Virginia Woolf/ Friedrich Nietzsche: life or the Innocence of Becoming in Mrs Dalloway

Résumé

The essay explores life as it is experienced and written in Mrs Dalloway alongside Nietzsche's own sense of life as it is worked out throughout his writings. If many echoes with Nietzche's work can be traced in a vision of life hosting what is supposed to be its opposites whether they be oblivion, silence, suicide or death to come, the article nevertheless argues that life in Mrs Dalloway precludes conceptualization if only because it it best expressed when it challenges and resists writing. Virginia Woolf's syntax, grammar thus expose the representation of life to a poetics of mere intensities resisting or exceeding metaphysical assumptions. In different ways it is termed as an ever-renewed experience of the instant, sometimes as suspended decision/ indecision, what Nietzsche calls “the innocence of becoming”.