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‘Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct?’: Woolf’s ‘Gigantic Conversation’

Ariane L. Mildenberg

Résumé

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.

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  • 1 James Naremore, The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven and London: Yale (...)

1In The World Without a Self, James Naremore claims that Woolf, in her novels, ‘tries to evolve a technique which will allow her to present the ‘luminous halo’ of experience, even the ‘tremor of susceptibility’ in the self, without neglecting what is “outside [. . .] and beyond”’.1 Drawing on the work of Harvena Richter, who ‘has suggested that we set aside the conventional terminology and ‘approach the question of voice,’ which, in Virginia Woolf, “is at once conscious and unconscious, personal and impersonal, individual and collective”’, Naremore attempts ‘to indicate how the narrator of Mrs Woolf’s novels modulates between these extremes until it becomes the voice of everyone and no one’, but stresses: ‘It is probably impossible to find a term that would accurately characterize this voice’ (75).

  • 2 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Hogarth Pres (...)
  • 3 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 11.
  • 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwester (...)
  • 5 Using aspects of Heidegger’s phenomenology, Suzette Henke has already demonstrated that the ontolog (...)

2The particular ‘voice’ that Naremore refers to is most apparent in The Waves. One of Woolf’s diary entries reveals that her intention with this work was ‘to saturate every atom [. . .] to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity; to give the moment whole, whatever it includes. Say the moment is a combination of thought, sensation, the voice of the sea’.2 But ‘giv[ing] the moment whole’ was not an easy task: ‘[H]ow to [. . .] press it into one,’ she wondered, ‘it might be a ‘gigantic conversation’’ (Diary 3 295). The final version of The Waves never presents us with ‘conversation’ in the usual sense of the term. Like waves in a sea, the words of the six speakers are at once dispersed and gathered in Bernard’s closing soliloquy, bringing to light an intersubjective world where voices ‘melt into each other with phrases [. . .] are edged with mist. [. . .] [and] make an unsubstantial territory’.3 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’, he writes, but rather a ‘general thing’, a phenomenon of reciprocal contact between perceiving subjects.4 In what follows I hope to show that Merleau-Ponty’s speculations, which are based on the fundamentals of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, shed a clarifying light on the ‘gigantic conversation’ of The Waves and provide a terminology for the ‘voice’ in Woolf’s work that Naremore lacks.5

  • 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962) VI (...)
  • 7 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce (London: Geor (...)

3Whereas the word conversation is often associated with purely linguistic interchange, Woolf’s ‘gigantic conversation’ has overtones of something more primordial, something of pre-semantic insubstantiality existing prior to our usual form of communication. ‘The world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins’, Merleau-Ponty writes in his Phenomenology of Perception.6 It is ‘already there’ in the shape of what Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, thought of as ‘[t]he misty horizon that can never be completely outlined [but which] remains necessarily there’.7 Husserl’s ‘misty horizon’ figures the infinity and continuity of the world. It is ‘misty’ because it is ‘always already there’, existing before reflection and can never be completely seized in words, and yet it is the ‘horizon’, the very background against which our thoughts and expression stand out.

  • 8 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.1, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Hogarth Pres (...)

4We never lose sight of this misty horizon in Woolf’s The Waves; it is there at the periphery of the six speakers’ perceptions: ‘We melt into each other with phrases,’ says Bernard, ‘We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory’ (11). It is also against this infinite horizon that all creative acts, including that of writing, stand out: ‘One sees a fin passing far out,’ wrote Woolf in her diary, suggesting that first creative impulse prior to words: ‘What image can I reach to convey what I mean?’ she wrote: ‘Really there is none’.8

  • 9 Joseph J. Kockelmans, Martin Heidegger: A First Introduction to his Philosophy (Pittsburgh: Duquesn (...)

5The goal of Husserl’s phenomenology was to get ‘Back to the things themselves (zu den Sachen selbst)’, that is to say, to uncover the primordial relation between consciousness and world and reveal this as the original ground for thought and expression.9 This could be accomplished by adopting the shift of standpoint of the so-called epoché or reduction, which would operate through a ‘bracketing’ (putting out of play) of pre-conceptions and theoretical reflections (Husserl 107–11). Husserl’s ‘thing itself’, then, signifies not the object in the world as it exists independently of experience, but is a term for the subject’s primary experience of the thing prior to the thematisations of habituality (Husserl 86).

6Again and again, Woolf challenges us to adopt such a shift of standpoint. Throughout her diaries, her speculations gesture toward a division between the primacy of perception and the written word. In a 1928 diary entry, she writes:

The look of things has a great power over me. Even now, I have to watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which is high, and still I say to myself instinctively ‘What’s the phrase for that?’ [. . .] But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes [. . .] (Diary 3 191)

  • 10 Virginia Woolf, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays, vol.2, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London (...)
  • 11 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 260.

7‘—[O]nce one takes a pen & writes?’ Woolf ponders elsewhere in the diary, ‘How difficult not to go on making ‘reality’ this & that, whereas it is one thing’ (Diary 3 196). What we usually call ‘reality’ is ‘real’ only because we have learned to see it that way. If only one could suspend our habitual ways of expressing the real, Woolf seems to suggest, and return to the ‘one thing’ that reality is before it is processed by some trivial objectivism, before we even learned to pin it down in the ‘this & that’ of language. Thus, she re-directs our attention to what in ‘Modern Fiction’ she calls ‘life, spirit, truth or reality, this the essential thing’,10 that is, the pre-thematised, unspoken order of things. It is this essential order that Lily Briscoe wants to grasp in To the Lighthouse: ‘Phrases came. Visions came [. . .] But what she wished to get hold of was the very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything’.11

8The phenomenal feature exposed through the reduction is that consciousness by its very nature is always directed toward some object. This fact that every act of the mind implies an object thought of bears the name of ‘intentionality.’ People do not exist in and for themselves but only in and through intentional relations, through thoughts, memories, or perceptions of (Husserl 241–44). Thus, there are two inter-related terms at work here: horizon and intentionality. Intentionality concerns our consciousness or perceptions of things and at its periphery lies the misty horizon of continuity.

  • 12 The idea of ‘the stream of consciousness’ traditionally referred to in connection with the self-con (...)

9The monologue-like soliloquies which shape Woolf’s The Waves can be characterised as intentional acts, continuous streams of fresh perceptions of things. Like the birds in the book’s third interlude, Woolf’s perceivers are ‘aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular’ (59): ‘“I see a ring,” [. . .]’ ‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ [. . .] ‘I see a globe’ (5). Woolf’s diary tells us that she imagined these perceptions to appear as ‘islands of light—islands in the stream that I am trying to convey; life itself going on’ (Diary 3 229). The ongoing stream of life conditions what Woolf’s speakers perceive. Their perceptions manifest themselves against a horizon of continual change in the book’s interludes: the rising and setting of the sun, the singing of the birds, and the breaking of the waves.12

  • 13 For this insight I am indebted to Judith Butler’s comments on Wallace Stevens’s poetry. See Butler, (...)
  • 14 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 442.

10The interaction between the six speakers’ perceptions and the change of the misty horizon within which they exist takes on the shape of some ‘gigantic conversation’, a conversation which goes beneath and beyond our ordinary forms of communication and becomes a ‘combination of thought, sensation, the voice of the sea’. It is ‘gigantic’ in that it points to the Husserlian horizon of continuity, which exists before we could even reflect on it. It is thus too huge to be grasped fully in words and yet it is the ever-present ground of all forms of expression.13 I can best rephrase this ‘gigantic’ idea by what the American poet Wallace Stevens spoke of as, ‘a shapeless giant’, ‘A giant on the horizon, glistening’.14 Stevens’s ‘giant’ is ‘shapeless’ because it refers to the insubstantial shape of pre-semantic experience, the first creative impulse, which, like Woolf’s ‘fin passing far out’, has not yet been fully crystallized: it is ‘on the horizon, glistening’. This ‘giant’ both lays the foundation for and surrounds our perceptions and expressions.

  • 15 For a clarifying examination of Merleau-Ponty’s concept see Jerrold Seigel, ‘A Unique way of Existi (...)

11Unlike Husserl, Merleau-Ponty assigns intentionality to the flesh of the body. It is the body which first experiences the world, not the mind. Just as our visible perceptions are conditioned by a pre-existing but unperceived ground or ‘horizon’, our ability to express our thoughts is conditioned by an unspoken, bodily communication with the world. All our acts, relations and clear thoughts arise from this differentiation within being itself, but although ‘[t]his separation (écart) [. . .] forms meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 216), we do not perceive it in daily life.15 Just as ‘the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure)’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 215–16), language has a silent centre, a ‘core of primary meaning round which the acts of naming and expression take shape’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xv). From the unperceived separation between these invisible/mute and visible/spoken dimensions of experience emerges the reversibility of ‘flesh’. The body, Merleau-Ponty tells us, has a twofold being that locates it at once apart from other sensible beings as a seeing/touching subject and among them as a seen/touched ‘thing’: ‘every perception is doubled with counterperception [. . .] is an act with two faces’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 264). We are all caught up in the ‘flesh of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 248) as both perceiving and perceived beings, simultaneously distanced from and intertwined with experience. The structure of flesh is therefore chiasmic: it refers neither to a complete separation nor a unity between invisibility and visibility, ‘mute perception’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 155) and speech, seer and seen, but something in between. ‘Flesh’ is a ‘general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139).

  • 16 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 11.

12Just as Woolf in The Waves directs our attention to the ‘misty’ horizon against which her speakers’ perceptions rest, so in Mrs Dalloway does she make visible the equally misty phenomenon that Merleau-Ponty terms flesh, the divergence within being from which self, other and world arise in mutual and reciprocal relations. Clarissa thinks: ‘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 [. . .] part of the people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best’.16 To Septimus the world is always exposed as phenomenon, hence his attention is centred only on this ‘mist between’ things, revealing that he, like other beings, is ‘part of [a] pattern’ (28). The wholeness of this pattern depends on the unperceived space between muteness and speech, invisibility and visibility, silence and sound: ‘Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds’ (28).

  • 17 For a different elaboration of the same paradox see my essay ‘Interrelation and Separation: Dialect (...)

13The unperceived betweenness of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh also allows us to articulate the paradox of experience that Woolf struggled to ‘press into one’ in The Waves. The book’s ‘gigantic conversation’ reaches its zenith in Bernard’s final summing up. Here Bernard’s voice and those of the other five merge, creating one ‘gigantic’ voice, indicating that the flesh of the single body is at once shared and reflected by the world: ‘Who am I? I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know’ (227–28). How can it be, Woolf seems to suggest, that we are conscious of other people, who are, simultaneously, conscious of us? Her six speakers are, on the one hand, part of the surging ‘stream’ of ‘life itself going on’, but are, on the other hand, above it, looking down from their dry ‘islands of light’, stressing at one and the same time their difference and similarity, their distance and intertwining: ‘At the moment when I am most disparate,’ says Bernard, ‘I am also integrated’ (62).17

  • 18 Hermione Lee has also pointed out that Woolf ‘wanted to feel what Proust felt and to see if she cou (...)

14Woolf’s diary reveals that she was fascinated with Proust’s writing. ‘The thing about Proust’, she writes in a 1925 entry, ‘is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity [. . .]. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of my own’ (Diary 3 7).18 Merleau-Ponty was equally impressed with Proust’s capacity to capture the unseizable within the solid: ‘No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 149). Proust most clearly highlights this idea when, in Swann’s Way, he refers to music as the ‘little phrase’ and Merleau-Ponty draws upon this notion when elaborating his own phenomenon of flesh. Like the ‘little phrase’, flesh is a ‘general’ notion, like ‘the notions of light, of sound, of relief, of physical voluptuousness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968,139, 149) which we cannot quite ‘get at . . . immediately and lay hands on’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 150). In our ‘operative language’, Merleau-Ponty writes ‘sense and sound are in the same relationship as in the ‘little phrase’’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968,153). The full meaning of language lies not merely in our spoken words but in the mute perception or silent language inhabiting these words: ‘language is everything [. . .] it is the voice of no one. [. . .] the very voice of things, the waves and the forest’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 155).

15Proust’s concerns with the unrepresentable seem to have influenced the gigantic project of The Waves in particular. When ‘[s]um[ming] up. . .the meaning of [his] life’ (199) to provide us, the readers, with a final story, Bernard claims that he is ‘tired of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground’ (199). ‘[D]istrust[ing] neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper’, he ‘long[s] for’ (199) a different kind of language, which is not of our usual conversational kind:

some little language that lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. (199; my emphasis)

  • 19 Patrick McGee has also argued that Bernard’s ‘little language’ stands for the unseizable and immate (...)

16Just as Proust’s ‘little phrase’ catches the invisible lining of the visible, the sense within the sound, so does Bernard’s ‘little language’ highlight the unseizable and immaterial hidden within the ‘neat designs’ of our conventional language. This ‘little language’ refers to the ‘broken’ and ‘inarticulate’ but it is not the opposite of what is ‘whole’ and articulate; rather, it is that invisible/mute element which inhabits our visible world and words. What Bernard longs to express is a more direct experience of the ‘thing itself’ without the obstructions of beautiful, neat phrases—a ‘poetry [which] rediscovers what articulates itself within us, unbeknownst to us’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 208).19

  • 20 In her diary Woolf describes The Waves as ‘an abstract, mystical eyeless book’ (Diary 3 203).

17‘It is Percival who inspires poetry’ (30), Bernard tells us elsewhere in The Waves. This silent and ‘eyeless’ but nevertheless central figure is not really a character but a metaphor for ‘the thing itself’, the ‘core of primary meaning’ in which the acts and expressions of the others are anchored.20 When Percival arrives at his own farewell dinner, he instantly inspires one gigantic moment which exposes the common ground of the six beings, the ‘flesh of the world’, the ‘voice of no one. [. . .] The very voice of things, the waves and the forest’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 155):

‘Now once more,’ said Louis, ‘[. . .] Do not move, do not go. Hold it for ever.’ ‘Let us hold it for one moment,’ said Jinny; ‘love, hatred, by whatever name we call it’ [. . .] ‘Forests and far countries on the other side of the world,’ said Rhoda, ‘are in it’; [. . .] ‘Happiness is in it,’ said Neville, ‘and the quiet of ordinary things.’ [. . .] ‘Week-days are in it,’ said Susan, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday [. . .] What is to come is in it,’ said Bernard [. . .]. (118–19)

18In accordance with Merleau-Ponty’s speculations, the repeated ‘it’ in this passage is ‘not matter. . . not mind. . . not substance’ but one of those unsubstantial ‘general’ notions like ‘the notions of light, of sound, of relief, of physical voluptuousness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968,139, 149): ‘love’ is in it, ‘[h]appiness is in it’, ‘[w]eek-days are in it’. ‘It’ directs our attention to the ‘gigantic’ horizon of experience which cannot be completely expressed because it exists before we could even reflect on it, and yet it is the ever-present ground of our acts, relations and expressions. ‘It’ refers exactly to that which we cannot ‘get at [. . .] immediately and lay hands on’ but which is, nevertheless, ‘the common tissue of which we are made’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 150, 203).

19In this light, let us conclude by considering the opening of Woolf’s short story ‘A Haunted House’:

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.
‘Here we left it,’ she said. And he added, ‘Oh, but here too!’ ‘It’s upstairs,’ she murmured. ‘And in the garden,’ he whispered. ‘Quietly,’ they said, ‘or we shall wake them.’
But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. ‘They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,’ one might say and so read on a page or two. ‘Now they’ve found it,’ one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open. (Haunted 3; my emphasis)

20Once again Woolf’s procedure is tantamount to the operation of the epoché, shifting our attention back to the ‘thing itself’. The short story exemplifies a phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of conventional ‘neat designs’ of representation, exposing ‘it’ or ‘life, spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing’ (Crowded 7), the more primordial dimension of experience that is the condition of expression and creativity alike. This is implied in the fact that the narrator stops her pencil upon thinking ‘Now they’ve found it’. ‘It’ marks that primary perception, the ‘fin passing far out’, which Woolf struggled to ‘get down into [her] pen’ (Diary 3 191) and out on her page. The passage, in other words, also lays bare an unperceived space of betweenness, that between the first, pre-semantic perception and the articulation of the ‘thing itself’, thus calling attention to the space or blank page where creative production takes place.

21Like the ‘mist’, edging the ‘unsubstantial territory’ of The Waves, the repeated ‘it’ in ‘A Haunted House’, then, represents what we are always, already haunted and somehow framed by: ‘we are always already in [. . .] [and] of it’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 248); it is ‘not what I think, but what I live through’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xvi-xvii). This ‘essential thing’ corresponds with the ‘gigantic’ region that Woolf never stopped questioning and struggled to grasp in words—a giant which both lays the foundation for and is the integument of our acts of consciousness: ‘life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ (Crowded 8).

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Notes

1 James Naremore, The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973) 75.

2 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1980) 209.

3 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 11.

4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) 139.

5 Using aspects of Heidegger’s phenomenology, Suzette Henke has already demonstrated that the ontology of The Waves is ‘more phenomenological than mystical’, thus arguing against previous scholars such as James Naremore, Louise Poresky and Madeline Moore, who place emphasis on the ‘mystical’ dimension in Woolf’s writing. See Henke, ‘Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: A Phenomenological Reading’, Neophilologus. 73.3 (July 1989): 461–72. Other connections between Woolf and phenomenology have been demonstrated by Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) 245 and 39 n. 24; Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986) xv and 3; M. L. Wadikar, Journey Towards the Centre of Being: Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson (Meerut, India: Anu Prakashan, 1980); Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998) 228; and Carole Rodier, L’Univers imaginaire de Virginia Woolf (Paris: Editions du Temps, 2001).

6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962) VII.

7 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1931) 102.

8 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.1, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977) 113.

9 Joseph J. Kockelmans, Martin Heidegger: A First Introduction to his Philosophy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1965) 18.

10 Virginia Woolf, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays, vol.2, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin Books, 1993) 7.

11 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 260.

12 The idea of ‘the stream of consciousness’ traditionally referred to in connection with the self-conscious techniques of high Modernist writers such as Woolf and Joyce has been approached foremost through William James’s Principles of Psychology. See for instance Robert Humprey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954) and Melvin Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study of Literary Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). As James is a significant factor in the relation between the Modernists and phenomenology, it is odd that the related patterns between Husserl’s thought and Woolf’s concerns with the acts of consciousness is a barely trodden field. Bruce Wilshire has pointed out that despite the fact that ‘James does not call his method phenomenological’, ‘his actual practice points in the direction of what Husserl later explicated’. See Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study ofThe Principles of Psychology’, 4, 6. Thus, taking his bearings from James, Husserl speaks of ‘the stream of experience’ (Husserl 116).

13 For this insight I am indebted to Judith Butler’s comments on Wallace Stevens’s poetry. See Butler, introduction, The Erotic Bird : Phenomenology in Literature, by Maurice Natanson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998) xiv.

14 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 442.

15 For a clarifying examination of Merleau-Ponty’s concept see Jerrold Seigel, ‘A Unique way of Existing: Merleau-Ponty and the Subject’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 29, n°1 (January 1991): 475–76. For other useful examinations see John Carvalho, ‘Folds in the Flesh: Merleau-Ponty/Foucault’, Rereading Merleau-Ponty: Essays Beyond the Continental-Analytical Divide, eds. Lawrence Hass and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Humanity Books, 2000): 293–312; and Brendan Prendeville ‘Merleau-Ponty, Realism and Painting: Psychophysical Space and the Space of Exchange’, Art History 22.3 (September 1999): 364–88.

16 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 11.

17 For a different elaboration of the same paradox see my essay ‘Interrelation and Separation: Dialectical Tensions in Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’, Across the Generations: Selected Papers from the Twelfth International Virginia Woolf Conference, eds. Merry Pawlowski and Eileen Barrett (published online at CSU Bakersfield: Center for Virginia Woolf Studies, 2003) 277–86.

18 Hermione Lee has also pointed out that Woolf ‘wanted to feel what Proust felt and to see if she couldn’t turn this world into something like À La Recherche’. See Lee, Virginia Woolf (London:Chatto & Windus, 1996) 468.

19 Patrick McGee has also argued that Bernard’s ‘little language’ stands for the unseizable and immaterial but in an entirely different way: ‘the little language is the discourse of the Other’, which ‘signifies something beyond [. . .] at which all language aims’. Unlike my attempt to argue that the pre-reflective dimension of experience laid bare in phenomenology reveals a new aspect of Woolf’s concerns with creative production, McGee uses his notion of the ‘Other’ to point out a ‘compatibility’ between Woolf and Lacanian theory, claiming that Woolf ‘reaches toward the unrepresentable [. . .] the locus of the signifier before it is captured by the symbolic rule of patriarchy’. See McGee, ‘Woolf’s Other: The University in Her Eye’, Novel, 23 (Spring 1990): 244, 230, 245.

20 In her diary Woolf describes The Waves as ‘an abstract, mystical eyeless book’ (Diary 3 203).

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Ariane L. Mildenberg, « ‘Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct?’: Woolf’s ‘Gigantic Conversation’ »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 11 juillet 2024, consulté le 08 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15046 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwm

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Ariane L. Mildenberg

Ariane Mildenberg has been awarded her PhD at the University of York in 2004. Her thesis examines the related patterns between phenomenology and aesthetic production in selected works of V. Woolf, G. Stein, and W. Stevens. Particular emphasis on philosopher Edmund Husserl’s concept of phenomenological reduction and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s refinement thereof creates an interpretive foundation from which to articulate the Modernists’ aesthetic inquiries. She has published on Woolf and Cézanne; one of her most recent essays on Joseph Cornell, John Ashbery and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, will appear in Joseph Cornell: Opening the Box, ed. Jason Edwards and Stephanie L. Taylor.

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