Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

178 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
makes this such an intense and cryptic novel to read. 4 But Woolf was also a writer with
a strong vision to communicate; a writer who posed penetrating and stringent critiques
of her society; a writer who probed as far as she could into the depths of reality, on the
grounds, again to draw upon Th e Years, that we cannot model a new society if we do not
know ourselves. But how do you communicate any system of values without it becoming
propaganda? How do you assert a strong coherent vision without the attendant assumption
that your vision encompasses all?
In this light, I would argue, the ragged edge establishes a double textual ethics: on the
part of the writer, an ethics of interpolation, in which the text is constructed as both provisional
and contingent by being inserted into larger ongoing communal fl ow of thought;
on the part of the reader, an ethics of extrapolation, in which the freedom of the future to
break out into the new must do so in response to the words of the past. Th e ethics of interpolation
enable the writer to communicate values without their becoming propaganda;
the ethics of extrapolation unite the reader’s freedom to determine her own values with a
responsibility to the text that has been read.
Th e dynamics I think are easier to explain than to achieve. Ethical writing does not
come about without a struggle, and it is this struggle that becomes graphically evident
in the playwright Miss La Trobe. For if even La Trobe’s pluralistic participatory theatre
comes under the threat of being domineering, is Woolf not suggesting that all writing is
subject to a colonizing desire to impose its own views? Rather than targeting La Trobe
for her assertive proclivities (allowing us to distance ourselves from these characteristics
as belonging to the enemy), is Woolf not exposing the “subconscious Hitlerism” 5 that lies
in all human nature, that is indeed inseparable from the artist’s ability to create? Th at is,
is she not showing us something about ourselves? Th e amazing victory, then, is that La
Trobe resists her desire for infl uence, takes down that fourth wall of the stage, empowers
other human beings and even animals as creators, makes the choice, to her own cost, that
to lose her audience is better than to win them by authoritative means. La Trobe succeeds
in communicating values without writing propaganda through a conscious and heroic
eff ort to give her words to her audience and to take nothing for herself. Furthermore, her
play avoids the monist narrative guided by origin and teleology by drawing upon multiple
source texts and beginnings, and by transposing into other voices at the end. Th e closest
we get to an originary source is that fertile mud in her mind, but we must also note that
the words bubbling out of it are organic transformations of words that have descended
into it fi rst. La Trobe was indeed listening to those voices in the pub, and the implication
is that those choric voices have sunk deep into her unconscious to mingle with all the
cultural detritus that has accumulated in her memory. As Bart Oliver intuits, what La
Trobe sought out, at the end of the day, was “darkness in the mud; a whisky and soda at
the pub; and coarse words descending like maggots through the waters” (BA 203). Linked
to the cesspool of the novel’s opening words, the fertilizing mud comes close to being
a circulating alimentary-excremental paradigm for art’s generation, showing once again
how those early critics who thought that Woolf eschewed the body were so wrong. 6 Does
not Woolf indeed—to employ another organic metaphor—suggest a paradigm of art as
cultural compost: a process of decomposition and composition occurring in the interval
between the old and the new? For as part of a continuous process of derivation, assimilation,
transformation, and generation, La Trobe’s words are interjected into the ongoing