Waveriders

We move on, of course, to the enormous challenges (and hopefully the enormous delights) of Woolf's 1931 novel (her seventh), The Waves. Previewing some of your reactions and comments in this space might be a good way to get things going as we look ahead to Wednesday's class (when we'll start by returning to Joyce & "The Dead" but then make our way in short order to Woolf). First of all, some relevant excerpts from her diaries, where she emphasizes issues of both sound and rhythm: "Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises" (6/23/1929); "The Waves is I think resolving itself into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively? ... I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself: therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book" (8/20/1930).

Woolf certainly felt the pressure of form when she wrote the novel (like Beethoven, she struggled fiercely throughout her career to free herself and her art from conventional form, from the "two and thirty chapters" of her literary predecessors, as she pursued what she memorably called the "luminous halo" of life). And now we feel the pressure of reading and responding to that form. Most skeletally, we will encounter nine episodes that each follow an italicized interlude (or maybe prelude is a better word for these): the latter trace the arc of the sun, from dawn to dusk, and aspects of the natural world, in a day-spanning progression that may nearly make us recall the similar sort of (metaphorical) arc in Keats's "To Autumn." The episodes follow six individuals from childhood (episode 1) through their school years (episode 2), their university years (episode 3), and all the way up through middle age (episode 7) and, in some cases, death; through it all, the six (Bernard, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, Louis, and Susan) remain life-long friends.

Our job, I guess, is to understand how Woolf is using form in this novel -- especially musical form -- but also to look for the presence of music as a thematic context, and, hopefully, to enjoy the aesthetics, the story, and the wisdom that the novel has to offer. As you would expect from Woolf, this novel will not be about a sequence of events, but about what Wordsworth calls "spots in time": we don't, after all, typically think of our lives in strictly chronological terms. The emphasis will be on lucid moments, on bright, vivid scenes and impressions. Many of them will recur. If the characters share anything, it's probably the desire to achieve reintegration and deeper meanings, to find in all those disparate moments and images a kind of pattern and unity. So, try to perceive some manner of relationship between the preludes and the melodies and concerns of the voices that follow in the attached section, try to identify the ways the six voices/individuals resemble each other and differ from one another, try to track the role of memory in the novel, and, especially as we work towards the conclusion and our 2/27 meeting, try to figure out where this all leads.

(Do feel free, as well, to offer some comments on the presence/role/influence of music in Joyce's story -- especially if you missed our previous class session or haven't yet had a chance to share some of your observations)