Virginia Woolf. La stratégie du grain de raisin ou l’utopie d’un corps translucide

Abstract

The dialectic of transparency and opacity permeates Woolf’s writing. The feeling of “lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow” is a major pictorial pattern of her autobiographical posthumously-published autobiographical essay Sketch of the Past. More than a pattern, it is a concept for a psychic utopia, the image and the locus of an indescribable rapture. Through this metaphor, Woolf’s writing on traumatic memories unfolds affective, visual, auditory, olfactory, and kinaesthetic early experiences. We might compare this semi-transparent grape and Freud’s “navel of the dream”: Freud suggests that the psychoanalyst should pursue the analysis of a dream as far as possible, but this pursuit runs up against a point of impossibility, the “navel of the dream”: it is less a question of deciphering than of grasping it as a space of writing in which the birth of the symbolic is conjoined with the origin of desire and jouissance. The “navel of the dream” allows one to ponder the limits of the possibility of the interpretation of the interpretable; Virginia Woolf’s metaphor of the grape ponders the limits of the possibility of joining through writing the very source of the sense of being.