Leonor María Martínez Serrano ORCID: 0000-0002-5114-9513 University of Córdoba (Spain) l52masel@uco.es
The Mind Is the World: Virginia Woolf on the Embodied Self Abstract
Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s insights into bodies as the place of existence, David Abram’s thinking on the more-than-human world, Jane Bennett’s conceptualisation of vibrant matter and Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “transcorporeality,” this article explores how Virginia Woolf transforms fiction into a powerful epistemological tool in her examination of the self amidst a vibrant world. In novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), Woolf found not only that human beings are finite, singular and exposed, but also porous, embodied selves that are sensuously immersed in the vitality intrinsic to matter. Fasci-nated by the flow of consciousness and the workings of the human mind when confronted with reality, the novelist seeks to capture the evanescent moment in time as refracted through the consciousness of her own characters. Her compulsion to write down impressions, thoughts, and half-ideas is expressive of her concern with imposing order upon the phenomena of a world populated by agentive entities through the medium of language. If the flux of life was simply unstoppable, language gave her at least the opportunity to freeze moments of being and look at them as if from simultaneous perspectives, as well as to shed light on how humans are in and of the earth – i.e., part of, not apart from, a more-than-human world.
Keywords:
embodied self, more-than-human, perception, transcorporeality, vibrant matter, Virginia Woolf Finite, Singular, Exposed
“Know thyself”: this is the ancient motto Thales of Miletos is said to have uttered somewhere on the coast of Asia Minor in the fifth century BCE. The pre-Socratic poet-philosophers knew that, like the universe, the self is a mystery of gigantic pro-portions. One needs to spend a whole lifetime to start making sense of what it means to be oneself, and not anybody else – or anything else, for that matter. Traditionally,
Vol. 9 pp. 295–315 2020
ISSN 2083-1226 https://doi.org/10.34858/AIC.9.2020.349
© Copyright by Institute of Music of the Pomeranian University in Słupsk Received: 10.10.2020
Accepted: 26.11.2020
the novel has looked tirelessly at human nature to try to decipher the mystery of the self from innumerable standpoints: the self vis à vis a specific social, political and hi-storical context; the self as a construct affiliated to communal entities like the nation, or as something shaped by biological and social forces such as sex, gender, race, cul-ture or language; the self as the crossroads where time and being meet in the process of apprehension of physical reality; or the self as a solipsistic entity, distinct from the outside world and yet inevitably partaking of the bustle of life as an embodied mind or consciousness. Whatever we might mean by self or individual, it remains a central category that is inextricably linked to the way Western thought has conceived of hu-man beings, a tradition whose origins can be traced back to the very cradle of Greek philosophy. In other words, our understanding of the self is closely determined by Western notions of human nature – i.e., of what it means to be human.
The aim of this article is to elucidate the meaning of such complex concepts as the self’s finitude, singularity and exposure as depicted in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, by drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s insights into the body as the place of existence, Jane Bennett’s conceptualisation of vibrant matter, David Abram’s ecophilosophical think-ing on our sensuous, embodied relationship to the more-than-human world, and Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “transcorporeality.” More specifically, this article examines the way the Modernist author seeks to depict diverse landscapes of the embodied self, fas-cinated as she was by the participatory nature of perception, the flow of conscious ness and the workings of the human mind. Reading Woolf’s works, readers find them selves in the presence of an omnivorous and sensitive mind, involved in deep thinking about the interactions between humans and a vibrant world of agentive entities. In fact, in an essay titled “Modern Fiction,” Woolf asserts that her aim is to “examine an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” and how it is shaped by what she calls “a myriad
impres-sions” and “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms”1 coming from all di rections.
Likewise, in “Life and the Novelist,” Woolf explains that her artistic vision amounts to capturing the endless flux of life through the medium of language:
Taste, sound, movement, a few words here, a gesture there, a man coming in, a woman going out, even the motor that passes in the street or the beggar who shuffles along the pavement, and all the reds and blues and lights and shades of the scene.2
Reading Woolf’s texts is an experience of lasting aesthetic value, as readers are confronted with a perceptive mind thinking deeply about the world, sharing her dis-coveries in the hope that they might be of help in our understanding of reality and human relationships. This is no minor accomplishment. After all, knowledge was the great passion of Virginia Woolf’s life: she had an unquenchable thirst for knowl edge and she needed to make sense of the fascinating world within and around her. She loved order and harmony, and barely tolerated chaos, which may partly account for 1 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume Two (London:
The Hogarth Press, 1966), 106.
2 Virginia Woolf, “Life and the Novelist,” in Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume Two
her compulsion to write down all passing impressions, half-ideas and thoughts in the form of diaries, letters, essays, short stories and novels.
Affirming the value of the novel in capturing the human experience and portray ing human psyche, David Lodge claims that “literature is a record of human conscious-ness, the richest and most comprehensive we have” and that “the novel is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual hu man beings moving through space and time.”3 Given her acute sensibility, bound less curiosity and
all-encompassing intelligence, Virginia Woolf looks at the self and tries to capture the evanescent moment in time as reflected and refracted through the consciousness of her characters. In other words, her artistic project entails conveying the unique-ness each person feels when surveying the world from the inside of their own mind. She discovered not only that the individual of her time was finite, singular and ex-posed, but also that he/she was an undecipherable mystery. Her own self was exposed to the overwhelming flow and bombardment of data and stimuli from the surround-ing world. In addition, she was well aware that her self was finite in the face of the vastness of the world, but, at the same time, she knew that her self was singular in a way that her own personal worldview remains unique and clearly recognisable to any reader alert to the nuances of her words and the subtlety of her thinking. Her compulsion to write ultimately testifies to her concern with discerning patterns in the carpet of existence and with imposing order upon apparent chaos by means of words. Faced with a changing world, language gave her at least the opportunity to freeze moments of being and look at them as if from simultaneous perspectives. A moment of being is not synonymous with a moment, as it entails a sort of hypersensitivity to the flux of life. An artistic and spiritual concept central to Woolf’s fiction, a moment of being is a moment when an individual is fully conscious of their experience and catches a glimpse of their connection to a larger pattern hidden beneath the surface of daily life. In contrast to the states of non-being that dominate our conscious lives, moments of being are moments when an individual experiences an enhanced sense of reality, moments when time slows down and awareness sharpens, moments that have the texture of transcendence and represent landmark events in a person’s lifetime. As such, they are inextricably linked to the notion of epiphany – a moment of sudden and great revelation, a moment in time and yet outside of the province of time where everything coheres all of a sudden. In her novels, Woolf sought to portray elusive mo-ments of being – i.e., episodes in which characters are conscious of being conscious, living most fully in the present – and to share them in the form of precious epiphanies. As a result, her fiction is marked by verbal complexity and her writing replicates fluid thought: evanescent impressions, half-thoughts, associations, unexpected epiphanies, and ideas are all caught up in the web of words with great dexterity. At any rate, in spite of the sense of epistemological uncertainty and existential unease (Angst) implicit in her writing, the ultimate message of her work appears to be optimistic, as the glorious sense of being alive and the inexhaustible variety of life are tirelessly celebrated in her fiction and non-fiction.
3 David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel. Connected Essays (Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard
A World of Embodied Minds
The universe and the world of natural phenomena have always been a mystery, but homo sapiens has posed the greatest puzzle of all to the human mind. In one of the choruses of his Antigone (lines 332-375) and one of the most probing meditations on human nature, Sophocles (ca. 496-406 BCE) says: “πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.”4 That is to say: “Strangeness is frequent enough, but nothing / is ever as strange as a man is.”5 About twenty four centuries later, in a diary entry dated Friday, 7 December 1917, Virginia Woolf writes: “nothing is more fascinating than a live person; always changing, resisting & yielding against one’s forecast.”6 When Woolf’s words are set against Sophocles’, two rhyming sensibilities seem to be disc-losed. To the Greek playwright’s mind, nothing was stranger than human beings; to Virginia Woolf’s mind, nothing was more fascinating than a live person. Across oce-ans of time, the enigma of the self remains intact.
Since the cradle of Western Philosophy, humans have been conceived of as con-sisting of a body – a perishable physical part – and a mind or soul – a non-tangible, spiritual part, immortal according to some religions and philosophical systems, and an organ of cognition according to modern Neuroscience. Self, mind, soul, psyche or spi rit form a most interesting constellation of words that evoke the irreducible core that lies within the irreplaceable individual. Both body and mind constitute identity, which is the signature and uniqueness of any living being. At the beginning of the Modern Age, Descartes still embraced the notion that a human being is a split creature: res extensa was the material body and, by extension, the stuff or matter out of which the cosmos was made, whereas res cogitans was the mind, engaged in understanding the mysteries of the world. Heir to Plato’s thought, which further divided the world into the realm of perishable things (appearance) and the realm of eternal ideas (essence), – Cartesian thought left an indelible mark upon subsequent conceptions of humanity that is deeply entrenched in Western Philosophy.
In the twenty-first century, the turn towards materialism and embodiment has re-suscitated the centuries-old mind-body problem. Drawing inspiration from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, researchers in a range of disciplines have demon-strated that mental experience is “dependent not only upon the functioning brain but
upon the whole of the animate organism” or, in other words, that “the mind is less an attribute of the brain than of the living body as a whole, of which the brain is simply
a necessary constituent.”7 By revealing “the hidden, overlooked intelligence of the
4 Sophocles, Sophocles in Two Volumes. Vol. I, trans. Francis Storr (London: William Heinemann;
New York: The Macmillan Co., 1912), 340. In Storr’s translation, this line reads thus: “Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man,” 341. And in Sir Richard C. Jebb’s ren-dering, it reads slightly differently: “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.” Sophocles, The Tragedies of Sophocles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 138.
5 Robert Bringhurst, Selected Poems (Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2009), 52.
6 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 19151919 (London: Penguin Books,
1977), 85.
7 David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Knopf Doubleday
human body itself, ascribing new value to corporeal forms of knowing,”8 scholars
have shown how bodily experiences are at the root of mental categories and concepts. In this respect, in a book-length essay entitled Corpus, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy provides a most interesting definition of the ‘body’:
Bodies aren’t some kind of fullness or filled space (space is filled everywhere): they are open space, implying, in some sense, a space more properly spacious than spatial, what could also be called a place. Bodies are places of existence, and nothing exists without a place, a there, a “here”, a “here is,” for a this. […] [T]he body makes room for existence. […] The body is the being of existence.9
Thus, Nancy claims that the body is “the being-thrown-there”10 and “the very
fa-miliar strangeness of this being-there, this being-that”11 is a moving mystery with
which philosophy has been confronted since antiquity in all traditions across the glo-be. Bodies are the place of existence, “bodies are existence, the very act of
ex-isten-ce, being”12 and so we live in a world populated by vibrant and sensitive bodies. In
Nancy’s conceptualisation, only a body can touch or be touched; a spirit or a soul can do nothing of the sort. As a result, the philosopher appears to claim that ontology is to concern itself with bodies, not as shells, simulacra or deceiving appearances, but as the true places of existence. In his view, the Cartesian ego’s articulation (cogito ergo sum) makes sense inasmuch as it is literally embodied: “‘Ego’ makes sense only when it is declared, proffered (and when proffered, its sense is exactly identical to existence: ego sum, ego existo). […] In the Cartesian ego’s articulation, therefore, mouth and
mind are the same: it’s always the body.”13 Hence, body, mind and speech are central
to the constitution of humans and, as a result, “it makes no sense to talk about body and thought apart from each other”14.
Being a philosopher is an attitude to life characterised by a constant inquiry into ultimate questions concerning being, truth, life, death, love, beauty, or virtue. Virgi-nia Woolf was also a philosopher in this wider sense of the word. Instead of writing dry treatises on the wicked problems that philosophy has tackled over the centuries, she chose to write beautifully-wrought novels that are attempts at unveiling the inner landscapes of the self immersed in a vibrant world. In other words, her novels are gestures of a mind trying to decipher the irreplaceable and unique individual amidst a cosmos that is a boundless enigma. One of her undisputed masterpieces, Mrs. Dallo way (1925) reveals itself as a brilliant investigation into the self that partakes of the vi-tality of the universe. Thus, Septimus Smith, for whom human nature is remorseless, is shown struggling with an overwhelming reality in the aftermath of the Great War, after the mercilessness and the visions of horror he has witnessed on the battlefield; 8 Abram, Becoming Animal, 105.
9 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 15. 10Nancy, 13.
11Nancy, 13. 12Nancy, 19. 13Nancy, 25. 14Nancy, 35.
Sir William Bradshaw, the reputed psychiatrist, is seeking to understand and accura-tely diagnose the ailments of the human soul as represented by Septimus himself, who is Virginia Woolf’s fictional persona; Peter Walsh is trying to explain Mrs. Dalloway’s self thirty years after she refused his love; and Mrs. Dalloway herself is coming to terms with the glorious sense of being alive among people who are transparent and impenetrable at the same time, who are bound to disappear into the uncharted territo-ries of death any minute. In the end, Woolf finds that humans are vulnerable and fragile beings moved by desire, in need of solace and empathy, in pursuit of a life with a purpose, making the dots connect to produce a coherent picture at some point.
Let us consider a piece of evidence from Virginia Woolf’s novel. In Nancy’s view, bodies are always perceived as being “first and always other, just as others are first and always bodies.”15 There is, in this respect, an eloquent sense of uneasiness in the
fol-lowing passage, where Mrs. Dalloway finds herself trapped within a body not her own, floating past other bodies, and amazed by the materiality of her own bodily con stitution. As Nancy puts it, “I’ll never know my body, never know myself as a body right there where ‘corpus ego’ is an unqualified certainty.”16 Not only is the soul an undecipherable
enigma; so is the sheer physicality of the body qua vibrant, sensitive matter:
That she herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, consi-dering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore […], this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of chil-dren now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.17
Body, mind and speech make human beings. “Communication is health;
commu-nication is happiness,”18 mutters Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. Tormented by his
visions of the brutal forces he has witnessed in the Great War, he is desperately in need of communicating his emotional numbness, as well as the existential pain induced by the war. The most sophisticated vehicle for human communication, language is a boon from each and all to each and all of us. A true work in progress and a collec-tive enterprise, language is also the very basis of human societies and the tool we use for everyday social interaction and interpersonal relationships. Speaking allows us to touch other people’s sensibility – i.e., to build bridges across people’s minds and hearts, which seem to be separated by an abyss. Not in vain, in the cradle of human-ity, speaking was the basis of learning and the means of handing down invaluable, pre cious knowledge from one generation to another. Knowledge is oral then and it is born in the mouth in the first place, though the hand might be quick enough to catch what the ear can hear through the technology of writing. Writing is not just the dance of the hand along the invisible paths on paper, but also a form of touching. Put simply, 15Nancy, 29.
16Nancy, 31.
17 Selected Works of Virginia Woolf (London: Wordsworth Editions, 2005), 133. 18Woolf, Selected Works, 187.
writ ing is a way to touch knowledge and caress other people’s hands and hearts: “I know of no writing that doesn’t touch. […] Writing in its essence touches upon the body. […] Writing touches upon bodies along the absolute limit separating the sense
of the one from the skin and nerves of the other,”19 says Nancy. Touching the body
with the incorporeality of sense or meaning: this is what great writing accomplishes best of all. In this respect, we are all touched by Virginia Woolf’s writing.
Speech, learning and knowledge go hand in hand. If we admit that learning is the true vocation of all human beings from all ages, then it is reasonable to think that speaking (together with listening) is one of the essential prerequisites for learning to happen. Speaking is also the most elementary gesture that brings human beings from all ages together. It is the basis upon which human knowledge is built in the first place. Thus, in ancient times, the Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle spoke to philosophise – i.e., to verbalise their insights into ultimate questions related to the meaning of life; to such elemental concepts as love, virtue, honesty, justice, beauty, or goodness. At any rate, homo sapiens is homo loquens: language is an endless work in progress and the treasure-house of all the knowledge that has been conquered by men and women over time. There is no end to language, as there is no end to human knowledge, or to the capacity of the world to surprise us. However, according to Vir-ginia Woolf, language proves inadequate to convey what one feels in moments of the utmost emotional urgency. Thus, in To the Lighthouse (1927), Lily Briscoe analyses the powerlessness or impotence of language in these terms: “no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark.
Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.”20 Language reveals
itself to be an imperfect tool to convey to others the emotions directly experienced by the body: “For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express
that emptiness there? […] It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind.”21
Knowledge as a Collective Enterprise
In spite of the solipsism evoked by Lily Briscoe’s words, humanity is not a collection of unconnected monads,22 and the self is not an isolated sphere, closed on the outside,
floating aimlessly amid the vastness of reality. The self is the self vis à vis the others and the world at large. The awareness that one might be utterly alone in the midst of a hostile world is truly painful. From a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s novels, we gather that she had gained an insight into this reality quite early in her literary career. Life itself reinforced her conviction that the world was a meaningless, hostile 19Nancy, 11.
20Woolf, Selected Works, 371. 21Woolf, Selected Works, 371.
22One, simple and indivisible, monad is the term used in Leibniz’s philosophy to refer to a
sub-stance, to the fundamental existing things. Around the end of the seventeenth century, he posited the notion of monad as a superior alternative to the theory of atoms that was becoming popular in natural philosophy in his time.
and arbitrary place. The premature death of her mother in 1895, when she was very young, of her half-sister Stella, of her father a few years later (in 1904), and of her brother Thoby in 1906 had a most negative impact on her mental balance and shat-tered the sense of safety and warmth she had enjoyed at home. But time and again, the author reminds us that we are not alone, that humans are part of the living mesh of things (both human and nonhuman), and that the self’s true vocation is to live life with dignity and make sense of existence with a modicum of grace. It comes then as no surprise that what is truly at stake in Virginia Woolf’s novels is an exploration of the self amidst a vibrant world, or, to put it differently, an investigation of the roots of perception, of the uniqueness of the self making sense of the surrounding world and of itself in the larger mesh of things. This is called epistemology, a branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, and so Woolf’s novels can be said to be poetical essays in epistemology – i.e., explorations of how humans construct meaning out of conflicting and colliding perceptions of what is and what isn’t.
It seems that knowledge is a collective enterprise; the act of constructing meaning and sense is also a collaborative, social gesture. Over the centuries, literature has been sanctioned as a prestigious, widespread cultural practice whereby humans may come to understand the universe and our place within it. At any rate, as pointed out above, language is the most complex art object we have and writing is a powerful form of technology that endows humans with a limitless capacity to preserve knowledge to the benefit of future generations. In her novels, Virginia Woolf is concerned with the secular construction of knowledge, which is to say with the odyssey of human in-telligence and imagination over time. She was deeply interested in ideas and she was also well aware that the true vocation of all human beings is to know. Some twenty four centuries ago, Aristotle claimed in the opening lines of his Metaphysics23 that all
men and women want to know and to understand. He pointed to a basic intellectual necessity that has continued unabated over thousands of years. About three centu-ries after Aristotle’s death, somewhere else, in Rome, Seneca affirmed in his treatise De vita beata that the real vocation of human beings was the pursuit of happiness,24
which he defined as being a cupiditas naturalis, that is, a natural, inescapable desire. Thus, the true vocation of human beings might be to know and to be happy, to love the world and, by loving it, to understand it and to let themselves be changed by the earth we are a part of, not apart from.
23These are the opening lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics I.I, 980a 21-7: “All men by nature
desi-re to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer sight to almost everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.” Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Ox
ford Translation. Vol. II, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1984), p. 1552.
24Seneca’s treatise De vita beata opens like this: “To live happily, my brother Gallio, is the desire
of all men, but their minds are blinded to a clear vision of just what it is that makes a happy life; and so far from its being easy to attain the happy life, the more eagerly a man strives to reach it, the farther he recedes from it…”, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Essays. Vol. II, trans. John W. Basore (The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 99.
Not much happens in Jacob’s Room (1922), one of Virginia Woolf’s early novels, which has been considered a celebration of the completeness of her brother Thoby, whose death in 1906 represented the death of an ideal. In much the same way as her mother, Julia Stephen, had been the embodiment of her ideal of a complete woman, her brother Thoby was the epitome of a complete man. Their deaths shattered the very foundations of Woolf’s psychological well-being. But Jacob’s Room is also a moving celebration of human knowledge as a collective enterprise. In the British Museum, Ja-cob himself is overwhelmed by the presence of the ancestors murmuring from beneath the covers of thousands of books:
The books were now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet were sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophoc-les and Shakespeare; the literature of Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed flat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid smooth against another in a density of meaning, a conglomeration of loveliness. […] This density of thought, this conglomeration of knowledge. […]
There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is there cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe. This great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it. Nevertheless […] one can’t help thinking how one might come with a notebook, sit at a desk, and read it all through. […] And then there is science, pictures, architecture – an enormous mind.25
Plato’s dialogues are still well and alive, talking to us with astonishing clarity and authority twenty four centuries later, and the library is depicted as being a gi-gantic creature, full of the voices of the ancestors coming from afar, from beyond the mists of time, to unveil the true nature of human beings and their place in the larger scheme of things. The enormous mind of the British Museum is an apt meta-phor to signify the unstoppable hunger and quest for knowledge that is inherent in humankind. What makes this passage central to Woolf’s novel is precisely that it reminds us of the exi stence of luminous minds like Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle or Shakespeare, and also of the implicit exhortation addressed to all of us to keep the treasure-house of knowledge alive and expand it in new directions. As a matter of fact, books were tools, art obje cts and aesthetic artifacts that surrounded Virginia Woolf’s daily life. In an entry in her diary dated 5 April 1918, books are said to
“include a good deal of life”26 and, in Between the Acts (1941), books are defined
in the following terms: “Books: the treasured life-blood of immortal spirits. Poets; the legislators of the world. Doubtless, it was so. […] A great harvest the mind had
reaped.”27 In Virginia Woolf’s life, books were a constant reminder that knowledge
finds a solid incarnation in things made by the human mind and the human hand. This may account for Leonard and Virginia’s interest in typography and their work at the Hogarth Press as publishers of the works of influential authors such as T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster and Dostoevsky, just to name a few.
25Woolf, Selected Works, 78-79.
26Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 131. 27Woolf, Selected Works, 977.
Time, Space and Mortality
According to Nancy, “[t]he body is the being-exposed of the being. A body is a fee-ling body.”28 This might sound like a simple tautology, but this is the aesthetic body, claims Nancy, gesturing towards the absolutely corporeal existence of human beings, spaces of existence that are open to the world outside through the senses. In fact, countering the Cartesian subject vs. object dualism, ecophilosopher David Abram claims that the body is “a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth”29 and that perception involves “an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives.”30 According to Abram, the dividing line between inside and outside becomes blurred, as “the bounda-ries of a living body are open and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorphosis and exchange.”31 Following in Abram’s steps, Stacy Alaimo has posited the all-important notion of ‘transcorporeality’ to refer to the human body as being porous and open to a world of material beings. It follows that, given the porosity of our bodies and the permeability “between our flesh and the flesh of the world,”32 “the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.”33 As an open space, the body is exposed to... and bombarded by thousands of stimuli coming from the outer world of which it is a part. Thus, the act of perception is expressive of transcorporeality and evidence of the participation of our porous flesh in the larger flesh of the earth. After all, as Sullivan points out, “sensory perception is the environmental engagement of every organism at its most basic.”34
As pointed out above, Virginia Woolf was extremely interested in exploring hu-man perception, in investigating the way huhu-mans make sense of the world from sense
impressions that coalesce into a huge kaleidoscope. The only means by which she co uld accomplish this was words. The stream-of-consciousness technique was thus her way of capturing moments of being before they vanished into nothingness. To catch the ebb and flow of life, to make time stand still for a while, was part of Woolf’s arti stic mission as she set out to change the face and course of modern fiction. Ac-cording to Roger Poole, ‘embodiment,’ a concept he borrows from Merleau-Ponty,
refers to “the way the ‘lived body’ perceives the world.”35 He further elaborates on
28Nancy, 35.
29David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a MoreThanHuman World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 62.
30Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 57. 31Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 46.
32Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo
and Susan Hekman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 188.
33Stacy Alaimo, “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature,” in Material Femi nisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 238.
34Heather I. Sullivan, “The Ecology of Colors. Goethe’s Materialist Optics and Ecological
Posthu-manism,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 81.
sensory per ception as an act of creation in an enlightening paragraph that is worth quoting in full:
[Embodiment] is everything that […] the great Romantic poets wished to re-introduce when they spoke of the world we ‘half perceive and half create.’ In that Romantic conception, whether Kant’s, Hegel’s, Blake’s or Wordsworth’s, of a world which is created by perception, brought into active being by perception, the phenomenological conception of the activity of consciousness in the ‘lived body’ may well have its hidden historical origin. […] In Virginia Woolf, indeed, phenomenology found its novelist. The ways the body is ‘lived,’ is active in creating, and participating in, a world of meanings, is her theme throughout her fictional career. […] [W]e inhabit bodies which are them-selves creators of meaning in the world of created meanings.36
Stream of consciousness denotes the new method of rendering consciousness in itself as it flows from moment to moment. As Walter Allen lucidly observes, “[t]he old barriers between the reader and the novelist’s characters are down. The novelist
as mediator has almost disappeared.”37 With Virginia Woolf, “we, as readers, are as
it were at the cutting-edge of the characters’ minds; we share the continuous pre-sent of their consciousness. There is, obviously, an immense gain in intimacy and
immediacy,”38 which results in the reader’s active involvement in interpreting the
whole story as it unfolds. As a conscious literary technique, stream of consciousness derives from a particular Zeigeist and from what in the first decade of the twenti-eth century was the new science of psychology. Togtwenti-ether with Jung, Freud laid the fou ndations of psychoanalysis, in which they emphasised the individual human being, the individual sensibility, the individual reaction. There is a complete shift from the naturalistic point of view of the human being, in which the great shaping force on the individual is the environment, towards a kind of fiction more interested in exploring the radical subjectivity of the individual, the workings of the human mind, the way reality is perceived through the vantage point of a specific consciousness. Thus, as
Virginia Woolf puts it in her well-known essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,”39
whe-reas their Naturalist forebears depicted characters from the outside, largely ignoring their perceptions of the world, she feels that the distinctive quality of the true novelist is a permanent interest in recording characters’ perceptions from the inside, so as to give a more accurate rendition of the complexity of what it means to be a feeling body and an inquisitive mind, an embodied mind amidst a world of vibrant matter.
According to Walter Allen, the Heraclitean quality of the stream-of-consciousness technique poses a crucial structural problem for the craft of fiction, though: how to capture or grasp the evanescent world of impressions through language, which relies not on unique experience but rather on generalisation and all-embracing concepts, and how to make language a reliable tool of cognition. “How impose significance on the 36Poole, 198-199.
37Walter Allen, “1914 and After,” in Modernism. Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Stud ies. Vol. II: 19351970, ed. Tim Middleton (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 108. 38Allen, 108.
39Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” in Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume One
flux? In a sense, the whole subject of Virginia Woolf’s novels is this very question,” claims Allen.40 Her characters are always “in search of a pattern in the flux that shall
give meaning to the whole”41 and transience is the very stuff of her material. Slight action is enough for Virginia Woolf’s purposes. In novels like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse or The Waves, one sees life as if in “a state of constant creation, changing
endlessly from moment to moment.”42 What is more, Woolf’s characters are highly
ar-ticulate and abnormally aware of the moment as it passes, watching their thoughts and feelings the whole time. She is most interested in what happens to characters’ minds, not in faithfully portraying a detachable background unless it is caught, reflected, and refracted through the consciousness of the characters moving through it. It is the em bodiment of the world – i.e., the lived experience of the world through the body and the mind – that is central above all other things to her whole literary project.
Nothing ever stands still; everything is in permanent motion. Change is the es-sence of all living things, the beating heart of life. Virginia Woolf’s novels are full of motion, energy and life. Herakleitos was right in saying that παντα ρεῖ: everything flows, everything undergoes a perpetual metamorphosis. Woolf had a more than acute perception that this was the case and her novels record change from moment to mo-ment, as if they could themselves partake of the unstoppable motion of being. As a result, they are ecstatic novels where time appears to have frozen for a fraction of a second. If humans are feeling and thinking bodies, then what is the exact nature of their existence in time and in space? And what exactly are time and space? A ten tative definition would go along these lines: time and space constitute the essential coordi-nates along which human experience unfolds, for our lives are lived in time and space. We might be rooted in time, as if it were the ultimate nutriment we need to keep on breathing. Flowing through us, time might simply be the stuff humans are made of. It certainly defines humanity in a radical and inescapable way. With space it is some-how different. We appear to be in control: we move through space as best we can, we charter new territory and in dancing we experience the joy of motion somewhere at the intersection between space and time. In space it is always possible to go back home, whereas in time we navigate only the realm of the present, which threatens to vanish into nothingness any moment. Navigating time gone by or yet to come is some-thing we can accomplish by various means like memory, reminiscence or art (music, cinema or literature), but not with our own bodies. We try to move around in time by writing poems or novels, or by composing symphonies or fugues. As Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst puts it, “space is the unfolding of Being out of itself, while time is the slippage of Being along itself.”43
Virginia Woolf’s novels tirelessly explore the twin mysteries of time and space with consummate skill and intelligence. Her characters wander around in the city, navigating space with their bodies, while their minds seem busy refracting the myriad
40Allen, 110. 41Allen, 110. 42Allen, 110.
impressions coming from all sides, getting lost in the maze of their imagination, as if their bodies were truly present in their world whereas their minds had gone some-where else. Thus, in To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe stands motionless before her canvas, painting a landscape that has been a work in progress for a long time and is an apt metaphor for the novel itself, while her mind is occupied reminiscing about little details surrounding the beauty and energy that Mrs. Ramsay radiated to all those around her. Similarly, in Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh moves around in space and walks the streets of London thinking of Clarissa Dalloway, of how much he loved her thirty years earlier, trying hard to interpret her impenetrable self. Time moves through him, bringing memories of the past. There is always a ticking clock beneath Virginia Woolf’s novels. For instance, in Between the Acts, the people gathered to attend the central play at the heart of the novel are confronted with the beauty of the visible world and a big ticking clock:
The children; the pilgrims; behind the pilgrims the trees, and behind them the fields – the beauty of the visible world took his breath away. Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued.
‘Marking time,’ said old Oliver beneath his breath.
‘Which doesn’t exist for us,’ Lucy murmured. ‘We’ve only the present.’ ‘Isn’t that enough?’ William asked himself. Beauty – isn’t that enough?44
And beneath a ticking clock, there is always death waiting just around the corner. Clarissa Dalloway thinks deeply about time and death, about existential Angst, as she hears about Septimus’ death:
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impo-ssibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death. […] [T]here was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into 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. […] She had escaped. But that young man had killed himself.45
A Sense of Spiritual Kinship
Humanity is what we give to each other – the gift from each and all to each and all. Humans are not alone. As Aristotle pointed out centuries ago, we are political animals and so we have companions in the art of living. There is then the private self and the social self: the private self spends a lifetime in perpetual soliloquy with itself, wondering whether the dots connect beautifully at last to make a coherent picture of one’s life; the social self interacts with the others, tries to define itself in relation to other individuals who are similarly finite, singular and exposed. These three ad-jectives deserve a moment’s reflection. First, being finite means that individuals are contained within the seemingly clear-cut boundaries of their bodies and their minds. The skin, that big organ that comprises our bodily existence, marks the boundary that
44Woolf, Selected Works, 962-963. 45Woolf, Selected Works, 244.
separates ourselves from the outer world. However, in a world of porous, feeling and thinking bodies, humans are all connected to each other and to the nonhuman. Hu-mans are finite both in space and in time, as thinking-feeling bodies contained within themselves and living for a limited period of time. Second, being singular means that we are irreplaceable and unique, that nothing and no one resembles us in any possible way beyond the common features that define humanity or human life. Humanity may well be plural, but humans are all singular. In other words, humanity is a plurality of singular beings; this is the major singularity of humankind – and of all living species on Earth. Third, being exposed means that we are inevitably fragile and vulnerable in the midst of a hostile world, that we are transparent and yet inscrutable at the same time, not easily decipherable, and that we are open to the others’ scrutini sing eye. It is precisely because we are finite and exposed that we need the presence of the oth-ers and that we are in desperate need of solace, compassion and empathy. It seems that it is our perception of others and others’ perception of ourselves that ultimately confer existence to our very being. This is Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway thinking of his companions in the art of living:
By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for so-lace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women; […] sees with amazement how grave they become; how majestically, as the breeze stirs them, they dispense with a dark flutter of the leaves cha-rity, comprehension, absolution, and then, flinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety of their aspect with a wild carouse.46
Virginia Woolf’s intimation is that there is no way of completely knowing the self, whose determination appears to be to remain unknown. There is an unbridgeable gap or abyss between people. Getting to know the other is an impossible battle, and yet one feels a weird sense of affinity with other bodies (human and nonhuman) in the world. It is as if our bodies were projected in space onto other forms of existence, as if the living mesh of things were truly a vibrant network of relationships in constant
change. Clarissa Dalloway muses on this issue and realises that she is part of a uni-verse of vibrant matter, as conceptualised by Jane Bennett in her homonymous book, where she contends that matter is not “passive stuff” or “raw, brute, or inert,”47 but has
an agency of its own. By ‘vitality’ Bennett means that (nonhuman) bodies or things have the capacity “to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propens ities, or tendencies of their own.”48 A propos the final unknowability of the self and the
inter-connected texture of the world, Virginia Woolf writes:
Clarissa had a theory in those days […]. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissa-tisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed,
46Woolf, Selected Works, 164.
47Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), vii.
how little one knew people. But she said […] she felt herself everywhere. […] She was all that. So that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns.49
Peter Walsh feels that Clarissa Dalloway has influenced him more than any other person he has ever known. “Brief, broken, often painful as their actual meetings had been, […] the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery abo ut it,”50 he confesses. He looks at the human soul and finds out that it is inscrutable: “For
this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities.”51 In this context, intimacy is a true miracle: there are
people who understand each other without things being said, who are married in the spirit as it were, and neither absence nor distance matter at all. Sally Seton, Clarissa’s close friend, also muses on human relationships, and this is the revelation what she comes up with:
… for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life – one scratched on the wall. Despai-ring of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her. But no; he did not like cabbages; he preferred human beings, Peter said.52
Cabbages and cauliflowers might be great peace-givers indeed, but humans need the company of their species, complex and undecipherable as they might be. There are precious messages sent by the vegetable world and we only have to listen attenti-vely for what they say. Trees, cabbages or flowers do not despair; they simply exist. There is no sense of unease, no desire in them other than the compulsion to persist
in time, but being human is much more complicated than being any element in the green world. Ezra Pound, another of the great Modernist masters, knew that it was in nature that men and women were to look for the true measure of things. In Canto 81, one of The Pisan Cantos, he sings in memorable words: “Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. / Learn of the green world what can be thy place / In scaled invention
or true artistry,”53 proclaiming nature as the ultimate source of wisdom and beauty,
harmony and serenity, virtue and humility, technology and art, as he looks at an ant, “a centaur in his dragon world,” and “not man / Made courage, or made order, or
made grace,”54 as the true measure of all things. Virginia Woolf’s main concerns are
the enigma of the self, human relationships, and how the mind, sensuously immersed in the world, seeks to grasp the phenomena of existence. In another landmark novel like The Waves (1931), she writes: “I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. 49Woolf, Selected Works, 224.
50Woolf, Selected Works, 224. 51Woolf, Selected Works, 229. 52Woolf, Selected Works, 249-250.
53Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1998), 541. 54Pound, 541.
We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones, silence,”55 affirming the vitality of matter of which our bodies are
par-ticipant in the cosmos.
A Whole Out of Wholes
There is a central passage in Mrs. Dalloway – central to the whole corpus of Virginia Woolf’s fiction – that is a vortex of inexhaustible meaning. It reveals much of what the author found not only about the self’s finitude, singularity and exposure, but also abo ut the mystery of time, life and the beauty inherent in the universe. The greatest para dox at the centre of Septimus Smith’s epiphany is his painful awareness of the passage of time, his love of life, his fear of human nature, and his emotional numbness before the beauty of the world. This might be the great paradox at the heart of humankind. The “supreme secret” or “astonishing revelation” Septimus is to deliver to humanity at such a climactic moment of the novel is the intimation that there is a kind of beauty in-herent in human existence, a hidden pattern that gives harmony and orderliness to the universe at large. The dogma is quite straightforward and simple: “that trees are alive; next, there is no crime; next, love, universal love.”56 That is to say, human be ings seem not to be aware that they belong to something that transcends themselves as part of a commonwealth of breath that keeps all life forms (flowers, trees and stones) together, regardless of whether they are animate or inanimate. In this context, Septimus feels he is one more tiny part of a breathing cosmos, corporeally embedded in a living land-scape: “Leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by mil-lions of fibres with his own body.”57 Septimus’ epiphany is that, no matter how medio-cre life may turn out to be, there will always be a spot in time to remind us that love and be auty exist in spite of us. Beauty sprang instantly wherever Septimus looked, despite the horrors and sense of exhaustion pervading Western civilisation in the aftermath of the Great War. “He had only to open his eyes. […] We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to say. […] [B]eauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”58
According to Poole.59 Septimus Smith is the perfect objective correlative for Vir-ginia Woolf’s own state of mind in 1912-1913, when she suffered a severe nervous breakdown shortly after her marriage to Leonard Woolf and was examined by two neurologists who prescribed a rest cure. Emotionally anaesthetised by what he has witnessed first-hand in the Great War, Septimus Smith’s root problem is his inabi lity to feel. The psychic cause of his mental collapse is war itself, human cruelty, the hor-ror of mercilessness of man to man. His nerves shattered by the war, he returns home mentally and morally wrecked. When he sees Evans killed in battle, he con gratulates
55Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000 [1931]), 63. 56Woolf, Selected Works, 171.
57Woolf, Selected Works, 141. 58Woolf, Selected Works, 172-173. 59Poole, 186.
himself on his own resilience and his inability to feel anything at all. But then the hor-ror sets in: his emotional numbness leads to the conviction that the world itself might be without meaning and a hostile place. What he experiences (and Virgi nia Woolf so masterly describes) could be called “a vision of ontological emptying,” “the world ‘seen without a self’” or “the ontological draining of the world,”60 which is a terrify-ing experience. Thus, his view of humanity is utterly pessimistic. He starts readterrify-ing the texts of classic authors, only to find out that beneath the intoxication of beautiful words there is a message of loathing and disgust:
[I]t might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. […] How Shakespeare loathed humanity – the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of the words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same. [...] For the truth is [...] that human beings have neither kindness nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.61
To turn again to the climactic moment or epiphany in Mrs. Dalloway, three move-ments for the soul are discernible in Septimus Smith’s revelation. First, Septimus is a man with a mission: he is to announce to the world a message of the utmost impor-tance and the onset of a new religion. Right from the beginning, he is shown as be-ing “in a state of peculiar attentiveness, in which objects in the world ‘out there’ sud-denly seem to coalesce and to gleam with intense and personal meaning,”62 so much so that his state of bodily awareness is one of “quite intolerable sensitivity.”63 He is exposed to the constant bombardment of loud noises, bright light and stimuli com-ing from every corner of the world. After all, “knowledge comes through suffercom-ing and the flesh,”64 which is to say that knowledge is ultimately carnal. It is in this state
of heig htened consciousness that he senses the revelation that he is to share with his fellow human beings. However, his message is put forward with astonishing economy, with just three brush-strokes as it were: “trees are alive,” “there is no crime” and “love, universal love.”65 He embraces not an anthropocentric, but rather a bio-centric scheme
in which life, not homo sapiens, is at the centre of the universe. The thought dawns on Septimus that humans are part of a grander design that transcends their very bodies. Trees are therefore subtly united to the rest of creation through invisible fibres that make everything that exists coalesce into a whole. All is harmony then; the myriad things populating the world merge into one and the same thing. “There is no crime” means that at some point there might be a world where there is no room for human cruelty or for sin, where being thrown out there into the world to live life is not to be experienced as a guilty or traumatic fact of existence. The secret blueprint beneath the whole orderly 60Poole, 195-196.
61Woolf, Selected Works, 184-185. 62Poole, 192.
63Poole, 192.
64Woolf, Selected Works, 229. 65Woolf, Selected Works, 171.
design of the universe is love, which keeps things and beings together and stops them from drifting far apart from each other. This revelation is truly moving. In the passage below we see the truth of a life rise in it, the truth of all life insofar as it is mortal and of every life insofar as it is singular. The truth is at the point of departure, but Septi-mus Smith succeeds in catching it with his teeth and in imparting a form of precious wisdom to humanity. Being the fictional persona of Virginia Woolf, this is the novelist- -philosopher touching upon the truth and speaking to her readers:
The supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first, that trees are alive; next, there is no crime; next, love, universal love, he muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them for ever.66
Secondly, universal beauty is part of the grand design of which humans are just a tiny part. One must have ears to hear what Septimus Smith says, eyes to see into the ultimate essence of things as perceived in this state of hyper-sensitivity. Septimus lo oks at the world and he can only see beauty pervading everything, not just in the green world, but also in human-made things that make up the familiar cityscapes surroun ding his daily life. Trees, swallows, flies, the sun, passing cars: they all par-take of this universal beauty. And Septimus feels at peace with the entire cosmos for a fraction of a second, as he absorbs the vibrancy of thing-power, the confederation of things that are communicative and agentive, the vitality of matter that is not pas-sive or inert stuff, but truly alive. Septimus is shown empathetically resonating with a vibrant world:
The trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked, at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round
and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them… […] Beauty was everywhere.67
Thirdly, the intersection of time and timelessness is at stake in Septimus’ hyper sensitive response to the world. Woolf creates a new novelistic structure in Mrs. Dallo way wherein her prose has blurred the distinction between dream and reality, between the past and the present, experience and recollection. An authentic human being fun ctions in this manner, simultaneously flowing from the conscious to the unconscious, from the fantastic to the real, and from memory to the real mo-ment here and now. The sense of time beneath a novel and pervading actual life itself is of the essence, as can be seen from the cause-effect link between events chronologically arranged that constitute the story. It might be instructive to think about the threefold dimension of time: first, there is physical time, measured by clocks in terms of hours, minutes and seconds; second, there is psychological time,
66Woolf, Selected Works, 171. 67Woolf, Selected Works, 172-173.
related to the subjective value and in tensity of the experiences of a lifetime; and third, there is the linguistic coding of time through verb tenses and related linguistic means. In Virginia Woolf’s novels, it is psy chological time which really matters, the process of internalisation whereby the indi vidual subject perceives and grasps experience as filtered through the senses. After all, we are rooted in time; time is the stuff we are made of. This is Virginia Woolf on time:
‘It is time,’ said Rezia.
The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids.68
Here is Virginia Woolf’s mind imposing order upon the seeming chaos of reality by means of words, freezing moments of being of the utmost transcendence, touching upon beauty and truth with the tips of her fingers, and writing down a moment of vital revelation for the sake of posterity.
Life Is a Moveable Feast
One of Bringhurst’s essential insights is that everywhere being is dancing. Poetry, he says, is possibly the purest form of knowing, “knowing freed from the agenda of possession and control – knowing in the sense of stepping in tune with being, hearing and echoing the music and heartbeat of being.”69 Poetry is also an attribute of reality and poems happen to be the way poets capture being through the medium of words.
Similarly, in her lyrical novels, Virginia Woolf seeks to capture the dance of be-ing and to partake of the incessant beauty of the moveable feast that life is. That it is moveable means that it is inescapable and that you can take it with you everywhere you go, unless you are intent on wasting your limited time living somebody else’s life, not your life. The Modernist author appears to suggest that the incessant music and the inexhaustible beauty of life are an unexpected boon and an invitation for all of us to make the most of our lives. The world might be intensely irrational or furio usly obscure at times, but then the ultimate message Virginia Woolf conveys to her readers in her novels is one of vital optimism. Thus, in Jacob’s Room, Jacob senses that “No one stands still. It seems as if we marched to the sound of music; perhaps the wind and the river; perhaps these same drums and trumpets – the ecstasy and hubbub of the soul.”70 Clarissa Dalloway celebrates beauty, “not the crude beauty of the eye,”71
but beauty sublime, and she loves life deeply: “Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite 68Woolf, Selected Works, 173.
69Robert Bringhurst, “Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing Is Known,” in Everywhere Being Is Dancing. Twenty Pieces of Thinking (Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2008), 15.
70Woolf, Selected Works, 82. 71Woolf, Selected Works, 230.
richness, this life”72. Time and again in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa declares her love of
the glorious sense of being alive amid so much beauty and the simple fact that she is inextricably linked to a vast network of relationships and corporeally em bedded in a living world where life is an endless work in progress:
[D]id it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended abso-lutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, 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…73
In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf keeps on asking the same question. Lily Bri-scoe dwells on the meaning of the mystery that life is. Life is a miracle, an ecstasy and a compelling riddle:
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. […] Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment so-mething permanent […] – this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape: this eternal passing and flowing […] was struck into stability.74
In her fiction, Virginia Woolf reminds us that humans are made of body, mind and speech; that the self is vulnerable, but not alone, amid a world of living, feeling and thinking bodies; that nothing stands still; that humans are rooted in time and seek to move around in space in the best way they can; that the others are the true measure of
our humanity; that art is a sublime way of imposing order upon chaos; and that life is a moveable feast, a mystery and a gift. It comes as a shock that she, being so deeply in love with life, decided to fill her overcoat pockets with stones and let herself drift away in the waters of the Ouse River in March 1941. And yet, littera scripta manet, the written word remains: the beauty of Virginia Woolf’s thinking and sensibility ta kes one’s breath away. She was intent on capturing the beauty of fleeting moments in time. One cannot but be grateful that she did all of this on behalf of humanity.
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