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 9th section of the novel, one may find the emergence of a 7th
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 7th 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
