The Notion of Lessness: Revisiting Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room through Dialogism

Abstract

Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, – a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. - Notes on the Eternal Recurrence – Vol. 16 Nietzsche’s Complete Works (in English) As per the idea of conceiving a complex text and the politics of its representation goes, the Greek concept of ‘Phronesis’ or practical wisdom plays an intriguing part to the ‘understanding’ of that which is apparent. Now literature with self-interpretation of the historically given textuality with a contextual contravention involving socio-moral psychological exegesis can be intriguing enough to problematize the set notions of truth or morality. 1922 the in-between (of the two major Wars on the planet) year marked the reality of a tiresome humanitarian world that diminished the idea of the organic being which was primarily deconstructed by the very 1859 book of Darwin. Freud with the three divisions of mind: Id, Ego, Super Ego, corollary to Unconscious, Subconscious, Conscious untogethered the notions of full-fledged human system that could exist in or outside the text. In this context, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (October, 1922) is worth to be re-read as a commencement text of the reader’s response. A multi-vocal attitude throughout the novel gives us the idea of the peripheral. The broken metanarratives of micro familial relations reveals the macro with reference to a newly emerging formlessness. In this paper we would try to point out the notion of ‘lessness’ in the novel as a primary signifier of the century and how it discloses world with values redeemed in a waste-land only to be juxtaposed with a Sisyphean barrenness of repetition.