The Waves: Woolf Returns to the Beach

The Waves is my least favorite Woolf book thus far but also allegedly the one closest to her vision. To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway were dreamy and beautiful but held together by some semblance of plot scaffolding. Here, none of that. Woolf goes directly to the essence of the thing ("inner life") and, rather than a conventional novel, we get an abstract poem-play. Beautiful, but a bit too much on the dreamy side for my taste.

to the Godrevy Lighthouse, the waves in St. Ives Bay

The fuzzy "setting" is similar to Lighthouse, with the childhood garden scenes and then recurrent ocean/beach interludes as metaphors for time passing (To the Lighthouse and the Letter H). Themes from Lighthouse appear again here: the inadequacy of language and communication, and the acute presence of time through a combination of nostalgia and Being In The Moment. The book is five friends from childhood to old age ... but they all sound the same -- on purpose, because there is no narrator. Taking things a step further than Lighthouse, where the characters were always wishing to know what others were thinking, here all the characters are the same thing, i.e., an internal monologue divided into parts.

So, in absence of a plot, what the heck is this book about?  It's about the EXPERIENCE of reading Woolf's style, with the purpose of connecting with the characters' inner lives/life. (see: Susan Sontag, On Style)  To be right now In The Moment is to have sensual perceptions and impressions, versus: "this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional" (A Writer's Diary, 139).  Everything in the book -- places, people and even time -- then "exist[s] only in relation to the consciousnesses on which the novelist-poet concentrates exclusively"; basically, subjective rather than objective (Virginia Woolf and Her Works, 287).  Any event or place "exists only in the mind that is aware of it ... a single bundle of sensations, images and thoughts, hastily tied up and labelled" (VWHW, 288).  So, the complexities of friendships and life throughout the book are addressed indirectly but also MOST directly. 

As Guiguet notes in Virginia Woolf and Her Works, "a certain community of vision is undoubtedly necessary for the understanding of The Waves" (302).  I felt a better connection reading Mrs. Dalloway and especially To The Lighthouse; I tend to be uncomfortable with loosely structured books/poems/plays and really the style WAS the book here. Unanswered (unanswerable?) questions include: What is Percival representing and what's his point here? Why does Rhoda kill herself and what's with the pillar in the desert? Is there intentional symbolism for either of those or am I trying to over-interpret?

The book ends with Bernard, who, like Woolf, is the "phrase-keeper" -- although in the spirit of the book, Woolf is all of the characters and all of the characters are one another (i.e., different facets of the same entity). Bernard's pseudo-explanation at the conclusion is "enabled by means of phrases to shape life into groups and sequences and constructions" (VWHW, 294); in other words, talking about life rather than being in it, which is something he's pitied for throughout the book:

"We are all phrases in Bernard's story, things he writes down in his notebook ... He tells our story with extraordinary understanding, except of what we most feel" (The Waves, 70).

Bottom line: Stylized stream-of-consciousness, difficulty Class III rapids.

The Narrator with the Girl Problems

Edmund Wilson's "Memoirs of Hecate County" gets a spot on my bookshelf because of "The Princess with Golden Hair," basically a novella within a short story collection. The book was racy at the time (1940's) and had the expected censorship reaction, so its reputation precedes it (see also: Tropic of Cancer).

"Princess" has one of the most EXASPERATING narrators, which, according to Wikipedia and author bios, is based off Wilson and his personal experiences. And by personal experiences I mean extramarital affairs and general schmoozing. The narrator is an alcoholic womanizer (although he would disagree); this actually makes for great reading because the rest of the characters are seen through that lens and as the novella progressed I wanted to reach out and smack all of them.

E. Wilson. (Srsly ladies, he's not THAT dapper.)

Let's do a step-by-step deconstruction of the narrator and his exploits.

- The narrator falls for the upper-class married beauty Imogen, who has a dramatic, carefully cultured aura of mystery and coyness. Of course, you always want what you can't have, and the narrator quickly becomes obsessed and weaves a fantasy around her.

- Who is the narrator?  A young man who's come into some money, dropped his economics studies, and is currently "writing" about art history and sociology.  "And now suddenly I felt myself dissatisfied. The effect on me of the revelation of Imogen had been to make me feel rather worthless." Meanwhile, he has an ex-girlfriend (also previously married) who has recently moved away: "I had always had the comfortable assurance that she would be back with me the first of the year: I had not had to be desperate about Imogen." (139)  ... And then still meanwhile, he meets Anna.

- Who is Anna?  A "working class" girl from an immigrant family in New York City with a bad husband. (Yes, if you're keeping track, this is married woman #3 for our narrator.) After meeting grounded, realistic Anna, the narrator's opinion of Imogen switches to "she was slightly trashy".

- And thus begins the rotating carousel of women for the narrator. Anna goes away, Imogen comes back. Anna comes back, Anna goes away, Imogen comes back. Anna comes back, the ex-girlfriend comes back. Both Anna and Imogen go away.

- The narrator vacillates between fantasies of Imogen ["It was always as a wife that I saw her now" (174)] and Anna ["I ought to take a house in the suburbs and have Anna and her little girl live with me" (301)]

- After refusing to sleep with the narrator, Imogen confesses she is crippled from a childhood accident and must wear a complex back brace. The narrator's reaction? "The brace explained everything, of course" (198) and "I must conquer Imogen" (270).  But, still frustrated, he instead has a fling with an acquaintance.

- Upon finding out that Imogen's brace is nothing but a "neurotic sham," she claims with dramatic flair that: "I was always the heroine and always terribly oppressed and persecuted" (290).  UGH!  Silly woman!

- The narrator pauses for a long soliloquy where he reflects that his neglect of Anna, who is deathly ill, is a reaction to Imogen's neglect of his advances; i.e., he is taking out his anger at Imogen through Anna. He debates whether or not this is true for a full page, then goes to sleep and doesn't seem to trouble with it (283). It's almost a meta-moment, as if the narrator were addressing the thoughts of the reader and considering it for a turn.

- In the end, the ex-girlfriend comes back from California and the narrator breaks off with Anna to return to what's comfortable. Now back in the country, he reflects that Anna "had given me that life of the people ... she had transmitted a belief and a beauty that could not be justified or explained" (312-313). And instead of rhapsodizing Imogen's fairy-tales, he's elevating the simple, real love of Anna.  He's then "felled by a sudden glumness ... we should never make love again" (313).

So, that being the end of the story, it's tempting to say that the narrator regrets leaving the love he may have had with Anna, and that he realizes the superficial nature of his rich country friends' lives. BUT, it sounds to me as though he's just replacing one idol (Imogen) with another (Anna), and again wanting what he can't have. Wilson could very well have placed another chapter right after this where the narrator cheats on his newly-returned girlfriend with the newly-married Anna, for the sake of nostalgia and his idealism of the organic beauty of the working class.

The narrator is hypocritical, shallow, egotistical and selfish. He uses others to make himself feel better about his life, is easily carried away by flights of fantasy, and is comfortable sitting on a high horse to judge the women when they have affairs. The narrator is what makes this story so good -- because of his ugly human imperfections he becomes more real and you can relate to him (or at least say some men's attitudes have changed very little since the 1940's!). See also: Franzen's "The Corrections"; Who says all your characters -- or any of your characters -- need to be likeable for an engaging story?

Bottom line: Recommend. Narrator needs to get his shit together, don't we all.