Waves and fragments: linguistic construction as subject formation in Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1996 by Julie Vandivere

However, despite the emphasis on dependable, structured, indicative speech to define a concrete world, this passage is simultaneously laced with its opposite, so that the grammatical structures also hint at the inescapably mercurial nature of existence. While the first 14 lines of the passage repeat the grammatical pattern only three times and make only a few essentialized claims (such as "Those are white words"), Neville uses a form of "to be" four times in six lines, in each case when he is asserting the solidity of existence. In other words, the greater the claim to a concrete reality, the more frequent the repetition of the structure.

This particular repetition invokes a Cartesian faith in the expression of existence as the most reliable test of existence; the insistence on "to be" is the insistence on actuality, and is its only necessary proof. But in this passage, as in Descartes, the reasoning is tautological. The pronouns of the first half of the equation ("there," "this") provide no further definition of the second terms ("order in the world," "distinctions," "differences"). Consequently, neither statement possesses the root it claims in the concrete but moves pointlessly in circular modification.

Throughout The Waves, the sorts of grammatical and figural complexities that I have been exploring are a primary manifestation of the text's recurrent doubts about the stability of any linguistic or ontological assertion. Neville's statement that "There is an order in this world, upon whose verge I step" points to the impossibility of grounding in either the concrete or the abstract, the indicative or the subjunctive, the male or the female, and undermines any assumption that one may make such distinctions. A forging of the world and of selves within it rests on the thetic contradiction of living, we might say, enslaved by the ideal of the indicative but perpetually drifting into the flight of the subjunctive. Ultimately, Woolf's language in The Waves suggests that there is no choice but to live straddling the aporia between inevitably opposing constructions embodied within grammatical ambiguities.

In Between the Acts, Woolf's interrogation of conventional subject formation is less directly gendered than in The Waves but is no less insistent on the ontological impossibility of formation. Moreover, the interrogation is in this novel no less grammatically and rhetorically based, for even more than in The Waves, in Between the Acts Woolf concerns herself with how we are to shape lives forced as we are to live suspended between any solidities or certainties from which we would ordinarily expect to construct ourselves. And, as in The Waves, this concern manifests itself primarily on linguistic levels.(3)

To study language in Between the Acts, one must extend one's perspective beyond conventional linguistic presuppositions to consider the possibility of signification devoid of meaning. Woolf signaled as much in her diary when she described the novel's prose as "quite distinct" (D 5: 105) in that "the rhythm of the notes is far freer and looser" (D 5: 339) than that. Rather than as language, with words and meaning, Woolf here figures Between the Acts as music, with notes and rhythms. Any signification such a language is to achieve must derive from its sound. In Between the Acts, Woolf links music with language to explore the aesthetics of language, using music to empty language of its ability to gesture to something outside of itself and then correlating this linguistic incapacity with our inability to construct subjectivity.(4)