A watery umwelt : intercorporeal currents in Virginia Woolf’s the waves and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy

Abstract

This article explores possibilities of narrative and textual Umwelten or relational systems in The Waves in dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied ontology. It reads the text as concerned with various forms of intercorporeality: that is, the shared tangibility and relationality between bodies, parts of one flesh or times and places, and the intervals or gaps between these. It traces a variety of narrative and textual kinships in The Waves, exploring the congruencies and divergences between the two thinkers in relation to their approaches to life as an interconnected weave of the human and nonhuman. Ultimately, it suggests that situating Woolf’s practice as intercorporeal allows one to think differently about the potential of literary language to foster dynamic meaning-making environments that avoid hierarchization or anthropocentrism.