SOURCE: Besnault-Levita, Anne. “What ‘It’ Is About: The Implicit in Virginia Woolf's Short Fictions.” Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 40 (spring 2003): 135-47.

In the following essay, Besnault-Levita analyzes Woolf's use of the pronoun “it” in her short fiction and explores “the implicit theories of meaning and interpretation behind the implicit as they are put to the test by Woolf's fictional prose.”

How does “it” mean, what is “it” about and what does “it” reveal about the ethics of Virginia Woolf's poetics of the implicit, and therefore of fiction, are the three questions I would like to raise in this paper. My starting point will be the recurring use, in many short stories, of the indefinite pronoun “it”, that haunting black mark on the white wall of the texts whose metalinguistic function challenges some of our common assumptions about the implicit as a linguistic and literary concept...