The waves

The waves , Eng. The Waves (published in 1931 by The Hogarth Press , London ) is Virginia Woolf's third and last of the so-called experimental novels after Zum Leuchtturm and Mrs. Dalloway .

content

The novel describes the lifelong, agonizing self-exploration of a group of six people. The focus is on excerpts from the lives of three women and three men from their hours together as children up to their old age. The episodes dedicated to them are framed ten times by short interludes in italics that describe the impressions of a day on the coast from its summer dawn to an autumn or winter evening. Central to these inserts are, among other things, the eponymous waves , a symbol of the being carried and, at the same time, of being entwined with all living things.

The transition from the interludes that describe the sun, the beach, the garden and the house and are set in italics, to the episodes of the characters produces a rhythm of repetition and change, in the course of which one day at the coast, the change of seasons and life evolve meet the six main characters. The episodes from the lives of these three male (Bernard, Neville and Louis) and three female (Jinny, Rhoda and Susan) characters are told by them in the form of self-talk. This chorus of voices is the real content of the novel.

Composition and narrative form

In the interludes , in contrast to the episodes, an anonymous narrator appears, who repeatedly follows the changes in the position of the sun, on the beach, in the garden and house over the course of the day - less from a personal perspective and more like a poetic researcher. Already in the first introductory interlude, Woolf writes a style rich in comparisons, metaphors and other poetic forms, which unfolds its power in short sentences and in passages that are transparent for themselves. These descriptions of nature are essentially determined by a consistent anthropomorphism , for example in the repeated description of whitecaps as warriors wielding turbulence. On the one hand, this creates an analogy between nature and the human world of experience, on the other hand, it characterizes nature itself as something active and living. In a similar way, in the second part of her 1927 novel Zum Leuchtturm , Woolf had already depicted nature as something living, in this case also possessive.

In the episodes , the anonymous narrator then steps back behind the characters, to whom he, as it were, gives the floor in turn. The director delivers this experiment of taking back the narrator to the voices expressing themselves according to time and place in a vague now, whose self-analyzes become the actual plot of the novel. What appears pictorial and poetic in the individual sentences and paragraphs becomes strangely floating and abstract despite the severity of the form in the sequence of sections and episodes.

The connection of the main structure of interludes and episodes is first achieved through certain common motifs: for example, through the images of waves, a warrior or a pounding wild animal, the sounds of which penetrate the world of the characters from the beach or from somewhere; or connected by the opposition of the world of light and the world of gloom and rot; or through the contrast between identity and isolation, between community and the burden of individual life, which is increasingly prevalent in all the characters. In addition to these individual motifs, a comparative examination of the larger structures of the interludes and the episodes suggests a parallelism. To the same extent that the cycle of a day and a year is run through during the interludes, initially with an expanding perspective, but then again sharply narrowing at the end of the text, to finally concentrate at the very end of the book in the one-line description of waves broken on the beach to become, the individual episodes are also shaped by such a change in perspective. You start off with shared childhood experiences in one place. In the following episodes, the characters are initially in different places in England, before stays in Rome and Spain - Africa also appears on the horizon - move into the experience of individual characters, until finally, towards the end of the novel, as it were with the sunset of the previous one Interlude, only the character Bernard remains. He owns the first and last utterances in the episodes.

In each of the episodes, the voices only have a direct speech, introduced with a stereotype: … said Bernard,… said Susan… . The reports of the votes almost exclusively use the present tense: There! This is my moment of ecstasy. Now it's over. Past / perfect and future / future tense hardly play a role in these momentary protocols. Bernard describes this procedure with the words: The surface of my mind glides along like a pale blue stream, reflecting what goes by. Although each of these snapshots is accompanied by an inquit formula , it cannot be said whether they are actually actually spoken or whether they are rather a technique for clarifying a stream of consciousness . In this case, the messages of the figures are not to be understood as an articulation. In Woolf's first novel The Journey Out, the young Terence Hewet, aspiring writer, would like to write a novel about "the silence". In a way, Woolf realizes this in The Waves . Because factual information and description exist in this novel only in the voice of the narrator of the interludes. In the episodes themselves, these aspects are always limited to the perception of the individual consciousness of a character and are not communicated to the other characters or the reader through an actual articulation.

This technique of reproducing six different streams of consciousness creates the novel's multi-perspective. Woolf's technique is very peculiar. In a comparison with other outstanding works that use the technique of the stream of consciousness, such as James Joyce's Ulysses , it is noticeable that Woolf chooses a style in The Waves that is essentially characterized by rationality as well as logical and syntactic structure. Idiosyncratic properties of the language are completely absent, apart from Louis' Australian accent, which is only mentioned but not shown. Likewise, the language of the preschool-age children from the first episode resembles that of their adult counterparts without distinction. The differences that reveal the development of children from adults are more in the images and symbols perceived, as well as in their different interpretations, which ultimately refer to the technique of multi-perspective.

Despite all the differences, there is also an attempt to recognize order and uniformity. Bernard is known among his friends for his stories, in which he tries all his life to arrange the chronological sequence of the snapshots with a continuous thread and to look for something healer between sentences and fragments . But in retrospect, he is resigned to the fact that life ... may not respond to the treatment we give it when we try to tell. Narration as a meaning, meaning as a plan for life - that appears to Bernhard as a helpless concept against chance and inevitability of life. It is these life experiences of Bernard from the end of the novel that the author seems to adopt at the beginning of her writing.

Figure constellation

Even the precocious children of the beginning hardly relate to one another, only seem to be in roughly the same place at about the same time without participating in one another in their actions. The multiple selves, who tell their lives verbatim like a polyphonic dream, remain lonely, abstract and lost in time even in their mutual reflections as adults.

The shorthands of her dreams and conversations with herself initially reflect the perception of the outside world. First gradually, then more and more, the reflection on oneself, on the concept of the world, overgrows the account of actions - the characters do not grasp the world or shape it, but think of it, each for himself. Compared to Virginia Woolf's other novels, the six main characters are drawn very sparingly as individuals; more schemes remain than characters reproduced from life. Her reflections revolve around loneliness and her own identity, the longed-for merging with friends and the rare, short moments of shared happiness. Not only 130 years, but entire ages lie between z. B. the five daughters of the Bennet family in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice and the six main characters of the waves .

Since the figures, drawn differently but one-dimensionally, relate to each other almost exclusively and with increasing depth in their reflections, some critics consider them to be facets of one and the same person: An anonymous narrator seems to unfold into different I's and in the female figures between world enjoyment, Fear of the world and turning away from the world and alternating between excessive fantasy, discipline and earning a living in the male. The characters play with their identity and multi-personality several times, as if a personality wanted to split up, decline its fate through the six colors of different biographies and measure its content of loneliness.

interpretation

The strangeness of the narrative, the variety and intertwining of the motifs make the work one of the “difficult” books to this day. Even the basic concept of the course of the day, which swings in a mysterious rhythm with the change of the seasons and the lifelong isolation and joylessness of the main characters, is as fascinating as it is disturbing. Trapped in this rhythm, in which the characters' lives fit in, unhoused and helpless in the face of all shocks, there is only one consolation: there is always something that you have to do next. Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday to Tuesday , as Bernard circled the meaning of his life several times in the long monologue at the end of the novel. It goes on , he notes, but why?

No wonder that some interpreters are looking for an overall ideological interpretation or for a specifically feminist perspective contained in the work. Others reconstruct parallels between the main characters and friends and family members and with the author's increasing despair. And yet other approaches find in the literary concepts expressed by the main characters a poetic discourse on the part of the author, who has experimented with a narrative form that fits the situation of the individual in the 20th century beyond the mainstream of her time.

Some critics consider The Waves to be a masterpiece, but many also consider it not very entertaining. With all due respect for this great experiment in the search for a new narrative form, these critics believe that the work no longer “works” as a novel. In this work, in which Virginia Woolf has perhaps come closest to her own narrative style, she has moved furthest away from her readers.

Book editions

• The waves . Hogarth Press, London 1931; dt., The waves . Novel. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1994, ISBN 3-596-12184-1 .

literature

• Mark Hussey: Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference to Her Life, Works, and Critical Reception. Facts on File, New York, 1995, ISBN 978-0-8160-3020-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Willi Erzgräber , for example, writes the following about the most hopeful person Bernard : “In his peculiar view of human existence, Epicurean and stoic elements are mixed with one another: He enjoys the moment, surrenders to the wave-like ups and downs of life, the pulsating rhythm of the daily bustle, feels the touch of impermanence and yet always finds strength to withstand the pull of emptiness. The image of the rider, who rides undefeated and unyielding towards death with an inserted lance, becomes the epitome of human self-assertion and greatness. Even if Bernard is ultimately defeated in the battle with death like Percival, his friend who lost his life while riding in India, he remains free from all resignation and longing for death [...] This is the attitude of many heroes in modern times Literature for which, in the sense of Nietzsche, God is dead, but which still try to preserve a trace of human dignity, both living and dying. ”(Ders. In: 'Reiz der Words', Reclam, Stuttgart 1978, page 61)