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

How does it happen that I give to my hands, in particular, that degree, that rate, and that direction of movement that are capable of making me feel the textures of the sleek and the rough? Between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some . . . kinship. . . . This can only happen if my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible . . . if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. (Visible 133)

"Opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part": we will see that this phrase characterizes Mrs. Ramsay's mode of being, as it characterizes the narrational posture of To the Lighthouse, which nevertheless uses this ontology, this opening onto, to expose the physical self-sacrifice enacted by Mrs. Ramsay within a patriarchy which feeds on her ontological resources while devaluing their power.

A contrast may be useful in clarifying this "intercorporeality" among bodies and things, as Merleau-Ponty calls it. Merleau-Ponty shares with Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he had a lifelong friendship and intellectual dialogue, an emphasis on the seeable thisness of the individual human. But while Sartre pursues the transcendentalist and time-honored path of identifying the import for an autonomous consciousness of this thingness of ourselves, culminating in his philosophy of human existential "otherness," Merleau-Ponty sustains a contemplation of the mutual "access" engendered by the "kinship" among things and bodies in the world. Sartre assumes the essential deadness of objects and focuses his philosophy on a distinction between being-for-itself (humans with consciousness) and being-in-itself ("mere" objects or animals), exhorting humans to denounce mere in-itself existences and forge meaning for-themselves. Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, explores the ways in which our in-itselfness in conjunction with the in-itselfness of the object world contains the means for constructing worlds for-ourselves.

Importantly, the "ourselves" here is not exclusively human; the object world is itself dynamic and forceful and a part of the "worlds" we create. While Sartre continued the deep division between human and nonhuman, and Heidegger, too, speaks of "the world" humans inhabit in a monolithic, if resonant, language, Merleau-Ponty traces more closely the ways we live, think, feel in discrete interdependence with innumerable things, in an involuntary intercorporeal connection with them. Thus "the thickness of my body, far from rivaling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of things" (Visible 135). For Woolf the "thick" or materially embedded body -- such as that of Mrs. MacNab in "Time Passes" or the wandering woman in Mrs. Dalloway -- is indeed a vehicle for entering the "heart of things"; but importantly for her "the heart of things" is not only a realm of joy or community -- it is death, as J. Hillis Miller and others have recognized; it is "that emptiness there." Yet, at the same time, for her as for Merleau-Ponty, "that emptiness" inhabits a fullness, a phenomenality.