Global Forms: Allegory, Collage, and Virginia Woolf’s American Utopia

In ‘America, Which I Have Have Never Seen’ (1938), Virginia Woolf imagines America as a global community condensing the cultures of several nations. Questioning existing utopian and dystopian American constructs of the time, her overtly fictional mock-utopia starts with an allegorical process of substitution—the paradigmatic substituting of America for the ‘cosmopolitan world of today’—, which gives way to a metonymic dynamics of juxtaposition, leading to the ‘combination and collaboration of all cultures’. At a time when the interwar intergovernmental project of the League of Nations had come to be seen as a utopian failure, Woolf rooted the possibility of intercultural contact in an open-ended politics of form, foregrounding a capacity to rethink the historical present through global tropes. In seeking to understand Woolf’s idea of global form—to rephrase Joseph Frank’s title—, this close reading interprets the interconnectedness of allegory and collage, and the bond they establish between undecidability and syncretism, as part of resistance to hermeneutic, rather than geographic, totality