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,

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[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,

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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

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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’”

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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,

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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.

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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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