Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? Woolf’s ‘Gigantic Conversation’

Nearing the end of writing The Waves, Virginia Woolf struggled with the book's closure. "[H]ow to [ . . . ] press it into one", she wondered, "it might be a `gigantic conversation"'. The Waves never presents us with "conversation" in the usual sense of the term. Instead the book's six voices "melt into each other with phrases [ . . . ] are edged with mist. [ . . . ] [and] make an unsubstantial territory" (W, ii). In The Visible and the Invisible, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau‑Ponty provides us with a term for this "unsubstantial territory": "flesh" (la chair). "The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance" but rather a "general thing" (1‑39), a phenomenon of reciprocal contact between perceiving subjects.