Writing in Absentia: Woolf and the Language of Things

ABSTRACT:This essay queries the identification of modernist fiction with the development of formal strategies of interiority. Returning to the novel that Auerbach singles out as exemplary of the inward turn, I read To the Lighthouse as a work that does not engage exclusively with problematics of consciousness and memory but is also concerned with the ontological precarity of the object-world. I argue that in the aberrant middle section of the novel, titled “Time Passes,” Woolf develops a practice of writing in absentia—a form of narration that evacuates consciousness, without rising to omniscience. Within this section, Woolf represents a world in which the anthropocentric premises that elsewhere govern the text are suddenly suspended: the active, self-determining, subject and the inert, affectable object cease momentarily to be the primary points of reference for parsing existence. The spectral quality of this narration, which is neither “objective” nor mediated through character, de-stabilizes conventional wisdom about focalization, insofar as the latter relies on distinctions between interiority and exteriority that are organized with reference to the human and its variable epistemological positioning. Inquiring more broadly into the place of things in modern fiction, the essay situates Woolf ’s experiment in relation to contemporaneous developments in philosophy and psychoanalysis. I focus first on how she revises a central conceit of Cambridge Realism—namely, hypothesizing the absence of the perceiver in order to establish objects as “real”; and second, on Walter Benjamin’s evocation of a “language of things,” which illuminates Woolf ’s effort to cultivate a new form of elegy.