A Review of The Waves, by Virginia Woolf

I. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is a novel composed almost entirely of speech delivered by six recurring characters. In fact, barring the short, impersonal, and prosaic preludes that begin each chapter, there is nothing more to the novel than a series of cascading, interweaving speeches made by these six characters. The extent to which there is a narrative viewpoint embedded within the book beyond these expressions is exhausted merely in there being consistent and accurate reporting upon who is currently speaking. We are always told by the novel who is saying what, and always in the same way (“X said”), but other than the speech itself, nothing further. Indeed, if the novel was rewritten to bear the same notational form as a play, where each piece of dialogue followed a name (“X:”), instead of being written in prose, the form and content of the novel would be almost entirely preserved.

It would be easy to think, upon reading this, that the novel therefore consists of a series of scenes involving overt interactions and conversations between characters, where the characters are continually responsive to the moves the others make within the human situation they jointly inhabit. It would be easy to think, given it is almost wholly speech, that the novel is a series of claims, questions, responses, retorts, rapport, and rebukes. This would be easy and even natural to think, but it would be wrong. For the dialogue constituting The Waves is not a conventional series of exchanges between human subjects, but instead a series of what could best be described as dramatic soliloquies.

The two features relevant to traditional soliloquies that make this description apt are first, that when a character delivers a soliloquy, they are usually spoken to and about the character delivering it, so to and about themselves, and thus directly to the audience or reader. They function as a way of directly communicating with the audience or reader the character’s thoughts, feelings, desires, ruminations, motivations, and anxieties about the situation at hand. Second, they – in a sense at least – take place alongside, rather than as part of, the events which they are about. Typically, when a character delivers a soliloquy, none of the other characters are supposed to hear the content of that monologue, and the action of delivering it is supposed – again, in a sense at least – to be understood as something that happens outside the world of action which the character inhabits. This is the case of the soliloquies that make up The Waves, too. Each character takes turns giving a detailed and deliberate commentary on their own experience of things, in the broadest sense of experience. But while these commentaries are spoken, they are not spoken to each other, they are spoken to themselves, and thus (only) to the reader. Each character does not hear every other character’s depiction of their own internal machinations, though they do accurately infer aspects of them when depicting their own.

On the other hand, the soliloquies that make up The Waves also differ in an important respect from traditional soliloquies. In plays an author can and often does embed a certain perspective within the text that is not, strictly speaking, the character delivering the soliloquy. Thus, a soliloquy is not just a way of the author saying: “here is the internal state of character, here is what they are thinking and feeling”, it is a way also of communicating to the reader or audience what you are supposed to think about the character. For example, a soliloquy may be written in such a way that you are supposed to think the character delivering it is a buffoon with delusions of grandeur, and you are supposed to laugh at them. Where this is the case, it not exactly ‘up for interpretation’ what you are supposed to think of this character. They are supposed to look ridiculous, and this is the perspective that the author has embedded within the text, an outside perspective you are supposed to understand as the reader or audience. Woolf does seem to embed any such perspectives in the soliloquies that make up The Waves. The novel seems to be written in such a way as to completely expunge any trace of such an outside perspective, you are just left with the perspectives themselves.

For those that have not read the text, this should all seem rather extraordinary. After all, I stated earlier that this book is entirely made up of dialogue but am now stating that the dialogue is not actually between the characters, but is just dramatic monologues delivered by and about each character that takes place outside of the world and situations that the characters inhabit. If this is the case, then there is no actual dialogue in the book at all, just a series of speeches. This would be extraordinary. But The Waves is an extraordinary book, and this is exactly what we find. It is a book about the characters’ overlapping, interweaving perspectives on the events making up their lives, not the events themselves, which we can only infer and reconstruct from their perspectives.

This raises a decisive question for our getting a grip on the text: why did Woolf choose to express these perspectives through speech at all, and not, like in some of her other works or those of her modernist contemporaries (see my essay on The Sound and the Fury), through a more direct description of their phenomenology that blends togethers thoughts, speech, and events? Why does she express these perspectives in discrete monologues, and why are these the only perspectives she expresses? In order to appreciate what an answer to this might look like, it will be useful to first consider the content of the book, what the monologues that make it up are actually about.

II. The Waves is a series of dramatic soliloquys delivered by six different characters spanning nine different phases of their lives, all the way from their childhood to their old age, and death. (I am not going to talk about Percival, who does not deliver any speech, though much could probably be said.) These characters grow up together during the early stages of their life, in childhood, and at school. As they get older, and reach different, critical junctures in their life, carving out a place for themselves in the world, they and their respective lives inevitably drift apart. Each of the nine phases corresponds to the nine chapters that make up the book. The nine phases depicted by the book are not exhaustive of their entire lives – we do not get a play-by-play of each person’s entire life, without gaps. Rather, they are episodes of their lives, mostly based on significant and memorable events involving each of the characters: moments during their childhood and schooling, the beginnings of their forays into the world, their subsequent meetings throughout the rest of their lives, closing with a final reflection upon it. Nonetheless these phases proceed chronologically and are always representative of a certain point in the whole trajectory of each person’s life, relative to each other person’s point in their own trajectory, in all the ways that they coincide and come apart from one another.

One thing that is striking upon first picking up and reading this book is that soliloquys are being delivered by very young children that have a level of sophistication such that no child of that age could actually have delivered it. Indeed, there is something positively incongruous about children speaking in such a way. But there is also something profound about it. For it reminds us of the depth of feeling, and the depth of the world that is experienced by children. The extent of the language a perspective has at its disposal to express itself often delimits, for all practical purposes, our understanding of that perspective, especially in novels. Thus, when children speak in the way that children actually speak, whether in reality or in fiction, the world they express is going to be impoverished relative to the world expressed by most adults. However, if we think back to our own experience as children (or at least if I do), our world was anything but impoverished. Children have a rich inner life that teems with intrigue and tumultuous affect, encounters constant novelty, is animated by curiosity, and is constantly encroached upon by powers allied and alien. Thus, while it may be a little less expansive, and certainly less organized according to the neat conceptual schemes we adults impose upon it, the world of a child is often as rich and as deep as the world of an adult. Woolf giving children the expressive force, through their grandiloquent soliloquies, to bring out this depth of experience, and remind us of this fact, is one of the many great achievements of this work. (Compare this to Faulkner’s depiction of Benji’s experience in the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury, which in a sense takes the opposite approach.)

The Waves also serves as a reminder that the world of children, just like the world of adults, is one carved up according to distinctions between people. For it is not just ordinary objects and parents that make up the world of a child, it is other children, too. And children, as much as adults, notice, compare, and contrast aspects and abilities of themselves and others. Crucially, they also see the effects these aspects and abilities can and do have on other beings in their world, whether these other beings are socially salient people, such as parents, teachers, or each other, or objects of glory, such as footballs, cricket bats, or books. Individual comparisons congeal into fixed distinctions between persons, concepts are formed, and rituals of induction into different social spaces are developed. Thus, even from a very young age, highly complex, dynamic, and phenomenologically significant social distinctions come to structure a child’s world. (I might speculate that the three most fundamental axes across which human children’s lives are drawn in our time are (a) gender – whether you are a boy or a girl – (b) whether you are athletic or intelligent (or both or neither) and (c) whether you are a speaker or a listener. Each of these are explored in the book.) And with these structures come the indignities, embarrassments, and humiliations of children feeling themselves different, sometimes fundamentally, to others that cohabitate their world. Most of these episodes we forget as we get older and adopt our own, more civilized embarrassments. But as children we feel them acutely, and with an unrivalled emotional intensity, and dysregulation. Their manifestation through the expressions of the characters in The Waves alerts us to this again.

Despite the intensity of the experience of distinctions as children, there is something superficial, or misrepresentative about it, relatively speaking. For when we are children comparing ourselves to other children, especially those growing up in our immediate social and cultural milieu, we may have great differences of personality, in the ways that we tend to react to possible situations, but we have little differences in our history, the circumstances and events that constitute our life so far. Indeed, in terms of their history, the children in the novel start out living roughly the same life. However, as we grow up and into our lives, we accumulate a history that typically becomes increasingly singular, increasingly unlike anyone else’s life, especially as we set upon paths that, as we travel down them, foreclose upon other possibilities of action and connection.

Our movement down this path is partially propelled by our personality, including our particular set of abilities, as it is our personality which is determinative of our range of possibilities in any given situation, and in particular the ways in which we may do well or badly within the socially salient domains we find ourselves in. But we are equally propelled by the path dependencies that our accumulated history itself might necessitate, such as your being sent to a particular school, your parents moving, your moving for education, relationships, or jobs, your falling in with specific social milieus, your training and subsequently taking of certain jobs in certain sectors. Thus, as your life unfolds and your history accumulates, you tend to both come apart from and become different than others, especially as your personality and paths diverge. (See my Nature, Nurture, & the Constitution of Human Life for more on this distinction between personality and history.)

There is a sense in which the six characters undergoing this process is what the rest of the novel is about. Each of their experiences of the distinctions among them as children slowly blossom, as they get older and grow apart, into distinctions increasingly material. These distinctions are always expressive of their personality, their particular character. But equally, these distinctions – especially as their patterns of life congeal to be more stable as they get older – are expressive of, and ultimately shaped by, the broader forms of life they choose to participate in, whether that be the life of a busy, self-assured London socialite (Jinny), a quiet, romantic scholar (Neville), a professionally ambitious, and highly self-aware businessperson (Louis), or as someone from the country, who lives their life according to natural rhythms (Susan). By placing themselves within certain fields of human life, moving according to the rules and expectations that govern them, recognizing and paying service to the distinctions they track as salient, each character shapes themselves, their identity and their own conception of their identity, around and according to that field. It goes without saying that we do this too.

The two problematic characters, with respect to this point, seem to be Bernard and Rhoda. For they do not easily take refuge within a relatively fixed form of life to which they can conform their own unfolding. Bernard’s identity is supplied instead by the immediate presence of others, and especially by the words he summons upon his specific encounter with them. His identity is therefore far more fluid than the rest of the characters, in the sense that it is constantly changing. And while it takes definite forms through these changes, it seems to lack coherence, when viewed over his entire life, including to himself. Rhoda’s identity struggles always to take a fixed form at all, let alone according to some relatively well-defined form of life within which one’s movements can become increasingly agile and automatic. Rhoda is constantly and self-consciously searching for some foothold upon which she can fasten her being and is constantly and self-consciously failing to do so. Given their particular personalities, and thus the way they interact with their shared environment, they most often experience alienation from others, Bernard especially when he is alone, and Rhoda especially when she is with others. The others still feel alienation, especially in the face of the other characters most unlike them, or from whom they most want validation, but they always have their life to return to.

Despite saying that Bernard and Rhoda seem to be the problematic characters, their identity and experience is not fundamentally different in kind from the others. Rather, it is just relatively less fixed according to specific distinctions that manifest themselves stably in the others, but changeably in themselves. And despite the relative permanence of these distinctions in others, they are equally mutable – in principle at least – as the distinctions that constitute Bernard and Rhoda. Fixity is the norm for us, in both the descriptive and normative sense that most of us tend to be relatively fixed, and that many people think it is good for us to be fixed, and this is what invites the perception that these characters are problematic. But whether problematic is taken in a descriptive or normative sense, this perception is mistaken. For not only do most of us in fact change the ways we are distinct from others, thus making Bernard and Rhoda no less problematic in principle from those who change less, we can and should always be asking ourselves whether such changes might be good for us, thus allowing us to say that Bernard lived a good life where Rhoda did not, independently of their shared unfixity.

Indeed, The Waves is as much about distinctions as it is about their dissolution, and the consequent coincidence that can be achieved between persons open to one another. We see this throughout the novel each time all the characters come together. It is true that as they get older each of their lives are increasingly braided into habitual movements, largely closed off from the outside interference of the others. But it is also true that in each of these episodes they are able, at least to some extent, to unbraid themselves from that movement, wound increasingly tightly as they get older, and to form a new one involving all of them, however temporarily, and with whatever fragility. This does not necessarily mean that the indignities, embarrassments, and humiliations go away, nor the tempestuous emotions attendant upon them. But it does mean they can create a space in which the individuating role of their particular history on their identity is suspended, and becomes superficial, as it was in the world of their childhood.

As such, their final meeting goes as follows:

“Hampton Court,” said Bernard. “Hampton Court. This is our meeting-place…”

 

“There at the door by the Inn, our meeting-place, they are already standing – Susan, Louis, Rhoda, Jinny and Neville. They have come together already. In a moment, when I have joined them, another arrangement will form, another pattern. What now runs to waste, forming scenes profusely, will be checked, stated. I am reluctant to suffer that compulsion. Already at fifty yards distance I feel the order of my being changed. The tug of the magnet of their society tells upon me. I come nearer. They do not see me. Now Rhoda sees me, but she pretends, with her horror of the shock of meeting, that I am a stranger. Now Neville turns. Suddenly, raising my hand, saluting Neville I cry, ‘I too have pressed flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets,’ and am churned up. My little boat bobs unsteadily upon the chopped and tossing waves. There is no panacea (let me note) against the shock of meeting.”

 

“It is uncomfortable too, joining ragged edges, raw edges; only gradually, as we shuffle and trample into the Inn, taking coats and hats off, does meeting become agreeable. Now we assemble in the long, bare dining-room that overlooks some park, some green space still fantastically lit by the setting sun so that there is a gold bar between the trees, and sit ourselves down…”

 

“It was different once,” said Bernard. “Once we could break the current as we chose. How many telephone calls, how many post cards, are now needed to cut this hole through which we come together, united, at Hampton Court? How swift life runs from January to December! We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade; we make no comparisons; think scarcely ever of I or of you; and in this unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction and part the weeds that grow over the mouths of sunken channels. We have to leap like fish, high in the air, in order to catch the train from Waterloo. And however high we leap we fall back again into the stream. I shall never now take ship for the South Sea Islands. A journey to Rome is the limit of my travelling. I have sons and daughters. I am wedged into my place in the puzzle…”

 

“But now silence falling pits my face, wastes my nose like a snowman stood out in a yard in the rain. As silence falls I am dissolved utterly and become featureless and scarcely to be distinguished from another. It does not matter. What matters? We have dined well. The fish, the veal cutlets, the wine have blunted the sharp tooth of egotism. Anxiety is at rest. The vainest of us, Louis perhaps, does not care what people think. Neville's tortures are at rest. Let others prosper – that is what he thinks. Susan hears the breathing of all her children safe asleep. Sleep, sleep, she murmurs. Rhoda has rocked her ships to shore. Whether they have foundered, whether they have anchored, she cares no longer. We are ready to consider any suggestion that the world may offer quite impartially. I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked off accidentally from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space.”

 

“Unreasonably, ridiculously,” said Neville, “as we walk, time comes back. A dog does it, prancing. The machine works. Age makes hoary that gateway…”

 

“While we advance down this avenue,” said Louis, “I leaning slightly upon Jinny, Bernard arm-in-arm with Neville, and Susan with her hand in mine, it is difficult not to weep, calling ourselves little children, praying that God may keep us safe while we sleep. It is sweet to sing together, clasping hands, afraid of the dark, while Miss Curry plays the harmonium.”

 

“The iron gates have rolled back,” said Jinny. “Time's fangs have ceased their devouring. We have triumphed over the abysses of space, with rouge, with powder, with flimsy pocket handkerchiefs.”

 

“I grasp, I hold fast,” said Susan. “I hold firmly to this hand, anyone's, with love, with hatred; it does not matter which.”

 

“The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us,” said Rhoda, “and we enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent. Wren's palace, like the quartet played to the dry and stranded people in the stalls, makes an oblong. A square is stood upon the oblong and we say, ‘This is our dwelling-place. The structure is now visible. Very little is left outside.’”

III. We may now return to my earlier line of questioning: why did Woolf choose to write The Waves in the form of soliloquies? One tentative answer to this may go as follows: it is an attempt to reflect our own existential situation.

There is a tradition in philosophical phenomenology going back to Hegel which says something like: our world is constituted entirely through our own and others’ finite perspectives. What this means in our own case is more obvious. The idea is that anything you perceive, think about, imagine, remember, or in some other way encounter, is necessarily something you encounter only in and through your own experience, and this experience is always a finite perspective. It is finite in the sense that it is always experience of something from a particular place and time, with a particular history, and with particular dispositions. You can see this because as soon as you try conceiving of something you are not at the same time experiencing from your perspective, whatever it is, you experience it from your perspective, wherever that perspective happens to be coming from. (This is not the same thing as saying that conceiving of an unexperienced object is impossible; that would require a further step of argumentation and is not what is being claimed here.) Necessarily, then: the horizon of your experience, which just is your finite perspective, is the horizon of your world.

Within that world, however, we encounter beings remarkably like us, and we recognize them as beings who have perspectives that are different to our own. To see this, imagine you are walking down the beach. As you keep walking down it, you see several large rocks scattered around you. There is nothing particularly striking about this experience, they are just part of the furniture of the world, so to speak. But suppose now that you see the silhouette of a human body on the horizon, a body that progressively becomes clearer and more distinct as you approach each other. Once you are close enough you see their face, and they yours, you see that they see your face, and they see that you see theirs.

This experience seems to be of a wholly different kind to our experience of rocks, or other inanimate objects. For we not only experience another object from our perspective, we experience another perspective existing concurrently to our own. Further, we experience that perspective apparently having their own perspective on the same things we have a perspective on. Thus, we experience our world and things in it not only as a set of things that exist only in relation to our actual and possible perspectives on it, but as a set of things that exist in relation to other actual and possible perspectives on them. And not only do these perspectives experience different aspects of the same objects as us, but they also bring a different set of attitudes, dispositions, and abilities to bear on them. Thus, not only are these perspectives unique, and different to our own, they are just as rich and multitudinous, opening us to the possibility that any given thing may manifest or afford itself differently to them as it does to us.

We live in a world densely populated with people, and the ever-renewing possibility of new people, and thus in a world of actual and possible perspectives existing concurrently with our own. We therefore cannot but see the world not only through our own perspective, but through that of others too. We cannot but experience the things that exist for ourselves from our perspective as existing for others, and from their perspective. The horizon of our experience is still the horizon of our world, but it is an experience much richer, an experience suffused with actual and possible modes of presentation and affordance available to other perspectives as well as us, but also as available to others but not to us. According to this tradition of phenomenology, this recognition and integration of other perspectives into our experience is the genesis of the human lifeworld, of communication, language, objectivity, knowledge, morality, and law. It is also the origin of the distinctions and coincidences between persons which come to structure our society, and which so haunt The Waves. But it is as much origin as it is sustaining force. For without constant encounters with, and anticipations of, these other perspectives, the features of our lifeworld, all of which presuppose that participants recognize others and their perspectives, could not be sustained. Thus, it is through our encounters with others that the world as we know it is made possible and sustained.

By purging as far as possible the expression of any perspective outside those discrete perspectives expressed by the main characters of The Waves, Woolf may be said to be depicting as closely as possible our own world, which itself brooks no perspective outside of our own, and the perspectives of others encountered within it. The fact that the soliloquys are not traditional dialogue and instead take place outside the events that make up the characters lives is no barrier to understanding the novel in this way. This is because, if you accept this picture of the world, then there is no such thing as the events making up our lives independently of our finite perspectives on those events. Any conception we have of those events will be our conception, plus our conception of others’ conception of them. And this is exactly the extent of what the soliloquys making up The Waves seem to express. If something like this is right, then the preludes, which I only very briefly mentioned at the start, could be said to imaginatively evoke this picture of our world.