“宮籟”的回返: 維吉尼亞 • 吳爾芙小說中的異質主體

Abstract

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) has long been associated with stream-of-consciousness novels in Anglo-American Modernism. By examining the poetic elements or the modernity of language in her novels, this study tentatively shifts Woolf from the fixed connotation of the “unified subjectivity” in the stream-of-consciousness school, or Anglo-American Modernism, to “the heterogeneous sense of subject.” Specifically, this study borrows literary theories of French modernity, among others, of Jakobson in the 1950s and of Barthes and Kristeva in the 1970s, to revisit Woolf’s three prestigious stream-of-consciousness novels: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. The purpose of this study is to enrich the conversation of Woolf scholarship with the “aesthetic space” between the real (or the author’s intention) and novel writing. That is, taking Woolf’s lamentation for the problematic language into consideration, we trace the materiality of language, the maternal enunciation or the metaphorical language in Woolf, which she employs to point out the existence of the unspeakable, such as the sense of emptiness or nihilist “death in life.” In contrast to the “Author God” in realism or the “unified subject” in stream-of-consciousness fiction, the survey of the materiality of language in Woolf’s novels entails a heterogeneous sense of subjectivity. The study is divided into three main chapters, apart from Prologue and Epilogue. Chapter One borrows Kristeva’s theory of poetic language to examine the symptoms of the returned semiotic chora in Mrs. Dalloway. In contrast to the link between the characters’ private perceptions and public expressions of the London scenes (or events) discussed by some Woolf critics, this chapter focuses on the rift space (and its reconstruction) functioned by the returned chora that is shown in Woolf’s London writing. This practice reveals the chora that flickers among the characters conscious’ activities and haunts the symbolic order by accident, making Kristevan genotexts of Woolf’s London writing. After demonstrating that “poetic language” forms the aesthetic rift between the characters’ private perception towards London and the symbolic writing, Chapter Two goes on to exemplify the eternal void between immediate perception and verbal expression that Woolf explores in To the Lighthouse. Again, different from the confidence in the communicative function of language evident in the stream-of-consciousness perspective, by using Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I trace the character Lily Briscoe’s lamentation for the verbal expression of immediate perception and show the “maternal enunciation” of painting, which compensates for the unspeakable sense of loss of her mother figure, Mrs. Ramsay. In this sense, our psychoanalytic reading of the novel assumes that the subject is conditioned by the limit of language, and the unspeakable maternity or the abject returns and haunts the consciousness of the “subject.” So during Lily’s intermittent painting process throughout the novel, Lily reconstructs every moment of abjection she experiences and works out a heterogeneous sense of self. Finally, Chapter Three of the present study employs, among others, Jakobson’s and Barthes’ discourses of metaphor and Kristeva’s psychotherapeutic theory to solidify the assumption of the “aesthetic void” between the real and writing and demonstrate the heterogeneous sense of self in Woolf’s most accomplished novel, The Waves. In carrying out this analysis, I trace the different language association types of the six main characters and observe their transformation before and after the deconstructive fatality. And by the last chapter of the novel, Bernard’s final soliloquy, I put into play Kristeva’s theory of counterdepressant and examine Bernard’s “waves of mood.” Reading the metaphorical writing of the rising and falling waves of mood, I demonstrate that “the dark places of psychology” in Woolf’s characters are not as transparent as a stream-of-consciousness mind, but as the “semi-transparent envelop,” which is entangled between Kristeva’s dialectical modes, the semiotic and the symbolic, in her theory of poetic language. By the poetic elements in Woolf’s novels, the modernity of language in Woolf leads us to cross not only the limit of “Mr. Bennett”—the realist “representation” of the material world—but also that of the “transparent mind”—the “representation” of the inner world in the stream-of-consciousness reading. The poetic elements or the modernity of language in Woolf’s novels become a Barthesian “politically and ideologically uninhabitable place” and, in terms of Kristeva, shed an apocalyptic light after the absence of the ultimate Divinity.