Silence as Disclosure: Virginia Woolf’s Style of Being-in-the-World

Abstract

Drawing on the ideas Maurice Merleau-Ponty this article reveals how Virginia Woolf's relationship to silence helps her depict human existence as fundamentally interrogatory and the imagination the prime agent of questioning. Silent characters such as poet Augustus Carmichael in To the Lighthouse and the woman writing in The Waves represent the questing and questioning imagination operating at the edges of the known to seek the not-yet-known. The role of the imagination, Woolf suggests, is to be the intermediary between the two, to build a bridge between the silent world of meaning that surrounds us and our desire to find meaning.