Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

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)
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