The Force of the Blow – Traumatic Memory in Virginia Woolf’s Writing

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s notion of memory, outlined in her memoir “A Sketch of the Past”, destabilises conventional conceptions of the relation between past and present. For Woolf, memory escapes linear time: past and presence no longer follow each other chronologically. Paradoxically, remembered scenes render the past present. It is important to note that only special experiences, characterised as moments of being, have this potential. In contrast to everyday life, which is “not lived consciously”, moments of being are described as “sudden, violent shocks”, remembered “forever”. At the same time, moments of being are only created in retrospect, when they are written down. In this sense, one can observe a striking parallel between Woolf’s moments of being and the notion of traumatic memory outlined by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The article shall focus on the way in which traumatic memories find their way into Virginia Woolf’s literary texts. References to traumatic events like World War I do not occur in the form of narrated past events, but as memory traces articulating themselves in a symptomatic and performative manner. Thus, traumatic memories are preserved in her words as present symptoms that are encountered and acted out by the readers.