"These Emotions of the Body": intercorporeal narrative in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Laura Doyle

Kristeva, Julia. "Women's Time." Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology. Hannerl O. Keohane et al., eds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.

Langan, Thomas. Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason. New Haven: Yale UP, 1966.

Meisel, Perry. The Myth of the Modern. New Haven, Yale UP, 1987.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonse Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968.

-----. "The Child's Relation with Others." The Primacy of Perception. James Edie, ed. Evanston, Northwestern UP, 1964. As Lily Briscoe gazes at the drawing-room steps in the third section of To the Lighthouse, she thinks they look "extraordinarily empty." She asks, "How could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?" (265). We more clearly understand Lily's questions when we recall that "that emptiness" is the space once filled by a mother's body, by Mrs. Ramsay. This once female-occupied space may well be understood as the "absent center" that feminist deconstructive critics locate at the core of language. For Mrs. Ramsay's marriage is a relationship in which "he could say things; she never could," and in this sense Mrs. Ramsay represents an absent or unspeaking presence in the text. Moreover, for Lily, Mrs. Ramsay's absence constitutes the problem at the center of her attempts to express, to paint. Woolf herein anticipates both the general deconstructive skepticism about language as a vehicle of "reality" and the more specific feminist arguments for such skepticism -- that a silencing objectification of women rather than a scientific objectivity about "reality" generates the terms of language.

But Woolf's project also moves us beyond these critical insights. I will argue that, beneath her explorations of both of these layers of philosophical doubt, Woolf reveals that the "emotions of the body" which Lily feels in response to that "emptiness there" are precisely the means whereby the text can turn inside out the unnamed, body-transcending core of traditional Western philosophy and narrative. While Woolf's characters vacillate between vertigo and exhilaration as they stand on the edge of "that emptiness there," Woolf's narrator moves into and within that emptiness, both discovering already within it a phenomenological fullness and further filling it herself. Specifically, in To the Lighthouse the narrator stations herself within the objects which situate the mother's and the other characters' presence in the world; she can therein reincarnate and even extend the mother's phenomenality insofar as it is carried silently within those objects; but in doing so she not only breaks the mother's silence, evincing the "emotions of the body," but also revises the patriarchal coding of bodily emotions, in which the traditional mother is complicit. By extending the mother's embeddedness in things, in other words, the narrator transgresses the patriarchal and traditional motherly frame for that embeddedness and creates a site of uncoded embodiment.

More broadly, by literalizing and spatializing "that emptiness there," by casting it as a dimension of physical and emotional existence rather than as an ineluctable metaphysical condition, Woolf corporealizes the spaces rendered empty by patriarchal culture and thought. She constitutes narrative not according to what Edward Said once characterized as its "celibate enterprise" of forming "individuals" who mark their own "beginnings," but as an entrance into what Helene Cixous calls the "in-between" of self and self created by the physical world (254). Woolf attends, as her narrator says, to "all sorts of waifs and strays of things. . . . A washer-woman with her basket; a rock; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers" to get at what Lily Briscoe calls "the common feeling that held the whole" (286). But neither Woolf's nor Lily's "common feeling" is a naive humanist "fantasy of totality" of the kind that Julia Kristeva warns feminists against (49). Her narrative includes ironies, alarms, and disruptions as hinted by the double meaning of the red-hot poker inserted into the preceding series of images. Woolf's prose moves into the fleshy "in-between" of her characters' fictional world, discovers its folds and ruptures, embraces its curves and arabesques. In short, far from maintaining the prudery or ethereality with which Woolf has often been identified, her narrative sensualizes metaphysical questions -- of death and presence, speech and silence, time and space.

To the Lighthouse will serve here as an example of what I will somewhat awkwardly yet nonetheless precisely call Woolf's "intercorporeal" narrative strategies. I borrow the term from the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose ideas indicate the direction of Woolf's experiments more fully, as I will discuss in the first section of this essay, than either the German phenomenology or the deconstructive criticism that has been used to read and critique modernism.

Phenomenological conceptions of duration or time-in-process served for earlier critics of Woolf to explain her concentrated "moments of being" -- which provisionally protect her characters from the erosions of time and death. As is well known, under the influence of Henri Bergson and other disseminators of phenomenology, midcentury critics of Woolf and of modernist fiction studied temporal flux and simultaneity as elements of the fluid subjectivity represented in experimental novels.(1) "Being" in novels by Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf was elusive and contingent, never fixed and often fragmented, yet full and buoyant, because it was caught up in the phenomenological flux of time.