A Cinematic Reading of Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”

In “The Cinema” (1926) Virginia Woolf discusses film as a new cultural product. However, I argue here that the author, already inspired by mainly silent films, began to experiment with simulating the cinematic rhythm in her writing as early as 1919 in the short story “Kew Gardens.” I show how silent films may have led her to try to recreate in writing the spontaneity of images and sounds, their immediate appearance on the screen as raw percepts and affects, penetrating our bodies before our minds or subjectivities can make sense of them. In addition to the Deleuzian notions of sensation (as compound of percept and affect) and the fourth-person-singular (or nonhuman, nonsubjective) perspective or “point of articulation,” I use the notion of what I call the “voice-over voice” to interpret “Kew Gardens.” This voice, based on some of Woolf’s observations in “The Cinema,” is what appears in our minds before wecan really think, helping us to make sense of these strange and unfamiliar images and sounds, these raw percepts-affects that change our bodily state. This “voice” is ambivalently subjective-objective, linguistic-mental-bodily, appearing and/or being heard on the movie screen and/or on our mind-screen. The interpretation of the story offered here thus sees what traditionally might be called the authorial or omniscient-narrative voice as a voice-over voice, and it elucidates the story’s fragmented multiplicities and ambivalent sense of “enclosing everything” while also “permeating into the smallest internal spaces” in the light of a Deleuzian cinematic rhythm.