‘The Ebb and Flow of Conversation’: a Metaphorics of Maternal Presence
Résumé
The exposé proposes to examine conversation in Woolf’s works as an ebb and flow which is audible as recitative in the ‘sea’ novels: To the Lighthouse, The Waves and The Voyage Out and might be read as an undercurrent of continuity which is a metaphor of the mother’s voice. Through close reading of various extracts we analyse this recitative in terms of a poetics of refrain and anaphora giving rise to a rythmic anteriority which silences prose in a way Virginia Woolf herself recognised as proper to both the poetic per se and to the sea. This poetics is often based on a character’s reminiscence of words spoken, as words recalled and repeated in states of semi-consciousness—after dinner, before sleep—recover the intensity of their acoustic and visual potential, silencing semantics. Conversation in this sense is linked not so much to the spoken, as to orality, prosody, what G. M. Hopkins called ‘the record of speech in writing’.
Texte intégral
1‘The Ebb and Flow of Conversation’, the metaphor recalls the sea, the tides, and the movement of the waves which is also sonorous—‘the wash and hush of the sea’, an ebb and flow of sound and perpetual rocking, at once lullaby and cradle, a more or less distant rhythm, which this paper proposes to relate to maternal presence.
Let us recall the closing moments of the dinner scene in To the Lighthouse:
- 1 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; London: Granada, 1977) 102. I have marked out certain word (...)
the voices came to her very strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a cathedral, for she did not listen to the words. The sudden bursts of laughter and then one voice (Minta’s) speaking alone, reminded her of men and boys crying out the Latin words of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral. [. . .] Her husband spoke [. . .] He was repeating something and she knew it was poetry from the rhythm [. . .] The words [. . .] sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves
. . . She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside herself, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things [. . .]
I wonder if it seems to you
Luriana, Lurilee
[. . .] as if this were, at last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice speaking.1
2Thus dissolving as if ‘in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked’ (To the Lighthouse 103) conversation is subsumed and silenced by poetical rhythm, musical refrain: ‘she did not listen to the words [. . .] floating like flowers on water out there [. . .] she did not know what they meant [. . .] like music’ (102). Like the landscape dissolving into the sea in the letter Virginia Woolf writes to Clive Bell in 1908 prose is reduced to silence by poetry. Hence it is not the prose of conversation we remember at the closing of the dinner scene but its acoustic remainder, ‘the voices [. . .] voices [. . .] one voice [. . .] the latin words [. . .] The words [. . .] the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice’ (102). Here, anaphora acts as the lever to a rhythm emerging from the reminiscence of voices, of words sonorous ‘like music’, carried by a movement we might call anaphoresis, carried by what Henri Meschonnic has referred to as ‘le rythme sémantique des repetitions’ (the semantic rhythm of repetitions); for the rhythmical refrain has a meaning which remains to be discovered. Let us simply insist for the time being that for Virginia Woolf rhythm is anterior to meaning:
- 2 Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Paper Darts: The illustrated Letters, ed. Frances Spalding (London: (...)
Now this is very profound what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing [. . .] one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it [. . .]2 All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm. (Paper Darts 125)
3And so she returns us to the metaphor of the waves, breaking and tumbling with words on their backs. Now if we take a closer look at this poetics of repeat at work in the scene of Cam’s going to sleep it becomes apparent that the words exchanged between Cam and her mother will be repeated as if in an echo chamber:
And then she came back to Cam and laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam’s and said how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little birds and antelopes [. . .] She could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cam’s mind and Cam was repeating after her how it was like a mountain, a bird’s nest, a garden, and there were little antelopes, and her eyes were opening and shutting and Mrs Ramsay went on saying still more monotonously, and more rhythmically and more nonsensically, how she must shut her eyes and go to sleep and dream of mountains and valleys and stars falling and parrots and antelopes and gardens and [. . .] (To the Lighthouse 106)
- 3 Pierre Fédida, ‘Le conte et la zone de l’endormissement’, Corps du vide, espace de séance (Paris: D (...)
4Thinking about this echo chamber I am reminded of the space Pierre Fédida defined as a ‘zone d’endormissement’ (going-to-sleep-zone) in ‘Le conte et la zone d’endormissement’,3 and in which the spoken word is rendered out of the echo of listening. Thus between someone speaking and someone listening a sonorous imaginary space is formed in which the words spoken, in this example by the mother, are set in motion as they are heard and imagined. In terms of sonority we might say that repeated phonemes create a sort of elementary conversation, an echolalia accompanying the word-made-image promised in the dream. It is as if the word realised its potential as image only when carried by rhythm and by dint of its withdrawing from the normative function of communication. The anaphoric movement of wave after wave is modulated by the repetition of ‘and’ which appears twenty-two times in this extract; it is the movement of a tide coming in, at once background noise and backcloth for the emerging sound of words it carries.
5Examining other examples of this kind we notice that when Mrs Ramsay sitting in her armchair knitting remembers the dinner scene, the words then spoken, fragments of a recited poem, are set in motion:
[. . .] and slowly those words they had said at dinner, ‘the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee’, began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind [. . .]. (To the Lighthouse 109)
6In order to elucidate what is happening in these extracts between words spoken and their reminiscence I quote from Ernst Cassirer’s study Langage et mythe, as well as recalling the elements of Woolf’s text on which his thinking casts light:
- 4 Ernst Cassirer, Langage et mythe, translated by Ole Hansen-Love (Paris: Minuit, 1973) 52–53. ‘We ha (...)
Il nous faut [. . .] attribuer au phonème la même fonction, la même tendance à la persistance qu’à l’image mythique [. . .]. L’homme ne voit pas dans le mot un produit de sa propre création, mais trouve en lui une réalité objective, qui existe et signifie par elle-même [‘like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all’]. Dès que l’étincelle est passée, que la tension et l’affect de l’instant se sont déchargés dans le mot [. . .] commence en quelque sorte une péripetie de l’esprit [‘and slowly those words they had said at dinner’].4
- 5 For a more detailed elaboration, in English, of Pierre Fédida’s thinking about language in psychoan (...)
- 6 Liliane Louvel, ‘Nuances du pictural’, Poétique (avril 2001) 175–88.
7In the light of Cassirer’s observations Woolf’s text alerts us to a poetics of the heard such as that defined by Pierre Fédida in his essay ‘Restes diurnes, restes de vie’ in which the sonorous response created in echo to another’s words is seen as a transformation, out of passivity into activity, which turns the act of listening into an act of language.5 In response to the extracts of To the Lighthouse just quoted we might then say that as the récit slows down, expands to remember and becomes recitative not only is an acoustic space created in which words are sonorously produced and re-produced in the rhythm of a lullaby ‘from side to side’, but also a synaesthesic, oneiric space in which they light up ‘like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow’. The question of internal thresholds between word and image arises here, and in this respect Liliane Louvel writing on picturality in To the Lighthouse has referred to words in which ‘la couleur est première, le sens vient après’ (colour is primary, meaning secondary).6
- 7 Henri Meschonnic, Poétique du traduire (Paris: Verdier, 1999) 127: ‘The spoken and the oral can be (...)
- 8 For further detail of the functioning of the day’s residues in the dream I refer the reader to Lapl (...)
8To use a distinction which is a feature of Henri Meschonnic’s argument in Poétique du traduire I would say that it is not so much conversation as speech—le parlé—which engages our attention in Woolf’s text, rather conversation as orality. To quote Meschonnic, ‘A partir du rythme comme organisation subjective d’une histoire on peut distinguer le parlé et l’oral [. . .] L’oral est compris comme un primat du rythme et de la prosodie dans l’énonciation’ (Meschonnic 117).7 Now in Woolf’s writing orality is set in motion by the acoustic recalling of things heard; it is a production of writing. Paradoxical as this may seem, orality belongs to the writing. So conversation as orality—which we can define, as Meschonnic recalls after Gerard Manley Hopkins, as ‘the record of speech in writing’ or after Apollinaire as ‘prosodies personnelles’ (personal prosodies)—functions as a mnemic remainder whose memory is preserved in the writing and which is returned to our attention along the lines of rhythm and anaphora. But how? In order to sketch an answer to the question it would be useful to recall the function of the day’s residues in the dream. Like the elements deriving from the waking state of the previous day which we find in the dream account and the dreamer’s free associations, words heard in conversation in Woolf’s text find their echo when they are reiterated and, often in states of semi-wakefulness recalled as memory. It is then that they recover their hypnotic potential. According to a famous Freudian metaphor, the day’s residues are the entrepreneur of the dream.8
9Let us return to Cam, who ten years after being sent to sleep by her mother’s words and following her mother’s death, will make the journey to the Lighthouse and look towards the terra firma she has left behind. At that moment not only will she hear those words as if in a lullaby but also feel their movement as if in a cradle:
Cam was tired of looking at the sea [. . .] But as, just before sleep, things simplify themselves so that one of all the myriad details has power to assert itself, so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island, all those paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and disappearing, and nothing was left but a pale blue censer swinging rhythmically this way and that across her mind. It was a hanging garden; it was a valley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes [. . .] She was falling asleep.(To the Lighthouse 187)
10It is important to note that these words, like the day’s residues undertaking the dream which safeguards sleep, derive from the material of a previous conversation following a mnemic trace which transforms the récit into recitative. It is this trace—as it carries a movement we have related to the cradle and a sonority we have related to the lullaby—which is inscribed in the writing as both reminiscence of childhood and at once a metaphor of the sea and of the mother. Cam is in the boat; rocked by the movement of the waves she remembers her mother’s words. Let us note further that the movement and sonority of these words as they are repeated, their rhythm, recalls that which the mother herself perceived ten years earlier as she spoke, ‘she could see the words echoing [. . .] rythmically [. . .] nonsensically’ and that sonority is visible to her, ‘she could see the words echoing’. Thus like the day’s residues, conversation carried by a tidal, cradle movement on the brink of sleep, ‘like words on the backs of rhythm’ is carried along a mnemic trace which infiltrates consciousness as rhythm.
11Let us recall the passage in Moments of Being in which Virginia Woolf intends to transcribe her first memory:
- 9 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Triad/Panther 1978) 74.
the first memory [. . .] This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground—my mother’s dress [. . .] and she was sitting [. . .] and I was on her lap [. . .] They must have been anemones [. . .] it must have been evening [. . .].9
12and is interrupted by another memory which breaks into the anamnesis:
my other memory which also seems to be my first memory [. . .] It is of lying [. . .] it is of hearing the waves breaking one, two, one, one, two [. . .] it is of hearing [. . .] it is of lying [. . .] hearing [. . .] and seeing this light. (Moments of Being 75)
- 10 For further reading on this link between the sea and unconscious memory of the mother in Woolf’s wr (...)
13Here the memory of the waves, of the rhythm and light of the tides, is superimposed upon the memory of the mother’s dress as if the sea current and the maternal current underpinned each evocation of a moment at which someone strains to listen or to remember.10 So if we take up To the Lighthouse once more and scand the passage in which Mrs Ramsay can no longer hear the background noise of men talking and children playing we will hear that she is lulled as if by a distant echo.
The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said that the men were happily talking; this sound [. . .] such as the tap of balls upon bats [. . .] of the children playing cricket [. . .] had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach [. . .] beat a measured and soothing tatoo [. . .] and seemed to repeat over and over again [. . .] the words of some old cradle song murmured by nature. (To the Lighthouse 19–20)
14Is it not indeed this lullaby, like the music of the waves breaking on the beach, which we can already hear implied in the distant, irregular murmur of men’s voices speaking and children playing?
- 11 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915; London: Vintage, 2003) 193.
- 12 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931; London: Penguin, 1992) 120.
15I shall now continue this research into the traces of a poetics of conversation which I have discerned in To the Lighthouse, by turning to The Voyage Out, an inaugural work—which can be heard in echo in the writing of The Waves. Following the thread of our research through The Voyage Out we become aware of the extent to which the sea operates as a mute, a soft pedal, in this novel. Forever present, she is the background noise to Rachel’s inaugural voyage. The sea changes conversation, carries away sentences, breaks sentences, silences them. She pulls language in towards a depths of silence which is nonetheless audible like distant music. So when Helen and Rachel are speaking of Rachel’s dead mother, Hewett hears their gentle voices ‘as if they fell through the waves of the sea’,11 their ‘broken sentences’, fall one by one like arpeggios and stand out with ‘an extraordinary beauty and detachment’ against a background of sleep ‘as though they were spoken by people in their sleep’ (The Voyage Out 194). When Rachel is feverish and the weather is so hot that no one can speak, someone will recite Milton whose words it is not necessary to understand, simply to retain the substance and shape. To Rachel all words sound strange, meaning different things than usual. She hears only ‘a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head’ (363). Back at the hôtel St. John makes it his business ‘to start the talk and to keep it from dying out’ (357). Ridley recites a poem fragments of which are ‘wafted in at the open window’ (373). When Rachel dies in the early hours of the morning there is a profound silence until dawn when the first sounds to be heard are inarticulate cries, like those of children, recalling the little language of The Waves ‘words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing’ (227). At daybreak these sounds become clearer like colour replacing the white of dawn in The Waves. The bereft speak in ‘broken words’ or not at all, or they take ‘pains to keep up an elaborate conversation [. . .] with no interval of silence’ (386). And then after the storm voices re-assert themselves and the conversation is ‘gentle, fragmentary and intermittent’ (393); Mrs Elliot’s words fall ‘gently one after the other’, smoothly and half-consciously, like the stitches of her knitting’ (394). Returning to the hôtel, St John is comforted by the sound of voices surrounding his semi-consciousness; just as Neville in The Waves, exhausted after the shock of Percival’s death, wants to surround himself with ‘life . . . books and little ornaments and the usual sound of tradesmen calling’.12
- 13 Lorna Sage, The Voyage Out in Moments of Truth (London: Fourth Estate, 2001).
- 14 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism’ in On Not Being Able to Sleep (London: (...)
16Can we not say that in The Voyage Out conversation is always heard against a background rhythm, the background music, the grundton of the sea, the depths of an audible silence. If we follow Lorna Sage’s reading of the novel13 and hear in that subterranean language an echo of Rachel’s destiny, of her music, her shelter from speech, her silence, and the advent of her death, it would nonetheless be a mistake to extrapolate from this a metaphor of the deadly, for that audible background rhythm is shattered when death occurs in the novel, is lost. And the intensity of the writing which always carries the traces of this shattering silence of death—‘broken sentences’, ‘broken words’—in a process Jacqueline Rose has called its interminable mourning, is a measure of this straining towards the restitution of a semi-audible, sonorous continuity.14
- 15 We have already analysed the poetics of The Waves in two articles, ‘‘Passages dérobés’: La traducti (...)
17That continuity is the writing of The Waves. In Woolf’s most poetic text we are at the furthest possible distance from normal communication, in a breach of meaning from which springs the truth of a poetics of little language, in ‘a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights’ (The Waves 196).15 Everywhere in The Waves the oral recitative: the bible, nursery rhymes, lessons, the Romantic poets, folksongs, Shakespeare, occupies and enchants the reader’s ears. Woolf’s written howl, cry, against the sentence at once espouses and resists the sentence, cleaving to the verb, pouring energy into an infinitely rhythmical phraseology made up of words like shreds picked up by children in the presence of their mother sewing, of voices heard, and tracing a movement declining emotion as in a fugue. Thus might we argue that in this text language attains an absolute transparency to the elementarity of speech—speech as shreds of words, that The Waves is the other conversation.
Notes
1 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; London: Granada, 1977) 102. I have marked out certain words in bold in this and the following quotations to draw attention typographically and sometimes semantically to the importance of rhythm traced out in a space beyond semantics. In quotations in which bold marks out a rhythm pattern underlining is used as a semantic marker.
2 Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Paper Darts: The illustrated Letters, ed. Frances Spalding (London: Collins & Brown, 1991) 247.
3 Pierre Fédida, ‘Le conte et la zone de l’endormissement’, Corps du vide, espace de séance (Paris: Delarge, 1977).
4 Ernst Cassirer, Langage et mythe, translated by Ole Hansen-Love (Paris: Minuit, 1973) 52–53. ‘We have to attribute to the phoneme the same function, the same tendency to persist as we do the mythical image [. . .]. Man does not see a product of his own creation in the word but rather finds therein an objective reality, which exists and signifies of its own accord—‘like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all’—As soon as the spark is spent, as the tension and affect of the instant are discharged into the word [. . .] then there somehow begins a peripeteia of the mind—“and slowly those words they had said at dinner”’. My translation.
5 For a more detailed elaboration, in English, of Pierre Fédida’s thinking about language in psychoanalysis and the insight this affords our thinking about poetics see Anne-Marie Smith ‘Pierre Fédida, The Insistence of the Dream Reference’ forthcoming in Paragraph, the journal of the Modern Critical Theory, November 2004, and ‘The Body of the Word; The Work of Pierre Fédida’ forthcoming in Sound in Psychoanalysis, ed. Griselda Pollock, CentreCATH publications, University of Leeds.
6 Liliane Louvel, ‘Nuances du pictural’, Poétique (avril 2001) 175–88.
7 Henri Meschonnic, Poétique du traduire (Paris: Verdier, 1999) 127: ‘The spoken and the oral can be distinguished against the backcloth of rhythm as the subjective organisation of a story [. . .] What we understand by oral is a primacy of rhythm and of prosody in enunciation’. My translation.
8 For further detail of the functioning of the day’s residues in the dream I refer the reader to Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis translated from the French by D. Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1980).
9 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Triad/Panther 1978) 74.
10 For further reading on this link between the sea and unconscious memory of the mother in Woolf’s writing, and which I here study in the specific context of words exchanged, see Françoise Defromont’s illuminating commentary Virginia Woolf Vers la maison de lumière (Paris: Des femmes, 1985) and particularly the section ‘Ondes et féminité’ which is part of the chapter ‘Les Vagues d’or liquide’.
11 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915; London: Vintage, 2003) 193.
12 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931; London: Penguin, 1992) 120.
13 Lorna Sage, The Voyage Out in Moments of Truth (London: Fourth Estate, 2001).
14 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism’ in On Not Being Able to Sleep (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003).
15 We have already analysed the poetics of The Waves in two articles, ‘‘Passages dérobés’: La traduction du poétique:The Waves, Virginia Woolf, Les Vagues, Marguerite Yourcenar’, Frontières et passages: les échanges culturels et littéraires, Actes du XXVIII congrès de la SFLGC, textes réunis par Chantal Foucrier et Daniel Mortier (Presses Universitaires de Rouen) 270 (1999): 47–55; and ‘The Waves, Virginia Woolf, Origine et création de la métaphore’, Études de poétique, rassemblées par Josiane Paccaud-Huguet et Michèle Rivoire (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2001) 159–67.
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Anne-Marie Smith-DiBiasio, « ‘The Ebb and Flow of Conversation’: a Metaphorics of Maternal Presence », 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/15056 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwn
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