Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Afterword
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE COVERS: BEGINNINGS, ENDINGS, AND
WOOLF’S NON-COERCIVE ETHICAL TEXTS
by Melba Cuddy-Keane
Coming at the end of this volume, my contribution—to use the title of Sybil Oldfi
eld’s recent book—assumes something of the role of Afterwords: words, as in
those words praising Woolf after her death, standing as a tribute to the many fi ne
words that have come before. My words, however, are certainly not off ered as condolence,
but as a way of both drawing these proceedings to a close and looking ahead to new beginnings.
In this fi nal paper, it seems fi tting to dwell on the some of Woolf’s most familiar
words, the words with which she begins her works, and the words with which she ends.
My interest in this subject “began” when I was asked to contribute a chapter on Woolf for
a book on Narrative Beginnings, and I responded enthusiastically with a commitment to
write about the way Woolf does not begin. 1 But what seemed an easy project caused me
endless diffi culties. I hadn’t realized how hard it is for a writer to avoid beginning, if not on
the opening page, then on a later page, or at some implied point preceding the fi rst words.
I also hadn’t fully realized the implications of beginnings for our conception of the end,
and the importance of endings to the writing of what I will call non-coercive ethical texts.
For the problem of the non-authoritarian writer is the problem I think Woolf stages in the
playwright La Trobe: how do you communicate an intense ethical vision (which means
imposing a way of seeing), in an ethical way (which means leaving the audience free to see
for themselves)? Th e answer has to do, I think, with both the creation and the reception
of words—that is, with both beginnings and ends.
As opposed to the straight edge of the page we turn as we open a book, Woolf writes
what I have called beginning’s ragged edge. Textual energy, in her works, pushes against
the clean cut edge of the paper, reconstructing the opening page as if it were a bit of torn
cloth. A ragged beginning exposes dangling threads, those on the present cloth and those,
by implication, on the larger cloth from which the piece was torn. And the dangling
threads encode both a multiplicity of pre-texts and the formation of the present through
ruptures and breaks. Th e truly revolutionary nature of this practice is indicated by the
absence of terms to discuss it; narrative theory has always assumed that a fi xed beginning
point emerges somewhere in the story and that it supplies the motivating force for the
action that proceeds; Gerald Prince’s A Dictionary of Narratology, for example, defi nes beginning
as “Th e incident initiating the process of change in a PLOT or ACTION” (10).
But Woolf’s plots break with the Old Testament creationist mythology in which in the
beginning was the word; her novels are haunted by the ghostly presence of voices always
remaining outside the text, and prior to it, but there is no absolute single point of origin
to which the present narrative can be traced. No god-like creationist act informs the narrative
as an a priori trope; and, pace Stephen Dedalus, the artist’s creation is not fi gured in
god-like terms. Woolf’s ragged beginning is, furthermore, radically transformative of the
end. In their rejection of a fi xed point of beginning, Woolf’s narratives break with the teleologically
driven plot that advances to a single, fi nal goal. Feminist criticism has of course