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VICTORIAN ENGLAND -- IMPORTANT WRITERS -- BRITISH HISTORY NOTES

'THE WAVES' AS THE QUEST FOR SELF

1931

The Waves as the quest for self.

                     Keeping all the mess of life aside, one may wander in the pursuit of one’s self.  When one begins to question who am l? , there evolves the inception to the quest for a self. There exists no meaning wandering in search of self, instead an introspection into ones’ deeper insights or inner self would be fine. Even though this self is not a single self, since our identities keep on changing and also the way one thinks as one live the experiences of one's life, 'self' , a flexible concept takes innumerous shapes in the course of one’s existence. It’s just like finding meaning of oneself from the emotional and intellectual development of ones’s consciousness which is continuously shaped as one treads along the cycle of life.

                    Self is itself a distorted element, self is itself a product of the merge of several selves, and this concept has been wonderfully traced in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ which she wishes to consider as a playpoem rather than a novel. The Waves was published in 1931, which deals with six different but synchronised lives, three male and three female, as Woolf follows them across nine parallel episodes from childhood to the end of their life. Within the hours of day, following the trajectory of the sun, she traces the entire life of these six individuals. Her novel floats in her stream of consciousness with its polyphonic nature giving the inner monologues of Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Jinny, Louis, and Neville. Following the line of experimentalism, Woolf rejects “conventional narrative viewpoints, voices and tenses” trying to find “a new way of redefining the compound, complex nature of consciousness itself.

                  Rather than giving some details of the lives of her friends as many critics believes, like Bernard as her friend Desmond Mac Carthy, Susan her sister Vanessa bell, Neville as Litton Starchey, I would like to come to the point that all the 6 characters are different or different aspects of author’s  own self. In the 9^th section of the novel, one may find the emergence of a 7^th voice that sometimes seem to be Bernard and at times one see no Bernard. There’s no doubt its Virginia Woolf giving the readers her life through lots of stories, which does not have a truthful existence, thus depicting the ambiguous nature of a persona’s self.

                      But unfortunately, what I see (this globe, full of figures) you do not see. You see me, sitting at a table opposite you, a rather heavy, elderly man, grey at the temples. You see me take my napkin and unfold it. You see me pour myself out a glass of wine. And you see behind me the door opening, and people passing. But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story — and there are so many, and so many — stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and none of them are true.

                      The characters are not just separate individuals rendering their thoughts about the people around and life, but they could be considered different faces of one single individual or self that emerged from the androgynous mind of the author.

                          In persuading her I was also persuading my own soul. For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda — so strange is the contact of one with another

                           If one take the monologue sequence separately, it cannot offer a complete image of the novel and of the self; coherence is attained only when they are brought together, completing one another, each bringing something new to this quest for the exploration and reconstruction of a single self.

                          ‘I begin now to forget; I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality of here and now, to tap my knuckles smartly upon the edges of apparently solid objects and say, “Are you hard?” I have seen so many different things, have made so many different sentences. I have lost in the process of eating and drinking and rubbing my eyes along surfaces that thin, hard shell which cases the soul,… And now I ask, “Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt “I am you”. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. . Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.

                        “But I did mean that in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people”, writes Virginia Woolf in a letter to G. L. Dickinson. “The six characters were supposed to be one. I’m getting old myself – I shall be fifty next year; and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia; even though the special Virginia in whose body I live for the moment is violently susceptible to all sorts of separate feelings” (in Woolf, 1978: 397).

·                            Bernard unravel his thoughts like this, Let us go back together over the bridge ,under the elm trees to my room , where with walls round us and red serge curtains drawn ,we can shut out these distracting voices . Now we have regained our territory. Here we are masters of tranquillity and order, inheritance of proud tradition.

                              Virginia woolf’s desire for  a room of her own is expressed in the relation between Bernard and Neville.  And this room of one’s own to write fiction is a medium to explore oneself, and a fruitful space of self discovery. And there she realises, ‘ I am Bernard , I m Byron ,I m this that and the other.i m more self than Nevelle thinks.’

                          To write gives wool’s immense pleasure and her works defines her , gives her identity, that when she becomes she, and as Beranrd says, When I cannot see words curling likr rings of smoke round me I am in darkness- I am nothing. She recognises herself in words.

Each character perceives the world differently, and their different aquintances with life . Each of them becomes a mirror reflecting the outside world, and the angle from which they observe the world is an individualized one, never superimposed on another’s,

                                “What am I? I ask. This? No, I am that. […] I am not one and simple, but complex and many” (W 56), says Bernard at the beginning of the third part of the novel. The image of a multi-layered self that escapes framing (“I escape them, am evasive”) is thus reemphasized, and so is the connection between self and circumstance.

                               One ‘self’ realises the presence of other self when, Neville says-“ Now let Bernard begin. Let him bubble us telling us stories, while we lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence, Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story, Louis is a story.”

                                Author is the god, the victorian status of god emerges when the 7^th voice slips. The authority of Woolf, her power of the construction that destines the life of her characters could be very explicitly found in her voice.

                               The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst. Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers. Faces recur, faces and faces — they press their beauty to the walls of my bubble — Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand others. How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole — again like music. What a symphony with its concord and its discord, and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath, then grew up! Each played his own tune, fiddle, flute, trumpet, drum or whatever the instrument might be. With Neville, “Let’s discuss Hamlet.” With Louis, science. With Jinny, love. Then suddenly, in a moment of exasperation, off to Cumberland with a quiet man for a whole week in an inn, with the rain running down the window-panes and nothing but mutton and mutton and again mutton for dinner. Yet that week remains a solid stone in the welter of unrecorded sensation. It was then we played dominoes; then we quarrelled about tough mutton. Then we walked on the fell. And a little girl, peeping round the door, gave me that letter, written on blue paper, in which I learnt that the girl who had made me Byron was to marry a squire. A man in gaiters, a man with a whip, a man who made speeches about fat oxen at dinner — I exclaimed derisively and looked at the racing clouds, and felt my own failure; my desire to be free; to escape; to be bound; to make an end; to continue; to be Louis; to be myself; and walked out in my mackintosh alone, and felt grumpy under the eternal hills and not in the least sublime; and came home and blamed the meat and packed and so back again to the welter; to the torture.

                               When one doesn’t know what to do with life, its better to follow as self rather than submitting to what is given to them

 ‘Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal.

PERCIVAL

                       The characters translate reality differently, their choice of words is an individualized and individualizing one, and woven together their perceptions offer a complex image of the outward reality.  The unity of the novel, its coherence is given by some linking/unifying devices that Woolf employs, managing to bring all the six subjectivities together and at the same time to keep them distinct. The unifying factors could be : “the uniformity of style” in the characters’ soliloquies, “the positioning of a seventh character”, Percival (to whom all converge), and “the use of the character of Bernard as the chief spokesperson of their relationship” (Fand, 1999: 53-54).

                       There is an important seventh figure a sportsperson, athletic, a champion, a hero, god in the novel, a central figure whom the other six characters admire of. He is their school friend, not just a friend but more beyond that. Woolf doesn’t give a voice to this silent figure Percival and hence he is known through the monologues of characters. Neville believes-

Bernard half knows everybody, he knows nobody. And when Percival joins them he says, Now is our festival. Now we are together. But without Percival there is no solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without a background. He came, my heart rises. All oppression is relieved. all impediments removed. The reign of chaos is over. He has imposed order. Knives cut again. Percival is the silent figure that brings all the six of them into a harmony

Jinny

“Let us hold it for one moment, love, hatred, by whatever name we call it, this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man again. Percival is youth and beauty that diminishes with time.”

                        May be Percival is the unconscious space where there is not distinction in terms of self, one is unaware of anything in that space, and when comes to conscious one exhibit different self. Through my own infirmity, I recover what he was to me; my opposite.

BERNARD

                          “But here and now we are together. We have come together, at a particular time, to this particular spot. We are drawn into this communion by some deep, some common emotion. Shall we call it conveniently love. Shall we say love of Percival, because Percival is going to India.”

A disaster happens in the lives of these friends when Percival says hi to death.

“He is dead. He fell. His horse tripped. all is over. the light of the world has gone out.  there stands the tree which I caanot pass. My past is cut from me. I will not climb the stairs. We are doomed all of us. Its just like Percival is gone, and there no scope to get the holy grail anymore.”

Percival would symbolise time, hope, death.

                            Percival is virginia wolf’s conscious mind from where all the six voices took shape. When  a work is born, there is the death of the author. Its just like let me retreat back, and let the characters make their own like out of their thought. Its just like a child born, which in the process gets separated from mothers womb.The method of reading, shouldn’t rely on the identity of the author. And then on the characters separate in their course of the search of self, she leaves the works in the hands of her readers. A puch initially is given to the wave, and there own wave is out of control of even itself. The work is always separated from its author. When one self is born and you try to be that self, which which take you away from your past self.

BERNARD

                           “Such is the complexity of things, that as I descend the straircase I donot know which is sorrow, which joy. My son is born, Percival is dead. About him my feelings was ; he sat there in the centre. Now I go to that spot no longer. The place is empty. ‘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. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’

“The waves broke on the shore” - percval  reminds of death. Here I feel the significance of Shakespeares’ verses of Sonnet 60

Like as the waves makes towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end,

Each changing place with that which goes before,

In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

RHODA

                      “On the bare ground I will pick violets and bind them together and offer them to Percival, something given him by me. Look now what Percival has given me. I am alone in this hostile world. I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy. I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me. This is my tribute to Percival; withered violets, blackened violets.”

There is always a mental conflict when one cannot understand oneself as an individual being. And for Woolf, life had been imperfect, an unfinishing phrase. I, carrying a notebook, making phrases, had recorded mere changes; a shadow. I had been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I proceed now, I said, without a self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion. Characters identifies their self in the presence of Percival. Percival is the mirror then. This departure from self, becoming someone else separated from ones being, is like wandering in a wasteland with no memory of ones past life.

‘Our friends — how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely. Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known — it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call “my life”, it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am — Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.’

Reference:

INNER WORLD AND LANGUAGE IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S THE WAVES  Assistant PhD Candidate Cristina NICOLAE “Petru Maior” University of Târgu-Mureş 

Woolf, Virginia.The Waves.Wordsworth Edition Limitted2000.print

Nowhere No Trace Can I Discover by Faiz Ahamed Faiz

No Where No Trace Can I Discover

                                                 -- Faiz Ahamed Faiz


Nowhere, No trace can I discover
Of spilt blood,
not on the murderer's hand nor on his sleeve;
no daggers with red lips nor scarlet-pointed swords.
I see not blots on the dust,
no stains on the walls.

Nowhere, nowhere
does the blood reveal its darkness

Not spilt in grandeur
nor as ritual sacrifice,
it was not shed on the field of battle,
it did not raise a martyr's banner.

Screaming loudly the orphan blood flowed on.
No-one had the time or sense,
none bothered to listen.

No witness, no defence;
the case is closed.
The blood of the downtrodden
seeped mutely into the dust.

Alavil Shirdhi Sai Baba Mandir Mahotsavam, 2020 -- Jan 12