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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Laura Doyle

Postmodernist literary criticism has since, of course, thrown phenomenological readings of literature, including modernism, into question. Along with the demotion of phenomenology to a philosophy of the falsely integrated subject went the demotion of modernism to naive precursor to postmodernism.(2) One flaw in this automatic chain of demotions was, as more critics have come to recognize, a too strong dependence on somewhat oversimplified new critical uses of phenomenology to explain modernist experimentation. The multiple dimensions and attitudes of modernism are now seen to obtrude in several directions beyond the scaffolding provided by universalized phenomenological conceptions of time and subjectivity.(3) This essay also rereads modernism outside of such conceptions, but it does so by foregrounding another phenomenology and reconfiguring the relations among phenomenology, feminism, modernism, and postmodernism.

For an important, often obscured choice underlies the postmodern demystification of the phenomenology of modernism: that of postmodernist thinkers' selective critique of phenomenology as a philosophy. In focusing its critique of phenomenology -- I have in mind, particularly, Jacques Derrida's seminal readings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger -- on transcendental German phenomenologists, postmodernist thinkers have focused on the phenomenology most vulnerable to deflation by a postmodern ethos of instability and fragmentation. It is not the case, of course, that Derrida and others overlook this tradition's anti-transcendental rereadings of itself. Heidegger does, as Derrida recognizes, explore the phenomenality of a concrete "being in the world" in his revision of Husserl's conception of a pure transcendental consciousness. Heidegger also, as Derrida acknowledges, uncovers a decentering principle in consciousness when he notes that "the forgetting of Being is a part of the very esence of Being." Derrida himself borrows Heidegger's term "trace," building on Heidegger's description of the way in which the "presence of the present" remains "sealed in a trace" (156-57).

Nonetheless, Derrida composes his project in counterpoint to German phenomenology, attempting to dismantle its transcendental assumptions further, yet at the same time perpetuating the honored romance with that transcendental tradition and obscuring other traditions of phenomenology. Deconstruction thus discredits phenomenology on the basis of a critique of the German tradition, and in the wake of that critique modernist novels suddenly appear as narrative embraces of presence. Or they appear to need rereadings attentive to their subtextual fragmentedness. On the one hand, both kinds of reading seem to me valid, in that modernism similarly debated both sides of those questions of time and presence which postmodernism considers its special arena.

Yet, on the other hand, I would suggest that modernism (if not literature generally) can now be re-encountered with another phenomenology. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, in particular, though temporarily obscured by recent currents of intellectual history, can powerfully inform the contemporary discussion of a historical body. In the terms of this discussion, as I see it, presence accumulates and leaves its "trace" not as an ontological mythology but as a historical marking which relegates to different bodies distinct postures, clothes, labors, neighborhoods, goods, pleasures, and so on. Scrutinizing the line where body meets its surround and where consciousness cleaves to body, Merleau-Ponty begins to lay the foundation for discussing the embeddedness of ideology in the body, and for further understanding Western logocentrism's "absent center" as the effaced materiality of history. His work can supplement discussions of the body not as a fixed or positivistic referent, not as that which escapes history and contingency, but as that which continually infringes on transhistorical meta-narratives of the body's world. I would add immediately, too, that the notion that the body infringes does not necessarily mean either that the body marks the limits and contours of discourse only through its pain, as Elaine Scarry suggests, or that its joy becomes manifest in language only as semiotic rupture, as in Julia Kristeva's notion of a pre-Oedipal embodiment. The body does not survive only beyond and against language and narrative; it survives with and in language and narrative, partly because language's physicality extends the phenomenal world's physicality, and vice-versa, as both Woolf and Merleau-Ponty recognize.