“PERFECTLY DARK HEART OF THE ECLIPSE”: REIMAGINING ONTOLOGICAL STATES OF SLEEP IN THE WORKS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ANNA KAVAN

Abstract

Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophising of sleep as a non-phenomenal condition, this thesis examines the ontological significance of sleep in the writings of two modernist authors, Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan. The experience of sleep is inevitably inscrutable, for the sleeper leaves his or her cognitive faculties behind in slumber. As Nancy astutely points out, sleep “shows of itself only its disappearance, its burrowing and its concealing” (13). However, the void that sleep creates does not indicate an insipid emptiness, but proffers fertile grounds for encounters with otherness that the waking self eludes. In Woolf’s and Kavan’s representations of sleep, moments of slumber are animated by their unknowability and unassimilable to individual subjectivity. The bounds of selfhood are thus transgressed, and alternative subjectivities and non-subjectivities are instantiated. This thesis argues that the experience of slumber performs a way of unworking – a deliberate act of drawing back into uncertain darkness – in order to cede to newfound territories of knowing. I first examine how the sleeper’s sense of self in slumber is dismantled and moves into an alternative, hybrid frame. Following this inflection of the individual, insular subjectivity, I look at how in maintaining an openness to the exterior, the condition of sleep invites ethical possibilities. Finally, I argue that sleep morphs into a discrete entity – a space of Other that one encounters – that overcomes staid identity binaries. The sleeper is thus entrained, transformed, and disrupted by the ontological experience of sleep. Ultimately, Woolf’s and Kavan’s writings negotiate the elusiveness of sleep by situating it as a form of being that creates generative absence – one that discloses new and unexpected perspectives.