"Thoughts without words": silence, violence, and memorial in Woolf’s Late Works

Résumé

In several reflections on her own creative processes, Virginia Woolf suggests that ‘the “book itself” is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel’ (‘On Re-Reading Novels’), that thought begins ‘without words’. In her unfinished posthumous work, Between the Acts, a character asks whether there can be ‘thoughts without words’, a question this essay relates to Woolf’s thinking about violence and language at the onset of the second world war. Regarding Woolf’s oeuvre as elegy, the essay compares Woolf’s narrative strategies to the work of phenomenological investigations of consciousness. The importance of the act of reading to Woolf’s creation of a form for memorializing the losses of violence and war offers a possible explanation of why she could not finish her last work of fiction.