‘Languages are so like their boots’: Linguistic Incompossibility in Flush

Abstract

Reading the 1933 biography Flush alongside Woolf’s translation theory and Braidotti’s nomadic ‘multilinguism’, this paper argues that Woolf’s modernist dislocation of English both informs and is informed by her relationship with non-English languages. Using the Deleuzean idea of the ‘incompossible’ as a way of considering a world made up of multiple co-existing yet contradictory relations, I trace the presence of a ‘linguistic incompossibility’ throughout Woolf’s oeuvre. As a writer, publisher and translator, Woolf articulates a mode of being in and relating to the world that is positively constituted through the multilingual, and which in turn often constitutes the monolingual as static, ineffective, and even impossible. From the contradictory etymologies of ‘Spaniel’ offered in Flush, to the process-orientated relationship with languages in Woolf's non-fiction writing, the old idea of a closed, objective and monolithic language is inadequate for communicating the nomadic movements of modernist subjectivity. Linguistic incompossibility becomes a way of figuring the affirmatory possibilities of difference across, between and within languages to reveal the fluidity and multiplicity of language itself.