Chapter 2 - ‘Unity–Dispersity’

Summary

This chapter examines the resonances and the divergences between Woolf’s depictions of the nervous self and those constructed in popular accounts of neurology. The first section, ‘Threads and Fragments: The Integrative Action of the Nervous System’, looks at Woolf’s use of metaphors of unity and fragmentation in Between the Acts, identifying resonances with popular accounts of the nervous system which, extrapolating from Charles Sherrington’s influential work on nervous integration, conceive of the role of the nervous system to be the formation of a unified bodily identity – an identity that is shadowed, however, by the cellular discontinuity of the body. The next section, ‘The Evolutionary Nervous System’, traces resonances in Woolf’s writing with the contemporary conception of the nervous system as an evolutionary hierarchy. While for neurologists the dissolution of the nervous hierarchy is always pathological, in Woolf’s writing it enables an escape from a delimited identity and the construction of a form of self that is materially connected to the natural world. The last section turns to the concept of ‘Sympathetic Vibrations’, demonstrating that in Woolf’s writing, as in modernist culture more broadly, it is used to illustrate the permeable nature of the boundary between self and world.