Virginia Woolf's 'ontology of style': Mrs. Brown, The Waves, and the ethics of character

초록

This article discusses the ethical implications of Woolf's theory and practice of characterisation in her essays and The Waves (1931). It illuminates Woolf as a philosophical writer who considers the distinctive ontological status of literary character - pieces of writing that evoke the idea of a person - to envision an ethical form-of-life where human life becomes indivisible from its expression. Examining the ways that Mrs. Brown, Woolf's example of novel character, exhibits a life fully resolved into writing, the article contends that Woolf imagines a non-totalitarian model of community that has language as its common ground of being. My reading of The Waves highlights how Woolf cancels the binary relationship between reality and language, which amounts to a vision of a life at once individual and communal, and private and public. In examining Woolf's ontological view of literary form, the article identifies a close yet understudied affinity of her thoughts with Giorgio Agamben's. The conversation between the two writers provides a compelling account of the ontological hybridity of character as a narrative concept, while rescuing Woolf's literary experimentation from the name of solipsistic formalism.

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