The Voyage Out: Towards the Far Side of Language

Abstract

One of Virginia Woolf’ s most eloquent statements on the role of language appears in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ where she asserts that, in order to understand Aeschylus,

it is not so necessary to understand Greek as to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks of us Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into other words. The meaning is just on the far side of language. (C I, 7)

The passage accurately describes the workings of Woolf’s own mature art, yet even in her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), language attains the concentration and suggestiveness of poetry. The novel rewards patient analysis, for in Rachels’ restive questioning of the functions of language, Woolf introduces what will become a persistent theme in all her works: the problem of how words can encompass and communicate human experience. Further, it is in The Voyage Out that one discovers Woolf labouring to achieve what she would later effect with felicitous ease: a mode of discourse which compels the reader’s active participation, guiding us to the point where we can make our own intuitive leap, to apprehend a reality that will not submit to denotative prose.