1. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1931), p. 215; subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition in its separate paperback issue (1978).

2. Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 69.

3. 16 November 1931, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1982), p. 53.

4. William Butler Yeats, Introduction to Fighting the Waves (1934), quoted in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, in re Woolf's allusion to "Old Yeats . . . writing about me" (vol. 4, p. 255n.28).

5. 7 January 1931, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 4, where she is speaking, in particular, of the attempt in Bernard's soliloquy to "break up, dig deep."

6. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich), p. 212; Woolf, "Longer version" of Between the Acts, p. 230, continued from "Typescript with author's ms. corrections, unsigned, dated throughout from April 27, 1938-July 30, 1939, 186 pp." (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).

7. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1927), where the aspiring female writer is said to find no "common sentence ready for her use," only "a man's sentence" (p. 79).

8. Attempting to rescue Woolf's call for "androgyny" from charges of feminine defeatism, Toril Moi argues in Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist continue

Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985) for a Kristevan reading of Woolf precisely because of Kristeva's resistance to a "metaphysical belief in strong, immutably fixed gender identities" (p. 13). My phonotextual approach to voicing in Woolf means to reject as completely as Kristeva does any feminine "essentialism" about voice as the unmediated language of the female body, a position one finds expounded, for instance, in the writing of Hélène Cixous, as summarized by Moi in her subsection " Ecriture féminine 2) the source and the voice," pp. 113-19.

More tightly focused around issues of linguistic engenderment at the level of morphology itself is the closing and title chapter of Louis Marin's La voix excommuniée: essais de mémoire (Paris: Galilée, 1981). The homophonic cryptogram, or inscribed cryptophone, of Stendhal's secret writing on the inner lining of his belt -- especially its junctural syncopation of letters and pauses at J(e) vais and voir/la -- seems to authorize in advance the concluding move of Marin's book. There, he audits the inner lining, as it were, of an operatic phrase from Manon, as sung by his sister, in order to mount an oblique argument about the return of voicing to text, an argument that he knows may seem like "verbal evidence substituted for the evidence of ideas" (p. 173; my translations of this closing section). The sung line in question: "Adieu, notre petite table" (p. 174). Over the course of ten pages, Marin speculates on an enunciation of the "t(e)" sufficient to forestall the liaison with " t able" and thus to introduce a stray vowel cluster into a new set of free-form associations. The graded run of these vocalic associations, ti/te/ta, anticipates, on Marin's hearing, both the iterative internal echo of "ti/tubant" (pp. 175, 180; for the "careening" of the echo's own "noise" [p. 182]) and the missing /o/ that would generate out of peti/to/table a virtual anagram of the " tableau phonologique" itself (p. 182). From such lateral counterplay is generated at any number of levels the "double difference" (p. 180) which casts "te" into simultaneous distinction from the substantive (and substantial) "table" it somehow reform(ulate)s as well as from that adjectival root it would ordinarily complete and feminize. This last is the most far-reaching aspect of Marin's reading: the "deconstruction" of "petite" (through its own hyper-articulation) leading to implicit inferences about the arbitrary engenderment of discourse and the polymorphous lexical perversity of its undoing. For Marin, there is a "force" in the "sonorous flux" that "displaces 'te'" (in its "floating between 'peti' and 'table'") and recasts it as a register of vacillation between "feminine and masculine, in a difference which is the difference, the neuter itself" (p. 181).

Marin ascribes this "secret" (p. 185) syncopation of the written text (in allusion, one presumes to the earlier "secret" on the inside of Stendhal's belt) to the productive rewriting of the written by the read. His book closes by offering -- in answer to the question "how is the auto(biographical) able to engender an ex(communicated or communicable)?" -- the final "affirmation: its Ex- has generated my Auto-" (p. 185). Expelled and/or expunged, exiled or continue

excised, the absent voice of the author has produced my voice as reader. Yet in all this theorizing of textual reception, there remains a vestigial mystification, it would seem, in which some sense of aural "communion" between author and reader -- rather than sheer textual generation -- is still the touchstone. Reading does the voicing, yes -- but then, on Marin's account, we also seem to be hearing voices, as if what is activated by the text, spun out of it, is in some sense an "echo" of what went into it. This is, again, that phantom of the "auto-bio-phonic" origin recuperated from within the "autobiographic" (see Chapter 3, n.33). Figures of origin may in Marin be just that, figurative, but at times something more may well seem at stake in his account than merely textual simulacra -- even in the co-productive sense of syncopated vocalization. Though admitting that the "communication of self to a possible reader" is constituted by "nothing else but the tactics of writing" and that any "singular essence" and "proper sense" always "melt into literal insignificance" -- hence suffer, in a word, "excommunication" -- nevertheless "they remake themselves in the same movement, outside of all signifying intention, and reproduce themselves outside of all transcendental synthesis" (p. 176). They do so, however, at least so Marin is moved to add -- in an acoustic metaphor(?) begging the very textual question he has so importantly located -- they do so "in echo of a voice that all symbolic articulation has 'originarily' excommunicated" (p. 176). Part of the question is to what extent autobiography -- self-writing, the very "life" of the author in words -- is the privileged locus of this echo. But this question aside, Marin's work, as I suggested in Chapter 3, joins that of Finas in its insistence on reading itself as a text. If all Marin means to suggest by the "echo" of origin is that the phoneme, rather than the speaking voice, is the victim of an excommunication by the grapheme, a banishment instated at the founding moment of symbolization, but that this e-dict against the "saying" within the "said" (again, see Chapter 3, n.33) is rendered reversible in the reading act, then this returning (from nowhere) of the phonic to the fold of read writing is very much what my book, and what Woolf in her genderless "reprise" of one word in the next (to borrow Marin's metaphor for textual "darning"), are after. In light of Marin's own earlier work (see Utopics: Spatial Play [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984 (originally published in French in 1973)]), this could indeed be called the return from the "utopic" space of internal difference, a return sounded, latently, upon the body of the reader.

9. Quite apart from her work in modernist poetics, Julia Kristeva has written of the female psyche in its uneasy relation to the three main modes of temporal consciousness that she finds governing Western culture. See her "Women's Time," trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7 (Autumn 1981): 13-35, in which her hypotheses bear directly not only on Rhoda's exile from temporal continuity but on the linguistic metaphors that figure such an exclusion in her own mind. Woolf's title, The Waves, happens to signal one such temporal mode: the cyclic, the time of eternal renewal so often mythi- soft

cally associated with the feminine. Woolf has Bernard, her novelist spokesman, evoke this sense of time -- in chiasmus and in affirmation -- on the last page of the novel: "Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again" (p. 297). If cyclical time is associated with the maternal, the regenerative, the other pole of temporal consciousness, the one identified not with repetition but with eternity, is also linked with a feminine principle. As against cyclical time, this is what Kristeva calls "monumental time." Rather than linear, progressive, it is instead all-encompassing, potentially devouring. In between repetition and eternity, cyclicity and monumentality, falls succession, the "time of history," a temporality that, for Kristeva, "renders explicit a rupture, an expectation, or an anguish which other temporalities work to conceal" (p. 17). This is the temporality in which Rhoda, Woolf's female alter ego in The Waves, can never quite relax, for she "cannot make one moment merge in the next" (p. 130). It is no accident that, in Kristeva's terms, what fails Rhoda is not only the recalcitrant time of history but, by an analogous sense of successivity, the duration of language itself: the linear time, as Kristeva has it, of "noun + verb," a time which "rests on its own stumbling block, which is also the stumbling block of . . . enunciation -- death" (p. 23) or, in other words, void . This is Rhoda's central apprehension, her panic -- a recognition of that death by severance underlying the analogy between time and language, a death whose gaping blank returns as soon as it is repressed. This is because language, like time under the aspect of history, is founded (Kristeva here follows Lacan) on the separation anxiety reproduced by, if not reducible to, syntax itself. In Kristeva's view, a common (though by no means "essential") female reaction to this anxiety, exaggerated in those women psychoanalysis terms "hysterics," is "to deny . . . separation and the language which ensues from it, whereas men (notably obsessionals) magnify both and, terrified, attempt to master them" (pp. 24-25). Woolf plots a more complex story upon a similar gender grid, with the "terror" over severance and death being divided between her suicidal heroine and the male writer figure who never more than intermittently masters it.

10. J.-A. Miller, "La suture (éléments de la logique du signifiant)," delivered on 24 February 1965, to Lacan's seminar, and published in French in Cahiers pour l'analyse 1 (1966): 37-49; rpt., as "Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)," trans. Colin MacCabe, Screen 18 (Winter 1977-78): 24-34. For the technical argument upon which Miller bases his discussion, see Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin, 2d ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968). With a comparable psycholinguistic agenda, as indicated by the title Desire in Language (ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980]), Julia Kristeva chooses to overthrow rather than revise Frege, along with other twentieth-century logicians, as "ineffective within the realm of poetic language," given their allegiance to the "0-1 sequence" (p. 70). Following Bakhtin in her approach to continue

nonmonologic form, Kristeva's "polyvalent narrative" requires a "poetic logic" which "would embody the 0-2 interval, a continuity where 0 denotes and 1 is implicitly transgressed" (p. 70). Instead of such a wholesale evacuation of the unitary in favor of the double integer, the interests of the present discussion--and precisely in their debt to the Kristevan "semiotic" realm before symbolic regimentation--gravitate instead toward that absence-within-presence of the 1-2 sequence: never a gradation in plenitude, always an elision of the recurrent blank, the sliding cipher necessitated by incremental transition.

11. See Joan Copjec, "The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine," October 23 (Winter 1982): 46, a position which might legislate, in turn, Kristeva's more radical departure from Frege's theory (see n. 10 above).

12. See above, Chapter 1, p. 46.

13. See above, Chapter 3, p. 104.

14. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 25-27, from which this further paraphrase of her argument about the semiotic chora is drawn.

15. In my essay, "Catching the Stylistic D/rift: Sound Defects in Woolf's The Waves, " ELH 54 (Summer 1987): 442-43, I consider Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's critique of French psychoanalytic claims about female linguistic development, in light of Woolf's stylistic ambitions in The Waves; see Gilbert and Gubar, "Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality," New Literary History 16 (Spring 1984-85): 537. My essay also finds room for a fuller discussion than here of the Lacanian mirror stage as it serves to illuminate Rhoda's crisis in The Waves (see pp. 432-36). In a recent argument often running parallel to my own, Makiko Minow-Pinkney sees Woolf steering in her verbal experiments between "the complementary pitfalls of both feminist realism . . . and schizophrenic modernism"; see Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 155. Minow-Pinkney's study appeared at the same time as the ELH article on which this chapter is based. Her book answers, in a sense, half the call put out by Toril Moi (see n.8 above) for a "combination of Derridean and Kristevan theory" in "future feminist reading of Woolf" ( Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 15). Such an approach coincides with mine in finding much of the tension in The Waves focused around the character of Rhoda, a being "incapable of establishing the thetic subject" (p. 163). Minow-Pinkney writes that "though Woolf does not dislocate syntax, even in Rhoda's extreme assertions of psychic breakdown, she goes a long way toward emptying syntax of its function of articulation across the novel as a whole" (p. 172). Yet Rhoda's suicidal fate exposes the paradox of Woolf's endeavor: "Associated with whiteness and emptiness, outside time and logic, Rhoda marks out the locus of a feminine space, that non-symbolisable Other that must be repressed but none the less exist for a normative discourse to be installed." No such installation is possible, however, without selling out to the symbolic. "A continue

feminine discourse of the white spaces remains strictly a contradiction, impossible except as silence" (p. 183). This is where Minow-Pinkney's argument and mine part company. Among all the recent treatments of The Waves, hers is the theoretical investigation most drawn to stylistic issues, but her concentration on syntax as touchstone disables her from answering her own best question: "How indeed is it possible to actualise a feminine writing that is not organised around phallocentric identity and positionality, but would none the less not just be lost in silence?" (p. 186). My answer should by now be clear. Making syntax itself possible, segmentation creates the spaces that register as blanks; transegmental drifts invade and animate those gaps with a fluid continuity apart from strict "syntagmatic constraints" (p. 172). To write from, as well as across, those gaps may be Woolf's way of speaking the feminine in prose, loosening not only the "ligatures" but many of the other binding obligations of a hierarchical discourse.

16. Gilbert and Gubar, "Sexual Linguistics," p. 531, quoting the passage from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway ([New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927], pp. 122-23). It is interesting to note that the expository wordplay of these two authors, though far more cerebral and less "enigmatic" than Woolf's, is still lexically transgressive, a teasing of the spaces between words. See especially the sliding open of the idiom "alas and alack" into the Lacanian parody (in style as well as in substance) of "a lass and a lack" (p. 537). The passage at issue in Mrs. Dalloway is also mentioned in passing by Makiko Minow-Pinkney, where it is aligned with the "pre-symbolic" in Kristeva's terms; see Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, p. 73. More recently yet, in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), Jane Marcus's introduction to this collection of her essays on Woolf concludes with a section, influenced by Kristeva, called "Moaning and Crooning: The Charwoman's Song" (pp. 10-17) in which she numbers the old crone from Mrs. Dalloway among those representatives of Woolf's "socialist feminist aesthetic" (p. 11) who fuse the energies of labor and language, "tunneling a channel into the obscure origins . . . where language follows the rhythms of the body" (pp. 12-13).

17. Virginia Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, transcribed and ed. J. W. Graham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), draft 2, p. 733.

18. Translated as "breach" in Kristeva's Revolution (see p. 247n. 71).

19. Xaviere Gauthier, "Is There Such a Thing As Women's Writing?" trans. Marilyn A. August, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 164.

20. The first death scene Virginia Woolf wrote comes at the end of her first novel, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1920), where Rachel dies quietly in her fiancé's arms. As the heroine's mind is emptied out of the scene, we are drawn into the hero's with an indirect discourse, much continue

worked over at the draft stage, that would seem to cure the void of death with an idiomatic, a dismissive sense of "nothing." Writes Woolf for the hero: "this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to breath." Those impacted infinitive phrases seem odd, deliberately clinical, unperturbed, until one hears them as part of a pulsional code, a counterpoint, something which the very fact of an infinitive grammar is meant to resist. The point of the passage in context is of course that death ends nothing between the lovers except Rachel's breathing. But listen to what shadows it in passing: "It was nothing. It was to cease  . . ." The infinitive phrase of an action, "to cease," itself the logical negation of an action, easily collapses, even in silent reading, into the disyllabic and etymologically related noun of death itself, decease, hermetically sealing the very gap of scriptive difference or functional negativity that syntax, on behalf of rhetoric, is still trying to keep open. Here, as in Bernard's sentence-long rendition of Rhoda's death, I am further developing the phonemic implications of two cadenced phrasings already investigated from a different perspective in my Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 263-64, 303.

21. Julia Kristeva, "Phonetics, Phonology, and Impulsional Bases," trans. Caren Greenberg, Diacritics 4 (Fall 1974): 36.

22. Gertrude Stein, Four in.7erica (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1947), p. 125, in an essay putatively on Henry James. My thanks to Lorrie Sprecher for directing me to these passages.

23. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975 [originally published in French in 1973]), p. 66.

24. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 45.

25. Woolf, 28 March 1930, A Writer's Diary, p. 153.