Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov by Uhlmann Anthony

Author:Uhlmann, Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2011-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

5

Virginia Woolf: the Art of Sensation

If the particular aesthetic method Joyce develops through Exiles and Ulysses allows us to understand the general sense in which the concept and practice of relation generates thinking in literature, how might certain of Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic ideas help us to understand the complex interplay between perception, possible worlds, the incompossible, viewpoint, sensation, and thinking in literature?

As we have seen in Chapter 2, above, the idea, derived from Leibniz, of “possible worlds” is, for Deleuze, related to all fiction, but it has been explicitly related to the work of Virginia Woolf by a number of critics (see Henry 2003: pp. 71–92; Ferrer 1990: p. 36, 156; and Banfield 2000, who links Woolf to Leibniz via Russell). In this chapter, then, I will focus on the idea of sensation, as it emerges in Woolf’s work. Sensation is the central concept in the list of interlinked concepts listed here for two reasons: first it connects and informs the other concepts, and second it involves a kind of thinking that is proper to the arts.

With regard to the first point, sensation is that which precedes and informs the composition of a series of mutually exclusive (incompossible) perceptions, which are incompossible because they pertain to distinct individuals, into a unity. For example, Lily Briscoe’s sensations in To the Lighthouse, like those of Woolf herself, draw together (relate) and compose disparate, even incompossible, perceptual elements (sensations), so as to create an idea of the real. Sensation involves perception, both making it possible and calling it into being: what we perceive is what announces itself to our perceptions through sensation. Leibniz accounts for the multiplicity and unity of possible perceptions in the concept of the monad. The monad is a possible world, defined by what it perceives clearly. The infinite monad (God) perceives all things clearly, yet human minds only perceive some things clearly. Fiction, as we have seen in Chapter 2, can to an extent account for, or represent, something of this paradoxical relationship between the individual and the world: allowing us to understand how the world involves the interaction of multiple viewpoints which both converge and diverge.

This divergence and convergence announces itself to readers in Woolf’s particular form of writing, in works such as To the Lighthouse (Woolf 2000a) through the, at times, rapid shifting between the perspectives, or points of view both of different characters and within single characters. That is, “sensation” furnishes the multiplicity of perceptions which coalesce into these viewpoints, and, as we have seen in Chapter 2, the same complicated character might fold several viewpoints within their “self.” This style might be in part understood to develop from Woolf’s desire to capture “reality” as fully as possible. So too, it results from her understanding that art can develop a kind of thinking proper to itself, as, as noted with reference to Baumgarten in the introduction, the aesthetic involves perception.

The problem of how to capture reality through art (how to do justice to or adequately imagine

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