울프의 단편과 사물(事物)의 시학

The Meaningness of Objects in Virginia Woolf

This study focuses on her exploration of the thingness of objects or things. Modernism, with many faces, shows its various potentials. With its deliberate symbolism it may lean towards idealism, but it may also lend itself to producing a ‘thingly’ work of art that reveals and in some way conjoins the historical movement of being. The modernist Woolf, in the face of the most uncertain and fluid times, seems to be fully conscious of the interaction and interdependence between the outer world and human consciousness. Virginia Woolf, in her very short and deceptively simple story “Solid Objects”, focalizes a man’s etishistic attachment to unusable things to the extent that all human (economic or cultural) value systems look problematic while things reaffirmed in themselves. As such, the story borders at once on Lukács’s critique of reification and on Heidegger’s meditation on the thingness of things. She explores two different attitudes of modernist art towards the marketplace: one turns its back on the marketplace and conceptualizes art as the sum of heroically collected and preserved fragments of life; the other defines itself in through the marketplace, with its meanings multiplied, negotiated, and co-produced by its consumers, which is to say that the marketplace provides moments of shared consciousness and interconnections between strangers. This difference involves not only two differing responses to modernity, but also two differing accounts of the artist’s relation to her work and readers. As mass production rendered mass culture an increasingly defining presence, Woolf would sometimes look nostalgically backward to the times before the age of mechanical reproduction. But she could positively align herself with the marketplace, providing a range of possible experiences which take shape only when one purchases as a consumer. That point is the dilemmatic boundary line on which the modernist Woolf stands just as do many other modernists. In her short fiction, however, Woolf not only privileges the shopper over the collector, but also redefines the shopping itself as an act of creating a social environment, in which the mind wanders freely over spectacles, meditates on losses and desires, and enters into sympathetic relationships with others. In addition, Woolf depicts consumption in the age of mechanical reproduction as an act of generosity and openness. In her portrayal of shoppers and collectors in her short fiction, I could trace some elements of post-modernist technique ahead of her times.