Virginia Woolf

by Ruth Gruber

  The aesthetic crises through which she has progressed, are thus, with urgent clarity, reanimated in “The Waves”. Two poets are presented, Bernard and Neville, to personify the faction of romanticism and classicism. Bernard revels in subjective imagery, arbitrary and unselective; Neville in Roman precision and absolute concept of beauty and truth. Bernard is like young Orlando, the emotional, all-observant phase of Virginia Woolf’s character. Bernard is sensuously alive to nature, to people, to his environment, but it is through his fancy rather than his eye alone. Like Virginia Woolf, objects fascinate him as they recall past associations and are convertable into literary conceits. “Up they bubble—images. ‘Like a camel’, … ‘a vulture’. The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel; for Bernard is dangling wire, loose, but seductive. Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparison, a lightness comes over one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels.”9

  The “bubble” is the imprint of Virginia Woolf’s self-consciousness. Though she justifies images, seeing in them the release of pent emotions, she is conscious also of the argument against them—her perception of polarity. Style-conscious, she acknowledges the unsolidity of many of her images, absurdly broken by the mere touch of reality. Innately visionary, she experiences the constant struggle for a deeper truth. “ ‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?”10

  Where Bernard is rhapsodic and darkly symbolic, Neville is in love with the unclouded daylight of an Italian sky. His is the southern clarity, repelling Bernard’s northern romanticism. He is the least Christian, the most Hellenic of the characters, desiring a perfection such as the Greeks had known. Admitting of life and its disorders, he seeks the Greek harmony, the beauty in nature and the vital present.

  “ ‘In a world which contains the present moment,’ said Neville, ‘why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure. The sun is hot. I see the river, I see trees specked and burnt in the autumn sunlight. Boats float past, through the red, through the green. Far away a bell tolls, but not for death. There are bells that ring for life. A leaf falls, from joy. Oh, I am in love with life! Look how the willow shoots its fine sprays into the air! Look how through them a boat passes, filled with indolent, with unconscious, with powerful young men. They are listening to the gramophone; they are eating fruit out of paper hags. They are tossing the skins of bananas, which then sink eel like, into the river. All they do is beautiful. There are cruets behind them and ornaments; their rooms are full of oars and oleographs but they have turned all to beauty.’ ”11

  Of the varied characters, Neville is the humanist, the T. S. Eliot in the modern classic-romantic antithesis. He detests all vagueness and fitful connotations; he recoils from sentimentality. Reflecting the younger Virginia Woolf, influenced by the rhetoricians, he seeks the classic peaks of structure. “That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection, to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead.”12 Like Rodney of “Night and Day” he is a lover of Roman ratiocination. He seeks an order implicit in form: “Everything must be done to rebuke the horror of deformity. Let us read writers of Roman severity and virtue, let us seek perfection through the sand.”13

  This desire for perfection is counterbalanced in Bernard’s more feminine aesthetics and aspect of life. He lacks Neville’s sense of firm, logical sequence. His are the irrational, chaotic experiences of life: “Arrows of sensation strike from my spine, but without order.”14 Life for him is a stippled inlay of the observations of little things. He is captured by the immediate image, distracted by the haphazard accidents of life.

  Poetic, like Virginia Woolf, his irrelevant and unordered words are his peculiar weapon: “ ‘It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue—the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook’ ”.15 Words, mosaically lovely, are his offering to life. “ ‘I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent. And each of you feels when I speak, “I am lit up. I am glowing” ’ ”.16 Again like Virginia Woolf, he is conscious of the limitations of his words and images, of his romantic lawlessness. “ ‘I am apt to be deflected. I make stories. I twist up toys out of anything. A girl sits at a cottage door; she is waiting; for whom? Seduced, or not seduced? The headmaster sees the hole in the carpet. He sighs. His wife, drawing her fingers through the waves of her still abundant hair, reflects—et cetera. Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter—all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then another, I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once’ ”.17

  Representing the two poles of literary style, the two phases of Virginia Woolf’s conflict, neither Bernard nor Neville surpasses the other. Neither one can proclaim that his is the absolute style, nor boast that his poetic recreation of life is the true one for mankind. Signally, both poets fall short of immortality; an intimation, sub-conscious perhaps, of the author’s personal fear.

  It is wavering integrity which impedes Neville, tragically caused by the dualism of his nature. Over-conscious, he oscillates constantly and in hesitating, loses his sincerity. The “flaw in the center” which had impelled the decay of women’s creation, is his bar to greatness too. “ ‘Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, ‘the falling fountains of the pendant trees’. I see it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this, I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop—how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me—some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity’ ”.18

  And just as Neville, the classicist, fails through “some flaw”, “some fatal hesitancy”, so Bernard, the romanticist, fails too. Within the tremendous bounds of a law of polarity, are scales and gradations for the weak and the great. Bernard’s “charm and flow of language” is enfeebled by the very blunders of his romanticism. Actively sensitive, like Virginia Woolf, to all impressions, he knows little selectivity or rigid form. “I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I have observed. More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. This, I say to myself, is what I need; why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters.”19

  The tragic failure of the romanticists may be symbolized in the room of unfinished letters, unfinished because consciousness has come before the end and reason has shown the flaws in imagery and rhythm. The fear that comes as soon as inspiration has waned, the fear of being insincere, which obstructs Neville, is again the grim destroyer. The great inner compulsion, which necessitates completion of a work, recedes; faith is lost. Sensitive to criticism, Bernard loses his integrity. It is significantly Neville, in his counter sensibilities, who analyzes Bernard’s failure. He perceives “a certain effort, an extravagance in his phrase”. Percival, he notes “ ‘feels bored; I too feel bored. Bernard at once perceives that we are bored. I detect a certain effort, an extravagance in his phrase, as if he said ‘Look!’ but Percival says ‘No’. For he is always the first to detect insincerity; and is brutal in the extreme. The sentence tails off feebly. Yes, the appalling moment has
come when Bernard’s power fails him and there is no longer any sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of string and falls silent, gaping as if about to burst into tears. Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories’ ”.20

  In all its sharp antitheses, the struggle which has marked Virginia Woolf’s development is presented. In Bernard and Neville she erects the poles of her literary conflict. Currents are set up between them, but all attempts to establish a superiority, fail. Greatness, she perceives, is determined not by classic or romantic mannerisms, but by a deeper recognition of human values, molded but not subjugated by form. It is the mark of Virginia Woolf’s organic concept of life, that she concludes an endlessness in conflicts. As long as there is night and day, light and darkness, there will be antithetic stylists, inimical poets and negating critics.

  The conclusion that there is no absolute truth in either fact or fancy, structural or rhythmic form, enables her to employ both styles without self-consciousness or doubt. The conceits and lyrical cadences which marked “The Voyage Out” are restored, supplemented by the intellectual, clarified structure of “Night and Day”. No compromise is struck between them; both are used to frame two distinct moods. Melodic lyricism, however, far outweighs architectural sophistication. Fluidity is dominant: “I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way, flowing that way’”.21 Yet concurrent with this rhythmic emotionality is the structure of thought: “the fringe of my intelligence floating unattached caught those distant sensations which after a time the mind draws in and works upon.”22

  The laws of mathematics, though less a part of Virginia Woolf’s nature than the laws of music, throw added light upon the Faustean “two souls which dwell within my bosom”. Orchestral music is envisioned in the symbols of mathematics, of abstract thought. This is not the meaning of life, but the refuge, the surcease from the desperate, hopeless search.

  “There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

  “ ‘The sweetness of this content overflowing rune down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding. Wander no more, I say; this is the end. The oblong has been set upon the square; the spiral is on top’ ”.23

  Reanimating conflicts, “The Waves” gives profound expression to the divergence between painting and music when used by a writer. Just as, within the polarity of romanticism and classicism, Virginia Woolf tends to seek out one pole, so in the antipodal borrowed arts, she tends towards that of music. The musical technicalities which had characterized especially “Jacob’s Room” and “To the Lighthouse” are again applied, with increasing simulation of the opera. Like an overture before each act, a descriptive preface ushers in the chapters. With poetic symbols and extreme romanticism, these prefaces foreshadow the action which is to follow. They unfold, with inner sequence, the normal day, tracing the movement of the sun. The symbol is immediate; the one day is the microcosmic reflection of the life of the characters, the evolution of the sun, their rise and fall. Their childhood is implied by dawn, and in the few chosen objects which compose the prefaces, all their mental torments, their longings for identity or immersion, their moments of joy or resignation are suggested. Human changes are portrayed as the six characters mature, reflecting age the slope of the sun. The book opens in the uncertain greyness between darkness and dawn, symbolic of early childhood.

  “The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

  “As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper, whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woolen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sky blazed gold.

  “The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down.” (This trick of contrasting upward and downward motion is constant throughout Virginia Woolf’s later writing, typical of her aspect of the rhythm of life). “The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue fingerprint of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.”24

  It is the overture to childhood. The hidden sun, the blending of sky and sea are symbolic of that stage of half-trauma where the child is still vaguely identified with his mother. Like the slow sun-rise, the child breaks from the infinitude and darkness of his birth. The poetic imagery of the prefaces is veiled with deep mysticism; there is little clarity, little objectification. The effect is that of a shimmering network through which objects are seen in fragments quickly lost. No vision is made plastic; there is an interweaving of figures and sensations. The images want distinction, natural in the poet’s apprehension of an organic, amorphous flow of time.

  The chapters are founded upon leit-motifs barely variated from the opening pages to their close. Each of the six characters is presented with a unique concept of life, abstracted in a symbolic image or a typifying phrase. The six appear like mystic poets seeing visions whose symbolism gains comprehension as the characters mature. These esoteric visions are the expression, the dialogue of the consciousness. Sounded in early childhood, they are repeated throughout, becoming the motifs through which their thoughts are entered upon the stage. There is no direct discourse; the lyricist Virginia Woolf recoils again from dramaturgy. Soliloquies are juxtaposed, related only by an external semblance of conversation. The desire to write such a novel is found stated in her earliest work: “ ‘I want to write a novel about Silence,’ ” says Terence; “ ‘the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense’ ”.25 It needed true integrity and self-confidence for Virginia Woolf to create in her last novel what she had sought for in her first. It needed maturity. This is the language of the inner life; of the half-conscious torments and desires. It is one long self-expression; the ego is unchained. Exploring again the stream of consciousness, the novelist does not fall back, as in “Mrs. Dalloway”, upon long prose expositions, but imitates the continuum of conversation in the psychic realm. It is a conversation like the consciousness itself, stripped of dramatic flesh, exposing the rich intricacies of the nervous system. The characters speak parallel to each other as though through nerve reactions, rather than through a tangible stimulus of words. Dispensing with all action and artistic motivation, the six are introduced together
. In childhood the play begins, all perceiving the images that remain their vision of life:

  “ ‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’

  “ ‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, Spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’

  “ ‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.’

  “ ‘I see a globe,’ said Neville. ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’

  “ ‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘Twisted with gold threads.’

  “ ‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’

  “ ‘Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,’ said Bernard. ‘It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.”

  “ ‘The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,’ said Susan.

  “ ‘A shadow falls on the path,’ said Louis, ‘like an elbow bent.’

  “ ‘Islands of light are swimming on the grass,’ said Rhoda. ‘They have fallen through the trees.’

  “ ‘The bird’s eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves,’ said Neville.

  “ ‘The stalks are covered with harsh, short hairs,’ said Jinny, ‘and drops of water have stuck to them.’

  “ ‘A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,’ said Susan, ‘notched with blunt feet.’

  “ ‘The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,’ said Rhoda.

  “ ‘And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the grasses,’ said Louis.

  “ ‘Stones are cold to my feet,’ said Neville. ‘I feel each one, round or pointed, separately.’