The Waves

Rating:
Summary: Language as Action
Review: With Woolf, as with Proust, it is easy to accuse the writing of being "dull" and lacking action or even plot. But for these authors the language itself IS the action. Nothing happens and yet everything happens. Just as their work tends to shy away from the conventions of the novel, I believe they are to be read just as unconventionally as they were written. Specifically, The Waves reads like the longest prose poem in the history of the language. When read as a "novel" it does indeed become every bit as difficult as a lot of readers say it is. Though Woolf attempts to differentiate between characters as though straining to achieve at least the skeletal image of the "novel," she does this only superficially by drifting from one name to another. The unwavering language maintains precisely the same tone and intensity throughout, and the focus of Woolf's lucid inquiry never drifts far from its central themes. The book is a series of dramatic monologues that blend indistinguishably into one another. Woolf was preoccupied here with mortality, transience, loneliness and the meaning of friendship, not with telling a story (though a story does get told in the process). As a poem, though, it reads like a great lost chapter of the Bible; a curious, explosive and inward lexicon of the human experience so sacred in its expression as to be humanly impossible. "All mists curl off the roof of my being," Woolf muses in one of the book's most gorgeous lines. It is a perfect description of the alert reader's response: an exuberance bordering on epiphany. If Dickinson is right and the great poem makes one feel as though the top of one's head has been sawn off, then The Waves is a great poem. There have been many great writers, but few who approach the eloquent desperation of this text.