‘Filamentary relations’: Virginia Woolf and India

Abstract

Woolf's own phrase, 'filamentary relations', referring to threads or filaments, 'webs of nerve', that reach out and touch, but may also snap and break, offers a better metaphor for Woolf's links with India than notions of filiation or affiliation. This essay traces the phrase 'filaments of the nerve' to Alexander Bain's The Senses and the Intellect (1855), the first text to mention a 'stream of consciousness'. I use the trope of the filament to explore the references to India that contextualize characters and histories in Woolf's work, the transnational modernist and anti-imperial print networks within which she was placed and the threads of connection that Indian writers work into their own texts. But just as the affective range of Woolf's textual filaments is limited by location and ideology, there are breaks and ruptures, too, in the networks of transnational modernism. Nevertheless, postcolonial Indian writers can be seen to look back at Woolf through lines of textual relation, filaments that form a postmodern web of connections. The essay offers a reading of responses to Woolf by Indian novelists across three generations: