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.