‘Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct?’: Woolf’s ‘Gigantic Conversation’
Nearing the end of writing The Waves, Virginia Woolf struggled with the book’s closure. ‘[H]ow to [. . .] press it into one’, she wondered, ‘it might be a ‘gigantic conversation’’. The Waves never presents us with ‘conversation’ in the usual sense of the term. Instead the book’s six voices ‘melt int...
Saved in:
| In: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Language: | Anglais |
| Published: |
Études britanniques contemporaines
2024
|
| Online Access: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | Nearing the end of writing The Waves, Virginia Woolf struggled with the book’s closure. ‘[H]ow to [. . .] press it into one’, she wondered, ‘it might be a ‘gigantic conversation’’. The Waves never presents us with ‘conversation’ in the usual sense of the term. Instead the book’s six voices ‘melt into each other with phrases [. . .] are edged with mist. [. . .] [and] make an unsubstantial territory’ (W, 11). In The Visible and the Invisible, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides us with a term for this ‘unsubstantial territory’: ‘flesh’ (la chair). ‘The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance’ but rather a ‘general thing’ (139), a phenomenon of reciprocal contact between perceiving subjects. |
|---|