I want to speculate on the possibility of relating the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, which attempts to unground our traditional views on schizophrenia (based on psychoanalytic paradigms), and Woolf's "heteroglossia" in The Waves. If Woolf is writing against (along-side/counter to) fascistic tendencies of "monologism," as McIntire suggests, it seems to me that the ideas put forward in Anti-Oedipus might provide some useful, post-psychoanalytic insights into what heteroglossia means for the body and for space. Another motive for my speculation is that as Woolf is opposing fascistic narratology Deleuze and Guattari oppose "the fascism within us," as Michel Foucault notes in the introduction to Anti-Oedipus, implying that the psychoanalyst's urge to rectify psychic fragmentation under a single metaphor (i.e. "the Freudian family") is part of the same impulse that drives monological fascism in every sphere. The schizophrenic, for Deleuze and Guattari is not the bi-polar or even the person with "multiple personalities" which are simply different means at reducing a "multiplicity" to a single diagnosis, but rather the anti-fascist body - the body which refuses in its very existence all attempts at reduction. In this light, even "schizophrenia" as a diagnosis indicates a fascistic tendency in psychoanalysis itself (i.e. "the fascism within us").
Deleuze and Guattari open their discussion of "schizoanalysis" (the analysis of human personality without the impulse to resort to reduction or family metaphors) by suggesting that the disruption of the fascism within has quite a bit to do with the fascism without. It is well known that Freud did not care for "schizophrenics" because they could not be situated within oedipal relations. These people could not use the word "I." It became utterly alien to their consciousness and therefore their consciousness refused psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis the "cure" for schizophrenia is of course "the talking cure", but that cure can only be administered in a very specific space - the psychoanalyst's couch. Within a space dominated by the analyst the subject could be worked upon in specific ways according to a discursive practice (telling stories) within a spatial practice (the couch). This practice reeks of the monologism McIntire identifies in opposition to heteroglossia. It seeks to enclose the wandering personalities within the discursive "I" by attaching the personality to something such as "God," "the family," "society" - some sort of stable point on which the subject can create equally stable discursive relationships. Yet at the same time it also encloses the schizo-subject within a physical space that is highly controlled by the analyst himself. Both of these practices in conjunction are meant to create a more normalized individual possessing a solid (solitary) story about themselves - an "I" - which has been more or less worked out by the analyst through metaphorical identification. Of course, what both Deleuze and Guattari as well as McIntire/Woolf recognize is that this is a subtle fascism exercised on discourse and space/the body.
I entirely agree with McIntire that in The Waves Bernard encompass this fascistic urge as much as he attempts to command all of the other characters's stories so as to create a single over-arching narrative. I think we can make the additional observation that Bernard, quite evidently in the first episode, does so by exalting metaphor above all other literary tropes. He transforms both spaces and personalities with metaphor in order to both unify experience under a single term and therefore render experience easily comprehensible. What can be seen as naive play-acting is, in another register, a narrative practice that can become quite sinister. I do not think that Woolf especially meant to cast Bernard as an "evil" character, but she certainly gave him fascistic quality in order to wrestle with the monological, literary fascism of the single story with a single narrator. Bernard allows her to raise this question within the body of a textual schizo.
I also think that The Waves, in as much as it is "schizophrenic" in the Anti-Oedipus sense, i.e. that as a body of writing it resists a single metaphor (the word "I" is alien to it) via the body, is perhaps the closest literary analogue to what Deleuze and Guattari are trying to do in un-grounding psychoanalytic interpretations. In opposition to the fascisitic/Freudian discursive-spatial practice of psychoanalysis they suggest that the schizophrenic "go for a walk." Instead of being form-fitted to the analyst's couch, the person with no "I" should go for walk in nature or at least a "wild" space that also embodies no "I" like the couch. It would be a great stretch to say that Woolf is mounting any sort of polemic on psychoanalysis through Bernard in The Waves, but I do not think it an impossibility that both Woolf and Deleuze & Guattari are engaging a general fascism (psychoanalytic/literary/discursive) which is primarily an expression of a more endemic and primordial relationship to language: the "I," the subject of the sentence, the "right" way to tell the story, the Truth, etc. By corrolating Woolf's undertaking in The Waves with Deleuze and Guattari's in Anti-Oedipus it may be possible to glean more insights into this general fascism on the level of language which can help open up for us in both literary and theoretical dimensions what it means to be unhinged from fascistic, monological, metaphorical narratives in terms of discourse as well as the body and our spatial practices.
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