Virginia Wool’s The Waves as a Bloc of Sensations: Based on Deleuze’s Aesthetics

This paper studies Virginia Woolf's The Waves through Deleuze's aesthetics. According to Deleuze, the work of art as a bloc of sensations or a compound of percepts and affects is an experiment or an event that leads to the occurrence of sensations, which cannot be expressed with a predetermined empirical representation. Such art captures the forces that are the generative elements of sensations and not hardened into perceptions by recognition, and the action of forces upon the body. Thus art that captures insensible forces undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions, and embodies the aspects of becomings that are below or above the threshold of perception and affection. Deleuze argues that art deals with a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned, or of tempting it into an uncertain combat. Virginia Woolf is an artist who explored the problem of being freed from such a life of confinement. Woolf emphasized capturing the entire moment when a myriad of impressions pour into a shower of innumerable atoms, insisting on capturing the aspects of becoming beyond everyday perceptions in writing. Woolf shows the work of capturing the impressions of these moments, the insensible forces in the Waves. And Woolf not only captures the imperceptible forces, but also invents unknown or unrecognized affects and brings them to light as the becomings of his characters in the Waves. Thus, Woolf seeks freeing from the imprisoned life and new possibilities in life against the clichés of opinion by embodying the becomings of the protagonists. And she urges us to lead to new becomings and escape from the imprisoned life through The Waves written in her own style, the language of sensations.