The Heterotopic Imagination: Remembrance of Woolf's Past

I’d like to focus on the interesting premises and assumptions on which the literary form of autobiography is based. As an enterprise that ostensibly and reliably accounts for a person’s life, the form provokes the ever pertinent question of how any kind of writing or narrating can purport to represent a stage of life in its entirety and objectivity. Woolf zeroes in on this when he admits that “[d]airies and letters almost always give an exaggerated, one-sided picture of the writer’s state of mind… Even to ourselves we habitually exaggerate the splendours and miseries of our life”. Woolf's constant referring to letters that he writes to Lytton show up the fact that he relates to himself as text that is self-consciously fashioned and produced. He also sees other people as characters coming out from other colonial literary texts like Kipling's.

While never reaching the comic and absurd extremes like Tristram Shandy does in his quest to hold a mirror to his own life, Woolf shows us that writing is indeed a form of disciplining the self. Like Proust’s narrator, Woolf reaches into his past and finds meaning and significance in the events that have happened and that thus can become aesthetically representable. In fact, Woolf’s writing makes explicit what is inherent in all writing: by separating the “I” that writes in 1960 about events that have happened in 1905, autobiography as a form posits that textual meaning can only arise as a result of this deferral in time, and displacement of space. The retrospective coding of colonial place as something sacrificed to modernity achieves its resonance at the juncture of its topographical reality that inheres, and its necessary deferral into a form of textual “exotic” and unreality. The event of writing (of the self) happens through this distance achieved.