Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

176 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
open future. James increasingly recognized similarities between his thought and Bergson’s,
as connections not of infl uence but affi nity. In similar fashion, affi nities between Woolf
and James help to illuminate the philosophical understandings that Woolf’s unconventional
beginnings imply.
In his posthumous Some Problems in Philosophy, James investigates the philosophical
ramifi cations of positing one “supreme purpose and inclusive story”—the narrative structure
he identifi ed with monism—as opposed to numerous stories that “run alongside each
other”—the pluralist hypothesis (131). Numerous parallel stories accommodate both oneness
and multiplicity; for, as James argues, the physical world manifests “neither absolute
oneness nor absolute manyness”; rather, “an infi nite hetereogeneity among things exists
alongside of whatever likeness of kind we discover” (127, 128). Th e monistic thesis, which
reduces reality to the single attribute of oneness, errs further since it thus circumscribes
the future as always “co-implicated with the past” (139). Pluralism, in contrast, conceives
an “additive world” in which disparate realities co-exist in loose relations, connected by
“the bare conjunctions ‘with’ and ‘and’” (136). It is this loose additive relation between the
multiple stories that allows the possibility for genuine novelty to “leak in” (132).
Virginia Woolf’s deployment of juxtaposed fragments, lateral associative movements,
and multiple simultaneous plots has been well recognised, but we can further link her multiple
indeterminate beginnings with the possibilities opened at her narrative ends. Woolf’s
disjunctive narrative structures disperse the gesture of beginning throughout her texts; the
continuous “leaking in” of novelty disorders past perceptions, and such disordering stimulates
the forward moving momentum into an increasingly rich, increasingly heterogeneous
world. Again James’s explanations connect such pluralistic, disjunctive structures with interventions
of the radically new. Th e “classic obstacle to pluralism” and hence to novelty, in
James’s view, is the “principle of causality” (189). For if all eff ects proceed from causes, he
argues, eff ect is always inherent in the cause. What is created is always created out of what
already exists; nothing can come into existence that is not some manifestation of the old. In
contrast, James posits a diff erent perceptual experience of time and motion, one responsive
to infi nite variety: “Time keeps budding into new moments, every one of which presents a
content which in its individuality never was before and will never be again” (148). Our conceptual
understandings, which explain by “deducing the identical from the identical,” can
name new forms, but only in the terms of the already known, so that “if the world is to be
conceptually rationalized no novelty can really come” (152). But our own experience, James
argues, tells us otherwise: “the perceptual fl ux is the authentic stuff of each of our biographies,
and yields a perfect eff ervescence of novelty all the time” (151). Transposing James’s
words to a diff erent medium, Woolf’s false starts, multiple starts, radical breaks, and sudden
narrative leaps challenge fi xed concepts with the shocks of perceptual novelty, making beginning
a perpetual possibility, and allowing for additive new stories beyond the end.
If the openings of Woolf’s novels adumbrate ghostly and multiple pre-texts, the following
narratives function as prologue, framing and shaping the proleptic gestures on
the fi nal page. Even Jacob’s Room, the novel that seems most to end in loss, creates its
fi nal impact through the elided presence of beginnings. In the social sphere, Jacob’s fate
is driven by strong elements of classic causality: the gendered pathways that regulate his life
just as much as Florinda’s and Fanny’s, the forces that send him to his privileged education
in Cambridge, and, as an ironic result of that privilege, off to fi ght in the war. But Woolf’s