‘When we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’

All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity…

‘The Waves’ is an experimental novel made up of highly poetic, sometimes almost abstract and visionary monologues, delivered by six characters, depicting their lives over 30 years or more as they grow from children through maturity to old men and women. The six are:

1. Bernard (fancies himself a novelist; never goes anywhere without his notebook in which he jots down notes for novels which never get written)
2. Susan (wants to be a rural materfamilias like her mother)
3. Rhoda (nervous, anxious)
4. Neville (fancies himself a poet)
5. Jinny (party-loving Londoner)
6. Louis (fancies himself heir to Egypt and all the ages; acutely self-conscious of his Australian accent and his father a banker in Brisbane)

Early on the image of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five appeared in my mind (Julian, Dick, Anne, George and their dog Timmy) and I never quite managed to lose the association. This book is about the Sensitive Six.

Here’s how it opens, to indicate the schematicness of the structure, and the stilted, hieratic nature of the prose.

‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’
‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’

In her great novels, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’, and to a lesser extent in ‘Orlando’, the narrator – or the characters the narrator describes – are continually noticing small details in the world around them: the toot of a car horn, a bird arcing in the sky, a fragment of dress someone’s wearing, the tinkle of cutlery. Quite often the pressure of all these details pressing in on the characters’ senses becomes too much, sensual overload giving rise to a sort of hysteria which I thought I detected in ‘Jacob’s Room’.

In a sense ‘The Waves’ represents the triumph of this detail-noticing approach over conventional plot or characters. The text consists of nothing but random details, hundreds and hundreds of them, described in isolation like jewels hanging in space.

There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots… That is the close-clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden… The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them… That is a wood-pigeon breaking cover in the tops of the beech trees… The lady sits between the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms… Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns…

From the start there’s no indication how old the characters are or where any of this is happening: it is a set of free-floating and deliberately random observations which is, to begin with, quite disorientating.

Children

In the event, the initial level of abstraction can’t be maintained for long – the speaker’s speeches become longer and start to contain circumstantial details. We learn that they are all together in one place and are children waiting for ‘lessons’ to begin. ‘My mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child,’ says Susan. We learn who they all are because Louis very bluntly tells us:

‘My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English. Susan’s father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in London…’

But they don’t speak like children at all. They talk in the fixed hieratic style of adults reciting the words of a play. Around the same time Woolf produced this experimental drama-novel other writers were doing something similar. T.S. Eliot tried to revive plays in verse starting in the early 1930s with ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. W.H. Auden wrote plays in verse starting as early as ‘The Orators’ in 1932. Woolf’s characters, also, speak like characters on a stage, standing facing an audience, reciting the words of a poetic play. Woolf herself referred to it not as a novel but a ‘playpoem’. No pre-school child talks like this:

‘Now the stricture and rigidity are over; and I will continue to make my survey of the purlieus of the house in the late afternoon, in the sunset, when the sun makes oleaginous spots on the linoleum, and a crack of light kneels on the wall, making the chair legs look broken.’ (Neville)

They are children talking in adult terms, using adult language.

Starting time and place

We learn that the children are all together in a country house named Elvedon. They are supervised and catered to by an extensive staff. It is the Edwardian decade because one of the girls refers to Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII, who reigned 1901 to 1910.

Structure

There are no chapters, as in ‘Orlando’, or parts as in ‘To The Lighthouse’. Instead the text is broken up into nine long sections in Roman text, each one preceded by ten short descriptive sections printed in italics. After a while I realised the italicised sections describe the transit of the sun across the sky during a single day. Not just that, it is the sun rising over the sea, over a seascape, necessarily characterised by waves. So each time we cut back to one of these passages the sun is just rising or is half-way up the sky or stands at noon etc, shedding its light on the sea and its endless waves, and that these also change appearance and character at these different times of the day.

These sections are highly formalised, almost all of them opening with the same key words, ‘The sun…’ and containing some reference to the endless waves.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky…

The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach…

The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach…

The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf…

The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and guessed at, from hints and gleams…

The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky. Its light slanted, falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing island on which no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught in the light and another and another, so that the waves beneath were arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that shot erratically across the quivering blue…

The sun had now sunk lower in the sky. The islands of cloud had gained in density and drew themselves across the sun so that the rocks went suddenly black, and the trembling sea holly lost its blue and turned silver, and shadows were blown like grey cloths over the sea. The waves no longer visited the further pools or reached the dotted black line which lay irregularly upon the beach.

The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness.

Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore…

So it is not just about the passage of the sun through the sky, it is about the interplay between the slow-moving, inevitable sun and the ever-changing sea, the endless waves which, clearly, give the book its title. Right at the end, the text concludes with the briefest of these italicised passages, just one short sentence:

The waves broke on the shore.

So although the prose sections take us through the growth from childhood to adulthood of the six main characters, in some sense their entire lives are compassed within the frame not even of 24 hours, but in the 12 or so hours from the sun rising to the sun setting, as if part of some larger, natural cycle.

No dialogue

I thought the style would loosen up and the characters would get to talk to each other, but they don’t, at all. There is no dialogue. The characters never interact. To all intents and purposes they might be lined up on a stage, facing the audience, declaiming their parts and never facing or interacting with any of the others. Talking of complete lack of interaction…

Aspergers syndrome?

Lack of awareness of others or how to interact with other people are classic symptoms of being on the spectrum from Aspergers syndrome to full-blown autism. Here are the symptoms of Aspergers:

• difficulty understanding social cues, body language, and facial expressions
• difficulty relating to others
• difficulty making eye contact
• difficulty responding to people in conversation
• difficulty staying on task and understanding or following directions
• unusual speech patterns
• formal style of speaking that’s advanced for their age
• repeating words, phrases, or movements (‘it is not you, it is not you, it is not you’)
• hypersensitivity to lights, sounds, and textures
• sensitivity to loud noises, odours, clothing, or food textures

These are exactly the traits demonstrated by all six characters throughout this strange book.

Section 1. Childhood (13 pages)

We meet the six children, all for some reason living in the same house and sketchily follow a day in their lives, playing in the garden, sitting through lessons. There are several key moments: one when Susan sees Jinny kiss Louis which throws her into a rage. One when Bernard convinces the others the gardeners are after them with their shotguns and persuades them to all runs away and hide in terror. Rhoda is described as floating flower petals on the water in a basin, pretending they’re ships, and this image recurs throughout her sections in the rest of the book.

Then (rather abruptly) they are being bathed and put to bed.

Section 2. School days (29 pages)

They set off for their first days at school, by train, so there’s a description of a railway station and a train arriving. The gaggle of children, the Edwardian formality made me visualise The Railway Children, which is set in 1905, so the children would have worn similar clothes.

Train journeys have for a century and a half been the pretext for random observations, fragments seen out the window cf The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. Woolf utilises it to the maximum, here as they head to school and even more at the end of the section, where Susan, Jinny and Rhoda all describe the fleeting images they see through the speeding carriage windows.

There a white church; there a mast among the spires. There a canal. Now there are open spaces with asphalt paths upon which it is strange that people should now be walking. There is a hill striped with red houses. A man crosses a bridge with a dog at his heels. Now the red boy begins firing at a pheasant. The blue boy shoves him aside…

The boys arrive at a private school with its quadrangles, statue of the founding father, promise of Latin lessons, the lobsided headmaster, Crane. The girls go to a separate school. At this point you start wondering whether it’s a problem that they all sound alike and that they all sound like Virginia Woolf i.e. no attempt is made to give them childish turns of phrase or to distinguish between them – the opposite, these children are all gifted with Woolf’s lyrical turn of phrase and describe Woolf’s great theme, ‘identity’.

This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience… (Rhoda)

Here’s Louis reacting to the sight of Dr Crane entering the chapel:

I rejoice; my heart expands in his bulk, in his authority. He lays the whirling dust clouds in my tremulous, my ignominiously agitated mind… (p.23)

Although they are given different opinions the opinions are secondary to the style, and the style is all the same. Yes, I think this is a flaw, a failing. Woolf substitutes any feel for how children actually think and speak, with her own lyrical but sometimes ponderous, almost pompous phraseology.

From discord, from hatred… my shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. (p.26)

There’s a service in the chapel. Cricket, of course. Bernard already wants to become a novelist, God help us. He is described as turning everything into stories – except that Woolf doesn’t turn everything into stories. There are hardly any stories in her novels, just page after page after page of lyrical descriptions. Louis envies the other boys, the ones with eminent fathers who dominate sports and clubs. Neville develops a hatred for the sign of the cross and becomes passionately devoted to the Latin poets, Catullus, Horace, Lucretius. Susan hates her school and would like to bury it.

Here, as in ‘Orlando’, Woolf claims a character (Bernard) is always bubbling over with stories, just as she claims various people in ‘Orlando’ (notably Nicholas Greene) are bubbling over with stories, and yet… there are never any stories. Not one, not one anecdote, tale or joke, nothing you could retell to anyone who hasn’t read the book. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Woolf couldn’t tell a story – with a beginning, middle and an end – to save her life.

It is extremely symptomatic that Bernard is good at setting scenes but that even he acknowledges that his so-called ‘stories’ always fizzle out, ‘tail off absurdly’ (p.34). What Woolf really means when she talks about ‘stories’ is the unstoppable flow of her own dizzyingly acute observations. But listing thousands of acute details and insights is very much not telling a story. In fact it’s the opposite of telling a story. A story is a sequence of linked events in the shape of a narrative. That doesn’t appear in any of Woolf’s novels.

I can sketch the surroundings up to a point with extraordinary ease. But can I make it work? (Bernard)

No. No he (and she) can’t make it work. Instead the tsunami of details never ends. They flood her mind and her text with a stricken profusion, a thousand snapshots, a million moments brilliantly lit.

Passing the open door leading into the private garden, I saw Fenwick with his mallet raised. The steam from the tea-urn rose in the middle of the lawn. There were banks of blue flowers.

When I wake early… I lie and watch the brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then the basin; then the towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart beats quicker.

I catch sight of something moving – a speck of sun perhaps on a picture, or the donkey drawing the mowing-machine across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel leaves…

Then their school days are over, and they look back at what they’ve learned. Susan gives a half page impression of London which triggers memories of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘Orlando’ before she catches a train back to her country home. And then the perceptions of Jinny, Rhoda, Louis and Neville on their respective train journeys home. Neville is 18.

Section 3. University (21 pages)

University, Cambridge of course (because that was the Bloomsbury University). Bernard ponders how he is multiple selves (the great theme described at the end of ‘Orlando’). He models himself on Byron (amazingly, given that Byron died 80 years previously). He tries to dash off a letter to his girlfriend but is crippled by self consciousness. It is thumpingly clear that what he means by a ‘story’ is in fact a thousand and one cluttered details with not the slightest sense of a narrative. In the same way Louis and Neville both fancy themselves poets but can’t write a line (see ‘The Bloomsbury Error’, below). They punt up the river and eat fruit from a bag, watching the cows in the meadows.

Susan was sent to finishing school in Switzerland but now she’s gone back to her parents’ farm where she lives a rural life, walking out to see cows and pick mushrooms. She wants to get married and have babies, like her mother.

Jinny lives in London and lives for elegant society parties, large lit rooms full of gilt chairs and being swept off her feet by handsome young men.

Rhoda also lives in London but struggles to make sense of her life, to hold her selves together, lacking the rural conviction of Susan or the society confidence of Jinny.

Section 4. Dinner for Percival (25 pages)

Bernard is engaged and catches a train to London, then stands in the busy street. All six are reuniting for a farewell dinner for their mutual friend Percival (who we haven’t seen much), ‘a hero’, who is leaving for India. Each of the six imagines Percival acting with godlike decision in India, to sort out ‘the Oriental problem’. They all genuinely believe this Percival would have been a great governor who would have ruled India widely and benevolently: ‘He would have done justice. He would have protected.’

Section 5. Percival’s death (10 pages)

News comes that Percival is dead. He was playing some game out in India when his horse threw him and he died on the spot. The Sensitive Six each give their responses which are, predictably, hyperbolic and immoderate:

• All is over. The lights of the world have gone out.
• We are doomed, all of us.
• All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever.
• I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous.

And so, immoderately, on.

Section 6. Success and babies (11 pages)

Louis has become a successful businessman. He loves his office, his desk and his telephone. He’d like to write poetry but is too busy advancing trade around the world. He and Rhoda are lovers. To do this, he has had to deal with the identity problem and from the many men inside him, make one.

Susan is married with babies. She feels replete, complete, and waxes lyrical about getting them to sleep in her country farm.

Jinny, the London party girl, is now past 30. She seems to be describing her life to a man she’s met, including gossip about loads of society figures, but also a lyric delirium about her body and her wish to go off in a ship over the sea.

Neville delivers an impassioned monologue to a woman he has a troubled relationship with, they walked round London together but then she abandoned him at the Tube but later that night arrived at his front door, so…

Section 7. Middle age (16 pages)

If you can’t think what to do next, send your characters abroad. Bored of middle-aged life, Bernard travels to Italy, to Rome. He is middle-aged and has, at last, acknowledged that he has no real talent, that all those clever hopes come to nothing.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories? (Bernard)

In other words, there is no final statement, there is no Masterwork all these observations are building towards. The observations themselves, in all their brilliant fragmentation, are the work. Or at least, they are in Woolfworld.

Meanwhile, Susan is very content with her rural life bringing up two children in a world of butterfly nets and home-made jam, and visiting the rural poor, especially the dying in their cottages.

Jinny appears to be single but forces herself to rejoice in London life, in the energy and excitement of the Tube and buses and the hectic streets.

Neville feels himself getting old. He’s lost the old anger and bitterness. Now he reads Shakespeare and drifts from party to friend’s house, all passion spent. His section feels more than usually demented, stricken, mad.

Back to Louis who is a successful businessman, well turned-out in spats and a gold-handled cane. He tells us Rhoda left him so he’s taken up with a slatternly Cockney mistress. He is still attracted to his first love – poetry – and fantasises about writing the one Great Poem which will make sense of everything.

Rhoda has been scared all her life, copying the others to give the right appearance of living normally. Now she is in Spain, on a pilgrimage to go by donkey to the top of a mountain where she hopes she’ll be able to see Africa.

Section 8. Lunch at Hampton Court (19 pages)

They all meet up to have lunch at a restaurant in Hampton Court. Unexpressed jealousies and resentments like stags clashing antlers.

Neville despises Susan for waking up every morning to the same husband, when he has a succession of different women, sensations and conversations every season.

Louis wants everyone to notice his smart clothes and success and yet feels the perennial outsider.

Jinny wants them to acknowledge her fascination with people and life.

Rhoda is terrified of the simplest things and imagines her bed at night falling over the edge of the world. She’s the most mental of the lot:

After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now. (Rhoda)

And indeed, right at the end of the book, in a throwaway remark, Bernard indicates that Rhoda kills herself: Woolf’s avatar, in this respect. She jumped out the upper story of a house to her death, as Woolf tried to when she was 13…

As I talked I felt “I am you”. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome

Then they all go for a wistful sad walk by the river, arm in arm and hand in hand.

Section 9. Bernard’s recap (40 pages)

Oddly and disappointingly a lot of this final section consists of a recapitulation of stuff we’ve read before.

Woolf has finished with all the other characters, we see and hear them no more, but for Bernard. This section consists entirely of Bernard’s voice and lugubrious reminiscences. It consists of him addressing someone over a meal in the West End, a barely known stranger he remembers boarding a ship to Africa with years ago and has recently bumped into, a virtual stranger to tell his life story and the story of the six characters to. So the text finishes with Bernard ‘winning’ and his version of events being the crowning and defining one. Shame. I preferred the women characters, Susan, Rhoda and Jinny. Tant pis.

Early on in his 40-page monologue, Bernard complains that he’s fed up of telling ‘so many stories’. This is a bit rich seeing as how nowhere at all has there been an indication of him producing even a half-decent anecdote let alone a full-blown story.

He also says he is sick of flamboyantly beautiful phrases, which is maybe Woolf being ironic against herself, seeing as Woolf is praised above all for her lyrical (and often delirious) prose style, and this book consists entirely of fine phrases almost completely bereft of plot, event or psychology. (I say bereft of psychology because, despite a handful of superficial differences, all the characters think and speak exactly like Virginia Woolf.)

Anyway, all Bernard does, at great length, is recapitulate many of the scenes we have already had described to us, described in the childhood, school and university sections. But a scene is not a story, it is just a scene. Repeatedly telling us that Rhoda liked stirring flower petals in a basin and Neville like the Roman poets is not a story, it is creating images which, through repetition, acquire a kind of talismanic power. (Woolf does it in her factual works, as well, for example the image of the officious beadle who shooed her off a lawn in Cambridge which is repeated throughout ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and even in ‘Three Guineas’ to become a kind of looming symbol of the patriarchy.)

And on and on it goes, by far the longest section of the book and essentially a recapitulation of everything we’ve heard before. Tragically, as I’ve mentioned, as he gets towards the end of this bald list of impressions and mild events, he says ‘that’s enough of stories’ and the reader thinks ‘what stories?’ His idea of a story seems to be that Percival died when his horse threw him. Not a scintillating story, is it? Not the most complex of narratives. Woolf is the great writer of anti-stories.

Another one of his cracking stories, so good he repeats it half a dozen times, is that once, Percival invited him to accompany him to Hampton Court but he said no. That’s it. Not the ‘Thousand and One Nights’, is it? It’s more of a motif, a (very small) incident which Bernard keeps remembering and which comes to haunt him. But a story it is not.

This long final section not only recapitulates many of the events (to over-describe them), the feelings and intuitions of the previous chapters, it makes great play of repeating certain memories which have become recurring motifs – like Jinny kissing Louis, Rhoda sailing her flower-petal boats, Bernard turning down Percival’s invitation to go to Hampton Court – and alongside this, repeating certain key phrases. Presumably the intention is to give them a kind of poetic or psychological charge, but I found it just made them more and more inconsequential, like the harmless words of a lullaby.

• The mind grows rings… the being grows rings… The being grows rings, like a tree…
• Life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday… Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday… I put on my hat, and went out to earn my living. After Monday, Tuesday comes… Life is pleasant; life is good. After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows…

Empty rhythmic lulling, like the waves which wash across the empty beach, slowly wearing the mind down into utter indifference.

Right at the very end, on the last few pages, Bernard describes an epiphany he had in the countryside, leaning on a gate looking out over a valley, when he felt like his ‘self’ disappear completely, with the result that he blundered on through the countryside, a man without a self.

Now, here, in this restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue, he begins to doubt the reality of the here and now. And then wonders if any of them are real. Who is he? Maybe he’s not one of them, Bernard, but all of them, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Louis?

As I talked I felt ‘I am you’. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome…

It’s the same theme which surfaced towards the end of ‘Orlando’, the suggestion that our so-called identities are almost infinitely malleable and interchangeable.

On the very last page of the book Bernard explains that no matter how old and tired you are, each day the waves come and lift you to start the day again, dawn, rising from your bed, breakfast and the whole day to be faced again. Again and again we are lifted and propelled forward by the endless waves.

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back.

For the waves endlessly driving us forward are life, and the only enemy of all of this, of this long, dense, verbose, lyrical, empty-headed text, is death. So down with death and on with life, and its endless waves.

Sex

There is no sex. The six characters go through puberty, adolescence and young adulthood without developing genitals, bodily hair, breasts, discovering masturbation, orgasms or having sex. None of them lose their virginities, they just marry and have children without the apparent involvement of sex at all.

Woolf was a Victorian lady. Like most of her class and generation she was too well bred to mention sex. But she also had a personal aversion to it, as well. Victoria Glendinning’s biography of her husband, Leonard Woolf, tells us that every time he broached the subject early on in the marriage, presumably with kissing and touching etc, she began to have a panic attack, beginning to display the symptoms of her full-blown madness. Understandably, he backed off and after a while, stopped trying, and so the marriage was never consummated.

Hence the strange absence of any sexual drive in any of her novels. The entire thing repelled her, was alien to her, she knew nothing about it, and so couldn’t write about it. Hence the impression all her books give of valuing a certain kind of billowing, purely verbal lyricism above anything to do with the body.

(Hence also her revulsion at James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ with its vivid descriptions of physical activities – not just the sexual ones, but peeing and defecating. She realised ‘Ulysses’ was a great book but couldn’t overcome the revulsion of her class at the vulgar goings-on of plebeians, and the revulsion peculiar to her against any descriptions of human corporeality. Taken together this explains why she couldn’t get past its ‘obscenity’. It’s a big blind spot.)

On the broader issue of physicality, none of the six characters have any physical oddities or ever become ill. That would drag the narrative down into the realm of the physical and, on one level, all of Woolf’s works are attempts to fly above and deny human physicality.

Mental illness, dissociation and fragile identity(ies)

I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am. (Bernard)

Woolf was stricken throughout her life with mental illness, nowadays through to be bipolar disease, striking her down with sustained periods of depression shelving into mania and madness. It’s fairly obvious that a lot of the heightened and often dissociated perceptions which litter her books derive from her own experience of altered psychological states, what Bernard calls his ‘states of detachment.’

Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy… (Bernard)

There is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually. (Bernard)

Woolf triumphed by turning her illness into a style, into a worldview. Still, some passages stick out as more than usually deranged, vividly describing the alienated, dissociated effects of mental illness.

I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. (Jinny)

‘That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder – that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. (Rhoda)

There is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back. (Rhoda)

Is it significant, maybe, that these shimmering states of mind are assigned to the girls? No. Bernard feels just the same if not more so. In fact all six characters routinely feel like this. Sometimes the descriptions dwindle down to something approaching a catalogue of symptoms more than anything else:

I choke. I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion. I imagine these nameless, these immaculate people, watching me from behind bushes.

I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Unstoppable images

More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. (Neville)

So many times it feels as if Woolf is barely in control of the never-ceasing bubbling up of images and similes which throng her mind, all the characters plight of being incurably ‘aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular’.

I feel at once, as I sit down at a table, the delicious jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation. Images breed instantly. (Bernard)

The bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan; image on top of image. I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another. (Bernard)

Endless lists, lists, lists of things seen, random collocations:

People holding forth under chandeliers in full evening dress, wearing stars and decorations, some spray in a hedge, or a sunset over a flat winter field, or the way some old woman sits, arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a basket… (Neville)

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter – all are stories. (Bernard)

A view over chimneypots; cats scraping their mangy sides upon blistered chimney-stacks; broken windows; and the hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel. (Louis)

Sometimes it feels claustrophobic, makes you want to put down the book and run out into the fresh air in order to escape the relentless bombardment of her text. And in some places the characters express the same sense of borderline hysteria:

I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do – I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate… (Rhoda)

So Woolf’s texts are matrices of these never-ending perceptions oppressing characters who can never switch off, never lose themselves in action or laughter or any physical activity, trapped in consciousnesses endlessly enmeshed and enmeshing themselves:

Thus we spin round us infinitely fine filaments and construct a system. (Neville)

And always watching themselves like hawks, afflicted with never-ending bombardment of brilliant and oppressive images till they feel like they’re going to burst.

I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. (Jinny)

There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. (Rhoda)

Identity(ies)

Which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. (Bernard)

Who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? (Susan)

What am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything?(Bernard)

The characters are continually assailed by the fragility of their own identity, rarely if ever feeling their ‘true’ selves, struggling to define what a true self even is.

In the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels. (Rhoda)

I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning petals float on fathomless depths and the birds sing. I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright waters of childhood. Its thin veil quivers. (Louis)

I feel insignificant, lost… I will let the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult… The huge uproar is in my ears… We are cast down on the platform with our handbags. We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost perishes… (Neville)

I am more selves than Neville thinks. (Bernard)

The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train moved. A man without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. (Bernard)

The ‘message’ of the last part of ‘Orlando’ is not that we are male or female, or even made up of aspects of male and female mingled, but instead that we have scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of selves, which all appear, mix and mingle continuously. Same here. It is Woolf’s central theme and message, expressed again and again and again:

‘What am I?’ I ask. ‘This? No, I am that.’ Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel – then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. (Bernard)

I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. (Neville)

Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here, twisting the tassels of this brocaded curtain in my hostess’s window, I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one. (Rhoda)

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self. (Bernard)

The Bloomsbury Error

Bernard, Louis and Neville are convinced they are going to be Great Novelists and Poets because of the depth and sincerity of their perceptions, just as Lily Briscoe in ‘To The Lighthouse’ is convinced she will be a great painter because of the vividness with which she perceives things.

Wrong. Just because you feel things deeply doesn’t mean you can express them well. The latter, especially being a poet and an artist, are matters of technique rather than feeling. It’s not clear that John Singer Sargent perceived things particularly strongly, it was his technique which makes him a master painter. (I think of Sargent because the old Granada paperback of ‘The Waves’ which I own has a painting by him, The Black Brook, on the cover.) Ditto what made T.S. Eliot the giant poet he was, wasn’t his depth of feeling (though he harboured terrible depths of feeling) but the dazzling effectiveness of his phrasing. It’s not about feeling, it’s about technique, craft, skill.

What makes reading a bunch of Virginia Woolf novels back to back a bit tedious is her unchanging, unevolving, naive conviction that deep feeling must inevitably lead to the ability to write Great Novels or Great Poetry. It is a fundamental error but one she apparently held and makes all her characters hold.

It is boring reading Bernard and Louis and Neville going on and on and on about how wonderfully intensely they feel things and yet, when they try to get them down on paper, their stories or attempts at poetry just fizzle out. It’s because they’re making the fundamental Bloomsbury Error of confusing deep feeling with artistic ability. It’s not clear that Picasso had particularly fine and sensitive feelings, in fact all the evidence suggests the opposite. Yet he had breath-taking technique which made him the artist of the century. QED.

Death and travel as basic narrative devices

The only significant things which happen in a Woolf novel are death and travel. Having run out of ideas what to do with Jacob in ‘Jacob’s Room’, she packs him off to Italy and Greece, ending up in Constantinople. Unsure how to end it, she simply has him killed off in the Great War.

The meandering mellifluousness of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ builds to an unexpectedly harsh climax with the suicide of Septimus Smith, which overshadows the book’s ending and Mrs Dalloway’s party. Arguably it’s a regrettable stain on an otherwise charming Cath Kidston drawing room of a book.

The dominating event in ‘To The Lighthouse’ is the death in the intermezzo of Mrs Ramsay, which completely changes the flavour of the book and dictates the events of the final part (the journey to the lighthouse undertaken as a sort of penance).

At a loss what to do with Orlando, Woolf has the bright idea of packing him off to Constantinople, ostensibly as British Ambassador and it’s here, abroad, that the decisive event of the book takes place, Orlando’s transformation from a man into a woman. (‘Orlando’ is by way of being the exception that proves the rule, in having no death of a major character; in fact part of the joke is that the central characters very much don’t die but live for hundreds of years.)

Here, in ‘The Waves’, first she bumps off the rather obscure character Percival, who all the others loved but whose voice we never hear; then she sends Bernard off to Rome, admittedly a minor excursion; but then, towards the end, in a throwaway remark we learn that the attractive character Rhoda has killed herself. So it was these deaths and excursions which triggered the reflections that death and travel are Woolf’s only two narrative devices.

Secondary characters

For me, the secondary or tertiary characters in a Woolf novel have a special interest, the characters which peep round from behind the curtain of the main narrative. It’s especially true of the servants, the unspeaking lackeys whose reliable labours enable the privileged lives of the main characters. As I argued in some of my reviews of E.M. Forster, I think part of the reason these classic novels are so enduringly popular derives from the way they provide the reader with the lovely, consoling, escapist fantasy that we, the readers, while we are immersed in the narrative, are living just such a pampered, privileged life – surrounded by cooks and cleaners and maids and servants to cater to our every whim, our only worries which shoes to wear with this skirt and who to invite to dinner. They’re the literary equivalent of the Sunday Times Luxury section.

There’s another aspect of the supporting characters which is how many there are. All of her novels rotate around a handful of main characters, as most novels do, but in each one I’ve been struck by the sheer number of tertiary characters she bothers to identify and name. Here’s a list of tertiary characters in ‘The Waves’:

• Two gardeners sweeping the lawn with brooms
• Miss Hudson the teacher
• Miss Curry, another teacher
• The cook
• Florrie, a maid
• Ernest, a male servant
• Mrs Constable, who bathes the children
• George, a servant with bandy legs who carries Bernard’s suitcase
• The housemaid cleaning the steps
• The boot-boy made love to the scullery-maid in the kitchen garden
• The stableboy
• The railway guard blowing his whistle
• The headmaster, Old Crane
• Mrs Crane, his wife, fan of French memoirs
• The boy who Susan leaves her squirrel (in a cage) and her doves to
• The fat woman, presumably the matron at the boys’ school
• Teachers at the boys’ school: Mr Barker, Mr Wickham
• Older boys, the ‘boasting boys’, at the boys’ school: Larpent, Smith, Archie, Hugh, Parker, Dalton, Fenwick, Baker, Roper
• Teachers at the girls’ school: Miss Lambert, Madame Carlo the music teacher, Miss Matthews, Miss Cutting and Miss Bard
• Lady Hampton, wife of General Hampton, one of the boys’ school governors (?)
• Boys at university: Simes, Billy Jackson, Canon, Lycett, Peters, Hawkins, Larpent, Neville
• Mrs Moffat, Bernard’s cleaner at university
• Miss Johnson, Louis’s secretary
• Louis’s business associates: Mr Burchard, Mr Prentice, Mr Eyres
• Bernard’s parlourmaid
• Bernard’s hairdresser

Conclusion

Despite dwelling at length on what I take to be its shortcomings and limitations, the overall impression of reading ‘The Waves’ is strange and haunting. It is an awesome book and Woolf was a great, great writer.

Credit

‘The Waves’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1931. Page references are to the 1977 Granada paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related links

• The Waves online
• The Virginia Woolf Society

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews
• 1920s reviews