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. Then, swollen but GILLIAN BEER, a Foreign Hon- contained in slippery satin, the sea-green woman orary Member of the American comes to our rescue. She sucks in her lips, assumes Academy since 2001, is the King an air of intensity, inflates herself and hurls herself Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Emerita, and past Pres- precisely at the right moment as if she saw an apple ident of Clare Hall College, Uni- and her voice was the arrow into the note, ‘Ah!’ versity of Cambridge. Her books “An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is include Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary warm; sound quivers within the bark. ‘Ah,’ cried a Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and woman to her lover, leaning from her window in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (3rd ed., Venice, ‘Ah, Ah!’ she cried, and again she cries ‘Ah!’ 2009), Virginia Woolf: The Common She has provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer (1996), and Open Fields: Science in Cultural what is a cry? Then the beetle-shaped men come Encounter (1996). She was made a with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come Dame Commander of the Order of their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the the British Empire in 1998. dance of olive trees and their myriad-tongued grey © 2014 by Gillian Beer doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00253 54 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00253 by guest on 30 September 2021 leaves when a seafarer, biting a twig table–so–and thus recover my sense of Gillian Beer between his lips where the many-backed the moment. A sideboard covered with steep hills come down, leaps on shore. cruets; a basket full of rolls; a plate of “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’–but what is bananas–these are comfortable sights. But the thing that lies beneath the semblance if there are no stories, what end can there of the thing? Now that lightning has be, or what beginning? Life is not suscep- gashed the tree and the flowering branch tible perhaps to the treatment we give it has fallen and Percival, by his death, has when we try to tell it. Sitting up late at made me this gift, let me see the thing. night it seems strange not to have more There is a square; there is an oblong. The control. Pigeon-holes are not then very players take the square and place it upon useful. It is strange how force ebbs away the oblong. They place it very accurately; and away into some dry creek. Sitting alone, they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very it seems we are spent; our waters can little is left outside. The structure is now only just surround feebly that spike of sea- visible; what is inchoate is here stated; holly; we cannot reach that further pebble we are not so various or so mean; we have so as to wet it. It is over, we are ended. But made oblongs and stood them upon wait–I sat all night waiting–an impulse squares. This is our triumph; this is our again runs through us; we rise, we toss consolation. back a mane of white spray; we pound on “The sweetness of this content over- the shore; we are not to be con½ned. That flowing runs down the walls of my mind, is, I shaved and washed; did not wake my and liberates understanding. Wander no wife, and had breakfast; put on my hat, and more, I say; this is the end. The oblong went out to earn my living. After Monday, has been set upon the square; the spiral is Tuesday comes. on top. We have been hauled over the “Yet some doubt remained, some note shingle, down to the sea. The players come of interrogation. I was surprised, opening again. But they are mopping their faces. a door, to ½nd people thus occupied; I They are no longer so spruce or so debonair. hesitated, taking a cup of tea, whether one I will go. I will set aside this afternoon. I said milk or sugar. And the light of the will make a pilgrimage. I will go to Green- stars falling, as it falls now, on my hand wich. I will fling myself fearlessly into after travelling for millions upon millions trams, into omnibuses. As we lurch down of years–I could get a cold shock from Regent Street, and I am flung upon this that for a moment–not more, my imag- woman, upon this man, I am not injured, ination is too feeble. But some doubt I am not outraged by the collision. A square remained.” stands upon an oblong. Here are mean streets where chaffering goes on in street –Excerpts from The Waves by Virginia Woolf. markets, and every sort of iron rod, bolt Copyright 1931 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and screw is laid out, and people swarm Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1959 off the pavement, pinching raw meat with by Leonard Woolf. Use by permission of Hough- thick ½ngers. The structure is visible. We ton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All have made a dwelling-place.” rights reserved. Used by permission of The Society [. .] of Authors as the Literary Representative of the “Should this be the end of the story? a Estate of Virginia Woolf. 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 143 (1) Winter 2014 55 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00253 by guest on 30 September 2021 On Virginia Virginia Woolf imagined and wrote The Water pours down the runnel of my spine. Woolf’s Waves through numerous drafts and ver- Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either “The Waves” sions over four years of intense emotional, side. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry political, and social involvement.1Her asso- crannies are wetted; my cold body is ciation with the Working Women’s Guild warmed; it is sluiced and gleaming. Water was time- and thought-consuming, her descends and sheets me like an eel. (19) love affair with Vita Sackville-West was These varying motions dapple the sur- at its height, her health was uncertain. face of Woolf’s language in The Waves. During this period, from September 1926 The book explores the intimate individu- to February 1931, she also published her alities of six people–three women, three magical mock-biography Orlando (1928), men–who know each other across their with its playful and disruptive challenges shared lifetimes but come together only to class, gender, and death, and A Room of infrequently once they are adults. We see One’s Own (1929), her ½rst major polemic them in childhood, at school, at university against the current ordering of society with and in youth, out to dinner together, vis- its disadvantaging of women. The Waves iting Hampton Park, and in the case of (1931) was mused on in the midst of all this Bernard, in old age: their thoughts range other activity and not sequestered from across time and tangle together events, it, though it moved in other directions. It images, and repeated emotions. They are was to be radically innovative, even, and very different from each other in their sex- boundless. It sought new ways to tell life- ualities and sensibilities though close in stories. But it also wanted to tell life itself. social class. The method of representing Writing against the grain of the novel genre each person’s consciousness is through was hard and compelling work. The lumi- direct reported present-tense utterance. nous sentences, precise and flagrant, fell The last vestige of the conventional nar- into rhythms of repetition and accretion. rator is held in the unvarying past-tense Woolf told her friend the composer and inexpressive speech tag, “said Ber- Ethel Smyth that she wrote the book to a nard,” “said Jinny,” “said Neville,” “said rhythm not a plot,2 but behind it lie two Rhoda,” “said Susan,” “said Louis.” In this inevitable orders: each day the sun rises, book, the effect is of quiet ritual rather reaches its zenith, and declines; each per- than presiding narrative presence. More- son moves from childhood through matu- over, utterance here does not imply speech rity toward old age and death. The sun is but rather a threshold voice, heard in the single, its effects multiple, colossal and reader’s ear alone and following the skeins minute. But the individual life is never of thought, passion, senses, and feeling single–rather, lateral, overlapping, recoil- within the mind.