Nec Tecum Nec Sine Te: The Inseparability of Word and Image in Virginia Woolf

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.29

Keywords:

art, language, philosophical hermeneutics, Virginia Woolf, Paul Klee, Paul Cézanne

Abstract

This article explores the interaction of verbal and visual art in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, exemplified by her novel, To the Lighthouse. The narrative of the novel not only features scenes of the painting of the Ramsays’ portrait, but it unfolds as the creative process advances and concludes with Lily’s final stroke of her brush. While words are used to enact the process of creation, visual art serves as both a frame and a basis for the verbal. The synergistic movement of storytelling and the act of painting a picture “within the narrative” is more than an interesting instance of ekphrasis. In To the Lighthouse, words operate like pictures—according to Horace’s maxim, ut pictura poesis—and pictures work like words. Art’s resonance in the novel extends beyond depicting the process of painting. I examine Woolf’s aesthetic sensitivity and creative talent in relation to Paul Cézanne’s and Paul Klee’s art. The proximity between Woolf’s novel and the works of the two painters encourages us to view the role of shape and color in the two seemingly separate arts as the space for uncovering some vital truth about our being-in-the-word.

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Author Biography

Małgorzata Hołda, University of Lodz

Małgorzata Hołda is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Lodz, Poland. Her published works explore topics within the modern and postmodern British novel, philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology, and postmodern philosophy. She is the author of On Beauty and Being: Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Virginia Woolf’s Hermeneutics of the Beautiful (2021) and Paul Ricoeur’s Concept of Subjectivity and the Postmodern Claim of the Death of the Subject (2018), as well as numerous literary and philosophical articles. She is a Senior Associate Fellow of the International Institute for Hermeneutics and a member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. Her publications foster understanding as a mode of being in the world.

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Published

2022-11-24

How to Cite

Hołda, M. (2022). Nec Tecum Nec Sine Te: The Inseparability of Word and Image in Virginia Woolf. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (12), 487–507. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.29