Woolf's Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque

Summary

In The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (2000), Ann Banfield describes Virginia Woolf's novels as variances of the Leibnizian monad through influence she locates in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and the aesthetics of Roger Fry. More recently, Jessica Berman, in an essay entitled “Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf” (2004), reveals the correlation between ethics and aesthetics through Mieke Bal's “Enfolding Feminism” and Gilles Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993). This paper diverges from these other studies in its examination of Woolf's and Deleuze's conceptions of the fold, with an emphasis not on the Baroque fold (of Leibniz), which organizes Berman's and Bal's arguments, but on the un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque, the intensity Deleuze takes from Alfred North Whitehead's notion of the event. In the neo-Baroque, as Woolf would say, “certainly and emphatically there is no God” (MOB 72). Thus, the harmony and compossibility of Leibniz's monadology are no longer the necessary factors because “God” cannot “select” the perfect world. Incompossibility is revealed as the originary state of existence: everything is part of the same fabric, like the “silk” of the sea and sky in To the Lighthouse (1927), which “stretche[s],” enfolding the Ramsays, the Macalisters, and the boat as “part of the nature of things” (TTL 188). Thus, binary opposition, such as harmony and dissonance, becomes irrelevant. It is, after all, through dissonance that supposed harmony is created, as Woolf affirms. Through the non-dialectical un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque, we can differently interpret the supposed contradictions in Woolf's writing: not as notes of dissonance, but as creative, vital moments in which both Woolf and her artists (including those artists-of -the-everyday) recognize and affirm textual and textural incompossibility, the everything-at-once, the unlimited bifurcations of the world.

Banfield makes a convincing argument for the connection between Russell's philosophy and the aesthetics of both Fry and Woolf, and, in a much earlier essay, entitled “Virginia Woolf and Our Knowledge of the External World” (1979), Jaakko Hintikka also pairs Russell and Woolf.