Virginia Woolf. In the nerves of writing

Beyond genre- or rather inside and against genre- Woolf’s essays, short stories, novels, and diary-writing can be read as a different nuance of the same challenge: a ‘try’ overdrawing the boundaries of narrative conventions and testing the figures (the narrator, characters, voices) that structure the discourse within the text. Rereading Virginia Woolf and embarking on a revised account of Woolf’s experience as a writer means facing a bewildering amount of critical commentary that copes with key issues related to “life” as a whole, and to the towering problem of “writing life”. “The nerves of writing” mentioned in the title mainly refer to what is acknowledged as the matrix-subject of Woolf's writing. “What is life”; what goes on in its name; which are its boundaries; how to cope with the “flickers” and signs we put into this ‘portmanteau’: these are facets of Woolf’s central obsession. And such obsession works as a major narrative magnet: it nourishes/feeds? a palimpsest of fiction and meta-fiction where self-scrutiny (steeped in autobiography) relates to the recognizance of the self (as an “I”, as a woman, as an Author), to the tunnelling within in search of one’s many selves, as well as to a psycho-collective history retrieved along pre-individual and trans-historical traces—as Deleuze’s concept of a “deterritorialised subject” has taught us to discern.