« Weaving a veil through which nothing is seen in its actual shape » ; au pays de l’étrangement poétique

Abstract

Language’s capacity to weave a veil through which nothing is seen in its actual shape, but rather as displaced or hollowed out, like an image’s negative or a sound in echo, is a fundamental trait of Woolf’s poetics. We first examine her writing through the paradox of dislocation and belonging, the coalescence of native and foreign, crystallised in the phrase « Out of England » as it points to that poetics in Jacob’s Room. Since it is made out of images so does the language of the poet, like that of the people, possess a silent figurative quality, an originary strangeness. In this way we regard how in Woolf the woman of the people in the figure of Betty Flanders or Mrs McNab, embodies a particular form of survival and of survivance as the vernacular speaks through her reveries and reminiscences. We then return to the question of strangeness in relation to the immemorial insofar as the two are intertwined in both « Anon » and « On Not Knowing Greek » where they refer to a form of poetic estrangement: the literary as universal, anonymous and beyond immediate grasp. We finally define this Woolfian poetics of veil weaving, outlanding, or shifts in perspective in her reading of De Quincey and the writing of « Time Passes » in To the Lighthouse.

Keywords

• Woolf (Virginia)
• De Quincey (Thomas)
• poetic language
• estrangement
• ‘not knowing’
• absence/presence