Conclusion: For a Time to Be Ethical

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Conclusion: For a Time to Be Ethical

For this difficult capacity to “[envisage] a world rent by lightning,” Woolf requires us to make the following commitment. Against the eagerness that wants to skip over the exposure to get to factual changes, that wants to know how to relate this diachronic vision to

immediate questions, Woolf advises that ethics demands patience. It has been correctly perceived that the call of the other is always to announce, command, unsettle—to pry open my time in our very midst. Held under this call, Neville recognizes that the consciousness of responsibility will necessarily dictate his life. Take this passage from his description of how to read a poem:

I go to the book-case. If I choose, I read half a page of anything. I need not speak.

But I listen. I am marvelously on the alert. Certainly, one cannot read this poem

without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scrapes of verbena and geranium. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes…One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound,

whether of spiders’ delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drain-pipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page…has withdrawn. There are no commas or semi-colons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense. One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. (141-42;

emphasis mine)

This is the closest analogy, though perhaps not the most accurate, of the Levinasian ethical relation. Neville’s responsibility derives from, in effect, his ability to respond to the other person, who has withdrawn from the scene of reading.

While Neville is at pains to

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Indeed, Woolf chooses Bernard, instead of Neville, to conclude the novel. Significantly, then, my view is that

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explain how to read a poem justly, he is suggesting that the only ethical, non-totalizing way to respond is with complete openness and submission, as with the answer, “Here I am.” Neville starts with his eagerness to “listen,” implying that there is an interlocutor or addressor. To be an astute listener, Neville insists, one must recognize the necessity of turning toward the other in “patience and infinite care,” and be “marvelously on the alert.” As if the subject had failed to hear this demand of the other, according to Levinas, “Ethical responsibility is ... a

wakefulness precise because it is a perpetual duty of vigilance and effort that can never slumber” (Kearney 30). That is, the “vigilance” must be brought to bear on the economy of the same. Only in such a posture of humility and attention in front of the other can the subject receive the revelation from the other. To answer the demand of the other, Neville asserts that only a reading with “myriad eyes” will suffice to attenuate whatever violence of reduction might operate therein, what Louis calls, “the injury of some obliquity” (120). In this sense, the utterance of “But I listen” is to be taken as the ethical exposure in my time; my identity comes from the impossibility of escaping from this responsibility.

Up to this point, Woolf builds up to addressing the issues as to how can one decide how to respond to the call of the other? How can one care for, and fulfill the needs of, the other, without any endeavor to sustain the status quo of dominance? Neville’s answer is: nothing we have preserved, those “antipathies and jealousies,” will equip us for the poem’s next line, which announces itself in its own singularity. Rather, these alleged scruples are “sheer nonsense,” for they lead to an elision of the ethical dimension of experience. Neville’s rejection, as Levinas would argue, is necessary for a truly ethical openness to the other. For the event of the ethical encounter to be possible, “Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror.”

one has to first, temporarily, turn to deal with this scene of Neville’s reading to better understand why Woolf

would give the term “death” to the call of the other in Bernard’s final proclamation, “Death, oh! Death,” in The

Waves. As I have made clear in chapter three, “death” also has an ethical dimension in this novel, insofar as her

characters’ interpretations of the death events, their interminable hashing over of the death of the other in

various versions, all but supplant the plot, which is quite limited in scope. And it is therefore viable to argue that

Bernard’s proclamation of death, like the poem Neville is reading, is significant only for its absence of definite

meaning, and for these characters’ ongoing ethical encounter with such an “appalling moment.”

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Neville thus pleads, and “…throw[s] caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely.” The subject in this novel, therefore, is first and foremost a Levinasian

“being-for-the-other.” Taking responsibility for another by responding to that person without reserve, in other words, by submitting to that person, gives a paradigm for the ethical itself.

For Woolf, time is a “relation” with the other but inadequate to contain the time of the other. There is no one time to be read here, but a mixture. From this perspective, reading The Waves is in trouble because its obscurity cannot simply be cleared up by mere synchronous

explanation in the cause-and-effect manner. It is in fact just that the characters’ responses are disturbed, suspended, temporalized, and called for beyond anything in the punctual present can possibly account for, which is to say, by the trace of the immemorial other. What both Woolf and Levinas hope to articulate is thus a diachronic moment without the certainty of connecting: “Even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time,” Bernard says, “there is always deep below it….a rushing stream of broken streams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights—While one straightens the fork so precisely on the table-cloth, a thousand faces mop and mow” (181; emphasis mine). This is the reason both Levinas and Woolf argue for diachrony, the impossibility of coinciding, as a figure to think the immemorial other in relation to time. If I understand Woolf correctly, there is no warrant for saying that the time of the other does not exist, as time opens itself up into the diversity and possibility of the ethical realm. It is to the immemorial other that Bernard speaks, “Time has given the arrangement another shake” (193) and, with humility, Louis speaks of the hope of temporal fulfillment as such: “The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared”

(28). For the ethical experience is forever in excess of any given formulation, the subject is

always to be left with a fresh surprise or shock. What is at issue is: the supremacy and closure

of the present need to be loosened up for the interruption of the time of other. On the whole,

Woolf’s concern is not so much to maintain the moment of ethical exposure as to cope with

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“the difficulty of living with precisely that surprise” (Gibson, 106), of living in relation to this diachronic moment. As we have argued, the passing of the other toward the immemorial past renders all the more imperative our vision of this very breakup of the present. To this point, Woolf would suggest that the best response to the collective solipsism of modernist culture is the assumption of ethical responsibility for the other, the realization of my delay in time.

Read into The Waves, the enormous power of Levinas’s thought, despite the exhausting or

“impossible” demand, resides in the fact that it speaks to this condition. In fact this is the whole point of Woolf’s effort to bring into legibility a time thoroughly shot through with violence and suffering. For her, the response-ability to “the alterity of veritable time,” the alterity in the juncture between my time and the time of the other, is always already the responsibility of human time.