ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of modernity and the crisis of representation, since Tristram Shandy, say, in the history of the novel, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore these ambiguities or pretend they are just accidental. As a writer of 'stream-of-consciousness fiction', often understood as the most effective method for breaking down the distinction between subject and object, Virginia Woolf might easily be supposed to sympathize with Lubbock's dictum. The very choice of image (a 'tunnelling process') shows that Virginia Woolf is not engaged in a work of consolidation but, on the contrary, one of undermining the basis of representation. The expression 'madness of language' is a good illustration of this paradoxical status. Language can only subsist through the exclusion of madness, whether this structural incompatibility be historically determined or inherent in any language bearing within it the requirement of sense.
