I thought Orlando was different.
The first few pages of reading the Waves is a jarring experience. Not that anything extreme happened in the plot, for the book lacks the plot itself, but the surprise comes in the actual form of the novel. Woolf is no stranger to pushing the conventions of the novel, but each book of hers that I’ve read blows my head right open.
The Waves is made up purely of internal / external monologues of its six very different characters as they navigate through life from their childhood to old age. For each different phase of their lives, the book is divided by the different phase of the day, from dawn to past dusk. Each of these passages begin with the waves at the sea, to the forests of birds, to an ambiguous room where the light of the day gradually reveals and eventually hides again the contents of the room.
It is like nothing you’ll ever read before and like nothing you’ll ever read again. Then again, I said this after having read Orlando. It is demanding, as most Virginia Woolf books are — but it is infinitely rewarding — as all Virginia Woolf books are. When the characters get going in their inner monologues, they are emotionally exposed, vulnerable only to the reader. We know their weaknesses and fears, their ambitions and accomplishments, but they still cast a shadow. We know the thoughts of each one and yet, for each of the characters there is still something intangible, ambiguous and makes them even more real.
I can relate with every single one, as it may or may not be intended — the six different characters are six different consciousness, which can be present in a single character. As Bernard described “… I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am — Jinny, Susan, Nevilla, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.” Do the characters only exist in Bernard’s minds, and if they do exist, how much of the soliloquy are properly theirs?
In some ways, the book is about relationships — how individuals affect each other and change one another, how the environment affects the individual and the role of memory. People change overtime, as these characters do, but even years later when they are more mature, there is something that remains static in each of these characters. As much as it is a book about relationship, it is equally a book about the self. This can get complex, especially when the reader takes on gendered reading and tussles between the character’s own struggles between the masculine and feminine selves.
Characters are put into a blender remade in our minds from what they say themselves and from what others say of them, sometimes mockingly sometimes with affection. Bernard still struggles to finish his stories, and only collected quotes into a little book with no place to put them; Louis, the Australian struggles with his “colonial” accent and as successful as he was, still thirsts for the approval of others, and Jinny, who is constantly sensual.
Out of all the characters, I connected with Bernard the most. For most of the beginnings of each new phase, he kicks off the soliloquy and the others jump in after him. He is a storyteller who can seldom ever finishes his stories, he is constantly distracted, yet he is the most meditative and he is kind. The one I understand the least is Rhoda, who I find the most bitter in her outlook on life and culminated in her own suicide.
The Waves in the novel is multi-faceted, like the seven sided flowers in the middle of the table, with a different perspective from each side. The waves is the constant repetition of the rhythm of life, moving in cycles until it ebbs. It is the singular journey of one wave from its rise to its decline, coming crashing down. It is the representation of the constant and the chaos, the surface and the depth. Woolf is a fucking genius.
By pushing the form of the novel, Woolf manages to push the form of the language. Make no apologies for reading this book out loud. It sounds amazing read aloud. Woolf is a master weaver of rhythm and language that it is criminal not to listen to how the prose sounds. Read it aloud in your minds at the very least.
