Woolf’s Embodied Cognitive Aesthetics: The Waves

Abstract

In 'Poetry, Fiction and the Future' (1927), also known as 'The Narrow Bridge of Art', Virginia Woolf delineates her vision of the future novel which would become The Waves (1931). She distinguishes between conventional prose narrative, which is linear and has a 'marvellous fact-recording power', and the composite narrative form she deemed vital for the modern era: part prose, part poetry, giving 'the outline rather than the detail' (1927a: 435). This closely corresponds to Susanne K. Langer's (1953; 1957) conception, enhanced by Adrienne Chaplin-Dengerink's (1999) modifications, of discursive and non-discursive symbolization as presented in Chapter 4. Written around the time To the Lighthouse was published, Woolf's essay prefigures Langer's cognitive aesthetic theory through its concern with the intricate correlation between perception, cognition and intuition within subjective experience. The future novel, Woolf stipulates, ought to '[extend] the scope […] so as to dramatise some of those influences which play so large a part in life, yet have so far escaped the novelist': the power of music, […] the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of colour, the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which become so irrationally in certain places or from certain people. (1927a: 439)