"This Globe, Full of Figures": Woolf's Comprehensive Economy

1. To Sum Up

How to add everything up, Virginia Woolf often seems to ask herself: how to make sense of the whole, whether that be the whole of experience, the whole of a character, or the whole of the world. Throughout the whole of Jacob's Room, her first experimental novel, Woolf pursues the question as she surveys the landscape of her central character's life, the narrator "choked with observations" at the vast and uncountable details that make up any singular identity. To make the task more challenging, Jacob takes shape only through the shadows he casts, in the network of friends and lovers, the objects that fill his room, and the dreams he inspires. The narrator works hard to understand him and, more emphatically, his effect in the world: over him, she claims, we hover, yearning for more. It's a libidinal structure that Woolf articulates through her frustrated narrator and, with the web of characters that make up the novel, a layered economy that she explores. The impulse to sum up is arguably an economic one, tied that is to quantification, to gains and, more importantly, losses sustained over the course of a lifetime. Does a libidinal economy—the measured rise and fall, the excitement and discharge, the pleasures banked and their restless expenditure—interact with the accounts and balance sheets of an economy more conventionally construed?

Desire is central to this early novel, framed as it is by impossible longing, and it is longing on a global scale that eventually takes up Woolf's attention, formed against a much greater context than one's lived experience. Experience is too narrow a category and one that can't account for the magnitude of relations that feed desire. Woolf draws on the global in order to articulate the unboundedness of human want that is, nevertheless, bounded by a worldly context. In effect Woolf is a theorist of the global: the formal concerns that drive her most ambitious works are entwined with those worldly ones that determine most aspects of her characters' lives.¹ In The Waves, arguably Woolf's most formally ambitious novel, the globe is wrapped with lines that she figures as economic, poetic, and libidinal. Woolf, one might say, produces global modernism by reorganizing the constitution of the subject via the network of lines that connects subjects to the world while also binding and controlling them. The bourgeois western subject is made to account for a world that remains remarkably, even unforgivably, unknown despite the prodigious rewards it supplies.

Woolf is hardly the first to notice the intertwining of lines that connect individual subjects to the rest of the world. Her characters share striking resemblances to the citizen John Maynard Keynes describes in his 1919 surprise bestseller, The Economic Consequences of the Peace²:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world. … He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality…then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

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Here Keynes offers one view of the luxury afforded by the global economy, one in which privileged citizens could take Europe's economic organization for granted, without knowledge of, Keynes tells us, its weak foundation or the threats—"[t]he projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion"—that were everywhere "playing serpent to this paradise." Rather, the bed-lounging or globetrotting Briton experienced those symptoms of instability as mere newspaper "amusements" that "appeared to exercise almost no influence...