Department of English
Beyond Vision Eyeless Writing in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Marie-Helen Rosalie Stahl Master Thesis
Literature Autumn, 2018
Supervisor: Giles Whiteley
Abstract
In the early 20th century, a “crisis of ocularcentrism” arose in philosophy, replacing the Cartesian epistemological notion of a disembodied mind inspecting the object-world from the outside with an ontological and phenomenological approach to vision and being, embedding humans corporeally in a world exceeding their perceptual horizon (Jay 94). In response, modernist artists abandoned realist and naturalist techniques, rejecting mimetic representation, and experimented with new artistic forms, trying to account for the new complexity of life.
In this context, Virginia Woolf wrote her novel The Waves (1931), “an abstract mystical eyeless book” (DIII 203). Despite countless studies on The Waves and vision, its “eyelessness” has never been thoroughly examined before. Since Woolf considered vision and being to be inherently embodied and communal and longed for capturing moments of being, this thesis proposes to unlock Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late corporeal phenomenology. Alongside his concepts of the flesh and chiasm, this thesis claims that eyeless writing is Woolf’s method to go beyond vision in order to reveal the inherent corporeal interconnectedness of all beings in a hidden, visually imperceptible pattern—the eyeless flesh of the world—by creating a narrative that is eyeless in several ways. It is at once eye- and I- less due to lacking a single focalising point and denoting an anonymous visibility enveloping all beings. Rather than being structured by a narrative eye/I, it is governed by the characters’ bodies and their chiasmatic relations with the world. On this basis, emphasising the carnal adherence of all human and non-human beings, their eyeless kinship thus comes to light, creating a nonanthropocentric conception of Being-in-and- of-the-world. In this sense, The Waves uncovers that since the Wesen (essence) of Being lies in the common, visually imperceptible flesh, it can only be reached eyelessly, via the body.
Keywords: Modernism; Virginia Woolf; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; phenomenology;
vision; eyeless writing; anti-ocularcentrism; nonanthropocentrism; body
List of Abbreviations
Works by Virginia Woolf
DIII The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1925–1930. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 3, London: Hogarth Press, 1980.
DIV The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1931–1935. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press, 1982.
EIII The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1919–1924. Edited by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 3, London: Hogarth Press, 1994.
EIV The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1925–1928. Edited by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press, 1988.
MB Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed., New York:
Harcourt Inc., 1985.
SE Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
TTL To the Lighthouse. 1927. Edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
W The Waves. 1931. London: Vintage Classics, Penguin Random House, 2000.
Works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
EM “Eye and Mind.” 1960. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader:
Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson, Northwestern University Press, 1993, pp. 121–149.
PP Phenomenology of Perception. 1945. Translated by Donald A. Landes, Routledge, 2012.
VI The Visible and the Invisible. 1964. Edited by Claude Lefort, Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Table of Contents
Introduction………..1
Chapter I The Dethronement of the Visual Sense…..…...……….……..6
Merleau-Ponty’s Subject-Object………..………12
Approaches to Woolf’s The Waves, Being and Vision………..17
Chapter II “Eyeless” and “I-less” Writing—Enveloped by Anonymous Visibility………21
Eyeless Writing as “Bodily” Writing………....29
Eyeless Percival and the Things in Themselves………38
Conclusion………...47
Works Cited………51
Introduction
In an interview with the art historian Pierre Cabanne in the late 1960s, the modernist artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) declared that his engagement with art was characterised by an “antiretinal attitude” (Cabanne 43). He stated that “too great an importance [is] given to the retina” (Cabanne 43), rejecting all art, especially impressionism, that was preoccupied with visual appearance (Krauss 124). Instead, Duchamp strove for art that would go “beyond the retina” and reach the “grey matter;”
not as a disembodied domain of cognition and reflection, but as inseparable from the body and its physical processes (Krauss 125). While Duchamp was arguably one of the most radical artists of the early 20th century, modernist art and literature in general was shaped by a so-called “anti-ocularcentric discourse,” striving to replace the Cartesian notion of knowing an exterior world through disembodied vision with a more ontological and phenomenological approach to vision, embedding the self corporeally within a world that exceeds its perceptual horizon (Jay 94). Seeking to account for this radically new conception of reality and the self, modernist artists abandoned realist and naturalist techniques that tried to mimetically represent an alleged univocal reality through visual form and objective description (Jay 94). Instead, they experimented with techniques that would account for lived, bodily experience, penetrating external appearances to reach the underlying “core of things” (Ruhrberg et al. 71).
As is well established, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was one of the key figures of modernism and continuously experimented with literary techniques in order to account for the enigma of modern life. Like Duchamp, she disdained writing and art that “appeals mainly to the eye” (EIV 244), longing for a new kind of writing that would
capture “life itself going on” (DIII 229), “these invisible presences” that shape human experience (MB 80), our “feelings and [general] ideas” about the world (EIV 435).
Pursuing this goal, Woolf arrived at the climax of her experimentations in writing The Waves (1931), conceived of as “an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem” (DIII 203), combining the abstractness of poetry with the flexibility of prose (DIII 139). In nine episodes alternating with nine interludes, depicting the course of a day from dawn to dusk, The Waves follows the lives of seven characters, recording their thoughts in first-person soliloquies. Owing to the fact that The Waves abandons character-drawing and external description, countless studies have examined the role vision plays in this novel. For instance, material and cultural-historical studies investigate how advances in science and technology influenced Woolf to create a nonanthropocentric narrative in The Waves, and inspired her to develop a “decentred aesthetic vision,” marked by multiple points of view.1 More aesthetic and formalist approaches, on the other hand, have focused instead on Woolf’s use of visual literary devices as a means of producing vision from within the text, rather than describing external reality mimetically, while others have analysed how her narrative technique grants an inner vision to human consciousness.2
However, despite the plethora of studies of The Waves and vision, one aspect remains largely unexplored, namely, its “eyelessness.” In point of fact, there is no in- depth study on eyelessness, but only the odd allusion to the idea peppered in the margins of a few scholarly works. Since the novel uses the term “eyeless” in only one occasion, describing the character Percival after his death, as “abstract [and] eyeless […] in the sky” (W 109), scholars have deduced its meaning primarily from Percival, viewing him either as the epitome of eyelessness in The Waves, like Ariane Mildenberg (119), or as depicting death’s “eyeless hostile presence,” like Gloria Jean Tobin (201). Others draw a connection to its homophone, “I-less.” While Gillian Beer argues that it reflects the novel’s “multiple ‘I’s” (66), Julia Briggs claims that it signifies the characters’ isolation from the I-less interludes, “emptied of human presence” (“Novels” 76). Similarly, Ann Banfield claims that the interludes’ eyeless world, “inaccessible to the senses” and independent of human existence, is juxtaposed with a “sensible” one in The Waves (13).
Nevertheless, since those critics engage with eyelessness only peripherally, I would
1 See, for instance, Henry (2003) pp. 93–107, Ettinger (2012) pp. 1–19, Ryan (2013) pp. 171–202.
2 See, for instance, Richter (1970) pp. 83–99, Tobin (1978) pp. 205–243, Ryan (1991) pp. 190–206, Briggs (2005) pp. 238–268, Olk (2013) pp. 155–183.
argue that their analyses do not account for the complexity and multifacetedness of eyelessness in The Waves, reducing it either to one figure or binding it into a dialectical structure.
Striving to express lived “moments of being” in her works (DIII 209) and to reach the “things in themselves” (W 213), Woolf’s philosophy has been related to phenomenology; a practice aiming to describe lived “human experience […] from a concrete first-person point of view,” bracketing out objective reflection in order to get to Edmund Husserl’s famous “things themselves”—the essence or “stuff” of being (Carman 14).3 Focusing either on Woolf’s engagement with consciousness, endured time or Being-in-the-world (Dasein), most critics have applied traditional Husserlian, Bergsonian, or Heideggerian phenomenological approaches. 4 However, early phenomenology neglects the body’s importance in lived experience and maintains a dualism between subject/object, mind/body, whereas Woolf considered being and vision to be inherently embodied and communal. She stated not only that one cannot
“separate off from the body [, always] gaze[ing] through it” (EIV 318), but also that all beings are fundamentally interconnected with the world in a “hidden pattern […]
behind the cotton wool of daily life” (MB 72). On this basis, this paper proposes to unlock Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology. Accounting for Woolf’s notion of embodiment and intercorporeal connectedness in an invisible common structure of Being, this approach complicates standard approaches to the novel which rest either on the above-mentioned phenomenological approaches or psychoanalysis, feminism, and more recently, post- Bergsonian traditions.5
Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was the first phenomenologist to claim that “the body is the vehicle of being in the world,” making it the centre of subjectivity (PP 84).
However, it is in his later work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), that he undermines Cartesian dualism by establishing a common ground of Being in a position which may be characterised itself as a part of that general movement of anti-ocularcentrism that
3 For an overview on the relation between phenomenology and modernism see Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg (2010).
4 For Husserlian studies see Hough (2002), Najafi (2014) pp. 436–442, Strehle (2015), pp. 81–91; for Bergsonian studies see Gillies (1996) pp. 107–132, Armstrong (2005) pp. 90–114, Mattison (2011) pp.
71–77; for Heideggerian studies see Henke (1989) pp. 461–472, Simone (2017) pp. 25–63.
5 For psychoanalytical studies see Ferrer (1990) pp. 65–96, Ryan (1991) pp. 190–206, Snider (1991) pp. 87–106; for feminist studies see Minow-Pinkney (1987) ch. 6, Beer (1996) pp. 74–91, Goldman (1998) ch. 14; for post-Bergsonian studies see Ryan (2013) pp. 171–202, Skeet (2013) 475–495, Jobst (2016) pp. 55–67.
Martin Jay has spoken about. Merleau-Ponty argues that Martin Heidegger’s Being-in- the-world depends on “my body [being] of the same flesh as the world” (VI 248). This flesh is the general, anonymous “element” of Being rather than a “substance” (VI 139).
In this common flesh, selves, others and the world are already primordially interweaved with each other through chiasmatic relations, in which every being is at once a sensible and a sentient, continuously reversing roles as corporeal perceiver/seer and being- perceived/visible (VI 136). In this sense, Merleau-Ponty created a “subject-object,”
revealing that all beings share the carnal, invisible structure of the flesh of visibility (VI 137). Also, Merleau-Ponty’s term “sensible sentient” (VI 173) indicates his kinship with anti-ocularcentrism’s quest to undermine vision’s primacy among the senses (Jay 111), signifying that since being is corporeal, it is consequently omnisensual (VI 256).
In addition, being corporeally embedded in the world, sense perception is necessarily restricted, meaning that the anonymous visibility, surrounding every subject-object, lies partly beyond its perceptual horizon (VI 142, 148). Lastly, he claims that just as the flesh is visibility’s invisible “inner framework,” every sensible sentient has an invisible
“inexhaustible depth,” where its Wesen (essence) lies (VI 143), so that every being is
“more than [its] being-perceived” (VI 135). In this way, Merleau-Ponty abolishes the dialectic of subject/object, self/world, visibility and invisibility, turning them instead into each other’s “obverse and reverse” (VI 138), grounded in the common flesh of Being.
Some scholars have already pointed out the closeness of thought between Woolf and Merleau-Ponty, arguing, for instance, that Woolf’s characters all “live their bodies” in different degrees of “embodiment” (Hussey 5). However, so far, scholars have either utilised Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology or focused on other works than The Waves.6 Moreover, none of them draw a connection to Woolf’s eyeless writing. Only Ariane Mildenberg, referred to earlier, mentions the term in her Merleau- Pontian study of The Waves (119). However, while she discusses the characters’
embeddedness in the common flesh, she does not analyse how Woolf’s eyeless writing enables her to reveal this primordial connectedness with the world, reducing eyeleness instead to the figure of Percival. In contradistinction to Mildenberg, Tobin, Beer, Briggs and Banfield, some of the few scholars to refer to eyelessness, I will demonstrate that the idea neither signifies one character or presence in The Waves, nor belongs to a
6 See, for instance, Hussey (1986) pp. 3–20, Doyle (1994) pp. 42–71, Westling (1999) pp. 855–875.
dialectic structure, in which an I/eye-less world opposes a sensible one. Instead, taking Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology as a lens, I claim that eyeless writing is Woolf’s means to go beyond vision in order to unlock and reveal the inherent corporeal interconnectedness of all beings in a hidden, visually imperceptible pattern—the eyeless flesh of the world—by creating a narrative that is eye/I-less, being devoid of a single focalising point, and instead governed by the characters’ bodies and the intercorporeal, chiasmatic structure of human and no-human relations, in which all beings are equal, co-existing subject-objects.
Since Woolf’s eyeless writing has never been explored in this way before, this thesis will provide important new insights into research on The Waves and Woolf’s ideas on being and vision, revealing that her main artistic ambitions and philosophical conceptions combine and culminate in eyelessness. Woolf seeks to produce writing that goes beyond the retina, to create a method that accounts for the notion that vision and being are inherently embodied, to reach the “hidden pattern” behind life by which all sensible sentients are inherently corporeally interconnected with each other, and in effect, to make apparent the “things themselves” residing in-the-visible. In this sense, analysing Woolf’s eyeless writing alongside Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology, this thesis seeks to coalesce material and cultural-historical approaches to Woolf’s writing with formalist and aesthetic ones, demonstrating how Woolf’s eyeless writing as a method produces a non-dialectical, nonanthropocentric conception of Being-in-and-of-the-world in The Waves.
The thesis consists of two chapters, each divided into three subsections. The first chapter commences with considering the historical and cultural background of Woolf’s eyeless writing, before explaining Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology in relation to his predecessors Husserl and Heidegger, and concluding with an overview of previous approaches to The Waves, vision and being. The second chapter analyses Woolf’s eyeless writing, moving from a macroscopic to a microscopic view: from the novel’s structure, to the body and finally to the “things themselves.” In the first subsection, I will examine the novel’s structure, narrative technique and literary devices, demonstrating, firstly, that all beings in The Waves are immersed in an anonymous, eye/I-less visibility depicted in the interludes, and secondly, that The Waves is eye/I-less on the whole in that it undermines the Cartesian notion of a single, univocal, autonomous subject. Following this, the focus shifts to the body, arguing that eyeless writing, in fact, resembles a kind of “bodily” writing, signified by a narrative
that is itself carnal, being governed not by single consciousnesses but by the chiasmatic, carnal structure of relationships between corporeal beings, interconnected in the eyeless flesh of the world. Lastly, Percival’s eyelessness and the revelation of the “things in themselves” take centrestage. As mentioned earlier, Percival is predominantly viewed as representing eyelessness in The Waves since it is him who is tied to the only occasion in the novel in which the term “eyeless” appears. However, I will show that Percival does not resemble eyelessness himself, but rather turns eyeless through the loss of his body in death, becoming part of the eye/I-less anonymous visibility surrounding all characters. Secondly, I will demonstrate that Percival’s death reveals the futility of trying to impose an order on life and the ways in which this shows that it is only in lived, bodily moments of being, in which all human and non-human beings peacefully coexist and are allowed to just be, that the “things in themselves” can be encountered and the eyeless kinship of all beings comes to light.
Throughout this thesis, I engage not only with other scholarly voices on The Waves, but continuously refer to Woolf’s own philosophical writings in her diaries and essays, considering her as a philosopher herself. On this basis, this thesis will now set out to show that eyeless writing, similar to Duchamp’s anti-retinal art, was Woolf’s method to surmount the primacy of the visual in her writing. It enabled her to go beyond vision and explore the Wesen of Being, laying bare our inherent, corporeal interconnectedness in the eyeless flesh of the world. In other worlds, since the essence of Being lies beyond our visual grasp, it can only be reached eyelessly, via the body.
Chapter I
The Dethronement of the Visual Sense
Between 1900–1918, the social and political climate of Europe was unstable. Major breakthroughs in physics, as well as technological innovations, reinforced this sense of instability even further. Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum (1900), on which Niels Bohr’s atom and quantum theory was based (1913), as well as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (1905, 1915), radically changed our conceptions of the self, generating a rethinking and renegotiation of human beings’ position in the world. As Holly Henry notes in Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003), scientific discoveries resulted in a “sense of insignificance and ephemerality of humans on the cosmological scale” and together with the political and social changes effected a “modernist human
decentring and re-scaling” (3). Woolf herself in “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927) called for new ways of literary and artistic expression, capable of capturing modern life, “for it is an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves” (EIV 429). Bohr’s “indeterminacy principle” in quantum-physics revealed that human beings are merely a part of a whole in which they are embedded and with which they share the same matter since “spatially separate particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities but rather are part of the same phenomena […], it is not that there are x number of atoms that belong to a hand and y number of atoms that belong to a coffee mug”—rather, the interface between human and material matter is ontologically and visually indeterminate (Barad qtd. in Ryan, Materiality 176). As such, it became apparent that our environment is not entirely visually perceivable, nor graspable for us, rendering an all-encompassing point of view impossible.
Those drastic changes in the conception of the self and vision were accompanied by a radical questioning of the dominant epistemologies at the time, which, as Jay claims, led to a “crisis of ocularcentrism” in philosophy. This crisis is characterised by the undermining of the dominant “Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime” (Jay 101) and the aim to replace it with alternate conceptions that “[explore] the embodied and culturally mediated character of sight” as it was now experienced by the modern human being (Jay 94). Apart from the unstable political and social sphere and the discoveries in physics, technological innovations such as the stereoscope further fuelled the anti- ocularcentric discourse (Jay 95). In fact, the development from the camera obscura to the stereoscope, albeit at a time somewhat earlier, serves well to exemplify this conceptual shift, the camera obscura representing the Cartesian spectatorial epistemology and the stereoscope representing the shift to the modern ontological mode of vision. As Jonathan Crary argues, in the camera obscura (dating back to the late 1500s), an “isolated [and] enclosed” observer with a monocular point of view in the subject-position, looks through a peephole onto the exterior object-world (38–39).
Crucially, vision is decorporealised in this process as it is not the physical eye producing the image but the mechanical process of the camera obscura (Crary 39). In this sense, one can speak of a “[rationalisation] of sight” in Cartesianism, inspecting the exterior world with a disembodied mind (Jay 33). This exterior world was believed to be univocal due to “the divinely insured congruence between […] ideas and the world of extended matter,” rendering individual perspective irrelevant (Jay 113). Thus, the
camera obscura represents Cartesian dialectical thinking between subject/object, mind/body, and corresponds with its aspiration to “found human knowledge on a purely objective view of the world” (Crary 48). However, with the invention of the stereoscope in 1838 by Charles Wheatstone, vision increasingly lost its position as “a privileged form of knowing,” but itself turned into the object of study to interrogate the physiology of human vision (Crary 70). Since stereoscopic vision is binocular, it showed that the human organism synthesises two slightly disparate images into one unitary three- dimensional image (Crary 120), demonstrating that it is “the body of the viewer” that is “the active producer of optical experience” (Krauss 133). Hence, in contrast to the incorporeal, monocular, objective, atemporal view of the camera obscura, the stereoscope revealed that vision is inherently binocular, subjective, temporal and embodied (Crary 70). It is in this sense that Jay claims that the crisis of ocularcentrism was characterised by a “return of the body” in philosophy (95), replacing Cartesian perspectivalism and the belief in unmediated perception with approaches that focus on the immediate bodily experience of Being-in-the-world.
According to Jay, “the initial frontal attack on ocularcentrism” was Henri Bergson’s concept of “durée” (1889)—the lived subjective experience of time—valued over objective, measurable time (Jay 110). Bergson argued that objective, measurable time always implies a “visual image in space” (qtd. in Jay 115), whereas durée is irreducible to a number and thus “not easily available to vision” (Jay 115). Bergson claimed that rather than identifying with exterior world’s objective time, one should focus on durée since only “the formless flow of time” allows us to transcend ocularcentrism and arrive at immediate lived experience (Jay 117). Importantly, according to Bergson, experienced time and lived experience in general are mediated through the acting body as “the ground of all our perception” (Jay 113). A sense of Being-in-the-world can only be grasped if one returns to a primordial state in which consciousness and the body, mind and matter, are interweaved rather than divided and where the senses are not disparate but a holistic unity (Jay 113). Thus, it is crucial to note that the anti-ocularcentric discourse does not abandon vision but dethrones it from its primacy among the senses and stresses the senses’ entanglement in lived bodily experience. The human being is no longer seen as autonomous and separate from its environment but as embedded within it. In other words, the Cartesian epistemological mode of vision, also defined as “assertoric,” and characterised by a spectatorial distance, “abstracted, monocular, inflexible, unmoving, rigid, ego-logical and
exclusionary,” is replaced by an ontological mode of vision, also called “aletheic gaze […], multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary [and] horizonal” (Jay 164).7
All of the above-mentioned political, scientific, technological and philosophical developments also resonated with literature and the arts and led to the efflorescence of new artistic and literary forms of expression in the early 20th century, known as modernism. In her essay “Character in Fiction” (1924), Woolf famously states, “[o]n or about 1910 human character changed,” referring to a shift in human relations between “masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children” due to the demise of, first, the Victorian and then the Edwardian era (SE 38–39). However, it is well-established that Woolf’s remark also alludes to the first post-impressionist exhibition in London in 1910, curated by her close friends and fellow Bloomsburians, Roger Fry, Desmond McCarthy and Clive Bell (Goldman 38). One of the key figures of this exhibition was the French post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), who greatly influenced the aesthetics of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.8 Cézanne’s art marks the shift from impressionism to post-impressionism; he critiqued the impressionist belief in unmediated perception and its focus on surface appearances, producing “art for the eye” (Jay 98). Instead, like Bergson, Cézanne focused on lived perspective and its rootedness in an experience where the senses are merged rather than separated (Jay 98). In this he also rejected the realist and naturalist ideal of mimetic representation grounded in Cartesianism, in favour for multiple perspectives, representing a complex rather than univocal, objective reality (Ryan, Vanishing 93).
This is a point which Merleau-Ponty himself made in “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), writing that Cézanne detected “that lived perspective […] is not a geometric or photographic one” (64). Instead, Cézanne wanted to paint “a world perceptually [organised] by our bodily involvement in it,” bringing sensations on the canvas that would place the spectator, the painting and the painter in a dialogue with each other (Carman 184). Cézanne strove to surmount the distance between the viewer and the viewed, the dualism of subject and object, and the differentiation of the senses, since it would only then be possible to recapture “the very moment when the world was new”—
7 The distinction between the two modes of vision refers to Heidegger’s phenomenology, which will be discussed in subsection three of this chapter.
8 For a discussion on Cézanne and the Bloomsbury Group see Uhlmann et al. (2009), pp. xi–xxi.
a primordial reality (Jay 98).9 However, in order to do so Cézanne believed in the “logic of sensation,” postulating that the myriad sensations perceived first need to be organised by the artist’s mind in order to then create a unified whole on the canvas (Uhlmann et al. x–xi). Partly due to the significance of the mind in Cézanne’s aesthetics, literature on modernism and the Bloomsbury Group tends to focus on their preoccupation with the mind and consciousness, with Fry often considered a key figure.10 In his essay “The Artist’s Vision” (1920), Fry relied on Cézanne’s logic of sensation to claim that the artist’s “detached and impassioned vision” is superior to ordinary vision, since only it allows a disinterested contemplation of the “chaotic”
sensations perceived, and permits them to be organised into an “aesthetic unity” (33).
While the early Woolf strove to explore the “dark places of psychology,” as she noted in “Modern Fiction” (1919; SE 11), I argue that the later Woolf increasingly warded off from this path, turning towards a more phenomenological stance, viewing vision as inherently embodied. In “On Being Ill” (1926), written not long before The Waves, she states that literature “does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind” and not with the body, whereas “the very opposite is true” (EIV 317–318). The mind “cannot separate off from the body” but always “[gazes] through [it]” (EIV 318).
Due to her believe in embodied vision, Woolf also rejected Fry’s notion of the artist’s disinterested vision, arguing instead that the artist is always inextricably implicated in his/her work (Henry, Discourse 100–101). Consequently, Woolf also rejected a privileging of a particular point of view since for her, the world “is variable and complex and infinitely mysterious” (EIV 76). In “Montaigne” (1925), she states that
“no one has any clear knowledge,” either of one’s own self or of the world around us (EIV 78). It is the enigma of “life itself going on” that Woolf wants to explore and that becomes the subject of inquiry in The Waves (DIII 229). In “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927) Woolf, without explicitly stating it, already constructs the literary form of The Waves: “a playpoem” (DIII 203). She postulates that this new hybrid form, combining the abstractness and exaltation of poetry, the flexibility and ordinariness of prose, and the drama of a play (EIV 435–437), will be more capable of accounting for
“[l]ife [, which] is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it”
9 This refers to Husserl’s “epochê,” in which the “natural attitude” is replaced with a “phenomenological”
one in order to reveal “the ‘essence’ of things lying on the other side of our concrete fact-world”
(Mildenberg 4). For further explanation, see “Theoretical Background.”
10 See, for instance, Banfield (2000) pp. 245–293, or Uhlmann (2010) pp. 58–73.
(EIV 439). It will capture what so far “escaped the novelist” but is essentially shaping human lived experience of Being-in-the-world, namely,
the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of [color], the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine. (EIV 439)
In other words, The Waves as a playpoem will be “an abstract mystical eyeless book”
(DIII 203). It will illustrate the intangible, visually imperceptible complexity of life,
“the outline rather than the detail,” and the broader relations of humans to “general ideas” (EIV 435).
Woolf develops these ideas further in her diary, writing that in The Waves “I want […] to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity:
to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea” (DIII 209). In tune with anti- ocularcentrism’s turn towards lived embodied experience, Woolf aimed to capture the moment as it is immediately and corporeally perceived and does not distinguish between exterior and interior, subject and object. Instead, “some combination of [the inner and the outer] ought to be possible” (DIII 209), in the moment of being as an amalgamation of all: thought, sensation and the alleged outside world, “the voice of the sea.” This sense of human interconnectedness and embeddedness within the world echoes Woolf’s famous remark in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939): “that behind the cotton wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art” (MB 72). Moreover, in her diary entry she writes further that she rejects the
“appalling business of the realist” as the latter includes “things that don’t belong to the moment” (DIII 209)—the “superfluous” or “useless details,” as Roland Barthes will later argue, that create the “reality effect” of realism (140, 143). And it is precisely that—just an effect—since, as Woolf states, the realist’s writing is “false, unreal [and]
merely conventional” (DIII 209). Woolf’s critique of realism is paralleled in what she defines to be “bad writing” in her essay “Pictures” (1925), also reminiscing of Cézanne’s critique of impressionism. Woolf claims that bad writing is such that
“appeals mainly to the eye” (EIV 243), and instead praises writers like “Proust, Flaubert, Hardy and Conrad,” for in their works,
[t]he whole scene, however solidly and pictorially build up, is always dominated by an emotion which has nothing to do with the eye. But it is the eye that has fertilized their thought; it is the eye, in Proust above all, that has come to the help of the other senses, combined with them, and produced effects of extreme beauty and of a subtlety hitherto unknown.
(EIV 244)
Rather than focusing on outer appearances, it is the invisible but perceivable essence lying beneath them—what Rhoda in Woolf’s The Waves also terms as “the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing” (107)—that needs to be the centre of writing.
The eye supplies the entry point but it is only in unison with the other senses that
“hitherto unknown” beauties are uncovered. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty states that “[n]o one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible” in his eponymous work (VI 149).
In conclusion, anti-ocularcentrism stems from the realisation that it is the entire being, with mind and body merged, that perceives its environment with which it is irrevocably interconnected, rather than a disembodied mind that inspects an objective, exterior world through monocular, disembodied and disinterested vision. Vision is, thus, not abandoned but dethroned from its primacy among the senses, re-united with them and lodged in the body. By understanding that omniscience and objectivity are impossibilities, life’s intangibility and enigma become the subject of inquiry in philosophy, literature and the arts.
Merleau-Ponty’s Subject-Object
Woolf’s fascination with lived, bodily moments of being as uncovering the unconscious
“hidden pattern” behind the surface of daily life (MB 72), signifies a close kinship with phenomenological thought. In fact, phenomenology is a method or practice that strives to describe basic, human, lived experience of being from an immediate first-person point of view, rejecting the detached third-person perspective of scientific inquiry that applies judgement and preconceived categories to phenomena (Carman 14). Husserl, known as the father of phenomenology, famously argued that in order to get to “the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), the “natural attitude,” meaning presuppositions and expectations, needs to be reduced to a “phenomenological” one, a
“primordial dimension of,” or a “pre-reflective” experience (Mildenberg 3–4). Through this “transcendental reduction,” called “epochê,” one reaches the immanent contents
“of [pure] consciousness” (noema), of “transcendental subjectivity,” where the external world, its essence or phenomena, is experienced (Carman 41). His student Heidegger,
on the other hand, showed that there is no separation of consciousness and the world in our lived experience of it, since being is always Being-in-the-world (Dasein), always inextricably embedded (Carman 75, my emphasis). Hence, in general, phenomenology longs to describe the “of-ness or ‘aboutness’ of experience,” drawing on Franz Brentano’s notion of “intentionality” as the directedness of consciousness toward something (Carman 74). Whereas Husserl located intentionality in consciousness, Heidegger placed it in Being-in-the-world.
By contrast, Merleau-Ponty marks the first phenomenologist to replace the human intellect as the locus of subjectivity (intentionality) with the lived body as the conscious subject of experience. Since Woolf believed in embodied vision, as demonstrated previously, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology caters best to unlocking the issue of eyelessness in The Waves. His corporeal phenomenology fully embraces anti-ocularcentrism’s return to the body and entirely renegotiates the notions of visibility and invisibility. In his last essay “Eye and Mind”
(1960), Merleau-Ponty states that “[the body] is caught in the fabric of the world” (125);
“I do not see [the world] according to its exterior envelope; I live it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is around me, not in front of me” (138). Indebted to Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty asserts that it is only possible to perceive the world because we are in it corporeally. Thus, Merleau-Ponty rejected the mind-body distinction of his predecessors, first and foremost Husserl’s.
Husserl saw the human as a “psycho-physical unity” of a “bodily […] [and] a transcendental ego,” and claimed that it is only due to this unity that one can
“apperceive” others as minds as well, hidden behind the visible appearance of their bodies (Carman 138). In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty there is, firstly, no mind-body distinction at work in the “most basic experience of ourselves and others” (Carman 149), and secondly, the body is not just an appendix of the self but, in fact, is the self (VI 244–245).
In his posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible (1964), Merleau-Ponty draws heavily on Husserlian phenomenological notions of the lived body (Leib) and the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Husserl argued that one can only become aware of the material body (Körper) as a lived body (Leib) through touch, not sight, since only touch has a “double aspect,” meaning that I can touch myself touching and thereby experience “my own bodiliness [Leiblichkeit]” (Carman, 128). The lived body is tied to Husserl’s “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) as the “‘concrete world of everyday
experience’” (qtd. in Mildenberg 21), in which not only physical (e.g. human) but also cultural and historical objects, as well as social institutions, are “braided” or
“interwoven” with each other (Verflechtung) (Lawlor x). Merleau-Ponty takes up this double-touch experience as a characteristic of the lived body; however, rather than prioritising touch, he extends the structure of the double-touch not only to all senses but also to the world as a whole. It is in this fashion that Merleau-Ponty develops his key concepts of flesh and chiasm in connection to the visible and the invisible. As a crucial advancement in his thought, he claims that Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world depends on our being of the world, meaning that “my body is made of the same flesh as the world” (VI 248). Merleau-Ponty borrows from Husserl’s Verflechtung (braiding) in defining the structure of the flesh as chiasmatic, meaning that the relationship between body and world is no longer one of stimulus and response but one in which they are “interweaved” into a single fabric (flesh). As Mildenberg notes, the direct translation “braiding” describes the chiasm of the flesh much more accurately than
“interweaving” (1). Whereas weaving entails separate “warp threads and weft threads,”
in braiding, each thread fulfills both functions, so that through a “zigzagging [motion]
[…] the warp becomes weft and vice versa” (1). This crisscross pattern (chiasm) lies at the heart of the experience of Being-in-and-of-the-world. Taking artists as an example, Merleau-Ponty writes, “many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things”
and as such, he argues that there is not only a reversibility of touch (Husserl’s double- touch) but also of vision, and even an intertwining of them since “vision is a palpation with the look” (VI 134):
There is a circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold of the touching; there is a circle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is not without visible existence; there is even an inscription of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible—and the converse.
(VI 143)
Importantly, he adds in his working notes that this reversibility of the seeing and the visible is inherent to all senses (VI 256), and their intertwining also means that neither of them is prior to the others. By uncovering the body’s “prereflective […] unity” (VI 141), being a “sensible sentient,” being at once perceived and perceiver, Merleau-Ponty replaced the Cartesian subject with a subject-object, grounded on the notion of intercorporeality (flesh) between body and world (VI 137). This synergy of sensible and sentient not only occurs in a single body but also between different organisms, since for Merleau-Ponty sensibility is grounded on a “carnal adherence” between
subject-objects rather than on “belongingness to one same consciousness” (VI 142).
However, this does not mean that Merleau-Ponty falls into monist thinking. Rather, the chiasmatic structure of the flesh entails a paradox of “envelopment and distance, […]
of unity at distance or sameness with difference” (Johnson 47 f.). Being of the same flesh means being simultaneously distanced from and interweaved with the world, which is, however, according to Merleau-Ponty, not a contradiction but the “means of communication” between, for instance, the seer and the thing (VI 135). Consequently, the flesh is not matter or substance but the primordial ground of all Being, a “general thing” (VI 139), through which it is made possible to encounter and inhabit the world.
In Carman’s words, “[t]o see the world, we must already be in a kind of [unconscious]
bodily communion with it” (VI 124). As such, it is the body that upholds consciousness and not vice versa (VI 141), and thus, it is “the body and it alone […] that can bring us to the things themselves” (VI 136). They cannot be found in Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity but only in the prereflective flesh of the world, which we normally take for granted.
Furthermore, as his eponymous work suggests, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of visibility and invisibility is integral to his corporeal philosophy. He writes that perception of the world is only possible because the body is in and of the visible (VI 134 f.); in fact, “[t]o have a body […] is to be visible” (VI 189) and is to be enveloped by the visible (VI 271). The common flesh of the world is the flesh of visibility, the
“prephenomenal being” that makes perception possible (Carman 124). As such, the body is only a “variant” of the carnal world, the flesh of visibility, “a prototype of Being,” and shares with all other visibles its chiasmatic structure (VI 136). Hence, visibility and its flesh are both anonymous entities that envelop the world and constitute a space that exceeds what I can immediately see or touch (VI 143). Already in the chiasmatic experience of sensing and being sensed it becomes apparent that each subject-object is more than its “being-perceived” (VI 135). That is the case because things (Sachen) in order to exist cannot just be their surface appearance but they, as well as any other subject-object, have depth (VI 136). In fact, according to Merleau- Ponty, the visible is “a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscole borne by a wave of Being” (VI 136). Merleau-Ponty’s notion of depth draws on a horizonal structure of Being that develops both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of it further. As Merleau-Ponty points out, for Husserl the horizon is “a system of ‘potentiality of consciousness’”
gazing onto the world (VI 149), whereas for Heidegger, “‘world is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject […]’” (qtd. in Jay 163). Heidegger claimed that an all-seeing view is impossible to attain since every individual is immersed in a visual field, not located outside of it, and her/his horizon is limited to what lies within her/his field of vision (Jay 173). This is also reflected in Heidegger’s preference of the ontological, embedded or “aletheic gaze” over epistemological “assertoric,” disinterested vision referred to previously (Jay 164). Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, connects the horizon to depth and flesh, stating that “it has meaning only in the Umwelt (environment) of a carnal subject, as Offenheit [openness], as Verborgenheit [invsibility/hiddenness] of Being” (VI 185). While every subject-object has its own depth, its “interior horizon,” it is also “caught up, included within” the depth of the flesh of visibility in general, the “exterior horizon” (VI 148–
149). Thus, those horizons are not opposites but they open up onto each other and “by encroachment” complete each other in the flesh’s chiasmatic structure (VI 202).
Lastly, then, the visible is not all there is but like the sentient is the obverse of the sensible and vice versa, the invisible is the obverse of the visible. In fact, “the visible is pregnant with the invisible, […] to comprehend fully the visible relations […] one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible” (VI 216). The invisible is the visible’s “lining and its depth” (VI 149), it is its “non-figurative inner framework” (VI 257), it is its “Wesen” (essence) (VI 247) and therefore not its counterpart as it would be in Cartesian dualism. The relation between visibility and invisibility is then like the relation between “sound and meaning, speech and what it means to say”—they are each inscribed in each other without a question of priority (VI 145). Therefore, Merleau- Ponty also claims that literature, music and the arts are an exploration of the invisible (VI 149)—they lay bare the invisible in-the-visible.
In this way, Merleau-Ponty, drawing on both Husserl and Heidegger, altered their philosophies by anchoring consciousness in the body and the body in the world.
He collapsed dualist thinking between mind/body, self/world and visibility/invisibility by demonstrating that they share a carnal structure of reversibility, the flesh of visibility, in which they are embedded. In sympathy with a broader shift towards anti- ocularcentrism, Merleau-Ponty lodges lived experience of the world in the body and stresses the intertwinement of the senses in the engagement with the world, which always remains partly invisible to us. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology suits the purpose of my thesis, since I argue that Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves,
abandoning a single subject-position and anchoring the characters in their intercorporeally connected bodies, explores and uncovers a common, anonymous Being, in which all subject-objects are grounded, being of the same flesh.
Approaches to Woolf’s The Waves, Being and Vision
Previous research on Woolf’s The Waves, Being and vision has broadly fallen into three categories: material and cultural-historical approaches that focus on science’s impact on Woolf’s writing; aesthetic and formalist approaches that examine Woolf’s aesthetic vision; and phenomenological approaches that analyse her engagement with human’s experience of Being-in-the-world.
Derek Ryan in Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory (2013) and Henry in Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003), both analyse how advances in the sciences and technologies in the early 20th century influenced Woolf’s writing of The Waves. Even though Ryan focuses on Bohr’s quantum and atom theory and Henry on advances in astronomy, they arrive at a similar conclusion, namely, that Woolf deconstructs human beings’ alleged superior position in the world in The Waves, depicting characters that are embedded in a world over which they do not have dominion. Ryan argues in this respect that the human and non-human relationships in The Waves can be seen in connection to Bohr’s indeterminacy principle, revealing, as noted earlier, that “edges or boundaries [between all agents] are not determinate either ontologically or visually” (176). He claims that the characters negotiate their positions through a kind of “intra-action,” trying to distance themselves from each other but always perceiving a deep sense of entanglement, recognising the essence of quantum physics: “‘[W]e are part of that nature we seek to understand’” (Barad qtd. in Ryan 174). Henry, on the other hand, connects Woolf’s nonanthropocentric layout of The Waves not only to Woolf’s development of a “decentred aesthetic vision” but also to her rejection of Fry’s “aesthetic unity,” inspired by astronomy and inventions such as the stereoscope (107). Referring to Woolf’s declaration that The Waves ought to be a
“playpoem,” Henry defines it to be the peak of Woolf’s experimentation with not only different styles but also multiple perspectives, denying the possibility of the privileging of a particular point of view and accounting for the restrictions of human vision on the world and themselves (105–107). Both, Ryan’s and Henry’s analyses, convincingly examine the characters’ inherent embeddedness in their environment as agents sharing equal agency with all other human and non-human agents in the world. While this
implicitly speaks to my Merleau-Pontian approach and the concept of flesh and the visible, both neglect a discussion of the body as the centre of lived experience.
Moreover, Ryan does not explore the importance of vision and the senses at all concerning human and non-human relations in The Waves, and despite Henry’s examination of Woolf’s decentred vision, she leaves Woolf’s eyeless writing untouched.
More formalist examinations of Woolf’s aesthetics in The Waves can be found in the works of Claudia Olk, Banfield and Tobin. While my analysis also involves an examination of Woolf’s use of literary devices regarding a common ground interconnecting the characters with each other and the world, Olk’s, Banfield’s and Tobin’s studies present an entirely different understanding of The Waves. Both Olk and Banfield argue that The Waves is structured by a dialectic of subject and object, interior and exterior, invisible form and visible surface. Olk claims that those binary pairs are
“[organising] paradox[es] [in] Woolf’s aesthetics” (167) and asserts that Woolf’s use of visual literary devices becomes both “a mode of production” (15) and a way of negotiating the relation between the characters as autonomous individuals and their surroundings (7). However, despite Olk’s formalist analysis of vision and even visibility and invisibility in The Waves, she does not connect her findings to Woolf’s eyeless writing, mentioning the term only twice (128, 165). In contrast, Banfield in The Phantom Table (2000) establishes a connection to eyelessness and claims that it was influenced by Fry, valuing post-impressionist emphasis on “design” over impressionist focus on “vision” (“art for the eye”) (248). This distinction, argues Banfield, is tied to a dualism between a “sensible world” against an eyeless world, “inaccessible to the senses” (13). Tobin in her doctoral dissertation “Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and The Years as Novel of Vision and Novel of Fact” (1973) also remains within a dialectical mode of thinking but goes even further, stating that The Waves is a drama centring on the “hostile relationship of eternal opposition” between humans, nature and a transcendental, disembodied “eyeless presence,” representing the hostile forces of life and death (204). However, rather than presupposing an a priori existence of the above- mentioned binary oppositions, by taking Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal philosophy as a lens, my analysis will remain closer to nonanthropocentric approaches, revealing the intercorporeality of human existence. Thereby, I will read The Waves as an optimistic engagement with Being, and eyeless writing as a positive exploration of Being’s invisible depth, inhabiting rather than opposing all beings.
As implied by the studies of Ryan and Henry discussed above, critics have registered Woolf’s move towards a more ontological and phenomenological thinking, especially in The Waves. Nevertheless, phenomenological studies of the novel are scarce and predominantly use Husserlian or Heideggerian philosophy, disregarding an analysis of vision and corporeality. Sheridan Hough (2002), for instance, ties Woolf’s declaration to “think of things in themselves” in “A Room of One’s Own” to Husserl’s
“things in themselves” (41–42). Referring to Husserl’s epochê, Hough argues that Woolf’s “androgynous view” produces a phenomenological “presuppositionlessness (Voraussetzungslosigkeit)” (45), enabling her to describe the world as it manifests itself in consciousness in The Waves (51). Emma Simone and Suzette Henke, on the other hand, take a Heideggerian approach. Henke’s article on “Virginia Woolf’s The Waves:
A Phenomenological Reading” (1989) is the earliest and, until recently, the only in- depth phenomenological study of The Waves published, and Simone’s Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study” (2017), traces similarities between several of Woolf’s works and Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger states that in perceiving the world there is never “a process of returning […] to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness […]; even in perceiving […] that Dasein which knows remains outside,” remains in the world (qtd. in Simone 31).
Regarding The Waves, Simone predominantly analysis the characters’ interpersonal relations as oscillating between detachment and connectedness in relation to Heidegger’s claim that “Being-in is Being-with Others” (39). She contends that the characters in their “average everyday mode of Being-with” do not experience connectedness but isolation (44–45). Henke’s analysis of The Waves is similarly pessimistic. Reminiscent of Tobin’s study, she examines the novel’s “mystical” aspect, presenting life as an ongoing “wave-like” fight “against hostile forces,” in relation to Heidegger’s remarks on “dread” (463). Henke argues that in order to perceive “the world seen without a self” Bernard strips off his identity and experiences “dread” in the face of “nothingness” (465), allowing him eventually to reach a mystic experience of
“the miraculous ground of being” (467). Referring to Heidegger, Henke claims that Bernard thereby reaches an “existential authenticity,” “an impassioned freedom towards death” as the moment when self and nature merge (470). However, since Husserl and Heidegger do not recognise the importance of the lived body in humans’
experience of Being-in-the-world, Hough, Simone and Henke all miss the characters’
bodily interconnectedness with themselves and their environment, characterised by interdependency rather than hostility.
As demonstrated in the previous subsection, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal philosophy accounts for this gap, which is why I consider it to be most suitable for unlocking The Waves’ eyelessness. The only phenomenological study that takes a similar approach to mine is Mildenberg’s monograph Modernism and Phenomenology (2017). Utilising Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in analysing The Waves, Mildenberg shifts the focus to the body-in-the-world in which consciousness emerges rather than vice versa (10). Mildenberg shows that The Waves is inherently “non-dialectical”
(113), arguing along Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of flesh and chiasm that there is a
“‘double-touch’ experience” at the centre of the novel through which The Waves unfolds, being “‘not concerned with the single life […], but with lives together’”
(Woolf qtd. in Mildenberg 116). Mildenberg also briefly discusses the issue of eyelessness but claims that it refers to “the mute and ‘eyeless’ figure of Percival” (119).
In contrast, my analysis will focus entirely on eyelessness in The Waves and will reveal that while Percival is one of its manifestations, “eyelessness” is not restricted to one character or presence but refers to multiple aspects of the novel.
In conclusion, whereas the material and cultural-historical approaches to The Waves implicitly speak to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh and the visible, they nevertheless do not entail a discussion of intercorporeality. Furthermore, while the studies on Woolf’s aesthetic vision entail an analysis of the visual literary devices she uses in order to establish interpersonal relations, they remain within dualist thinking, viewing eyelessness as the dark and hostile counterpart of the sensible world. Finally, since the majority of phenomenological studies apply Husserlian and Heideggerian philosophy, they not only miss the bodily interconnectedness of self and world in The Waves but also a discussion of the senses’ entanglement in lived bodily experience.
Hence, by unlocking eyelessness in The Waves with the help of Merleau-Ponty’s late corporeal philosophy, I will fill an important gap in research, tying Woolf’s The Waves to her ideas on Being and vision.
Chapter II
“Eyeless” and “I-less” Writing —Enveloped by Anonymous Visibility In her diary on June 18th, 1927, Woolf ponders about The Waves, here still preliminarily called “The Moths,” developing her “play-poem idea [further]: the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night&c, all flowing together” (DIII 139). In The Waves, Woolf was preoccupied with exploring the fundamental grounds of human existence rather than the subject matter of realist or naturalist fiction, the mimetic attempt to represent reality through character-drawing and a coherent plot, structured according to the succession of events, but which thereby failed to capture the complexity of life. Writing The Waves meant going against literary conventions, producing arguably Woolf’s most formally experimental novel.
In nine episodes, The Waves illustrates the life of seven characters—three women, Rhoda, Jinny and Susan, and four men, Percival, Bernard, Louis and Neville—
from early childhood until late adult life, each recording their sensations, experiences and thoughts in present tense soliloquies. In the middle of the novel Percival, the only character whose voice is never heard, dies in India, reducing the group to six. The nine episodes alternate with nine interludes written in italics and past tense, tracing the course of the sun from sunrise to sunset on the shore and the sea in the absence of human consciousness, symbolically paralleling the characters’ different stages in life.
As such, Woolf writes that The Waves is structured according to “a rhythm not […] a plot” (DIII 316), in which the interludes serve to be both a “bridge & also […] a background” to the characters’ lives (DIII 285). In this sense, they do not represent a separate world, autonomous from human beings or any kind of sentient being, but they depict something akin to Merleau-Ponty’s visible world, enveloping and framing the characters’ lives. The first interlude illustrates how
[t]he light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. (4) In this ekphrastic description, the sunlight illuminates the visible world, awaking it from its slumber. The sunlight is personified and vivifies not only the birds, chirping their morning tunes, but also shines on the white blind of a bedroom window, implicitly waking its human residents, whose presence is further alluded to via the image of a
“finger-print[-shaped] shadow” cast by the sun. The first episode, following this interlude begins,
“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.” […]
“I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.” […]
“Stones are cold to my feet,” said Neville. “I feel each one, round and pointed, separately.” […]
“Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,” said Susan.
“Look at the house,” said Jinny, “with all its windows white with blinds.” (4–5)
This passage amounts to a series of similar remarks of the characters, recording their perception of dawn standing together in a garden. Whereas the interludes and the episodes are formally separated parts, I argue that they are interconnected with each other since the visible world of the interludes is inhabited by the characters. In other words, the characters live in and corporeally perceive the visible world described in the interludes, which recalls Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh of visibility as the
“dimensionality of Being, […] as universal, [wherefore] everything […] is necessarily enveloped in it” (VI 257). This general visibility described in the interlude is not limited to what the eye sees but is open to all senses simultaneously. Hence, rather than depicting Husserl’s “double-touch,” this scene depicts Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility or chiasm inherent to all senses. While the characters are at once sentients, hearing the birds’ singing, touching the cold stones and seeing a ring of light, they are also immersed in the fabric of the world as sensibles, being touched by the stones, object to the ring of light quivering above them as well as the being-perceived of the birds surrounding them. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “[e]very vision takes place in a tactile space” and vice versa (VI 134). No point of view is elevated over another, just like no perceptual sense is granted primacy over the others; rather as Woolf states in “Sketch of the Past” (1939), “what was seen would at the same time be heard […]—sounds indistinguishable from sights. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of […] first impressions” (MB 66). Each character’s individual description stands simultaneously on its own but also merges with the others into a larger picture, constituting the characters’ immediate, embodied, collective experience of dawn in the garden. As a result, the relation between the visible world presented in the interlude and the characters’ perceptual experience of it in the episode exemplifies what Merleau-Ponty writes about the relationship between sense experience, the sensible and the sentient:
[E]ach monocular vision, each touching with one sole hand has its own visible, its tactile, each is bound to every other vision, to every other touch; it is bound in such a way as to make up with them the experience of one sole body before one sole world […] [,] the little private world of each is not juxtaposed to the world of all the others, but surrounded by it, levied off from it, and all together are a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general. (VI 142)
In the passage of The Waves cited above, not only is each character a sentient perceiving the sole world, but due to their collective sensuous experience, they, in fact, together form into a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general—the visible world presented in the interludes. This is possible because, rather than being isolated from each other as individual consciousnesses, the characters are interconnected with each other and their environment in a primordial, corporeal way, due to them being subject-objects or sensibles and sentients simultaneously (VI 142). They can only perceive because they themselves are perceivable, because the body is in and of the world (VI 134–135), or as Louis remarks, because they are “rooted to the middle of the earth” (W 7).
Furthermore, while the structure of the episode in the previous excerpt reminds the reader of dialogue, the characters do not actually respond to each other directly.
Instead, like a choir, each has its voice and together they form a chorus. Thus, the characters are not only interconnected with each other in their carnal adherence, their common, invisible flesh, but also formally and structurally in the text. Through anaphora (“I see,” “I hear”) and parallelism, their utterances structurally mirror and complement each other, which also serves to create a communal sensuous experience formally, as well as in terms of its content. Moreover, this excerpt also serves to exemplify Woolf’s “play-poem”-style. Rather than recording their perceptions in present progressive, the common tense of conversation, the characters utter them in simple present tense, more often utilised in poetry (Briggs, “Novels” 77). In fact, Stephen J. Miko defines this technique as “a kind of suspended present tense [reducing]
existence to a moment perpetually,” thus giving the characters’ immediate, embodied
“moment of being” without reflection or judgment (69). Bracketing both the characters’
presuppositions and the mimetic representation of things, their immediate perception of life itself, as Woolf described it, is in focus, namely, “the power of music [, the birds singing], the stimulus of sight [, light and shadow], [and] the effect […] of the shape of trees or the play of colour” (EIV 439). Hence, I argue that the suspended present tense is one manifestation of eyeless writing in The Waves, producing a kind of phenomenological reduction in itself, making the characters’ invisible impressions
