“But… I had said ‘but’ too of ten.” Why “but”?

Summary

Why “but” indeed? Had one of Virginia Woolf's narrators in A Room of One's Own (1929) “said ‘but’ too of ten”? And how many times is “too of ten” for that dreaded word we all anticipate, the word that may make us angry? It's a word that interrupts, undermines our most cogent assertions, attempts to transform our thinking, as it proffers a differing point of view. But—to immediately express, enact, and perhaps contradict what I have just stated—it is also the word we all rely upon to implement those sometimes subversive acts. And we treasure that opportunity! The word “but,” therefore, in its variously resistant modes, seems to me the perfectly limited yet enormously resonant entry point for my exploration of our richly provocative conference title: “Contradictory Woolf.”

The word “but”—in addition to its varied functions in all of our dialogues—stands as a crucial turning point in my own complicated relationship with Woolf's writings, and can be traced back to my very first reading of A Room of One's Own. In my initial experience of this text, I was captivated by the narrator's self-conscious questioning of her own use of “but,” partially quoted in my title: “But…I had said ‘but’ too of ten. One cannot go on saying ‘but’. One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, ‘But—I am bored!’ But why was I bored?” (AROO 104). I knew that I would go back to this passage—as I have many times over more than twenty years—for those self-conscious references to “but” always called for further investigation. My focus on “words” began with an earlier close reading of the beginning of Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). The equivocation was palpable as I noted the words “if,” “may,” “seemed,” “perhaps,” and “but” in the interchange between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as they responded to their son James's longed for trip to the lighthouse: “Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow”; “‘But,’…‘it won't be fine’”; “‘But it may be fine —I expect it will be fine’”; “‘No going to the Lighthouse, James’”; “‘Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow’” (TL 9,10,11, 26, emphasis added).