Arendt and Woolf: A Dialogue on Narrative
Nagehan Yanar [i]
“The most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all. Not only is it perhaps the only experience which we are unable to transform into a shape fit for public appearance, it actually deprives us of our feeling for reality to such an extent that we can forget it more quickly and easily than anything else […] Pain, in other words, truly a borderline experience between life as ‘being among men’ (inter homines esse) and death, is so subjective and removed from the world of things and men that it cannot assume an appearance at all” (HC, 50–51).
Hannah Arendt claimed that the sense of pain necessarily lacks visibility in the public sphere and that pain must remain private for the individual. Arendt’s verdict raises a particular question for literary studies: Can narrative unite the private with the public sphere to make pain visible to the common world? This question might engender a conversation between Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf, though both thinkers belong to different horizons of inquiry — literature and political philosophy. Woolf was a prominent figure in her age who invited people to ponder irreversible experiences that brought a sense of pain such as fascism, war, and totalitarianism. She used narrative to illuminate how inner feelings become apparent under the light of the public realm. While their reflections on the role of the artist (and especially with respect to narrative) unveil a potential dialogue between them, Arendt’s notion of narrative is very different from Woolf’s own.
Arendt claims that narrative, or “storytelling” in her phrasing, brings the private sphere into close relation with the public realm.[ii] Through narrative, the narrator unearths deeds and words of the individual by making the inner space visible to the public world. The personal, according to Arendt, is transferred to the public sphere with the aid of narrative as such. Narration is also an activity through which treasures of the past and memories are recollected in the mind. In a similar line, Woolf describes her writing method as a “tunneling process” to burrow into the mind of her characters and to lay bare new caves that connect the “pearls” of the past with the modern present.[iii] She situates herself in a position that attempts to break the boundaries of personal feelings aroused by the outer world. Woolf would therefore agree with Arendt that disclosing private experiences through narrative bestows a new reality on them. In other words, sharing the inner world with a new space of reality enables the writer to comprehend a fresh perspective per se.
However, Arendt makes an exception for the sense of pain, for pain leaves us destitute from the space of appearance and remains private for the individual. “The experience of great bodily pain,” Arendt declares, “is the least communicable of all.” Her conviction is that pain is deprived of visibility among other people because of its subjectivity. Given that pain cannot be transmitted to the outer world, can the novel, or “the only entirely social art form” in Arendt’s definition, take responsibility for endowing pain with appearance? (39). To my mind, narrating personal pain and suffering, such as war experiences, political chaos, and the death of beloved ones, expands our awareness that we are not alone in our private affairs. However, if pain is to be treated as “least communicable of all,” how can we convey and share our defeats, frustrations, and heartbreaks, and eventually, how can we come together with the aid of narrative? Narrative, insofar as it is not just the telling of fiction or illusion, is a human activity that makes these experiences visible to others in the shared world. Its more profound value resides in the fact that narrative bestows on the inner world a new space of reality, as Arendt once put it (50).
To return specifically to Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, we see how Woolf documents the romantic inwardness (Innerlichkeit) of her characters and the sense of pain after the First World War. Woolf’s narrative of the decline of the Ramsay family demonstrates the destructive outcomes of political turmoil. The second section of the novel shows the death of some family members including Mrs. Ramsay who stands in for Woolf’s beloved mother, Julia Stephen. Woolf questions the extent to which narrative can unify the darkness of the inward space with the brightness of the public sphere. In her narrative, the outer world does not disappear in romantic introspection, for it is the public sphere that illuminates the inner world. Woolf uses narrative as a tool to disclose both her own and her characters’ subjective feelings through omniscient narration. With the aid of narrative, Woolf tells of her own family memories and of the common world by narrating the daily life of the Ramsays. Storytellers, as Arendt puts it, “tell us more about their subjects, the ‘hero’ in the center of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it” (184). For Woolf, the narrative is a way of disclosing the identity of the narrator who recalls and interprets both private and public memories. Through narrative, she saves extraordinary experiences from the danger of being forgotten by making them permanent in the present. Woolf underlines how the inner space and its feelings are in need of the light of the public realm: “Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience … but as a wedge of darkness” (To The Lighthouse, 71). This is because the inevitable consequences of the war and political issues, meaning people’s pain, are intimately tied to the realities of the twentieth century. In this way, Woolf teaches us how to think politically by observing the private, the intimate.
Arendt’s and Woolf’s respective engagements with narrative also point to the essential role of the artist. Woolf, in her political essay “The Artist and the Politics,” declares that: “Art is the first luxury to be discarded in times of stress; the artist is the first of workers to suffer” (181). The artist must pay close attention to the public concerns of the common world; thus, narrative becomes essential in creating a common sense: “Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground” (Woolf “The Leaning Tower,” 125). Woolf’s understanding merges the private emotions with the public by inviting the artist to leave the protected shelter of the private realm, for the subject matter of narrative is broadly about the human condition. On the other hand, for Arendt, the distinction between private and public is extremely important to her idea of political action, which can be performed only in plurality. Experience, Arendt believes, is revealed through narrative. Action produces stories, and the role of the artist is to disclose these stories taken from daily life. In other words, narrative pertains to the inevitable break with radical subjectivity so as to make experiences become apparent to others. However, contrary to Arendt, Woolf shows how there is a close relationship between the most private feelings like pain and narrative. Fundamentally, this is about the requirement of being sensitive not only to our own inner world but to others’ worlds in order to figure out what we have experienced. As both Arendt and Woolf suggest, being-with-others provides the meeting of perspectives that dispel the limited point of view we have about our experiences so that we gain a clearer sense of objective reality of ourselves and of the world. As such, a common sense, in Arendt’s remark, emerges.
[i] Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Étienne Balibar, Louise Westling, Marina MacKay, Zeynep Direk, Ömer Aygün, Hatice Karaman, Bonnie Honig, James Martel, Maxime Rovere, Adriana Raducanu, and Anne Chapman for their incredibly insightful comments of earlier versions of this essay and for their encouragement. I would like to thank Jana Schmidt for inviting me to contribute to the Hannah Arendt Center Blog and for her brilliant editorial support.
[ii] I owe a special thanks to Étienne Balibar for reminding me of the different meanings of “storytelling” and “narrative” during our conversation about an earlier version of this essay.
[iii] In Woolf’s words: “How I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment” (A Writer’s Diary, 60).
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. Vintage Publishing, 2016.
— . “The Artist and Politics.” The Moment and Other Essays, The Hogarth Press, 1952.
— . “The Leaning Tower.” The Moment and Other Essays, The Hogarth Press, 1952.
— . A Writer’s Diary. Ed. Leonard Woolf. The Hogarth Press, 1953.
