When the Sealing Matter Cracks. The ‘Real’ in Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past.

Abstract

In this essay, I explore the concept of the real in Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical text A Sketch of the Past. My thesis is that the real here refers to a quality of experience, characterized by sensuous openness to the world. This quality of openness resides in certain moments in a life. Access to the real in this sense is therefore discontinuous rather than pervasive. For the analysis, I use the perspective and conceptual framework of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and show that several aspects of how Woolf describes her experience of “moments of being” correspond to Merleau-Ponty’s description of perception as a phenomenal field: her insistence on the vagueness of impressions; her emphasis on how sense impressions are integrated in experience; the sense of flow and integration between subject and world; her strong emphasis on experience as embodied. I suggest that Woolf’s moments of being may be understood as a form of phenomenological reduction.