1 - Being-in-the-world
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
Summary
With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being. (ND: 245–6)
Evident throughout the various forms of Woolf's writings – from her novels and short stories, through to her essays, reviews, memoirs, letters and diary entries – is a consistent and dominant preoccupation with the relationship between the individual and the world. Refl ected in these works is Woolf's understanding that while the ‘world’ consists of the physical environment and its tangible objects, as well as those individuals with whom we co-exist, this notion also comes to be defi ned by the individual's everyday involvements and engagements; that is, ‘our experience of the world’ (Hussey 1986: xiii). As this chapter will demonstrate, for Woolf, defi nitive elements of this ‘experience’ are those expectations, prescriptions and hierarchical structures of the prevailing milieu and social order that not only regulate and direct the everyday lives of members of society, but also defi ne the individual's view of the world.
Woolf's understanding of the world as an inclusive and fluid phenomenon is poetically elucidated in the fourth section of her 1931 novel, The Waves. As the six central characters, now in their early twenties, prepare to go their separate ways after spending an evening together, Louis refl ects upon the ‘common feeling’ that embraces those within this group, and warns:
‘Do not move, do not let the swing door cut to pieces the thing that we have made, that globes itself here, among these lights, these peelings, this litter of bread crumbs and people passing. Do not move, do not go. Hold it for ever.’
‘Let us hold it for one moment,’ said Jinny; ‘love, hatred, by whatever name we call it, this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man again.’
‘Forests and far countries on the other side of the world,’ said Rhoda, ‘are in it; seas and jungles; the howlings of jackals and moonlight falling upon some high peak where the eagle soars.’
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- Information
- Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-worldA Heideggerian Study, pp. 25 - 63Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017