1‘I cannot tell you if life is this or that’, the character of Jinny admits in Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves (Woolf 2006, 134). Famously compared to ‘a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ (Woolf 1994, 160), ‘life’ in Woolf proves to be an elusive notion, one that evades definition and whose ‘vagueness’ the writer is all too keenly aware of (159). Yet it is also ‘the spirit we live by’ (Woolf 1988, 436), an indomitable force that imposes itself on the writer: ‘Is it not the task of the novelist’, Woolf asks in ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display . . . ?’ (Woolf 1994, 160–161).

4Keeping in mind this theoretical background insisting on immanence, I would like to suggest that ‘The Death of the Moth’, along with another essay entitled ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, is the occasion for Woolf to present ‘life’ as circulation. What the interplay of these two texts reveals is that, far from conceiving life as a centripetal force orientated towards the perpetuation of energy and the cohesion of the self, Woolf pictures it as a centrifugal process of dissemination which threatens to do away entirely with the notion of individual—or rather, which exposes the individual as an unfit and reductive framework.

Outer Connections / Inner Fragmentation

because he [the moth] was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about him. (443)

7As evidenced by the preceding remarks, the worldview embraced by Woolf in ‘The Death of the Moth’, and many other texts, is particularly well attuned to the findings of new materialism, especially as it insists on the absence of clear-cut boundaries between human and non-human actors and seems willing to ascribe agency to matter. In Woolf’s essay, ‘vigour’ (typically characterising humans or animals) comes ‘rolling in from the fields and the down’ (442). Clauses such as ‘The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window’ (442) see objects (the plough) synecdochically stand for their possessors (the ploughman) and serve as grammatical subjects of the sentence, eliciting an almost animistic sense of volition. The similarity is thus striking with the perspective developed for instance by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: ‘The aim’, Bennett contends ‘is to rattle the adamantine chain that has bound materiality to inert substance and that has placed the organic across a chasm from the inorganic’ (57). Her plea for a recognition of ‘materialities as actants’ (Bennett 62) and ‘for a materialism in which matter is figured as a vitality at work both inside and outside of selves, and is a force to be reckoned with without being purposive in any strong sense’ (62), resonates forcibly with the ‘power’ that Woolf describes as ‘massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular’ (Woolf 2011a, 444), and yet generating motion and activity of its own accord.

It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it. (Woolf 2011a, 443)

9Tellingly, the narrative voice emphasises both the apparent agency that manifests in the scene (‘as if someone had taken’, ‘to show us’) and the lack of genuine purpose ascribable to any one of the actants, as the moth is unaware of the function he comes to play in the assemblage. As with Bennett’s application of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, ‘[t]here is not so much a doer (an agent) behind the deed . . . as a doing’ (Bennett 28), something Woolf evinces through the reference to a ghostly ‘someone’ seemingly organising the scene, but who actually exists nowhere other than in the interplay of actants. Through assemblages, the immanent life force embodied by the moth, but also by the pulsating nature outside, is thus able to circulate, to flow from one being to the other, and above all to produce understanding and self-reflective awareness of such process among living beings.

11‘Evening over Sussex’ in various ways seems to prolong and echo ‘The Death of the Moth’: the movement of the car, speeding through the countryside, is substituted for the haphazard fluttering of the moth, while the latter’s renouncement before the overpowering force of death is mirrored in another admission of defeat: ‘I cannot hold this—I cannot express this—I am overcome by it—I am mastered’, the narrator of ‘Evening over Sussex’ exclaims, faced with the daunting task of conveying beauty through words (Woolf 2011b, 454). Most importantly, ‘Evening’ represents life as a process of circulation and exchange that takes place, not only between the subject and the nonhuman world, but within the bounds of subjective consciousness. While she ponders on the passing scenery from the passenger seat of the motor car, the narrative voice of the essay experiences a split of her personality between various ‘selves’, successively appreciating the situation through their own particular perspective. This process of fragmentation, which directly echoes a similar scene in chapter VI of Orlando, is conceived of in the essay as ‘disappearance and the death of the individual’ (455). Yet, as in the case of the moth, death is not so much equated with absolute cessation as with the occasion of a renewed dialogue or circulation, this time among the four selves that make up the I of the essay. Together, they are able to grasp the different facets of reality, ‘brought in’ as so many ‘trophies’ to be ‘arrange[d] in order’ by ‘I, who preside over the company’ (455). Connection thus follows up on fragmentation—just as in Between the Acts, ‘Unity’ and ‘Dispersity’ (Woolf 2008, 181) answer each other in Miss La Trobe’s pageant—so that both dynamics are shown to be reconciled within the flow of life, whose highly relational nature they each come to exemplify.

Interchangeable Experience: The Stylistics of ‘One’

12As evidenced by the final elegiac confession of ‘The Death of the Moth’—‘death is stronger than I am’—vital circulation is also at work in the essays at the level of enunciation, the first-person pronoun being used to conflate the subjectivities of the lifeless moth and of its mouthpiece, the narrator, who formulates for another being a statement which implicitly applies to her as well. It is this enunciative circulation I would like to explore now, focusing on the pronoun ‘one’, which I argue Woolf uses as the cornerstone of the intersubjective space of the essays—or ‘meeting-texts’. By drawing on the unstable status of ‘one’ as both indefinite and (potentially) specific, Woolf is able to destabilise its reference in a way that helps bridge the gap between the narrative voice and the reader. ‘One’ thus becomes the pronoun through which to articulate a form of joint experience—that which the narrator, unwilling to claim it solely for her own, opens up to other perceivers by proxy.

13Both ‘The Death of the Moth’ and ‘Evening over Sussex’, in a way that is representative of Woolf’s writing in her essays, make an extensive use of ‘one’, including in contexts where the usually indefinite ‘one’ quite transparently stands for the very specific ‘I’ of the authorial persona: ‘One could not help watching him [the moth]’, she writes in ‘The Death of the Moth’. ‘One was, indeed, conscious of a clear feeling of pity for him’ (Woolf 2011a, 442; emphasis added). In other cases, ‘one’ alternates with the first-person pronoun (‘So far as I could tell, the pin had something to do with one’s own impotency’ [Woolf 2011b, 454; emphasis added]), revealing both the proximity and the subtle differentiations that characterise their interplay, and upon which Woolf capitalises in the pursuit of her own pragmatic ends. A staple of essayistic prose in general, ‘one’ is indeed to be interpreted here in the light of the vital circulation described and aimed at by both essays.

14In The Stylistics of ‘You’, the monograph she has devoted to the second-person pronoun, Sandrine Sorlin contrasts the respective uses of ‘one’ and ‘you’ in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. As Sorlin shows,

• 7 Sorlin is here quoting Élise Mignot, ‘Pragmatic and Stylistic Uses of Personal Pronoun One’, The Pr (...)

[a]lthough the second-person pronoun seems to share with ‘one’ [a] combination of potential indefiniteness and definiteness, there is a difference between the two pronouns: while ‘one’ is an indefinite pronoun that can shelter ‘an element of definiteness’,7 ‘you’ is inherently a definite pronoun (because of its original interpersonal base) that can include an element of indefiniteness. Though an impersonal referent is not impossible for ‘you’, it is the definiteness that is primordial. For ‘one’ on the other hand, though the possibility of a more definite, specific and personal reference (i.e. ‘one’ meaning ‘I’) is not to be excluded, it is the indefiniteness that comes to the forefront. . . . ‘One’ can be other-oriented in its inclusive ‘we’ reference but it lacks the (effect of) address that ‘you’ conveys. ‘One’ is thus more author/speaker-oriented and introduces some distance with the actual reader, not involving her (indirectly or directly) as ‘you’ inevitably tends to do. (48)

15This is particularly interesting as, while in Sorlin’s analysis of Orwell’s prose, ‘one’ appears as a ‘weaker’ instrument of readerly involvement as ‘you’, it precisely seems to achieve such a role in Woolf’s essays. This effectively signals one of the idiosyncrasies of Woolf’s use of the pronoun: whereas Sorlin reveals it to be ‘better suited with mental processes that involve some distancing from the action’ and ‘one step too remote from an embodied re-enactment of experience’ (55)—with Orwell switching to ‘you’ whenever he wants to communicate ‘the physical strain of work’ (55)—Woolf does (sometimes counter-intuitively) rely on ‘one’ to convey bodily sensations and perceptions, as in this passage from ‘Evening over Sussex’: ‘one looks up, one is overcome by beauty extravagantly greater than one could expect—there are now pink clouds over Battle; the fields are mottled, marbled—one’s perceptions blow out rapidly like air balls expanded by some rush of air’ (Woolf 2011b, 454; emphasis added). Notwithstanding the peculiar use of ‘one’ in embodied contexts of interaction with the environment, a form of contradiction would seem to remain between the impersonal ‘streak’ in ‘one’—its being first and foremost indefinite—and the pragmatics of involvement it contributes to in Woolf. Let us try and understand what guides the writer in this choice.

16Whereas one of the effects of ‘you’ is to diminish impersonality by creating an ‘addressee-oriented perspective’ (Sorlin 4), ‘one’ works the other way round. In instances such as ‘one looks up, one is overcome by beauty extravagantly greater than one could expect’, or ‘One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom’ (Woolf 2011a, 444), the subjectivity expressing itself seems to dilute its own perspective in a larger whole, although it clearly evokes its own situated experience. In other words the personal account that forms the very substance of both essays is implied to be so (personal, individual) only by a form of accident: it is always open to generalisation, hence also the absence of any biographical information that could bind the narrative voice to a specific identity (apart from Woolf herself as implied author). Temporal or spatial markers, such as ‘here’ or ‘now’, which would seem to prevent indefiniteness, are thus used in conjunction with ‘one’—as in ‘mastery here meant the power to convey what one saw now over Sussex’ (Woolf 2011b, 454; emphasis added)—to adopt a hybrid enunciative stance.

‘The Death of the Moth’ and ‘Evening over Sussex’ as ‘Meeting-Texts’

18By using the phrase ‘meeting-text’ I refer to the properties of a number of writings by Woolf—often essays, short stories and/or generically hybrid texts—whose uniform spatiotemporal features and dialogical openness to the reader aim at creating a sense of intimacy—the impression of sharing the company of the narrative voice expressing itself. ‘Meeting-texts’, it seems, include the reader within the diegesis as a ‘phantom’ presence: never directly addressed, their role is nonetheless felt to be more than that of a witness. Emotional participation is required as the voice of the narrator itself is never self-sufficient, never ‘lonely’, but instead makes itself heard as part of a larger theatre of human voices. Accordingly, meeting-texts, although they have discursive aims and are driven by argumentation, can be thought of first and foremost as forms of coexistence. Woolf herself, in the 1924 essay ‘Character in Fiction’, uses the terms ‘meeting-place’ and ‘common ground’ (Woolf 1988, 431) to refer to the intersubjective function of the literary work as it seeks to anticipate its reception and establish an impression of mutual understanding between the two parties involved. Writing, Woolf argues, is a matter of ‘breaking the ice’ between oneself and one’s readers. In this respect, it is akin to the business of the ‘hostess’ putting her guest at ease:

Both in life and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other. The hostess bethinks her of the weather, for generations of hostesses have established the fact that this is a subject of universal interest in which we all believe. She begins by saying that we are having a wretched May, and, having thus got into touch with her unknown guest, proceeds to matters of greater interest. So it is in literature. The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy. (431)

20One of those features, as discussed above, is the reliance on the pronoun ‘one’ to facilitate the intersubjective conflation of the narrator’s and the reader’s perspectives within one single enunciative standpoint. In that regard, just as there are ‘you narratives’, meeting-texts often correspond to ‘one narratives’. Another essential characteristic has to do with the already observed generic fluidity of much of Woolf’s production, as meeting-texts cut across the divide between fiction and non-fiction. Whereas pieces like ‘The Death of the Moth’ and ‘Evening over Sussex’ were not included by Susan Dick in her edition of Woolf’s complete shorter fiction—presumably on account of their being less evidently ‘imaginary’ than ‘factual’, and of the similarity between ‘the narrator’s voice’ and ‘the author’s’ (Dick 2)—she admits to the difficulty of such choices, as ‘[t]his has meant the exclusion of a number of works which closely resemble [Woolf’s] fiction’ (Dick 2). And indeed, the two essays analysed here, like many others by Woolf, testify to the inclusion of ‘elements of fictionality’ (Reynier 10) within the framework of essayistic prose. In these circumstances, the category of the meeting-text, by highlighting the continuity between works otherwise set apart along generic lines, enables us, if not to dispense with, at least to distance ourselves from classifications (essay, short story) that Woolfian critics have long deemed unsatisfactory.

21The third distinctive feature bears on the setting of meeting-texts, which typically unfold along homogeneous spatiotemporal coordinates, taking place as they do at one specific point in time, in one given location. In other words, meeting-texts always amount to consistent ‘chronotopes’—the concept famously coined by Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin 84). Let us turn again to ‘The Death of the Moth’ and ‘Evening over Sussex’ in order to establish why this should be so.

22As previously observed, ‘The Death of the Moth’ takes place on ‘a pleasant morning, mid-September’ (Woolf 2011a, 442). From the few, rather vague indications of time provided by the narrator (‘after a few moments’ [442], ‘After a time’, ‘for a time’, ‘After perhaps a seventh attempt’ [443], ‘a few minutes before’ [444]) and the nature of the actions undertaken, the reader is conscious of only a short time having elapsed by the end of the essay—something the narrator confirms on the last page: ‘I looked out of doors. . . . Presumably it was midday’ (444). Space is as condensed as time and is structured around a broad division between ‘the field opposite the window’ (442)—where ‘the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and . . . the lean bare-backed downs’ (442) can be observed—and the ‘blind spot’ occupied by the narrative voice on the other side of the window. This interior space, which is never described, is also where the reader instinctively ‘settles’ in the company of their ‘host’.

25As Kate Flint has demonstrated,

Woolf presented congress with books as something linked to the pleasures of sexuality, but without the threats and dangers attendant on assertive masculine participation. Like sex, reading should ideally be a reciprocal transaction, she suggested, rather than a process of establishing dominance. (187)

26Reading, Flint goes on to argue, is for Woolf ‘an affair of close communion with an author and her or his work’, a ‘passionate liaison’ (198)—albeit one which is grounded in a profound paradox. The ‘intensity and possessiveness’ (198) Flint sees at stake in Woolf’s conception of reading might indeed be accounted for by the seemingly unbridgeable absence of the Other at the heart of the text (reader or writer) and the desperate attempt to overcome it in spite of everything. Woolf’s Orlando, who ‘had the odd conceit of those who write that words written are shared’ (Woolf 2016, 101), bears witness to this dilemma, which ‘meeting-texts’ seek to address on a formal basis.