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For Hana
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement (The Waves)
“Like” and “like” and “like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? (The Waves)
He had no command of metaphor (Between the Acts)
Is it possible to speak origin, to linguistically articulate primordial sexuality? The unconscious, Lacan says, “is neither primordial nor instinctual” and knows nothing about “the elemental” other than “the elements of the signifier” (1970, 170). These elements are semantically empty, not referring “to any object” yet “structured like a language” (Lacan , 167). Could there be a linguistic form wherein the unconscious accesses the elemental the unconscious can never fully grasp? Lacan, in his suspicion of origin, would seem not to encourage such a search. Yet the writing of Virginia Woolf, considered in terms of its narrative and rhetorical patterns as structures and hence modes of organization of the unconscious suggests a linguistically specific way of speaking the primordial as a zone of the real within the symbolic.2
This article rhetorically maps Woolf's writing of the elemental, in particular in her last novel Between the Acts. I trace Woolf's writing of the elemental in terms of Michèle Montrelay's theorizing of an elemental signifier, part of the shadowy, ancestral zones of the real, and in terms of the tradition of elocution, of the theorizations of the figures and tropes of