe that, for Woolf, the capacity for ‘creative organization of experience and its representation in language’ is what ‘gives us our being and counters the threat of nothingness.’29 While Rhoda’s metaphors express her experience, she enjoys no comparable relief from distress. How, then, is it possible to use this language of approximation—‘“like” and “like” and “like”,’ metaphors used to express bodily experiences—to counter the insufficiency of approximation that Rhoda speaks of. To this end, Kore-Schröder observes that for Woolf, ‘bodily experience determines nothing less than her use of metaphor itself.’30 Using José Gil’s concept of force, I analyse how metaphors are literary devices that serve the function of being approximations, and are
27 Wienman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves, 37. 28 Unlike moments of being, moments of non-being are moments in which we do not live ‘consciously.’ See: Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 70. 29 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 159. 30 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and The Body,’ 15. 51 able to engage the body in the expression of characters’ experience of negative moments of being.
José Gil’s and Judith Butler’s concepts of force
Bodily experience that characters struggle to express needs a language which creates an effect beyond signification and representation. This will be elucidated through Gil’s and
Butler’s concepts of force. To introduce these concepts, I first consider a situation where force is enacted upon one character through another character’s speech, resulting in a bodily experience that can only be expressed in metaphor. In The Waves, however, this situation is rare. Much more common are instances in which bodily experiences are expressed by metaphors that produce force. These metaphors are addressed by the character to the character himself or herself. The more common instances can be expressed in two ways: first, in metaphors that are used in clusters to express bodily experience in the soliloquies and second, in individual metaphors that are used in the interludes to describe the natural environment. I then argue that the repetition of these metaphors, across both interludes and soliloquies, means that they are removed from characters’ control, independent from the characters’ subjectivities. This raises the questions: what are repeated metaphors able to achieve, and what are their effects?
First, we need to return in more detail to Gil’s concept of force, which provides an approach to analyse the effects of certain types of signification without dismissing the function of signification itself. My aim here is to explore the ways in which metaphors that produce force bring the body into the expression of bodily experience through certain instances of signification and not others. Gil defines force as the effects of signification: the practical effects of signs. Gil’s project, then, is
52
to ask what forces draw up or shore up, and through which mechanisms they are likely to trigger certain effects; to cease interrogating the semantic change of forces, but rather, to interrogate the energetic power of signs.31 There are thus contradictory characteristics of force. Force is produced through signification, but it functions independently from signification.32 Further, force cannot be contained within the system of signs, and yet force is essential to that system. Gil questions what force is able to ‘draw up or shore up,’ asking what force is able to move and consolidate. The answer, it is suggested, lies in the ‘energetic power of signs’; the focus is on what can be achieved by force that is produced through signification, rather than the ways in which force itself can be understood through language.33
Gil also states that force is ‘lived,’ and this involves the whole range of possible experiences, from the mental to the bodily.34 The lived body is, moreover, intimately connected to metaphor. For Gil, to use metaphoric expressions is to be aware of the
‘phenomenal state of affairs,’ and in particular ‘of having a lived body and experiencing it.’35 Metaphor thus plays a crucial role in Gil’s theory of the production of force. As Gil explains, when the process of signification produces force,
The signifiers swap, and the signified, while remaining the same, steps aside because a new meaning comes forward […] Now metaphor is at the heart of symbolic thought. If one signifier can be replaced by another (‘arm’ by ‘new shoot’), it is because there is an operator capable of carrying out the substitution.36
31 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, xii. 32 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, x. 33 Gil suggests that force is not produced, but activated, as force has always existed; the main question is what conditions are necessary for force to come into play (Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, x). This discussion is beyond the scope of the thesis. Since I am concerned with how Gil’s conceptualisation of the process of signification makes use of force and not with the origins of force itself, and since Butler’s concept of force is produced through illocutionary speech acts, I use the term ‘produce’ for consistency. 34 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, xii. 35 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 117. 36 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 113-114. 53
The quoted passage presents the argument that the construction of metaphor—the substitution of tenor and vehicle in which the body is instrumental—is an aspect of the production of force. As will be shown in this section, the body is an instrument through which the construction of metaphor takes place. In particular, Gil states that ‘The zone where metaphoric meaning is born evokes a domain outside the semantic field: it is the body […] that will provide it.’37 Tribal life and language are Gil’s objects of study; they are used to elucidate the metaphoric aspects of rituals which employ the body. In this case, the body as an instrument is able to ‘send and receive signs and inscribe them on itself, to serve as a base for all communicative activity.’38 The body is the operator carrying out the act of substitution; it is not the body or its physical actions and gestures that are communicative. It is metaphor that expresses a state of experiencing a lived body, in a space where the body cannot be distinguished from its outside world.39 The effect of metaphor is that there is no distinction between the world and the body; there is the production of a material energy. In the event where force is produced, there is a transformative process where the body extends into space, such that there is no fixed location for the body.
Further, Gil uses the process of substitution in metaphor to illustrate that force is attached to the body. For Gil, the body is necessary for the emergence of metaphoric meaning in the process of signification. I now return to this quote:
Now metaphor is at the heart of symbolic thought. If one signifier can be replaced by another (‘arm’ by ‘new shoot’), it is because there is an operator capable of carrying out the substitution.40
37 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 114. 38 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 107. 39 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 103. 40 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 113-114. 54
If metaphor is the heart of symbolic thought and the body provides the space in which
‘metaphoric meaning is born,’41 the body is an instrument that carries out the substitution.
It is then possible to extrapolate the overlapping of body and metaphor—a process of signification that takes the body into account. That the act of substitution occurs through the body suggests that the expression of bodily experience relies on the body as well as metaphor. The body and metaphor are therefore intertwined in the process of signification; it is the use of the body in the process of metaphorisation that contributes to the production of force.
As mentioned above, Gil’s theory was developed to study the effects of the rituals of tribal peoples: how the enactment of rituals, using the body, are acts of signification and also produce practical effects.42 Gil’s project compares the forces at work in social exchanges of modern and tribal societies, and examines how the difference between the two societies constructs different types of power.43 However, the practical effects of signs are not the main focus of this thesis. Rather, it is the link between body and metaphor, provided through Gil’s concept of force, that helps in the identification and analysis of literary metaphors that express intense emotional experience but do not explicitly use bodily metaphors. To extend Gil’s discussion of the body, metaphor and force to The
Waves, I examine the metaphors that produce force when expressing bodily experience.
The body exists in the soliloquies as the body of the character. However, it can be part of a metaphor, and in some cases, the body is part of a metaphor that is used to describe another metaphor. In the latter situation, the body is not the body of the character. And in the interludes, the body is only one of the many metaphors being employed—it is not used to express characters’ bodily experience, but to describe the environment. It is in
41 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, 114. 42 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, xii. 43 Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, xi. 55 this sense that, in The Waves, the body used in metaphors is mobile: it is able to exist in different spaces of the soliloquies and the interludes, in different capacities, including, in certain instances, being part of a metaphor without being attached to a subject.
While bodily experience relevant to the present chapter reflects the experience of the ‘moments of being’ described in ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ not all of Woolf’s discussions of them reflect Gil’s force. They describe the experience, rather than express them through a process of metaphorisation. In contrast, in The Waves certain metaphors are necessary for the experience of moments of being to be expressed. It is the relationship between metaphor, force and the body discussed in the previous paragraph that is crucial to the expression of those moments of being. According to Sim, Woolf’s moments of being are sometimes conveyed with metaphors of waves, often in moments of ‘ecstasy’: the rhythmic movements of waves ‘present images of the external world flooding into the subject, or a change in the boundary between inner and outer, self and world.’44 Gil’s intertwining of the body and metaphor is reflected in Sim’s idea that some of these moments are ‘empirical ones in which the body is, if somewhat paradoxically, presented as a conduit to, or vehicle for, a numinous reality.’45 These experiences ‘involve intense physical sensations and powerful states of feeling,’ including ‘feelings of physical vulnerability.’46 Particularly, these moments result in characters questioning their sense of self; the experience engenders the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness.
It is important to note that Gil’s and Butler’s concepts of force are different. In contrast to Gil, Butler defines force by referring to effects produced by illocutionary speech acts. But both Gil’s and Butler’s concepts deal with the effects of signification.
44 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 142. 45 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 141. 46 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 150. 56
That is to say, these speech acts do something beyond signifying. But force produced by illocutionary speech acts depends on repetition in the social realm, such that the particular speech act exceeds the speaker.47 In relation to speech acts, Butler provides an example of the way in which hurtful or discriminatory speech does something—it injures others.
Here, Butler refers to Toni Morrison’s statement that, ‘Oppressive language does more than represent violence, it is violence.’48 Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture tells the story of a woman who ‘thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with consequences.’49 Butler notes that
Morrison uses a ‘conjectural way’ of writing about what the woman in the story conjectures about language—so that the story and the telling of the story are theorisations in and about language and its ‘conjectural possibilities’:50 ‘Morrison gives us the performance of this act of substitution, this simile by which language is figured as life.
The life of language is thus exemplified by this very enactment of simile.’51 For Butler, the conclusion of Morrison’s story does not provide claims of what language is (for example: language is agency), but draws attention to the ways in which language is a tool with which agency is enacted.52 In the story, a group of children approaches a blind woman to ask her whether the bird in their hands is dead or alive. When the blind woman says, ‘I don’t know… but what I do know is that it is in your hands,’ the woman refuses to give power to the children’s hurtful question. Hers is both a literal and figurative answer; it ‘refus[es] and displac[es] the question.’53 Here, language substitutes for the actual event in the way it enacts what it says by displacing power, resisting the act of
47 Butler, Excitable Speech, 3. 48 Toni Morrison, ‘Nobel Lecture,’ Nobel Prize, accessed 28 December, 2013, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html. 49 Morrison, ‘Nobel Lecture.’ 50 Butler, Excitable Speech, 6. 51 Butler, Excitable Speech, 6. 52 Butler, Excitable Speech, 7-8. 53 Morrison, ‘Nobel Lecture.’ 57 injury and making the children accountable. This is the force of the woman’s speech. For
Butler, force is produced by substituting language for bodily action.
Applying Butler’s concept of force to fiction in general means that when a character speaks, force may be enacted upon another character, the addressee. On Woolf’s writing about trauma, J. Hillis Miller notes, ‘Woolf here speaks of the operation of literary composition as a performative enunciation, as a speech act in J. L. Austin’s sense.’54
However, Butler’s concept of force is only used in this thesis to approximate characters’ experience of abjection, as abjection bears a significant resemblance to the impact force has on the addressed. Butler theorises force as an injury done to the addressee of the speech act: to be injured by language is to be acted upon by the force of language. This experience affects the subject as a whole. This vulnerability of subjects to language in these situations results in the bodily experience of being disoriented, and this experience is then tied to the mind: it generates a rupture in identity.55 Thus, the physical body is part of the injurious experience, and a metaphorical connection between physical and linguistic vulnerability is needed to understand the extent to which we are affected by language (that is, ‘words wound’).56
As experiences being discussed in this chapter are not limited to those of injury or violence, the important issue to note here is language’s ability to act, that to an extent, it is a living thing, independent of character subjectivity. Both theorists conceptualise a type of language that accommodates the body in the process of signification. Gil configures the way a body might be part of the process of signification, while Butler analyses how the force of speech acts injures an individual’s subjectivity. Gil’s and Butler’s
54 Miller, ‘The Waves as Exploration of (An)aesthetic of Absence,’ 674. 55 I owe this to Butler’s postulation that to be injured by speech is to ‘suffer a loss of context,’ to not ‘know where you are.’ See Butler, Excitable Speech, 4. 56 Butler, Excitable Speech, 4. 58 conceptualisations of force, which both theorists contend has the capacity to achieve more than representation, rely on both the body and metaphor. I argue that certain metaphors in The Waves produce force and are able to express characters’ ‘speechless’ bodily experience,57 and as will be discussed in the second part of this chapter, the repetition of these metaphors shows how metaphors function beyond the characters’ awareness, independent of their subjectivity.
The relationship between the body and metaphor is more complicated in The Waves than in Mrs Dalloway. Metaphors are especially important in The Waves considering that, with the exception of the interludes, the novel consists of a series of soliloquies that are highly stylised and figurative; they do not present speech in a naturalistic fashion. The tension between the literal and the metaphorical is also present in the ambiguity of how much of the speech act is addressed to the speaker herself or himself,58 and how much any given speech act is addressed to others. The complex nature of characters’ speech can be attributed to the repetition of words, phrases and metaphors used by characters. Dorrit
Cohn suggests that characters partly share the same consciousness,59 and, as discussed early in the thesis, Weinman takes The Waves as a representation of intersubjectivity:60 characters are generally separate beings, but there are moments when this separation is removed. Due to the novel’s departure from the norms of scene dialogue and the construction of intersubjectivity, the positioning of the speaking subject is complicated in the novel.
The construction of intersubjectivity relies on metaphors, and this can be seen in the way that intersubjectivity is portrayed through an unstable demarcation of space. In
57 Chun, ‘Between Sensation and Sign: The Secret Language of The Waves,’ 54. 58 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 264. 59 Cohn, Transparent Minds, 265. 60 Weinman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves, 87. 59 one passage, for example, Bernard observes that when playing with Susan in the garden, the ‘division’ or boundary that makes them separate beings is absent:
‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’61
The clause, ‘But when we sit together, close,’ highlights the physicality of the body, that
Bernard and Susan are sitting near each other, but are separate beings. This sense of separateness dissipates in the subsequent metaphor: ‘we melt into each other with phrases.’ At one level, this can be interpreted as Bernard and Susan conversing with one another and sharing their thoughts. However, the phrases, ‘melt[ing] into each other’ and
‘edged with mist’ provide metaphorical descriptions of a further breakdown into one subject: the sharing of phrases gestures to the momentary fluidity of their subjectivities.
The phrase, ‘an unsubstantial territory,’ following directly from the sentence, ‘We are edged with mist,’ further highlights the blurred boundaries of Bernard and Susan’s subjectivities, which dissolve when words are used. As a result, the manifestation of the corporeal body in the novel appears to be unstable because of its relationship to a consciousness which, in its construction, extends beyond the individual subjectivity.
More importantly, shared language (both literal and metaphorical) among characters reinforces their intersubjectivity.
In the following passage, Neville describes a sense of unease towards his identity.
His anxiety about not having a stable subjectivity is compounded by the lack of distinction between the characters’ language. The following passage presents Neville’s contemplation of his mastery over language and his unease towards his identity:
Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that 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. How useful an
61 Woolf, The Waves, 7. 60
office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how 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?62
Neville states in literal language his sense of being disoriented and of experiencing non- physical pain: ‘Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated.’ That Neville is ‘changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend,’ suggests Neville’s sense of self has been undermined, in the same way that Bernard’s was when Neville impressed upon Bernard that Bernard is himself, not Byron (discussed further in the next section).63 Additionally, the same experience is described as ‘[having] one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another.’ The description of Neville being mixed with somebody recalls the two paths of a foaming river merging and then separating, much like the merging and separating of subjectivity between Bernard and Susan. The repetition of metaphors shows that the ‘mixing’ and ‘addition’ of friends reflects the mixing and addition in the repeated metaphors of Bernard and Susan melting, and in other metaphors in the novel.64 These metaphors support Peter Hühn’s argument that The Waves portrays the ‘precariousness’ of ‘autopoesis.’ This precariousness is shown through ‘contrasting six different protagonists and focusing on their conscious struggles for ‘self-identification’ and by having these protagonists move between ‘self-reference’ and ‘other-reference.’65 These processes further demonstrate ‘[having] one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another,’ and seems to correlate with the instability of intersubjectivity. In the quoted passage above about Neville, not only is intersubjectivity directly described, it is also
62 Woolf, The Waves, 53. 63 Woolf, The Waves, 57. 64 Some of the examples include: ‘I cannot float gently, mixing with other people’ (see Woolf, The Waves, 63) and ‘We are for ever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities’ (see Woolf, The Waves, 76). 65 Peter Hühn, ‘“The Precarious Autopoiesis of Modern Selves”: Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,’ European Journal of English Studies 5, no. 3 (2001): 340-341. 61 conveyed through the repetition of metaphors. The way in which intersubjectivity contributes to the construction of a metaphoric environment will be discussed in the next section.
II—The construction of metaphoric environment through repetition
This section examines the ways in which metaphors are repeated, and how these repetitions emphasise the overlaps between the soliloquies and the interludes, and shape the metaphoric environment that informs the language of The Waves. The metaphoric environment consists of metaphors that produce force, and other metaphors that share their tenors or vehicles with those that produce force. Through this metaphoric environment, and in particular through metaphors about nature, nature becomes part of the expression of the characters’ experience. Metaphors that produce force rely directly on the experience of characters, and it is these that connect other repeated metaphors that do not produce force in the metaphoric environment. In this part of the chapter, I show that though metaphors in the interludes do not produce force, they are part of the same metaphoric environment as the metaphors that do.
Metaphors that produce force
In this section, I show three clusters of metaphors that produce force, all of which involve wave metaphors. I conceptualise a cluster of metaphors as a group of metaphors that collectively convey an individual experience. These clusters of metaphors are able to convey an experience of negative moments of being. Woolf describes one such an experience here: ‘dumb horror came over me […] that collapse I have described before
[…] exposed to an avalanche of meaning that had heaped itself up and discharged itself upon me, unprotected, with nothing to ward it off, so that I huddled up at my end of the 62 bath, motionless.’66 As Sim argues, the term avalanche ‘evokes ideas of physical discomfort, threat and suffocation.’67 In this particular example, a cluster of wave metaphors is used to describe Bernard’s experience of being dragged ‘open,’ revealing
‘the pebbles on the shore of [his] soul,’ an emotional experience of discomfort and vulnerability:
He looked at me, turning to face me; he gave me his poem. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence— dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances were rolled up. ‘You are not Byron; you are yourself.’ To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange.68 The second metaphor in the passage—‘Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence—dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul’—involves likening Neville to the waves and Bernard to a sea shore.
Bernard compares the experience of being affected by Neville to the experience of standing underneath a wave before being hit by it: ‘he went over me.’ The metaphor then develops, suggesting that Bernard feels exposed: he is ‘dragged open,’ his innermost thoughts revealed to others, ‘laying bare the pebbles on the shore of [his] soul.’ The dragging action highlights the moment when waves fall and the water is pulled from the shore back into the ocean, revealing the pebbles previously covered by the waves when they fell. Bernard’s innermost thoughts are revealed to the world just as pebbles are revealed when waves recede back into the ocean. The passage continues—‘It was humiliating’—followed by another metaphor: ‘I was turned to small stones.’ Both sentences show a transformation in which Bernard’s sense of having a complete identity
66 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 78. 67 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 154. 68 Woolf, The Waves, 57. 63 is taken from him, embodying Woolf’s negative moments of being as engendering a
‘peculiar horror’ and a ‘physical collapse.’69 This cluster of metaphors brings the body into the expression of Bernard’s emotions.
Here is a second example of a cluster of metaphors that produce force. The passage describes Bernard’s spatial experience of having the metaphorical horse and wave ‘beneath’ him, and of metaphorically riding the horse. It brings Bernard’s bodily experience of spatiality into the expression of his sense of his mortality:
‘And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’70 The repetition in this passage augments the blurring of the literal and metaphorical realms and the instability of space. In this cluster of metaphors, the rise-and-fall movement of waves is employed consistently. The metaphor of waves is first used to describe the feelings rising in Bernard; the second sentence, which is part of that metaphor, still describes the characteristic of a wave as it rises and ‘swells.’ In the next metaphor, a horse is used to describe Bernard’s experience, or becoming aware, of this ‘new desire.’ This
‘new desire’ that ‘ris[es] beneath’ Bernard echoes the movement of a wave ‘rising’ and
‘arch[ing] its back,’ much in the way in which the rider pulls the horse back. In this way, the movement of the waves becomes the movement of the horse.
This second cluster of metaphors that produces force brings the body into the expression of Bernard’s emotional experience. It is Bernard who brings the metaphor of
69 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 72. 70 Woolf, The Waves, 199. 64 waves and horse together, both in the wave that ‘rises’ within him, and in the desire
(‘something’) that rises like a ‘proud horse.’ The horse metaphor is sustained throughout the passage: the rider, when first mentioned, is only a hypothetical person, separate from
Bernard: ‘like the proud horse whose rider.’ But later Bernard also becomes the rider (‘I ride’). The metaphor references the horse again and Bernard compares himself to a
‘young man’ who ‘strike[s] spurs into [his] horse,’ and to Percival, ‘when he galloped in
India.’ The entire passage consists of metaphors which are used to describe Bernard’s experience, and the metaphor’s vehicle consists of waves that are compared to a horse, with Bernard being the instrument which also helps connect the tenor and the vehicle, and to connect bodily experience to his emotions.
We have established that the wave metaphors in this passage, together with metaphors of words and horses, are used to connect Neville’s emotional and bodily experiences. In an earlier scene, the comparison of words to waves connects the associative metaphors attached to waves. Neville uses the metaphor of waves to describe his emotional and bodily experience while watching Percival and nature:
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, ‘the falling fountains of the pendant trees’. I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this, I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop—how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me—some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity.71 The sense of inadequacy (resulting from Neville’s realisation that he cannot express himself through words in an accurate fashion) conveyed in the last sentence of the
71 Woolf, The Waves, 52-53. 65 passage, shows that it is a negative emotional experience. Here, words are described as having similar rhythms to waves: ‘words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise.’ Not only does the fall and rise mimic the movements of waves, the clause ‘toss their crests’ also brings waves to mind.72 Here, the experience of intense emotions is the tenor, while Neville’s body (‘Now begins to rise in me’) and words are the vehicle, rather than waves, so the metaphor is not a comparison of Neville’s body and words used to describe intense emotions.
Instead, Neville’s emotional experience, his words, the horse and the waves are all part of the metaphor, compared to each other throughout the passage. All these things are brought into the metaphor, not merely the one tenor and vehicle. The sequence of comparisons is as follows: the rhythms that Neville feels, reminiscent of waves, are compared to words. The first mention of frenzy, referring to the emotions that Neville feels (‘I feel it all’), is compared to foams—again reminiscent of waves. This is emphasised in the description, ‘Yet even as I feel this, I lash my frenzy higher and higher.
It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere,’ which has Neville’s feelings as the tenor, and the movement of waves as the vehicle. We return to words, which are described as horses, with long manes and tails. The statement that Neville feels he cannot follow or make use of words (‘I cannot give myself to their backs’) connects him with metaphors of words, and with the horses to which those words are likened. Finally, Neville’s hesitation is compared to foam, as part of waves—but it also suggests the foam on horses spurred to exertion and exhaustion.
The production of force, achieved through semic intersections, intertwines the body and metaphor, and this can be seen in the way that Neville is figured in the cluster
72 The ‘crest’ (the foamy part of waves) and the rhythmic rise and fall of words are firmly linked to waves when one thinks of the example, ‘The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads.’ See: Woolf, The Waves, 9. 66 of metaphors. That is, this cluster of metaphors creates a semic intersection through which
Neville’s corporeality is brought into the expression of his emotional experience. There is an intertwining of literal and metaphoric language in this passage, where the words
‘lash’ and ‘foam’ connect the metaphorical actions of Neville, horses and words, and the imagery of waves. The metaphorical lashing of ‘frenzy’ (Neville’s emotion) causes it to foam: this sentence contains associations with the imagery of horses, waves, words, and with Neville himself. His feeling rises like waves, which foam, and the frenzy which is lashed, also foams. The word ‘lash’ can be used to describe human action, but within this cluster of metaphors, the word takes on the qualities of both human and animal, and ‘lash’ is also to describe a metaphorical action of words. The anaphoric clause that replaces ‘my frenzy’ with ‘it’ further communicates a rising feeling of insincerity in Neville’s expression through language. At the end of the passage, when the feeling of artificiality peaks, ‘There is some flaw in me—some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity,’ Neville’s character turns to foam, he himself is false and insincere.
Here, Neville’s sense of self is challenged, an experience much like Bernard’s, as described in the first cluster of metaphors above.
As can be seen from this analysis, the cluster of metaphors brings together
Neville, words, waves and horses as it weaves in and out of different things which describe Neville’s desire and recalcitrance in using language (and his self-reassurance of his skill as a poet). Waves, then, are a third entity that stay in the background. There is a mix of things within the metaphor, with the body as an instrument which carries it. These metaphors create a semic intersection which expresses a state of experiencing a lived body in a metaphoric space, where the body cannot be distinguished from its outside world.
67
Furthermore, the repetition of metaphors of waves, horses and words in the passage quoted above are repeated elsewhere in the novel. The commonality of characters’ emotional experience and their intersubjectivity are shown through metaphors that are tied together by the rising and falling of waves (the rhythm that rises in Neville repeats Bernard’s description of his emotions: ‘And in me too the wave rises’), the movement of words and of horses, and these metaphors are part of the metaphoric environment constructed in The Waves.
Repetition of metaphors between characters
Not only are wave metaphors repeated throughout The Waves, they comprise experiences shared among characters. For instance, Rhoda and Bernard share the experience of the dissolution of the self, expressed through the metaphor of being overwhelmed by waves.
The experience of being tumbled and overwhelmed by the tides is repeated at different points in the novel. As a child, these waves threaten to overwhelm Rhoda and leave her disorientated: ‘Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched.’73 Of Rhoda’s experience as an adult, we read: ‘Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. […] Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.’74 In these cases, the metaphors portray a sense of isolation in the experience of losing one’s sense of identity, of being lost and unsettled.
Wave metaphors are once again repeated; they show dissolution of the self, which occurs concurrently with the overlaps of literal and metaphorical realms. In the following
73 Woolf, The Waves, 15. 74 Woolf, The Waves, 137. 68 passage, Rhoda describes the terror in the experience of not being connected to her physical body:
I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.75
Here, there is a clear shift between the literal and the metaphorical realms, moving from metaphorical nature and object, to Rhoda’s actual body. The metaphors liken Rhoda to objects: the foam that races across the beach, moonlight that falls on a tin can, on a spike of holly, or a bone, or a half-eaten boat. These are followed by metaphors describing
Rhoda being whirled down caverns and comparing her to papers flapping against corridors. The cluster of metaphors ends when Rhoda returns to her physical self, an occurrence that is suggested by the statement that she had to ‘press [her] hand against the wall to draw [herself] back.’ A clear demarcation of literal and metaphorical spaces is provided, as can be seen when Rhoda states: ‘I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.’76 This sentence constructs both the metaphorical space and the space of the physical world. That is to say, the metaphor is placed in juxtaposition with a statement of fact, that Rhoda is also a girl. Both cases emphasise the shift to metaphorical settings, and these settings are occupied by Rhoda, just as she occupies the actual, embodied world. The shift between literal and metaphorical settings implies that the metaphors are experiential, that the realness of sensations and the world are not only part of Rhoda, but are also part of these metaphors.
75 Woolf, The Waves, 85. 76 Woolf, The Waves, 69. 69
Similar to the expression of Rhoda’s experience in which there is an overlap of the literal and metaphorical environment, Bernard expresses a dissolution of boundaries between the natural environment and his subjectivity to further describe his emotions. In the following example, Bernard uses metaphors of waves to describe complex emotions surrounding his loss of determination to act independently of society’s expectations:
Once more, I who had thought myself immune, who had said, ‘Now I am rid of all that,’ find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessions, leaving me to collect, to assemble, to heap together, summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy.77
At the beginning of this sentence, a clear demarcation of the human body and of the wave is used to describe Bernard’s weakening resistance against the ‘Disorder, sordidity and corruption’ to which he ‘had thought [himself] immune.’ With that weakening resistance, he finds ‘that the waves have tumbled [him] over.’ The description, ‘to collect, to assemble, to heap together, […] rise and confront the enemy’ suggests the water gathering into rolling waves, so that Bernard’s description of gathering forces also suggests the formation of waves. The description contributes to the persistent image of rising up, but as is expected of the image of the waves, one anticipates a subsequent fall. After being left to collect his ‘forces,’ Bernard rises again, and this image is echoed in the images of the waves and the ‘new desire.’78 Here, wave metaphors, connected to Bernard’s metaphorical actions, are used to portray the dissolution of boundaries between the environment and Bernard’s subjectivity, expressing the intensity of his emotions. Wave metaphors are also used to describe Rhoda’s dissolution of self, and shows how sensations and the world are part of the metaphors. The prevalence of wave metaphors is tied to intense experience and emotions, which affect character subjectivity. These wave
77 Woolf, The Waves, 196-197. 78 Woolf, The Waves, 199. 70 metaphors and metaphors using natural imagery do not produce force, but they are connected to metaphors that do, and the relationship between metaphors and their connection to character subjectivity can also be seen in the metaphors about the environment.
Metaphors about nature and their relationship to character experience
Other metaphors about the natural world, which are not wave metaphors, also make references to water. Their connections to wave metaphors and metaphors that produce force are more tenuous than those metaphors repeated between characters discussed in the previous section. This includes metaphors of flowers, roots and stalks, and these metaphors, like metaphors of waves, interact with characters’ subjectivity, show the dissolution of self and complicate the construction of space-time. Interestingly, these are metaphors where waves might not be used explicitly, but where references to water and rivers are made, suggesting a peripheral connection to wave metaphors:
Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. I am a boy in grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here. Down there my eyes are the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. I see women passing with red pitchers to the river; I see camels swaying and men in turbans. I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.79 The passage starts with a description of flowers, followed by a comparison of petals and harlequins. The description of flowers swimming like fish brings to mind images of water, and there is a combination of the two spaces of land and water in the phrase, ‘green
79 Woolf, The Waves, 4. 71 waters.’ While the colour green, in essence, describes the water, the colour itself is associated with leaves of the flowering plant that are ‘specked on’ the ground—the
‘depths of green.’ The subsequent metaphors, (following the description, ‘I hold a stalk in my hand’) are positioned within a metaphorical setting: ‘I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver.’ Here, Louis becomes part of the metaphor of the stalk, to the point where he says, ‘I am all fibre,’ and feels the press of dirt against his ribs as if he was the stalk. His subjectivity is merged with the stalks he is holding. As such, metaphors further augment the unstable space that show a lack of distinction between the exterior world and the interiority of characters. This can be seen in two contrasting settings. The first is the literal: up here as a boy in the garden (the stalk). The second is the metaphorical: ‘down there’ as a boy in the desert. The positioning of Louis in the settings of ‘up here’ and ‘down there’ mirrors the stalks that sprout from beneath the ground and flower above through the soil. Moreover, the space of ‘down there’ is also part of history, such that the body in the present is also linked to history: ‘Down there my eyes are the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile.’ This idea reappears further down the same page: ‘in the long, long history that began in Egypt, in the time of the Pharaohs, when women carried red pitchers to the Nile.’80 The metaphorical setting suggests the intensity of experience, which can be seen in the depiction of its reach to ancient history and ancestors, positioning Louis in an unstable time, in addition to space. A description of the intensity of experience that invokes history can be found in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ where Woolf discusses her experience of sexual abuse. This description shows that Woolf has used metaphors that position the body in an unstable space to describe intense bodily and emotional experience elsewhere:
80 Woolf, The Waves, 4. 72
I remember resenting, disliking it—what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. It proves that Virginia Stephen was not born on the 25th January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past.81
The ‘dumb and mixed’ feeling, as mentioned, refers to Woolf’s experience of a negative moment of being, a bodily experience expressed through the description of her detachment from the body in the present moment. That is to say, Woolf’s portrayal of her body as having been born ‘thousands of years ago,’ and more tellingly, her explicit distancing of her actual body (‘Virginia Woolf was not born on the 25th January 1882’— italics mine), serve to remove her from the present, actual world and her own experience of her physical body. Woolf’s placement of bodily experience in different temporalities in The Waves echoes the experience in the above quoted passage from ‘A Sketch of the
Past.’ In summary, the repetition of metaphors that express bodily experience highlights the intersubjectivity between characters, the conflation of literal and metaphorical realms, and the construction of unstable space-time.
There are certain scenes in The Waves where the conflation of literal and metaphorical realms may occur, but it happens in a way that makes the metaphorical world and character consciousness more prominent. The following example takes place in the soliloquies, and it hints at this different relationship between the environment and the subject. That is, the employment of metaphors goes further than the previous example
(of metaphor of Louis and stalks) to make the metaphorical realm the primary setting for characters. In the scene where characters meet at a restaurant for dinner, Rhoda uses the following metaphors to describe the people and the setting:
81 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 69. 73
But I see the side of a cup like a mountain and only parts of antlers, and the brightness on the side of that jug like a crack in darkness with wonder and terror. Your voices sound like trees creaking in a forest. So with your faces and their prominences and hollows. How beautiful, standing at a distance immobile at midnight against the railings of some square! Behind you is a white crescent of foam, and fishermen on the verge of the world are drawing in nets and casting them. A wind ruffles the topmost leaves of primeval trees. (Yet here we sit at Hampton Court.) Parrots shrieking break the intense stillness of the jungle. (Here the trams start.) The swallow dips her wings in midnight pools. (Here we talk.) That is the circumference that I try to grasp as we sit together. Thus I must undergo the penance of Hampton Court at seven thirty precisely.82 The passage begins with a metaphor which describes the side of a cup as a mountain and antlers, followed by one which describes the brightness of the cup as a crack in darkness.
After comparing the voices of friends to trees creaking, the scene shifts into a metaphorical setting: standing against the railing of some square with water behind them.
Once again, here is a reference to waves: ‘Behind you is a white crescent of foam, and fishermen on the verge of the world are drawing in nets and casting them.’ The descriptions, while presented as real, are actually metaphorical. This halts the separation of the literal and metaphorical settings, the characters existing in the literal world versus characters existing in the metaphorical world. The parenthetical sentences ‘(Yet here we sit at Hampton Court),’ ‘(Here the trams start)’ and ‘(Here we talk)’ remind the reader of the actual scene that is taking place, but the fact that the metaphorical setting is temporarily foregrounded, partially displacing the physical world, provides the sense of an unstable space-time, and momentarily complicates the positioning of the body in space.83 That the metaphorical setting is foregrounded highlights the prominence of character consciousness, which makes this example different from those previously
82 Woolf, The Waves, 148-149. 83 In addition to the palace’s historical significance, it is also an important anchor that marks the passing of time throughout the characters’ lives as they reunite throughout their lives. See Woolf, The Waves, 139, 143 and 185. 74 discussed. In this passage, the metaphors Rhoda uses are the mid-way between metaphors that are more directly engaged with the characters’ bodies and emotions, and the descriptions of metaphorical bodies in the interludes. Metaphors about nature and the physical environment are interesting in that they are used in the interludes where characters’ bodies and emotions are not prominent; this will be discussed in more detail in the next section.
Repetition of metaphors in the interludes Metaphors about waves and the natural world are also repeated in the interludes, and the repetition of metaphors across the soliloquies and the interludes fills the gap between the landscape of the interludes and the world of the characters. According to Michael Tranter, the descriptions in the interludes show the passing of time and follow the progression of characters’ lives, but not in a way that is marked by life events.84 In contrast, the soliloquies do show the passing of time through actual life events. There is also a slower movement of time in the interludes: sunrise to sunset. Moreover,
The interludes provide a time sequence that seems utterly natural—the sun rising and setting—and the sections between the interludes mark stages in the lives of characters that have no relation to any plans in the lives of those characters; the only ‘plot’ of these stages seems to be that of moving in accord with the physical flow of time. The interludes gradually come to seem a set of metaphors that define each section of the book as a stage in those six human lives and those stages of the six lives then appear to be waves that flow as a result of natural forces, not human choices or historical events.85
The metaphors in the interludes do not appear to express a particular character’s experience, but a general sense and atmosphere of their lives as conveyed in the
84 Michael Tranter, ‘The Bodies In/Are The Waves,’ Virginia Woolf: Writing the World, eds. Pamela L. Caughie, and Diana L. Swanson (Clemson, South Carolina: Clemson University Press, 2015), 155. 85 Tranter, ‘The Bodies In/Are The Waves,’ 155. 75 soliloquies. Sunrise in the interludes, for instance, mirrors the characters’ first perceptual experience of the environment, and so on. This makes the space in which the characters exist the same as the space of the interludes; it is a metaphoric environment that transcends the events of the soliloquies and interludes. This overlap of metaphors between the two sections of the novel has been discussed by Chun, who notes that the metaphors in The Waves are connected throughout the characters’ soliloquies and the interludes, and this makes the consciousness of characters a part of the physical world of the interludes.86
For Chun, this unique interweaving of the physical world and consciousness in The Waves is precipitated by the way in which imagery is repeated in the world of the objective omniscient narrator in the interludes, and the subjective world of the characters in the story event.87 This contributes to the cultivation of the sense of words existing as things in the material world of sounds and objects,88 resulting in a physicalized consciousness in the novel.89 I agree with Chun’s assessment of the overlaps between the metaphors in the soliloquies and the interludes. Rather than showing that the natural world of the interludes is subsumed into the subjective consciousness of characters, the overlaps between the soliloquies and the interludes show that the metaphoric environment can, in parts, function without the character.
First, let us examine wave metaphors discussed previously which are also present in the interludes:
The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the
86 Chun, ‘Between Sensation and Sign,’ 54-55. 87 Chun, ‘Between sensation and the sign,’ 54-55. 88 Chun, ‘Between Sensation and Sign,’ 55. 89 Chun, ‘Between Sensation and Sign,’ 54. 76
turf. Their spray rose like the tossing of lances and assegais over the riders’ heads. They swept the beach with steel blue and diamond-tipped water.90 In this excerpt from the third interlude, waves are described solely as part of the environment and are used to describe animals. The passage references a rider and horses, which bring to mind Bernard’s final monologue without directly mentioning Bernard himself. In line with this, Hühn argues that the sea links human experience to the course of nature, and thematizes the plenitude of life, its destructiveness and violence.91 The metaphors thus bridge the gap between the soliloquies and the interludes, as Chun notes.
Further, the description of waves and mention of the rider also echo the concluding paragraph of Bernard’s final monologue.92 In this way, the story events are situated as part of the environment beyond the soliloquies. That metaphors are repeated between the interludes and the soliloquies suggests there is a conflation of the spaces of the interludes and the soliloquies as well. The narratological descriptions in the interludes, absent of characters and their corporeal bodies, are ‘mixed’ with the actual world of the characters.
Despite the differing temporalities shown through the movement of the sun in the interludes and the cumulative portrayal of a whole lifetime in the soliloquies, the soliloquies and the interludes are of the same realm. While the interludes use imageries of the body, the bodies of the characters are not present. And while the metaphors are used without characters’ awareness, the interludes are not completely removed from characters’ experience.
Resonances between wave metaphors and other aspects of the natural environment are also present in the interludes. In the following passage from the fourth
90 Woolf, The Waves, 70. Italic text in all quotations from the interludes is original. 91 Hühn, ‘The Precarious Autopoiesis of Modern Selves,’ 346. 92 Woolf, The Waves, 199. 77 interlude, bird songs are the tenor of the metaphor, and songs are intertwined with metaphors of grass, sea and leaves:
They swept and soared sharply in flights high into the air, twittering short, sharp notes, and perched in the upper branches of some tree, and looked down upon leaves and spires beneath, and the country white with blossom, flowing with grass, and the sea which beat like a drum that raises a regiment of plumed and turbaned soldiers. Now and again their songs ran together in swift scales like the interlacings of a mountain stream whose waters, meeting, foam and then mix, and hasten quicker and quicker down the same channel, brushing the same broad leaves. But there is a rock; they sever.93 The main metaphor compares the bird song to a mountain stream and is connected to other metaphors that have been discussed earlier: of Rhoda and waves, of Bernard and waves, horse and a horse rider. At the end of the above passage, an abrupt action is introduced, emphasised through the use of a short sentence, and the contradictory ‘But’:
‘But there is a rock; they sever,’ bringing to mind the crashing of waves on the shore. As mentioned, in Bernard’s final monologue, the movement of rising and falling is a theme that connects the metaphors of waves, horse, and rider, used to deal with the concepts of desire and death. The most overt moment which reflects the blurred relationship between the literal and metaphorical spaces is present in the metaphor of Bernard riding his horse to meet his death, which blurs the distinction between the tenor and the vehicle of the metaphor. The phrase, ‘And in me too the wave rises,’ provides a recurrent rising movement which is threaded through other metaphors of waves and desire. A similar movement of a horse (‘beneath’ Bernard rather than ‘in’) is then provided.94 This is followed by a metaphor of Bernard riding the horse, in opposition to him being tumbled by the waves.95 Like the convergence and divergence of character subjectivities, these
93 Woolf, The Waves, 70-71. 94 Woolf, The Waves, 199. 95 Woolf, The Waves, 199. 78 metaphors merge and separate: the ‘mixing’ and combining of metaphors in this passage are connected to other passages (drawn from their use throughout the novel). The interlocking of metaphors of rising and falling waves, of bodies and animals, shapes the language of The Waves.
These metaphors work beyond Bernard’s control. Instead of the frequently used actions of the rising and falling of waves, this description shows a stream of waters meeting, foaming, mixing and then separating, again suggesting the way in which characters’ subjectivities in The Waves converge and diverge. Though the metaphor of the movement of water is repeated throughout The Waves, it is used to portray different emotional experiences of all characters. Arguably, these experiences are brought together in the last passage of the novel. Miller notes that ‘The Waves ends with a forty-two-page soliloquy by Bernard in old age that recapitulates all the motifs and moments that have come before in the soliloquies of the six characters.’96 This attributes significance to
Bernard as a character whose consciousness is privileged, positioning him as the main character who ties the story together. That repetition occurs not only between characters, but also between the interludes and the soliloquies, suggests that expressions linked to characters’ bodily experience are being circulated in realms beyond their awareness. The main difference between the soliloquies and the interludes, in relation to metaphor, and beyond the fact that the interludes are given in the voice of a third-person narrator, lies in the question of whether there is a character who speaks the metaphors. The presence of actual characters in expressing experience is important and unquestionable, but how important is the absence of characters in the interludes?
Critics have addressed the relationship between characters in the soliloquies and the natural environment in the interludes, and though they use varying frameworks, have
96 Miller, ‘The Waves as Exploration of (An)aesthetic of Absence,’ 662. 79 reached similar conclusions which challenge the privileging of the human body over its environment. In Bruce Bromley’s discussion of perception in relation to the introduction of the human body in The Waves, he argues that by adding the human body to three already existing ‘bodies’ of the sky, the sun and the sea in the first interlude, Woolf problematizes the understanding of visual perception as being mediated by a narrator.97
Likewise, Hühn argues that the signs of an authorial voice in the interludes subvert the
‘belief in subjective aspirations by creating an outside view’ and the ‘privileged position individuals ascribe to themselves.’98 Note as well that people are used as metaphors to describe the natural environment: ‘and the sea which beat like a drum that raises a regiment of plumed and turbaned soldiers.’ The drum that raises a regiment of soldiers is the vehicle of the metaphor, which describes the sea. The use of human beings as part of the description of the environment does not negate Bromley’s and Hühn’s arguments: the sea is being perceived by birds instead of people. The natural environment does not depend on characters to be brought into being. The world of the interludes broadens the area in which exterior and interior spaces are conflated, and the interludes and the soliloquies overlap even though there are temporal inconsistencies. While characters are not present in the interludes, the metaphorical and thematic links between the interludes and the soliloquies are dictated by metaphors that produce force in the soliloquies. This means that the relationship between characters and the natural environment in the interludes is a complicated one: the environment in the interludes does not rely on characters to be brought into being, but the descriptions and metaphors about the
97 For Bromley, the use of simile and protatic clauses in the first interlude binds together absence and presence even though the narratorial voice cannot be attributed to a body. See: Bruce Bromley, ‘Between the Mover and the Moved: Reimagining the Figure in The Waves,’ Women and Performance 12, no. 2, (2002), 89-90. 98 Hühn, ‘The Precarious Autopoiesis of Modern Selves,’ 346. 80 environment depend on the expression of character experience through metaphors that produce force.
The construction of a metaphoric environment The clusters of metaphors that produce force are the core of the metaphoric environment: they hold together intersubjectivity, character experience and other related metaphors that do not produce force. At the same time, the metaphoric environment is enriched by the characters’ intersubjectivity: characters use similar metaphors to describe their experiences, including both shared and distinct emotions or life events that are repeated throughout the novel. Intersubjectivity, then, contributes to the construction of the metaphoric environment, and supplements the way in which the clusters of metaphors that produce force work. That the repeated metaphors are shared by the characters mean that the metaphoric environment contains the experiences of all the characters.
I do not go so far as to argue that characters are aware of the repetition of metaphors in the novel. Rather, this repetition constructs a metaphoric environment that functions outside the story events. Miller provides a productive analysis that challenges this idea of a metaphoric environment where the soliloquies and the interludes overlap:
In another place, however, [Woolf] speaks of the waves as spectral in relation to the everyday life of the characters: ‘The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves’ (Diary 140). The shift from past tense in the interludes to present tense in the soliloquies supports the idea that they belong to different incompatible or mutually exclusive realms.99 However, that waves are ‘spectral’ does not necessarily mean that they are disconnected from characters: we have established that the overlapping of the literal and metaphorical
99 Miller, ‘The Waves as Exploration of (An)aesthetic of Absence,’ 661; ‘The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves’ is a quote from Woolf. See Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 3, 236. 81 is one of the things that comprise the kind of bodily experience being examined in this chapter. For this reason, these ‘unreal’ aspects of nature in the interludes are not part of a separate and different realm. The ambiguity of whether the interludes ‘express
“insensitive nature”’100 or whether they are merely phantoms is one of the main characteristics that shape the novel, and therefore, to discard one part of that characteristic is to forget an essential feature of The Waves. It is the repetition of metaphors that brings the two realms together. Each repetition of a metaphor is part of a set, embedded in the metaphoric environment. The connection between the characters in the main story and the interludes enables the contradictious past and present tenses to be comprehensible.
That metaphors are repeated in the interludes as well as the soliloquies shows that characters in The Waves have limited control over the language they use to express bodily and emotional experience. That is, these metaphors are circulated beyond characters’ speech, and it is not definite that the characters are the sources of these metaphors. This phenomenon highlights the agency of metaphors themselves rather than of the characters.
Furthermore, that the repetition of metaphors exceeds characters’ awareness suggests that the utterance of metaphor is removed from the particular space-time situation in which characters speak. That these metaphors are repeated throughout characters’ lives, and throughout the interludes, suggests that the past, present and future exist in the same metaphoric environment. This sets up a space-time that destabilises the notion of the subject as the one perceiving and experiencing the world, hence bringing the world into being. Here, the distinction between the interiority of the subject and the exterior world is repeatedly blurred. Within this metaphoric environment, where corporeality and consciousness are integrated, the characters are not merely bodies that exist in a space beyond their awareness—they are beings that are blended into the environment.
100 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Signet, 1968), 148. 82
In the matter of metaphorisation, Woolf’s conceptualisation of nature as ‘insensitive,’ or detached from human beings’ experience, emphasises the lack of control the characters have over the repetition of the metaphors—most clearly seen in those of nature in the interludes—which express their experience. Miller draws attention to the detachment of language in the interludes and Woolf’s delegation of the interludes to ‘express
“insensitive nature.”101 It bears remarking that Woolf often describes nature—the sky in particular—as ‘heartless’ or ‘indifferent.’ This is the case in The Waves, as well as ‘On
Being Ill’:
Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless. Immeasurable resources are used for some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit. If we were all laid prone, stiff, still the sky would be experimenting with its blues and golds.102
In The Waves, characters often perceive people’s faces and actions as indifferent, but more importantly, this indifference is also attributed to nature:
Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel—then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. Bernard, in public, bubbles; in private, is secretive.103
The Waves achieves what characters fear language is unable to achieve: the expression of bodily and emotional experiences that are difficult to convey through literal language or through individual metaphors. And it is the metaphoric environment, generated by the repetition of metaphors, which makes this expression possible.
Death and expression through the metaphoric environment
101 Miller, ‘The Waves as Exploration of (An)aesthetic of Absence,’ 661. The phrase ‘insensitive nature’ comes from Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary. See Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, 148. 102 Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ 105. 103 Woolf, The Waves, 48. 83
That the agency of metaphors shows the tenuous control characters have over language has a significant implication for our understanding of negative moments of being and bodily experience. The negative moments of being have been discussed earlier in the chapter, and I have explored the concept further through Sim’s argument that these moments are traumatic in that they ‘resist comprehension and representation due to the excess of undetermined meaning that they intimate,’ leading to ‘a crisis of comprehension and signification.’104 According to Sim, death and lack of comprehension, like
Wordsworth’s exploration of the sublime, ‘threaten’ like ‘a kind of death by plenitude.’105
The sense of excess, what Sim calls an avalanche of meanings, risks the ‘crisis of comprehension’; it is by writing that one manages the ‘moments that are menacing with meaning.’106 The repeated metaphors in the metaphoric environment, brought together and into focus by clusters of metaphors that produce force, express these moments that characters experience.
As discussed earlier in the chapter, the paralysis of the body and the crisis of comprehension hold the threat of nothingness for certain characters in The Waves. As part of moments that are ‘menacing with meaning,’ the threat of nothingness is similar to actual death where language is no longer possible. More generally, it is not so much that the threat of nothingness suggests a lack of meaning, but more that there is a limit to a character’s access to language—the efficacy with which they can use language.
According to Weinman, Rhoda ‘expresses a more fundamental dissatisfaction with language’s ability to found a stable self in a reliable world.’107 Weinman also persuasively argues that this problem with language is not its ‘[impotence],’ but that it is ‘all too
104 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 158. 105 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 158. 106 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 159. 107 Weinman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves, 36. 84 powerful.’108 That is to say, it is Rhoda ‘being composed by language’ and ‘composing’109 herself in language that lead her ‘to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea.’110 This metaphor, as with many others in The Waves, shows the ‘avalanche of meanings’ that
Sim conceptualises as part of moments of being. It is the overwhelming power of language that has a dire consequence for Rhoda. Using Judy Little’s work on Woolf,
Weinman thus argues that ‘Rhoda, strictly speaking, as a subjectivity that recognizably persists in a socially inhabited world, does not exist.’111 This reading of Rhoda’s character—the ‘impossibility’ of her subjectivity—suggests that her dissolution of the self is severe: ‘But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity’112 and ‘I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one.’113 Moreover, the dissolution of Rhoda’s selfhood is sometimes described together with the portrayal of her body as detached from herself. That her subjectivity ‘does not exist’ seem consistent and is made starker by Rhoda’s detachment from her body; the sentences, ‘I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone,
I often fall down into nothingness,’114 is one such example.
Furthermore, if experiences such as Rhoda’s result in a temporary disengagement from the ordinary functions of the body and limit one’s access to language, in paralysis and the crisis of comprehension, then it seems that Rhoda and Bernard’s fear of the insufficiency of language is well-founded. How, then, do we move towards an
108 Weinman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves, 36. 109 Weinman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves, 36. 110 Woolf, The Waves, 69; quoted in Weinman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves, 36. 111 Weinman, Language, Time and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves, 36; Judy Little, The Experimental Self: Dialogic Subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke Rose (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 67-68. 112 Woolf, The Waves, 18. 113 Woolf, The Waves, 69. 114 Woolf, The Waves, 26. 85 understanding of metaphor which counters the threat of nothingness so as to make expression possible? Perhaps the three different concepts of death present in The Waves can be useful in this endeavour: character death in the story event, death as the threat of nothingness of language, and death which separates character from the metaphoric language they use—meeting the limits of speech and metaphor. Death as the threat of nothingness conjures the threat of the ‘avalanche of meanings’ from the signification of certain experiences, and succumbing to the threat of nothingness implies that incomprehension overwhelms the subject. This marks the limits to characters’ access to language, and points to the space in which language agency exists. It is in this way that death serves to separate metaphors from particular subjectivities.
That characters have little or no control over the meanings produced by metaphors can be seen in the way that the repetition of metaphors also functions independently from characters’ awareness. The repeated metaphors, employed at the different temporalities of the interludes and the soliloquies, constitute the same space, so that the characters become part of an environment that is larger than what they perceive in the story. In this way, the characters do not control the way metaphors are circulated in the environment.
In a different framework, Miller’s analysis of Woolf’s wave metaphors in The Waves suggests something similar to my argument about metaphors here: ‘For Woolf in that novel, once something has happened that is felt with great intensity, it goes on happening somewhere with an independent existence.’115 That is, the repetition of metaphors works independently from the subject that speaks them—removing them from the characters’ awareness.
While it is feared that the excess of meaning can lead to nothingness, proving that language is insufficient for the expression of bodily experiences that are difficult to
115 Miller, ‘The Waves as Exploration of (An)aesthetic of Absence,’ 671-672. 86 articulate, repetition is crucial to the expression of that experience because of its generation of a metaphoric environment. The overlaps between the soliloquies and the interludes in the metaphoric environment provide contrasting relationships between the subject and metaphor. In the first relationship in the soliloquies, the subject is part of the clusters of metaphors that produce force. These metaphors bring the bodily experience of the subject into the expression of their emotional experience. On the other hand, subjects are absent from the interludes, and so they are not part of the metaphors present there. In the second case, the metaphors are detached from subjects. Death is a useful example of the two contrasting relationships. Alan Bourassa quotes Gilles Deleuze in his discussion of death and its relationship to force:116 ‘Death has an extreme and definite relation to me and my body and is grounded in me, and it also has no relation to me at all—it is incorporeal and infinitive, impersonal, grounded only in itself.’117 I mentioned three concepts of death earlier. The commonly understood notion of death is one that signals the end of speech, in the sense that one is unable to speak. Death as ‘plenitude’ or excess of meaning, can also mean that language is no longer possible. However, death as conceptualised by Deleuze exemplifies the way in which the repetition of metaphors in a metaphoric environment is related to the subject’s bodily and emotional experiences.
The metaphoric environment structures the excess of meanings so that metaphors can be harnessed to express bodily and emotional experiences in negative moments of being. As discussed early in the chapter, Sim notes that by ‘creative[ly] organiz[ing] and
116 Deleuze’s concept of force is different from the one used in this thesis, although it is worth noting that Gil’s concept of force is influenced by Deleuze’s philosophy (as mentioned in the Introduction). Bourassa interprets Deleuze’s concept of force in the following way: ‘[force] is more of a real non-existence at the heart of power and of formations of power.’ See Alan Bourassa, ‘Literature, Language and the Non-human,’ A Shock to Thought, ed. Brian Massumi (London: Routledge, 2002), 68. Furthermore, death is an example of Deleuze’s notion of the event, and this event has force. See: Bourassa, ‘Literature, Language and the Non-human,’ 66. For more information, see Bourassa, ‘Literature, Language and the Non-human,’ 66-69. 117 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 151-152 quoted in Bourassa, ‘Literature, Language and the Non-human,’ 67. 87
‘represent[ing]’ negative moments of being in language, Woolf is able to counter the threat of nothingness.118 Applying this to The Waves suggests that even though the threat of nothingness may be attributed to metaphors (language is ‘“like” and “like” and “like”’), certain metaphors, when structured in specific ways, are able to counter this threat. The metaphoric environment makes this possible.
The metaphoric environment consists of metaphors from the soliloquies and from the interludes, and as discussed, the repetition of metaphors that creates overlaps between the soliloquies and the interludes. However, metaphors in the soliloquies have a different relationship to the body compared to the metaphors in the interludes. While the body is incorporated into the clusters of metaphors that produce force, in the interludes, metaphors are removed from characters’ bodies. The latter also contribute to the expression of the characters’ experience, but are not part of it. These opposing relationships between metaphors and the body reflect the paradox in Deleuze’s concept of death: death that is ‘grounded in’ the subject yet ‘has no relation to’ the subject parallels the ways in which metaphors both function beyond characters’ awareness and subjectivity, and bear connections to characters’ experience. Consider again these two passages from Bernard’s final monologue:
Once more, I who had thought myself immune, who had said, ‘Now I am rid of all that,’ find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessions, leaving me to collect, to assemble, to heap together, summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy.119
And,
‘And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing
118 Sim, The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 159. 119 Woolf, The Waves, 196-197. 88
against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’120
Bourassa’s interpretation of Deleuze’s notion of death is pertinent here: ‘it holds together the human and non-human in two resonating series that make the human possible.’121
This relationship between the human and non-human can be seen in the above quoted passage, where the metaphors of waves and horses are positioned in relation to Bernard’s body and express his experience, but the connection between waves and horses is established separately from Bernard. That is, death establishes a relationship between the metaphors so that they do more than revolve around Bernard’s subjectivity. The uncertainty of the presence of the body and its necessity reflect the way these metaphors progress: the metaphors intermittently exceed the subject.
My reading suggests that the repetition of metaphors exceeds Bernard’s subjectivity, and that the ‘world seen without a self’122 can be expressed and put relation to the characters’ subjectivities via the metaphoric environment. However, Bernard is not aware of the workings of these metaphors; and as discussed in the introduction of this chapter, language, as Bernard conceptualises it, is not appropriate for the portrayal of his experiences as a subject. This is worsened by Bernard’s belief that his observations about himself and his life are filled with ‘artificiality’ and ‘falseness.’123 As a result, the stories
Bernard tells about his life are ‘illusory and bear no relation to anything outside themselves.’124 According to Hühn, Bernard is unable to ‘define his identity’ by placing
120 Woolf, The Waves, 199. 121 Bourassa, ‘Literature, Language and the Non-human,’ 67. 122 Woolf, The Waves, 192. 123 Hühn, ‘The Precarious Autopoiesis of Modern Selves,’ 344. 124 Hühn, ‘The Precarious Autopoiesis of Modern Selves,’ 344. 89 himself as part of a story: ‘Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know.’125
These stories, then, cannot be trusted to help him stabilise his sense of self.
Even though Bernard is disillusioned by language as he knows it, he still makes a final attempt to anchor his identity in the story at the end of the novel. On Bernard’s
‘verbal defiance against death’ (the common definition), Hühn notes the following:
‘Bernard has contrived to integrate the radically extra-verbal death, in a story after all and thus to define a new identity concept for himself—in the desperate and blatantly futile attempt to stabilise himself in the face of death.’126 His inability to establish a stable subjectivity as an individual character, whose language is limited to that within the soliloquies, highlights the importance of the metaphoric environment. Not only does the metaphoric environment express the experience of having a destabilised subjectivity in a way that brings together the bodily, mental and emotional, it does the same for the experience of being part of a fluid intersubjectivity through the repetition of metaphors between characters.
While death in the soliloquies might signal the end of a character’s use of metaphors, Deleuze’s concept of death illustrates how certain metaphors may be used by a character and are part of a characters’ experience, but may also continue to be circulated beyond the expression of that character’s experience. This creates a metaphoric environment that includes spaces not inhabited by characters. As a result, in this metaphoric environment, the characters are not the originators of the world; sensations and perceptions do not rely on characters to be experienced or perceived in the world.
Bernard’s actual death in the soliloquies is made even more final by the last sentence in the novel: ‘The waves broke on the shore.’ The rise and fall of waves, both literal and
125 Woolf, The Waves, 193 quoted in Hühn, ‘The Precarious Autopoiesis of Modern Selves,’ 344. 126 Hühn, ‘The Precarious Autopoiesis of Modern Selves,’ 345. 90 metaphorical, is absent here. Where the elaborate metaphors are used to embody the flow of life, the breaking of the waves disrupts the flow by denying readers the complete description of the rise and fall of waves.
This chapter has been concerned with the expression of certain experiences that cannot be accurately achieved through literal language. Using Gil’s theory of force, I identified metaphors that produce force, and argue that these metaphors are able to express these experiences by incorporating the body as part of the process of metaphorisation. Furthermore, the repetition of these metaphors in the soliloquies emphasises the characters’ shared language and experience—their intersubjectivity— which highlights the dissolution of the self that occurs as part of the negative moments of being that are difficult to express. I then investigated how the repetition of the same metaphors between the soliloquies and the interludes show that these metaphors function in a way that is removed from characters’ subjectivity and exceeds their awareness. Force brings into The Waves a relationship between body and metaphor that strengthens the connection between corporeality, consciousness and emotions, which together cumulate into the sense of experiencing a lived body. This is the effect of metaphor that is separate from subjectivity, suggesting that the body becomes less pertinent. And yet, the metaphors in which this can occur need the body in order to be constructed.
The next part of this thesis presents a poetry collection that explores a different way a metaphoric environment may be written, how various types of bodies—physical, abstract, human and non-human—can exist in a metaphoric environment and what can be expressed through this relationship between the body and metaphor. The creative work does this by constructing experiences of the human and non-human: the monstrous plant, the crow, the boy and the fox spirit in ‘The Laughter and the Crow.’ While there is a stronger focus on the human experience in ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits,’ the
91 work also shares the same non-human metaphors and portrays the experiences of the fox- spirit. In this fashion, it is still connected to the non-human. I argue that writing a metaphoric environment enables the expression of experiences that are difficult to express and are considered to be unwritten. Further, writing various types of bodies in such a context conveys the complexity of a subject’s experience, the intertwining of different subjects’ experiences, both human and non-human, and it shows the importance of a subject’s environment and its contribution to said experience.
92
Part II— The body in a metaphoric environment: A poetry collection— Maps and Black-feathered Stones
93
The Laughter and the Crow (A Salivating Monstrous Plant)
94
I—And the laughter of a transparent, flickering boy
95
Garden
The sounds that appear at five-thirty with the crackling leaves, dust and dried mud speak of morning and of a red sun-lit garden. These noises conglomerate, building like a nest of waking vipers, their hissing jolts the plant once more from its near-sleep. A slight lift of the head: there is no need to turn and look at the things stitched across its back and shoulders, where the parasitic sits between the receding darkness and the possibility of coming back. This is the hour of commitment. When, always upon waking, there will be a bastardisation of anatomy: the plant makes itself monstrous, in effect, inducing organ failure and muscle wastage. Do this before anyone else can (so that no one else can): scrape away the thighs, stomach, breasts, arms; this leaves in the stead of a body, a completely foldable blade.
96
Disembowelment
Still, there is the compulsion to let the skin melt, starting from its extremities; to lie back on the ground, back to zero, back to sleep. But there is a wish, for all that’s in excess of this being, for all that is deficient, to feel through its weaknesses in this quiet and exigent condition. What it doesn’t know it doesn’t remember, only that the place it has come from is filled with cool water, the faces it draws during the sleeping hours shift and shift, being in an enclosed womb that juts out in every direction, not knowing where the body is going after the place that is here.
97
Wakes
Something bubbles from deep within the chest, travels along the air tract and presses against vocal chords to barely scratch a way out of its throat.
In that moment the jaw opens and the neck elongates with the desire to move, to propel itself forward—it keens—only to be dragged down by the weight of its limbs, or what is left of it, its leaking skin sticks flat to the bones, its lungs, kidneys and liver. It heaves, lifting one organ at a time, every inch of the small intestines, followed by the large intestines, nudging and pulling, learning to use the rhythm between muscle and gravity. All the motions within range of this body that is falling apart, though some excreted debris are held together by cloudy and congealed fluid, they collide unexpectedly. Joints turn three-hundred-and-sixty degrees and roll through the mud, while ulnas stretch the oesophagus and diaphragm further apart; bile is pushed out as the plant crawls along a wet floor as a bleeding vomiting thing. In turn, its torn stomach sucks back in nutrients from fresh soil, spreads them among its blood vessels to reconnect the fibres in the wasted muscles, so that it can keep moving forward, still.
98
In hiding
It’s like this. A creature that refuses to let itself be seen, obscured partly by sharp branches, leaves, half-blooming flowers, wanting the whole spectrum of possibilities placed along the vertical and horizontal axis: urgently now, divine me the death of this longing, calculate the speed of its movement with the indices of indefinite number, and tell me, tell me the times approximate to the whys and why-nots, and the excess of the deficient.
99
I don’t feel like i.
I won’t let it go. The weather-storming-sun hovers out of alignment, there are fissures and a shadow is cast: what can you say of these stones at my feet? Precariously. There’s not a word from feathers or thinly shaped bones brought about by crashing through muddy grounds. By such, my head hurts, my feet and eyes sore, and there’s no noise from the birds (other than me). They say the blackness gets darker as you grow and it is the only good thing, being borne from this tree that is too small even for this too-thin bone. Like toothpicks.
ii.
Bone against bone—neither one of us (and still they whisper: bone against bone). Others are made of leaves and twigs, dark too, but of different shades: underlays of green and purple, sometimes, in rare places, navy blue, shimmering. The ground beneath the heaving beast slowly escapes, blends, resulting in shifts, in flooding water. The shifts can reform when they want, muddy themselves when they want. There is no quake to warn. Bells tied to the wrists, branches, wings, wooden staffs. He misses us.
100 iii.
Cast an alloy: more than half the periodic table is in here, the process is entertaining, but the product is useless and costly. It needs to withstand all temperatures, they say, because temperatures can’t be fixed; but it’s barely over a hundred and fifty-five degrees and the alloy starts to disintegrate. Papers are torn into strips, eaten, fed not-roasted; you wouldn’t want to put out a forest fire, even if the trees are bright and dead and can’t be hurt.
101
North point
Forty-five degrees and equidistant from where it was standing, there’s a stretch of empty land, and along the soil, see the collimated light, though it doesn’t quite reach that shivering tree with decaying roots. Infected and compromised—through what means will it survive the necessary severing of limbs? Meanwhile, it fights with itself, shaking, pulling, bending, all manner of resistance; its noises are gaining on its ears, first gradually, then a loud piercing sound. And among the cicadas, among any other echoing thing: the wheezing, whistling, ticking and clucking, snaps, whole beats, two whole beats, halves, interruptions; the process of uprooting, or the attempts to.
102
II—The breaking of the crow
103
Island shores
See, the flapping wings of a seagull carrying blood from its flesh, and there are fruits and throw-away seeds gathered beneath. The others pull into the sky with their feathers dyed red and black, and the dyeing anchors their physicality into an old apple being picked from the grass.
Turning my head disrupts the stasis of a narrow, sickly tree. It no longer sleeps—instead it lifts its heavy clump of branches and leaves.
Drowsily. Running through, light clouds and the sea, and black birds rush past; they exist after foreign colours are grounded into their arteries, and vine leaves crack the wood open with a single crash against the trunk; from this the water drips, flesh is torn until the sea, with its grey water, becomes visible, along with a beach of black sand, and where the water meets shoreline, there is a row of red-petalled flowers, their nectar and leaves rough like unearthed coals.
104
The birth
Teetering, lines cross street intersections between this city and the next, demarcating everything in between them. What is it that takes hold of the shadows from ground up, reaching for leaves, the clasping, letting go?—at right angles the tree slants and suddenly shivers, breaking its bark open into mist that has congregated; lungs are compressed, are expanded, and breathing stirs. The cold is getting to the skin and in its dryness reveals tiny holes, going in beneath the functioning organs, beneath taut muscles with fingers tugging and pulling, the roots appearing through fibres, the edges scarring, then more—succulent skin, snapping, puncturing, streams of white emulsions seeping out from small branches that pierce the thin membrane; from that a bird grows, its head is slowly pushed out, bones snapping, pink-skinned, with its beak barely visible.
105 and snaps of a crow
Travel downwards and there is pressure against the inner barks from breaths of a bird being born. One black feather appears on its right shoulder, pushing through its flesh, and another, and another, struggling through a too-thin bark. Resistance of the body hollows out the wood, leaving itself bent in angles impossible to measure without up-ending the protractor, and from bent angles weak bones snap, then pushed to crushing. Like the saliva that holds together a nest of twigs and dried leaves, the crow’s first movements put together the crushed bones as they reform themselves. A mistake and the off-white sticks come apart.
Again it recalibrates its brain for a different direction, a different sense for putting itself back together. The nature of its birth bears anger and fear that come from knowing how its body is small enough to fit the palm of a child. But other words have already gathered up in parts of my mouth, limp and weighing on the tongue, and forcing my lips apart until my jaw aches and there they are: grey stones piled up to the roof of her mouth and pushing against the back of her throat. There are measurements and proportions to be found, and some resemblance of sunlight overtakes the weaved shadows beneath the saliva, reveals a residue from the inability to fix the dynamics of vapour and mould, their chemical reaction which are thrown askew which now clings to the body that does not know of stopping: the shivering bears resonances.
106
Itch
Eyes close for synonyms of things that should not have to be said. The sounds no longer stay still, and the point in which dizziness grabs hold, not able to see anything but still waters and shadows that scorched through the sun. More than all the words combined, they go swiftly, these sounds, ants follow them from the ground and the trees, and sand falling. The sightline from above the tree has pressed into the skin, and as when quakes or explosions occur, the seagulls stand to the side with beaks gaping wide, waiting for a slice of meat or organ.
107
Scavenging
Shaken, but limbs still hold, sturdy, bone to bone now attached. The consequences being that, once the horror slips, what’s left behind is a cross between emptiness and dirt. And what can be done with this kind of knowledge, when, from present moment to present moment, this sturdiness keeps getting tested: we both know that the act of dismemberment has started from its core muscles, years ago. Oranges and an apple in a plastic bag, the crow’s beak cuts through methodically, the juices are splattered. An echo of forest green slides past its feet, the leaves, triangulated, are turning to the side and folding, crawling through mud, turning, shifting, stretching its mouth. The tastes overwhelm and around it the clicking of time signatures are a reminder that what was bitten will slide and puncture through the gut. Landscape presses against the shadows of two feet bound, nails and reactions blunted in clear water on the floor, next to it the stone slab lies, a reminder to always be mindful of death to the point of saturation. The notion is left on the cold dusty surface looking up as it does to see the boy as he disappears.
108
While the plant crawls
A leg taps at the shimmering water, a frog glances up and dismisses the hanging limb. One minute. Then, the parts of swiftly moving sky, the landscape and the thin line that make up a street that bursts at the side, the push of a city’s river, refusing to move in one direction; only—a tree is felled, sinking into the water and disrupting the currents, and then such a river is gone, gushing away: down and up, it’s like watching the shadows streaming down a back and spine, as they’re swept away, they leave sun to section off into grey waters, white, clear blue, specks of warm pink. Whatever else I’m seeing that cannot be quantified, hold them in your stomach and know that you will never forget.
109
Crossing
Careening into each other, trickling down and bubbling into buds of chrysanthemums, splashing: there are part of the many things you try to keep track of as they flee around the corner of your eye. Others being the bastardisation of anatomy present in the complacency of lightly scratched lines, ovals that make up the face, the attempt at details: the darkening of the irises, a fuller, more defined shape of the lips. The attempt doesn’t last. The papers get chewed up, digested by acid and bile. Before long, this opens up to many strange things: a cake with a mossy top tastes like mulberry, the layer of sponge with tiny arms reaching out, and when it’s swallowed, the hands start to slide, clinging to the walls of the oesophagus, the slight sticky feeling follows right down to the stomach.
And away from the shores, directions have shifted; the compass, merely an ornament.
110
Our cities
At transition from the weightlessness of a stone to the clearing where a dirt road that has been trampled on (created through the seeds from decomposing garbage and fibrous beings)—that’s where it finds seed- miniatures that don’t stand to be eaten by others, broken down and led through the vortex of your throat and oesophagus, in the process being filled with red, yellow, golden yellow. Here, someone else turns their back: left or leaving because there is always a possibility of a return, like choices, lack of words and the feeling of water filling lungs. Remember the staircase we used to crawl up and down, heading straight for the table with carvings of elephants engaged in battle among a forest of banana trees. A leaf holds coconut rice and red and brown spices, twigs of green that stick out and sit self-assured among the rest. The spoon and fork rest in silence next to them as exhaustion beats down the ceiling. Lift your thigh, knee and foot, remembering that staircase, but the toes don’t quite clear the steps.
111
Eat and Nausea
There is not a fear to be spoken of, the controlled body unlike fire sliding down the shoulders, causing it to move, to wake; it becomes lukewarm, comforting, and gets carried away before it gets stuck, starts to panic and shuts off everything. Falling now, so please control your intake because the apple seeds are poisonous, and the sap of a Christmas plant, the latter follows the veins from the tip of the middle finger, down to the knuckles, the back of her hand, wrists, towards the elbow before it fades.
The rest of body is made into an object of half-moons, removed from all sorts of associations; it chooses not to refer to itself as anything other than what it is standing next to. Its eyes cloudy and unseeing of the cloth that drags and clings to the floor, more off-white and heavy, hauling along with it this boneless body made of rubbery flesh.
112
A boy and a river
A boy lives very quietly and very close to the river. Next to him lies a large, lone petal, with specks of yellow and purple harsh against the grey-white cement—it folds itself up, twists and drags from the roots all the nutrients, through the veins, across the expanse of its body—only, only, it will be a while before they begin to look for him. So it starts, each morning when he opens his blank eyes and heads towards the other end of the city. If he had only closed his left eye, he would have seen the light seasoned with green overlaying a nightmare: a rush of black and gold and the impetus to move, to flounder your way to the next exit, the nearest tree branch, that spot in your brain. Another nightmare: as an eight-year-old, taking up the big black wings that now trail from his body to the floor, unfurling wide towards the light from the window. As a bird of prey, he had scurried, a rodent, but with his beak in the flesh of some unfortunate fish.
113
Pacemakers
The quiet in the remnants of a heart functioning, the organ not so central as one might think, you can put machines in it; the pacemaker, compel it to run. Put machines in place of it, and make those run too. A story of a boy who’s hid his heart in the great oak tree, his white hair turns green- ocean-blue before flickering into transparency and strangers trail after him in curiosity, but they cower, instinctive, when he lays his eyes on them, his smile stretching across his cheekbones. The smile tumbles into laughter, no sound, and his eyes are closed once more. What he doesn’t see is that the crow has taken notice, like shadows rising from the ground, reaching for the leaves, clasping, letting go, and the black bird flies next to him, having already fallen through.
114
White noise and shadows
With the way he is moving though, the boy is little more than debris that make a person. It is not the shivering or convulsions, but that rhythm, constant in the way he speeds up and slows down in blocks, laughter peeling off into silence. The transparency of his skin still consists of mostly technicolour, but with slight static, fading in and out, giving glimpses of green, pink and purple, blood vessels at times, his flesh bears no meat at all; but most of the time his body is a see-through to his surroundings, like this living room he’s managed to make himself appear in: grey carpet and scattered red throw pillows, a low wooden bookcase. He wakes up again on the floor, outside, elevated, sees the currents rush through the city; he cannot stop laughing. Just then, as he opens his eyes, a shadow, and for a second he sees the crow at the peripherals of his vision. Exhaustion takes over, pulling at his skin and curling his bones, and not being able to stay awake for any amount of time, he disappears from this place before sleep makes itself known completely.
115
Disorderly and Eat
Nothing can be seen through, from the remnants and the recesses of form, from the black—nothing is gathered from words that are said once, with masses of limbs interlocked, and again teetering on lines that cross street intersections. It is close, they will meet when he remembers that he belongs to a body, and trials that once again, the cumbersome control of his limbs. No time for this questioning: how they break at the bones, shattering into bits of sky here, and there, some pieces of flower, water, feet of birds, then being fitted into sharp metals, insidiously at first, then they start to rust, see how deep the metals have sunk in, the bone-bits, reacted upon by oxygen—a familiarity revisited by dreams that hold on to fear, contentment, an empty house save for the stove and oven, the walls are in white and outside, trees with the perpetually setting sun—and then they delve in, gut-deep and going, through the layers that divide the organs, the fats that are keeping them from crushing each other, into the bloodstream, the cells and the plasma. And the secret to seeing, this clotting of blood and the sealing of injury with metal crusting over skin—here, the slight angles in which he tilts his head, how his torso shimmies and feels its way through the laughter.
116
For fear of
Perhaps the sun is sliding sideways. I can’t see much, over my shoulder some buildings are leaning against the water, clouds are thinner here and the remains of laughter further away. The sky is now an inversion following its falling off the swollen moon. Sweat beads out in shapes, the wingspan grows wider but still, the boy—the boy—
117 engulfment one body moving through another, into and swallowed whole, the places of initial contact catalyse the sliding like slime on hands, and sticky, dripping through fingers and the back of the hand, stomach, presses on the side of the ribs; the heart is squashed as it passes through the now bending ribs, pushing the jaw, the cheeks, separating lips and clenched teeth, hollowing out the other cheek, and pushing through again.
Swallowed into heaviness that the plant feels, the boy once more disappears into dark green and purple, fleshy reds and even here, forgetting is not allowed. Within, sharp and useless like papers that have been bundled up to keep and are now unfolding, the digestion is aided by acid broiling through, parts withered, parts standing to walk, this inflammation is causing the plant to crawl, lifting a muscle at a time, twisting bones, rolling joints three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, manoeuvring, pushing up the chest and torso, belly and boy sliding through.
118
Satiation
There’s more that I’d like to tell them, like how this craving doesn’t go away, this excitement, and bringing with it the satisfaction, this denial, laughing and delirious, lovingly—strenuously, who can tell?
119
Into forest hunting grounds
Buds of flowers as flat as nails, compressed, growing and clutching at the rock bed of moss, sucking on the others’ nutrients, and each becoming their own parasite; all this has eventuated inside the belly.
Passing through an echo of forest leaves that slide and press against the shadows of two feet, legs, and a whole body with its sturdy skeletal frame resting within. A structure for strange things like images that come and go with dissipating colours against eyelids. Presently, the wheels of a rolling cart against the gravel, see where friction has scraped it to green and see, myths about snakes, televised snow, bay leaves, plastic cups; unable to reach with these words, metal clanging, a tongue and half of a snapped tooth.
120
Saturation
And how we were both wrong. Look here, I say, the surfaces of a non- reflective glass littered onto my stomach and pelvis, all pressed into place. I shift them around slightly when I’m lying on my back, careful, because the edges are. I’ve found this grove to hide from the sun. There’s slow rustling of leaves and grass around this body, where the insects are curious and have come to collect what they can from me, suckling, parasitic; well, we all are, all of us, hidden from the sun. It’s always damp here, as I am, but this does not deter their climbing into my leaves and twigs, taking shelter between my arms, legs, the curl of my neck, in this ear. Taking shelter, these critters, but not—not me—pristinely, precisely so, not so: some will say I’ve run, and I would have run, but, shelters, there are many and wrong ones; like wrung from the neck, that shelterer, sucked dry.
121
Folly
This, a baring of teeth: prismatic and dispersing: I can’t handle stories anymore—can’t—can’t—handle—stories—any—more—I. Well, I mean, I—because, they will, uh. They will, they will come to, to harm, me—me. Don’t you think? Polygonal, sulphuric, post-ambition, brightly, prosthetic, on the tongue, and voracious, like how—how—at the juncture—I was told that I don’t—I won’t—I won’t—I won’t—
122
A memory
But I don’t know—don’t know how it feels—disallow—can’t—don’t do not—or you will come to harm—me—but to—access granted— access—to do so with—no clarity and—no—roof of my mouth—and you open wide—listen—granted. You can’t know—now—how this dry and withered skin is to me—disgusting—but is my skin—against—my judgement—time does not pass—like orifice—because the—the opposite is worse. But—what gestures will you make for me—make me see—touch and turn—this golden moon will take your eye— mirthlessly—but I love you?—muted with—and stuffed to the brim. Just because I can’t conceptualise it—I don’t— can’t know—how—crossing can sting and is stunted. It doesn’t—
123
Like audiotapes
It doesn’t signify. It does. Like plastic and placentas, non-soluble, like hard structures. Like red doves against the sea, I can’t say I know how to give you this morning when the plants slowly wake, poisonous as they are, and I am already forgetting your face, and the leaves won’t know the names you and I have been called; being interrogated, disparaged, like adulterer, at the point—
I’ve never laid a hand against you—
of death; detractor, murderer, traitor, slanderer, seditionist—all these mad and ceremonious processes of grieving, this fury that I don’t know what.
In the place of this image, disguised with dark painted teeth, purflings, metal-like maxillary process, the fear of not being able to live up to this—flesh, robotic, machines inside your head, can’t say that I know, that I know of you, me, pristinely, like incisions. Don’t let me leave. It does. They do. Laughter, insidious and calling, echoing, causing tremors, can’t sleep. Heatwaves, seismic and a laying down of arms, of obstructions. In daylight: how divisive the function, each unfamiliarised word has taken up residence in my brain.
124
Insidious
But see, it rings incessantly: shadows that form on your back, stones that are stunned and muted, clearings of dry soil fan the remains of a muscle contraction, the compulsion echoes through to the heart and lungs, once again contracting. Bracelet-shaped, caught, endlessly, tirelessly, to discover the fascination in eating your own tail, spin, warp from places to here, learn and memorise the linings of meat, nothing but (more than this), swingingly and jerk, and how much do I fascinate you? Now, here is empty and dry like the cutting of meat that is desiring—nothing—but is then being pushed down on the chest, the edge of a broom clutched into fixation—swing! Fixture like light is secured and spread, if I then exploit myself, not heights measured but cushioned, knees, doorknobs and fingers don’t tell anyone but dark, the darkest pink, like marooned red.
125
Limbs and static
I get toxins that are derived from plants. Silently, the vowels are strung out, elongated and echoing, diminishing, and then reaching a certain octave, and so they leave by barrelling through sudden breaks and collisions. I remember a moment exactly like this. This place of madness creates within itself a sanctuary, given that its meaning has been lost among the grasses—the feathers slowly gathered are as much in your line of sight as they are the tree that keeps allowing its flowers to drop, the flower its petals, leaving behind a small rounded fruit harder than teeth—now mask the fleshy grin behind the ceramic as mist is breathed out: being looked at, being judged, judging and having lost faith, the defeat lies between us and our bent limbs. That they can forget: narrow passages, mould, water, wooden planks that make a bridge barely floating on water. Smear that poison across your eye and cheek. I remember holding down, being held down, the shoulders, quick, push, no distinction between them and the many many bodies.
126
The crow grieves
A crow wanting to shed its feathers and all its skin, driven towards emptiness—to cut off all desires—what, then, can be achieved after?
This process, the gestures already belong to insufficient and minimal expression, and as the plant continues on, the contradiction between consciousness and the void, everything is obscured. Nothing can see through the tangled stems and roots, the rest are amputated. The sun streaks, and the inevitable poisoning that occurs as the crow feels its belly ache, the trails of black and purple move further away as the skin of the plant oozes into the ground. No sight for comfort. Like wanting to be done with a morning ritual, and regardless of whether it was the quietness that had led to this unknowing, or the ire that had soaked up the day’s passing, its presence does not leave. And what has this opened up to?—the creases of half-folded sheets, leaving behind the sound of a shutting door: a body that recognises no other bodies but itself.
127
Crashing
Night that gives way to words flaking from a piece of old bark that, in taking up the moisture from the ground, cuts through, like the fish that throw themselves out of the ocean surface, there is a slight change in temperature, undetectable at first, and then, unknowingly, they creep up against shorelines—these wandering machines, cutting the gathered mist. Behind such intention, the grasses crouch and crumble, weaving among the small stones uprooted from their place in the mud and wander along to the red-headed snake absorbed in a reflective pool, showing the nose and whiskers of a brown mouse sneaking around a mushroom bend, poisonous and heads bending low. The mouse engages in early rituals of food-finding and hearing a cry from the northern end, it looks up to see the crow surrounding it from the cloudless sky, slowly backs away, and hearing the hiss from the red-headed snake, scrambles onto gnarled roots of the fig tree so brashly that it tears its skin.
128 and crashing
The centre of water current is whirling constantly, hoarding to it a pile of yellow and pink flowers, purples and oranges are hidden beneath and have to swing their way through and over. On the convex petals, tadpoles are sucking gently on wet residues of dirt. No longer attached to the crumbling landscape, don’t want to wake or be woken to laughter with the belly and chest aching. From here, there is no reply so I can’t be trusted to speak, what of sun streaks and the inevitable poisoning, since these wings are still capable of flapping, postarmistice, thinking of prime numbers, impossible ones: but I miss you.
129
Like letting go
I don’t feel like I can let go. Fissures and the weather-storming-sun.
Towering over, a shadow is cast: what can you say of these stones at my feet? Precariously. Not a word from feathers or thinly shaped humerus brought about by crashing through muddy grounds. My head hurts, sore feet, sore eyes, no noise from the birds other than me. They say blackness gets darker as you grow and it’s the only good thing, being borne from this tree that is too small even for this thin fibula. Toothpick.
Cast an alloy: more than half the periodic table is in there, the process entertaining, the product useless and costly. There is a need to withstand all temperatures, they say, because the temperature can’t be fixed, but it’s barely over a hundred and fifty-five degrees and Alloy is already starting to disintegrate—like papers torn into strips, eaten, fed not- roasted, because you wouldn’t want to put out a forest fire even if the trees are bright and dead and can’t be hurt. Try again. Bone against bone—neither of us—bone against bone. The other is made of leaves and twigs, dark too, but of different shades; there are underlays of green and purple, and sometimes, nestled somewhere, navy blue, shimmering.
The ground beneath the heaving beast escapes, blends; resulting in shifts, and water. The shifts can reform when they want, muddy themselves when they want. There is no quake to warn of. Bells tied to wrists, to branches, wings and wooden staffs. He misses us nonetheless.
130
III—Paper collection, the fox spirit and the calligrapher
131
In history, in the mid-morning
So there’s a book-eating fox spirit that lives in a house with a man who keeps forgetting—consciously, insistently—at every moment of his day he never wants to remember. The fox-spirit goes to the bookshelf, to the papers scattered on the floor and eats the pieces as it wishes. The man spends his time drawing calligraphy and rescuing his papers from the book-eating spirit, but not before he realises that the top-left corner of the paper was already gone. Can nothing be said? The craft of paper- making, puppeteering, the definition of things, making fire and ornaments, part of what has been done before: the folding, cutting, putting back together. Situated above the crow, the boy and the salivating monstrous plant, the house crouches over the sea, with an upright piano with an extra key squashed in, its sounds have not been heard for a long time: that moment when concern ceased its dripping from their tongues, he had crossed the river waters and disappeared into his corner: there, silent, a shelter. But, to the rumbling and slippery cottage I insisted upon, hiding directly beneath the sun and the trickling of water, endless and wilful, is this stillness standing as a photographic image. When a weak hue of red dissipates, slowly rising up in its place, are clusters of orange lined up onto the edges of negligence, of time clipped onto a string, collecting the traces of this house they live in. A seagull resting on the roof bends its neck to look through the window, spying, a day-old flower in a square transparent vase.
132
Isolation
Here is the thing that matters and you can’t even say it. Wind it around your throat until there’s nothing but let the words rush out; these then become worlds, building and growing as they push through your throat and out of your mouth, the skin of your neck bruised and hurting. Now imagine something else, taking the strength of your skin and pulling it tight against the echoes of your railing shadow. In the midst, here, tumbling down your body are worlds that slowly break and encrust your skin with dry greyish-white substances. For certain, there’s silence, and through that, relief. But then—lines and maps, following the route and losing sight of it, directionless and prone to stopping. At the time we were so used to living in this sense of having a collective past, but today, there is none of that as each brick and layer of cement shudders slightly under the paint at the thought of the next onslaught, of unsettling like stones that shatter as wind cuts through the floor of the garden. The door is always kept open, a silhouette against sun relives the times before, dry as grains of old sand in slippers, and hearing, the echoing cries of black birds, when before most of what could be seen lived in shades. Now, there is no island, only water that sustains itself, rolling and emerging from it a derelict house with fogged up windows, the rooftop gone murky green with mould and even then—just for a few moments, you desire to know it, the feel of that diseased structure which disgusts and fascinates.
133
Swinging and swirling
Clear the table of ink vials, the many things happening at once that you try to keep track of, and they flee around the corner of your eye, the reds, yellows and blues. A place where nothing stands in stillness, and tracing the trajectories from here on out, being led with surprising swiftness towards the sea borders, turn back, wait outside the big window panes, cataloguing and throwing away the methods with which to escape from their grasp, the constant and heavy presences. But it needs to be said, as machines set themselves upright and their bodies angled to the side, waiting, as the sounds of the typewriter echo, fingers straining for the
‘q’ and the ‘p’, the scratching needle of a gramophone, waiting, for this house to be rebuilt. Something I’d like you to say if such a thing should occur, words and words, slumped down, when the sleeping man wakes.
One of those few places that’s stationary, but even still, the force of the water currents running can be felt, the skin of his cheeks is irritated and peeling, already his mind snatches at the images of salt breeze that won’t be there if he walks out the door.
134
Anaesthetic
Stories, stories, stories: fire, puppets, shadows and ornaments. See now, how I’ve eaten my own feet.
135
Sneaky and swift
It eats papers and never grows. The drawings of poppy seeds and the word ‘tea’ are missing the lower left corners. These must be filed in a ring-binder. Purple-black ink stains the side of the right hand as water threatens the integrity of the house—some has already leaked through the window sill. The rest could not be found, not through any sense of time; where has that boy gone and his contours of a fist, the limit is drawn at the door, a voluntary manifestation of a body, and the way they tell it, the body lives like a long green snake outside the window, slithering along rough-textured walls (they say snakes in dreams bring good fortune).
136
Rising
Eyes closing, and when water rushes in, disperses. Here, the hysteria of a piano key that loses its focus, so it keeps devouring the outpouring of notes like birds, birds, which are spying on the locked machine, set in your image, embracing me. The hysteria of a piano key—
Flooded with half-ways and in-betweens, a house lived and abandoned and lived, unheeding of the climate. Mould is close to reaching the middle of the shelf where stones, eyes and blunt knives are held back from the edge, struck into a fast unwinding perspective. But because the hanged man has already flown, this points to meaning that reverts back to death in the gallows, positioned on the shelf next to the yellowed rosemary in a glass jar. This kind of cruelty has always been possible, as seen in these perfect geometrical shapes, three dimensional, porous, incongruent movements of particles, disassembled. In a book: a wolfhound that eats papers is a puppy that never grows. Startled, the fox spirit doesn’t believe it. Meanwhile, in a completed script for masks and shadow puppetry, they meet, once again remembering that each belongs to a body, and trials, once again, the cumbersome control of a body- container—only—they were not in despair enough, desired is the stillness that comes after: the sound of a voice speaking, but eyes are caught on shadows like the raintrees outside.
137
Like hydroxides
Remember how this keeps turning strictly through gravitational force,
and once this has been allowed, the centre of gravity shifts when eyes
are closed. In stillness, saying the ‘I’s until they stop sensing; shaking
and bouncing off each other, coerced, angry and in control, and that
pisses them off more. These stories, crack them open and serve
sectioned into small and manageable pieces, otherwise, regurgitate and
gargle; the whole process equals the length of time it takes to count the
folds of the petals, the taste of them on stiff tongues, bland, but with the
smell of nectar and grass. Among them, the conifers, but where is the
snow, where, the fallen flowers? Thrust an arm into the tall bushes, the
thin, sharp branches. I remember the colour of fruit and petals, dead
seeds—multitudes of them—impossible to grow from the same plant,
yet here they are. At the outer radius of fallen things, the oak tree is
partly submerged in water, the sun reflects from top wide-spaced
branches, throwing shadows of the tree across water. The air is still.
Despite this, shapeless clouds, flat against the orange-beige sky, are
spreading across without ceasing. When a yellowed leaf floats above the
nose of a fox and slowly rests on its head, what is being offered?
138
I don’t feel like I can let go
Bluebells and fissures, a weather-storming-sun, the latter braves the fussiness of it all, towering over a cast shadow: sayings of these stones at my feet? Pesky, precariously so, the question. Still no word from feathers or thinly shaped bones, they were brought about by my crashing through muddy grounds. My head hurts, sore feet, sore eyes, no noise from the birds other than this me. They say the blackness gets darker as you grow and it is the only good thing that’s come from being born from this tree that is too small for this thin bone. Alongside: toothpick. Cast an alloy and more than half of the periodic table is in there. Fascinating process, also, useless and expensive. There is a need to withstand all temperatures, because the temperature can’t be fixed, it’s not even over a hundred and fifty-five degrees and alloy is already starting to disintegrate—like paper being torn into strips and eaten, fed non- roasted. You wouldn’t want to put out a forest fire, even if the trees are bright and dead and can’t be hurt. Try again. Catastrophise. Bone against bone—not one of us. The surface of the other is made of leaves and twigs, dark too, but of different shades: visible and pricklish underlay in purples and green, and sometimes, in patches, navy blue, shimmering.
He misses us nonetheless. (They see the house shifting.)
139
IV—Into the ants’ nest
140
Swarming
The house stretches slow, pauses, is at rest. It doesn’t occur to anyone that the sounds appear faintly, teasing the edges of sight and are gone.
The noose that hangs from the closest tree to the house is more pliable than any rubber tapped from a plant. But far from this house that used to stretch slowly but is now at rest, the bright landscape of the ocean grows heavy and presses down a body that writhes, is pulled back, writhes, and thrashes. Underneath are other bodies, swarming, bare and struggling to stand, ribs protruding above bloated but painless stomachs, their ankles and knees are collapsing from the water pressure. A tamarind tree that still bears fruit even though it has been cut down leads to the entrance of the house. To reach this place, to find a house by the river that withstands all uneven temperaments, know that a few miles away the city has lodged itself onto the ground, pushing through soil, bricks layered, but still, water runs through. To find this place, remember the feather of a feather, teetered between the lines that intersect this city and the next. Where do they lead to, when in the next instance they begin to blur and become merely ripples that bear the fallen, still flowering plants?
141
Towards the lakes
The cargo boat becomes a travelling house, passing a temple nearby, quiet and foggy at night and in the morning it clears: the house and the water, in stillness. In truth, the boat-and-travelling-house can be unfolded into many pieces of paper, many times creased, glued, their corners tucked in. Pull them tight against the strength of your body, measure them as I search for roots and grounds shaken beneath the waters. There is no such thing as a reassurance. But there is a kind of fear rising, placing scenes inside eyes and silences, tilting them forward and back so that there is always a question, even with the knowledge reaped and gathered, caution comes later, rising sleepily: there’s danger.
142
Portraits
A delayed realisation of being used as bait, a conscious denial: what happens when it works, the parameters: don’t say it without meaning it, don’t say it with meaning, don’t close your eyes, douse your skin in the mist while the torchlight reveals the rotting in the leaves and the roots are immovable. Set around the house are ceramics a hundred years old, maintained as they are, edges black and blunted from use. There’s a struggle when they come near the wall and the shadows elongate, still wanting to live, perhaps, the plant, the crow and its precious, digested boy, and so reaching the doors with hinges that are rusty and resisting.
The water does not reach the front steps, but the floorboards and ceilings are leaking, a pair of black and white shoes is left next to the door, droplets have been shaken off, the remaining clung to the leather. A wish to be rid of this dampness. Perched on top the oak-wood table with its tall but sturdy legs is a briefcase with vials and vials of liquids and powder: amber, white, cerulean, a mossy hue. Re-order them. From darkest to light, interspersing its liquid counterparts in between, plucking up one of red earth brown; a recurring dream: stare up with tired eyes, bright red paint stretched thin on the mouth, wait for the unvoiced anger, the brunt of it directed at the hand-woven rug beneath their feet, black and white leather shoes hold against the moving ground.
Speak of conquests, of benediction, resignation and disdain, in total, a weariness that does not care to be seen.
143
Junta
If you could just leave me be, let me rest. Shaded in grey-blue, a hint of green, a whitely painted background; the brush is sinking, counter clockwise, like swinging sheets and the sky creasing, opens its mouth, swinging. I can’t carry them: every possible manner with which the body starts to shiver and break itself open, the shifting conundrums of festered rust, and the need to go on functioning. Wander. Eyes looking on from afar do not increase or decrease the distress it feels. It only has eyes, for itself is tearing through the degenerative insides and wiring. Before all the discrepancies of its computations settle in, it lives through the host, one filled with the purplest tar. Own components, not set in stillness but buoyed by clear gel with white emulsions. It wondered how its own body could compare. Following others too stubborn to die, so there’s a rush of fire through the arms, a heartbeat whirling, fuel, all of them, whirling.
Reaching for leaves, clasping, letting go to account for the difference between the sharpness of steel, and of iron made into carbon. Take all this desire, drag it out and leave the body to dry: I can’t handle stories anymore. I—uh, I, that is, uh, voracious. But not anymore. I mean. I— stories. (laughs) Vo—vo—vo. Can’t. You know what pisses me off the most? That you, that I, and I and I and I, and I and I—I—I—I—I—I—
I—I—I—I—vo-raaa-ci-ous—and you know what
If there was a sloping plane aboard our spaceship that
crawls along the moonscape of your face ... if there was a ...
144
One of us
I can’t carry them—the floor lamps, insects, crows, a nest of ants. There is no need to be repulsed; we were all drawn in, and as the three-wheeled cart rolls against the gravel before distantly stumbling off into the water reminds us, this kind of charm is not usually wanted. Back then, there used to be rain, electric currents, noise, being aware of the start and end of things, within darkness, within shades, the sounds of fire and between bone marrows, it sucks deep, being aware of the sounds of things, squandering for stillness, like protrusions, like glass.
145
Weeds and punctures
It rests without a sound, lying on a piece of flat rock stuck deep into the uneven ground, conflates and seeps into the soil as it travels through, and what it houses is on its way out, still clinging to the body… The idea of conception is this: being eaten and growing into something else, wavering, words tumble to sustain the momentum until the northmost point is reached and nowhere else, river waters sweeping through. The sky with no sun. In its waywardness, weeds move according to the distance put forward by winter and wonder about the spillage of things entrusted to this body, the whole and fractions of it. The clearing has enough wet sand, dripping, and stones are stuck to sweaty skin. Lastly, words on eyelids are excessive, no time to question the extent of puncture wounds suffered, these doubts at the sight of the black bird.
146
One of us
They are unwilling to be touched, unwilling, until there is nothing left— but no one cares about any of that now. So, your nightmares, in that distorted place, they come in from the periphery, like hunger pangs that hit the stomach until you’re dry or are in the process of drying up, how much do I keep transparent? Until there is nothing left, those mayflies will feed, constantly dying, and a voice, ‘but that cherry blossom tree, isn’t it supposed to bear the strongest wood in all of these regions combined?’—the trunk is greying, in essence, what I said I will never do: give you this story, do with it what you will, but more than this, I want, much more than this: the bastardisation of anatomy, birthing a dead crow from a tree a flower has withered, first, the damp petals basking in acid, the sun. How much do I fascinate you in the process of forgetting, but I do miss you is the thing, do I have to put everything into a well-condensed form for you to listen? I won’t let you hear it, because all of this is mine. Look at the movement of my wrist and fingers—the specificity of the body is not here. A grin, deep in the flames, telling them of the river waters, of gratitude, of how she’s been crossing those rivers and back, look back, please, I’m still here aren’t I. All perspectives, things. This is commitment. Witness the designs of these rooms. I can’t stand them. I’m not a thing. Don’t look at me.
147
Resistance
‘Where does it start?’ A body wholly obscured by bruised veins and leaves. Moving slowly, needing to consciously lift every organ of its body with every step, until, slowly, going on all fours to increase the ratio of volume and surface area to support itself with, crawling and sliding on its growling belly. Inside, the boy is, as always, almost translucent, constantly laughing while awake, only, silent. Now thoroughly digested, the plant takes from the boy a conflation of purple, light brown, beige, grey and pinks—they flicker in and out. The house is still, life teeming in it, but still, the garden is very still—the colours are faded, trees with brown and ashen trunks, their muted lime green leaves not so bright. The sun pours, yellowish, into the garden and the study. Much lighter—tatami mats, white walls, but the trees are so still, sometimes the only movement comes from the flurry of falling papers.
Airless. Water is rushing in from all corners.
148
Breaks, expulsion
There is no sense of a memory, this possession of the presence and absence of a body. Driven into emptiness, vomiting out a breathing thing in a sac, the cyst is sucked on until the membrane is stretched, almost bursting, light streaking into water stained eyes, limbs floating, trying to crawl out. It’s impossible tonight, the river runs towards the sea in darkened shades continuously, and what comes, undulating, the bits of mud and the half-dissected marigolds, grounded, the dark greens, purple are shades deeper; ants. The plant attempts to swallow back the tired body and sac, climbs over the walls, the fences; its huge stem-body is still obscured by thick vines and leaves, still gushing, as it overtakes the house.
149
Rebirth and corpse-like
A foetus of a plant, the embryonic fluid breaks through the sac and partly, the leaves and petals push through, unforgiving, a head pokes out from the slanted golden-reds of the marigolds: so much of it is self- presentation, this body, figuring the ends it needs to achieve and looping back, to keep it working. In the distance, a hatch to the roof is open, outside the sky is hanging low. The crow wakes up and takes notice, perhaps, the boy, perhaps, there will be flowers adorning his head, his feet, but nothing comes from me alone, how frightful, now that the first flower has withered. That thing tries to crawl back into the uterus, but to no avail.
150
Drifting
A reminder of speed, how laughter falls, the landscape we turn to, and the rain. Words that are uttered as street markings: ‘It’s only temporal.
The feather of a feather will slowly become unstuck as the hanged membranes slip, a bone has torn through flesh.’ Know that you are only cruel to me because I have permitted it. Slower. There is always a risk of going back, don’t discount that possibility, though the phrase, ‘it was a nightmare for her’ was written a hundred and three years ago, there is a strange honesty to it, how one only has to think of the muddy river that flows across the city to remember. The shifting shadows of the crow, no sense in the way they travel, the speed. Out of turn, capture in the distortion the reflection and refraction of light that make shadows prominent, adjusting themselves over faces and drifting into names. This place of naming has not been left, but there is a fear that punctures at the skin, sweat congealing out of its many pores. The inversion of things: the sun hatches the moon like a squab, the lifting of a flower’s heavy head, being caught up in how the sticky white threads hold the fibres together, undeterred by the weight placed on its gaping knots.
No skin off my,
no skin off my,
no skin off
151
Expectancy
List all the kindnesses. Adulate. It’s only a body, the skin can be adjusted for eyes that are intent on the only kind of pleasure they know.
152
4th
It heaves.
153
Skeletal
Water breaks. The boy is left standing with skin that is no longer porous; bile and digestive fluids slide easily over his body and paralyse his ankles, the heels and arch of his feet. He sinks slightly into the sand as a small wave crashes into him. There’s no meat left underneath his skin, having been starved, stolen from, fucked over. His chin, elbows, shoulders and knees are sharp, as if newly chiselled from clay, flaunting a ribcage. His temple is pounding; overhead there are loud and repeated screeches, separated into short intervals. He moves his unblinking eyes to see that the crow is circling with quick and harsh flaps of its wings; he looks it in the eyes as it dives, catches the skin on his head and back, swoops up behind him; he keeps his eyes open as talons claw into his shoulder blades, right where the knobs of bone jut outwards, sinking in, melting and fusing into his bones. It aches and burns, and the heat sears through his lungs, his chest, up his neck and face. Half-boy, half-crow, maybe this co-dependence will finally kill him. The crow part of him sings, he feels the notes vibrating through his vocal chords, the caw-caw resounds and is taken up by others. Finally, he opens his mouth, and drawing from his diaphragm: it bellows, the long unending sound. His teeth are decayed and bared, his throat burns. Half-asleep, the world in tatters, tiredness, but there is food, which accounts for breath, but it does not stop the heaviness in the chest, the labours in the inhales and exhales.
The calligrapher stands to the side, wonders at a world in pieces— there’s an honest question, but not one pretty or substantial or courageous enough to be uttered, not even in one’s head; so now, a crow- 154 and-the-no-longer-laughing-boy, a monstrous plant that crawls and brings with it a poisonous forest, they put their heads down to rest. It’s not muteness, no, but the decision not to speak, and what is this fear, residing in the chest still. So for all that the calligrapher can think, for all that could be yearned for, encapsulated in the stack of papers—some are soaked with ink that doesn’t dry. The plant snorts and hiccoughs, throwing up what remains of its stomach contents: ants, bugs, other dead and poisonous plants, all foul-smelling. The sand surrounding it becomes stained, muddied, flooded. And then it all converges, the house stands as it does, moving, unmoving, as we crawl towards them, the dreams that grow in limbs, the bark sharp on our hands, feet, scrapes the stomach, thighs; we are close to losing sight of it, the water now calm with currents undamaged.
155
I don’t feel like I can let go
The melding of boy and crow—the crow breaks, obsessed. Bellows, but not soundless laughter. The ferocity in breathing, the alloys have solidified, and blue and purple feathers, exquisite: I wish I can know of him, still, and he—he has calmed, bones extended, growing into his body—quiet now, too quiet. Solemn and unmoving, looking down at his feet, dirt and sand, stinging. When then, will he be able to articulate the screams and bellows, hissing sounds, plosives, croaking and the turning of his neck. They are joined in muscle, bone and flesh, talons on the bones of shoulder blades, when the wings are spread it looks like a headdress. There’s desire running through, wanting to know of someone almost wholly forgotten, except for their voice, a vague memory of interaction, alongside grief.
156
V—What threatening gestures, this building of myself
157
Signal fire
Put your head down a while, as the waves ride in, faces drown, then
drawn out. Let them crash, and still no sign of the sun. I had expected
too much, there’s no—
It was my doing, like a felonious thing.
158
Reconstruction
A misplaced ellipsis travels with ink stained hands. Building them as puppets, shadows, fire, and ornaments—how disgusting, how tiring— lined up they make too much sense. All this thinking, all this feeling.
I’m only partly absent, so it can be said without: how weak-minded, and in the matter of dreams, what do I know of nightmares?—that it crawls in from the periphery, like a giant crow that clutches at the balcony rails, its black and white eyes focused as it slowly steps over to the centre to watch its prey. It never just disappears—instead opens its wingspan, black feathers shining, and with big flaps that rush into dry eyes, it flies past trees that shake and shudder at the contact. But why not leaving?— remember that this keeps turning only through gravitational force, that its parts will find its way back to the torso, that the centre of gravity shifts once eyes are closed. Remember that no one knows where this place is, that this un-forgetting occurs when the periphery clears and the rest is in darkness.
159
So that you could eat
If there was a sloping plane aboard our spaceship that crawls along the moonscape of your face there would no question uttered on tongues and lips that looked and shied away but instead it refused to lower its eyelashes and sweep away the dust to cover the markings that went right left right left like pendulum weights on metal strings where Newton’s law felt proud of its evidence and its mystery as if mystery gave it the quality of one well-versed in obscure scholarship and yet based on enough facts for it to stand tip-toeing next to the ungainly chaos of the universe pointing and saying: I made this happen and if I can trace the lines on your face and commit them to the muscle memory of my fingertips—if only you had not turned away as if these were fingers that forced your chin this way and promptly you moved back within the three point five seconds verging on four that it took for a mouth to open and stay open with the sentence half a step onto thin air and the other trenched in this salivary tongue.
160
Incantations
They break at the bones, shattering into bits of mercury and plastic, then being fitted into sharp metals, insidiously at first, before they start to rust, the bone-bits, reacted upon by oxygen, and then they delve in, gut- deep and going through the layers that divide the organs, the fats that are keeping them from crushing each other, into the bloodstream, the cells and the plasma. And the secret to seeing, the clotting of blood, with metal crusting over skin: hold them up by centimetre, the stories unseen by eyes placed above. There are echoes that resound into shapes, into shadows, seen, unseen. These are the things they refuse to speak o, and so syntax and grammar are pounded into granules and dissolved in clear liquids. To find them again: place over heat of a hundred degrees Celsius and tepid green precipitate will form. But what is this thing that is capable of sitting next to and opposite the shadows for any length of time, if time is of any use here? There’s nothing to amuse you anymore, like me not wanting to be alone, still. In the darkened sky there are no floodgates, only a smooth stone for a water path—if only, if only, if only—I can finally see you rest your head, if only there was more than a thought that leads back to the silenced explosions of ‘if only if only if only.’ But the crow knows my face now. All this hunger that doesn’t really do anything while the body rests before it disappears. A knee cracks and cracks and cracks until bone shatters and muscles lie in shock, bruised and hiding, folding onto itself.
161
But cloaked beneath
these treacherous grounds, soil and stones are dry and bloodless in the
midst of churning colours, doubts, and history; like the language that has
been left behind and the song that you no longer sing. Before, when the
fox spirit was entrenched in its own perceived stupidity, indiscretion,
and hope, it takes care of the calligrapher, who has the ability to hold the
brush the right way, his thumb, index and fifth fingers placed just so. He
was relentless, lines curved, pressed and tapering off as needed. He too,
knew no way of stopping, sheets and sheets of paper are thrown about,
there’s some inadvertent splashing of ink, in ridiculous and beautiful
arcs. Its hunger was uncontainable then, and it had to sneak in small bites
of paper away from the calligrapher's line of sight. He must have caught
on though, because he began to file papers in a ring-binder, and even
though his movements are no less erratic, a smile stretched across his
cheeks, it is clear that the extra work is taxing, inhales and exhales are
shorter, and tears stream from his eyes. That wasn’t its intention at all!
The guilt sits heavy in its stomach, and the paws rubbing its abdomen
have no effect.
162
Arrangements and echoes
Give me your hands because it can’t be said. Bodied, fingerless, only half a foot showing through, punctured with the right wrist resting, where a long piece of cloth rests (a return to the womb), inverted, perhaps a voice, like questions and wailings, but there is emptiness, and ants crawling. Small stones that hang from trees are not trusted to fall.
From the tree branch to the stems, and leaves and veins, vapour and the sun, parts of the sun, they will always be mindful of death. And included in that: all of its paraphernalia, everything it’s made up of, what it belongs to, the whole mimicked set. The splitting of the leaf-body, at least in its remembrance, is posited alongside the shadows, (and what with the forgetting and recitation and saying -), the side-streets and rushing, the waterways are clogging up, things start to tilt once more, look, there’s a blankness, with the colours and air, the smoke will start to make sense of itself and coil around bodies that, in movement, also cover the birds of prey and the carrion as they sink slowly into the ground, unsteady as they are because they have indented themselves into mud and water, while the wind disperses the seeds, which are also swallowed. Fungus is growing on mud and these flowers, water rots through soil—slit open the flower’s head, its peeled-back skin, beneath, the bones of leaves are snapping, shadows growing on their undersides are climbing one at a time, diffusing across the edge of the petals. Its skin drops onto the gravelled surface. Meat and flesh. Push in deep. Ants like black grains are headed here from the house with water stains in the process of moulding, like stillness and ink—it brings with it very precise 163 movements, this dripping, breeding the same cells that grow nails and teeth in a water sac. But because I am capable of taking this kind of cruelty, peel back my cornea as well as the surface of my skin, see, white-blood cells are congregating at the spine where the poppies are waiting, standing erect, before they crumble with the body, too much, not enough. The ground breathes.
164
Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits
165
I—Familial and valedictory thoughts
166
Aggrieved
There is a story of how she turned into ashes: a voice says, ‘her presence, like stones—’ Like stones: from the bowels of the house the embers slowly quiet their movements, the grey and white flakes flutter above the splintered floorboards; it has been a long time since the last fire was lit. There’s a certain kind of weariness in the way the paint has endured but the wallpaper has fallen off in corners, and when fingers slide down the torn material, there is comfort in the ciphering of the present and the past without an inclination for either. And so she did call herself ash, for a while, and it suits her better, and the house. Isn’t it a relief, she thought to herself. She should like to never leave this place; it is hers, now, and hers alone. Firstly, with grains of dirt clinging to her feet, smeared onto her arms, chest and back, she’s looking for a source, perhaps more than one, weak and cracking (and the sound of burning firewood still echoes—in her ear or distantly?—) and she did love her name, who she was before. But she is not alone, now, and she will have to take care when they come for her, for the two of them: she would be needed, at least, her mind. And secondly, a ritual: rolling her neck, right shoulder and wrist, her spine and centre of gravity are adjusted to empty herself of feeling, this dread, sometimes seated so deeply it pushes against her backbone.
167
In physical form
Expansive wings, dark as soot with a reflective oily shine, heavy, as cover for warmth, for comfort she isn’t sure belongs to her, or—even— if it really is there on her back, weighing on muscle and bone. Ribcage hitches as diaphragm expands and contracts, breathe, deep and deeply rest, my things will still be here, having been collected, poised, when you wake. What was said of your name, once? Like improvising with someone else’s voice which echoes. Listen to this: ‘The poison winds are not blowing, Kazan, yet my ears are ringing. I have not eaten garlic,
Kazan, yet I burn within. The yellow snake has not stung me, yet my white body rises and swells. In my breast, which seems dried up, my milk is leaping. I cannot see my only son, and my heart is aflame. Tell me, Kazan, about my only son. If you will not, I shall curse you, Kazan, as I burn with fire.’
The wings shall trail downwards. What I mean to say, he is alone, here, I, you, or him, so make it known. Islands. Like the ship-less seas, closer, and then, sand. Names, autumn, summer; and I, I fear for a child of summer (yes, I see you a child). The rules are long forgotten. The fox is here.
168
Resurrection
It used to work like a library, the Mad One apprises (and I would have listened to him if I were able to). The shelves were old, their layers thin; be careful of catalogues, the division of shadows, as head-heavy, eye- and-tongue-heavy, as contrary; before long, neck joints will collapse.
Here, they used to travel through the uproar; here, ghosts and splintered fingers as I crawl along the moonscape of your face, clasping your jaw between both of my hands. Woman of the house, hold, they said, for there are those lost and hungry. Woman of the house, the fox is here. It used to work like a library. There were scripts for you to see, the diaries, ashes, and the rest, but now they are no more. The fox is here, so hold still with that leaf in your hand. She had thought voices were ringing, the radio-cassette player was spinning, the antenna pulled long and tight, there was static. Untenable, this skin, this desert in the mist. She raises her hand to her belly and makes long slow scratches. The odd features of the sun, gone, stringently; they tear away. Where are they now—they would have wanted an establishment with wide open spaces underground. Here though, it’s a house made of wood and bricks, sturdy and dark, with light bulbs that are no longer working, the electricity has been cut. The womb stretches and spasms. And quietly they recite: stomach acid rises up, milk curdles, meat is further broken down into protein and fat, churning. Her eyes sting and cross, and she remembers putting the script back onto the shelf. Next to it, a thin hardcover picture book filled with family histories. A trumpet bleats through the stuttering
169 of the radio, and then the static overtakes again. She goes into her room and pulls the cloth away from the full-length mirror.
170
Aralu
No one here speaks ill of the dead, except me, because I want to, and I
do, for her, for me. I speak it quite openly: see those golden and rough
textures on your tongue; try and swallow them whole. It’s quite cold,
isn’t it? Clear away the dust in your throat; there’s too much of it, like
this place, and so very quiet. The others have left, it seems. The mirror
has smudges, but it reflects well, there’s light falling through the
window. The skin looks like how it feels, covered with cracks and
webby lines. Sandpaper skin. There’s not much hair left on her head, but
what is left is quite long, almost reaching her lower back, and curly,
stationed in clumps. The mirror is wide and tall enough to show a
protruding ribcage, two columns of bones on the chest, a rounded and
aching belly. She thinks of the desert and the sun on a red-raw back.
Fingers reach down, past her belly button, a small diagonal scar, the
coarse hair between her thighs, push in, in; it hurts, a scraping, the
rhythm, jarring. She sits down, knees wide. In, out. Nothing. Her
stomach roils, the dread returns, and emptiness; inhale, exhale. Sickness,
and her stomach heaves again. I don’t want to hurt anyone out of
carelessness. She crawls back into bed.
171
Arrival
A trickster. It sources blood that brings forth names of those beloved and condemned, plants with their written histories, the storm clouds, the distant sound of thunder. It bears a language of its own, this collection of names with soft and intricate syllables, like blended tinctures, words and words that are repeated and revered. Its eyes are half-shut, anticipating and sleepy. See, a marigold: a proclamation of cruelty, jealousy and grief, the listing strikes true. For when the fox spirit travels from land to land, its body shirks and cries; in parts it is terrified and bemused. ‘You are the sun and moon,’ it says and the phrase resonates deeply. (But it can't—it can't say for certain, what it is to feel attached to a thing, a creature or person; its life makes sense through purpose and delicate action, being needed, wired and stretched thin.)
Even so, that woman proves to be an interesting specimen. Look here, where the snakes are at rest, sleeping with their bellies full of bird egg—the stories emerge as a ritual, as a remembrance (—and look, the dead knots tied onto her feet and bent fingers, fractured, all of them).
The offering of flowers, as a thanksgiving, is made on a plank of wood, in the river. Muddied and dark, even on a summer day, the water swallows them quietly and in private, and it is here that the fox spirit wavers. The man on the boathouse is the only witness, and back and forth along the stream he travels; the currents made by the surrounding boats obscure any words he might have spoken—from where the sun hits the water surface, to where the occasional tree shadows it, deep in his gut, there is isolation and stillness. Heavy ropes are tied around his 172 waist and thrown over his right shoulder. Hopefully he will keep his own counsel.
173
Aggravation
And once you fall out of that spell?
What then? In my breast, which seems dried up, my milk is leaping. I am sleepless and steadfast, blank, and in chills. Nightmares fill the sun, pitiless, and if you look up, steady now, see how they are flying? It’s just one more thing to get through, Babylonia-love, so you can feel the feverish sweat. It’s much too bright outside. There’s this children’s book
I saw once, The Rules of Summer. Two boys, burnt grass, wide open spaces, a machine with a lidded almond-shaped eye. I won’t be exonerated from this, I know, having been incubated, already owing too much. Be inexpedient with your wishes, a voice says. Impoverish others and your mind; leave them there: desert, like you have been deserted. In a violation of the laws of one’s land.
174
Filth
This monster grows, incurable. So I wait, watching as the shadows recede and blossom. The grey and murky sky will surely come. There are paintings, portraits, beautiful ones, careless ones, those lacking in effort, those borne from hatred. My arm hangs from my body, heavy and aching, my shoulder follows, my mind is filled with blankness as I navigate, searching for anchors. Only: it is slow going, as they say, this process of self-portraiture, but vivid, worthy of something like uncanny retrospective views, or striking vocal responses. Mine is tucked in a corner, near the closet; I’ve been fatigued, too tired to look at myself.
The shadows follow my every movement, and the moon illuminates.
A finger follows the shoulder to the clavicle. I wonder who is it that I can’t forgive? My skin itches, my back hurts; I cannot rest. Leave, here, the traces of my thoughts—if only you had let me rest. Those shadows like bodies, like maps and trajectories, crawling through, water-bound, close to the borderless land. The heat against my cheek, down on the floor, extinguishable. Left hardened and covered with dust
(but I cannot remember her voice):
1. cerulean
2. crimson
3. vermillion
I know what it’s like to be cut open from my breastbone to my belly. I
refuse to touch you.
175
Affection
I had to stand on my toes to look at his portrait. It was not what I expected, when I went into his room for the first time: the pillow was gone, his blanket pulled taut under the mattress with bedsheets. Next to his door was a hook that hung his light polyester jacket. On his table lay his magnifying glass, an old camera film, a metal water bottle. The portrait was there, leaning against the door to his bathroom. His smile looked fierce, showed more of his teeth than she remembered; the pupils were darker than his real ones, his eyelashes long and sharp. It was like this: a photograph of his feet in their pond, the leaves of a lotus pushed at his ankles. He gave me a key ring with pieces of hands and feet once, a baby’s. Hey there, look what I’ve got for you, while a paint brush swiped at my nose, unsuspecting, wet and sticky, look here. Mother seemed too quiet and haggard, so I spun the brush between my thumb and index finger—huh, the green bits have dried at the tip—drop it on her foot, no reaction. He nagged at me to cut my nails, I remember, and he—he—he never cleaned them up properly, and there were the nails on the floorboards, she had frowned then. But at least they looked like— father’s—Father, the jackfruit tree isn’t thriving, look. I had dirt under my nails from stuffing the bark in a conical flask. I added some seeds, see if something happens. The key ring. My belly is growing.
176
Boundaries
With mosquitos buzzing at night, I take those seeds into my mouth—it is the open spaces that get to me so easily, once I find this, a possibility: the fox spirit knocks on my doors, windows, rooftop, these worried, energetic movements, fierce and awake, in the middle of the night which is warm and distant with florescent paper-covered lights, flapping kites and standing lamps. A list: disjointed architectural spaces and disjointed dreams, light-headedness and excitement flare. Feverish skin, muscle cramps and I vomit like a child. Commerce, like fireflies moving across the river to step inside the boxing ring (who was I at the time time?), this failure of business, and to step onto a small boat made of wood where words are incomprehensible. Distance, footwork and centre of gravity: in the midst of waking, the colours that blur, they have not abandoned me yet, I am left with sweat and coloured lights behind eyelids. What have I done? The seeds are bitter and they burn. Food can no longer be swallowed. Things that could have happened, in sleep, heavy.
177
Bones, eyes
Don’t look, touch, feel, hear things. A room where the curtain flaps high and the afternoon sun always finds its way in. The mortar grinds and grinds, resulting in rich pastels. A stick sweeps at the edges, a soft willowy sound. Even when ghosts come to visit and beings collide, everything is ornamented, glistens, constantly: the movements for the making of things. From this the consistency of the paste is produced just so, with grainy pieces to be rubbed on the side of the wrist to test the colour. Contentment, that’s what it is, with black eyepiece canisters (it would have been good to help with those lenses as a surprise); a loose doorknob, rusted bronze; and a dog’s tooth on the other end of the room.
They would have been horrified, if they had remembered, but she helped the neighbour’s dog once with his infected molar and it had become hers to keep. There it is. A little heavy on the nose, perhaps, but the details around the eyes have improved, the shading more astute. She had been sitting right next to the window with the afternoon sun—it would be good to do a version with her oils. She’s been taking them on so quickly, one by one, a finished canvas and the next—she’s been worried, she’s asked her to rest, four in the morning now, more difficult to breathe, like having too much oxygen, like wanting to throw up. I have an aversion for such strange heights, stray thought passes through as she lifts her throbbing head. She can’t see clearly except for the collapsed curtains next to her and the portrait. She looks regal and bright, like a child. Fit a gas mask over her face and she might feel better (she’d always lacked oxygen in the brain), what was it that they used to say?—Amorites and 178 their lamps—holding their fire torches as they travel the mountains; the front focal length seen as she flies is engraved onto her body, a worn piece of cloth clipped over her eyes with wooden pegs. Only the body, rotten as it is, is needed to sustain the house, and the house sustains it; that’s the certainty. Sometimes, she can feel her strength returning as the ground hums beneath her. Her finger twitches.
179
Gifts
In the aftermath: water under the skin and surrounding tender muscles,
a swollen ankle and aching knuckle joints. Permissible, memory,
elevated. Bruises, hands rubbing over tea leaves, fresh, a bitter smell;
and scabs on skin, close to fully healed.
In theory, stepping aside, here are the shadows, and here, thrown
back, remunerated, and I’m here, held tight, hands locked and
folding, wrists twisted and folding, bi-partisan, mottled and
arching.
Comforting, elusive, this process of decay.
180
Ahistorical
Perhaps the fox is already here. I need to make my way, roll onto my stomach and crawl if I have to. I miss my body, which is dragging, slap a hand forward and pull, next, the opposite leg, like a house-bound frog.
And hers, well, hers was easier, and look what she had on her desk: a newly cut key, a test tube, plastic tubes, a sketch of a flowerless plant.
Hers was a study of grey, white, black and silver; from all sorts of materials one can discover and use. Sharp cheekbones leading to rounded cheeks, slanted eyes and elaborate stage make-up. Dried leaves and blackened twigs adorn the top of her eyes, at the edges, the colour of crushed pearls. The key, she gave her for an old refurbished chest, varnished. But the rest, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t remember. There has to be a way to escape this place. Her stomach is getting heavier, she can feel the baby move, a further distention of her skin.
Already, it withers.
181
Gas mask
The toxins are particulate; an incantation, really, and a rarity. The process of harvesting poison—the leaves and stalks of a rhubarb, for instance. (As for the way affection manifests, it’s like hiding underneath a cave where a hole has been tunnelled through unfertile soil, and in this underground:
-a garbage can with a metallic lid, aluminium
-a peach seed, hollowed brown
-tree branches
-it’s harrowing.
The term ‘safety’ suggests old thoughts and a weaponless night, but in actuality, a thin membrane of a scaled fish, waiting. There is no blood flow, the muscles contract, the production of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen, the expulsion of waste matter. This, the failure to build the body as an antidote to all poisons, all matter of harm.
182
Dexterous
Already, it withers.
Four years ago, there was a lack of clarity, the spider web, all around the corners and under your bed. You, a shadow, the impatient one, needles and burst balloons—imagine your head looking like that— experiments and accidental combination of light. Please explain it to me again. You shouldn’t get lost, explain it to me again, and be careful because I cannot see from my right. These were your sunflower seeds; remember the stories Mother would tell you, and how I tried to get you to plant them? You were the best among us. Here’s a ruler, a Bunsen burner (remember not to give it too much oxygen, it frightens me, the green), some matches. Scour for these things. Get a good—non- leaking!—flask, bring the saline solution to boiling point, then the
Benedict’s solution, and use that strip of coarse paper. Time it, observe, note down, draw and label. Draw, observe, label, note down, draw, observe, draw, draw—it resounds, and see the black feathered wings. I’d rather not give them to you. I can’t find you. Which room are you in?
Tell me where you are. Tell me your name. Someone answer me. But now, with your eyes averted, with me in front of you, tied down, my eyes on the ceiling. No sound. Then, the burning of ghost money at funerals, incense, the fumes, calligraphic; the fox spirit sits with its eyes closed, anxious. At its feet are scattered black feathers, snapped white bones that appear smaller than they should be, dry and shrunken twigs, their bodies petal-less.
183
Plants
If the plan was to leave, which way would you go—which land is yours now that you’ve extricated yourself? He was grooming us, setting up with the charms of words and gestures, constructing traps. The preparation was intricate, in secret, in isolation. And now, everything has left, a weight presses down, the ground is tilting at thirty degrees and your feet are slipping—the bathtub is unwashed, tiled floors littered with burnt matches, dirt, jars of liquid with plant material from the garden, surrounded by potted ferns and tall windows, separate and unattached.
Having been initiated and decided by the requirements of a cat’s cradle, trained fingers, and the stretching of worn fabric: himself, his rituals and his weapons, when he strikes, it is like the disordered clotting of blood in the body.
184
Preserve
The words you say I wanted: the lifting of the minute-hand with sudden shifts of words the ones we’ve read and whispered and the archways they echo through they are slightly off-pitch but corrected in the next instant and on the reflective surface the scarred skin on my back and then a boy asks if he could just leave and out of the jar comes an elaborate mess of tangled things and unlike threads they can’t be cut and
I can’t go off into the woods even though I want to and the weather hasn’t changed in the last two decades and we can’t get enough rain and the crops are dead and we are starving and the numbers don’t make sense and what is this thing crawling on your face and thin-legged I’m too frightened to look away because it might come for me.
185
Restless
Like stories, it never really disappears. It goes like this:
Aversion: The deeply sleeping monster crawls, unbidden and out of your throat, saliva clinging to its closed eyelids, a sleepwalker. To starve oneself of human contact: To have more than enough and then not enough; there is nothing for it, the revulsion and the wanting alternates. Decisive: The sharpshooter hides, and among the bushes wild fruit grows, the colours turn a deeper hue; the gun is freshly oiled, the target, slow-moving, comes into my line of vision. Occlude: The square- root of twenty-five, five times. Corrosive: The fleshy rotten punctured thing drags the bricked and fiercely cut miser bones—stretch and twist and push below stagnant eyelids: red-ish white with infection, fire beneath the iced-on skin, drip-drop, and leading to the hanged-amidst- of-tumbling reeds on grounds; they are airy like under the tree branches where cloudless skies and dark drooping shadows swallow moons into branches. Limestone skin: At the limits, it won’t respond if you’re not careful. It’s too close, there’s too much fear in being dependent on things that fall over edges. So it stays, still, with wilfully shut eyes, mouth and ears. Furs: An armoury, and within it: knives, staffs, history lessons, instinct, movement, stillness, breath, control, space, raised arms, parry, blocked hands, parry, feet and toed-in edges, circular motions, patience.
Soreness: Can you bring this out of me: the carnival air, a child running up, a large smile on a quiet face, the wind puckering through the landscape and sweet-smelling stalls, travelling Ferris wheels and machine-operated horses, hours that seep into the skin, sigh-filled and 186 rocking. Avoidance and a lever: mass times gravitational acceleration.
Gutted, the sun, pleas, soundless and snaking through organs. Fingers and light applications of pressure, soundless. Sand: There’s a weighty pull on the wrist and a draft blasts through—a seized thought, coin-thin.
This missing doesn’t just run its course but presses on every surface it can touch. It leaves a little room to recollect though, before a gust washes over, leaving the body breathless and hollow.
Already, it withers. Please tell me your name. Take one, it’s unwieldy, wear it. I take one, but the word doesn’t look good against my skin. I leave each letter by the mirror, and according to which, the scarring on my back has grown prominent.
187
Arithmomancy
A dribble of yellow ink spreads, reaches across edges and ends in ruins:
a balm. Acid burns, the threat of it, a blustering thing, vaunted and a
self-contemptuous cheer, thrown. And if she was to blame, why?
incurable—a love elegy, sitting at the table, the seat across is empty, the
night sky crowding inwards, the unexpected swelling from mosquito
bites. Think of a name, of an adolescent, of a child. Two days or three,
four, a week. Papers on the table, from a mould, stretched, pressed dry.
Recitation of names, lines, to the point of saturation, in equal parts. My
name, my letters, into numbers. Counting, how many are with me now?
188
Akkadian
An elegy, these stone sculptures, coloured like old ivory, held cohesive
by lines—attached: and so, through paper-making a mixture semi-solid,
broken in and swirling. The fox spirit snuck in through the window, and
standing amongst a family of green lanterns, pine green, myrtle green,
dark moss green: midori and—to be in leaf, to flourish. I won’t be able
to do it, let you go like that. From Prussian blue to a partially transparent,
deep saffron, to mustard yellow pigment. A script, likely in
remembrance and scraped out, non-orchestral, industrialised. In the
sights of birds of prey, tired out, a brown snake calms—in hiding, falsely
so, and the lizards, they—they’re—
Covetous, I live for these transitions.
189
Care
To the north-west, at the edge of the river-strewn landscape, the soil turns arid, lacking in nutrients necessary for plants to grow. The plant hunters, they are long gone, as is the hope of this forgotten land being rediscovered. But there are things that can be sacrificed, for this is the tragedy, in two-folds: that she can't forget, and that beyond the fear, beyond the humiliation and the need for sustenance, a restlessness crawls and shimmers against the skin, takes hold and creates an open wound. A flesh wound, really, necessarily, a balm against intoxication, the heady illusion of judgement, the kind of surety of knowledge that spins and spins. But that balm is rancid and ineffective, and so fury curls in her throat, her jaws are locked. Like the headless stalks that are bullied in the harsh wind (a foretelling of rain), the fox spirit hovers and questions, always questions: in sleep, at an angle, her body is tense, no relief, and in wakefulness, like a renaissance, energetic, clawed. A fraternal twin, hers even when there's danger, groomed. And lost, the both of them. Their existence is a rare chance, statistically impressive.
But he's gone now. Back in their house, there's the first person to leave a painting behind, then the second, third, fourth and fifth: a thing of nightmares, really, the ones that cling to her consciousness, and now her body refuses to move. The aftereffects, she supposes, of being filled to the brim—with people pushing and jostling, asking for things they have no right to ask, murmuring and laughing, and then, suddenly, to be alone.
See, this, unceasingly: I wake to the sound of spinning bicycle wheels, omnipresent and hard on the ears. With no one in the room, everything 190 is in its place: the piano sits in the corner, covered with dust, the windows are shut and shaded with water stains, the tables and chairs are wrapped in plastic. Still I walk, a sentinel both protective and curious, and strangely tired. There is no homecoming. On the right of each doorway, there's a bowl—shiny, made of blue, grey and gold, the best features of the sea, filled halfway with cool water. Next to each of them, there's incense, and a lit candle, the gathering smoke stings her eyes. In an empty room, the fox spirit starts to draw, haltingly, the alphabets and characters, listing them like those complicated dictionaries. The dark ink drips down its robes, and it looks down sadly, the brush poised in mid- air, further, its hunger for paper is starting to manifest. It quenches its rising anxiety and resumes its work.
Really, they are guilty, the both of them: kin who are alike in every way except for their thinking. Chromosomes, enzymes, hormones, neurons, any number of things that result from the splitting of a faulty embryo (according to her grandfather)—a curious interaction of variables, all suspect in their transgressions against each other. She is curious, lacking any hesitation to use others. And so was he, only, there is a sharpness to his gestures, prone to hurt, and fast—there is no sense in stopping, no time for doubts, he insisted, as his hands wrap around her throat. And she supposes he loved her, in an artless, absolute and elegant way. Perhaps, first, some kind of an end: in their attempt to deliver the world from pain, the snakes gather and they draw poison into themselves, but, the multitude of toxic flowers is overwhelming; just a small bulb of a narcissus is enough to render them unconscious, lead
191 them into shock, into paralysis, and in some cases, death. In the light of their loss and failure, they hide in the trees, clinging to each other in their recovery, the shame sticks to them even after they shed their scale-like skin. (The ants dig a nest for them, but the space is too small, and their efforts remain unappreciated.) She would have forgiven them, her shadows, if they had let her rest after his body was burned, just let her sleep and sleep until her body sinks into the dirt with only her face to surface, let her skin shrivel, her organs shrink, her eyes trained onto the unshifting sky.
192
Power, ruler, home
This is for me, and no one can take it away. For my eyes to see, and no one else. Disused voice and familiar rhythms, in childhood, where my machine is stuttering, prayer beads on the wrist, dark brown and red. For your protection. But then, there he is—three quarters in profile, a distance away. And here is where I dream of you, to spur and sustain this notion between us, to possess command over others, and since I can’t hold this strength, this failing permeates. Though in this (now that
I admit to it, strapped to the brain), thoughts stray deep into the vessels, navigating this interrogation of carbon dioxide, ash and fire. And spurring you on, this strength that I’ve been thought to have, with words that are stuck and then thrown away (that I want to know the place that you come from, the sounds and meanings that can be decanted from your name) and then reclaimed, back here. And march into the desired nautical coordinates you have given me—I have them written on my hand. And this is how I hate: creating a place of refuge, sovereign and unwillingly corrosive.
193
Delusional
By degrees, in time, this will be how I remember you (the places I have walked, as I have been made terrible, transformed, flaunted), in the sense that I will be made to remember you, with the returning shadows broken through skin and heavy clothing, but the face that my hand follows is different from the faces that I see. This lit room, shaded with paperweights, and me—thrown into shadows by insufficient suns, by degrees. Infusions and rituals for the dead, that they died so that we could live—only, we, holding sticks in that room flooded with water and smoking incense, the building of a paper house.
194
II—Throned, a swaggering thing
195
Alchemic
The skin as an unending procession of red patches, propelled, seeping
into black; perhaps an infection, vine-leaves and vinegar for the sting,
the smell of saltwater while sand chafes at our skin, markers for those
almost lost. The thing with pining and all manners of mourning is that
they are boundless. A suffix to gestures and movement. The shadow
across the back and shoulder disappears, the skin is now becoming an
old hunting ground. Raised patterns, slowly, the rash spreads together
with ink that rolls down the shoulder blades. Markers: the house slowly
shifts, the sunlight oscillates, uninterrupted. A salve, a jar of poultice
made of lemongrass and lime leaves. (But is it for me to say, extending
further than language structures that I miss you? That is to write in a
different language, he is only human, within these structures of control.)
196
Risen, cumulative
They had to die so that we could live: think of a movement that chases
comfort in darkness, as a form of sustenance, as a signal fire. Floods and
burnt grass in the mud, with a stunted tree and no one near: a place where
it rains and rains, but the smell of smoke still overwhelms. We would
not be here otherwise, if not their death written into our bodies.
197
Charred
Skin forked and peeling, a cleaved heart, snakes around my neck and
face, feathered, blood pulsing from torn valves. But a dead and flaking
layer of skin is still a resilient covering, reaching from the collarbone to
the jaw and the corner of the lips, revealing angry raised scales of a
resting and cold reptile. Poison to the nervous system, latent and
waiting—letters that were sent, seeds that are unfolded and rectangular.
198
Ambush
In the company of dried fish, their heads cut off. If you have to
remember me, remember me thus: speaking precise words and trusting
gestures, the things I have made. They are lying on the ground next to
my fists, the necks hollowed out—the flesh scraped from the skin.
Tendrils curling, no fear. Think of this when you are trapped amongst
the many blankets, damp, the many languages that have deserted you.
(It is not within your control, strangling, vengeful, and here is the place
that has been consigned). Salient, swiftly, seamless, with white sticky
substance that I vomit like a child. Seen. Dry leaves break under the
weight of my head. Blue and dark blue, chipped. Sweat dripping. I am
what you are. I create fear in others. And I wish you were here to take
my place in death. Substantive. I give you credibility—the flow of
oxygen in the circulatory system. Scaled, feet and wrists tied down. But
people suffer endlessly. Keep looking. Stay silent.
199
Air
In askance, languid and statured, decided, lawless; the baby’s face is a
stranger’s and its umbilical cord is tied around its neck, the way it has
latched onto her sore nipple and won’t let go. Tears are falling, but she
feels nothing; she can’t move her limbs and her fingers are too numb to
tug at the slimy bleeding thing attached to her chest.
She had a feeling, the first time the baby kicked, that perhaps one of them would not survive. Five months along, and already, she could barely move. The skin on her back was especially dry, and the itchiness drove her to distraction. Thinking of the knife pushed into his chest, the pressure eases. What things are like in the garden: the mature plants are flowering, echoes of their historical manifestations, with restricted movement, yet gangrenous and careless. She should miss him, though something does unfurl and flourish in her sternum—what with his grievances against her that causes her to weep. There, a face disintegrating despite the need for survival: intentions are corded and kept safe, but self-love is tiresome (bearing madness), and her muscles strain and fail her. The moment in which her body submits, she turns away and catches a lotus in the unlikeliest of places, coiled around a stone, and clutching it in her hand she wonders at knowing the time and particulars of one's death.
200
Inchoate
Stationary thoughts that matter or don’t matter, the grainy rocks dig into
my back, inconceivable, the heat blurs the swats of colour, heaped on
and inhaled into the hazy scorched lake in the line of sight, with salt in
my eyes, the trees are shaking and shifting—the sun falling through the
leaves onto the drying hair and body. The edge of the concrete cuts red
and purple marks along my spine, with an arm flung out, the dirt hard
and arid underneath my knuckles.
201
Aril
More than an inconvenience, an interrogation of sorts: stepping into the
ants’ nest, wrapped up in contingencies, the insects crawl up the feet,
ankles and legs—their defiance is miasmal. Dogs whine and the sound
echo gently, as if travelling from the ground up. Their inconsistency is
telling, partial and strained into grievances, in which growls become
deeper and gruff. And the discolouration on her neck, beyond reproach.
(We are all adaptable, self-consciously so—the posture in which the
body is placed—well-composed yet struggling). Yapping and barking
follow, curling from the neck to the back of the ear.
202
Old tobacco pipe
There are places that you are not supposed to go back to. Watching from
the periphery, not alive enough; the setting sun is paralysed, paused
halfway between the drying ground and the birds, nesting. He said he
loved me, but, crossing boundaries and his hands on my face and
wandering, tracing the outlines of a corpse-like body, he never gave me
a name. Make it through, I thought, I can’t be touched, make it through:
the haze engulfs my head, swallowing, just enough to make it—the
audience like statued people, eyes averted, boring into the cloudless sky.
203
Bereft, bereavement
When awake: those heavy hunting boots with mould and wet dirt, one
houses a fractured foot, an old language from the corner of the room,
elongated. The house grows, a maw, digesting, roiling with acid. Pushed
down onto unsteady grounds, and meanwhile the ceiling is draped with
dust. Maw.
-Yes
-Yes, but not—
Pushed down on my neck, my legs and torso, trapped; I forget the ways
in which I could hide, so I then take directions, fleeing, without exit
strategies—the whole thing is enclosed in shades: scaling up
construction rails, the scaffolded half-open building shakes and makes
clanging noises—inevitable, really—with these aluminium sheets; it has
no light, except for the high and narrow window demarcated by small
wooden planks. The sun sneaks in. A salivating mouth. I need help,
please. Tied and immobilised. A familiar red dress, dark silk and heavy,
climbing, cankerous. I smell of mould and wet dirt. A need uncurls low
in the belly, and this I cannot forgive. Below, a playground, at the edge
and out of frame: sunlight in parts, mostly in shadows. A tinted washed-
out colour, adrift and crowding into a stranger’s face, obscured, mauled.
I fall asleep to dream of these things—a fear of falling, being held; like
dark and endless movements, this excitement and lack of care:
physicalised and unbidden. Anorectic.
204
Uptake
Holy basil flower in a container of sprigs, time runs sibilant and other
designed, sounds cut off from the original source, spaced out and spaced
in-between and in-between corners of see how I put my hands on my
face. Plosives and sputterings and things in silence and hiding and
stillness standing in for an external source and I can’t hear the water and
the harrowing soreness deep within the chest, they say it takes root from
the sun lying in wait too much two satellite sounds orbiting critters
among the sand. And I fear for that child, still I don’t have the energy
needed. Expenditure and not of the hollowed sores, a carcass left with a
whirling brain—it twirls and twirls. Like open-mouthed laughter, jaw
unhinged. Don’t say that around me because I can’t stand the flowers
resting, a dead language. Like a fused tree. Perpendicular. Immobile, but
only for a set period of time. Just think of the cartographies, the history
of the spice trade. Years and years of stone erosion; the smell of brisk
salt water, lying in wait for—they turn away and I can’t tell stories like
I used to: jarring pauses, lack of words, memory, emotion: all the things
they ask for that I can’t provide. Pyres, smoke from burnt papers,
warmth for the flesh, firewood, stacked. All of this is yours to keep. For
meat, succulent and wanting. Remember, the language of flowers is a
dead language, for they can’t stand to be looked at. Or me. They suffer
to be enshrined and stand in crisis. I don’t know how this will work and
this being in the dark and frowns drawn out from the skin into the pillow
case and look at the proliferating lines, the lack of clarity is hateful in 205 the absence of the sun for a moment there I thought you—I thought you were going to and look how I thought of you so certain and precise and by that I mean made up in my brain which has been busy and my eyes follow, the rest of my body, suspect—though they are also afraid— muscles revving to flee, they said. Conjuring, conduit, it’s all in my imagination, nothing, presently, nothing, so scrying and rest. Cleaned from my hands—see now, how they run. The eyes and the nose and the tongue. Clogged, clover, cleaned. Stances. Now. Presently. Defensive.
Hide and see how far you can go. Lobster-red. Envelopes like haze, like dust. Sound studies. Look at the city landscape and here I will take you by the hand—throat. And so take it down. Take everything.
206
Ardent and corresponding
She strips the tree of its bark, eats them in lengthy pieces, the dying: that
could have been her, in different ways, and sight. Dream-like and
wanting, expecting you to be here, kindly. But I can imagine, still, with
this unforgiving thought and arms locked, held down, face pushed into
the ground. Unending, always. Think: twisted in ways you can’t
imagine, where the portraits are set on an altar, tall and fixed, as is in the
darkness. As it turns out, I am good with death: I call fourth this image
while his strong and wrinkled fingers wander, unasked. And me, like an
alter ego, a doll, frozen and in denial, having lost all sense of direction,
with blood stains for all to see, watching him wipe his hands on an old
white shirt.
207
Anatomy
Anatomical knowledge, effective
in uncertain terms—torched, bracing—a taste of metal on the
tongue, cold, a prime number on the back of the hand (they are
partial to eleven),
the chambers spinning, the back of the throat,
oratory, a click of the gun, many suns revolving, a maze, puzzled
and pressure points. Shine, and the importance of reflection in
summer, vectors in logarithmic equations. Movements driven
from desirous states. If being uncontrolled means it cannot be
mapped, its trajectory cannot be predicted—
the back of the hand, differentials, scheming:
legs held open and searing pain as the baby crawls back into the womb,
enraged at the world and its lack of kindness, stretching, rolling forward.
And diagonally from her aching head, the incense keeps burning.
Don’t think less of me. An insect.
Stay, stay.
Dreams, choking. I cannot touch you.
If you configure loss in a certain way, would you be able to find a way
out of it?
208
Articulate, oratory
Words, imagerial, crippling thoughts, only, make it through. The strong
late morning sun, sweat down the temples, back of the neck. What with
asking, retelling, propagating, this wanting to talk about things,
overwhelmed, failed vocal chords, sentence construction, and that old
tobacco pipe: clutched, inhaled, resistant, aril of the fleshy and sallow
plant—its seeds have grown this—now write movement into language,
broken in, poisonous.
209
Ishtar
An incision between the shoulder blades, intently, on acid-burnt skin.
Pushed beyond the limits of what I am. Drums and upended bells,
stationed. The portrait, idealised, crippling. By my own design, and the
things that could be said, given the chance. The fear of falling, spread
thin, denied to the end. Marginal, the gall to, teeming with, filled to the
brim. So don’t speak to me like that. But why not me? Congregating into
their nests, the ants travel underground through dry and arid soil with
the summer burning, the smog and the sawed timbers, now that I’ve
found a place to rest my head, and the colours meld into an armour,
slowly, in grey, sliding onto the sycamore tree sturdily, the imagined
falls, the northern hemisphere from whence I came, to be left without a
history, crossing the equator, seamless.
210
The kind of anger that is senseless
I was done; there were lines that separate us so I don’t have to know
you. I no longer want to be here (if only I could see you): to be easily
dismissed by others: I remember clutching those things in my hand,
sharp and ready to hurt. I don’t miss you: you are selfish and bragging,
angry, absorbed in how clever you are, how right. This process of
decomposition continues. It wants to get away from here, so it crawls,
tears away the red flesh of the labia with its round meaty hands, pushes
its head through the vaginal opening, pushes further in, its shoulders
meet stronger resistance, chafing the dry flesh until it bleeds, its belly
grazes the ground until it slides, slowly, between her legs. Its knees push
on a particularly painful spot, and she couldn’t brace herself fast enough
to prevent a cry from escaping. Inside the warmth of the uterus, its skin
starts to melt away, consumed by fungus and bacteria, causing bloating
and the excretion of fluids.
211
Adrenomimetic
Throned, adroitly, but they do speak ill of the dead—necromatic theorems, in payment for my endeavours; it’s a failure of business, this dysfunctional marrow—that they know what I am:
pancreatic and silent, in dreams, I do want this, I do, but I don’t.
Mastery and self-love: factors which characterise, tediously, my
folly, anchorless, into depths, into noise. What does it matter, if I
should say that I don’t want this—hard on the ears as the words
tumble down, and these pebbled things—this self-deception—this
madness.
There you go, saying those kinds of words. I am telling you that you
have to forget this. There is no stable ground on which I can land. I don’t
have no desire to talk. There is no emotion you can provoke in me that
I have not felt before. And there is nothing you can do to me to provoke
an emotion I have will not feel.
212
Sketches, charcoal
and chemical reactions: remember that this place of the body and mind
is a dangerous place. An imposition, these acts of cruelty (as preludes to
self-emptiness). In question, dualisms and precedents. No stars, no sun,
but having strung up these stones by thin wires that barely break skin,
the things to be done with the heaviness that is lacing through: it pushes
down, and lower still, so I forget for a moment that there are flowers on
the stalks instead of leaves, and nearby, the petals push through the barks
of a tree trunk, their mouths gaping. I can’t take them in my hands.
If she could have done something differently, it would be this: crushed poppy, narcissus and datura, fresh seeds, petals and bulbs, dried and powered, stuffed into his mouth and down his throat. He can bite hard on her hand, he's got nothing on the snakes. The feeling of his tongue, the foaming of saliva, her hands gentle on his face. She was curious, that’s all. They hang bay leaves underneath the cupboards: I change but in death. Then, the endless litany of days. The fox spirit cries when the calligrapher disappears, its small body curls up, breathless and inconsolable. In the night, she thinks of heavy and brightly coloured ceremonial robes, of a new way to walk and laugh, like a puppeteer's learning of a foreign language, of a new systematic thought; see now, how the house is dimly lit as the fire burns a green and blue flame. The fox spirit puts a leaf on its head, but its power fails it, there’s no water, no hint of a transformation.
213
Conclusion
This thesis examined how certain metaphors express experiences, often bodily ones, that are difficult to articulate and often remain unwritten. The creative component of this thesis sought to explore new ways in which metaphors can express the bodily, mental and emotional experiences of ‘moments of being.’ In addition, the creative work as a whole experiments with how the physical, abstract, human and non-human bodies can be written such that bodily and emotional experiences that are difficult to articulate can be expressed. The collection of poetry continues the work done in the critical analysis by providing a different method of exploring the idea of a metaphoric environment, of how the body can be figured in and by such an environment, and of how it can be written. The two parts of the poetry collection share the same metaphors even though they take place in differing landscapes, with the same metaphors repeated in the two parts. ‘The Laughter and the Crow’ follows a salivating monstrous plant as it travels across a flooded city, and a crow born from a tree trunk that was too small for its body, a calligrapher and a book- eating fox spirit. ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits’ is about a woman living in a house where the present moments are interspersed with the imaginings of the past to the point where she cannot distinguish between the two. Writing prose poetry that contains narrative threads enabled me to create scenes with a less restrictive plot. Similar to the way in which Woolf’s poetic prose in The Waves does not fit neatly into the genre of the novel, these prose poems are closer to narrative fiction than conventional collections of prose poetry. As mentioned in the introduction, I have experimented with performing the text during the writing of these poetry collections, but the physical performance is by no means the main aim of the project. Rather, it is part of a larger exploration of the body, consciousness and language. Fundamentally, the creative work is an attempt to resist the
214 repressive silence surrounding certain bodily experience. Writing about confronting experiences that are difficult to speak of or make sense of by combining a cohesive narrative with the use of poetic devices is one way to do this. Within the metaphoric environment, repetition shows how experiences of multiple subjects are connected.
Juxtaposition brings different aspects of a subject’s experience together in the poetry collection, such as the unexpected pairing of emotions one might feel regarding a particular event. The speakers in the prose poems are presented in a way that emphasises characters’ intersubjectivity. Put together, these poetic devices portray how the formation of the subject can constantly shift, and how the formation and dissolution of the subject can be expressed through the subject’s experience of the environment. The way that subjects are connected to the environment shows that space and time can be written in a way that expresses the subjects’ lived experiences, which provides another method to mitigate the difficulty of expressing overwhelming experiences.
The issues of gender and the expression of female bodily experience were discussed briefly in the introduction of the thesis. In particular, I raised the problem of the presentation of the female body as monstrous and deformed in writing.1 At the same time, there is a possibility of writing as a method of expressing bodily experience and as a way to make sense of negative experience, such as the traumatic bodily experience of a female subject. And in this venture, it can be a necessity to present the body as monstrous, while keeping in mind the risk of falling into the damaging depictions of the female body and subject that are prescribed by society. Moreover, by including experiences of both female and male subjects, as well as animals and the plant, I hope to disrupt the convention that dictates the monstrous and the abject to be only the female body and
1 Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, 16. As Taylor observes, the female subject is often depicted as having a tendency towards madness and suicide. See Taylor, ‘Kristevan Themes in The Waves,' 18. 215 subject. Issues of sex and gender are present in the collection of poetry, particularly in
‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits.’ In the poetry collection, the monstrous feminine, while present and true of the subject’s experience, is only one part of the experience. The writing of multiple bodies held together by their intersubjectivities via metaphors explores how the re-stabilisation of the subject might also be possible, even if that re-stabilisation is temporary. This writing also acknowledges how fraught certain experiences, such as trauma, recovery, identity and sexual politics, can be, and it suggests that connections can be made between subjects with different experiences. In-depth discussion of feminism and feminist theory is beyond the scope of this thesis, however.
The central aim of the critical chapters of this thesis has been to explore how the bodily experience of Woolf’s characters is expressed through metaphors. Furthermore, this thesis has striven to show how expression in Mrs Dalloway and The Waves encapsulates the intertwining of body and consciousness in characters’ subjectivities in ways that do not privilege either one. The scope of this thesis is limited to negative bodily experience that Woolf considers to be unwritten and difficult to express, and analyses its impact on character subjectivity.
Much of the Woolf scholarship on the body is concerned with feminism and feminist aesthetics, and understandably so, as Woolf’s contemplations of the body stem from her preoccupation with the female body and the female subject. This can be seen in her essays and her longer nonfiction writings such as A Room of One’s Own and ‘A Sketch of the Past.’ In ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ not only is there societal pressure that discourages the expression of female bodily experiences, there is also the problem of making sense of such experience which brings about that ‘dumb and mixed a feeling.’2 This thesis started with a focus on female experience, but I include male characters because of the
2 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 69. 216 commonalities of their experience of abjection and negative moments of being; these are experiences that extend beyond the female body.
This thesis has argued for the importance of metaphors in the portrayal of the experience of abjection, understood as the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness in this thesis. My analysis of Mrs Dalloway has shown how metaphors about the body parallel the experience of abjection. These metaphors illustrate the dissolution of boundaries between corporeality and consciousness, which portrays the destabilisation of characters’ subjectivities. Clarissa, one of the characters who experiences abjection and destabilized subjectivity, is able to recuperate her sense of self.
While the process of recuperation is the opposite of abjection, it is also portrayed through metaphors about the body. The relationship between corporeality and consciousness also plays an important part in the expression of bodily experience in The Waves. In this case,
I examined how metaphors that produce force bring the body into the expression of emotion, so as to portray holistically the sense of having a lived body. The repetition of the latter metaphors in The Waves illustrates how they function beyond characters’ awareness or control, independent from their subjectivity. The chapter investigated negative moments of being and the effects these experiences have on character subjectivity. The dissolution of body and consciousness in The Waves constructs intersubjectivity between characters. While motifs of waves, flowers and animals (among others) are used throughout Woolf’s body of work, the repetition of these metaphors in
The Waves is such that they operate across the different spaces of the interludes and the soliloquies. Additionally, I demonstrated how the repetition of such metaphors allows for the expression of bodily experience and showed how such language works beyond characters’ awareness and subjectivity to express experiences that are difficult to articulate.
217
As the scope of this thesis has been mostly limited to experiences of abjection and negative moments of being, further research can be done to investigate the intertwining of positive and negative moments of being. As Schröder notes, Woolf’s metaphors can also express unity and wholeness, while being interlocked with death, meaninglessness and abjection.3 Woolf’s positive moments of being include feelings of wonder and elation.4 This combination of negative and positive experiences, at extreme ends of the scale, can be observed in the following sentence from her essay ‘The Death of the Moth’
(1942): ‘As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder.’5
3 Kore-Schröder, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Body,’ 19-20. 4 The term positive moments of being originates from Sim’s The Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 141. 5 Virginia Woolf, ‘Death of the Moth,’ The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. unknown (Oxford: Benediction Press, 2011), 27. 218
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