Virginia Woolf, Carnal Hermeneutics, and Democratic Reading

“The Particle and the Wave” (2015), an audio/video/text performance by artist Himali Singh Soin and musician David, traces the distances between 1,265 semicolons in Woolf’s The Waves and creates sound waves as Soin performs over a video scroll-through of Woolf’s novel with improvised marginalia. The semicolons in The Waves are integral to the composition of this novel’s music, capturing the rhythm of life, thought, relations and expression. Spurred on by Soin and Tappeser’s performance and drawing upon the related fields of carnal hermeneutics, postcritique, and phenomenology, this chapter argues that the semicolons in Woolf’s The Waves have a pacifist quality that transgresses and subverts disembodied and hierarchical reading practices, articulating a space beyond dichotomies and welcoming a form of “democratic reading” that brings to light the anti-imperialist and pacifist form of Woolf’s novel.