The Organism of the Letter

This book examines Virginis Woolf's The Waves as a point of crises in her writing career: in her previous works, Woolf was able to construct iambic rhythm and topological shapes as substitutes for that part of the symbolic which did not work for her. The rhythm and the topological structures Woolf assigns in her texts serve as her sinthomatic solution; the singular solution of the subject in the form of his creation. Both the rhythm and the topological shapes are symbolic prosthetic substitutes that hold the real in a net-like form. When that net breaks, as happens in The Waves, Woolf is left facing the real. Woolf's constructed rhythm is the solution she comprises as a result of a racing pulse that indexes an irregularity of the symbolic. The topological shapes are Woolf's attempt at creating an imaginary, non-specular body; the topological shapes give body to Woolf's real organism and serve as their extension. This book also reveals Woolf's inability to continue manufacturing her organism, and her failure at composing a substitute rhythm. This failure, as manifested in The Waves, leads to Woolf's fatal passage into an object, and to her eventual suicide.