This is The Waves; written in such a way that it can’t be interpreted at a distance. Woolf herself called it a ‘playpoem’ rather a novel. There is no action, no descriptions, only a rotating cycle of soliloquies: deeply vulnerable statements that have almost no natural connection to the ones that precede them or the ones that follow. The six speakers are unique characters, and yet they’re all the same. They’re defined by their types, then they subvert the portraits they’ve been painting of themselves. Instead, this whole collection must be read granularly; macro interpretations betray its architecture. To consider its context, to apply it to a theory, or to attempt to connect each part: these all feel wrong after closing the book. It has to be reviewed in the same way that it was read, submerged.
My favourite writing, the books that are, to me, profound, are the ones in which I immerse myself in each sentence and am hit with the revelation of: yes, this actually happened to me; yes, I’ve felt this way; yes, I’ve known this to be true all my life—only, how did they know it? Every single one of Woolf’s sentences has this impact on me. I feel like I am discovering my own words whenever I read her, like I am putting paint to the thoughts and emotions I’ve felt my entire life but never had the ability, or strength, to colour in. I have very little interest in trying to pin down where she fits in, or in considering different readings of this book. I only want to submerge myself, under her water, and highlight my favourite phrases and write notes next to every line and say—these are all the ways this has nestled into my heart. So I’ll begin.
Together; they are time-keepers. Even as children, they seem constantly aware of their time, their lack of control over it. They recognise youth’s innocence the moment it blooms, as if they can see their future selves lurking in the background, carrying all their nostalgia. Moments that should be beautiful are imprinted with the depression of these future lives, as if they’re existing concurrently, or haunting backwards. Time is, in a sense, always flowing; waves are receding and then crashing in a constant movement. Yet these moments are also depicted as frozen slices in time, scared of being let go, scared of letting the adjacent scenes connect in some way, “If that blue could stay for ever; if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever—”, (p. 25). (How I also wish to bottle the fragments of my life: the people, the places, the feelings!). Time turns them into outsiders and Neville’s words fit them all, “I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life”, (p. 33). They all have their quirks and differences, but they don’t fit together properly—they may make up the constituent parts, but even together there are always traces of absence. Their relationships are defined by how they fail to complete one another, “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? […] There is nobody”, (p. 35). Despite these gaps, sincerity never fails them. They may not truly know each other, or have the ability to communicate properly, but at every level they are true to themselves. As readers, we uncover them; they confess to us; they live inwards. They all have extra compartments and shades that they either can’t show the others, or don’t want them to see. These ambitions are unending: the world is not enough for them. Not that the world forces itself upon them, or ruins them, or acts against them, but there is always some missing ingredient. Their view is in constant parallax, some angle is always missing. When they reunite to bid Percival goodbye, they reminisce in much the same tone and poetry as they have been speaking to the reader, as if they are in a constant state of reminiscing. They are the 7-sided flower which creates a new colour and shape with every passing observer; but one of its petals will soon fall off, “a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution”, (p. 89). Then they internalise how they are unlike one another, how they have been incorrectly defined; misrepresented. In the dinner scene, they are aware that the scene, as it’s being lived, will be stored up; they are gripping their emotions at the same time as they are experiencing them, “Let us hold it for one moment”, (p. 103). It doesn’t take nostalgia to appreciate something precious or beautiful (a skill I need to work on). “We are creators”, (p. 103); they don’t simply observe, they carve out sculptures that they can look back on. In each of their own ways, they are trying to create; to make something out of each moment, of each other. All of them ebb back and forth with internal movements; as they learn something, then unlearn it; as they achieve success, they fail; as they look forwards, they look backwards—all, like waves. As they meet for the final time, they will not gladly succumb to each other, “There is always somebody, when we come together, and the edges of meeting are still sharp, who refuses to be submerged”, (p. 151). Neville admits there are locked parts of themselves that will never emerge. But this inner submerge isn’t always to hold these parts secret, or to grip them tighter, but that for an extended period of time, all the way into middle-age, it becomes so much easier to not care any more, to stop living with that pain or anxiety in the front of their throats. Eventually, it will settle, somewhere deeper, it shall nestle, because that makes everything else easier, even if it never really goes away.
This is Percival; who is the sun. The God who brings light to the others at the beginning of the novel. But with light comes shadow, and his brightness is always measured against his absence: “a shadow falls on the path like an elbow bent […] finger-shaped shadows”, (pp. 4-5). Even as children, the others seem prophetically aware of Percival’s fate; he is the happiest among them yet his tragic, early demise is already sewn into him, stitched across time. He is the necessary force; the rage; the object of desire; the object of hatred. More than anything, he is needed, as much as the sun itself, “Yet it is Percival I need; for it is Percival who inspires poetry” (p. 27). But, like the sun, he can’t be looked at directly. The others must avert their gaze as to think about him too much would be to go blind. He is unlike them for he is not an outsider—he fits in. The unease of his silence slowly builds: he acts, is described, forms new part of himself, enters new spaces, but never speaks. He becomes defined by his silence, his absence. Maybe that adds to his aura. Bernard even, at one point, calls him a God, “He rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were—what indeed he is—a God”, (p. 96). There is a sense that Percival only illuminates the rest, or allows them to look upon themselves. But Louis, perhaps, sees through this. He recognises that Percival’s presence breaks the illusion of the other characters’ self-reveals: their attempts at self-definition suddenly look like performances compared to him. Maybe his death becomes necessary, to allow everyone to look inwards.
This is Susan; who nurtures. She clenches and hardens and squishes down everything she holds dear in fear of letting it go, “Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief”, (p. 8). But these things still need to breathe. She pines to release them; to let the petals of her heart unfurl; to pollinate. Strangely to say, she was never a very good child. She’s one of those children who cannot wait to grow up and be an adult. Then adulthood finally arrives and she comes into herself. Susan finds her purpose in motherhood, “Yet more will come, more children; more cradles; more baskets in the kitchen and hams ripening”, (p. 123). This is her calling; to be a mother, to protect. It’s worth asking: is Susan the happy one? The truly, honest-to-herself, happy person in this group? She has the strongest awareness of what she wants, the others wander. There is a resentment to her idleness but more than the others, she gets what she desires, “I have had peaceful, productive years. I possess all I see”, (p. 135). Can the rest say the same? Perhaps she makes the greatest sacrifice for it: by letting the others go, by letting Percival go. She carries on breathing.
This is Neville; who worships. He can not communicate, only to himself and the reader. University, urban spaces, crowded rooms: these only saturate his loneliness, rather than deterring it. He is defined by one love and one place. He is singular. Forever romantic, he embraces intolerable suffering if he knows it might resolve in discovering his desire. Not even to fulfil his desire, just to become aware of one; of having it dimly lit inside of him to nurture:,”Therefore I go, dubious but elate; apprehensive of intolerable pain; yet I think bound in my adventuring to conquer after huge suffering, bound, surely, to discover my desire in the end”, (p. 42). Then his love is taken away from him and the sun loses its light. He can live his life no longer, but has to live the lives of others: Caligula, Horace, Shakespeare. He has to find himself in those who don’t share his tragedy. After Percival’s death, Neville gives himself over to permanent absence: “Why meet and resume? Why talk and eat and make up other combinations with other people? From this moment I am solitary. No one will know me now”, (p. 107). Bernard, on the other hand, thinks only of his presence, of Percival’s impact on the world—what he was in those short twenty-five years. (And they are short. And twenty-five years is young. And I have barely broken into my hoard). Neville can’t function without someone to love at all times. In fact, the who or why or how doesn’t seem to matter as much as he needs to perform the act of loving. It doesn’t even have to be Percival, “I shall then—for there is no end to the folly of the human heart—seek another, find another, you”, (p. 129). Love secretes in a constant output; he just needs someone to put it into, even a ghost will do. Eventually, he turns away from his books. They are a part of him, he cherishes them, but were once he turned his nose on ordinary scenes, and simple people, he sees now its energy. He sees real life. The explanation, the scene, the feeling—these are suddenly within reach. Life can be grasped; it is not permanent darkness. Real life does not have the structure or clarity of writing, it is a poem with no punctuation, it is not as convenient, “There are no commas or semi-colons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths”, (p. 142). And still, Percival, his ghost, will not let go of him. Neville hallucinates the dead, despite his best efforts. And this cycle will continue indefinitely; shifting backwards and forwards between self-pity and forgetting. Neville, the great devourer of history, the poet, explores everything but returns to the singular, “From the myriads of mankind and all time past he had chosen one person, one moment in particular”, (p. 197).
This is Jinny; who spends her years. “I have fifty years, I have sixty years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the beginning”, (p. 38). She is not only aware of time, but deeply savours it. She protects her hoard because she knows how precious it is to use it. More than the others, she dissolves into her surroundings and experiences joy at its base value. Skin, breath, dresses: she feels each person in how they present themselves, rather than how her past or present might shape it. She knows what it is to be present. But presence comes at a cost; days turn into commodities. Her life is an account, a hoard, and one day it will be spent, “I open my body, I shut my body at my will. Life is beginning. I now break into my hoard of life,” (p. 44). Jinny is sensual, she connects through touch and appearance: this is how she integrates with the world, “I pass them, exposed to their gaze, as they are to mine. Like lightning we look but do not soften or show signs of recognition. Our bodies communicate. This is my calling. This is my world”, (p. 71).
This is Louis; who buries himself. He regrets his monotonous life, his accent, his identity. He hates the life which he feels has been chosen for him. So much so, he obsesses over every part of history that has come before him; a world that, like him, has been pre-written, “I seem already to have lived many thousand years,” (p. 46). Louis doesn’t know his true identity; he copies those around him, changing shape and colour; he hates the parts that are there, “I am conscious of flux, of disorder; of annihilation and despair. If this is all, this is worthless,” (p. 66). History and the present blur before him. Day-to-day life has the same landscapes of the spaces which make up his histories; his imaginings: “remembering all this as one remembers confused cries and toppling pillars and shafts of red and black in some nocturnal conflagration. I am for ever sleeping and waking. Now I sleep; now I wake”, (p. 67). He devotes himself to wealth, but what does the successful man get for himself? What material will plug the gap of his soul? He will not rejoin with Rhoda, for she is immaterial and not of this world. He can not follow Bernard, for as he finds the right words for each point and each object, Louis needs to connect these strands, to trace his finger along the ley lines. He lives at the periphery of the world. And not at the edge of a place, but of time, and that time has already passed.
This is Rhoda; who has oblivion in her. A 2mm gap of empty space that the rest of her atoms have to avoid and grow around. She is tuned to 97% opacity: caught at the right angle of light, it may be possible to see straight through her, to catch something behind her staring back. Yet she emanates a deep love, a love she can’t channel or direct to a focal point. It seeps from her body, in all directions, subjectless, “There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle […] To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them—Oh! to whom?”, (p. 39). Rhoda controls water: still pools, puddles in courtyards, many ocean fathoms, kitchen basins with white petals floating in them; she is full, but without a current, this water does not flow. She needs her misery to make her unique. She can not accept the melancholy of others, despite being so familiar with it. Her sadness is selfish; not to be shared, “It is because of Neville and his misery. the sharp breath of his misery scatters my being. Nothing can settle; nothing can subdue”, (p. 86). Rhoda gets almost freed after Percival’s death. She engages with strangers, throws herself into public life, sees people and lets herself be dragged into all the crevices of the seaside rocks. Without Percival, without the sun, she comes alive in the darkness, “Into the wave that dashes upon the shore, into the wave that flings its white foam to the uttermost corners of the earth, I throw my violets, my offering to Percival,” (p. 117). But she does so in dedication, in honour of the light, “I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams”, (p. 147). Rhoda is a non-being; the thing not remembered or focused on. Non-being is typically negative; the counter-force, the ennui. Where the others are defined by their presence, their wants, Rhoda is the absence, the one without wants. She intrudes into spaces, like the foam filling the cracks of the coast’s rocks. She is the origin of waves; the master of water.
This is Bernard; who binds them. He is the thread that tethers them together; the one who comforts, the one who amuses. This is his duty, his responsibility. He, like time, is sewn through each person. But, like time, he is the one who outlives them, “Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories”, (p. 26). Bernard makes the greatest sacrifices, and he is the only one left speaking at the end. He is the most sociable, talking to strangers, filling gaps of silence, picking up people and characters like they’re there to be collected, “I fill my mind with whatever happens to be the contents of a room or a railway carriage as one fills a fountain-pen in an inkpot. I have a steady and unquenchable thirst”, (p. 46). In his youth, he is not one for reflection or sentimentality as the others do. Like Jinny, he exists to occupy each present moment, but unlike her, he does so against his better judgement. His deeper wish is to capture these moments, to put them into words. It doesn’t even matter if they are not his words; they could belong to Shakespeare or Byron or Milton. Time, for him, is not actualised without the right series of words to capture it. But these phrases fail him. He loses his ability to connect the pieces; language withdraws. Neville tries to open up about himself, “You are not listening to me […] I am asking you to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to repulsion in those I love?” (p. 61), yet Bernard cannot answer: the great writers hadn’t written the answers for him. Neville wants to descend inward, whereas Bernard immediately turns outwards. He is constantly torn between double binds: he has an awareness of precisely the kind of man he wants to be, how he wants to be seen, but his self-awareness of this image stops him from properly reaching it, “I need an audience. That is my downfall […] I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self”, (p. 81). It takes Percival’s death for Bernard to become truly earnest. The journey is a long one, it will take him most of his life. It will mean squishing down his ideas, being patient enough to let them come naturally, and not prying them before they’re due: “Something lies deeply buried. For one moment I thought to grasp it. But bury it, bury it; let it breed, hidden in the depths of my mind some day to fructify. After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand,” (p. 111). Bernard needed phrases and he oscillates between imposing order on his experiences and surrendering to its authenticity. In his contemplation, he becomes disappointed with the person he has become. All his distractions fall in on themselves: “Why impose my arbitrary design? Why stress this and shape that and twist up little figures like the toys men sell in trays in the street?” (p. 133). Bernard turns away from the beautiful phrases and stories to capture life; he no longer seeks the perfect phrase but the “shuffling of feet” (p. 171): unplanned, unsung moments. He becomes nostalgic, but to capture feelings, not words. In these recollections, he toys with the memories of his friends like someone playing with animals; like moving fish between bodies of water or picking up insects to watch them fall, “But let me dip again and bring up in my spoon another of these minute objects we call optimistically ‘characters of our friends’”, (p. 175). Susan, Rhoda, and Jinny become “birds who sang with the rapt egotism of youth by the window” (p.177), but he can only recall their sounds, not their wings. It is only with age does he become true to himself: he returns to the lived moment, to simple interaction. He embraces the chaos of daily life as “extreme precision is a mistake”, (p. 183). He becomes the last speaker but only because we no longer hear from the others; they have grown silent, they have lost their ability to listen. Bernard is the only one who learned and re-examined himself and grew through his pain, “The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth”, (p. 185). He sees his life as the continuation of other lives; of what came before and what comes after him; he is the water, not the sea. “The little language is enough” (p. 189). There is no one left to hear him, but he will carry on speaking, “I saw but was not seen” (p. 206). The first death is in the heart, it has taken the others, but it will not take him. His heart still beats: “Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and rise again. And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches it back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse rider first spurs and pulls him back”, (p. 214).
Images: collection of seascape artworks by Ethel Walker.
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