Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Volume 6 of THE ESSAYS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, edited by Stuart Clarke (2000), contains Virginia Woolf's essays "Anon" and "The Reader."

In our contemporary oral culture 2.0, songs abound on the radio and in other forms of communications media that accentuate sound.

Mark Hussey, who is now an administrator at Texas A&M University, is also the author of the book THE SINGING OF THE REAL WORLD: THE PHILOSOPHY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF'S FICTION (1986).

Hussey is not wrong in suggesting in the subtitle of his above-mentioned 1986 book that the so-called philosophy expressed in Virginia Woolf's novels can be characterized, figuratively speaking, as singing the real world.

For a relevant discussion of expressing a so-called philosophy in oral culture 1.0, see David M. Smith's perceptive 1997 essay "World as Event: Aspects of Chipewyan Ontology," which is reprinted in the 360-page anthology OF ONG AND MEDIA ECOLOGY: ESSAYS IN COMMUNICATION, COMPOSITION, AND LITERARY STUDIES (2012, pages 117-141). Smith is an anthropologist who lived and worked with the Chipewyan people in western Canada. Many of his professional publications center on their narratives.

In his above-mentioned essay, Smith borrowed Ong's expression about the world-as-event sense of life. See Ong's article "World as View and World as Event" in the AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pages 634-647.

Ong contrasts the world-as-event sense of life in oral culture 1.0 with the world-as-view sense of life that emerged historically in ancient Greek philosophic thought as exemplified in the works of Plato and Aristotle.

Concerning the world-as-view sense of life expressed in ancient Greek philosophy, see Andrea Wilson Nightingale's book SPECTACLES OF TRUTH IN CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY: THEORIA IN ITS CULTURAL CONTEXTS (2004).

Virginia Woolf was not an oral singer of tales in oral culture 1.0. Nor did she write any scripts for plays, as Shakespeare and other playwrights did, nor for radio programs (in oral culture 2.0) -- or for movies. Instead, she was a writer of tales for publication in print culture 1.0. In addition, she was a prolific writer of essays, book reviews, letters, diaries, and even biographies. She and her husband Leonard Woolf were also publishers; they owned and operated Hogarth Press. In her day, she was a public intellectual, as was G. K. Chesterton, for example.

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S PERIODIC BREAKDOWNS

Periodically, Virginia Woolf suffered breakdowns. As a result, she could be the famous face in ads for a public-awareness campaign about bipolar disorder and/or suicide prevention and/or complicated grief.

No doubt her fear of another breakdown contributed to her decision to commit suicide in 1941.

In her breakdowns, powerful forces in her psyche overpowered her ego-consciousness. At times in her breakdowns, she heard voices. In the Hebrew Bible, individual persons who hear voices are known as prophets. In other instantiations of oral culture 1.0, shamans experienced what we today refer to as auditory and visual hallucinations.

In the controversial book THE ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (1977), Julian Jaynes claims that our pre-historic ancestors in oral culture 1.0 heard voices.

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