THE GHOSTS OF FUTURE'S PAST: WAR, PARANOIA, AND THE ETHICS OF MOURNING IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S JACOB'S ROOM AND THE WAVES

Abstract

In light of Paul K. Saint-Amour’s survey of interwar modernism, which redefines the chronological shorthand as a period bracketed by both the traumatic memories of one war and a violent anticipation of the next, this thesis positions two of Virginia Woolf’s elegiac interwar novels, Jacob’s Room and The Waves, in an era seized by both melancholia and anxiety. Foregrounding, in particular, the spectral absent-presences of Jacob and Percival, it analyses Woolf’s deliberately evasive approach to these characters through Derrida’s deconstructive aporia of mourning. Seeing as, for Derrida, it is only in one’s refusal to name and know – and thus, lay to rest – the other that one may maintain an ethical responsibility to him, the indeterminacies of Woolf’s “spectral writing” can be said to open up a hospitable space for individual subjectivities to exist. In this regard, by working against the impulse to fix a patriotic and commemorative meaning upon these soldier-figures – her cognate representations of the war dead – Woolf can be said, against charges of her apolitical and ahistorical technical experimentations, to adopt an ethical stance of “ghostpitality”. Nevertheless, this thesis also calls to our attention the caveat within Derrida’s theory of hospitality – the risk that always lies in one’s unconditional openness to the other. For the haunting of a spectre always marks a return, it also awaits the re-visitation of a future to-come. Hence, what this entails in the interwar era is an anticipation of future violence; an expectation which, in itself, can be said to also enact a psychological violence on the here and now. Underscoring the paranoid affective implications of the author’s proto-Derridean ethical imperatives, this thesis develops extant perspectives of Woolf’s literary resistance, to reconsider the significance of mourning in the interwar and the cost of writing traumatic histories.In light of Paul K. Saint-Amour’s survey of interwar modernism, which redefines the chronological shorthand as a period bracketed by both the traumatic memories of one war and a violent anticipation of the next, this thesis positions two of Virginia Woolf’s elegiac interwar novels, Jacob’s Room and The Waves, in an era seized by both melancholia and anxiety. Foregrounding, in particular, the spectral absent-presences of Jacob and Percival, it analyses Woolf’s deliberately evasive approach to these characters through Derrida’s deconstructive aporia of mourning. Seeing as, for Derrida, it is only in one’s refusal to name and know – and thus, lay to rest – the other that one may maintain an ethical responsibility to him, the indeterminacies of Woolf’s “spectral writing” can be said to open up a hospitable space for individual subjectivities to exist. In this regard, by working against the impulse to fix a patriotic and commemorative meaning upon these soldier-figures – her cognate representations of the war dead – Woolf can be said, against charges of her apolitical and ahistorical technical experimentations, to adopt an ethical stance of “ghostpitality”. Nevertheless, this thesis also calls to our attention the caveat within Derrida’s theory of hospitality – the risk that always lies in one’s unconditional openness to the other. For the haunting of a spectre always marks a return, it also awaits the re-visitation of a future to-come. Hence, what this entails in the interwar era is an anticipation of future violence; an expectation which, in itself, can be said to also enact a psychological violence on the here and now. Underscoring the paranoid affective implications of the author’s proto-Derridean ethical imperatives, this thesis develops extant perspectives of Woolf’s literary resistance, to reconsider the significance of mourning in the interwar and the cost of writing traumatic histories.