Waving Goodbye (again)

I may be creating more false endings than you see in a bad Hollywood slasher film, but not only is it tough to leave Woolf behind, but her novels 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 been a big fan of Kundera, 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 that’s just me. It’s just that when you give yourself over to Woolf’s novels, you can experience such an extension and, to use Keith’s word, such an “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.

As another gesture towards bidding adieu to The Waves – and for those who may be interested in consolidating (and helping me create?) some additional notes and thoughts – allow me some final (yeah, right) and perhaps ultimately rambling musings:

First of all, as we did for To the Lighthouse, how about examples of memorable lines, similes, or generally stunning writing? How about Bernard contemplating the calibration his wife brings to his life and being: “I am inclined to pin myself down most firmly there before the loaf at breakfast with my wife, who being now entirely my wife and not at all the girl who wore when she hoped to meet me a certain rose, gave me that feeling of existing in the midst of unconsciousness such as the tree-frog must have couched on the right shade of green leaf” (260). Or this metaphor describing the conversations and confluent minds of Neville and Bernard: “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 life? 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 (to recall 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).

A 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). It has been 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 spectral spirits of “The Waste Land,” to the animating presence of the late Mrs. Ramsay, to the incomprehensible loss of Percival – the living dead return to nourish, to challenge, to force self-reckonings, to console … Wordsworth is all over the place as a seeming influence in this novel, too, isn’t he? It makes me realize that one of things I love about courses like this is the serendipitous threads, associations, and conversations that end up being created across disparate texts. At one point Bernard observes that “visual impressions often communicate thus briefly statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words. I notes under F., therefore, ‘Fin in a waste of waters.’ I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter’s evening” (189). Doesn’t this sound like one of Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” one that’s stored away until “emotions recollected in tranquility” lead to artistic inspiration.

As for music, well, I don’t think Keith will mind if I import text from one of his emails; it’s too good not to share, and it suggests we can benefit from using the language of chamber music and the language of the symphony/sonata form to understand the formal and thematic concerns of Woolf’s project: “How like listening to a concert the experience of reading her (and others who do such thinking on the page) can be once you focus (instead of multi-task or zone out) and see what she's up to. Specifically, if you think of the standard quartet as four voices speaking a musical language, it's not difficult to find the parallel with Woolf's sextet of characters. Look at how, by the third section of The Waves (sun risen, characters now college age), the soliloquies stretch out and the language deepens to reflect the expanded awareness of the characters. Voila -- exposition to development! And then, when the group reunites for the first time post-college, Woolf makes the next masterstroke. She has them speak in much the same way – same short bursts, full of metaphor -- as they were when they were kids. The awareness is greater, but the constructions and rhythms of language are absolutely similar. Sounds like the first round of recapitulation to me.”

Musical language and identity: what friends, what family members – what notes – do you need in your life for balance, for completion? 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).<>

There’s also the despair dueling with resolve and heroism in The Waves that recalls the dramatic shifts of emotion and tempo in Beethoven’s late works. And there’s the significant fact that when Bernard is pulled out of his reveries in the restaurant near the end, it’s sounds that summon him back, positively: “Listen: a whistle sounds, wheels rush, the door creaks on its hinges. I regain the sense of complexity and the reality and the struggle” (294). It may be he’s hearing an urban version of the music of the spheres. And will Bernard leave the world “not with a bang but a whimper,” like Eliot’s “hollow men,” or will he, like Gabriel Conroy, ride out the last wave with the awareness that it is “better to pass boldly into the next world than to wither dismally with age”? We know the answer to that one, of course: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” (297).