Naming the Indescribable: Woolf, Russell, James, and the Limits of Description

This essay examines a preoccupation in early twentieth century literature and philosophy with the limits of describing first-person experience in language. Reading Virginia Woolf’s novels together with the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and William James, I argue that the indescribable in modernism is not so much a sublime beyond comprehension but rather the particularities of feelings that we ourselves know too well. These idiosyncratic experiential textures escape full expression by words that are inevitably general, but I suggest that Woolf stages this descriptive limit by exploiting a set of nondescriptive terms, whose distinctive features are elucidated by the remarks of James and Russell. The aim of this paper is to trace a less familiar intellectual history of literary modernism by highlighting its connections to early analytic philosophy, while at the same time working across literature and philosophy in a way that does not take recourse to the model of a “lens” or an influence study, but that instead examines the two fields” shared preoccupation with similar problems, which they elaborate in distinct ways.