Becoming a Child: Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of Fluidity and Permanence

The chapter retraces the pattern connecting Woolf and Carroll, particularly following their shared interest in recreating the complex relationship between perception and language in childhood. The pattern entails elements of convergence and divergence, as well as of fluidity and permanence, especially in relation to what Deleuze has defined as ‘the paradox of pure becoming’, wherein ‘it is language which fixes […] the limits, but it is language as well which transcends the limits and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming’. Many of the elements constituting the ‘common ground’ between Woolf and Carroll, as well as the differences between them, seem indeed to rotate around the double-faceted quality that renders language simultaneously as a fixed/fixing element and as an ever-moving phenomenon – an aspect which, interestingly, Deleuze observes in both Woolf ’s and Carroll’s writing.