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The Waves artist: Tara Luther click for larger version |
some notes on The Waves (1931)
“the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair,
like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea….”
from Woolf’s essay, “On Being Ill.”
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Woolf Seminar:
The Waves
artist: Tara Luther
click for larger versionsome notes on The Waves (1931)
“the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair,
like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea….”
from Woolf’s essay, “On Being Ill.”
section one two three (new!) four Percival (new!) five six seven (new!) links eight (new!)
All references are to the Harcourt Brace/Harvest paperback edition Nine italicized "interludes" alternate with nine sections of lyrical narration
7 at first the sea is indistinguishable from the sky each comes into vision. Note the focus on perception in these passages between sections.
The "dark bar" on the horizon "became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk" and "the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk." Note the images of sedimentation and in contrast to sedimentation, a clearing away that permits vision. This motif will recur throughout the novel. You might think of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and the shadows, or illusions, the prisoners in the cave mistake for supposed "reality" before they go out into the sun and see the "real" objects whose shadows they had mistaken for the objects themselves.
In Woolf, as in late 19th and 20th Century philosophy and aesthetics, the notion that there is an objective "reality" outside that can be perceived is approached with a sense of ambivalence and ambiguity.
The sky is compared to a woman raising a lamp (the sun). The sun is like a fan, spreading its rays. The sky-woman raises her lamp higher and the air becomes "fibrous" and tears away from the surface like "the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woolen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue." This transformation of a great weight into something of beauty is also a recurring motif in the novel.
"The surface of the sea slowly became transparent" as the lamp is raised higher and higher until eventually "the sea blazed gold," that is, was transformed by the light into a blazing thing, illuminated.
Something similar happens when the light strikes the leaves; it makes them temporarily transparent.
All of this is described as though from the perspective of no one, or anyone. Compare to the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse, where certain passages also seem to be presented without a narrator, in contrast to those where Mrs. McNab observes things...
Consider the ongoing, relentless processes of nature and time; the human desire for illumination, for knowledge, for understanding of such processes, for a meaning, which may or may not exist.
9-10; several of the main characters are introduced. Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis are a group of children from different families and backgrounds all playing, going to school, and growing up together. Rather than using old-fashioned exposition, Woolf manages to introduce them through their dialogue, thus giving the reader some bearings without dullness, without breaking the rhythmic, poetic form of the novel. Each speaks in turn. This technique of alternating the different voices forms a kind of chorus. The novel is a polyphonic novel, that is, a novel without a governing central monologic voice of narration. There is no narrator per se. Each voice performs its own contribution to the novel. The voices do not merge; they remain distinct and separate and enter into a dialogue with one another. In the dialogic or polyphonic novel, everything is understood as part of the whole. Nothing exists in isolation." Discourse is "the path leading from contradiction to contradiction" (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge). It is the path of heteroglossia, that is of many languages, many different voices; all utterances are "functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup and therefore impossible to resolve" (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 428).
The distinction between a sentence and a Bakhtinian utterance is important in The Waves. Sentences are repeatable, but each utterance is unique. "Two verbally identical utterances never mean the same thing, if only because the reader or listener confronts them twice and reacts differently the second time" (Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin:Creation of a Prosaics 126). The context surrounding a particular sentence is never exactly the same, and the meaning is unique to that occurrence, although the repetition of the sentence may appear to suggest a pattern.
On p. 9, Louis says that he hears "something stamping. . .A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps." Louis will repeat this sentence, or similar ones, on p. 58 and again on p. 67. Thus we have a recurring image that may tell us something about Louis, but we must also recognize each utterance of this statement as it appears in very different contexts. However, the contexts in which this statement appears are always in Louis's voice. Think about what this great beast might be.
On pp. 10-11, Rhoda observes that the birds always sang in chorus first, but that "one sings by his bedroom alone."
p. 11 An early reference to "bubbles" forming on the floor of the saucepan and then rises to the top, in Jinny's voice, will later be echoed in references to Bernard and his "bubbles," his words, both by Bernard and by other characters.
p. 11 Louis observes that the church bell strikes, and he seems to appreciate the order of the one, two, one, two…In many later references Louis will consistently mention his love of neatness, order, rules, etc. Later, on 11-12, Louis is hiding in the hedge, trying to be still, when suddenly Jinny discovers him and kisses him. He is upset by this sudden intrusion. He has thought of himself as a stalk rooted to the earth, and he wanted them all to pass him by. When Jinny kisses him, "All is shattered."
Then, as in Faulkner, we get the same kiss from Jinny's point of view, and also as observed by Susan, who saw them through a chink in the hedge (p. 13). The transitions to different points of view are often similar to the style of transitions Woolf used in Mrs. Dalloway. Susan's agony is dramatically rendered. She reacts as if it is a great tragedy, whereas for Jinny the kiss really was just an impulsive act.
14 Bernard then watches Susan and decides to follow her to be on hand to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage. Susan thinks or tells Bernard that she is "squat" and "short" and that "the yellow warmth" in her side "turned to stone" when she saw Jinny kiss Louis. She "shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted" (15). This image of dying in the water foreshadows an event much later in the book (not exactly what you may think).
16 Bernard knows that Susan suffers and knows that she wanted to "possess one single thing" which happens to be Louis now. Bernard, the observer, has chips in his own hair because he's so busy observing he doesn't take time on his own appearance. Already, as a boy, he is in love with words, and is the character everyone associates with the novelist, the storyteller. On p 16 he says that when "we sit together, close . . .we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory." Susan senses Bernard's love of words, and whereas she finds that words confine her, tie her down, he rises up higher, with words and words in phrases.
Bernard describes images of sinking, of the waves closing over us, and of a "stable clock" with its gilt hand shining. Notice the reference to the waves closing over them (compare to Susan's remark about dying in the water) and how the context here is ambiguous. Notice the image of the clock here in Bernard's voice as compared to the image of the church bell in Louis's voice.
16-17 Bernard takes Susan on an adventure wherein he invents in language an elaborate fantasy. They run and look over the wall at the estate of Elvedon, and then they run because the gardener has seen them. Bernard imagines that they will be shot. This is all part of the adventure. He tells Susan they must escape to the beech wood (the beech wood has already been referred to and will recur later). They must hide. There must find a "secret path."
p 18 Bernard thus distracts Susan with his game, invented in his imagination and shared through words, through dialogue. His MOTIVE in inventing the game, using language, is to distract Susan, to respond to her suffering, to comfort her (cf. 16). This is an important element of the novel, and you may wish to think here of the theories of art and writing that have been percolating throughout Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Susan describes Bernard's phrase making as something that makes him trail away, or rise in the sky (mount) like an air-ball's string, higher and higher, out of reach. Bernard's words are thus compared to a balloon (like the bubble image) and a string, a thread. Yet he also "escapes" her, Susan, she says.
pp. 18-19 We meet Rhoda in some depth here. Rhoda has a very active imagination, less directed in terms of its connection to a utilitarian purpose than is Bernard's. She is creating her own little world with a basin that she has filled with water. She uses white petals for white ships floating on this sea. She uses a twig for a raft to help an imaginary drowning sailor (uh-oh, foreshadowing again). She imagines she will plant a lighthouse in her basin to guide the ships. She rocks the basin to create a storm and make her ships ride the waves. Some will founder and crash. One sails alone, and she imagines that this is her ship. Notice how Rhoda is playing both artist and God here in creating her little world.
19 Neville. Neville comes on stage and thinks of Bernard with Neville's knife. He is upset at Bernard's inconstancy, always "twangling," going after Susan, etc. Bernard here, as earlier (in Susan's voice), is linked to thread-like images. Neville compares Bernard to a dangling wire, seaweed, and the broken bell-pull. Neville hates "dangling things." He hates "wandering" and "mixing things together," things that Bernard seeks (and by implication, novelists and other artists).
19-20: Louis afraid to conjugate the Latin verb until he has heard Bernard say it. Bernard is better at Latin at this stage than is Louis. Louis is self-conscious because of his Australian accent and repeatedly refers to his father the banker in Brisbane, even though he knows his "lesson by heart" (20) and knows "more than they will ever know." He feels inferior and self-conscious because his background is less English and less aristocratic than the other boys'. On p. 30 Louis will also speak of following Bernard. Louis describes himself as neat and again echoes the images of the stalk, the roots, the fibres. His roots must go deep underground, he thinks, because the top of the world, the visible surface, illuminated by the yellow clock, is dominated by those with proper English accents. Notice that he mentions Jinny and Susan, Bernard and Neville, but not Rhoda as those who bind themselves into a "thong" with which to "lash" him. Rhoda has no father. Louis apparently is not intimidated by her. (See p. 22) Jinny lives with her grandmother in London, but also has self-confidence, and dared to kiss him.
20 Susan refers to words as stones, and then we shift almost immediately into Bernard's voice, who describes words as "flocks," like birds that fly sometimes together, sometimes separately; then we shift into Jinny's voice, and she thinks of a fiery dress; and then Neville, who thinks of "an order in this world" by tenses, distinctions, differences (20).
21 Rhoda and terror; the others understand the mathematics lesson, but Rhoda doesn't. She cannot write the answers. She has to stay after school in the schoolroom. The clock ticks, and Rhoda has a vision of the clock being like a desert and the hour marks like green oases. She is afraid she will be outside the loop of time (22).
22 Louis understands that Rhoda does not understand math (and other meanings). He says "She has no body as the others have" and that he does "not fear her as I fear the others."
22-23 Bernard invents a fantasy, another adventure, another world. He is able, through his imagination, to make "everything" seems "strange," one of the requirements of art, according to the Russian formalists. Art defamiliarizes the familiar so that we can see something new.
23 Jinny: she knows that now they are of an age when the boys will go off to boys school and the girls will go off to their girls' school. She wants to appreciate this one moment because "this is now," or rather, because "this is only here; this is only now." This reference to the importance of the moment echoes Woolf's theory of the moments of being, and such references will recur in the novel.
24 Neville is sickly and delicate and does not go with him on Bernard's expedition. Neville invents his own story in his imagination, based on a story about a murdered man he overheard adults telling. He says he will call the murdered man's corpse, this stricture, this rigidity, "death among the apple trees" forever. When Neville refers to "an obstacle" as an "unintelligible" obstacle and compares this to an "implacable" and "immitigable" apple tree "which we cannot pass," what do you think he is referring to?
27-28 They go to their respective boys' and girls' schools. On pp. 27-28 Rhoda describes unpacking her clothes and putting away her desire to be like other girls. She will stretch her toes so that they can touch the bed rail, something hard, that is, to assure herself that she is still in contact with reality. When she lies in bed, she feels she is not as vulnerable because she is no longer upright "to be knocked against and damaged." She feels free to let her mind pour out, and to think of her Armadas, her ships in the basin, her own world and its "high waves." Yet this safety is an illusion. She is "relieved of hard contacts and collisions" but then she imagines that she sinks and falls. She falls asleep and reams, and is both exhilarated and frightened. And she wishes to awake from dreaming, sees the trusty chest of drawers (reality) and wants to "pull" herself "out of these waters." But she can't. She imagines the waves heaping themselves on her, sweeping her "between their great shoulders" turning and tumbling her, like "people pursuing, pursuing." Notice the alarming connection here that Rhoda makes between people and stormy, frightening waves engulfing her. In this passage, it is her own dreaming mind that is engulfing her. Her hold on reality is clearly tenuous.
V. Section Five
notes to be provided soon by Carissa Mondino
VI. Section Six
notes to be provided soon by Elizabeth Fiting
1. Rose Norman's "plot" guideline for The Waves: http://www.uah.edu/woolf/wavesplotout.html
2. Andrew Edward Treloar's 1998 dissertation, Computer-Assisted Analysis of Characterisation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves. (Yes,
it appears that he has posted the entire dissertation. A substantive site for study of this novel.)
http://www.deakin.edu.au/~ardena/3. An index listing frequency of word use in The Waves:
http://orlando.jp.org/VWWARC/DAT/wavindex.html
See more links on the page for section seven.
The Waves
Watercolor by Tara Luther
this page created April 26 2000; updated May 3, May 20, 23, 25, 26 2000
