Excerpts from The Waves, - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Excerpts from The Waves,
by Virginia Woolf

with discussion by Gillian Beer

“Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in,

where one hears music among somnolent people
who have come here after lunch on a hot afternoon.
We have eaten beef and pudding enough to live for
a week without tasting food. Therefore we cluster
like maggots on the back of something that will carry
us on. Decorous, portly–we have white hair waved
under our hats; slim shoes; little bags; clean-shaven
cheeks; here and there a military moustache, not a
speck of dust has been allowed to settle anywhere on
our broadcloth. Swaying and opening programmes,
with a few words of greeting to friends, we settle
down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy
bodies incapable of waddling to the sea, hoping for
a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy, and too much
dry shingle lies between us and the sea. We lie gorged
with food, torpid in the heat. Dann, swollen but
contained in slippery satin, the sea-green woman
comes to our rescue. She sucks in her lips, assumes
an air of intensity, inflates herself and hurls herself
precisely at the right moment as if she saw an apple
and her voice was the arrow into the note, ‘Ah!'

“An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is
warm; sound quivers within the bark. ‘Ah,’ cried a
woman to her lover, leaning from her window in
Venice, ‘Ah, Ah!’ she cried, and again she cries ‘Ah!'
She has provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And
what is a cry? Then the beetle-shaped men come
with their violins; wait; zählen; nod; down come
their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the
dance of olive trees and their myriad-tongued grey

GILLIAN BEER, a Foreign Hon-
orary Member of the American
Academy since 2001, is the King
Edward VII Professor of English
Literatur, Emerita, and past Pres-
ident of Clare Hall College, Uni-
versity of Cambridge. Her books
include Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary
Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, Und
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (3rd ed.,
2009), Virginia Woolf: The Common
Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer (1996),
and Open Fields: Science in Cultural
Encounter (1996). She was made a
Dame Commander of the Order of
the British Empire in 1998.

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leaves when a seafarer, biting a twig
between his lips where the many-backed
steep hills come down, leaps on shore.

“‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’–but what is
the thing that lies beneath the semblance
of the thing? Now that lightning has
gashed the tree and the flowering branch
has fallen and Percival, by his death, hat
made me this gift, let me see the thing.
There is a square; there is an oblong. Der
players take the square and place it upon
the oblong. They place it very accurately;
they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very
little is left outside. The structure is now
visible; what is inchoate is here stated;
we are not so various or so mean; we have
made oblongs and stood them upon
squares. This is our triumph; this is our
consolation.

“The sweetness of this content over-
flowing runs down the walls of my mind,
and liberates understanding. Wander no
mehr, I say; this is the end. The oblong
has been set upon the square; the spiral is
on top. We have been hauled over the
shingle, down to the sea. The players come
wieder. But they are mopping their faces.
They are no longer so spruce or so debonair.
I will go. I will set aside this afternoon. ICH
will make a pilgrimage. I will go to Green-
wich. I will fling myself fearlessly into
trams, into omnibuses. As we lurch down
Regent Street, and I am flung upon this
woman, upon this man, I am not injured,
I am not outraged by the collision. A square
stands upon an oblong. Here are mean
streets where chaffering goes on in street
markets, and every sort of iron rod, bolt
and screw is laid out, and people swarm
off the pavement, pinching raw meat with
thick ½ngers. The structure is visible. Wir
have made a dwelling-place.”

[. . .]
“Should this be the end of the story? A
kind of sigh? a last ripple of the wave? A
trickle of water to some gutter where,
burbling, it dies away? Let me touch the

table–so–and thus recover my sense of
the moment. A sideboard covered with
cruets; a basket full of rolls; a plate of
bananas–these are comfortable sights. Aber
if there are no stories, what end can there
Sei, or what beginning? Life is not suscep-
tible perhaps to the treatment we give it
when we try to tell it. Sitting up late at
night it seems strange not to have more
Kontrolle. Pigeon-holes are not then very
useful. It is strange how force ebbs away
and away into some dry creek. Sitting alone,
it seems we are spent; our waters can
only just surround feebly that spike of sea-
holly; we cannot reach that further pebble
so as to wet it. It is over, we are ended. Aber
wait–I sat all night waiting–an impulse
again runs through us; we rise, we toss
back a mane of white spray; we pound on
the shore; we are not to be con½ned. Das
Ist, I shaved and washed; did not wake my
Gattin, and had breakfast; put on my hat, Und
went out to earn my living. After Monday,
Tuesday comes.

“Yet some doubt remained, some note
of interrogation. I was surprised, opening
a door, to ½nd people thus occupied; ICH
hesitated, taking a cup of tea, whether one
said milk or sugar. And the light of the
stars falling, as it falls now, on my hand
after travelling for millions upon millions
of years–I could get a cold shock from
that for a moment–not more, my imag-
ination is too feeble. But some doubt
remained.”

–Excerpts from The Waves by Virginia Woolf.
Urheberrechte © 1931 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1959
by Leonard Woolf. Use by permission of Hough-
ton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Alle
rights reserved. Used by permission of The Society
of Authors as the Literary Representative of the
Estate of Virginia Woolf.

Gillian Beer

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143 (1) Winter 2014

On Virginia
Woolf’s
“The Waves”

Virginia Woolf imagined and wrote The

Waves through numerous drafts and ver-
sions over four years of intense emotional,
politisch, and social involvement.1 Her asso-
ciation with the Working Women’s Guild
was time- and thought-consuming, ihr
love affair with Vita Sackville-West was
at its height, her health was uncertain.
Während dieser Zeit, from September 1926
to February 1931, she also published her
magical mock-biography Orlando (1928),
with its playful and disruptive challenges
to class, Geschlecht, and death, and A Room of
One’s Own (1929), her ½rst major polemic
against the current ordering of society with
its disadvantaging of women. The Waves
(1931) was mused on in the midst of all this
other activity and not sequestered from
Es, though it moved in other directions. Es
was to be radically innovative, sogar, Und
boundless. It sought new ways to tell life-
stories. But it also wanted to tell life itself.
Writing against the grain of the novel genre
was hard and compelling work. The lumi-
nous sentences, precise and flagrant, fell
into rhythms of repetition and accretion.
Woolf told her friend the composer
Ethel Smyth that she wrote the book to a
rhythm not a plot,2 but behind it lie two
inevitable orders: each day the sun rises,
reaches its zenith, and declines; each per-
son moves from childhood through matu-
rity toward old age and death. The sun is
single, its effects multiple, colossal and
minute. But the individual life is never
single–rather, lateral, overlapping, recoil-
ing. The singleton motion of the life span
is warped, enriched, and embroiled in the
lives of others. The insistent present is
iridescent with the multiple past. Das
past reaches through personal history
into the cold dark of the universe as well
as the antiquity of Egypt and primeval
creatures. The body is now, in all its rich-
ness and absurdity from the childhood bath
on into old age:

Water pours down the runnel of my spine.
Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either
Seite. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry
crannies are wetted; my cold body is
warmed; it is sluiced and gleaming. Water
descends and sheets me like an eel. (19)

These varying motions dapple the sur-
face of Woolf’s language in The Waves.
The book explores the intimate individu-
alities of six people–three women, three
men–who know each other across their
shared lifetimes but come together only
infrequently once they are adults. We see
them in childhood, at school, at university
and in youth, out to dinner together, vis-
iting Hampton Park, and in the case of
Bernard, in old age: their thoughts range
across time and tangle together events,
Bilder, and repeated emotions. Sie sind
very different from each other in their sex-
ualities and sensibilities though close in
social class. The method of representing
each person’s consciousness is through
direct reported present-tense utterance.
The last vestige of the conventional nar-
rator is held in the unvarying past-tense
and inexpressive speech tag, “said Ber-
nard,” “said Jinny,” “said Neville,” “said
Rhoda,” “said Susan,” “said Louis.” In this
Buch, the effect is of quiet ritual rather
than presiding narrative presence. More-
über, utterance here does not imply speech
but rather a threshold voice, heard in the
reader’s ear alone and following the skeins
of thought, passion, senses, and feeling
within the mind. Neither spoken aloud
nor sealed within consciousness these
utterances can be received by the other
people in the book as well as the reader,
but seem to dwell on a threshold between
thought and speech.

I have come to love the book partly for
what it can make happen in a group. Es ist
integral to several of my most poignant
experiences as a teacher, and as a listener.
It is a book about the everyday, forthright

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and mysterious. It embraces the ridiculous
and does not seek to smooth out incon-
gruity. It is a merciful book, and a book
for all times of life. I ½rst read it in my
early twenties and now I’m in my seven-
ties–as old as is Bernard at the book’s end.
Some works wane, but in the course of
Zeit, for me, The Waves has gathered. Re-
cently I sat above the sea and heard the
thump and withdrawal of the waves, hors
Bedeutung, restful, mächtig, their systems
invisible, their forms fleeting and manifest:
unstoppable. Reading The Waves we must
trust its process from page to page with
some of the same quiescence and alertness
that sea-sound induces in us. The book
assuages narrative anxiety once we follow
its rhythms. But it is also the vehicle of
passion and ferocity.

The Waves, darüber hinaus, is a work of extraor-
dinary sensory directness, with sentences
that make your ½nger-ends ½zz.

Neville: “Yet that crimson must have burnt
in Titian’s gizzard.” (129)

The ½zz of this sentence comes through
your ears as well as your eyes: those clus-
tered Rs and Ms and Ns siphon down
toward the assonance of “Titian’s gizzard,”
which is an exercise for the tongue even
when silently voiced. And the false trigger
of the earlier S in “crimson” summons
“burst,” behind “burnt.” Taste becomes
violence, becomes color. All our senses
commingle as we read. And this is just
one sentence in the midst of a paragraph
in a fluid procession of lapsed and recov-
ered moments.

My ½rst encounter with the work was

almost accidental. I was invited to teach a
summer course at a small liberal arts col-
lege in the Midwest. It was my ½rst visit to
Die Vereinigten Staaten. The syllabus had already
been set before I was involved, and I felt a
slight pang of dismay when I saw The Waves
on the list, particularly because I had been

told that the participants weren’t univer-
sity students. They included the owner of
the town’s gas station, a beset housewife
with four young children at home, a man
angry with his job as a counter-clerk, A
young girl just out of education, and a
retired man whose previous job I never
discovered. How they all contrived to be
there impressed me at the start.

At the ½rst meeting they told me how
much they hated this book. They couldn’t
read it. It was obscure, aloof, nothing like
real life. I wasn’t sure how much I liked it
entweder. We set to work, reading passages
aloud, watching the stories accumulate and
unspool, puzzling over the difference and
likeness of the people, listening to the un-
censored run of thoughts and images set
just below the level of speech. That was
what ½rst caught people’s interest: es war
how we habitually live, articulate and un-
wary, at ease in the unuttered, thinking
things we would never own aloud. And
this book didn’t blame us for that process;
it didn’t chastise or judge. Here we could
enter through a blatant silence into six
persons’ heads and experience a new kind
of intimacy.

Woolf thought that she had done away
with characters and was puzzled by reviews
that emphasised the individuals.3 What
emerged in the summer group was a fas-
cination with the six individuals and the
way they gradually resolved into known
people–in the way indeed that known
people resolve, after time, but never quite
securely. It became clear that when dip-
ping into the book, the particular voices
could be recognized at once, partly because
of their preoccupations but also because
of the shape of their sentences, their ad-
versarial relations to each other’s identity.
Yet their reactions could not always be
foreseen, as when the devoted wife and
mother Susan suddenly thinks, “I am sick
of my own craft, industry and cunning, von
the unscrupulous ways of the mother who

Gillian Beer

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143 (1) Winter 2014

On Virginia
Woolf’s
“The Waves”

protects, who collects under her own
jealous eyes at one long table her own
Kinder, always her own” (159). So the
characters became food for ordinary gos-
sip, an unexpected development, rousing
a good deal of laughter, animation, Und
scorn. The events that are ordinarily fore-
grounded were here merely stated in the
midst of a wider flow: Bernard married
and had a son; Rhoda committed suicide;
Louis made good in the city and was
secretly a poet. A flood of speculation and
intimate knowledge crowded into the
group’s conversation. What Woolf would
have made of this I don’t like to think, Aber
she wasn’t there. Her book was, and it
engaged everyone in thinking about their
own lives and the lives of others in new
ways.

So this was my ½rst encounter with the

power of the work. Much later, I prepared
an edition with an introduction and notes
for Oxford World’s Classics when Woolf
briefly emerged from copyright in Britain
In 1992.4 Editing always compels immer-
sion and slow reading, reading even at the
pace of composition. You become part of
the writing, marking the pauses between
Sätze, the ½ssures between paragraphs,
the pressure of syntax on sense, the drag
and the rapture of the writing hand. ich war
moved in quite new ways as I uncovered
the traces of thought that led out to Woolf’s
life and to other writing in the book’s rich
allusive texture: Shelley, Catullus, und das
½n in a waste of waters, her dead brother
Thoby and the streets of London and its
historic places open to everyone–St. Paul’s
(just then reopened after several years),
the National Gallery, Hampton Court–
the city’s flow of people:

“Here I stand,” said Jinny, “in the tube sta-
tion where everything that is desirable meets
–Piccadilly South Side, Piccadilly North
Side, Regent Street and the Haymarket. ICH

stand for a moment under the pavement in
the heart of London. Innumerable wheels
rush and feet press just over my head.” (160)

Immediately after these sentences Jinny,
the flagrant metropolitan, so intoxicated
with her own beauty and sex, suddenly
sees herself as old: “I shall look into faces
and see them seek some other face.” The
Lethean descent of bodies on the escala-
tors momentarily makes her cower:

I admit, for one moment the soundless flight
of upright bodies down the moving stairs
like the pinioned and terrible descent of
some army of the dead downwards and the
churning of the great engines remorselessly
forwarding us, all of us, onwards, made me
cower and run for shelter. (161)

Death haunts life; but Jinny revives.
Repeatedly in this novel the humdrum
becomes colossal and then reduces again
to its ordinary scale: that pulse, expansion
and contraction of emotional and physical
scale, is attentive to ordinary experience
in a way that is rarely registered in writing.
(Sebald does it, too.) The rhythmic inten-
sity of the characters’ self-awareness, their
shared and heightened language, their
skeptic readings of each other’s personali-
Krawatten, all answer to the unacknowledged full-
ness of the everyday. That recognition of
the sheer scope of common experience is
one of the gifts that Woolf gives the reader.
She gives it despite the narrow social
range of the main participants. Woolf dis-
trusted her own ability to capture working-
class speech without caricature, and so she
gradually abandoned, over the rewriting,
her original intention to include a broad
range of people: not only Roger who “of
course, was among those who would have
nurses”; but Albert, “the cowman’s son,”
later “apprenticed to a linen-draper”; Und
also “Flora and Dorothy”: “They would
be going to schools in Switzerland about
the same time that Florrie had went out

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for the ½rst time as kitchenmaid.” Florrie
cried all night after “being spoke to very
severely by the cook” and “was then dis-
missed with a scolding.” The narrator in
the ½rst version muses uneasily:

No one could follow lives which like that;
witho–without the intention (wandering
An, Die) which makes the eye squint & sehen
only a pro½le, an outline, an edge, of draw-
ing comparisons & treating these rounded
& entire ½gures as if they were silhouettes
cut out fragments merely; one being half
obscured by the other.5

Woolf knew something of these less
privileged lives. While she was writing
The Waves she was also writing an intro-
ductory letter for Margaret Llewelyn
Davies’s collection of letters written by
Co-operative Working Women, Life as We
Have Known It, which the Hogarth Press
(owned by Woolf and her husband,
Leonard) published in 1930.6 There work-
ing women wrote ½rst-person accounts
of the dif½culties and achievements of
their lives. It may well have been reading
those letters in direct address that made
Woolf fully aware of the impossibility for
her of rendering working-class speech so
as to show the people as the “rounded and
entire ½gures” they were. Instead of de-
scribing individuals, she includes everyone
together propelled by “the churning of the
great engines remorselessly forwarding us,
all of us, onwards” (161).

A decade later a colleague and I ran a

seminar on “speaking poetry,” encouraging
undergraduates to trust their voices, to pay
attention to line ending and rhyme, Und
not to feel embarrassed by the rhythms of
poetry. At the end of the course some of
them wanted the class to continue infor-
mally, so I told them that I’d long had a
fantasy of hearing the whole of The Waves
read aloud. Six of them volunteered; three
Frauen, three men, a variety of voices,

from Liverpool, from Kolkata, from Canada
and Denmark, Great Yarmouth and Cam-
Brücke. Instead of the imagined sounds of
1930s upper-middle-class speakers, we had
a gallimaufry of accents that opened the
text out again to wider experience, as Woolf
had initially wanted to do when she
described it on the title page of the ½rst
draft as “The Moths or the life of anybody.”
I read the interludes. Each of the speakers
read one of the characters. We sat in a
shallow arc, and the only dramatization
was that as each speaker rose to read, Die
previous speaker sat down. The effect was
of waves moving. We read, with breaks
between the sections, from ten in the morn-
ing until just before nine in the evening.
The event was open, and people came in
and out to listen; a few stayed through
the entire sequence. The sun reached its
zenith and declined and we ended with
lamps and darkness, accompanying Ber-
nard through his solitary meal while he
ruminates on the body and time, Und
merges his own life with the lives of all
his friends. What I gained above all from
this group’s work was the humor of these
lives pressing against each other and sway-
ing apart, the book’s incongruities of
mood and hope and desire. Absurdity is
beautiful here, and sharply–sometimes
sardonically–observed as well.

What we all experienced together was
living through ages of ourselves that we
had not yet encountered. One person said,
“Now I know what it feels like to be middle-
gealtert, to be old.” And the students talked
about learning how friendship survives
through an arc of time and absences and
estrangements: “Our friends–how dis-
tant, how mute, how seldom visited and
little known” (229). We also experienced
Tod, which comes at intervals all the
way through life and not only at its end.
The dead and the living are contiguous,
not discontinuous: “It is strange how the
dead leap out on us at street corners, or in

Gillian Beer

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143 (1) Winter 2014

On Virginia
Woolf’s
“The Waves”

dreams” (229). The one silent character
in The Waves is Percival, beloved of them
all in different ways, an impermeable pres-
ence whose death halfway through the
work marks the beginning of the end of
old ways of being, of old empires.

Looking back on that experience of
hearing the work read aloud, I realize that
for me it also opened out analytically and
emotionally its complex form, its af½nity
with chamber music.

As she worked on “the moths,” her ½rst

imagining of what proved to be The Waves,
Woolf wrote in her diary on 27 Juni 1927,
thinking about how to set the scene:

Frankreich: near the sea; at night; a garden under
the window. I do a little work on it in the
evening when the gramophone is playing
late Beethoven sonatas. (The windows ½dget
at their fastenings as if we were at sea.)7

Late Beethoven and the windows bump
and rasp, the sound of the sea evoked: Das
is a new kind of music, merging instru-
ments and natural sounds. Much later in
the process of composition she muses:
“It occurred to me last night while listen-
ing to a Beethoven quartet that I would
merge all the interjected passages into Ber-
nard’s ½nal speech.”8 The four instruments
playing the quartet on the gramophone
also interject and merge, each carrying its
own voice and timbre in a complex collo-
quy that forms an enormous conversation.
Woolf is seeking a prose that will move
“as prose has never moved before: aus
the chuckle & the babble to the rhapsody.”9
Bernard in the last section of the book
longs for a music “painful, guttural, vis-
ceral, also soaring, lark-like pealing song”
to replace the “flagging, foolish transcripts”
(209). In a string quartet, the voices of the
instruments entwine, all active, so that the
music is more than each, each intent and
Hören. Though the recurrence, chase,
and overlap of the voices in The Waves may

suggest fugal form, the intricacies of
quartet structure and performance are
more outward reaching than fugue alone.10
Musik, and particularly the innovations
and challenges of late Beethoven, are part
of the process of composition in this work.
So also is the start of Woolf’s intense and
dif½cult friendship with Ethel Smyth, Das
rarity for the time: a woman composer of
large-scale music.

The scenes I’ve invited you to read bring

music to the center of meaning and also
ask questions about story. It is hard to
disengage any passage from the rest of
the book since so many of its effects are
produced by the long-dispersed whispers
and echoes and shouts that mesh the
whole immense sequence together. More-
über, mood in this writing shifts so fast
that an extract risks seeming ½xed or por-
tentous when in its full setting it is fleet-
ing and contingent. This passage is, I hope,
long enough to hear the limber writing
ripple across moods.

This is the situation. Percival has died,
far away in India. The “I” in this passage
is Rhoda. From childhood on, Rhoda is
the most isolated and chagrined of the
group of friends. She is disgusted by the
menschlich, by the pressure of other people’s
bodies and presences. Hier, grieving for
Percival, she walks in Oxford Street among
the crowds and then turns aside and
enters what is clearly the Wigmore Hall,
the intimate chamber-music hall. Woolf
is always alert to how experience is charged
by where it happens: in Southampton
Row or Fleet Street, in the Strand or St.
James’s Park. Each lends a different tim-
bre. So does Wigmore Hall, its quiet art-
nouveau space recessed behind Oxford
Street. It is a place of cultural privilege as
well as of contemplation.

The passage opens as savage comedy.
The “decorous, portly” audience are som-
nolent and overfed, outwardly re½ned, yet

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their excess of “beef and pudding” brings
on the thought of maggots and they
verwandeln, in the speed of a simile, into
“walruses stranded on rocks,” too heavy
to reach the sea. They have entered the
hall as respite from the heat and mainly
to greet their friends. The “sea-green”
singer, herself grotesque in slippery satin,
“assumes an air of intensity,” but the sound
she makes abruptly reaches the core:
“the core is warm; sound quivers within
the bark.” The repeated “Ah” becomes
the sound of love, a primal sound, but not
enough for rescue. Next come the “beetle-
shaped men,” the string players, the “ripple
and laughter” of their harmonies evoking
the seafarer, perhaps Odysseus on his
return. Then Rhoda’s language turns
away from all these similes and their sur-
face comforts: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’
–but what is the thing that lies beneath
the semblance of the thing?” The ½erce
humor of excess despised is replaced by
something lean, pure, fell, as the string
quartet proceeds.

As a child Rhoda, left in the classroom
to ½nish the sums she cannot understand,
has experienced zero:

Look, the loop of the ½gure is beginning to
½ll with time; it holds the world in it. I be-
gin to draw a ½gure and the world is looped
in it, and I myself am outside the loop;
which I now join–so–and seal up, Und
make entire. The world is entire, and I am
outside of it, Weinen, “Oh save me, aus
being blown for ever outside the loop of
Zeit!” (15)

Jetzt, listening to the musicians in the face
of death, she is at last included and ½nds
a dwelling-place in the absolute geome-
try of meaning without language:

There is a square; there is an oblong. Der
players take the square and place it upon
the oblong. They place it very accurately;
they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very

little is left outside. . . . Wander no more, ICH
sagen; this is the end. The oblong has been set
upon the square; the spiral is on top. Wir
have been hauled over the shingle, down to
the sea.

Like the sweep of Lily Briscoe’s line and
triangle in her picture achieved at last at
the end of To the Lighthouse, the musicians
resolve experience into an abstraction so
extreme that it is all-encompassing, Und
comforting. Auffallend, obwohl, the zero
–the “o” that terri½ed Rhoda as a child–
is here absent from the visual forms
(square, oblong, spiral) and present only
in the letters of the word “oblong.”

Even this liberation and sweetness can-
not last for Rhoda untainted by the imper-
fection of bodies. The paragraph continues:
“The players come again. But they are
mopping their faces. They are no longer
so spruce or so debonair. I will go.” But
she goes, “fearlessly”:

As we lurch down Regent Street, and I am
flung upon this woman, upon this man, ICH
am not injured. I am not outraged by the
collision. A square stands upon an oblong.

Strengthened by the music, Rhoda de-
clares: “I will at last free the checked, Die
jerked-back desire to be spent, to be con-
sumed.” Her drive toward death is a drive
toward completeness. The hidden image
of the bitted horse comes to its fullness in
the work’s ½nal paragraphs, where Bernard,
facing his own death, imagines himself
as a horseman spurring his steed onward.
The grandiloquence of his assertion
“Against you I will fling myself, unvan-
quished and unyielding, O Death!” is fol-
lowed only by the italicized, neutralizing
Satz: The waves broke on the shore (248).
Bernard’s grandiloquence makes me
uneasy, and perhaps is meant to do so. Es
harks back to the imperial vocabulary that
surrounds Percival. No empire lasts, Und
yet death remains imperious. Bernard, Die

Gillian Beer

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143 (1) Winter 2014

Behind them lies the actuality of oceans
whose waves cover more than half the
globe and whose action never ceases.
Woolf’s encompassing metaphor of the
waves is more than metaphor. It turns
human eyes and ears upon the world we
inhabit and cannot control.

This is a book that draws you back over
time and takes you forward further than
you could have imagined, into and beyond
your own life. There is always more to
discover than you had noticed. And each
group of readers ½nds something else. ICH
am grateful to the people with whom I
have read the book: there is shared reve-
lation in the experience. The Waves has a
way of breeding friends across generations
and of whispering questions that continue
to disquiet.

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On Virginia
Woolf’s
“The Waves”

storymaker and storyteller among the
Gruppe, is always seeking ways of moving
beyond the “phrases and fragments”
with which he feeds his craft. He makes
his friends into stories and deeply dis-
trusts his own making. His incontinent
curiosity discom½ts him and makes him
feel himself second-rate. He carries some
of Woolf’s technical burdens for her:
“But if there are no stories, what end can
there be, or what beginning? Life is not
susceptible perhaps to the treatment we
give it when we try to tell it” (223). Der
physical world is essential to his and to
her creativity:

Let me touch the table–so–and thus re-
cover my sense of the moment. A side-board
covered with cruets; a basket full of rolls;
a plate of bananas–these are comfortable
sights.

He relishes the comedy and grand guignol
of the animal body:

There is the old brute, zu, the savage, Die
hairy man who dabbles his ½ngers in the
ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches;
whose speech is guttural, visceral–well, Er
is here. He squats in me. Tonight he has been
feasted on quails, salad, and sweetbread. (241)

Both Bernard and Woolf value routine as
precious and as fundamental to living:
“After Monday, Tuesday comes.” Routine
allows recovery and reminiscence. Aber
always within and beyond those easeful
stories with their pretended precision lies
another realm, which discountenances the
baleful continuity of narrative:

There is always deep below it, even when
we arrive punctually at our appointed time
with our white waistcoats and polite for-
malities, a rushing stream of broken dreams,
nursery rhymes, street cries, half-½nished
sentences and sights. (213)

These ways of being and of writing can-
not be reconciled but they can coexist.

Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & Wissenschaften

Endnoten
1 Virginia Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, trans. and ed. J. W. Graham (Toronto
and Buffalo: Toronto University Press, 1976). The Waves in the excellent recent Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, Hrsg. Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), includes a full chronology of the composition of the
novel; see pp. ci–cxvii. The Waves was ½rst published in the United Kingdom and United
States in 1931 by the Hogarth Press. Page references in this essay (noted parenthetically) Sind
to the edition I prepared for World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 1992), reissued as an
Oxford World’s Classic (1998, 2008).

2 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1888–1941, Hrsg. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols.

(London: Hogarth, 1975–1980), Bd. 4, 204.

3 “Odd that they [The Times] shd. praise my characters when I meant to have none”; The Diary
of Virginia Woolf, Hrsg. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols. (London: Penguin,
1979–1985), Bd. 4, 47. Woolf is rebelling against the practice of Arnold Bennett and other
“realist” authors of the time who provided long descriptions of their characters and their
surroundings.

4 The introduction I wrote for that edition is collected together with essays on the other novels
in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 1996). The Waves is now out of copyright again after the end of the seventy-year
copyright period, which had been extended from ½fty years in 1992.

5 Quotations in this paragraph are from the J. W. Graham edition, S. 67–68.
6 For further discussion, see the introduction to the Herbert and Sellers edition, S. xlix–li.
Siehe auch, passim, Alison Light’s brilliant study, Frau. Woolf and the Servants (London: Fig Tree,
2007).

7 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Bd. 3, 139.
8 Ebenda., Bd. 3, 336.
9 Ebenda., Bd. 4, 4.
10 In the preface to her 1937 translation of The Waves, French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar
writes briefly but compellingly about the fugue-like nature of the book’s organization and
its Mozartian allegros and andantes; see Les Vagues (Paris: Stock, 1937), v. The new study by
Emma Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politik, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2013), will greatly extend our understanding of Woolf’s interweaving
of music in her work.

Gillian Beer

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