“Give It Branches & Roots”: Virginia Woolf and the Vegetal Event of Literature

Abstract

This article examines Virginia Woolf’s figurations of her writing process on the basis of her published diaries with particular attention to vegetal imagery and metaphor. Employing insights from critical plant studies, specifically the works of Michael Marder, and biosemiotics, specifically those of Wendy Wheeler, I investigate the image of fluid, open-ended, multiplicitous, and non-appropriative vegetal (non-)self as convergent with Woolf’s view of the writing subject. Further, I argue that writing, as presented by the modernist author, requires the suspension of conscious ideation and increased attention to the pre-conceptual and therefore bears the trace of what Marder terms “plant-thinking.” Referring to the biosemiotic concept of abductive logic, I propose that the image of writing emerging from Woolf’s diary possesses a necessary embodied, intuitive, and relational component, characteristic and continuous with semiosis that pervades the entirety of more-than-human biological life. Finally, drawing on Marder’s reconceptualisation of the event according to the specificity of the vegetal, I suggest that literature, for Woolf, constitutes just such a vegetal event – both rooted and proliferating, unfolding towards exteriority and predicated upon chance rather than the logic of finality.

Keywords

• biosemiotics
• critical plant studies
• virginia woolf