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Department of English
Beyond Vision Eyeless Writing in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Marie-Helen Rosalie Stahl Master Thesis Literature Autumn, 2018 Supervisor: Giles Whiteley
Abstract
In the early 20th century, a “crisis of ocularcentrism” arose in philosophy, replacing the
Cartesian epistemological notion of a disembodied mind inspecting the object-world
from the outside with an ontological and phenomenological approach to vision and
being, embedding humans corporeally in a world exceeding their perceptual horizon
(Jay 94). In response, modernist artists abandoned realist and naturalist techniques,
rejecting mimetic representation, and experimented with new artistic forms, trying to
account for the new complexity of life.
In this context, Virginia Woolf wrote her novel The Waves (1931), “an abstract
mystical eyeless book” (DIII 203). Despite countless studies on The Waves and vision,
its “eyelessness” has never been thoroughly examined before. Since Woolf considered
vision and being to be inherently embodied and communal and longed for capturing
moments of being, this thesis proposes to unlock Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves
through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late corporeal phenomenology. Alongside his
concepts of the flesh and chiasm, this thesis claims that eyeless writing is Woolf’s
method to go beyond vision in order to reveal the inherent corporeal interconnectedness
of all beings in a hidden, visually imperceptible pattern—the eyeless flesh of the
world—by creating a narrative that is eyeless in several ways. It is at once eye- and I-
less due to lacking a single focalising point and denoting an anonymous visibility
enveloping all beings. Rather than being structured by a narrative eye/I, it is governed
by the characters’ bodies and their chiasmatic relations with the world. On this basis,
emphasising the carnal adherence of all human and non-human beings, their eyeless
kinship thus comes to light, creating a nonanthropocentric conception of Being-in-and-
of-the-world. In this sense, The Waves uncovers that since the Wesen (essence) of Being
lies in the common, visually imperceptible flesh, it can only be reached eyelessly, via
the body.
Keywords: Modernism; Virginia Woolf; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; phenomenology; vision; eyeless writing; anti-ocularcentrism; nonanthropocentrism; body
List of Abbreviations
Works by Virginia Woolf
DIII The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1925–1930. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell,
vol. 3, London: Hogarth Press, 1980.
DIV The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1931–1935. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell,
vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press, 1982.
EIII The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1919–1924. Edited by Andrew McNeillie,
vol. 3, London: Hogarth Press, 1994.
EIV The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1925–1928. Edited by Andrew McNeillie,
vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press, 1988.
MB Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed., New York:
Harcourt Inc., 1985.
SE Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
TTL To the Lighthouse. 1927. Edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
W The Waves. 1931. London: Vintage Classics, Penguin Random House,
2000.
Works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
EM “Eye and Mind.” 1960. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader:
Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson, Northwestern
University Press, 1993, pp. 121–149.
PP Phenomenology of Perception. 1945. Translated by Donald A. Landes,
Routledge, 2012.
VI The Visible and the Invisible. 1964. Edited by Claude Lefort,
Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Table of Contents
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter I
The Dethronement of the Visual Sense…..…...………………………….……..6
Merleau-Ponty’s Subject-Object……………………………..………………12
Approaches to Woolf’s The Waves, Being and Vision………………………..17
Chapter II
“Eyeless” and “I-less” Writing—Enveloped by Anonymous Visibility………21
Eyeless Writing as “Bodily” Writing………………………………………....29
Eyeless Percival and the Things in Themselves………………………………38
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...47
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………51
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Introduction
In an interview with the art historian Pierre Cabanne in the late 1960s, the modernist
artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) declared that his engagement with art was
characterised by an “antiretinal attitude” (Cabanne 43). He stated that “too great an
importance [is] given to the retina” (Cabanne 43), rejecting all art, especially
impressionism, that was preoccupied with visual appearance (Krauss 124). Instead,
Duchamp strove for art that would go “beyond the retina” and reach the “grey matter;”
not as a disembodied domain of cognition and reflection, but as inseparable from the
body and its physical processes (Krauss 125). While Duchamp was arguably one of the
most radical artists of the early 20th century, modernist art and literature in general was
shaped by a so-called “anti-ocularcentric discourse,” striving to replace the Cartesian
notion of knowing an exterior world through disembodied vision with a more
ontological and phenomenological approach to vision, embedding the self corporeally
within a world that exceeds its perceptual horizon (Jay 94). Seeking to account for this
radically new conception of reality and the self, modernist artists abandoned realist and
naturalist techniques that tried to mimetically represent an alleged univocal reality
through visual form and objective description (Jay 94). Instead, they experimented with
techniques that would account for lived, bodily experience, penetrating external
appearances to reach the underlying “core of things” (Ruhrberg et al. 71).
As is well established, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was one of the key figures
of modernism and continuously experimented with literary techniques in order to
account for the enigma of modern life. Like Duchamp, she disdained writing and art
that “appeals mainly to the eye” (EIV 244), longing for a new kind of writing that would
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capture “life itself going on” (DIII 229), “these invisible presences” that shape human
experience (MB 80), our “feelings and [general] ideas” about the world (EIV 435).
Pursuing this goal, Woolf arrived at the climax of her experimentations in writing The
Waves (1931), conceived of as “an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem” (DIII
203), combining the abstractness of poetry with the flexibility of prose (DIII 139). In
nine episodes alternating with nine interludes, depicting the course of a day from dawn
to dusk, The Waves follows the lives of seven characters, recording their thoughts in
first-person soliloquies. Owing to the fact that The Waves abandons character-drawing
and external description, countless studies have examined the role vision plays in this
novel. For instance, material and cultural-historical studies investigate how advances
in science and technology influenced Woolf to create a nonanthropocentric narrative in
The Waves, and inspired her to develop a “decentred aesthetic vision,” marked by
multiple points of view.1 More aesthetic and formalist approaches, on the other hand,
have focused instead on Woolf’s use of visual literary devices as a means of producing
vision from within the text, rather than describing external reality mimetically, while
others have analysed how her narrative technique grants an inner vision to human
consciousness.2
However, despite the plethora of studies of The Waves and vision, one aspect
remains largely unexplored, namely, its “eyelessness.” In point of fact, there is no in-
depth study on eyelessness, but only the odd allusion to the idea peppered in the margins
of a few scholarly works. Since the novel uses the term “eyeless” in only one occasion,
describing the character Percival after his death, as “abstract [and] eyeless […] in the
sky” (W 109), scholars have deduced its meaning primarily from Percival, viewing him
either as the epitome of eyelessness in The Waves, like Ariane Mildenberg (119), or as
depicting death’s “eyeless hostile presence,” like Gloria Jean Tobin (201). Others draw
a connection to its homophone, “I-less.” While Gillian Beer argues that it reflects the
novel’s “multiple ‘I’s” (66), Julia Briggs claims that it signifies the characters’ isolation
from the I-less interludes, “emptied of human presence” (“Novels” 76). Similarly, Ann
Banfield claims that the interludes’ eyeless world, “inaccessible to the senses” and
independent of human existence, is juxtaposed with a “sensible” one in The Waves (13).
Nevertheless, since those critics engage with eyelessness only peripherally, I would
1 See, for instance, Henry (2003) pp. 93–107, Ettinger (2012) pp. 1–19, Ryan (2013) pp. 171–202. 2 See, for instance, Richter (1970) pp. 83–99, Tobin (1978) pp. 205–243, Ryan (1991) pp. 190–206, Briggs (2005) pp. 238–268, Olk (2013) pp. 155–183.
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argue that their analyses do not account for the complexity and multifacetedness of
eyelessness in The Waves, reducing it either to one figure or binding it into a dialectical
structure.
Striving to express lived “moments of being” in her works (DIII 209) and to
reach the “things in themselves” (W 213), Woolf’s philosophy has been related to
phenomenology; a practice aiming to describe lived “human experience […] from a
concrete first-person point of view,” bracketing out objective reflection in order to get
to Edmund Husserl’s famous “things themselves”—the essence or “stuff” of being
(Carman 14).3 Focusing either on Woolf’s engagement with consciousness, endured
time or Being-in-the-world (Dasein), most critics have applied traditional Husserlian,
Bergsonian, or Heideggerian phenomenological approaches. 4 However, early
phenomenology neglects the body’s importance in lived experience and maintains a
dualism between subject/object, mind/body, whereas Woolf considered being and
vision to be inherently embodied and communal. She stated not only that one cannot
“separate off from the body [, always] gaze[ing] through it” (EIV 318), but also that all
beings are fundamentally interconnected with the world in a “hidden pattern […]
behind the cotton wool of daily life” (MB 72). On this basis, this paper proposes to
unlock Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
corporeal phenomenology. Accounting for Woolf’s notion of embodiment and
intercorporeal connectedness in an invisible common structure of Being, this approach
complicates standard approaches to the novel which rest either on the above-mentioned
phenomenological approaches or psychoanalysis, feminism, and more recently, post-
Bergsonian traditions.5
Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was the first phenomenologist to claim that “the
body is the vehicle of being in the world,” making it the centre of subjectivity (PP 84).
However, it is in his later work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), that he undermines
Cartesian dualism by establishing a common ground of Being in a position which may
be characterised itself as a part of that general movement of anti-ocularcentrism that
3 For an overview on the relation between phenomenology and modernism see Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg (2010). 4 For Husserlian studies see Hough (2002), Najafi (2014) pp. 436–442, Strehle (2015), pp. 81–91; for Bergsonian studies see Gillies (1996) pp. 107–132, Armstrong (2005) pp. 90–114, Mattison (2011) pp. 71–77; for Heideggerian studies see Henke (1989) pp. 461–472, Simone (2017) pp. 25–63. 5 For psychoanalytical studies see Ferrer (1990) pp. 65–96, Ryan (1991) pp. 190–206, Snider (1991) pp. 87–106; for feminist studies see Minow-Pinkney (1987) ch. 6, Beer (1996) pp. 74–91, Goldman (1998) ch. 14; for post-Bergsonian studies see Ryan (2013) pp. 171–202, Skeet (2013) 475–495, Jobst (2016) pp. 55–67.
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Martin Jay has spoken about. Merleau-Ponty argues that Martin Heidegger’s Being-in-
the-world depends on “my body [being] of the same flesh as the world” (VI 248). This
flesh is the general, anonymous “element” of Being rather than a “substance” (VI 139).
In this common flesh, selves, others and the world are already primordially interweaved
with each other through chiasmatic relations, in which every being is at once a sensible
and a sentient, continuously reversing roles as corporeal perceiver/seer and being-
perceived/visible (VI 136). In this sense, Merleau-Ponty created a “subject-object,”
revealing that all beings share the carnal, invisible structure of the flesh of visibility (VI
137). Also, Merleau-Ponty’s term “sensible sentient” (VI 173) indicates his kinship
with anti-ocularcentrism’s quest to undermine vision’s primacy among the senses (Jay
111), signifying that since being is corporeal, it is consequently omnisensual (VI 256).
In addition, being corporeally embedded in the world, sense perception is necessarily
restricted, meaning that the anonymous visibility, surrounding every subject-object, lies
partly beyond its perceptual horizon (VI 142, 148). Lastly, he claims that just as the
flesh is visibility’s invisible “inner framework,” every sensible sentient has an invisible
“inexhaustible depth,” where its Wesen (essence) lies (VI 143), so that every being is
“more than [its] being-perceived” (VI 135). In this way, Merleau-Ponty abolishes the
dialectic of subject/object, self/world, visibility and invisibility, turning them instead
into each other’s “obverse and reverse” (VI 138), grounded in the common flesh of
Being.
Some scholars have already pointed out the closeness of thought between
Woolf and Merleau-Ponty, arguing, for instance, that Woolf’s characters all “live their
bodies” in different degrees of “embodiment” (Hussey 5). However, so far, scholars
have either utilised Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology or focused on other works
than The Waves.6 Moreover, none of them draw a connection to Woolf’s eyeless
writing. Only Ariane Mildenberg, referred to earlier, mentions the term in her Merleau-
Pontian study of The Waves (119). However, while she discusses the characters’
embeddedness in the common flesh, she does not analyse how Woolf’s eyeless writing
enables her to reveal this primordial connectedness with the world, reducing eyeleness
instead to the figure of Percival. In contradistinction to Mildenberg, Tobin, Beer, Briggs
and Banfield, some of the few scholars to refer to eyelessness, I will demonstrate that
the idea neither signifies one character or presence in The Waves, nor belongs to a
6 See, for instance, Hussey (1986) pp. 3–20, Doyle (1994) pp. 42–71, Westling (1999) pp. 855–875.
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dialectic structure, in which an I/eye-less world opposes a sensible one. Instead, taking
Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology as a lens, I claim that eyeless writing is
Woolf’s means to go beyond vision in order to unlock and reveal the inherent corporeal
interconnectedness of all beings in a hidden, visually imperceptible pattern—the
eyeless flesh of the world—by creating a narrative that is eye/I-less, being devoid of a
single focalising point, and instead governed by the characters’ bodies and the
intercorporeal, chiasmatic structure of human and no-human relations, in which all
beings are equal, co-existing subject-objects.
Since Woolf’s eyeless writing has never been explored in this way before, this
thesis will provide important new insights into research on The Waves and Woolf’s
ideas on being and vision, revealing that her main artistic ambitions and philosophical
conceptions combine and culminate in eyelessness. Woolf seeks to produce writing that
goes beyond the retina, to create a method that accounts for the notion that vision and
being are inherently embodied, to reach the “hidden pattern” behind life by which all
sensible sentients are inherently corporeally interconnected with each other, and in
effect, to make apparent the “things themselves” residing in-the-visible. In this sense,
analysing Woolf’s eyeless writing alongside Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal
phenomenology, this thesis seeks to coalesce material and cultural-historical
approaches to Woolf’s writing with formalist and aesthetic ones, demonstrating how
Woolf’s eyeless writing as a method produces a non-dialectical, nonanthropocentric
conception of Being-in-and-of-the-world in The Waves.
The thesis consists of two chapters, each divided into three subsections. The
first chapter commences with considering the historical and cultural background of
Woolf’s eyeless writing, before explaining Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology in
relation to his predecessors Husserl and Heidegger, and concluding with an overview
of previous approaches to The Waves, vision and being. The second chapter analyses
Woolf’s eyeless writing, moving from a macroscopic to a microscopic view: from the
novel’s structure, to the body and finally to the “things themselves.” In the first
subsection, I will examine the novel’s structure, narrative technique and literary
devices, demonstrating, firstly, that all beings in The Waves are immersed in an
anonymous, eye/I-less visibility depicted in the interludes, and secondly, that The
Waves is eye/I-less on the whole in that it undermines the Cartesian notion of a single,
univocal, autonomous subject. Following this, the focus shifts to the body, arguing that
eyeless writing, in fact, resembles a kind of “bodily” writing, signified by a narrative
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that is itself carnal, being governed not by single consciousnesses but by the chiasmatic,
carnal structure of relationships between corporeal beings, interconnected in the eyeless
flesh of the world. Lastly, Percival’s eyelessness and the revelation of the “things in
themselves” take centrestage. As mentioned earlier, Percival is predominantly viewed
as representing eyelessness in The Waves since it is him who is tied to the only occasion
in the novel in which the term “eyeless” appears. However, I will show that Percival
does not resemble eyelessness himself, but rather turns eyeless through the loss of his
body in death, becoming part of the eye/I-less anonymous visibility surrounding all
characters. Secondly, I will demonstrate that Percival’s death reveals the futility of
trying to impose an order on life and the ways in which this shows that it is only in
lived, bodily moments of being, in which all human and non-human beings peacefully
coexist and are allowed to just be, that the “things in themselves” can be encountered
and the eyeless kinship of all beings comes to light.
Throughout this thesis, I engage not only with other scholarly voices on The
Waves, but continuously refer to Woolf’s own philosophical writings in her diaries and
essays, considering her as a philosopher herself. On this basis, this thesis will now set
out to show that eyeless writing, similar to Duchamp’s anti-retinal art, was Woolf’s
method to surmount the primacy of the visual in her writing. It enabled her to go beyond
vision and explore the Wesen of Being, laying bare our inherent, corporeal
interconnectedness in the eyeless flesh of the world. In other worlds, since the essence
of Being lies beyond our visual grasp, it can only be reached eyelessly, via the body.
Chapter I
The Dethronement of the Visual Sense Between 1900–1918, the social and political climate of Europe was unstable. Major
breakthroughs in physics, as well as technological innovations, reinforced this sense of
instability even further. Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum (1900), on which Niels
Bohr’s atom and quantum theory was based (1913), as well as Albert Einstein’s theory
of relativity (1905, 1915), radically changed our conceptions of the self, generating a
rethinking and renegotiation of human beings’ position in the world. As Holly Henry
notes in Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003), scientific discoveries
resulted in a “sense of insignificance and ephemerality of humans on the cosmological
scale” and together with the political and social changes effected a “modernist human
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decentring and re-scaling” (3). Woolf herself in “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927)
called for new ways of literary and artistic expression, capable of capturing modern
life, “for it is an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are
moving round us; we are moving ourselves” (EIV 429). Bohr’s “indeterminacy
principle” in quantum-physics revealed that human beings are merely a part of a whole
in which they are embedded and with which they share the same matter since “spatially
separate particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities but rather are part
of the same phenomena […], it is not that there are x number of atoms that belong to a
hand and y number of atoms that belong to a coffee mug”—rather, the interface between
human and material matter is ontologically and visually indeterminate (Barad qtd. in
Ryan, Materiality 176). As such, it became apparent that our environment is not entirely
visually perceivable, nor graspable for us, rendering an all-encompassing point of view
impossible.
Those drastic changes in the conception of the self and vision were accompanied
by a radical questioning of the dominant epistemologies at the time, which, as Jay
claims, led to a “crisis of ocularcentrism” in philosophy. This crisis is characterised by
the undermining of the dominant “Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime” (Jay 101)
and the aim to replace it with alternate conceptions that “[explore] the embodied and
culturally mediated character of sight” as it was now experienced by the modern human
being (Jay 94). Apart from the unstable political and social sphere and the discoveries
in physics, technological innovations such as the stereoscope further fuelled the anti-
ocularcentric discourse (Jay 95). In fact, the development from the camera obscura to
the stereoscope, albeit at a time somewhat earlier, serves well to exemplify this
conceptual shift, the camera obscura representing the Cartesian spectatorial
epistemology and the stereoscope representing the shift to the modern ontological mode
of vision. As Jonathan Crary argues, in the camera obscura (dating back to the late
1500s), an “isolated [and] enclosed” observer with a monocular point of view in the
subject-position, looks through a peephole onto the exterior object-world (38–39).
Crucially, vision is decorporealised in this process as it is not the physical eye
producing the image but the mechanical process of the camera obscura (Crary 39). In
this sense, one can speak of a “[rationalisation] of sight” in Cartesianism, inspecting
the exterior world with a disembodied mind (Jay 33). This exterior world was believed
to be univocal due to “the divinely insured congruence between […] ideas and the world
of extended matter,” rendering individual perspective irrelevant (Jay 113). Thus, the
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camera obscura represents Cartesian dialectical thinking between subject/object,
mind/body, and corresponds with its aspiration to “found human knowledge on a purely
objective view of the world” (Crary 48). However, with the invention of the stereoscope
in 1838 by Charles Wheatstone, vision increasingly lost its position as “a privileged
form of knowing,” but itself turned into the object of study to interrogate the physiology
of human vision (Crary 70). Since stereoscopic vision is binocular, it showed that the
human organism synthesises two slightly disparate images into one unitary three-
dimensional image (Crary 120), demonstrating that it is “the body of the viewer” that
is “the active producer of optical experience” (Krauss 133). Hence, in contrast to the
incorporeal, monocular, objective, atemporal view of the camera obscura, the
stereoscope revealed that vision is inherently binocular, subjective, temporal and
embodied (Crary 70). It is in this sense that Jay claims that the crisis of ocularcentrism
was characterised by a “return of the body” in philosophy (95), replacing Cartesian
perspectivalism and the belief in unmediated perception with approaches that focus on
the immediate bodily experience of Being-in-the-world.
According to Jay, “the initial frontal attack on ocularcentrism” was Henri
Bergson’s concept of “durée” (1889)—the lived subjective experience of time—valued
over objective, measurable time (Jay 110). Bergson argued that objective, measurable
time always implies a “visual image in space” (qtd. in Jay 115), whereas durée is
irreducible to a number and thus “not easily available to vision” (Jay 115). Bergson
claimed that rather than identifying with exterior world’s objective time, one should
focus on durée since only “the formless flow of time” allows us to transcend
ocularcentrism and arrive at immediate lived experience (Jay 117). Importantly,
according to Bergson, experienced time and lived experience in general are mediated
through the acting body as “the ground of all our perception” (Jay 113). A sense of
Being-in-the-world can only be grasped if one returns to a primordial state in which
consciousness and the body, mind and matter, are interweaved rather than divided and
where the senses are not disparate but a holistic unity (Jay 113). Thus, it is crucial to
note that the anti-ocularcentric discourse does not abandon vision but dethrones it from
its primacy among the senses and stresses the senses’ entanglement in lived bodily
experience. The human being is no longer seen as autonomous and separate from its
environment but as embedded within it. In other words, the Cartesian epistemological
mode of vision, also defined as “assertoric,” and characterised by a spectatorial
distance, “abstracted, monocular, inflexible, unmoving, rigid, ego-logical and
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exclusionary,” is replaced by an ontological mode of vision, also called “aletheic gaze
[…], multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary [and] horizonal” (Jay 164).7
All of the above-mentioned political, scientific, technological and philosophical
developments also resonated with literature and the arts and led to the efflorescence of
new artistic and literary forms of expression in the early 20th century, known as
modernism. In her essay “Character in Fiction” (1924), Woolf famously states, “[o]n
or about 1910 human character changed,” referring to a shift in human relations
between “masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children” due to the
demise of, first, the Victorian and then the Edwardian era (SE 38–39). However, it is
well-established that Woolf’s remark also alludes to the first post-impressionist
exhibition in London in 1910, curated by her close friends and fellow Bloomsburians,
Roger Fry, Desmond McCarthy and Clive Bell (Goldman 38). One of the key figures
of this exhibition was the French post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906),
who greatly influenced the aesthetics of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.8 Cézanne’s
art marks the shift from impressionism to post-impressionism; he critiqued the
impressionist belief in unmediated perception and its focus on surface appearances,
producing “art for the eye” (Jay 98). Instead, like Bergson, Cézanne focused on lived
perspective and its rootedness in an experience where the senses are merged rather than
separated (Jay 98). In this he also rejected the realist and naturalist ideal of mimetic
representation grounded in Cartesianism, in favour for multiple perspectives,
representing a complex rather than univocal, objective reality (Ryan, Vanishing 93).
This is a point which Merleau-Ponty himself made in “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945),
writing that Cézanne detected “that lived perspective […] is not a geometric or
photographic one” (64). Instead, Cézanne wanted to paint “a world perceptually
[organised] by our bodily involvement in it,” bringing sensations on the canvas that
would place the spectator, the painting and the painter in a dialogue with each other
(Carman 184). Cézanne strove to surmount the distance between the viewer and the
viewed, the dualism of subject and object, and the differentiation of the senses, since it
would only then be possible to recapture “the very moment when the world was new”—
7 The distinction between the two modes of vision refers to Heidegger’s phenomenology, which will be discussed in subsection three of this chapter. 8 For a discussion on Cézanne and the Bloomsbury Group see Uhlmann et al. (2009), pp. xi–xxi.
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a primordial reality (Jay 98).9 However, in order to do so Cézanne believed in the “logic
of sensation,” postulating that the myriad sensations perceived first need to be
organised by the artist’s mind in order to then create a unified whole on the canvas
(Uhlmann et al. x–xi). Partly due to the significance of the mind in Cézanne’s
aesthetics, literature on modernism and the Bloomsbury Group tends to focus on their
preoccupation with the mind and consciousness, with Fry often considered a key
figure.10 In his essay “The Artist’s Vision” (1920), Fry relied on Cézanne’s logic of
sensation to claim that the artist’s “detached and impassioned vision” is superior to
ordinary vision, since only it allows a disinterested contemplation of the “chaotic”
sensations perceived, and permits them to be organised into an “aesthetic unity” (33).
While the early Woolf strove to explore the “dark places of psychology,” as she
noted in “Modern Fiction” (1919; SE 11), I argue that the later Woolf increasingly
warded off from this path, turning towards a more phenomenological stance, viewing
vision as inherently embodied. In “On Being Ill” (1926), written not long before The
Waves, she states that literature “does its best to maintain that its concern is with the
mind” and not with the body, whereas “the very opposite is true” (EIV 317–318). The
mind “cannot separate off from the body” but always “[gazes] through [it]” (EIV 318).
Due to her believe in embodied vision, Woolf also rejected Fry’s notion of the artist’s
disinterested vision, arguing instead that the artist is always inextricably implicated in
his/her work (Henry, Discourse 100–101). Consequently, Woolf also rejected a
privileging of a particular point of view since for her, the world “is variable and
complex and infinitely mysterious” (EIV 76). In “Montaigne” (1925), she states that
“no one has any clear knowledge,” either of one’s own self or of the world around us
(EIV 78). It is the enigma of “life itself going on” that Woolf wants to explore and that
becomes the subject of inquiry in The Waves (DIII 229). In “Poetry, Fiction and the
Future” (1927) Woolf, without explicitly stating it, already constructs the literary form
of The Waves: “a playpoem” (DIII 203). She postulates that this new hybrid form,
combining the abstractness and exaltation of poetry, the flexibility and ordinariness of
prose, and the drama of a play (EIV 435–437), will be more capable of accounting for
“[l]ife [, which] is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it”
9 This refers to Husserl’s “epochê,” in which the “natural attitude” is replaced with a “phenomenological” one in order to reveal “the ‘essence’ of things lying on the other side of our concrete fact-world” (Mildenberg 4). For further explanation, see “Theoretical Background.” 10 See, for instance, Banfield (2000) pp. 245–293, or Uhlmann (2010) pp. 58–73.
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(EIV 439). It will capture what so far “escaped the novelist” but is essentially shaping
human lived experience of Being-in-the-world, namely,
the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of [color], the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine. (EIV 439)
In other words, The Waves as a playpoem will be “an abstract mystical eyeless book”
(DIII 203). It will illustrate the intangible, visually imperceptible complexity of life,
“the outline rather than the detail,” and the broader relations of humans to “general
ideas” (EIV 435).
Woolf develops these ideas further in her diary, writing that in The Waves “I
want […] to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity:
to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination
of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea” (DIII 209). In tune with anti-
ocularcentrism’s turn towards lived embodied experience, Woolf aimed to capture the
moment as it is immediately and corporeally perceived and does not distinguish
between exterior and interior, subject and object. Instead, “some combination of [the
inner and the outer] ought to be possible” (DIII 209), in the moment of being as an
amalgamation of all: thought, sensation and the alleged outside world, “the voice of the
sea.” This sense of human interconnectedness and embeddedness within the world
echoes Woolf’s famous remark in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939): “that behind the cotton
wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are
connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work
of art” (MB 72). Moreover, in her diary entry she writes further that she rejects the
“appalling business of the realist” as the latter includes “things that don’t belong to the
moment” (DIII 209)—the “superfluous” or “useless details,” as Roland Barthes will
later argue, that create the “reality effect” of realism (140, 143). And it is precisely
that—just an effect—since, as Woolf states, the realist’s writing is “false, unreal [and]
merely conventional” (DIII 209). Woolf’s critique of realism is paralleled in what she
defines to be “bad writing” in her essay “Pictures” (1925), also reminiscing of
Cézanne’s critique of impressionism. Woolf claims that bad writing is such that
“appeals mainly to the eye” (EIV 243), and instead praises writers like “Proust,
Flaubert, Hardy and Conrad,” for in their works,
Stahl 12
[t]he whole scene, however solidly and pictorially build up, is always dominated by an emotion which has nothing to do with the eye. But it is the eye that has fertilized their thought; it is the eye, in Proust above all, that has come to the help of the other senses, combined with them, and produced effects of extreme beauty and of a subtlety hitherto unknown. (EIV 244)
Rather than focusing on outer appearances, it is the invisible but perceivable essence
lying beneath them—what Rhoda in Woolf’s The Waves also terms as “the thing that
lies beneath the semblance of the thing” (107)—that needs to be the centre of writing.
The eye supplies the entry point but it is only in unison with the other senses that
“hitherto unknown” beauties are uncovered. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty states that “[n]o
one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the
invisible” in his eponymous work (VI 149).
In conclusion, anti-ocularcentrism stems from the realisation that it is the entire
being, with mind and body merged, that perceives its environment with which it is
irrevocably interconnected, rather than a disembodied mind that inspects an objective,
exterior world through monocular, disembodied and disinterested vision. Vision is,
thus, not abandoned but dethroned from its primacy among the senses, re-united with
them and lodged in the body. By understanding that omniscience and objectivity are
impossibilities, life’s intangibility and enigma become the subject of inquiry in
philosophy, literature and the arts.
Merleau-Ponty’s Subject-Object Woolf’s fascination with lived, bodily moments of being as uncovering the unconscious
“hidden pattern” behind the surface of daily life (MB 72), signifies a close kinship with
phenomenological thought. In fact, phenomenology is a method or practice that strives
to describe basic, human, lived experience of being from an immediate first-person
point of view, rejecting the detached third-person perspective of scientific inquiry that
applies judgement and preconceived categories to phenomena (Carman 14). Husserl,
known as the father of phenomenology, famously argued that in order to get to “the
things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), the “natural attitude,” meaning
presuppositions and expectations, needs to be reduced to a “phenomenological” one, a
“primordial dimension of,” or a “pre-reflective” experience (Mildenberg 3–4). Through
this “transcendental reduction,” called “epochê,” one reaches the immanent contents
“of [pure] consciousness” (noema), of “transcendental subjectivity,” where the external
world, its essence or phenomena, is experienced (Carman 41). His student Heidegger,
Stahl 13
on the other hand, showed that there is no separation of consciousness and the world in
our lived experience of it, since being is always Being-in-the-world (Dasein), always
inextricably embedded (Carman 75, my emphasis). Hence, in general, phenomenology
longs to describe the “of-ness or ‘aboutness’ of experience,” drawing on Franz
Brentano’s notion of “intentionality” as the directedness of consciousness toward
something (Carman 74). Whereas Husserl located intentionality in consciousness,
Heidegger placed it in Being-in-the-world.
By contrast, Merleau-Ponty marks the first phenomenologist to replace the
human intellect as the locus of subjectivity (intentionality) with the lived body as the
conscious subject of experience. Since Woolf believed in embodied vision, as
demonstrated previously, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology
caters best to unlocking the issue of eyelessness in The Waves. His corporeal
phenomenology fully embraces anti-ocularcentrism’s return to the body and entirely
renegotiates the notions of visibility and invisibility. In his last essay “Eye and Mind”
(1960), Merleau-Ponty states that “[the body] is caught in the fabric of the world” (125);
“I do not see [the world] according to its exterior envelope; I live it from the inside; I
am immersed in it. After all, the world is around me, not in front of me” (138). Indebted
to Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty asserts that it is only
possible to perceive the world because we are in it corporeally. Thus, Merleau-Ponty
rejected the mind-body distinction of his predecessors, first and foremost Husserl’s.
Husserl saw the human as a “psycho-physical unity” of a “bodily […] [and] a
transcendental ego,” and claimed that it is only due to this unity that one can
“apperceive” others as minds as well, hidden behind the visible appearance of their
bodies (Carman 138). In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty there is, firstly, no mind-body
distinction at work in the “most basic experience of ourselves and others” (Carman
149), and secondly, the body is not just an appendix of the self but, in fact, is the self
(VI 244–245).
In his posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible (1964),
Merleau-Ponty draws heavily on Husserlian phenomenological notions of the lived
body (Leib) and the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Husserl argued that one can only become
aware of the material body (Körper) as a lived body (Leib) through touch, not sight,
since only touch has a “double aspect,” meaning that I can touch myself touching and
thereby experience “my own bodiliness [Leiblichkeit]” (Carman, 128). The lived body
is tied to Husserl’s “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) as the “‘concrete world of everyday
Stahl 14
experience’” (qtd. in Mildenberg 21), in which not only physical (e.g. human) but also
cultural and historical objects, as well as social institutions, are “braided” or
“interwoven” with each other (Verflechtung) (Lawlor x). Merleau-Ponty takes up this
double-touch experience as a characteristic of the lived body; however, rather than
prioritising touch, he extends the structure of the double-touch not only to all senses
but also to the world as a whole. It is in this fashion that Merleau-Ponty develops his
key concepts of flesh and chiasm in connection to the visible and the invisible. As a
crucial advancement in his thought, he claims that Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world
depends on our being of the world, meaning that “my body is made of the same flesh
as the world” (VI 248). Merleau-Ponty borrows from Husserl’s Verflechtung (braiding)
in defining the structure of the flesh as chiasmatic, meaning that the relationship
between body and world is no longer one of stimulus and response but one in which
they are “interweaved” into a single fabric (flesh). As Mildenberg notes, the direct
translation “braiding” describes the chiasm of the flesh much more accurately than
“interweaving” (1). Whereas weaving entails separate “warp threads and weft threads,”
in braiding, each thread fulfills both functions, so that through a “zigzagging [motion]
[…] the warp becomes weft and vice versa” (1). This crisscross pattern (chiasm) lies at
the heart of the experience of Being-in-and-of-the-world. Taking artists as an example,
Merleau-Ponty writes, “many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things”
and as such, he argues that there is not only a reversibility of touch (Husserl’s double-
touch) but also of vision, and even an intertwining of them since “vision is a palpation
with the look” (VI 134):
There is a circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold of the touching; there is a circle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is not without visible existence; there is even an inscription of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible—and the converse. (VI 143)
Importantly, he adds in his working notes that this reversibility of the seeing and the
visible is inherent to all senses (VI 256), and their intertwining also means that neither
of them is prior to the others. By uncovering the body’s “prereflective […] unity” (VI
141), being a “sensible sentient,” being at once perceived and perceiver, Merleau-Ponty
replaced the Cartesian subject with a subject-object, grounded on the notion of
intercorporeality (flesh) between body and world (VI 137). This synergy of sensible
and sentient not only occurs in a single body but also between different organisms,
since for Merleau-Ponty sensibility is grounded on a “carnal adherence” between
Stahl 15
subject-objects rather than on “belongingness to one same consciousness” (VI 142).
However, this does not mean that Merleau-Ponty falls into monist thinking. Rather, the
chiasmatic structure of the flesh entails a paradox of “envelopment and distance, […]
of unity at distance or sameness with difference” (Johnson 47 f.). Being of the same
flesh means being simultaneously distanced from and interweaved with the world,
which is, however, according to Merleau-Ponty, not a contradiction but the “means of
communication” between, for instance, the seer and the thing (VI 135). Consequently,
the flesh is not matter or substance but the primordial ground of all Being, a “general
thing” (VI 139), through which it is made possible to encounter and inhabit the world.
In Carman’s words, “[t]o see the world, we must already be in a kind of [unconscious]
bodily communion with it” (VI 124). As such, it is the body that upholds consciousness
and not vice versa (VI 141), and thus, it is “the body and it alone […] that can bring us
to the things themselves” (VI 136). They cannot be found in Husserl’s transcendental
subjectivity but only in the prereflective flesh of the world, which we normally take for
granted.
Furthermore, as his eponymous work suggests, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of
visibility and invisibility is integral to his corporeal philosophy. He writes that
perception of the world is only possible because the body is in and of the visible (VI
134 f.); in fact, “[t]o have a body […] is to be visible” (VI 189) and is to be enveloped
by the visible (VI 271). The common flesh of the world is the flesh of visibility, the
“prephenomenal being” that makes perception possible (Carman 124). As such, the
body is only a “variant” of the carnal world, the flesh of visibility, “a prototype of
Being,” and shares with all other visibles its chiasmatic structure (VI 136). Hence,
visibility and its flesh are both anonymous entities that envelop the world and constitute
a space that exceeds what I can immediately see or touch (VI 143). Already in the
chiasmatic experience of sensing and being sensed it becomes apparent that each
subject-object is more than its “being-perceived” (VI 135). That is the case because
things (Sachen) in order to exist cannot just be their surface appearance but they, as
well as any other subject-object, have depth (VI 136). In fact, according to Merleau-
Ponty, the visible is “a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross
section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscole borne by a wave of Being” (VI
136). Merleau-Ponty’s notion of depth draws on a horizonal structure of Being that
develops both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of it further. As Merleau-Ponty
points out, for Husserl the horizon is “a system of ‘potentiality of consciousness’”
Stahl 16
gazing onto the world (VI 149), whereas for Heidegger, “‘world is never an object that
stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are
subject […]’” (qtd. in Jay 163). Heidegger claimed that an all-seeing view is impossible
to attain since every individual is immersed in a visual field, not located outside of it,
and her/his horizon is limited to what lies within her/his field of vision (Jay 173). This
is also reflected in Heidegger’s preference of the ontological, embedded or “aletheic
gaze” over epistemological “assertoric,” disinterested vision referred to previously (Jay
164). Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, connects the horizon to depth and flesh, stating
that “it has meaning only in the Umwelt (environment) of a carnal subject, as Offenheit
[openness], as Verborgenheit [invsibility/hiddenness] of Being” (VI 185). While every
subject-object has its own depth, its “interior horizon,” it is also “caught up, included
within” the depth of the flesh of visibility in general, the “exterior horizon” (VI 148–
149). Thus, those horizons are not opposites but they open up onto each other and “by
encroachment” complete each other in the flesh’s chiasmatic structure (VI 202).
Lastly, then, the visible is not all there is but like the sentient is the obverse of
the sensible and vice versa, the invisible is the obverse of the visible. In fact, “the visible
is pregnant with the invisible, […] to comprehend fully the visible relations […] one
must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible” (VI 216). The invisible is the
visible’s “lining and its depth” (VI 149), it is its “non-figurative inner framework” (VI
257), it is its “Wesen” (essence) (VI 247) and therefore not its counterpart as it would
be in Cartesian dualism. The relation between visibility and invisibility is then like the
relation between “sound and meaning, speech and what it means to say”—they are each
inscribed in each other without a question of priority (VI 145). Therefore, Merleau-
Ponty also claims that literature, music and the arts are an exploration of the invisible
(VI 149)—they lay bare the invisible in-the-visible.
In this way, Merleau-Ponty, drawing on both Husserl and Heidegger, altered
their philosophies by anchoring consciousness in the body and the body in the world.
He collapsed dualist thinking between mind/body, self/world and visibility/invisibility
by demonstrating that they share a carnal structure of reversibility, the flesh of
visibility, in which they are embedded. In sympathy with a broader shift towards anti-
ocularcentrism, Merleau-Ponty lodges lived experience of the world in the body and
stresses the intertwinement of the senses in the engagement with the world, which
always remains partly invisible to us. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology
suits the purpose of my thesis, since I argue that Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves,
Stahl 17
abandoning a single subject-position and anchoring the characters in their
intercorporeally connected bodies, explores and uncovers a common, anonymous
Being, in which all subject-objects are grounded, being of the same flesh.
Approaches to Woolf’s The Waves, Being and Vision Previous research on Woolf’s The Waves, Being and vision has broadly fallen into three
categories: material and cultural-historical approaches that focus on science’s impact
on Woolf’s writing; aesthetic and formalist approaches that examine Woolf’s aesthetic
vision; and phenomenological approaches that analyse her engagement with human’s
experience of Being-in-the-world.
Derek Ryan in Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory (2013) and Henry
in Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003), both analyse how advances in
the sciences and technologies in the early 20th century influenced Woolf’s writing of
The Waves. Even though Ryan focuses on Bohr’s quantum and atom theory and Henry
on advances in astronomy, they arrive at a similar conclusion, namely, that Woolf
deconstructs human beings’ alleged superior position in the world in The Waves,
depicting characters that are embedded in a world over which they do not have
dominion. Ryan argues in this respect that the human and non-human relationships in
The Waves can be seen in connection to Bohr’s indeterminacy principle, revealing, as
noted earlier, that “edges or boundaries [between all agents] are not determinate either
ontologically or visually” (176). He claims that the characters negotiate their positions
through a kind of “intra-action,” trying to distance themselves from each other but
always perceiving a deep sense of entanglement, recognising the essence of quantum
physics: “‘[W]e are part of that nature we seek to understand’” (Barad qtd. in Ryan
174). Henry, on the other hand, connects Woolf’s nonanthropocentric layout of The
Waves not only to Woolf’s development of a “decentred aesthetic vision” but also to
her rejection of Fry’s “aesthetic unity,” inspired by astronomy and inventions such as
the stereoscope (107). Referring to Woolf’s declaration that The Waves ought to be a
“playpoem,” Henry defines it to be the peak of Woolf’s experimentation with not only
different styles but also multiple perspectives, denying the possibility of the privileging
of a particular point of view and accounting for the restrictions of human vision on the
world and themselves (105–107). Both, Ryan’s and Henry’s analyses, convincingly
examine the characters’ inherent embeddedness in their environment as agents sharing
equal agency with all other human and non-human agents in the world. While this
Stahl 18
implicitly speaks to my Merleau-Pontian approach and the concept of flesh and the
visible, both neglect a discussion of the body as the centre of lived experience.
Moreover, Ryan does not explore the importance of vision and the senses at all
concerning human and non-human relations in The Waves, and despite Henry’s
examination of Woolf’s decentred vision, she leaves Woolf’s eyeless writing
untouched.
More formalist examinations of Woolf’s aesthetics in The Waves can be found
in the works of Claudia Olk, Banfield and Tobin. While my analysis also involves an
examination of Woolf’s use of literary devices regarding a common ground
interconnecting the characters with each other and the world, Olk’s, Banfield’s and
Tobin’s studies present an entirely different understanding of The Waves. Both Olk and
Banfield argue that The Waves is structured by a dialectic of subject and object, interior
and exterior, invisible form and visible surface. Olk claims that those binary pairs are
“[organising] paradox[es] [in] Woolf’s aesthetics” (167) and asserts that Woolf’s use
of visual literary devices becomes both “a mode of production” (15) and a way of
negotiating the relation between the characters as autonomous individuals and their
surroundings (7). However, despite Olk’s formalist analysis of vision and even
visibility and invisibility in The Waves, she does not connect her findings to Woolf’s
eyeless writing, mentioning the term only twice (128, 165). In contrast, Banfield in The
Phantom Table (2000) establishes a connection to eyelessness and claims that it was
influenced by Fry, valuing post-impressionist emphasis on “design” over impressionist
focus on “vision” (“art for the eye”) (248). This distinction, argues Banfield, is tied to
a dualism between a “sensible world” against an eyeless world, “inaccessible to the
senses” (13). Tobin in her doctoral dissertation “Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and The
Years as Novel of Vision and Novel of Fact” (1973) also remains within a dialectical
mode of thinking but goes even further, stating that The Waves is a drama centring on
the “hostile relationship of eternal opposition” between humans, nature and a
transcendental, disembodied “eyeless presence,” representing the hostile forces of life
and death (204). However, rather than presupposing an a priori existence of the above-
mentioned binary oppositions, by taking Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal philosophy as a
lens, my analysis will remain closer to nonanthropocentric approaches, revealing the
intercorporeality of human existence. Thereby, I will read The Waves as an optimistic
engagement with Being, and eyeless writing as a positive exploration of Being’s
invisible depth, inhabiting rather than opposing all beings.
Stahl 19
As implied by the studies of Ryan and Henry discussed above, critics have
registered Woolf’s move towards a more ontological and phenomenological thinking,
especially in The Waves. Nevertheless, phenomenological studies of the novel are
scarce and predominantly use Husserlian or Heideggerian philosophy, disregarding an
analysis of vision and corporeality. Sheridan Hough (2002), for instance, ties Woolf’s
declaration to “think of things in themselves” in “A Room of One’s Own” to Husserl’s
“things in themselves” (41–42). Referring to Husserl’s epochê, Hough argues that
Woolf’s “androgynous view” produces a phenomenological “presuppositionlessness
(Voraussetzungslosigkeit)” (45), enabling her to describe the world as it manifests itself
in consciousness in The Waves (51). Emma Simone and Suzette Henke, on the other
hand, take a Heideggerian approach. Henke’s article on “Virginia Woolf’s The Waves:
A Phenomenological Reading” (1989) is the earliest and, until recently, the only in-
depth phenomenological study of The Waves published, and Simone’s Virginia Woolf
and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study” (2017), traces similarities between
several of Woolf’s works and Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world. Unlike
Husserl, Heidegger states that in perceiving the world there is never “a process of
returning […] to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness […]; even in perceiving […] that
Dasein which knows remains outside,” remains in the world (qtd. in Simone 31).
Regarding The Waves, Simone predominantly analysis the characters’ interpersonal
relations as oscillating between detachment and connectedness in relation to
Heidegger’s claim that “Being-in is Being-with Others” (39). She contends that the
characters in their “average everyday mode of Being-with” do not experience
connectedness but isolation (44–45). Henke’s analysis of The Waves is similarly
pessimistic. Reminiscent of Tobin’s study, she examines the novel’s “mystical” aspect,
presenting life as an ongoing “wave-like” fight “against hostile forces,” in relation to
Heidegger’s remarks on “dread” (463). Henke argues that in order to perceive “the
world seen without a self” Bernard strips off his identity and experiences “dread” in the
face of “nothingness” (465), allowing him eventually to reach a mystic experience of
“the miraculous ground of being” (467). Referring to Heidegger, Henke claims that
Bernard thereby reaches an “existential authenticity,” “an impassioned freedom
towards death” as the moment when self and nature merge (470). However, since
Husserl and Heidegger do not recognise the importance of the lived body in humans’
experience of Being-in-the-world, Hough, Simone and Henke all miss the characters’
Stahl 20
bodily interconnectedness with themselves and their environment, characterised by
interdependency rather than hostility.
As demonstrated in the previous subsection, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal
philosophy accounts for this gap, which is why I consider it to be most suitable for
unlocking The Waves’ eyelessness. The only phenomenological study that takes a
similar approach to mine is Mildenberg’s monograph Modernism and Phenomenology
(2017). Utilising Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in analysing The Waves, Mildenberg
shifts the focus to the body-in-the-world in which consciousness emerges rather than
vice versa (10). Mildenberg shows that The Waves is inherently “non-dialectical”
(113), arguing along Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of flesh and chiasm that there is a
“‘double-touch’ experience” at the centre of the novel through which The Waves
unfolds, being “‘not concerned with the single life […], but with lives together’”
(Woolf qtd. in Mildenberg 116). Mildenberg also briefly discusses the issue of
eyelessness but claims that it refers to “the mute and ‘eyeless’ figure of Percival” (119).
In contrast, my analysis will focus entirely on eyelessness in The Waves and will reveal
that while Percival is one of its manifestations, “eyelessness” is not restricted to one
character or presence but refers to multiple aspects of the novel.
In conclusion, whereas the material and cultural-historical approaches to The
Waves implicitly speak to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh and the visible, they
nevertheless do not entail a discussion of intercorporeality. Furthermore, while the
studies on Woolf’s aesthetic vision entail an analysis of the visual literary devices she
uses in order to establish interpersonal relations, they remain within dualist thinking,
viewing eyelessness as the dark and hostile counterpart of the sensible world. Finally,
since the majority of phenomenological studies apply Husserlian and Heideggerian
philosophy, they not only miss the bodily interconnectedness of self and world in The
Waves but also a discussion of the senses’ entanglement in lived bodily experience.
Hence, by unlocking eyelessness in The Waves with the help of Merleau-Ponty’s late
corporeal philosophy, I will fill an important gap in research, tying Woolf’s The Waves
to her ideas on Being and vision.
Stahl 21
Chapter II
“Eyeless” and “I-less” Writing —Enveloped by Anonymous Visibility In her diary on June 18th, 1927, Woolf ponders about The Waves, here still preliminarily
called “The Moths,” developing her “play-poem idea [further]: the idea of some
continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night&c, all flowing
together” (DIII 139). In The Waves, Woolf was preoccupied with exploring the
fundamental grounds of human existence rather than the subject matter of realist or
naturalist fiction, the mimetic attempt to represent reality through character-drawing
and a coherent plot, structured according to the succession of events, but which thereby
failed to capture the complexity of life. Writing The Waves meant going against literary
conventions, producing arguably Woolf’s most formally experimental novel.
In nine episodes, The Waves illustrates the life of seven characters—three
women, Rhoda, Jinny and Susan, and four men, Percival, Bernard, Louis and Neville—
from early childhood until late adult life, each recording their sensations, experiences
and thoughts in present tense soliloquies. In the middle of the novel Percival, the only
character whose voice is never heard, dies in India, reducing the group to six. The nine
episodes alternate with nine interludes written in italics and past tense, tracing the
course of the sun from sunrise to sunset on the shore and the sea in the absence of
human consciousness, symbolically paralleling the characters’ different stages in life.
As such, Woolf writes that The Waves is structured according to “a rhythm not […] a
plot” (DIII 316), in which the interludes serve to be both a “bridge & also […] a
background” to the characters’ lives (DIII 285). In this sense, they do not represent a
separate world, autonomous from human beings or any kind of sentient being, but they
depict something akin to Merleau-Ponty’s visible world, enveloping and framing the
characters’ lives. The first interlude illustrates how
[t]he light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. (4)
In this ekphrastic description, the sunlight illuminates the visible world, awaking it from
its slumber. The sunlight is personified and vivifies not only the birds, chirping their
morning tunes, but also shines on the white blind of a bedroom window, implicitly
waking its human residents, whose presence is further alluded to via the image of a
Stahl 22
“finger-print[-shaped] shadow” cast by the sun. The first episode, following this
interlude begins,
“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.” […]
“I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.” […]
“Stones are cold to my feet,” said Neville. “I feel each one, round and pointed, separately.” […]
“Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,” said Susan.
“Look at the house,” said Jinny, “with all its windows white with blinds.” (4–5)
This passage amounts to a series of similar remarks of the characters, recording their
perception of dawn standing together in a garden. Whereas the interludes and the
episodes are formally separated parts, I argue that they are interconnected with each
other since the visible world of the interludes is inhabited by the characters. In other
words, the characters live in and corporeally perceive the visible world described in the
interludes, which recalls Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh of visibility as the
“dimensionality of Being, […] as universal, [wherefore] everything […] is necessarily
enveloped in it” (VI 257). This general visibility described in the interlude is not limited
to what the eye sees but is open to all senses simultaneously. Hence, rather than
depicting Husserl’s “double-touch,” this scene depicts Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility or
chiasm inherent to all senses. While the characters are at once sentients, hearing the
birds’ singing, touching the cold stones and seeing a ring of light, they are also
immersed in the fabric of the world as sensibles, being touched by the stones, object to
the ring of light quivering above them as well as the being-perceived of the birds
surrounding them. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “[e]very vision takes place in a tactile
space” and vice versa (VI 134). No point of view is elevated over another, just like no
perceptual sense is granted primacy over the others; rather as Woolf states in “Sketch
of the Past” (1939), “what was seen would at the same time be heard […]—sounds
indistinguishable from sights. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of […] first
impressions” (MB 66). Each character’s individual description stands simultaneously
on its own but also merges with the others into a larger picture, constituting the
characters’ immediate, embodied, collective experience of dawn in the garden. As a
result, the relation between the visible world presented in the interlude and the
characters’ perceptual experience of it in the episode exemplifies what Merleau-Ponty
writes about the relationship between sense experience, the sensible and the sentient:
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[E]ach monocular vision, each touching with one sole hand has its own visible, its tactile, each is bound to every other vision, to every other touch; it is bound in such a way as to make up with them the experience of one sole body before one sole world […] [,] the little private world of each is not juxtaposed to the world of all the others, but surrounded by it, levied off from it, and all together are a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general. (VI 142)
In the passage of The Waves cited above, not only is each character a sentient perceiving
the sole world, but due to their collective sensuous experience, they, in fact, together
form into a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general—the visible world presented
in the interludes. This is possible because, rather than being isolated from each other as
individual consciousnesses, the characters are interconnected with each other and their
environment in a primordial, corporeal way, due to them being subject-objects or
sensibles and sentients simultaneously (VI 142). They can only perceive because they
themselves are perceivable, because the body is in and of the world (VI 134–135), or as
Louis remarks, because they are “rooted to the middle of the earth” (W 7).
Furthermore, while the structure of the episode in the previous excerpt reminds
the reader of dialogue, the characters do not actually respond to each other directly.
Instead, like a choir, each has its voice and together they form a chorus. Thus, the
characters are not only interconnected with each other in their carnal adherence, their
common, invisible flesh, but also formally and structurally in the text. Through
anaphora (“I see,” “I hear”) and parallelism, their utterances structurally mirror and
complement each other, which also serves to create a communal sensuous experience
formally, as well as in terms of its content. Moreover, this excerpt also serves to
exemplify Woolf’s “play-poem”-style. Rather than recording their perceptions in
present progressive, the common tense of conversation, the characters utter them in
simple present tense, more often utilised in poetry (Briggs, “Novels” 77). In fact,
Stephen J. Miko defines this technique as “a kind of suspended present tense [reducing]
existence to a moment perpetually,” thus giving the characters’ immediate, embodied
“moment of being” without reflection or judgment (69). Bracketing both the characters’
presuppositions and the mimetic representation of things, their immediate perception
of life itself, as Woolf described it, is in focus, namely, “the power of music [, the birds
singing], the stimulus of sight [, light and shadow], [and] the effect […] of the shape of
trees or the play of colour” (EIV 439). Hence, I argue that the suspended present tense
is one manifestation of eyeless writing in The Waves, producing a kind of
phenomenological reduction in itself, making the characters’ invisible impressions
Stahl 24
visible. Michel Henry makes a similar point in his analysis of Kandinsky’s abstract art,
claiming that Kandinsky liberated colors and forms from what they represent
externally, instead reducing them to their impressions (82–84), expressing their
“invisible tonalities and forces” (Davidson xi–xii). Thereby, like Woolf’s The Waves,
Kandinsky’s art radiates “a feeling of life,” “the phenomenology of the invisible,” from
the canvas (Davidson xi–xii). In Woolf’s words, through the abandonment of “writing
[that] appeals mainly to the eye” in favor of eyelessness, “we are made to appreciate
the forms, the colours, the very fibre and texture of [things]” (EIV 244). On this basis,
while Merleau-Ponty only praises Proust for “fixing the relation between the visible
and the invisible,” I argue that Woolf as well succeeded in this with her eyeless writing
in The Waves, “describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, [the visible
surface] [but] that is its lining and its depth” (VI 149). Furthermore, while the speed
and flexibility of their dialogue reminds of prose, the characters’ descriptions are poetic
due to their richness in literary devices. Bernard’s alliterated imagery of a “loop of
light,” Rhoda’s onomatopoeic imitation of the birds chirping, and Jinny’s alliterated
description of the windows covered with blinds in wave-like iambic intonation, all
reinforce the sensuousness of the scene, making it even corporeally perceivable for the
reader. To compare this effect again with abstract art, the invisible feeling of life
radiating from the canvas (here, the characters’ sense perceptions) is, thus, repeated
contemporaneously by the spectator, or concerning The Waves by the reader,
establishing a “shared feeling” (Davidson xii). Thus, as Woolf noted about her
“playpoem,” it is not concerned with fiction’s “fact-recording power,” but with poetry’s
vivid and close expression of “feelings and [general] ideas of […] characters” (EIV
435).
In one sense, the characters are only able to experience immediately the general
dimensionality of Being, the visible world, due to the interludes’ particular general
narrative style. Such a generality has been defined as “impersonal” (Banfield 385),
reminding us of Woolf’s comment on the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse
(1927) in her diary: “I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract piece of
writing—I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all
eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to” (DIII 76). The style of “Time Passes”
and the interludes of The Waves is strikingly similar, seen for instance in the following
passage: “[t]he place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the lighthouse beam entered the
rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter
Stahl 25
[…]” (TTL 113). Like the interludes of The Waves, passages such as these seem to be
narrated from an observational distance, giving a seemingly omniscient view of the
visible world. However, there is no third-person or first-person narrator present, no
individual consciousness. The interludes lack a single pair of eyes, a focalising point—
they are not only “eyeless” but also its homophone, “I-less.”11 In fact, I claim that it is
precisely due to the interlude’s eye/I-lessness that the visible world described resembles
the general Being, a Sensible in general, Merleau-Ponty writes about. It is an
“anonymous visibility [that] inhabits [all characters], a vision in general” (VI 142),
rather than an eyeless world isolating (Briggs, “Novels” 67) or opposing them (Banfield
13). Thereby, Woolf created an eye/I-less “background” that allows the characters the
kind of lived experience Merleau-Ponty wants to return to in his phenomenology,
namely, an omnisensual, corporeal experience of a prereflective reality, where subject
and object are not yet distinguished (VI 130). Thus, the characters are able to experience
the visible world immediately and unfiltered because it is not already mediated through
the subjectivity of a narrative eye. Instead, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, their “[bodies]
stand before the world and the world upright before [them], and between them there is
a relation […] of embrace” (VI 271).
However, it is crucial to point out that this eye/I-less style of the interludes does
not, in fact, produce an omniscient point of view as one might be led to believe. Instead,
even in the interludes, the possibility of an all-seeing perspective is undermined. The
interludes demonstrate what Banfield defines to be “the condition of seeing, to have a
partial view” (343). For instance, according to Olk, the third interlude presents a
“microcosm of possible viewpoints,” alternating between a “panoramic view of the sea
and sky” (163)—"[t]he sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore” (W 50)—
and a “bird’s eye view” (Olk 164) of the same birds “that had sung […] in the dawn
on that tree” (W 51). Those birds glance around, “aware, awake; intensely conscious
of one thing, one object in particular. Perhaps it was a snail shell […]. Or perhaps they
saw the splendor of the flowers […]. Or they fixed their gaze on the small bright apple
leaves […]” (W 51). The repetitive use of the suggestive word “perhaps” signifies that
even the eye/I-less perspective of the interludes is not omniscient. Since birds are not
11 A similar argument has been made by Beer (1996) and Briggs (2000). While Beer’s feminist reading asserts that “multiple I’s” draw in and out of a communal, androgynous “we” (66), Briggs argues that the interludes’ I-lessness results in an isolation of the characters from nature (76). My Merleau-Pontian approach, however, stresses all beings’ primordial interconnectedness and embeddedness in an eye/I-less visibility surrounding them.
Stahl 26
things (Dinge) but subject-objects themselves, they are also “beings in depth,” not
pierceable by the eyes (VI 136). Hence, neither of the viewpoints is granted primacy or
omniscience, and secondly, they are not contesting views but entangled with each other
in the flesh of visibility. Just as the birds are part of the sea and the sky, the sea and the
sky are part of the birds; given that the birds are subjects-objects with depth, “there is
reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other” (VI 138). Furthermore, Woolf
writes in “Montaigne,” that “‘perhaps’ and ‘I think’ [exemplify] all of those words
which qualify the rash assumptions of human ignorance” (EIV 75). They emphasise, in
this passage, that in contradistinction to Cartesianism’s belief, no perspective can ever
produce all-encompassing knowledge of the world. Instead, eye/I-lessness accounts for
the modern, anti-ocularcentric conception that it is impossible to know the world
entirely and that not only humans but also non-human agents have a life of their own,12
since, according to Merleau-Ponty, every sensible sentient is “more than their being-
perceived” (VI 135). In fact, Woolf’s depiction of human and non-human agents having
not only equal agency in the world but also being of the same flesh, recalls Ryan’s
pusthumanist analysis of The Waves, claiming in reference to Bohr’s indeterminacy
principle that there is no ontological or visually perceivable boundary between them
(Materiality 175–176). Thus, the eye/I-less interludes reflect Woolf’s previously
mentioned attitude towards life being “variable [,] complex and infinitely mysterious”
(EIV 76).
This having been said, it is important to note that not only do the interludes
depict eye/I-lessness, but as Woolf herself claimed, the entire book is meant to be
“eyeless” (DIII 209). As I demonstrated earlier, the first-person suspended present tense
soliloquies exemplify Woolf’s eyeless writing, bringing forth the characters’ invisible
impressions of the visible world. However, this is just one aspect of the episodes’
eyelessness. The fact that they are structured like dialogue, indicated by the insertions
“Bernard said,” “Jinny said,” again suggests some kind of narrative instance; however,
they only serve to signal whose voice is rendered as there is no other voice or eye
present other than the characters’ in the entire novel. Hence, like the interludes, the
episodes are eye/I-less since there is no conventional omniscient third-person narration
12 Bill Brown (1999) famously made a similar claim, but concerning Woolf’s engagement with material objects rather than non-human animate agents (i.e. birds). He argues that she undermines the privilege of the human subject and liberates objects from their subservience to human beings, demonstrating that they have agency as well (7).
Stahl 27
at work, no single subject position that binds everything together, creating a univocal,
coherent reality in the text. Rather, reminiscing of the anti-ocularcentric aletheic mode
of vision as “multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary [and] horizonal” (Jay 164), the
characters, as Henry notes, together produce an assemblage of “a multiplicity of
perspectives” (Discourse 106). Returning to the metaphor of the characters’ voices
merging into a chorus, Bernard thinks, “while I hear one or two distinct melodies, such
as Louis sings, or Neville, I am also drawn irresistibly to the sound of the chorus” (176).
Thus, neither of the characters’ voices/melodies or points of view is prioritised but
rather the realist or naturalist focus on a single, autonomous subject is replaced with an
emphasis on community to which each character contributes equally and in which each
is embedded in a relation that can neither be grasped with the eye nor by a single I.
Their partial views demonstrate that the characters’ knowledge of themselves and the
world “is always local, contingent, and situated” (Henry, Discourse 106), being
inherently tied to their bodies and thus limited in their perceptual horizons; as Jinny
notes, “I can imagine nothing beyond the circle cast by my body” (91). Recalling
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the subject-object’s “Umwelt (environment)” as both
openness and invisibility/hiddenness of Being (VI 185), Bernard notes that “[c]ertain
things lie beyond my scope” (132). Hence, while the characters’ multiple perspectives
merge into one collective immediate experience of the visible world, as the previously
cited excerpt exemplifies, not only the environment in which they are embedded but
also the characters themselves remain partly fragmented and enigmatic, even to
themselves.
Aiming to explore the enigmatic, invisible relations and ideas of people and the
world in The Waves, Woolf’s narrative discloses “very little about the houses, incomes
[and] occupations of its characters” (EIV 435). In fact, according to Pamela L. Caughie,
it would be more accurate to call them “speakers” rather than “characters” since they
are neither “located in any specific local setting or geographical space,” nor
“individuated by physical details” (345), which would only scratch on the surface of
people and phenomena. The characters themselves reflect Woolf’s struggles as an
author, repeatedly making the experience that fact and mimetic representation fail to
capture phenomena or someone’s (own) identity. Jinny, for instance, tries to “catch”
the identity of “that man there, by the cabinet” by accumulating facts about him, but
eventually realises that they do not surmount to a “substance” (W 123–125). Therefore,
she then “drop[s] all these facts,” concluding that she cannot tell “if life is this or that”
Stahl 28
(125). Bernard, the writer of the group, is concerned with story-making and, thus, also
with character-drawing. Like Jinny, he finds that facts do not capture the complexity of
things and people, observing that “beyond [facts] all is darkness and conjecture”
(102)—a hidden depth that escapes objective description. Thus, trying to describe his
friends in their absence, Bernard applies poetic imagery instead: “I see Louis, stone-
carved, sculpturesque; Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of
crystal; Jinny, dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the nymph
of the fountain always wet” (82). On a meta-level, then, Bernard mirrors what Woolf
does in The Waves. He is not applying the “fact-recording power […] of fiction” but
the abstractness of poetry, giving “the outline rather than the detail” of his friends (EIV
435), rendering “in a very few strokes [their] essentials” (DIII 300). He is trying to
capture their abstract Wesen (essence) eyelessly, trying to reach the “inexhaustible
depth” underneath their surface appearances (VI 143). As Henry notes concerning
Kandinsky’s abstract art, a turn towards abstractness is a turn away from a mimetic
representation of the external, visible manifestation of phenomena (Invisible 6) (here,
away from surface appearances) in order to reach and make visible a phenomenon’s
invisible dimension—“how it is felt” (Davidson x)—which is internal to it, or in
Merleau-Ponty’s words, resides in-the-visible (VI 257). Thus, since the subject matter
of The Waves is not accessible to the eye, exploring the abstract Wesen of people and
the world, as well as their relations to each other and to general ideas, it has to be
approached eyelessly, through abstract poetic images.
All in all, there is no single subject or focalising point that orders The Waves’
narrative but, as Henry argues, its “ordering function […] is decentered or dispersed”
(Discourse 103). The narrative resists Fry’s notion of aesthetic objectivity—the
possibility that an artist, author or narrator can step back from the piece of art/writing
to produce an aesthetic unity out of her/his detached view (Fry 33). Thereby, The
Waves’ I/eye-lessness disputes the idea of the Cartesian subject autonomous from its
environment, inspecting it as well as others from a distance, and depicts interconnected
characters. An omniscient narrator or a dominant focalising point in the narrative would
instead presume that it is possible to impose an order on the world, to make it
transparent, coherent and tangible. However, humans do not steer the current but are
flowing within it, like in the city’s “heterogeneous crowd [,] [where they are] going to
be buffeted; to be flung up, and flung down […] like a ship on the sea” (W 125).
Stahl 29
As an attempt to account for the decentring generated by scientific
developments, the narrative of The Waves is not mediated by a narrator governing the
continuous stream of “human thought [,] the ship, the night&c, all flowing together,”
to repeat Woolf’s diary entry (DIII 139), but it arises out of the text itself, out of what
Merleau-Ponty calls “the schemata of Being, […] its ebb and flow, its growth, its
upheavals, its turbulence” (EM 123). As such, life itself is presented as what Woolf
terms in “Modern Novels” (1919), “the semitransparent envelope, or luminous halo,
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (EIII 33; my
emphasis). In other words, the general eye/I-less visible, in which we are enveloped, is
simultaneously open to and hidden from us due to not only “extending further than the
things I touch and see at present” (VI 143), but also being the “surface of a depth,”
within which the invisible, abstract Wesen of things lies (VI 136), which can only be
disclosed eyelessly.
Eyeless Writing as “Bodily” Writing After his first read of The Waves, the novelist and Bloomsburian E. M. Forster wrote a
letter to Woolf on October 23, 1931, praising the novel’s poetic and philosophical
profoundness. Trying to describe the “mystery throbbing under it,” he writes
the world is incomprehensible and must remain so to us animalcules [….]. But what are we? Waves, yes? but [sic] waves in the sea part of the sea inseparable from the sea bound too [sic]each of us to be this wave and not that […] but able and increasingly able as we get older to perceive that the other waves have their life too and that while we are clashing with them we are somehow they. (Forster 192)
Woolf was delighted by Forster’s letter, as it affirmed that her new playpoem form had
led her on the right path (DIV 52–53). As the previously analysed scene of dawn in the
garden exemplifies, the characters’ individual perceptions complement each other and
form into a collective immediate description of it. However, as Forster observes, The
Waves does not always depict an unquestioned unity of the characters, a calm sea, but
also depicts the waves “clashing”—the discord that also belongs to the schemata of
Being, as noted previously (EM 123). All characters strive to capture their own
identities against that of the others, asking themselves repeatedly “[w]ho am I?” (W 58,
69, 83, 166). In their clashing, however, the characters do not achieve a sense of a
univocal self, but, as my analysis will uncover, they find that they are multiplicitous
and variable, being fundamentally interlaced with each other in their bodies,
challenging the Cartesian notion of an autonomous subject.
Stahl 30
In the third interlude, for instance, Neville states “I do not know myself
sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I
am” (58). Neville longs to pin down his identity, to make it measurable, which implies
a possibility of objectively inspecting one’s own identity from a scientific distance,
computing a clear-cut, unambiguous core, immune to change and unique for every
individual. However, in point of fact, the opposite is the case: shortly after, Neville not
only feels that he cannot capture his identity but he also experiences that his
unidentifiable sense of himself is suddenly changing:
Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet the figure who is coming and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance of a friend. […] [H]ow painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody—with whom?—with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I? (58)
Neville does not experience this change to his sense of self through Bernard as an
enrichment but rather as further confusion and even a distortion of his self. The fact
that he feels his self curiously flowing together with Bernard’s challenges his world-
view, believing that “there is an order in this world; [that] there are distinctions” (13).
It is a lucky coincidence that it is Bernard who is approaching Neville, since Neville
believes that Bernard with his artistic genius is able to “describe what we have all seen
so that it becomes a sequence” (25). Bernard then tries to “create” Neville, noting that
Neville aspires to be a poet and longs to be a lover, but also tries to capture more
abstractly how Neville is felt; thus, Bernard is not “fixing remorselessly upon a single
object,” as Neville would (59–60). Neville again feels like his self is being distorted,
stating that “I am one person—myself” (61). He distances himself strongly from
Bernard, who believes himself to be a second Byron, and tells him “this is not Byron;
that is you” (61). Bernard, on the other hand, feels repulsed by Neville’s reduction of
himself, thinking “[t]o be contracted by another person into a single being—how
strange” (62). Instead, Bernard perceives himself as “I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am
this, that and the other. […] For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple
as our friends would have us to meet their needs” (62–63); rather, “I am […] complex
and many” (53), always changing depending on who and what one is surrounded by
(56). Hence, in contradistinction to Neville, Bernard embraces the fact that it is
impossible to capture one’s identity as it is in constant flux, interacting with and ever-
Stahl 31
changing according to one’s encounters. Neville experiences how his body, being
immersed in the visible as a visible itself, approaches what he sees and thereby “opens
onto the world” (EM 124). Due to both Bernard and Neville at once seeing and being
seen, they are in a state of what Merleau-Ponty terms Ineinander (in-each-other) and
Einfühlung (“quasi-reflection”), each encroaching upon and mixing with the other (VI
245).
This process of encroachment (chiasm) is the structure of the flesh common to
all subject-objects. As explained earlier, the flesh is not a “substance” but the sensibility
of things, the anonymous texture and general intercorporeal “element of Being,”
through which we are already preconsciously and primordially connected with the
world and others in our ability to sense and be sensed (VI 139, 143). As a result, since
both Neville and Bernard are sensible sentients, they are already in an unconscious
communion with each other through the flesh of the world (VI 142), so that Neville
senses Bernard before even seeing him clearly. However, since Neville mentally
refuses this process, he experiences it like a violent force working upon him, unable to
control this intercorporeal process. In fact, since consciousness is grounded in the body,
the body’s “movement is not a decision by the mind […]; but my body moves itself”
(EM 124). The body is the self (VI 244–245), emerging out of this chiasmatic
intertwining as a self by “inherence of the seer in the seen, the toucher in the touched,
the feeler in the felt—a self […] that is caught up in things” (EM 124). It suggests the
idea of a Neville mixed with Bernard and vice versa. Thus, the self is complex and
multifaceted, as Bernard perceives and embraces it, rather than measurable and static,
as Neville would have it, desiring order. It is on these grounds that I argue that The
Waves’ eye/I-lessness undermines the Cartesian conception of I/eye presuming a
singular, static and sealed off identity and a singular, disembodied view on the world,
by depicting characters that are multiple, variable, embodied and interlaced with other
human and non-human beings. The Waves is not narrated by a single I/eye but by
intercorporeally connected bodies, perceiving the world omnisensually, so that eyeless
writing resembles “bodily” writing.
This intercorporeality is acutely experienced by Jinny, who is, like Bernard,
profoundly aware of her embodied being. She perceives the world as “a great society
of bodies” (W 44) where “our bodies communicate” with each other through their
sensibility (W 71). In the third episode, Jinny is dancing and experiences in “the current
of the dance” the curious wonder of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world:
Stahl 32
[W]e are swept now into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us together, and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. (72–73)
The dancers touching each other touching are intercorporeally embedded in the
common flesh of the world, in the “it [holding] us together.” However, while the bodies
are enveloped by the flesh due to their carnal adherence of touching and being touched,
they each remain simultaneously distinct, one “hard” and the other “flowing.” This is
the case because flesh and reversibility express at once envelopment and distance (VI
135), or in Johnson’s words, “unity at a distance or sameness with difference” (47–48).
According to Mildenberg, the doubleness of being subject-object means that one is
located “at once apart from other sensible beings as a seeing/sensing subject and among
them as a seen/sensed ‘thing’” (115). However, this paradox inherent to the flesh’s
chiasmatic structure is not an obstacle between the embodied self and the world but it
is their “means of communication” (VI 135). In this sense, Jinny feels inherently
connected with the other dancers, her “peers,” thinking “I am one of you. This is my
world” (W 73), being one variant of the flesh, the carnal “prototype of Being” (VI 136).
Nevertheless, like Bernard and Neville, Jinny also has the urge to differentiate
herself from her friends. In the second episode, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda try to
demarcate themselves from each other via visual appearances. However, the narrative’s
structure reveals their prereflective and invisible carnal adherence. “[Going] upstairs”
to change clothes, they pass a looking-glass and Susan sees herself “with Jinny in front
and Rhoda lagging behind. Jinny dances. […] Miss Perry’s dark eyes smoulder with
admiration, for Jinny” (27–28). Later on, Susan thinks, “I do not want, as Jinny wants,
to be admired. I want to give and be given” (37). Right after this, Jinny’s soliloquy
starts, and she sees herself in the mirror, thinking “I see myself entire. I see my body
and head in one now, for […] they are one […]. I flicker between the set face of Susan
and Rhoda’s vagueness” (28). This soliloquy is followed by Rhoda’s, who is also
looking at herself thinking, “I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny
have faces; they are here. […] They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to
look first and do what other people do when they have done it” (29). Whereas Olk does
not analyse this particular scene, it illustrates that she is correct in asserting that in The
Waves “processes of vision, of seeing and observing” become crucial in the
establishment of relationships between the characters (166). However, since Olk misses
Stahl 33
the reversibility of the senses, the doubleness of the self, she claims that those processes
construct a dialectic between each character as autonomous self against her/his
surroundings (166). Instead I argue that sense perception turns into a narrative device
in The Waves, interlacing the characters with each other, instigating the transition from
a perceiving character to the character perceived, reversing their relation: Susan sees
Rhoda and Jinny; Jinny sees Susan and Rhoda; Rhoda sees Susan and Jinny; each thinks
about themselves in comparison to the others. Each character’s soliloquy is initiated via
an intercorporeal process with the others and the visible world, whether it be seeing,
hearing, or thinking about others/the visible world, illustrating “that one must see or
feel in some way in order to think, that every thought known to us occurs to a flesh”
(VI 146). As a result, The Waves’ underlying structure or invisible form is itself carnal,
being governed by the characters’ corporeal chiasmatic relations with each other and
their environment. While Olk claims that “invisible form” is the opposite of “visible
surface” in The Waves (163), I argue that it resembles the “hidden pattern” behind the
daily life (MB 72); the common flesh uniting humans and the world, whose very
structure is chiasmatic. It is on this basis that I claim again that eyeless writing manifests
itself as “bodily” writing in The Waves, since an all-seeing, disembodied narratorial
instance is replaced by a carnal narrative structure, flowing via the characters’ bodies.
Although Mildenberg does not, regarding the reversibility of sense perceptions,
draw a connection to The Waves’ eyelessness, she acutely observes that a “‘double-
touch’ experience” lies at the novel’s centre, simultaneously intertwining and
distancing the characters with/from the world they inhabit (116). The flesh, being a
mirror phenomenon, is an “extension of my relation with my body” (VI 255), and in the
double-touch, or rather double-sensation experience, the sensible and the sentient
“reciprocate one another” (VI 139). Susan, Jinny and Rhoda all being seen by each
other, or seeing themselves in the mirror, which amounts to the same, complete their
visible body via encroachment (VI 202), since it is not possible to see oneself seeing;
both, “my eyes” and my movement “are invisible to me” (VI 254). As Merleau-Ponty
notes, “[t]here is no coinciding of the seer with the visible. But each borrows from the
other, takes from or encroaches upon the other, intersects with the other, is in chiasm
with the other [,] […] in the sense of Uebertragung (transmission), encroachment” (VI
261). Thus, as noted previously, the characters are selves by inherence (EM 124), trying
to define themselves via what the others are and are not; they only come to a sense of
themselves in the first place through their surroundings. Nevertheless, since this self by
Stahl 34
inherence constantly changes, it always remains partly enigmatic, as Woolf observes in
“Montaigne” when writing about a spectator “gazing into [a painting’s] depth,” but, as
in human encounters, “seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer
they look, never being able to say quite what it is that they see” (EIV 71). In fact,
Bernard observes, “[t]o be myself […] I need the illumination of other people’s eyes,
and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is myself” (W 81).
However, there does appear to be one character who is an exception to this idea,
namely Rhoda. As the previously analysed scene of the three girls seeing themselves in
the mirror suggests, Rhoda feels inherently disembodied. She perceives the others as
embedded in the world, as “they are here [in] the real world [, and] I am not here,”
“[they] have faces [whereas] I have no face” (29), “they live wholly [and] indivisibly”
(92) and “I am nobody” (22). She “wish[es] above all things to have lodgement” and to
“touch something hard […] and so draw myself […] into my body safely” (112).
Merleau-Ponty already noted in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) that, since “the
body is our anchorage in the world,” it is also “our general means of having a world”
(146–147). However, Rhoda lacks a connection with her body and is therefore isolated
from the others and the world, with the exception of the two dinner scenes. Scholars
have argued that Rhoda suffers from depression or melancholia,13 and studies on
depression and Merleau-Ponty argue that depression is signified by a “disturbance of
embodiment,” where the body does not “giv[e] access to the world” anymore (Fuchs
and Schlimme 573).14 She feels that “all palpable forms of life have failed me” (W 112)
(all senses, since life occurs in a “tactile space” [VI 134]), and being thus disconnected
from her body and the world, she eventually commits suicide. Hence, The Waves
demonstrates that it is only possible to gain a sense of oneself via our lodgement in the
body and intercorporeality with others, which is why it is not narrated by a single,
disembodied and detached I, but is instead narrated eye/I-lessly, via the characters’
interconnected bodies.
Nevertheless, it is due to both the characters’ attempts to differentiate
themselves and the fact that they speak in separate soliloquies that scholars such as Olk,
Banfield, Tobin and Simone argue for a dialectic in The Waves between self/other and
exterior/interior. While they do acknowledge that the characters also move towards
13 See, for instance, and Lee (2005), ch. 5, Paccaud-Huguet (2006), pp. 30–33. 14 On Merleau-Ponty and depression, see Gilbert (2014), pp. 129–182, and Ratcliffe (2015), pp. 75–99.
Stahl 35
each other, “oscillating between detachment and connectedness” (Simone 44), in a
structural ebb and flow of “approximation and withdrawal” (Olk 167), they do not
question those binary oppositions but view them as pregiven, which is why, for these
critics, the characters are always drawn into isolation. I have already demonstrated that
each character, being inherently embodied, is interlaced with all other characters’ selves
due to the flesh’s reversibility. However, it is not until the fourth episode, where they
all gather for a farewell dinner for Percival, who is leaving for India, that their inherent
integration really becomes apparent. The six characters arrive one after each other at
the dinner, all anticipating Percival’s arrival. Each time a character enters, the others
record her/his entry and experience a change of the room and the relations between
them. For instance, when Jinny enters, Susan observes how Jinny’s presence “seems to
centre everything […]. Now she sees us, and moves, and all the rays ripple and flow
and waver over us, bringing in new tides of sensation. We change” (W 85). This effect
of each body entering demonstrates that since the body is a part of the visible (“to have
a body is […] to be visible” [VI 189]), the “moving body makes a difference in the
visible world” (EM 124); its movement inscribes the body into the world it inhabits (VI
133). Woolf herself notes in “Montaigne” that “movement and change are the essence
of our being” (EIV 75), a point picked up on in the figure of Bernard, whose “character
is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide and is not mine, as yours are
[…] [, it is] made and remade continually” (W 94). When Percival arrives and completes
the group, the final and most significant change occurs. The group is “drawn into […]
communion,” and Louis notes,
[i]t is Percival […], who makes us aware that these attempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that,’ which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false. […] We have tried to accentuate differences. […] But there is a chain whirling round, round, in a steel-blue circle beneath. (97)
Shortly before, this inherent interconnectedness in which the seven are grounded is put
into a poetic image by Bernard, thinking “[t]here is a red carnation in that vase. A single
flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce,
purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves—a whole flower to which every eye brings
its own contribution” (89). Whereas Henke argues for a dialectic between self and other
in the dinner scene, in which the characters experience their “self dissolve [into] a non-
self,” threatening their existence as autonomous beings (464), I argue with Ryan and
Stahl 36
Mildenberg that “life itself” as it is presented in The Waves, is “fundamentally
communal” (Ryan, Materiality 194) and “non-dialectical” (Mildenberg 113).
As noted previously, Ryan analyses The Waves along with Barad’s concept of
“intra-action” (174). Intra-action is tied to Bohr’s indeterminacy principle, based on the
notion that there is no “ontologically pre-determined separation” of phenomena, i.e.
human or non-human entities (Ryan 177), so that they are “entangled in ‘the ongoing
reconfigurations of the world’” (Barad qtd. in Ryan 174). Rather than presupposing that
the agents involved exist prior to their interaction, ontological intra-action postulates
that agents only emerge as distinct through intra-action, for “agencies are only distinct
in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (Barad
qtd. in Ryan 174). Although Ryan does not utilise a Merleau-Pontian approach, I argue
that, firstly, the kinship of agents, whether human or non-human, as the ground of intra-
action, is what Merleau-Ponty terms the common flesh of Being, and secondly, that
their “mutual entanglement” signifies the flesh’s chiasmatic structure, their
simultaneous envelopment and distance. In The Waves, the characters try to
differentiate themselves, to establish distinct identities, but realise in their communion
that there is a “circle beneath” (W 97), or as Woolf notes herself, “some invisible rope
[by which] we are bound” (DIV 11–12), namely, the flesh of the world, which binds
them together, recalling the relation of reversibility between “sensible [and] sentient”
as being “two segments of one sole circular course” (VI 138). Their selves do not
dissolve into a non-self, each being a petal of the whole flower, which is why the
realisation that each is part of the other, that they are one but many, is experienced as
comforting rather than threatening. As such, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the
“cohesion” of seer and visible “prevails over every momentary discordance,” since their
being is constituted of a common element, the flesh of all Being (VI 140).
In this sense, Bernard’s poetic image of the seven-sided flower metaphorically
anchors the characters in a common flesh. Recalling Woolf’s rejection of writing that
appeals mainly to the eye, she argues that a writer should not only “describe […]
carnations […], so that we can see them,” since every scene, “however solidly and
pictorially build up, is always dominated by an emotion which has nothing to do with
the eye. But it is the eye that has fertilized their thought” (EIV 244). The carnation is
not meant to primarily appeal to the visual sense but it is utilised as an access point to
the sevens’ deeper relations, symbolising the characters’ corporeal, eyeless unity. In
this sense, etymological reasons support that Woolf may have picked the “carnation”
Stahl 37
as her chosen flower carefully; it incarnates the group, since it signifies polysemously
the “crimson [red] carnation flower” (OED: “carnation,” n. 2.1b) and “the colour of
human ‘flesh’ or skin” (OED: “carnation,” n. 2.1a). The flower’s seven sides, the seven
characters, are not entirely congruent but are all constituted of and united in the same
flesh, in the flower’s pistil in which they coalesce. Each character/petal, each eye/I,
contributes its features to the wholeness of the flower, but not as autonomous, sealed
off eyes/Is but as entangled beings, interlaced and crossed over with each other in their
chiasmatic relations.15 As such, Bernard states in the last episode “it is not one life that
I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know
who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from
theirs” (W 199).
This shows that, recalling Forster’s letter to Woolf, each character is
“increasingly able as [she/he] get[s] older to perceive that the other waves have their
life too and that while [they] are clashing with them [they] are somehow they” (Forster
192). Therefore, one can in fact speak of an ebb and flow of connectedness and isolation
(or envelopment and distance) as Olk (167) and Simone (44) do; however, this dynamic
is non-dialectical, signifying the chiasmatic structure—the obverse and reverse of one
texture—of the flesh, the fundamental element of Being (VI 141). In addition, as Ryan
correctly notes, not only do the characters intra-act with each other, but non-human
agents are also part of their communion (Materiality 186). All sitting together, Neville
notes, “surrounded, lit up, many coloured; all things—hands, curtains, knives and forks,
other people dining—run into each other” (W 96). This illumination, “the light
[displaying] the world […], and [us] too” is also mirrored in the fourth interlude, where
the sun has almost reached its climax and falls “inside the room. Whatever the light
touched became dowered with a fanatical existence” (77). The moment of communion
at the zenith of their lives enlightens the characters, illuminates their entanglement in
Woolf’s “hidden pattern behind the cotton wool,” which is “not lived consciously” but
primordially connects all human beings with the world as a work of art—as part of it
(MB 72). This hidden pattern is the eyeless flesh of the world, in which all human and
15 Ryan makes a similar point, however, not via Merleau-Ponty but via Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of “assembleges” in Thousand Plateaus (1980), where they claim that each of The Waves’ characters “with his or her name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity […]. Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its edge, and crosses over into the others” (278). Proceeding from that, Ryan claims that the “multiplicitous intra-actions [in The Waves] [create] assembleges which include nonhuman as well as human agents” (Materiality 186).
Stahl 38
non-human agents are primordially rooted, recalling phenomenology’s prereflective
reality, where both the senses and subject and object are not yet differentiated (VI 130).
As we have seen, for Forster, The Waves lays bare that human beings are only
“animalcules,” to whom the world will consequently always remain intangible (Forster
129). It speaks to humans’ decentring and rescaling in anti-ocularcentrism (Henry,
Discourse 7). By interrogating the abstract, invisible “depths of the world,” Woolf
interrogates “the depths of the self” (EM 54). The Waves demonstrates that it is
impossible to render the experience of a single I/eye since every self only becomes a
self via its bodily encounter with the visible world and other sensible sentients, crossing
over in each other. Since our environment and encounters always change, the self is in
constant flux and is never complete. Abandoning mimetic representation of reality with
its emphasis on visual appearances, The Waves’ eye/I-lessness unveils this underlying,
invisible relation between humans and their environment as one of intrinsic
embeddedness in the common flesh of the world. As such, eye/I-lessness in The Waves
signifies not only the inexistence of a single focalising point, but also resembles a kind
of “bodily” writing. That is, since one can only encounter and inhabit a world through
the body, The Waves’ literary world is also only disclosed to the reader through the
characters’ bodies. Secondly, each character in the novel is presented as multiplicitous,
as carrying the other characters and her/his surroundings with her/him, thus,
undermining the Cartesian notion of a single and static I. Each I/eye is simultaneously
distinct, or “clashing,” and structurally identical with the others—enveloped and
distanced, so that, in Bernard’s words, “[w]e exist not only separately but in
undifferentiated blobs of matter” (W 176), constituted of the same flesh. Thirdly and
finally, since double-sensation turns into a narrative device in The Waves, the narrative
is guided by the characters’ bodies, their chiasmatic relations, rather than by an
individual consciousness. The Waves’ structure is therefore itself carnal, being
constituted of the eyeless flesh of its literary world. As such, Woolf herself writes about
The Waves in her diary, “the book itself is alive” (DIII 298).
Eyeless Percival and the Things in Themselves As we have seen, Mildenberg connects eyelessness not to The Waves and its narrative
style as a whole, but rather ties it to a single being in The Waves; Percival. But as we
have also seen, eyelessness has different facets in The Waves and not only one. In this
Stahl 39
sense, while I agree with Mildenberg that Percival is a manifestation of eyelessness in
The Waves, he is one among many.
Mildenberg argues that Percival is neither a character nor a presence in The
Waves, but a “mute and ‘eyeless’ figure,” whose voice is never rendered, coming only
into existence through the other six characters’ descriptions of him (119). He is
perceived by the others as “remote from us all,” as “some mediaeval commander” (W
24–25), and as their “hero” and “captain” (W 86–87). On this basis, scholars have
established that Percival is the centre of the group, gravitating towards him as if he were
a magnet.16 In this line of thought, Mildenberg claims that it is Percival, who with his
arrival at the farewell dinner reveals “the common ground of the [group], the flesh of
the world” (119). However, Woolf rejected the privileging of a particular point of view
or character (Henry, Discourse 105). By reading the text phenomenologically, we see
that Percival needs to be read from a more nuanced perspective. On these grounds, I
argue for a decentring of Percival’s position, stressing again the characters’
interconnectedness, before I will move to his eyelessness.
Recalling my analysis in the previous subsection, Louis observes that “it is
Percival,” who lays bare that all attempts to construct autonomous identities are false
(W 97). Completing the group with his arrival, the six do in fact perceive Percival as
inducing the revelation of their inherent connectedness. But whereas Mildenberg argues
that Percival is the ultimate “core” of the group, “in which the acts and the expressions
of the others are anchored” (119), I disagree. Percival does at once take a special role
in his muteness and the others’ admiration of him (Miko 81), but is nevertheless, as I
argue, embedded in the group without taking an elevated position. Shortly before the
seven-sided carnation forms, Bernard observes
[w]e are drawn into this communion by some deep, some common emotion. […] Shall we say ‘love of Percival’ because Percival is going to India?
No, that is too small, too particular a name. We cannot attach the width and spread of our feelings to so small a mark. We have come together […] to make one thing […] seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in that vase. (89)
Percival is the reason for their communion but it is the seven-sided carnation created
out of it as their symbol of unity that endows this gathering with significance. The
carnation makes visible, “seen by many eyes simultaneously,” the inherent
16 See, for instance, Olk (2014) p. 178, Briggs (2000) p. 78, Miko (1988), p. 81.
Stahl 40
interconnectedness of the characters in the common flesh of Being. This eyeless
interconnectedness, lying in Being’s inexhaustible depth, is made visible by each
character’s “body like a lantern,” as Jinny remarks (91); it is through their “hands
touch[ing]” that “nothing remains unlit” (99). Hence, it is not only each body, each
“eye,” that contributes equally to the making visible of the seven-sided flower, but it is
in the bodies’ encroachment with each other that their common flesh comes to light.
Percival does not have a special power that reveals their interconnectedness, but was
the last piece of the puzzle missing until he arrived. It needed the corporeal
completeness of the group for the common flesh to become visible. In this sense,
Percival is not the group’s/carnations’ core or pistil, but he is one petal equally
coexisting with the others.
This harmonious unity of the group, however, is momentarily shattered. In the
beginning of the fifth episode, Neville declares that Percival has died by falling from a
horse in India, which makes the others suddenly acutely aware of their ephemerality
(W 106). I argue that since Percival was part of each character’s corporeal self, a part
of each character has died with Percival, leaving each to reconfigure their sense of self.
Neville suddenly feels detached from his surroundings, thinking “[w]e are infinitely
abject, shuffling past with our eyes shut” (107). After Percival’s death, Neville no
longer sees meaning in a life with others, asking “[w]hy meet and resume? Why […]
make up other combinations with other people? From this moment I am solitary” (107).
Mourning his friend, Neville longs for isolation, since every new union with someone
is doomed to end in death again. For Bernard, on the other hand, Percival dies when his
son is born. He is devastated, thinking “[s]uch is the incomprehensible combination,
[…] the complexity of things, that I […] do not know which is sorrow, which joy. My
son is born; Percival is dead” (108). Bernard experiences the incomprehensible enigma
of the cycle of life and death, mirrored in the waves perpetually falling, withdrawing
and falling again in the preceding interlude (106). Then, Bernard “look[s] at the world
that Percival sees no longer,” which goes on relentlessly “as a thing in which I have no
part, since he sees it no longer” (108). Like Neville, through Percival’s death, Bernard
feels detached from the world, which moves on while he is in a moment of stasis,
overwhelmed by his emotions:
I remember, as a boy, his curious air of detachment. […] I say, addressing what is abstract, facing me eyeless at the end of the avenue, in the sky, ‘Is this the utmost you can do?’ […]. You have done your utmost, I say, addressing that blank and brutal face (for he was twenty-
Stahl 41
five and should have lived to be eighty) without avail. I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care. (109)
It is with his death that Percival is no longer only “mute” but also turns “eyeless,” which
is why Mildenberg attaches this attribute solely to him (119). Mildenberg does not,
however, thoroughly analyse Percival’s eyelessness but merely refers to the above cited
passage. I argue that since Percival is no longer able to see or otherwise perceive the
world—to encounter and be immersed in it with his living body—he has turned
“abstract [and] eyeless,” facing Bernard like a phantom “in the sky” (W 109). Later, in
episode nine, Bernard recalls a moment in his life when he felt detached from his self,
stating that he was “[a] man without a self. […] A dead man. […] How can [one]
proceed […] without a self, weightless and visionless [...]?” (205–206). Bernard implies
that death is the absence of a self and, as shown in subsection two, one only comes to
a sense of self through the body. Consequently, Percival being dead, no longer has a
body or a self and is, thus, “weightless and visionless”—an eye/I-less, abstract phantom
wavering in the sky. In contrast, being alive, one cannot “separate off from the body
[but always] gaze[s] through it” (EIV 318). Having left his body in death, Percival is no
longer a sentient, and thus, cannot behold the world anymore, which reminds us of To
the Lighthouse’s “Time Passes” again, in which life in the absence of human
consciousness is described as “beholding nothing, eyeless” (110). While I disagree with
Banfield’s dialectical analysis of The Waves, contraposing an eyeless world with a
sensible one (13), I agree with her stating that “eyelessness is linked to abstractness,
[…] to what does not need the human to persist in existing” (212). As shown in
subsection one, the eye/I-less anonymous background of The Waves’ interludes,
paralleled in the narrative style of “Time Passes,” surrounds the characters and always
lies partly beyond their perceptual grasp, since we “live [the world] from the inside”
(EM 138). In this sense, the vast, anonymous visibility surrounding all beings does not
have to be seen to exist, rather it exists beyond human perception. It is on this basis that
I argue that Percival, losing his body and his self in death, thus, merges with the
“Sensible in general” (VI 124), the anonymous visibility’s eye/I-lessness, beholding
nothing, turning eye/I-less himself.
As a result, encountering Percival’s eyeless and blank-faced phantom, Bernard
is scared, but rather than succumbing to sorrow, he swears to himself and Percival that
he will not “weep away [his] life,” that he will make Percival’s “meaningless death”
meaningful by carrying Percival with him in his life (W 109). Bernard addresses
Stahl 42
Percival a last time, saying “[y]ou have gone across the court, further and further,
drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But […] something of you remains”
(109). Writing about the phantom limb syndrome, Merleau-Ponty states that “[w]e do
not understand the absence or death of a friend until the moment we expect a reply from
him and feel that there will no longer be one” (PP 82–83). Percival is still perceived by
the other characters as if a part of him remains, since he was a part of their bodies
formed in their preconscious union in the flesh, but the fact that he is addressed “without
avail” makes his death reality (W 109). Their bodily sense of self and of their group has
been involuntarily changed by his loss and now has to adjust itself to “new worldly
conditions” (Carman 102).
As previously hinted at, the group’s sense of interconnectedness is only
momentarily shattered by Percival’s death. Not only are they able to reassemble again
and reconfigure their sense of self, but Percival’s death has also given the other
characters a new, more profound understanding of life and of themselves as ephemeral
beings. In the sixth episode, Louis observes “Percival has died. Susan has children,
Neville mounts rapidly to the conspicuous heights. Life passes. […] Meeting and
parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns” (120). Now being “past
thirty” (124), Percival’s death has become a part of the course of the six’s lives. Just as
their communion at the farewell-dinner revealed that it is false to speak of separate,
sealed off identities, Percival’s meaningless death has laid bare that life “wavers […]
in uncertainty” (130). It is pointless to “impose [an] arbitrary design” on life since, as
Bernard notes, “I am […] involved in the general sequence when one thing follows
another […]. I [am] surrounded, included and taking part” (134), recalling Heidegger’s
claim that the “[w]orld is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject […]’” (qtd. in
Jay 163). As I will demonstrate, it is due to this new-found acute awareness of their
fundamental embeddedness in the uncontrollable general sequence of life, that an
encounter with the “things in themselves” becomes possible. Firstly, however, I will
show how the group finds back together and how eyeless, abstract form again becomes
an access point to their underlying essential feeling of communion.
In the eighth episode, the six meet for a dinner at Hampton Court (150).
Whereas at Percival’s farewell dinner, they felt love, this time, their common emotion
is “[s]orrow” (151). Nevertheless, despite Percival’s absence, the six perceive their
inherent interconnectedness in their common flesh:
Stahl 43
‘A square is stood upon the oblong’ [, said Rhoda,] ‘and we say, “This is our dwelling place. The structure is now visible. Very little is left outside.’
‘The […] red carnation that stood in the vase […] when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.’
‘A mysterious illumination,’ said Louis, ‘visible against those yew trees.’ […]
‘Marriage, death, travel, friendship,’ said Bernard; ‘town and country; children and all that; […] a many-faceted flower. […] One life.’ (164)
Percival’s death brings the characters together again, creating in their sorrow a
“dwelling-place;” a comforting, homely space, where Rhoda for once “has no anxiety”
(164). Rhoda’s description reminds us of episode five, where she thinks “‘[l]ike’ and
‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?
[…] Percival, by his death, […] let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an
oblong. […] a perfect dwelling-place” (115). Like the painter Lily Briscoe in To The
Lighthouse, who, drawing a portrait of Mrs Ramsay and her son, does not want to
“[make] an attempt at likeness” and therefore draws a “triangular purple shape,” trying
to capture their “sense” through shape, shadow, light and color (45), Rhoda wants to
get to the essence underneath the surface of the sensible that cannot be captured by
analogy and simile. Just like the abstract Wesen of each character lies in its hidden
depth, as shown in subsection one, the Wesen of their communal experience, perceived
as a dwelling-place, is not visually perceivable. Consequently, Rhoda cannot describe
it mimetically but only eyelessly and abstractly. As Henry notes, “[t]he disappearance
of the object in geometrical abstraction is […] the bringing to light of its essence”
(Invisible 14), and as Merleau-Ponty observes, “the essence […] is an inner framework,
it is not above the sensible worlds, it is beneath, or in its depth,” its invisibility (VI 220).
Banfield claims that Woolf’s writing illuminates an eyeless world “inaccessible to the
senses” opposing a “sensible world” (13). Instead, I argue, Rhoda’s eyeless description
of the scene making the “structure” of the dwelling-place “visible” (W 164), reveals
that visible surface and invisible depth are not opposites of each other. Rather, the
invisible depth where the essence of things resides is each visible’s/sensible’s lining,
its obverse in-the-visible (VI 149).
It is in their eyelessly felt dwelling-place, then, that the essence of their
communal being is again made visible, resembled by the abstract image of the, at first,
seven and now six-sided carnation—their common flesh of Being, “the steel-blue circle
beneath” (97), anchoring them in the world. Aside from the previously analysed
Stahl 44
symbolism of the carnation, this second dinner scene is given another symbolic
meaning via the “yew trees.” In the context of this symbol for “renewal and rebirth”
(Hageneder 14), the characters’ bodily sense of self has adjusted to the “new worldly
conditions” without Percival (Carman 102). While the seven-sided flower was shattered
momentarily, the characters have now recreated themselves into a six-sided flower,
“one life” (W 164). Nevertheless, Percival has grown into the flower as well, his death
and their memories of him inscribed into the six character’s bodily beings, just like their
children and the environment they live in. Whereas Tobin argues that the characters are
in a perpetual struggle with death, resembled by Percival’s eyelessness (Tobin 203–
204), in fact, they accept death as being an inevitable part of their lives and common
being. In 1932, Woolf mourns the death of her own friend Goldswirthy Lowes
Dickinson and, like the six characters in The Waves, finds that all humans are “in the
midst of some vast operation: of the splendor of this undertaking—life: of being capable
of dying: an immensity surrounds us” (DIV 120); namely the eye/I-less, anonymous
visibility.
Finally, in the ninth and last episode the novel reaches its climax in Bernard
summing up the lives of the characters. Being now, due to Percival’s death, acutely
aware of humans’ ephemerality and embeddedness in an uncontrollable cycle of life,
Bernard ceases to try to impose an order on the world. As I will demonstrate, it is on
this basis that Bernard, in a peaceful moment of corporeal, co-existential being,
encounters the “things in themselves.” Firstly, however, it is crucial to note that
Bernard, like Percival, is not given an elevated position in the novel, despite him
narrating the entire last episode. Rather, it is meant to be “a gigantic conversation” (DIII
285), in which, as Mildenberg rightly argues, “Bernard’s voice and those of the other
five merge [into] one ‘gigantic voice’” (116), telling their story to an invisible listener
in a restaurant. In this sense, the story Bernard is telling is not his but theirs, “[f]or this
is not one life; nor do I always know if I am […], Bernard or Neville, Louise, Susan,
Jinny, or Rhoda” (W 202), again stressing their intercorporeality.
Since Bernard is “sum[ming] up” (170), this episode is the only one
predominantly written in past tense, except for when he is addressing his listener in the
present or ponders about his current existence. Trying to recapture the groups’ eyeless
sense of interconnectedness, Bernard repeatedly finds that it is “impossible to order [the
six] rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole—[…] like music.
What a symphony with its concord and its discord, and its tunes on top and its
Stahl 45
complicated bass beneath” (184). As Merleau-Ponty claims, “music [like literature]
[…] [is] the exploration of an invisible” (VI 149). Bernard wants to get to the meaning
behind the sound, to the “mute perception” of the groups’ essence (VI 155), again via
eyeless, abstract form, avoiding mimetic representation. However, Bernard does not
succeed in recapturing the sense of their common ground as they experienced it in the
dinner scenes—he cannot find it in the past. As Woolf writes, “[t]he past only comes
back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river.
Then one sees through the surface to the depths. […] [I]t is then that I am living most
fully in the present. […] But to feel [it] peace is necessary” (MB 98). As discussed in
subsection one, it is in the suspended present tense, Woolf’s eye/I-less method
functioning like a phenomenological reduction, that the invisible depth of Being
becomes visible. Interrupting his story-telling Bernard says “[l]et me touch the table—
so—and thus recover my sense of the moment” (W 192). Touching the table, being
touched himself, he feels grounded with his body in the present again. Eventually, the
listener leaves Bernard to himself (212). Now, there is no “need of […] phrases
anymore,” Bernard finds, relieved that he can stop trying to put the complexity of life
into inadequate words (213). In the absence of a listener, he can just be and corporeally
perceive his environment in peace, the six others’ lives and pasts inscribed in him. In
this peaceful moment of being, he experiences his own kind of phenomenological
reduction, thinking to “sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee-cup, this knife, this
fork, things in themselves, myself being myself” (213). Hough, taking a Husserlian
approach, argues that the “things themselves” only manifest themselves in the
immanent contents of consciousness, since “‘the world is nothing other than what I am
aware of’” (Husserl qtd. in Hough 50). However, Husserlian phenomenology neglects
the significance of the lived body. Instead, I argue that just like in the dinner scenes,
where “the moment was all; the moment was enough” (200), it is in anti-
ocularcentrism’s ontological lived, acute, bodily experience of being-in-and-of-the-
world where the eyeless common ground of Being is felt, since it can only be perceived
corporeally. As Merleau-Ponty writes,
[i]t is the body and it alone […] that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves […] beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that […] would coexist with them in the same world. (VI 136)
[They] offer themselves therefore only to someone who wishes not to have them but […], to let them be and to witness their continued being. (VI 101)
Stahl 46
Bernard, being “most fully in the present” (MB 98), experiences phenomenology’s
prereflective reality, where the synergy of subject and object comes to light (VI 130).
Aware of humans’ embeddedness and ephemerality, Bernard ceases to try to impose
his “arbitrary design” on the world (W 134) and merely coexists with his surroundings,
lets the things be in themselves (VI 101). In this sense, both the dinner scenes and this
last scene of Bernard coexisting with material objects are moments of communal being
where the inherent kinship between agents, whether human or non-human, is revealed.
In those scenes, the experience of “some invisible rope [by which] we are bound” (DIV
11–12) is not forcedly evoked but arises out of the peaceful coexistence of agents
sharing a carnal adherence. The parallelism of “things in themselves, myself being
myself” signifies this eyeless structural kinship between Bernard and material objects
(W 213), the “hidden pattern” connecting all beings (MB 72), demonstrating again, as
in subsection two, that non-human agents are also part of the flesh’s chiasm (VI 215).
Just as the seven/six characters are simultaneously enveloped in the common flesh of
Being as sensibles (metaphorically in the carnation’s pistil), and distanced from each
other as sentients (the carnation’s different petals), so are Bernard and the “things” at
once enveloped in the flesh of Being, as beings with depth, and distanced from each
other through the “thickness of the look” (VI 135). In other words, all agents are
simultaneously of the same flesh and always “more than their being-perceived,” partly
intangible to each other (VI 135). As a result, I claim that The Waves again emphasises
the non-dialectical structure of Being, in contradistinction to the majority of criticism
on the novel (Banfield, Henke, Olk, Simone and Tobin). This last scene demonstrates
that it is precisely in peaceful, lived, bodily, co-existential moments of being—of
Merleau-Ponty’s Ineinander (in-each-other) (VI 245)—that the “things in themselves”
but also “myself being myself” unfold. When all agents’ equal agency and their right
to exist in themselves as subject-objects is respected, the eyeless, primordial,
intercorporeal ground of Being—that we are all in and of the same flesh—becomes
visible. On this basis, all agents are anchored in what Bernard terms “the incessant rise
and fall and fall and rise again,” of which death is the inevitable but nevertheless
terrifying end (W 214).
Concluding, Percival resembles indeed another manifestation of eyelessness in
The Waves. However, Percival is not the epitome of eyelessness, turning only eyeless
in his death. He becomes part of the general, anonymous visibility in the interludes’
eye/I-less background—the Sensible in general, exceeding the perceptual horizon of
Stahl 47
each subject-object. I have shown in subsection one that all characters are immersed in
this general visibility, but that they are not congruent with it, encountering it as sensible
sentients, being simultaneously enveloped and distanced from the world and each other.
However, since Percival is dead and no longer anchored in his living body, he is not a
sentient anymore, but only a being perceived—abstract and I/eye-less, beholding
nothing. In effect, Percival’s eyelessness due to the detachment from his body in death,
again, reinforces my claim that The Waves resembles anti-ocularcentrism’s conception
of Being-in-the-world as inherently embodied. In addition, my analysis has shown that
it is also only in anti-ocularcentrism’s ontological lived, bodily experience of the
world—in peaceful, intercorporeal, co-existential moments of being—that the eyeless
ground of Being, our common flesh, comes to light. Since The Waves is concerned with
reaching this common, essential but hidden structure of Being, its narrative cannot
utilise conventional mimetic representation relying on visual appearances. Instead, as I
argue, it is The Waves’ “abstract [and] eyeless” method (DIII 203) and its lodgement in
the characters’ bodies, that enables an exploration of the “thing that lies beneath the
semblance of the thing” (W 107). The abstract Wesen (essence) of all Being lies within
its inner framework, in the invisible of the visible, the eyeless common flesh. Lying
beyond vision, it can thus only be reached via eyeless and bodily writing as well as
abstract form.
Conclusion
Writing about her idea of a new novel-form, which eventually turned into The Waves’
playpoem, Woolf concludes in “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927) that “this
unnamed variety of the novel will be written standing back from life, because in that
way a larger view is to be obtained of some important features of it,” which her
predecessors with their realist techniques had so far escaped (EIV 438). As we have
seen, seeking to capture her characters’ “feelings and [general] ideas,” the visually
imperceptible “outline rather than the detail” of life itself (EIV 435), Woolf abandoned
conventional narrative techniques, such as character-drawing, fact-recording and
mimetic representation. Instead, she strove to replace it with a new kind of writing that
would account for the complexity of modern life, shaped by the decentring of the
human subject as embedded in a world that exceeds its perceptual horizon. Informed
by the philosophical, scientific and technological developments at the time, Woolf’s
Stahl 48
struggle with the visual sense was symptomatic of the modernist, anti-ocularcentric
Zeitgeist and culminated in her arguably most experimental work: The Waves, her
“abstract mystical eyeless book” (DIII 203).
As I have shown, The Waves’ eyelessness has never been subject to an in-depth
study before so that analyses of it scratched merely on its surface, restricting its
meaning either to Percival and/or death’s hostile presence in the novel, or binding it
into a dualistic structure, contraposing an eyeless world with a sensible one. However,
especially the later Woolf increasingly rejected dialectical modes of thinking, seeking
to overcome mind/body, human/non-human and self/world distinctions in her writings,
laying bare their social constructedness by producing narratives that blur boundaries by
letting everything “flow together” (DIII 139), are anchored in the characters’ bodies
and reveal the inherent connectedness of all beings “in the world as a work of art” (MB
72). Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology accounts for Woolf’s modern, at that
time radically new and forward-thinking conceptions of reality, being and the self, as
he demonstrated that all beings are corporeally grounded in a common flesh—the
common ground of Being, or the “hidden pattern” Woolf is striving to reach in her
writing (MB 72). On this basis, by taking a Merleau-Pontian approach, I was able to
reveal that Woolf’s eyelessness undermines rather than maintains not only
Cartesianism’s dualistic mode of thinking, but also its notion of an autonomous,
univocal and disembodied self, inspecting the world from the outside. My analysis has
uncovered that eyelessness is Woolf’s method to go beyond vision and capture Being’s
eyeless flesh, its non-figurative inner framework lying in-the-visible, rather than
opposing the visible/sensible world (VI 257).
As my three analytical subsections in chapter two have laid bare, moving from
a macroscopic to a microscopic view, Woolf’s eyeless method shows itself in multiple,
interconnected aspects of the novel, permeating it on several levels. In the first
subsection, I have examined The Waves’ formal structure, narrative technique and
literary devices and demonstrated that not only the interludes but the novel on its whole
is eye/I-less in terms of lacking a single subject position and a focalising point,
undermining the notion of an omniscient point of view. In this sense, while Briggs,
Beer and Banfield are correct in asserting that eyeless also implies its homophone “I-
less,” this eye/I-lessness, however, signifies neither an isolation of the characters from
the novel’s interludes, devoid of human existence, nor a dialectic between a sensible
and an eyeless world. Instead, I have shown, regarding the interludes, that this eye/I-
Stahl 49
lessness resembles Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous visibility, the Sensible in general, in
which all beings are immersed and connected as sensible sentients. Concerning the
episodes, I have revealed that apart from being eye/I-less in the sense of giving multiple,
equal points of view, the novel’s suspended present tense is another manifestation of
eyelessness. It produces a phenomenological reduction in itself, making the immediate,
visually imperceptible impressions of the characters in lived, bodily moments of being
visible instead of rendering their reflection or contemplation on what things might
represent. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty’s prereflective reality, in which subject/object,
self/world as well as the senses have not yet been divided, comes apparent.
In the second subsection, the body became the focus of analysis, elucidating
that the characters are not only formally interconnected both with each other and the
anonymous visibility, but are interconnected as intercorporeal beings. It demonstrated
that the characters are presented in the novel as corporeal selves, who come to a sense
of self through encountering others and their environment, challenging the Cartesian
notion of the disembodied, univocal subject autonomous from its environment. As my
analysis has revealed, The Waves eye/I-lessness shows itself therefore also in the
characters being selves by inherence, interlaced with each other, multiplicitious and in
constant flux. Communal, intercorporeal, lived moments of Being-in-and-of-the-world
and eyeless writing in the form of abstract poetic images unlock the hidden Wesen of
Being, uncovering that the characters are different petals of one flower, not entirely
coherent as beings in depth but grounded in the common, eyeless flesh of Being due to
their carnal adherence as sensible sentients. Thus, the characters experience that it is
pointless to strive for a sense of a univocal, static identity and eventually find comfort
in the realisation of being one but many. In this sense, I have shown that eyeless writing
resembles “bodily” writing as The Waves is not structured by individual, autonomous
consciousnesses but governed by the chiasmatic relationships of the characters with
each other and the world so that the novel’s structure is itself carnal.
In the last subsection, the focus shifted to Percival and the “things in
themselves.” Arguing that Percival merges with the eye/I-less anonymous visibility of
the interludes in his death, losing his body and thus his self, he is discussed in the very
end, showing that he is just one manifestation of eyelessness rather than its epitome. In
this sense, my phenomenological analysis of Percival has shown that while most
scholars view him as the centre of the novel, he has to be examined from a more
nuanced perspective, being one equally coexisting part of their seven-sided flower,
Stahl 50
rather than inhabiting an elevated position. Lastly, I have demonstrated that Percival’s
death makes the other characters aware of their ephemerality and embeddedness in a
general sequence of life lying beyond their control. On this basis, Bernard ceases to
impose an order on life and is thereby able to encounter the “things in themselves” in
the last episode (W 213). In a lived, bodily, moment of peaceful, co-existential being,
letting the things and himself merely be, their eyeless kinship comes to light. As such,
the novel concludes on a clearly nonanthropocentric and non-dialectical note, laying
bare the interconnectedness of all beings in an eyeless inner framework, the “hidden
pattern” of life, or the common flesh of Being.
All in all, eyeless writing is Woolf’s method to surmount the primacy of the
visual in narrative, enabling her to unlock and reveal this “hidden pattern” connecting
all beings with each other and the world. My analysis has revealed that for both Woolf
and Merleau-Ponty it is only the body that can lead us to the things themselves, being
primordially interweaved with them as beings with depth, sharing a carnal adherence.
Since this carnal adherence lies beyond visual perception, it can only be captured
eyelessly, through abstract poetic images and in omnisensual experiences of lived,
bodily moments of being, in which phenomena coexist, having equal agency. I have
drawn parallels to eyelessness in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; however, due to the
limited scope of this thesis, I was not able to follow this line of inquiry further than just
pointing out similarities. On this basis, it would be interesting to trace Woolf’s eyeless
writing in several of her works, examining how and where this method emerges and
whether it takes different shapes in different novels. Finally, I would like to conclude
by quoting a passage from Woolf’s “Sketch of a Past” (1939), taking up the flower-
motive present in The Waves, signifying all beings’ rootedness in a “steel-blue circle
beneath” (W 97), in the common, eyeless flesh or ground of Being:
I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; ‘That is the whole,’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. (MB 71)
Stahl 51
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