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Woolf's Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque
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- By Laci Mattison, Florida State University
- Edited by Derek Ryan, Stella Bolaki
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- Book:
- Contradictory Woolf
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2012, pp 96-100
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Summary
In The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (2000), Ann Banfield describes Virginia Woolf's novels as variances of the Leibnizian monad through influence she locates in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and the aesthetics of Roger Fry. More recently, Jessica Berman, in an essay entitled “Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf” (2004), reveals the correlation between ethics and aesthetics through Mieke Bal's “Enfolding Feminism” and Gilles Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993). This paper diverges from these other studies in its examination of Woolf's and Deleuze's conceptions of the fold, with an emphasis not on the Baroque fold (of Leibniz), which organizes Berman's and Bal's arguments, but on the un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque, the intensity Deleuze takes from Alfred North Whitehead's notion of the event. In the neo-Baroque, as Woolf would say, “certainly and emphatically there is no God” (MOB 72). Thus, the harmony and compossibility of Leibniz's monadology are no longer the necessary factors because “God” cannot “select” the perfect world. Incompossibility is revealed as the originary state of existence: everything is part of the same fabric, like the “silk” of the sea and sky in To the Lighthouse (1927), which “stretche[s],” enfolding the Ramsays, the Macalisters, and the boat as “part of the nature of things” (TTL 188). Thus, binary opposition, such as harmony and dissonance, becomes irrelevant. It is, after all, through dissonance that supposed harmony is created, as Woolf affirms. Through the non-dialectical un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque, we can differently interpret the supposed contradictions in Woolf's writing: not as notes of dissonance, but as creative, vital moments in which both Woolf and her artists (including those artists-of -the-everyday) recognize and affirm textual and textural incompossibility, the everything-at-once, the unlimited bifurcations of the world.
Banfield makes a convincing argument for the connection between Russell's philosophy and the aesthetics of both Fry and Woolf, and, in a much earlier essay, entitled “Virginia Woolf and Our Knowledge of the External World” (1979), Jaakko Hintikka also pairs Russell and Woolf.
The Metaphysics of Flowers in The Waves: Virginia Woolf's “Seven-Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson's Intuition
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- By Laci Mattison, Florida State University
- Edited by Kristin Czarnecki, Carrie Rohman
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and the Natural World
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2011, pp 71-77
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Summary
Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) questions epistemology and ontology and, in so doing, becomes a novel concerned with the “thing–in–itself.” Kant, in Critique of Judgment (1790), posits that we can never reach the “thing–in–itself” because the intuition which would give us a full understanding or experience of this “thing” is impossible. However, within the framework of modernist philosopher Henri Bergson's theory of metaphysics, we will recognize how we might intuit the “thing–in–itself.” Rhoda asks in The Waves : “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” Like Rhoda, we want to “see the thing” (163), and, while we have been told by Kant and others that we will never be able to approach the “thing” fully, Woolf's writing suggests otherwise.
In the first dissertation on Woolf, published in 1935, Ruth Gruber writes that Woolf “is too innately creative, too inherently Bergsonian to be called Bergson's imitator. It is conceivable that she would have found the way without him” (49). Gruber's comments on the thematic bridge between Woolf 's aesthetics and Bergson's philosophy come as no surprise, especially as Bergson experienced immense popularity during the time she wrote Virginia Woolf: A Study. Currently and in part because of the publication of Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism, the English edition of which was published in 1988, a reinvigorated Bergson is once again popular. As with Gruber's perceptive comments, current scholars have not failed to identify the integral connection between Modernism—especially Woolf 's work—and Bergsonism. Mary Ann Gillies cites The Waves as a “Bergsonian work” (126) in Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996); Merry Pawlowski utilizes Bergsonian time in her more recent analysis of “feminine space” in The Years (2008). And, Angela Hague, in Fiction, Intuition & Creativity (2003), defines intuition through Bergson, William James, and Jung (among others) as she traces intuition in Woolf 's creative process, concluding that “[i]n The Waves Woolf achieves the triumph of intuitive form that she sought throughout her career” (275). Extending these and similar arguments that propose a productive coupling of Woolf 's work with Bergson's, this paper affirms that, like Bergson's philosophy, Woolf 's fiction calls for a new metaphysics, a redefinition of the “thing” through duration, intuition, and assemblage.