Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) questions epistemology and ontology and, in so doing, becomes a novel concerned with the “thing–in–itself.” Kant, in Critique of Judgment (1790), posits that we can never reach the “thing–in–itself” because the intuition which would give us a full understanding or experience of this “thing” is impossible. However, within the framework of modernist philosopher Henri Bergson's theory of metaphysics, we will recognize how we might intuit the “thing–in–itself.” Rhoda asks in The Waves : “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” Like Rhoda, we want to “see the thing” (163), and, while we have been told by Kant and others that we will never be able to approach the “thing” fully, Woolf's writing suggests otherwise.

In the first dissertation on Woolf, published in 1935, Ruth Gruber writes that Woolf “is too innately creative, too inherently Bergsonian to be called Bergson's imitator. It is conceivable that she would have found the way without him” (49). Gruber's comments on the thematic bridge between Woolf 's aesthetics and Bergson's philosophy come as no surprise, especially as Bergson experienced immense popularity during the time she wrote Virginia Woolf: A Study. Currently and in part because of the publication of Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism, the English edition of which was published in 1988, a reinvigorated Bergson is once again popular. As with Gruber's perceptive comments, current scholars have not failed to identify the integral connection between Modernism—especially Woolf 's work—and Bergsonism. Mary Ann Gillies cites The Waves as a “Bergsonian work” (126) in Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996); Merry Pawlowski utilizes Bergsonian time in her more recent analysis of “feminine space” in The Years (2008). And, Angela Hague, in Fiction, Intuition & Creativity (2003), defines intuition through Bergson, William James, and Jung (among others) as she traces intuition in Woolf 's creative process, concluding that “[i]n The Waves Woolf achieves the triumph of intuitive form that she sought throughout her career” (275). Extending these and similar arguments that propose a productive coupling of Woolf 's work with Bergson's, this paper affirms that, like Bergson's philosophy, Woolf 's fiction calls for a new metaphysics, a redefinition of the “thing” through duration, intuition, and assemblage.