11—
"I Do Not Know Altogether Who I Am"
The Plurality of Intrasubjective Life in The Waves

I think, often, I have the happiest of lives, in having discovered stability. Now one stable moment vanquishes chaos. But this I said in The Lighthouse.
(Diary 3: 141)

From the start, Woolf planned The Waves to be a difficult work. Orlando had been "mere childs play" (Diary 3: 264), an exercise in "continuity & narrative, & how to keep the realities at bay. But I purposely avoided of course any other difficulty. I never got down to my depths & made shapes square up, as I did in The Lighthouse" (Diary 3: 203). Now Woolf planned to

eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that dont belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. (Diary 3: 209)

External references were to be swept aside. What she aimed for was "an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem" (Diary 3: 203). Readers have been haunted by these three adjectives, especially eyeless , which seems to deny the dazzling descriptions that flood the novel. But eyes also reveal the seer in the act of seeing, establishing reciprocal object-relations. The infant looks into the mother's eyes both to know her and to know himself; by her reaction he forms his first self-image. An "eyeless" novel, then, is unresponsive; it does not accommodate itself to our needs as readers for unity or guidance. We are treated not as audience but as eavesdroppers, listening to voices that are not speaking to us.

Woolf prepared herself to write an eyeless book by withdrawing from social relations:

I am going to enter a nunnery these next months; & let myself down into my mind; Bloomsbury being done with. I am going to face certain things. It is going to be a time of adventure & attack, rather lonely & painful I think. But solitude will be good for a new book. (Diary 3: 219)

This is quite a different voice from that of the Woolf who feared imagining Septimus's madness. The turning point had come two years earlier. On September 15, 1926, at Rodmell House, Woolf recorded a short-lived depression, which she entitled "A State of Mind":

Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh its beginning its coming—the horror—physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart—tossing me up. I'm unhappy unhappy! Down—God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes; I detect that. Failure failure. (The wave rises). Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I've only a few years to live I hope. I cant face this horror any more—(this is the wave spreading out over me).

This goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. Then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vague. I doze. I wake with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint, or buying a new dress, or asking Dadie for the week end, tacked on.

At last I say, watching as dispassionately as I can, Now take a pull of yourself. No more of this. I reason. I take a census of happy people & unhappy. I brace myself to shove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward. I feel obstacles go down. I say it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I become rigid & straight, & sleep again. . . . Does everyone go through this state? Why have I so little control? (Diary 3: 110–11)

Woolf's recollection here resembles Lily's experience in her struggle to paint. Both must face an irrational horror—of failure, emptiness, sterility—before they are able to "march blindly forward." Woolf survives the waves of depression that threaten to drown her by watching "as dispassionately as [she] can" what engulfs her, by questioning mood when it affects cognition and self-evaluation. She exploits the phenomenon of "double awareness" to gain perspective: one part of her watches the other part feeling depressed. To maintain such openness to pain, she tries to let go in the face of drowning, instead of holding on defensively. Lily relinquishes her hatred of Tansley and opens herself up to the liberating acceptance of chaos outside and in, excitedly, nervously, squirting paint onto the canvas. Woolf lets go of her despair and questions its validity: "Why am I feeling this?" The tactic she uses to avoid becoming the dupe of depression is to embrace more perceptions, more impressions, as creative readers are sensitive to their responses to the text. Rather than be overwhelmed

by the content of mood, its message of failure, she splits her attention between the content of mood and its shape as a wave, a transparent deformation of the seemingly smooth surface of experience. The despair becomes "vague," less persuasive, and at last passes. By fulfilling her mother's wish to sink down completely, Woolf can rise up again refreshed. By creating another part of her self (like Alcorn and Bracher's "alien subject") to read her depression as a different kind of experience from the one it forcefully and narrowly presents, she can isolate despair. In effect, she exploits Leonard's schematization other breakdowns—that she was insane in only one-quarter of her mind—by using the other three-quarters to detect, question, and survive the "mad" domain.

Woolf has learned to deal with mood swings by questioning changes in beliefs and interpretations—in effect duplicating the techniques of modern cognitive psychotherapy. Depressives can alleviate some of their distress by recognizing and correcting overly negative "automatic thoughts" that arise as a result of the depression. A number of approaches, combining cognitive and behavioral techniques, are used, including "reattribution" (reviewing the facts to show that the patient's self-blame is not deserved), "induced fantasy" (envisioning happy moments, so that despair is seen as temporary), "labeling" (focusing attention on the patient's use of negatively loaded words or phrases as self-description and encouraging more benign synonyms), and "redefining of goals" (setting reasonable goals that will reinforce self-confidence).^[1] In dealing with her self-devaluation Woolf uses variations of all four methods. In reattribution, she lists her supposed failures—her childlessness, her taste in green paint—and detects the irrationality of magnifying their importance, realizing that the pain is, in reality, "vague" and inappropriately "tacked on" to specific incidents. In induced fantasy, she thinks of other people's relative states of happiness and unhappiness to resist depression's ability to seem "never-ending" and universal. In labeling, she shifts her attention away from negatively loaded words ("failure," "horror," "dead") toward phrases of active agency ("take a pull of yourself," "I brace myself to shove") to remind herself that she is not powerless. And she redefines her goals, telling herself that no failure matters so much in life that she deserves death.

Having separated self from her depressed mood, she can exert some self-control: nothing matters except what she allows to matter. Essentially, she must fight for the freedom to think outside of her mood. She cannot destroy the wave, but, conversely, it cannot destroy her unless she believes it can. Like Leslie and Mr. Ramsay, Woolf sets up reason and free will

as her guides, for she knows that mood-induced emotions are untrustworthy. She must rely on other parts of the self to counter this despair. But she is careful to avoid her father's defensive rationality; instead, she allows herself to sink when the flood of emotion is too strong, opens herself up to all experiences so that she can study them. By combining elements of both her parents' responses to moods, Woolf has, in effect, discovered a prophylactic therapy for mild and/or nonpsychotic mood swings, in which she retains some control over her thinking. Like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, she negotiates between moods to establish a limited sense of immunity.

Negotiating with parts of the psyche acting singly or independently led Woolf to view consciousness, not as a unity, but as a debate between psychic states or agencies. Indeed, this approach would naturally have occurred to her when, during her psychotic breakdowns, she heard these agencies as voices that damned her, exalted her, or urged her to commit "acts of folly" against her will. In 1904 she obeyed accusatory voices and threw herself out a window; later she realized that they were "only my imagination" (Letters 1: 142). In 1924 she heard "the voices of the dead" (Diary 2: 283). At Rodmell she recognized her depression for what it was: a feeling that was only a part of herself, something that she could attempt to manage. The voices were part of her, even though her breakdowns gave them a seemingly separate authority.

Woolf became conscious of the affinity between writing and madness because in both mania and creativity, words are put together with such rapidity that the ego cannot track how the operation is performed. Writing the last words of The Waves, Woolf experienced such "intensity & intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad). I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead" (Diary 4: 10). A manic-depressive has extensive experience of alien feelings and spontaneously generated scripts of elation or despair, and so Woolf was intrigued by the transparent line between her own voice and the other voices she could imagine. Engaging them in dialogue, detecting and contradicting them, establishing a relationship with them , made possible the sort of integration that was mediated automatically by normality but was denied to her.

As early as October of 1926, Woolf began thinking about The Waves as a "dramatisation of my mood at Rodmell" (Diary 3: 114), of "a mind thinking" (3: 229) in all its plurality, rather than the cohesive narration of a story. She considered "Autobiography" as a title (3: 229), but then abandoned it because the specific details were not to come from her

childhood (3: 236). Rather, she wanted to write the universalized autobiography of any mind thinking, for a "scientific" purpose rather than a biographic one:^[2] to express her belief that creative thought incorporates elements of manic and depressive cognitive styles. Woolf split up intrasubjective experience into six voices delivering dramatic soliloquies, six mood-congruent points of view. They live a common life, "running homogeneously in & out, in the rhythm of the waves," sometimes sharing thoughts, images, and linguistic style (Diary 3: 312), but each interprets differently, according to a predominant mood that colors both their inner and outer worlds and so irrevocably separates them. The agitated Susan barricades herself against loss to compensate for her own worthlessness. For Rhoda, the helpless self begins dissolving as soon as it is born. Neville acts out his depression through self-mutilation. To Louis, life is an enemy, a beast to be fought. An exalted, iridescent world welcomes the manic Jinny, rewarding her enlivened senses with intense pleasure and gaiety. The self-conscious Bernard ruminates upon all these disparate experiences, constantly reshaping them into narratives that quickly fall apart, for nothing permanent can hold together this dynamic confederation (that "queer conglomeration of incongruous things") of a mind at work (Granite and Rainbow 19–20). Constant movement within consciousness requires more flexibility than a single voice can long provide.

Readers feel helpless in the disconnected "mind" of the novel. Like Woolf at Rodmell, we must learn to let go of the desire to find an authoritative voice; a part of us must view the chaos dispassionately, accepting the conflicting assertions of six points of view that can be neither proved nor disproved. Rhoda's suicidal despair, Jinny's promiscuous ecstasies, and Susan's agitated possessiveness—as responses to life each represents some "truth" that is valuable, though they are all provisional. Consciousness is an unspecified blend of all six; Woolf leaves it to us to decide how to read this mind (for this is what we must learn to do with our own minds). Confused and unguided, we forge ahead, buffeted and provoked by a novel written "to a rhythm not to a plot" (Diary 3: 316). Woolf felt that the rhythmical form was "more natural" to her than the narrative, though she admitted that its "inchoate" (Letters 4: 294) qualities were "completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about all the time for some rope to throw to the reader" (Letters 4: 204). But she resisted tidying up too much by running "all the scenes together . . . so as to make the blood run like a torrent from end to end," achieving "a saturated, unchopped, completeness; changes of scene, of mood,

of person, done without spilling a drop" (Diary 3: 343), wresting control of the reading away from the reader, who must experience a mind's well and ill discourses without reduction.

In a letter written just after the novel was published, Woolf considered this problem of multiplicity and unity:

Many people say that [The Waves ] is hopelessly sad—but I didnt mean that. . . . But I did mean that in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one. I'm getting old myself—I shall be fifty next year; and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia; even though the special Virginia in whose body I live for the moment is violently susceptible to all sorts of separate feelings. Therefore I wanted to give the sense of continuity, instead of which most people say, no you've given the sense of flowing and passing away and that nothing matters. Yet I feel things matter quite immensely. What the significance is, heaven knows I cant guess; but there is significance—that I feel overwhelmingly. (Letters 4: 397)

Her concern about the disconnectedness, in Mrs. Dalloway , of the scenes between the sane and the insane once again emerges: can continuity and différance be reconciled or even represented in a single text? To underscore the problem, Woolf has Bernard plainly state the problem of identity:" [I] t is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis: or how to distinguish my life from theirs" (276). If identity somehow grows out of many voices, the reader faces the formidable task of connecting them in order to sense the collective, inclusive psyche.

On a less abstract level, The Waves contains several formal and stylistic devices that help convey a sense of psychic continuity:

All the language in the book has the same remarkable sensitivity to rhythm and metaphor, the same characteristics of repetition and alliteration, even sometimes the same use of rhyme, euphony, and assonance.

In fact, the separate voices often draw on the same body of imagery.^[3]

Unity of consciousness is further underscored by the artificiality of the dramatic-soliloquy technique. This is especially evident in the childhood scenes, where infants report their perceptions with such sophistication that the discourse becomes a litany:

"When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist," said Louis. "The birds sang in chorus first," said Rhoda. "Now the scullery door is unbarred. Off they fly. Off they fly like a fling of seed." (10–11)

These voices, neither spoken nor thought, are best described as "verbalized being ,"^[4] embodiments of different intrasubjective transactions that together compose consciousness.

There remains, however, a constant tension among these six voices that live such separate inner lives yet speak with a common voice. From the start, the novel focuses on how even sense perceptions of the same experience can mean quite different things:

"I see a ring," said Bernard, "hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light."

"I see a slab of pale yellow," said Susan, "spreading away until it meets a purple stripe."

"I hear a sound," said Rhoda, "cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down."

"I see a globe," said Neville, "hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill."

"I see a crimson tassel," said Jinny, "twisted with gold threads."

"I hear something stamping," said Louis. "A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps." (9)

The characters define themselves in terms of how they see the world. Each child's perception establishes leitmotifs that are repeated throughout the novel. Bernard's ring symbolizes his quest for a language to enclose the flux of experience. Susan's slab of yellow exemplifies her tendency to see life in simplistic terms, as love or hate, possession or rejection.^[5] Neville's masochism situates him as a fragile drop menaced by others. Jinny's crimson tassel with gold threads prefigures her self-indulgent life of ecstatic sensations. Seeing is the more analytical sense, fixing, immobilizing with a stare; hearing is passive, omnidirectional, and vulnerable, and only Rhoda and Louis hear their first impressions. Rhoda does not identify the source of the sound she hears, and later in life she feels persecuted by a world that also eludes her. Louis cannot see the waves crashing on the beach and worries that an angry beast is chained, reading into the perception what will be his lifelong preoccupation with order and safety. Although the voices long to share closer ties, to become one, their irreconcilable perspectives only widen the gap between them.

Even in childhood Susan's freezing possessiveness distinguishes her from Jinny and her carefree relations with others. Catching sight of Jinny kissing Louis, Susan retreats into self-hatred:

"Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before

lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there." (13–14)

Despair contracts subject-object boundaries until agony becomes more real than self, becomes a thing to be examined and hoarded. The image of herself as a hermit mythologizes Susan's plight; she identifies with her sense of isolation until it turns into something definitive, the only appropriate fate for an unloved being. Worthlessness ironically becomes valuable, because it aptly expresses her depressed identity. Everyone needs an identity that corresponds to his or her feelings, even if they are painful feelings. So depressives are stuck: their fatalism gives them the only continuity that "fits" their experiences. As a character, Susan expresses Woolf's insight into a problem most depressives and their therapists must face: why the patient sometimes clings to a self-definition so eminently painful. Attempts to explain away a patient's self-devaluations ("I'm a failure," "I'm unlovable," "the world is against me") as unreasonable or unrealistic and arguing that his/her resistance to change is an unconscious defense cannot succeed if the patient's experience and deepest feelings seem to corroborate these negative interpretations.

To fill the emptiness of her degraded self, Susan yearns to possess objects—a husband, children, the farm—and feel all the fierce maternal emotions ("I would fell down with one blow any intruder" who would harm her young, "making of my own body a hollow, a warm shelter for my child to sleep in" [172]), as if family were a treasure trove to be hoarded inside herself. Depressed, Susan feels "debased and hide-bound by the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity" (132). Motherhood has given full rein to her wish to "desire one thing only," but it is a thing that must then become hateful . Preparing herself to find a husband after finishing school, she knows that the gift she will bring to him, her self, is an equivocal blessing: "Something has formed, at school, in Switzerland, some hard thing. Not sighs and laughter; not circling and ingenious phrases. . . . What has formed in me I shall give him. . . . I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards" (98–99). Susan institutionalizes her self-contempt in marriage ("What shock can loosen my laboriously gathered, relentlessly pressed-down life?" [191]), which further suffocates her:

"Yet sometimes I am sick of natural happiness, and fruit growing, and children scattering the house with oars, guns, skulls, books won for prizes and other trophies. I am sick of the body, I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning, of the unscrupulous ways of the mother who protects, who collects under her jealous eyes at one long table her own children, always her own." (191)

Louis speculates that "to be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door" (120) like an old stoat. Endlessly hungry, she devours what she possesses and feels devoured in turn. Love becomes a cancerous knot, for her degraded self-image makes hurtful objects desirable. Embracing the agony that depression deems appropriate, she lives out its self-fulfilling prophecy.

But there are different levels and kinds of depression, as Woolf well knew. In the character of Rhoda, Woolf explores such severe powerlessness and helplessness that all reality seems hostile and invasive ("Life, how I have dreaded you. . . . I have been stained by you and corrupted"). Paranoid, Rhoda fears everything: people in general ("hideous," "squalid," smelly [203]), pursuing her down endless paths in dreams (28); people at parties, "throwing faint smiles to mask their cruelty"; doors opening ("terror rushes in!"); her own friends ("A million arrows pierce me. Scorn and ridicule pierce me" [105–6]). Like Septimus, Rhoda feels cut off from a world that is degraded and dangerous because it is evaluated by a pervasive nihilism she cannot question or control. Depression can become so severe that its perspective cannot be differentiated from or detected by the individual's capacity for "normal" thinking. Self-hatred, frigidity, and paranoid delusions about a hostile world spring up as totalizing explanations, fictional variations of a fundamental, unintelligible emptiness, locating in the identifiable real world what actually remains cloaked in mood.

Rhoda's vulnerability vividly dramatizes the insubstantiality of the deeply depressed self. Objects deny her very existence. She feels excluded when she finds Miss Hudson's mathematical formulas incomprehensible: "The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. . . . The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, 'Oh, save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!'" (21–22). Meaning is found when self has the power to organize perception of outer facts so that internal schemata coincide with the structure of objects. Understanding presupposes that the world can be organized and that the self is real enough to create or authorize schemata that illuminate previously hidden structures which bring the world closer and include the self in their life. Unintegrable perceptions attack the depersonalized, unauthorized self:

"I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do—I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. . . . I have no face." (130)

Without some kind of continuity to perception that makes meaning, identity seems to fall apart.

Because she lacks a sense of her self as existing, Rhoda frequently casts herself as a faceless person:

"That is my face," said Rhoda, "in the looking-glass behind Susan's shoulder—that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. . . . They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it." (43)

The self Rhoda's face represents is "not here," and so she must imitate others' reactions. She feels depersonalized and transparent—a common complaint from depressives, who seem not to have the energy to be responsive or even to recognize that a situation calls for an emotional reaction. Because Rhoda describes the real world as belonging to others, some readers assume that she lives in a mystical realm that seduces her into suicide^[6] —a tempting interpretation, since other characters do tend to see Rhoda's isolation as otherworldliness. But Rhoda herself characterizes it as a too real "nothingness":

"Therefore I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to the body." (44)

Depressive nothingness is neither a visionary experience nor a mystical level of consciousness. Acknowledging the solidity of the world of her friends, Rhoda attributes exclusive value to it: their world is full; hers is empty. Only by touching something solid can she get any sense of herself as existing, and then it is only a bodily sense; it has no recuperative meaning for her spirit.

Jinny escapes the violent, unsavory universe of Susan and Rhoda. Euphoric, uninhibited, and glowing, Jinny feels no fear, no limitations. Aware, as a child, primarily of bodily sensations ("'The back of my hand burns,' said Jinny, 'but the palm is clammy and damp with dew'" [10]), as an adult she indulges in a frenetic, manic pursuit of intensified sensory perception ("Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire" [140]). Although depression typically has a "neuterizing effect," roughly half of manic and hypomanic states have a "polarizing or enhancing effect on sexual identity." Heightened psychomotor activity combines with enhanced self-esteem and self-confidence to exaggerate sexuality.^[7] Jinny sees her body "ripple" in the looking glass and feels an ecstatic power in movement—"I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance" (42)—though she never discovers the source of all this energy: "What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs?" Expansive in mood, she kisses Louis to rejuvenate him—

"And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. 'Is he dead?' I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you." (13)

—as if the mere touch of her magical body could create life. Since, in a manic state, wielding power seems effortless, it is no wonder that some manics believe they are conduits for God or that they are somehow plugged into the energies and purposes of Nature (consider Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric").

Woolf emphasizes the energy of Jinny's world by constant use of action verbs in descriptions of her:

"Look, when I move my head I ripple all down my narrow body; even my thin legs ripple like a stalk in the wind. I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda's vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance." (42)

Her exultation in movement affects her perceptions. Just as, to explain her boundless energy and sense of well-being, she imagines that her "blood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against [her] ribs," so too the objects she sees are highly energized: "There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and

triumph" (46). She perceives her body as "incandescent," as if a stream is pouring through it, "a deep ride fertilising, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free" (57). At social occasions she is witty and grandiose, drawing men to her by the pure force of her personality, giving herself up to the "rapture" of being "much admired, my dress billowing around me" (63). Other people do not frighten her, as they do Rhoda; rather, they stimulate her dilated self-confidence and her enhanced sense of power: "They are anxious to make a good impression. I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me" (102). In mania, self and body are one and substantial:

"The torments, the divisions of your lives have been solved for me night after night, sometimes only by the touch of a finger under the tablecloth as we sat dining—so fluid has my body become, forming even at the touch of a finger into one full drop, which fills itself, which quivers, which flashes, which falls in ecstasy." (221)

But Woolf is aware that euphoria has its drawbacks. Although Jinny glows with a physical magnetism, it is an egotistical energy that draws everything to herself. Her self-centered imagination is limited to her body:

"Every time the door opens I cry 'More!' But my imagination is the bodies [sic ]. I can imagine nothing beyond the circle cast by my body. My body goes before me, like a lantern down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of darkness into a ring of light. I dazzle you; I make you believe that this is all." (128–29)

Mania dazzles but misleads, overcoming reality testing by its sheer energy. Manics feel they have discovered profound meaning or experienced transcendental joy when in fact they have not gotten beyond the door of physical senses. Jinny's "feather-headed carelessness" (55) causes her teacher, Miss Matthews, to grumble because Jinny "cannot follow any word through its changes. . . any thought from present to past" (42). So distracted and ceaseless are her vivified perceptions that she quickly creates similes out of them, but without going beyond the sensations themselves: "My hand is like a snake's skin. My knees are pink floating islands. Your face is like an apple tree netted under" (23).

Because the manic imagination, in its sensuous exercise of self's power, makes myriad ephemeral connections, Jinny's relationships are only moments of intense, short-lived intimacy, beginning with a show of power: "I begin to feel the wish to be singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by one person who comes to find me, who is attracted towards me,

who cannot keep himself from me, but comes to where I sit on my gilt chair, with my frock billowing round me like a flower" (46). The wish to be singled out is contingent upon someone else's subordination to the illusion of her power—her inflated sense of herself is ratified when a stranger finds her irresistible:

"I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way, I say to this one, 'Come.' Rippling black, I say to that one, 'No.' One breaks off from his station under the glass cabinet. He approaches. He makes towards me. This is the most exciting moment I have ever known. I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way, flowing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to me. 'Come,' I say, 'come.' Pale, with dark hair the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here; he stands at my side." (102–3)

As a child she feels fluid and unencompassable: "I do not want to be fixed, to be pinioned" (55); as an adult, she throws herself into the arms of many lovers and glories in their anonymity:

"I do not care for anything in this world. I do not care for anybody save this man whose name I do not know. . . . This is rapture; this is relief. The bar at the back of my throat lowers itself. Words crowd and cluster and push forth one on top of another. It does not matter which. They jostle and mount on each other's shoulders. The single and the solitary mate, tumble and become many. It does not matter what I say. Crowding, like a fluttering bird, one sentence crosses the empty space between us. . . . The veils drop between us. I am admitted to the warmth and privacy of another soul." (103–4)

Anonymity and intimacy may seem to be contradictions, but, for the manic, intimacy with only one person would bog down the splendid experience of the body's energy, the mind's fertility, and the effortless capacity to cross barriers and touch others with a perfect (though, to us, superficial) sense of fusion. Sixty percent of manics exhibit increased sexual desire; some become voraciously promiscuous, succeeding because the manic personality can be an appealing and persistent wizard with words. It does not seem to matter what Jinny says: the words come easily, the moment is magic, and the veil drops.

The manic delights in physical movement, beauty, and experience for its own sake, operating, as John Custance remembers of his own manic

breakdowns, purely on the pleasure principle and an uncanny sense of subject-object fusion:

Perhaps it can best be described as a "breach in the barriers of individuality". What Professor Grensted has called, if I remember rightly, the "sense of estrangement, fencing in a narrowly limited ego" disappears altogether. The shell which surrounds the ego and so often gets harder with the years is pierced. The experience partakes of the nature of the goodfellowship produced by alcohol; it also constitutes in some degree a regression to a childish faith and confidence in the benevolence, the "akinness" of the surrounding world.^[8]

One of the most interesting features of this experience is the light it throws on the nature of the sexual urge in mania. This urge is almost entirely impersonal. The question of selecting an attractive girl, which normally plays a large part in sexual adventures, did not trouble me in the least. I was quite content to leave it to chance. . . . Like Whitman, I really did feel all women to be "my sisters and lovers."^[9]

The burden of conscience, of the "super-ego" of Freudian theory, is enormous. In mania it is lifted as it were by magic.^[10]

Forty percent of manics do not exhibit an increased sexual drive, as apparently Woolf did not (though we cannot be sure, if we consider her playfully erotic letters to Vita), but clearly she understood that mania expresses itself in enlivened senses and a dilated self that cannot make authentic, personal contact with others:

Now my little tugging & distressing book & articles are off my mind my brain seems to fill & expand & grow physically light & peaceful. I begin to feel it filling quietly after all the wringing & squeezing it has had since we came here. And so the unconscious part now expands; & walking I notice the red corn, & the blue of the plain & an infinite number of things without naming them; because I am not thinking of any special thing. Now & again I feel my mind take shape, like a cloud with the sun on it, as some idea, plan, or image wells up, but they travel on, over the horizon, like clouds, & I wait peacefully for another to form, or nothing—it matters not which. (Diary 3: 248)

Since personality becomes a production, a stagey exaggeration of desire out of control, the manic cannot tell whether an object uncannily invites his responses or whether desire itself has provided the illusion of reciprocation. Acting upon such one-sided urges disperses identity and prohibits true fusion, whether sexual or aesthetic. But the lure of complete, ecstatic

fulfillment dispels doubt and inspires the frenetic devotion of a lover whose beloved promises bliss that permeates body and soul, earth and stars.

Mood states are also divided up among the males in the group. Like Rhoda, Louis feels the arrows of other people's attention aimed at him ("I suffer for all humiliations") and wants to be unseen to protect himself ("my shivering, my tender, and infinitely young and unprotected soul. For I am always the youngest" [219]). Unless he is able to organize them, he is unable to tolerate the discontinuous and violent perceptions of life. When, at Hampton Court, the six reassemble to remember Percival, Louis finds "this moment of reconciliation" to be "black" and intolerably painful: "What is the solution, I ask myself, and the bridge? How can I reduce these dazzling, these dancing apparitions to one line capable of linking all in one?" (219).

But, although depressed, Louis does not retreat into nothingness; he asserts himself against those "dancing apparitions" by imposing his own brand of order on the world and on himself: "My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the earth. My body is a stalk. I press the stalk. A drop oozes from the hole at the mouth and slowly, thickly, grows larger and larger" (12). Here is Rhoda's isolation combined with Susan's contracted being: only by pressing can Louis's essence be squeezed out, a thick, unpalatable ooze—a potent defense, which helps him assert himself: "'I have signed my name,' said Louis, 'already twenty times. I, and again I, and again I. Clear, firm, unequivocal, there it stands, my name. Clearcut and unequivocal am I too'" (167). The repeated "I" underscores Louis's egotism dictating order. Although he reassures himself by accumulating and mastering knowledge ("I could know everything in the world if I wished" [20]), he also suppresses himself ("My eyes are wild; my lips tight pressed" [58]) and feels he has found safety in the numbers of students filing into chapel: "I like the orderly progress. We file in; we seat ourselves. We put off our distinctions as we enter. . . . I become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge wheel" (34–35).

In his position in the shipping company Louis is able to fulfill his wish to make "orderly progress" real:

"We have laced the world together with our ships. The globe is strung with our lines. . . . My shoulder is to the wheel; I roll the dark before me, spreading commerce where there was chaos in the far parts of the world. If I press on, from chaos making order, I shall find myself where Chatham stood, and Pitt, Burke, and Sir Robert Peel. Thus I expunge certain stains." (200, 168)

Like Virginia's depressed grandfather, Sir James, that monster of industry who controlled himself by abstaining from any indulgence, even the pleasure of a good cigar, Louis becomes a judge with "solemn and severe convictions" (201) to establish coherence in himself. Only by opposing corrosive reality can he feel real: "I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord" (39). Opposition coalesces his fragmented identity and channels his agitation. If discord gave birth to him, he, like Klein's vengeful infant, turns upon his mother and tries to devour her, but his self-description is hideously negative: "Life has been a terrible affair for me. I am like some vast sucker, some glutinous, some adhesive, some insatiable mouth. I have tried to draw from the living flesh the stone lodged at the centre" (201). Louis reduces life to an ordered paste, a minimalist meaning which can be squeezed out by netting the globe, pressing his lips, regulating until all proceed into the chapel, uniform, indistinguishable. Louis silences all other voices but his own.

Howard Harper is right to describe Louis as a "superego" character, but only in the sense that he responds to self-hatred with rule, severity, and conformity.^[11] Self-loathing and fear of loss of control often lead depressives to fall back upon habitual and rigid modes of thought.^[12] Whereas manic cognition is expansive and elastic, depressive thinking lacks imagination and relies excessively on order and logic to oppose black despair. For a bipolar, the depressive desire for severity is not in itself moralistic in the Freudian sense (it does not result from a forbidden fantasy or wish), although, for want of a better one, patients may adopt such an "explanation" for why everything looks so bleak to them, why they feel so bad (and so Woolf has Louis offer us an inadequate reason for his pervasive sense of inferiority: that he is Australian). The feeling is compellingly real no matter what ideas are tacked onto it. Depressives think they deserve no better because mood limits their ability to mediate positive thoughts.

To underscore depression as a problem in perceptual processing, Woolf presents Neville's depression as a double bind:

"Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos," said Neville, "this formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the stars. Yet sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust." (226)

This is the depressive's version of the squinting modifier: Neville objects alternately to life's formlessness and to his own "deforming" instincts. Depression must have a vacuum, a center of emptiness or corruption, but patients vary as to where they place the source of their despair. It can be inside, outside, particularized in some other person (e.g., a disapproving lover) or relationship (e.g., parent-child), or generalized to all people and all relationships (society as victimizer, society as abusive parent). In the 1960s, when the phrase "I'm depraved on accounta I'm deprived" from West Side Story became a formula in popular psychology, society was blamed for all sorts of abnormal behavior, from criminality and suicide to drug abuse and anorexia. Some cases of pathology were correctly attributed to social context, but other patients were ill served when their own depressive projections were adopted by therapists.

Depression, then, can take any form the human mind can think of to represent what it is experiencing. Unlike Louis, who controls himself by controlling objects, Neville wants to be dominated, to be put into the position of object: "We are in that passive and exhausted frame of mind when we only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from whom we have been severed. All else is distasteful, forced and fatiguing" (233). He acts out his self-loathing in self-destructive object-relations, submitting to repeated severances, which he symbolizes as a knife cutting:"'Now Biddy scrapes the fish-scales with a jagged knife on to a wooden board,' said Neville" (11). Soon Neville has a knife of his own, which he mentions often, as an expression of his own critical sharpness and his need to make distinctions ("I hate wandering and mixing things together" [19]). Upon learning that each tense in Latin means something different, he exults: "There is an order in this world; there are distinctions, there are differences in this world, upon whose verge I step" (21). The depressive is so aware of difference, of gulfs separating and fragmenting, that he sees only a world of isolated objects. Severance becomes a defining characteristic of what life means; like Susan with her knot of agony, for Neville painful severance becomes real, emblematic of value, to be hoarded as part of his identity. Thus, as an adult in love with Percival, Neville associates affection with cutting ("I need some one whose mind falls like a chopper on a block. . . . To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?") and with self-mutilation ("Nobody guessed the need I had to offer my being to one god; and perish, and disappear" [51–52]). The jagged knife embodies the only peace depression can promise: that of self-annihilation. Seeing Percival, Neville seeks a continuity of depressive experience by allying desire, order,

and pain: "'Now,' said Neville, 'my tree flowers. My heart rises. All oppression is relieved. All impediment is removed. The reign of chaos is over. He has imposed order. Knives cut again'" (122).

When depressives like Neville identify themselves completely with their mood, they cannot love without pain, for mood shapes their worldview, their philosophy of life, and their psychological economy. Percival provides for Neville both that needed security of order and the "solidity" (122) of cruelty. Neville loves Percival's "pagan indifference," his remoteness, and his potential for giving pain: "He should have a birch and beat little boys for misdemeanours" (36). Neville craves attention, especially if it is harmful, because it fulfills his depressive expectations:

"He despises me for being too weak to play [cricket] (yet he is always kind to my weakness). He despises me for not caring if they win or lose except that he cares. He takes my devotion; he accepts my tremulous, no doubt abject offering, mixed with contempt as it is for his mind. For he cannot read. . . . He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. . . . [M]y suffering [is] an unceasing excitement." (48, 60, 129)

It takes pain and humiliation to make Neville feel real, just as it takes order to make Louis feel real. Being "cut" by his Percival makes him love even more the wielder of the knife. His beloved's contempt is his returned love, just as Neville's suffering becomes the proof of loving. In keeping with depression's inversion of values, Neville feels contempt for Percival's mind, which he considers far inferior to his own. The "love" he feels reflects the value of the love object. He accepts Percival's disdain as an appropriate evaluation of Neville's debased self, but he also despises his master because Percival, as recipient of a "deformed" Neville's love, must be unworthy as well. Depression can mediate negative readings either way. Self and object despise each other. Neville condemns what life has to offer ("Let me denounce this piffling, trifling, self-satisfied world" [70]) but also welcomes life's degradation: "Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob" (152). Self-destruction is seductive when it seems to explain everything.

Compared to the other five characters, Bernard is "diffuse" as a personality, "malleable to the point of dampness."^[13] He is so aware of circumstances that he becomes different men in different environments, acting various parts: "[W]hich of these people am I?" he asks. "It depends so

much upon the room" (81). The plurality of his fictional "faces" defies categorization by mood. He is not, like Rhoda, afraid of life's "little deaths." With easy aplomb he considers the fattened rabbit about to be killed for Sunday dinner (234). Unlike Susan, he is curious about the world. Unlike Louis, Bernard delights in chaos and multiplicity: "[W]hat am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure" (118). He does not care to lace the globe together tight until the world is uniform and safe: "[I]t is the panorama of life. . . that delights me" (242). Nor does he lacerate himself, like Neville, with fated pain. And he knows—unlike Jinny—that the body is not the "whole self." Bernard accepts all states of mind freely, even contradictory ones, as at graduation ceremonies: "We are all deeply moved; yet irreverent; yet penitent; yet anxious to get it over; yet reluctant to part" (59). Others industriously organize perceptions, but Bernard "distrust[s] neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notepaper" (238), concluding, like the narrator of Jacob's Room , that "life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it" (267). He is that part of the mind that can stand apart and detect the shape of the wave of mood (as Woolf did at Rodmell), and so he is preoccupied with narratives—not stories about anything in particular (that exclusivity would bring the risk of drowning) but narrative in itself, as a means of giving shape to self's plurality.

Bernard is happiest when he creates a transitional space where imagination and fact combine to produce meaning—but without the requirement that it be absolute, true, or persuasive meaning. His stories do not even have endings, so flimsy and unhurried are they, mere "linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another" (49). Other characters criticize his fictions as inconclusive or absurd, phrases dangling in the wind. But it is this reluctance to impose meaning or closure that makes his narratives playful, creative, life-affirming, that makes him immune to pernicious perspectives imposed by a reigning mood. Since personality is a "fictitious" order too, to impose it on reality—to order the world as a simple extension of one's personality and desires—obscures life's discontinuity and self's myriad possible forms.^[14]

Bernard's earliest fiction is of Elvedon, a mythical kingdom he creates while he and Susan wander the grounds of a neighboring house. Susan has just seen Jinny kiss Louis, and she runs off clutching her knotted agony,

convinced of its soul-defining truth. Bernard tells her the story of Elvedon, a secret and sacred landscape where life is only a dream and nothing is defined. He specifically describes his fiction in terms of softening the knot of hardness in Susan:

"When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it. But soon that will cease. . . . "

"I love," said Susan, "and I hate. I desire one thing only. . . ."

"But when we sit together, close," said Bernard, "we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory." (15–16)

Urging her to "sink like swimmers just touching the ground with the tips of their toes," to let go of the knowledge that this is merely a neighbor's yard and that Jinny is prettier than Susan, Bernard leads her down a secret path where she temporarily forgets her agony and sees what he can imagine: "'I see the lady writing. I see the gardeners sweeping,' said Susan. 'If we died here, nobody would bury us'" (17). An ordinary house lodges a mystery woman and the garden offers the thrill of danger and adventure. Life proves malleable as long as she steps out of her mood and creates a fictional Susan, the "alien subject" who is capable of feeling anything—or at least of reading the same text, mental state, or self-history and seeing something new, Other, different.

But Susan cannot sustain this fictional self and the "double awareness" it can support; she slips quickly back into her desperate hoarding, identifying mood with self, assuming that how she feels must be the way she is. In contrast, Bernard supports so many fanciful selves that he becomes concerned about ever finding his real self and its own distinguishing emotions: "For I changed and changed; was Hamlet, was Shelley, was the hero, whose name I now forget, of a novel by Dostoevsky; was for a whole term, incredibly, Napoleon; but was Byron chiefly" (249). Role-playing enlarges our behavioral repertoire, for by identifying with others we discover facets of ourselves: "To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self" (116). But who is the Bernard who plays the roles? In public, he "bubbles; in private, is secretive" (76), but what that secretive self is, he cannot describe: "A man of no particular age or calling. Myself, merely" (81). Personality belongs to the "many rooms" that provide the stimulus to create "many Bernards" (260). In solitude he disappears: "When I cannot see words

curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. When I am alone I fall into lethargy" (132–33). If there is an underlying self to the many Bernards, it extends beyond language, beyond mood. We may be tempted to consider him the euthymic self, pale and transparent compared to the vivid manic and depressive alternatives, but he is more than that. He is the problem Woolf has been considering for thirty years: when "normal," she looked back upon her various moods and marveled at the difference between them. Who was the real Woolf? Obscured by moods, unavailable to introspection, resisting neat answers, can the inclusive Woolf even be approximated by language? In summing up the novel, Bernard attempts to incorporate all these various selves. As in To the Lighthouse , a work of art provides the model:

"And now I ask, 'Who am I?' I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct?. . .

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me. . . shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves." (288–89)

Harper speculates that this configuration of characters is analogous to Freud's psychic triad: Neville and Jinny as the id, Louis and Rhoda the superego, Bernard and Susan the ego. Since Freud's therapeutic goal was to facilitate ego mastery over ever-increasing areas of the unconscious, Bernard should logically emerge as identity-spokesperson.^[15] But the role of the authoritative word-giver cannot capture the experience of the many selves, the plurality of intrasubjective life—as Bernard himself tells us: "Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle. . . . Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand others. How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole" (256). Identity is never complete, because even unborn selves must be embraced. Bernard is composed not merely of actual selves but of selves that must be continually created and continually integrated without conclusion. What can be imagined for oneself is as real as what one feels to be true; indeed, they often amount to the same thing. Identity is not an illusory order imposed by ego but an irreducible array of shimmering fragments: the wave, the trough, the self sinking and floating, the self as subject watching and the self as object

being watched, "and a thousand others": the all-inclusive Bernard. Woolf here suggests a valuable lesson for other manic-depressives: that finding out who they are should not involve denying "ill" selves, reducing identity to the sanest, most conventional, socially conforming part of themselves. Manic and depressive selves are "ill" only if exclusively in control, just as the euthymic self can also be "ill" if it pretends that there are no irrational depths to subjectivity, that all is clean, orderly, and apparent. A sane reading of literature is not necessarily a good one if it slavishly reinforces our habitual beliefs about literature.

Although Woolf's awareness of the plurality of consciousness came through her experience of manic-depressive illness, her insight into intra-subjective life extends far beyond her particular disorder. The proliferation of self-representations, the creation of other "me's" within "myself," appears in florid forms in mental states such as fugues, multiple personality, and hypnotically induced dissociation. In multiple personalities, for instance, autonomous self-representations have no specified limit. Some patients exhibit only three personalities; Sybil Dorsett presented sixteen, two of whom were male. Each new personality emerged in response to a particular crisis or change in circumstance and took on an entirely independent existence, exhibiting distinctive traits and attitudes, buying its own clothes, establishing separate bank accounts under its own name, taking different jobs. Some were aware of each other and regarded the others as separate persons. All these subpersonalities were active concurrently, even though only one at a time determined Dorsett's behavior and subjective experience.^[16]

Hypnosis also provides evidence that consciousness can be subdivided. Ernest Hilgard instructed normal individuals to create a "hidden observer" within themselves who watched unmolested while the "official ego" was hypnotized and behaved in uncharacteristic ways. He told a hypnotized student that he was deaf but then suggested that a part of his mind would remain intact to hear and remember everything that was said to him. The "deaf" personality was obediently unresponsive to verbal questions and unexpected loud noises behind his back, but Hilgard was also able to interview the hidden observer, who did hear and reacted to all that transpired. Upon awakening from his trance, the student was unable to recall having heard anything during the procedure until he was hypnotized again and the "deafness" was removed from memory. Only then did the barred auditory information, which had been fully processed, understood, and stored by the co-consciousness, become available. Hilgard

concluded that "the hidden observer is in all respects like the normal observing part as found in waking. It is objective and well oriented to reality." Divided consciousness also occurs, of course, in ordinary waking life—e.g., when we indulge in fantasy while talking to others, working, or driving a car.^[17]

The functional compartmentalization of consciousness, in which two concurrent streams of processing selectively feed into self-awareness, can help enrich and deepen experience. Many readers screen whatever ideas or feelings a text inspires that are incongruent with their identity-theme—the left hemisphere-dominant program of consciousness—and thus find themselves cheated of a fall response to the text.^[18] Christopher Bollas likewise maintains that unless a psychoanalyst is willing to become "situationally ill" by creating a generative split in his own ego—one part receptive to varying degrees of his patient's "madness," the other part simultaneously observing as a "not-ill" analyst—he will perceive only what his analytical skills and his psychoanalytical theory will allow: a onedimensional view of the patient.^[19] In both reading and psychoanalysis, "alien thoughts" create a subtle dissociation within the self: an "alien subject" who finds (or is "created" to find) these anomalous ideas compelling. If we integrate this other subject, we grow as human beings. But before growth there must first be discovery, the recognition of that dissociated subject who has read the same book but has had a different experience of it. This particular dissociated subject need not be a permanent feature of our makeup; it may be only an ongoing capacity that is "reprogrammed" each time an occasion arises that calls for divided or plural responses. Thus, each book we read invites us, in its own unique way, to co-create our experience of reading it. One blanket reading strategy is inadequate. Perhaps that is why human beings like to read fiction: it gives us the opportunity to put our multiple subroutine programming capabilities to use.

As Woolf knew by experience, such doubling occurs frequently in delusional psychotics. In hypnosis, the subject believes in imagined experiences directed by the hypnotist ("Your arms feel heavy"), in psychosis, the patient believes in his interpretation of a perception as if it were itself the perception ("My arms are being restrained by powerful magnets"). Neither subject is sufficiently aware of his own role in creating the experience and so shows less skepticism than a "normal" individual would.^[20] Both may harbor a "hidden observer" or co-consciousness who doubts that the anomalous or suggested experience is real, but psychotics tend to invest

a great deal of emotional commitment in their delusions, whereas hypnotized subjects rarely defend their adopted ideas with conviction and vigor: one is ill (and cannot integrate conflicting domains of consciousness); the other is only hypnotized (though "blind," he will not walk in front of speeding cars, evidence that some integration is still operating). Both demonstrate that the key to conscious awareness of reality is self-reference, which links the internal representation of a current perception with the representation of the self as the experiencer. As long as consciousness is divided into domains that cannot be integrated fully (because of psychosis or hypnotic suggestion), the "I" loses integrative control over perception, belief, and behavior.^[21] Thus, because Peter Walsh is not ill, his "I" can entertain fantasies in one domain while another co-conscious "I" keeps tabs on and control over conviction and behavior (just as readers do), but Septimus's self-reference is overwhelmed by two unintegrated domains processing contradictory experiences: the "I" who sees flames beneath the pavement, and the "I" who wonders futilely why he is seeing such impossible things. A biochemically disordered brain not only mismanages sensory perception, combining fear and flames into one percept, but also disables the ability of consciousness to integrate various domains: experience, instead of being processed as a richly layered, multidimensional, and personal event, is unraveled by many hands grasping for meaning. Richness is squandered on florid and inappropriate interpretations, and the individual, cheated of the reward of finding comprehension in his or her perceptions, is impoverished.

Woolf too saw the mind as many-chambered ("I have a very clear notion which parts of my brain think" [Letters 1: 357]) and herself as a traveler who walked through lighted rooms, exploring. She saw her experience of overproductive mania versus debilitating depression as related to the disintegration of identity, while recognizing that even delusion demonstrated the infinite capacities of her imagination. She also realized that a creative reading and writing strengthened the integrative capacity of consciousness she needed to survive manic-depressive illness. It made her feel whole, gave her the ability to entertain all sorts of perspectives, while creating a narrative that gave a liberating form to the self that felt so many fragmented things.

If secondary-process thinking can be creatively subdivided, then our model of the psyche must become more complex than Freud had envisioned. Hilgard argues that we need to reexamine those "sudden inspirations" that seem to come out of nowhere but which yield innovative

solutions or creative products. We have traditionally associated creativity with the spontaneity of fantasy-oriented primary-process thinking rather than with the more reality-oriented secondary process, an assumption that readily authorizes psychoanalytic explorations of the unconscious significance of works of art. Artists themselves (Woolf included) customarily describe their creative experiences in terms of extreme depths which bubble up to reveal new perspectives, ideas, or shapes, characters who come to life, sometimes even whole lines or stanzas of verse.^[22] Energized by hypomania, Woolf conceived her plan for To the Lighthouse "in a great, apparently involuntary, rush" while walking around Tavistock Square:

One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly. (Moments of Being 81)

The source of inspiration need not be unconscious simply because it is obscure or spontaneous, or because it is related to the artist's past or personal needs. A divided consciousness using parallel processing to work on two or more problems would produce similar effects, and it would explain why whole stanzas or theoretical solutions may present themselves, well-ordered, coherent, yet deeply meaningful, even though the artist felt only dimly aware (or even completely unaware) that an answer was forthcoming.

There is a provocative connection between this doubled mind and the fact that each hemisphere of the brain is capable of separate consciousness: "the subjective unity of self, of thought and of personal experience is an illusion created by the limited capacity of self-awareness systems and their need to process information sequentially" in the dominant hemisphere.^[23] Woolf reached essentially the same conclusion through her experience with cyclic bipolar states, which can correspond to successive dual personalities.^[24] She too saw how limited self-awareness was, how the ego sees only one facet of experience at a time and creates the illusion of unity and coherence only by filtering out dissonance (via Holland's identity-theme, discussed in chapter 3, above).

In The Waves , Woolf suggests that we can at least begin to know ourselves better if we constantly create new, more meaningful fictions to embrace our disparate experiences, always accepting them—and our "selves"—as provisional. When Bernard asks his existential question—"How can I proceed now, I said, without a self, weightless and visionless, through

a world weightless, without illusion?" (285)—he is meeting the challenge of discovering just how shifting and insubstantial identity is. Many domains of consciousness may coexist within us, unrealized, "unborn," created when the need arises; like Jacob Flanders choosing his seat in the opera house, we find it convenient to settle upon habitual modes of thought. Bernard, however, makes the inconvenient choice. By imagining psychic fragmentation and accepting unborn selves, by recognizing that the problem of identity is always unfinished—and always unfinished theory, not substance—he creates the strength to proceed against death, the realm of true nothingness, the antithesis of consciousness and identity, the experience that cannot be narrated. Through writing, he gives voice to these debating selves, gives birth to himself, incorporating with new understanding what was actually always a part of himself. Death and madness no longer have the power to prove that identity is an empty illusion simply because it must be constructed out of fragments. If thinking is a confederation of narratives, a work of art, then Bernard can survive living for moments as Neville, Susan, Rhoda, Jinny, and Louis, each of them a wave rising and crashing. The mother's body is no longer needed to authorize identity.

Thus, The Waves ends a series of novels that allowed Woolf to imagine herself surviving as a manic-depressive. Fiction could not cure her bio-chemically based illness, but it did give her a stage on which to set characters embodying bewildering, unconnected symptoms, and this dramatization of her mental states helped her recognize not only her illness but her wellness too: the sane and the insane, side by side, plural yet one, the one Virginia Woolf.