Experimental Identities: Quantum Physics in Popular Science Writing and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

摘要

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) is a novel about the impossibility of definingidentity. Throughout the novel, the six main characters utter soliloquies in which theyemploy image after image to define their own beings and experiences, the veryprofusion of the images indicating the impossibility of the task. Each image issucceeded by another, and none is final. At the end of the novel, one of the characters,Bernard, engages in an attempt to “sum up” (191) his life, but finds that he cannot doit, for the simple reason that his life is inseparable from those of the people around him:And now I ask, “Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny,Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do notknow. . . . I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no divisionbetween me and them. As I talked I felt “I am you”. This difference we makeso much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. (231).