Near the beginning of "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf speculates that one day "will it not be possible... that some device will be invented by which we can tap them" (67), that is our memories. Yet this are not "ordinary" memories, memories of "it happened," but the "things we have felt with a great intensity" (67). It is the happenings that not only happen but happen intensely that Woolf is concerned with. (I wonder, by way of digression, if the concept "saturated phenomena" used by phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion would be appropriate here? Something to explore later...). There is a dual peculiarity to these intense happenings: first that they are always happening (a memory-happening), something that re/occurs in her memory not merely as a recollection but as a re-vision (or re-sound, re-touch, etc.). In this sense "A Sketch of the Past" is a recording of memories for which the referent reemerges (from its shell?) more strongly than its initial emergence. The re-given phenomena is more intense than the initially given. However, I don't think that fully captures Woolf's idea of these intense happenings.
A memory-happening yes, "my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems that if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen" (67), but the second peculiarity of these intense happenings is that they are external (a happening-memory). Woolf makes a speculation that "things we have felt with a great intensity have an existence independent of our minds?" (67). More specifically, these external memory-happenings might still be in existence. Beyond the notion of a mere trace of memory, something Woolf makes great use of, this point seems more radical, more intense, and even more impossible. The suggestion in this notion is that not only are certain "memories" some how external, but that the things which happen intensely create a memory that is not reflexive. This non-reflexive memory is hardly a memory in the ordinary sense in which we think memory ("I am remembering myself"). This kind of memory is the non-reflexive middle which does not privilege the mirror of [personal] reflection which inevitably misses the character(s) involved but a means of being caught between the subject and the object, the active and the passive - speaking and writing besides one's self. As rhetoric scholar Eric White writes in his book Kaironomia, "The middle voice provides an alternative, then, to the sadomasochistic desire to establish a final version of the self. Forgoing the reassuring illusion of finality, in the middle voice self would serve only as a provisionally privileged center of pleasure. Such a self would lead a fugitive existence, always on the move from one newly constituted version of itself to another. The middle voice suggests not a fixed and abiding selfhood but a sequence of discontinuous partial selves..." (52). It is my opinion that Woolf, in order to circumvent the petulant methodology of memoir writing which misses the person involved by focusing on the objects which acted upon the individual (the various happenings), found a rhetorical escape in the non-reflexive middle voice. (Again, I want to be clear that it is non-reflexive because the subject is not finding its reflection in objects, White's "sadomasochism," but between sub.-obj. and hence "middle").
Victor Vitanza has articulated the ethics of this ethos in Chaste Rape suggesting that our re/telling of rape narratives (the memories of rape) cannot possibly grapple with the traumas of "It was" (Itys, "it-ys", the son of Procne and Tereus). "What I have in mind in terms of self-overcoming and the middle voice, and in terms of a mis/appropriate ethos, is what Kate Millett in The Basement has in mind but acts on in her refusal to stand above (so called objectively, outside...) the various texts... she writes about, but enters into these texts..." (31). Vitanza's considerations of un/personal narratives of rape do have bearing on the rhetoric of Woolf's auto-biographical sketch. Both are concerned with "It Was" and will not relegate "It Was" to either the object of personal reflection or subjective identity. Both practices are practices of canonization, of sorts. Vitanza and Woolf have different ethical injunctions, of course, but their rhetorical ethoi are similar (and of course Vitanza owes something to Woolf!). Woolf herself finds objectionable in the sense that each cuts out radical nature of the Event. She needs to "enter into" something it is im/personal, the collision of memory-happening and happening-memory - the memories that emerge from her while they are not her own. How can anyone "write" these intense happenings?
The question is not of "catching" the memories in writing (precisely the stupidity of biographies which can never characterize their literary subject) but of being caught in writing, precisely the absolute surprise of the conchologist in Bachelard's "Shells." The surprised ethos is a rhetorician placed in the (non) reflexive middle where one is caught between the phenomenon of the emerging snail and discursive description of that snail. By being caught (instead of catching) one is disposed to an activity of writing passively. A paradoxical non-position, but that is precisely the point. Working outside of the self, "It Was" (the happenings) are allowed to emerge as they forcefully emerge into/out of one's memory. This is, I think, the rhetorical paradox of Woolf's memory-happening/happening-memory. I would suggest that we can read "A Sketch of the Past" as 1) an un-writing of the auto-biographical tradition (on another plane Nietzsche is doing something similar in Ecce Homo) and 2) the practice of auto-biography, i.e. the biography that writes itself in which the author is discursively dissolved in the process of writing. In her sensitivity Woolf, spots the dangerous of characterization present in the auto/biographical genre of writing, and if she is going to characterize herself she must write outside of the self, create a wandering and nomadic characterization never settled on a complete character. In this sense "A Sketch of the Past" might then be both novelistic and poetic. It produces a character within a set of memory-happenings/happening-memories like Woolf's novels but also contains a viral-strand of poetic impossibility, i.e. the impossibility of writing which drives Woolf to write: "by writing I doing what is far more necessary than anything else" (73). This impossibility is both the impossibility of writing it all down (naturally), but also the impossibility of stopping. It is not the impossibility of catching the object (we have jettisoned that rhetorical/philosophical project), but the impossibility of fully absorbing the intensely given phenomena of the memory-writing Event which still exists, haunts us and pursues us through the corridors of life.
Works Cited
Vitanza, Victor J. Sexual Violence in Western Thought And Writing: Chaste Rape.
White, Eric Charles. Kaironomia.
P.S. Sorry this is late, Dr. Sparks! I too have been terribly sick since Friday and have been playing catch up all week on my work.
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