Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves': to defer that "appalling moment."

In The Waves, an "appalling moment" is one in which individual autonomy collapses in the face of a completely unnamable, unfathomable absence.(1) Such a moment cannot be avoided; merely deferred. While the collapse--and reconfiguration--of subjectivity is, in general, a major focal point for Woolf scholars, The Waves attracts particular attention: its six immaterial voices, each struggling towards self-definition from childhood to old age, make it impossible not to interrogate this novel's "subjects." Most critics seem to agree that subjectivity, for Woolf, is no simple matter, but they disagree on the significance, expression, and forms of its intricacies.(2) The most productive theories for reading Woolf are those which allow for a large measure of variation and ambiguity both between and within individual subjects. Makiko Minow-Pinkney, for example, argues that Woolf's characters are, in Kristeva's terms, "sujets en proces."(3) Within this perpetual deferral of form, "the subject is neither `this' nor `that.' Its true `site' is the very dialectic between dissemination and reconstruction" or between "dispersal and reassembly" (82, 157). The Waves, in particular, mediates this "precarious dialectic between identity and its loss" (155). Similarly, Pamela Caughie writes that "Woolf's characters and narrators do not present a consistent theory of self and world. Instead, they make us self-conscious of theorizing about self and world by making the narrative strategies self-conscious."(4) With such slippery characters to work with, it is perhaps less important--or even feasible--to try to define the form of Woolf's subjects than to trace a few of their paths and crossings. To do so is an even greater challenge when, as Bernard says in The Waves, "We melt into each other with phrases.... We make an insubstantial territory" (16). In this novel, six "characters" or voices alternate between acceptance and rejection of their own insubstantiality. And, Woolf would have us realize, her characters are not alone in this struggle, since they are caught within the most basic and most irresolvable questions of ontology--what it means to be and how one goes about that business.

How is it even thinkable to define something which is, at once, as amorphous and historically weighted as the verb "to be"? Who could be a "subject" when the words themselves, the central terms, refuse to stand still? For Nietzsche, it would seem that the answer is to get out while you can, to topple the mission by seeking not to define, but to shift between a series of moving oppositions. Since the "subject" comes with so much history, it cannot be defined in any scientific manner: "All terms which semiotically condense a whole process elude definition; only that which has no history can be defined."(5) We are left stranded, it seems, and even more so when Nietzsche asserts that the "subject" is nothing but a spell cast by "the snare of language," that "no such agent [as the subject] exists; there is no `being' behind the doing, acting, becoming; the `doer' has simply been added to the deed by the imagination-the doing is everything" (178-79). Woolf herself will say that "`I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being."(6) Have we then merely conjured ourselves into being? Are we no more materially substantive than Bernard or Rhoda or Neville?

In a manner of speaking, yes--but the trick is itself an imperative. While the "self" may be nothing more than a rhetorical illusion, there is perhaps no other illusion so necessary for life: "If we could imagine an incarnation of dissonance--and what is man if not that?--that dissonance, in order to endure life, would need a marvelous illusion to cover it with a veil of beauty" (Nietzsche, 145). The "self" is a paradox: since it never takes place absolutely, but rather occurs as a "perpetual unfolding," it is, in an "empiric" sense, "truly non-existent" (33). Yet, the mirror half of the paradox is that "both art and life depend wholly on the laws of optics, on perspective and illusion; both, to be blunt, depend on the necessity of error" (10). Without the "veil" and "error" of language which gives form to "us," there could be no action (51). And even that action is far from secure, since it depends on our ability to "forget" that "we" are, simply, not there.

Yet we do act. In our actions, Nietzsche would have us follow the example of the artist, rather than that of the "theoretical man": "while the artist, having unveiled the truth garment by garment, remains with his gaze fixed on what is still hidden, theoretical man takes delight in the cast garments and finds his highest satisfaction in the unveiling process itself, which proves to him his own power" (92). In the attempt to get at Woolf's subjects, then, we are in the impossible position of reading for what we cannot know: turning away from the "garments" and "veils" of the linguistic snare, we can only look at what we cannot see. We will not, in this unruly manner, find the essence of the Woolfian character, but in casting aside the "pure" there is no telling what beings might take shape. In any case, Nietzsche is certain that there is no other way, since the "pure" eye/I is "an eye such as no living being can imagine, an eye required to have no direction, to abrogate its active and interpretive powers--precisely those powers that alone make of seeing, seeing something" (255). The "pure" subject--one exempt from illusion and time, one that could know itself with complete certainty--is purely impossible. In gazing at itself, it would find no thing to see.