Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University
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Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

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“THE SHOCK OF LOVE” AND THE VISIBILITY OF “INDECENT” PAIN: READING THE WOOLF-RAVERAT CORRESPONDENCE by Alyda Faber The topic of Virginia Woolf and religion has attracted a somewhat wary interest for at least twenty years. 1 Evelyn Haller’s remark in a presentation at this conference suggests an even shorter time frame for the possibility of this kind of work: “only in the last fi ve years can we say that Woolf had spiritual interests.” Varying accounts of Woolf’s mysticism—atheistic, ironic, this-worldly, political, or as interpreted through details of her biography—are used to characterize Woolf’s “religious” sensibilities. 2 As a theologian, my interest in Virginia Woolf relates to her understanding of herself as a writer disturbed by “shocks” and “horror,” an understanding that resonates with a certain strain of thinking about religious subjectivity in Christian and Jewish theology. Th at is, a number of philosophers of religion and theologians propose a human subject constituted through a “summons to love,” a passionate (suff ering and joyous) responsiveness to other human beings, the world, and God. Th is view disturbs the liberal notion of the subject as a free chooser and complicates optimistic understandings of love. 3 In this essay, I read Woolf’s notions of “shocks” and “horror” using the thought of the Jewish German theologian, Franz Rosenzweig (as interpreted by Eric L. Santner), to illuminate Woolf’s understanding of religious subjectivity, although in her view, God or Gods appear as necessary fi ctions. Th ese “shocks,” as spasmodic openings of love, do not create a new belief, but revitalize living “in the midst of life” (Santner, Psychotheology 15). I explore this dynamic of ethical encounter in her diaries and letters and the recently published correspondence between Woolf and Jacques and Gwen Raverat in the 1920s when Jacques was dying of disseminated (multiple) sclerosis. Th e Shock of Love In “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf observes that “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer” (72). What does she mean by this? It seems to me that some striking resonances exist between what Woolf calls “shocks” and Rosenzweig’s modernist understanding of revelation. In Eric L. Santner’s reading of this understanding, a “‘shock’ of love” (Psychotheology 84) is a divine summons to love what is unloveable (demonic) in ourselves and other human beings, the “metaethical self” (Rosenzweig 73) in its unruly, repetitive, unintentional, unnameable strangeness. Th e strangeness of the “metaethical self” emerges in and through “personality” (Rosenzweig 69), the always unfi nished eff orts at social legitimation and correctness. Love for this self means the desire to stay near another person in their disorientation in the world, their wretchedness, their unloveability—the symptomatic excess of always unfi nished eff orts at social legitimation. For Rosenzweig, such responsiveness happens in discrete events, with this person in front of me, “one by one” (Santner, Creaturely Life 207, emphasis in original) not as a generalized command to love all persons. As Santner makes explicit with a reference to the unconscious, in these fi rst person encounters, Rosenzweig engages the inchoate expres-

Reading the Woolf-Raverat Correspondence sivity of another person (and himself) rather than belief, thought, or articulated meaning. Th is ethical encounter in the fi rst person can be accepted or refused (so that choice is reconceived as a matter of an accepted or desired responsiveness). Woolf’s childhood memories of what she calls “shocks” in “A Sketch of the Past” are encounters with human unloveability that also communicate something unnameable (yet meaningful) in herself, others, and the world. During a fi st fi ght with her brother, she suddenly stops hitting him, and thinks, “why hurt another person?” (MOB 71). On another occasion, at dinner, she hears that Mr. Valpy, a friend of the family, had committed suicide; later, the apple tree in the garden becomes associated with the horror of his suicide and she cannot pass it (71). In these examples of “shock,” Woolf’s sense of paralysis and desolation comes as a debilitating responsiveness to the realization that people hurt others and themselves. Another event elicits a diff erent kind of shock, one of delight rather than anguish. She sees a fl ower in the garden at St. Ives, and understands it to be, somehow, in its concrete particularity, the whole of life (71). Her description amplifi es what seems to be at work in the other examples of “shocks”: that the empirical particularity of a fl eeting event or thing can gain a “revelatory” signifi cance through a loving attention that creates a kind of permanence for it. Th is resonates with her subsequent account of writing as making severed parts coalesce, writing as making something whole (72), a dynamic that extends beyond her own powers. In a recent essay, Lorraine Sim helpfully elaborates Woolf’s sense of this wholeness as a hidden “pattern” that she perceives behind the everyday, a given “metaphysical reality” that awakens, jolts, touches “empirical reality” (38, 41). Sim calls this dynamic interaction Woolf’s “belief in the existence of an objective, non-material principle that provides order and meaning to life” (46), and also alludes to this pattern in Platonic terms as “worthy of imitation” or representation. I take this in a slightly diff erent direction, suggesting that meaning or imitation for Woolf seems to be primarily about a certain sensibility rather than belief, a form of life that sustains attention within disorienting shocks. 4 In the experiences of shock, Woolf details the intense physicality of her response, and a “permanence” given to discrete events that she names “moments of being” (73), of intense anguish or delight. As an adult, the helpless exposure Woolf felt as a child is replaced with a sense that the shocks are valuable, “that it is or will become a revelation of some order” (72). “Revelation” happens through a kind of writing that transforms debilitating shocks into reasoned “explanation[s]” (72) that retain a ragged edge of the unnameable. Woolf names and evokes the unnameable through her writing, an activity she describes as both “given” to her, and made by her (72-73), a paradox best understood, in my view, as loving responsiveness. Th at is, for Woolf, writing appears to be about a paradoxical, unwanted, unchosen, and yet a desired and accepted responsiveness to beauty as well as unloveability in herself, others, and the world. Woolf’s diffi cult responsiveness, I have been arguing is analogous to a religious subjectivity that disrupts the notion of the liberal free chooser. Accepting “answerability” (Santner, Psychotheology 9) to other humans and the world complicates human agency as Woolf’s examples of shocks demonstrate: such responsiveness can be debilitating, but it can also release an unnameable “too muchness” (Santner, Psychotheology 8) into life and intensify living “in the midst of life” (15). Woolf’s sense of responsiveness—welcomed and valued, yet aversive—opens her to an utter strangeness, an alterity within herself, others and the world. Th e nonhuman, repetitive, demonic aspect of the human that Rosenzweig calls the “metaethical self” (73) 59

“THE SHOCK OF LOVE” AND THE VISIBILITY OF “INDECENT” PAIN:<br />

READING THE WOOLF-RAVERAT CORRESPONDENCE<br />

by Alyda Faber<br />

The topic of Virginia Woolf and religion has attracted a somewhat wary interest for<br />

at least twenty years. 1 Evelyn Haller’s remark in a presentation at this conference<br />

suggests an even shorter time frame for the possibility of this kind of work: “only in<br />

the last fi ve years can we say that Woolf had spiritual interests.” Varying accounts of Woolf’s<br />

mysticism—atheistic, ironic, this-worldly, political, or as interpreted through details of her<br />

biography—are used to characterize Woolf’s “religious” sensibilities. 2 As a theologian, my<br />

interest in Virginia Woolf relates to her understanding of herself as a writer disturbed by<br />

“shocks” and “horror,” an understanding that resonates with a certain strain of thinking<br />

about religious subjectivity in Christian and Jewish theology. Th at is, a number of philosophers<br />

of religion and theologians propose a human subject constituted through a “summons<br />

to love,” a passionate (suff ering and joyous) responsiveness to other human beings,<br />

the world, and God. Th is view disturbs the liberal notion of the subject as a free chooser<br />

and complicates optimistic understandings of love. 3 In this essay, I read Woolf’s notions of<br />

“shocks” and “horror” using the thought of the Jewish German theologian, Franz Rosenzweig<br />

(as interpreted by Eric L. Santner), to illuminate Woolf’s understanding of religious<br />

subjectivity, although in her view, God or Gods appear as necessary fi ctions. Th ese “shocks,”<br />

as spasmodic openings of love, do not create a new belief, but revitalize living “in the midst<br />

of life” (Santner, Psychotheology 15). I explore this dynamic of ethical encounter in her diaries<br />

and letters and the recently published correspondence between Woolf and Jacques and<br />

Gwen Raverat in the 1920s when Jacques was dying of disseminated (multiple) sclerosis.<br />

Th e Shock of Love<br />

In “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf observes that “the shock-receiving capacity is<br />

what makes me a writer” (72). What does she mean by this? It seems to me that some striking<br />

resonances exist between what Woolf calls “shocks” and Rosenzweig’s modernist understanding<br />

of revelation. In Eric L. Santner’s reading of this understanding, a “‘shock’ of love” (Psychotheology<br />

84) is a divine summons to love what is unloveable (demonic) in ourselves and other<br />

human beings, the “metaethical self” (Rosenzweig 73) in its unruly, repetitive, unintentional,<br />

unnameable strangeness. Th e strangeness of the “metaethical self” emerges in and through<br />

“personality” (Rosenzweig 69), the always unfi nished eff orts at social legitimation and correctness.<br />

Love for this self means the desire to stay near another person in their disorientation in the<br />

world, their wretchedness, their unloveability—the symptomatic excess of always unfi nished<br />

eff orts at social legitimation. For Rosenzweig, such responsiveness happens in discrete events,<br />

with this person in front of me, “one by one” (Santner, Creaturely Life 207, emphasis in original)<br />

not as a generalized command to love all persons. As Santner makes explicit with a reference<br />

to the unconscious, in these fi rst person encounters, Rosenzweig engages the inchoate expres-

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