Abstract
O’Hara notes Woolf’s inclusive gesture offering readers the democratic play of readings: whatever edition used, they can use their novel’s key elements. Author, reader, and characters participate in reformative play. Sublime crisis is the impetus for discovering the latent impression of the future residing in the past. Following a brief review of Hegel’s dialectical self-making O’Hara shows the symbolic “god-image” as nexus where community and individual converge. Uncanny experience of the confrontation between past, present, and future is social and personal, as a close reading of the woman in the opposite house, noticed by Clarissa when she processes Septimus’s suicide, demonstrates.
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Notes
Anne E. Fernald, ed. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
See M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1970).
See Daniel T. O’Hara, Tragic Knowledge: Yeats’s Autobiography and Hermeneutics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). The term “god-image” is my own, though influenced by the work of Kenneth Burke, C. G. Jung, and Friedrich Nietzsche, about all of whom on this connection please see also my book: The Art of Reading as a Way of Life: On Nietzsche’s Truth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009). “God,” as I theorize it here, is an image, a term, for the highest energy state of maximally enhanced creative power, what Blake calls “The Human Form Divine” or “The Imagination.” It is why there is literature and why we read and read it.
See Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (New York: Harcourt, 2005).
Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories” in The Uncanny, trans. David McClintock, with an Introduction by Hugh Haughton (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 20. For the most complete study of the phenomenon of the uncanny and its relationship to the psychological concept of Nachträglichkeit, that belated revisionary imagination of those earliest moments of trauma that never enter into consciousness, see
Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003). See also my “Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism” in David H. Richter, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
For a thoroughly accessible discussion of this Lacanian model of the uncanny, see Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chaps. 3 and 6.
For the best summary of this aspect in the novels, see Tina Barr, “Divine Politics: Virginia Woolf’s Journey to Eleusis in To the Lighthouse,” boundary 2, 20, 1 (Spring 1993), 125–145.
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© 2015 Daniel T. O’Hara
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O’Hara, D.T. (2015). The Uncanny Muse of Creative Reading: On the New Cambridge Edition of Mrs. Dalloway. In: Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580061_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580061_3
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