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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Laura Doyle

Additionally, Merleau-Ponty traces the intercorporeality of the human body with the world, from which speech erupts, all the way back to the bodily situation of the human infant; in doing so he unknowingly anticipates more recent feminist theorists and at the same lime begins to throw light on Woolf's and other modern authors' preoccupation with the figure of the mother,(4) Merleau-Ponty borrows the French psychologist Henri Wallon's concept of the "syncretic thought" of the child and transforms it into a notion of "syncretic" existence. Wallon--in direct contrast to his contemporary Jean Piaget, who proposed an unthinking egocentrism in the infant--understood the child to be immersed in relationships; and he argued that the child does think but he or she thinks "syncretically." This syncretic thinking is akin to that which Carol Gilligan describes as characteristic of women making moral choices and also to what Sara Ruddick has called "maternal thinking": the syncretic thinker organizes object, concepts, and others within the context of the human relationships in which he or she encounters them.

Merleau-Ponty takes up Wallon's idea that the infant is syncretically "turned toward others," rather than turned inward, and folds it into his evolving philosophy of the intercorporeality of subject and object. He suggests that the young child's sense of fusion with others is not merely a confusion to be sorted out and transcended. It is not an experience of "fusion" at all. It prefigures the adult experience in which "the consciousness I have of my body" is something other than "the consciousness of an isolated mass." The child's body, like the adult's, moves and thinks within "a postural schema" which involves "the perception of my body's position in relation to the vertical, the horizontal, and certain other axes of important coordinates of its environment" ("The Child's" 117). In contrast to the assumption of an egocentric body, which thought must dictatorially direct outward, in this account the positionality of the body structures subjectivity and thought. The assumption of infant narcissism or an egocentric body underlies the familiar Western narrative of the "growth of objectivity" in human development (in which women and "primitive" civilizations typically "lag" behind). This assumption has informed theories of human development from Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Jacques Lacan. Wallon's and Merleau-Ponty's accounts of the child's perceptive intercorporeality begin to put into question this assumption of infant narcissism. By the same token, their ideas more effectively illuminate the phenomenological and narratival innovations of experimental twentieth-century novels like Woolf's.

But Woolf also supplements and politicizes the insights of Merleau-Ponty. She narrates how power infiltrates and directs the interplay of mother and child, body and world, empty and full, and of the narratival past, present, and future: she shows dominance inflecting the speech of intercorporeality. Moreover, she situates the mother strategically at the center of this power-inflected intercorporeality.