The aesthetical impact of the artistic personality in an expanded literary-cultural context in Rhoda's discourse in Virginia Woolf's The Waves
A Cognitive Pragmatic Approach
Dr. Mohammed Sameer Abd Elsalam
Rhoda is a singular and deep artistic character in Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves(1); It combines the glow of the pluralistic recurring beginnings, and the renewal in the creative representational voice of the potential other; That is why I see that Rhoda expands outside her own field towards the possibility of transition to a new ethereal, cognitive and imaginary field, in which she will be mixed with other spectra, potential artistic worlds drawn from art museums, theater characters, novel characters, and possible tales behind the narrator's discourse in the first communication model between the narrator and the recipient of her discourse. And also, the second model of communication is based on Rhoda's stream of consciousness in its artistic and potential interpretations within the wide network of the deeply interacted characters of Virginia Woolf's novel.
Then, we can infer the harmony of the narrator's discourse through the state of dynamic spectral spatial fluctuation which is inherent in Rhoda's consciousness and subconscious, and in the aesthetic interpretation of the multiple personal and spatial references in the novel; This unique state will be an appropriate entrance and compatible with the states of recurring emergence, absence, disappearance, the metaphor of the voice of the real other, the artistic or literary other, the metaphorical image in the mirror, or the self-image into a dream of falling, flying down, or swimming in a virtual space filled with artistic, natural, and historical sounds within an experimental room or an indefinite possible cosmic field.
Consequently, the discourse entails a kind of spatial-perceptual-figurative multiplication of the states of Rhoda's personality as well as of her other spectral presence in the deeper levels of the presence of the other personalities; so that, I see that Rhoda and Percival have an added aesthetic effect that renews the aesthetic identities of the other characters because Rhoda and Percival are closer to the artistic formation, transcending the absence and also the ethereal sphere affecting the structure of the network of relationships between the characters without belonging to it as a closed or separate unit.
In addition, we note that Rhoda's discourse includes repetition of the words dream, falling, the privacy of the face, the mirror, the voices, the water, and the indefinite experimental spatial field; Hence, Rhoda searches for a formative privacy, or another representative presence, or excessive privacy, or a pluralistic aesthetic presence mixed with disappearance, or that includes many voices in a wide dreamy and virtual spatial field that transcends the mirror, reality, and her historical identity.
Therefore, we see that Rhoda and Percival were close to the image of the beast, and the representative sounds in Louis's consciousness such as the old duke, Plato, the brown men, and others. Louis's old beast, for example, is similar to the hidden tone of emptiness accompanying Percival's absence, and the horror of division in the mirror in Rhoda's consciousness, and also his representative inner sounds resemble the renewal childbirth of Rhoda is in the vast virtual spatial field beyond the dream of falling, or the virtual cosmic swimming.
Additionally, we shall find that Rhoda's tone influences Susan's other undulating lives beyond her real presence, or in Jenny's performative states that resemble the deep levels of the subconscious, in the layers of sounds and places in Bernard's consciousness, and in the shades of Neville's readings and writings such as the specter of Shakespeare, the specter of Cleopatra, the specter of Hector, which be harmonious with the regeneration of the voice in the context of the evolution of the friends' lives and their implicit evocation of Rhoda's metaphorical field and waves of absence beyond the Percival's Void that relates to other levels of existence in the virtual experimental place that resembles Rhoda's feminine waters which also related to the microgravity in the imaginary external cosmic spaces.
*Context, communication attitude, and relevance:
We note that the broad social context in Virginia Woolf's discourse combines the virginity of the aesthetic perception of nature and the intuition of the first existence in the world, as well as the development of awareness of the natural aesthetic context according to the experimental rooms open to dreaming, daydreaming, the cosmic fields, and the old living experimental void recovered from the artistic and cultural heritage, and then the situation of social communication accepts expansion through its relationship with voices, personalities, and other experiential spatial references.
Moreover, If we re-read the context according to the theory of relevance of Sperber and Wilson, we will notice that the narrator selects the contextual indicator related to the literary and historical symmetry of the artistic personality. Rhoda's character, for example, is connected to other artistic and dreamy worlds as she searches for her face in the mirror, Susan's voice, and her wavy virtual reality; The personality then opens many levels of spiritual, ethereal, dreamy, and literary existence and accepts expansion in the world of the recipient of the discourse in another temporal context.
As for Rhoda, she chose the contextual indicator of the feminine imaginary fluctuation that precedes the formation of her own voice, or precedes the renewal of her literary entity, and expanded the stories and inferences related to the strength of her connection to the characters of dream and art in the distance between realization and delayed fall.
*The Visual Data of Rhoda according to Recurrent Processing Theory:
The void was not empty in Rhoda's consciousness; She sees herself in a state of division, ripple, or exit towards a possible artistic dream sound, so we can re-read her speech according to the relationship between neuroscience and consciousness in the recurrent processing theory according to Victor Lamme; We note here that Rhoda receives a set of visual data as entities in the void that are formed according to two types of brain processing. The first is the superficial recurrent processing, in which the brain calls for a wider local range, and Rhoda is formed as an experimental visual entity that combines invisibility and superior artistic presence. The second, deeper type of processing is global and broad, in which we can examine Rhoda's personality in connection with voices outside the local range beyond the fall or suspended flight, and this new visual data of Rhoda in pragmatic contextual reading leads to mixing it with other voices within Bernard and Neville, or with a wide range of sounds of the falling dream after its data is recovered globally in the waking state.
*Rhoda's mental state:
We can infer Rhoda's state of mind from her memory, dreams, daydreams, and emotional moods that tend to defer the firm boundaries of identity or being; Which makes her similar to a sophisticated dreamy wave even in the consciousness and subconsciousness of Virginia Woolf's discourse recipient in our current civil moment, and I also see that Rhoda resembles Cleopatra's spectrum recovered from Shakespeare's renewed personal reference in Woolf's novel, and it resembles the abstract, dynamic sound of birds alone in the vast external and literary spaces.
*Rhoda's internal representations:
Spatial and personal metaphorical margins are abundant in Rhoda's discourse and in her inner mental representations. The multi-layered room relates to the sounds of the universe and art, and the mirror relates to her soul, which is always divided between the voices of others, her dynamic deferred voice, the glow disappearance, and the possible dream voices. As for the water scene, it is a feminine imaginary scene similar to Bachelard's anima and makes her in a state of waking dreams, internal swimming, or internal flight that postpones the completion of the sound or its fall into the void.
*The main deductive argument in the discourse
The novel raises a major question or problem related to the birth of the voice, the birth of the creative voice of the character, and perhaps the sounds of birds and waves had a role in preparing for this renewed question in Virginia Woolf's discourse, and if we read the unity of the discourse as a whole, or the unity of Rhoda's discourse, we will find that the narrative discourse confirms the relative validity The hypothesis of the overlapping of the self-voice with the historical or literary other, and the result that the validity of the hypothesis entails will be the expansion of the creation of a renewed literary or dreamy voice that is more sensitive and effective in the personality of Rhoda, which confirms the hidden tone of disappearance and drains it at the same time.
*Cognitive metaphors and Blended Spaces:
We can note two major cognitive metaphors in Virginia Woolf's discourse on the character of Rhoda, and we can read them in terms of the cognitive efforts of Lakoff, Johnson, Faouconnier, and Mark Turner; The first cognitive metaphor implied in the discourse will be the interaction between the space of the first entry, which is the field of tension of Rhoda's voice or her fall, or her temporary disappearance, and the space of the second entry, which is the literary and imaginary liquid field, a vast field whose existence we infer beyond the discourse as a whole; The elements of similarity between the two mental spaces are represented in the formative literary dynamism, the possible transference of the narrative voice, and the rise of imaginative originality in the new other voice. Then, the blended perceptual space will be a vast, dreamy room open to literary waters and a vast cosmic space; The general sphere is the domain of the second birth of the voice in the world.
As for the second cognitive metaphor, it relates to the similarity between the first mental input space, which is the artistic personality in the narrative process; such as the characters of Louis, Neville and Bernard, and the second mental input space, which is the artistic personality, is accompanied by the aesthetic effect of Rhoda, which is the dynamic and renewed literary birth in the voice of the potential other; As for the elements of linkage and similarity between the two mental spaces, they appear behind the discourse in the artistic natural dynamism of the narrative voice, its historical closeness to the artistic, the universal, and the deferred Gothic world, and the ability to evoking Rhoda's spectrum within the processes of personal renewal; The general field will be the space of the personality's openness to the other, while the cognitive blended space will become the artistic personality that bears the effect of evoking the ethereal field of Rhoda within the special space closest to the wave or creative air.
*Some basic speech acts in the whole unity of the discourse:
We can recognize a collection of speech acts involved in Rhoda's discourse; such as the representative speech act which appeared in Rhoda's informing about her aesthetic vision of the landscape of nature and the realization of the element of verification mixed with disappearance in her inner world. Likewise, her discourse includes an implicit representative speech act related to the possibility of a wide literary spatial field of her voice accompanying the sounds of dreams and art. The representational speech act here leads to a kind of continuous cognitive modification of the development of Rhoda's metaphorical personality within the discourse and in possible reception processes and may lead to an active response related to the possibility of recalling Rhoda's aesthetic impact in another context in which the personality of the recipient of Woolf's discourse develops within a broad cultural context similar to the context of the Waves in terms of the breadth of natural reality and its openness to the effectiveness of dreamy sounds and literature.
Additionally, the novel includes an expressive speech act that appears in Rhoda's support for the representative voice within her, and an implicit directive speech act that appears in the renewal of the question about the meaning of the character and its possible dynamic presence. It consists in producing another question about Rhoda and its possible extension in other possible real and literary contexts. Also, the discourse includes an implicit promising speech act that seems to be possible to produce other images of Rhoda in many artistic mirrors of perceptual blending in the future, such as its possible mixing with mirror images that include the ghost of Mona Lisa by Da Vinci, the ghost of Lady Macbeth, or the transformed image of Ophelia by Shakespeare, or the mixing of her ethereal field with the ethereal field of the creative personality of Percival which was active and absent at the same time.
*Anaphoric Semantic Linking :
We can read the multiplicity of space layers and the polyphony of voices within Bernard in the end only by returning to the fluid feminine space and the metaphorical margins of Rhoda's quasi-cosmic room in the beginnings of discourse, as well as returning to the falling dream implied by another metaphorical rise in the daydream, and we are returning in this semantic context to Freud's connection in His book The Interpretation of Dreams between falling, childhood memories, innocent rush, play or punishment(2); Then the dream becomes an opening for a temporary absence, silence, or expansion of the representational play within Rhoda or Bernard
Finally, I find that presenting my study on Virginia Woolf at this time coincides with the month of International Women's Day in 2023, and also coincides with calling Rhoda's spectrum in a new cultural context.
*Notes:
(1) Read, Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Rosettabooks, New York, 2002.
(2) Read, Sigmund Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, Translated and Edited by James Strachey, Basic Books, New York, 2010, p. 69
Dr. Mohammed Sameer Abd Elsalam
Literary Critic and Art Critic
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