"Some Little Language Such as Lovers Use": Virginia Woolf's Elemental Erotics of Simile1

For Hana

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement (The Waves)

"Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? (The Waves)

He had no command of metaphor (Between the Acts)

Is it possible to speak origin, to linguistically articulate primordial sexuality? The unconscious, Lacan says, "is neither primordial nor instinctual" and knows nothing about "the elemental" other than "the elements of the signifier" (1970, 170). These elements are semantically empty, not referring "to any object" yet "structured like a language" (Lacan 1997, 167). Could there be a linguistic form wherein the unconscious accesses the elemental the unconscious can never fully grasp? Lacan, in his suspicion of origin, would seem not to encourage such a search. Yet the writing of Virginia Woolf, considered in terms of its narrative and rhetorical patterns as structures and hence modes of organization of the unconscious suggests a linguistically specific way of speaking the primordial as a zone of the real within the symbolic. ²

This article rhetorically maps Woolf's writing of the elemental, in particular in her last novel Between the Acts. I trace Woolf's writing of the elemental in terms of Michèle Montrelay's theorizing of an elemental signifier, part of the shadowy, ancestral zones of the real, and in terms of the tradition of elocution, of the theorizations of the figures and tropes of style. These theorizations of forms of language more numerous by far than the forms invoked by Lacan, Montrelay, and other psychoanalysts alert to the linguistic substrate of the unconscious, provide precise grids for mapping the linguistic structures of the psyche. ³ Rhetorical theory, a taxonomy of the symbolic, has always included forms rhetoricians associated with the elemental or archaic. This theory can help us do more than detect and even explicate the thinking of the elemental in Woolf's fiction. It can help us map the specific linguistic structure of an elemental signifier.

Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, ends on the verge of an ecstatic "tearing asunder" (156). As the reality of an English village at the time of World War II devolves into the "prehistoric" (158), the novel's two main characters, Isa and Giles, are at the threshold of a moment of intimacy as alluring as it is frightening:

Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared, also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night . . . It was the night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high places among rocks.

Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (158-159)

The rest is silence. Or seems to be. The language spoken by the pre-historicized Giles and Isa seems to remain beyond the novel and the personal history of Virginia Woolf, who took her life before the novel went to press.

Is the language of the psychic pre-historic what can never be re-articulated within the symbolic? Is it, although "spoke[n]," part of the unrepresentable, what Lacan would theorize as the real? Woolf described the writer's helplessness in the face of the cataclysmic real of death, saying she would never be able to represent "the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain" (1980, 327). Does Between the Acts suggest that when fiction and language meet impending apocalypse, when the imaginary and the symbolic are at the point of colliding with the real of death, what is...