“Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf -wise

Summary

If I weren't so sleepy, I would write about the soul. I think it is time to cancel that vow against soul description. What was I going to say? Something about the violent moods of my soul. I think I grow more & more poetic. Perhaps I restrained it, & now, like a plant in a pot it begins to crack the earthenware. Often I feel the different aspects of life bursting my mind asunder. (Virginia Woolf, Diary Saturday 21st June, 1924)

One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed individuality of each personal consciousness. The thoughts of one's soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be eternally insulated from every other soul. (William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890, 1:349).

THINKING SOULS IN FICTIONAL WORLDS

The aim of this essay is to develop an argument that Virginia Woolf banished the soul as what James calls the “closed individuality” of personal consciousness, in order to retrieve it, through her fiction, as something more closely resembling an enactivist, extended or distributed idea of mind. Part of her strategy for re-fashioning mind involved the laying bare of the assumptions and limitations of metaphysical dualism and the development of narrative techniques and a language for its deconstruction. This is not to claim that Woolf succeeded in overcoming dualism, nor that, in the end, a more “distributed” idea of mind would, necessarily, provide a foundation for a new conception of the soul. But at the very least, she hoped to prevent the disappearance of the soul or its shrinkage into the biological reductionisms of her own time. “The thoughts of one's soul must unite into one self”: fiction, as a medium for thinking selves into existence, and thinking about selves thinking, is where this argument begins.

Working on To the Lighthouse, Woolf fantasised about writing a novel that might transfer thinking directly onto the page, a novel “made solely & with integrity of one's thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they become a work of art” (D3 102). She immediately dismissed the fantasy: words would intrude, exert their own pressures, deforming thoughts. But the niggling question of how you might catch and tell a thought remained.