Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Inside and Outside the Covers
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resting place of a single beginning, even in hypothetical time.
Perhaps most radically, this indeterminateness of beginning informs Woolf’s most extended
allusion to the Biblical myth of creation: the echo of Genesis in the fi rst section of
Th e Waves. Opening in darkness, in a world of no distinguishable forms, the italicized prelude
would appear to narrate a scene of ex nihilo creation (the beginning of day imitating the
beginning of consciousness and initiating the beginning of form). Yet the informing paradigm
wobbles between tropes of creation and tropes of disclosure or discovery, ambiguously
mixing metaphors of birth and revelation. If the sun is the creative eye, then the movement
from dark to light, from undiff erentiated mass (“the sea was indistinguishable from the sky”)
to articulated forms (“the sun sharpened the walls of the house”) suggests the separation of
matter from chaos as a generative visual act (TW 7, 8). If, however, the sun strikes the eye,
then a slowly emerging landscape is recorded, notated, and doubled in the mind, the refraction
of light instilling the retinal image. Perception in this guise merely apprehends what has
preceded, in its existence, the sensory act. And the imagery of Woolf’s description reaches
back to the previously observed: a wrinkled cloth, a breathing sleeper, sediment clearing in
wine, or the arm of a woman raising a lamp. Seven times in the fi rst three paragraphs, the
words “as if” and “like” signal the dependency of perception on associations that antedate
the immediate scene. Th e implications are doubly transformative. Unlike the sudden creative
fi at of Genesis, here the artist, as the partially obscured fi gure of the woman whose arm
raises the lamp, is a creative fi gure without being a single and authoritative point of origin.
And, for the reader, beginning means entering into a process whose very multiplicity prevents
any reduction of the ensuing text into a single narrative line.
In various ways, Woolf’s opening words thus creep out from their locations between the
printed covers to link with prior life. And the implications again reveal the fallacy of earlier
assumptions about modernist thought. Far from being ahistorical, autonomous formalism,
Woolf’s writing is permeated with historical consciousness; and instead of plunging us into
subjective individualism, the adumbrated, pluralistic “source text” grounds the narrative
in an indeterminate, heterogeneous, communal past. However, such potentially positive
expansions of narrative also bring attendant threats. Th e negation of a single origin frees
us from confi nement in a totalizing, monolinear narrative, but the cumulative building of
pre-histories could still bind the future to rearticulations of the past. Th e question—and one
crucial to Woolf’s revolutionary feminist thinking—is whether one can engage the wholeness
of continuum and still allow a space for radical creative freedom to occur.
Such intense hauntings of pre-history escape a defi ning, deterministic trajectory, however,
precisely because the shift from monism to pluralism makes it possible to conceive the
radically new. By abandoning the construct of a single, unitary origin in one fi xed point
in time, Woolf’s narratives recast beginnings as indeterminate and multiple and hence
always pervasively potential. If antecedents of present experience have come into existence
in diff erent forms at diff erent times, then the phenomenon of beginning can occur at any
future point as well. A new eddy can fl ow into the stream, a new thread be woven into the
cloth, to enter and transform the holistic continuum of ongoing life.
Th is construct of time as continuous and yet ever changing, repetitive yet never the
same, recalls the correspondences, frequently noted, between Woolf’s narrative structures
and Henri Bergson’s concept of duration or durée. It is the late work of William James,
however, that most usefully explains the integral tie between narrative pluralism and an