Named after the character from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, Bernard reforms the English alphabetic script through the visual matrix of screen display, what Licko and other New Media type designers define by the constructs “map of bits” (bitmap) and “picture elements” (pixels).*
*Proposing a new beginning for English alphabetic scripts.
Woolf continually offers readers the understanding that the letter “R” already belongs to Mr. Ramsay, and that through description of his perpetual desire for more knowledge of self Mr. Ramsay is better able to observe “Q,” his collective concept of self.
To Woolf, Mr. Ramsay will always be an archetype of conscious study, but to Lily Briscoe, the painter, he can be the self that is observable through vision — at most a man, at least a typeform.
Woolf’s metaphor for consciousness is completed through analysis of the qualities her characters perceive would be to her use as a narrator, and the roles Woolf envisions they would elect for themselves as their shared roles in scenarios of collective role-play — best understood as the archetypes Woolf believes they have already played in earlier timelines, “The leader, the guide, the counsellor […].”
Her system of shared meaning understood instantly, as if it were the instant-genius of vision, “one flash;” Earlier, “a shutter.” Ending: After extended self-perception and observation of others Lily Briscoe — Woolf’s archetype of vision whom she inhabits through poetics — is able to complete Woolf’s novel. (“[…] I have had my vision,” Briscoe thinks.) It is Briscoe’s concept of selfhood that produces the final mark.
