Waving Goodbye

It is always tough to leave Woolf behind, and especially in this case given that her novel and her concerns are a landmark in so many ways for the pursuits of this course. They are like that fin rising out of “the waste of waters” for Bernard, the vision that momentarily and partially lends flashes of ecstatic meaning and coherence. I’ve always admired Kundera's work, but somehow I can’t help but feel we don’t do him any favors by reading him next to Woolf: there’s a thinness and near inconsequentiality to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting coming as it does on the heels of The Waves. But maybe that’s just me. It’s just that when you give yourself over to Woolf’s fiction, you can experience such an extension and amplification of your being in the world; aesthetically, too, a novel like The Waves is experienced as if it were a painting or a piece of music: you tend to feel it with your whole body.

In any event, I hope the novel offered various degrees of rewards to you. I hope, too, that the Beethoven string quartet seemed, even if in somewhat opaque ways, an enriching and intriguing complement to your reading. The most accessible intersection may be in the emotions of the music: that is, the mixture of sorrow and lament with defiance and heroism in the music seems particularly germane to the tenor of The Waves, and especially to Bernard's summing up in the final section.

Maybe some of you -- especially those who didn't get to weigh in as much during our class conversations -- would still care to reflect and comment in this space. And how about, simply, some examples of memorable lines, similes, or generally stunning writing? For example, in one of my favorites, consider that figurative "sauntering down the avenue" of Neville and Bernard, the extended analogy describing their conversations and confluent minds: “There we talked; sat talking; sauntered down that avenue, the avenue which runs under the trees, the trees that hung with fruit, which we have trodden so often together, so that now the turf is bare round some of those trees, round certain plays and poems, certain favorites of ours — the turf is trodden bare by our incessant unmethodical pacing” (272). Or the type of line that induces self-reflection, such as when Bernard recalls “being in love for the first time” and notes “I made a phrase — a poem about a wood-pigeon — a single phrase, for a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden transparencies through which one sees everything” (241). What have served as "sudden transparencies" in your lives? Along the same lines, and with only slightly different vocabulary, Bernard realizes that he and his five friends “all had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead.” After noting that “some people go to priests; others to poetry,” Bernard reaffirms “I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken” (266).

And this, finally, is what this novel ultimately seems to be about: finding something to shore against our ruins (as we look ahead to Eliot), something to at least create the illusion that things might be unbroken. Thus the consolation Bernard finds in realizing “what a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us!” (233). They’ll get up the next morning and open the shop, Tuesday will follow Monday, etc. For a while, Bernard’s wife, family, and domestic routines do the trick, causing him to think that “what was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose.” But then that oh-so-fateful appendage: “or so it seems” (262).

And then (here I realize I'm nearly repeating a comment I made in class) there's that line that could nearly apply to anything we’ve read (and will read) this semester: “It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams” (274). This is developing as a course about hauntings. From the younger selves of the narrator of “Tintern Abbey,” to Keats’s dead brother who permeates the two odes we read, to Michael Furey and the vast hosts of the dead, to the Abyssinian maid in "Kubla Khan," to Mary and the speaker's memories in Springsteen's "The River," to Dylan's speaker yearning after Mr. Tambourine Man, to the spectral spirits waiting for us in The Waste Land, to the incomprehensible loss of Percival – the living dead return to nourish, to challenge, to force self-reckonings, to console.

Regarding musical language and identity: what friends, what family members – what notes – do you need in your life for balance, for completion, for proper orchestration? Consider Bernard in this two-page sequence, when we understand that he’s both a musical note in a fugue AND a composer and arranger: “To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self … With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness … Yet they drum me alive. They brush off these vapours. I begin to be impatient of solitude — to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me” (116-7). And then, sentences later, it’s Bernard as composer: “I could describe every chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and thither with its veil of words for everything. To speak, about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an explosion. Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination” (117).

Art like this is a great challenge, but we're rewarded amply if we give ourselves over to it. Reading this novel reminds me of Neville's description of reading a challenging poem: "To read this poem one must have myriad eyes.... One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders' delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror.... One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so ... let down one's net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry" (198-9). In any event, I hope your nets revealed generous hauls.