The Waves

I think Molly Hite mentioned, or at least quoted people mentioning, that "The Waves" is one of, if not the, most ambitious work Woolf attempted. Or at least, that as the sense I got. If I was correct in getting that sense, then I would have to agree. She's really pulling out all the stops on this one. She's breaking all the rules, she's flipped structure and diction on its head, and the entire definition of "narrative" has been weighed, measured, and found wanting--at least in the conventional sense. It's just my opinion, but this has to be the most experimental work that I've read of hers, and considering that she never really shied away from the experimental, that's actually quite a feat.

For starters, Hite talks about Woolf's attempt to write this in the style of classic lyrical and epic poetry, and so far that really comes through: you can see it very clearly in the repetition of certain phrases and words (banker in Brisbane), said repetition, of course, stemming from the ancient lyrical conceit in order to help the poet easier memorize the thousands of lines he was reading. The language, too, of course, is an obvious one: everything is melodious and smeared with a thick layer of purple--fortunately, it never becomes unbearable in this novel, probably because the entire experience of reading it is so surreal that you're not really sure WHAT to think anymore. The purple prose works because Woolf hasn't confined this into the normal conventions--you, or at least I, was well aware that I was inhabiting an entire different universe than the fictional ones I was accustomed to. Everything is in speak, for starters, and there's no outside narrator to fill in the gaps--the novel relies entirely on the voices of the main characters to impart the story, to the extent that there is really a story...well, I take that back: I think the story is very present, it's just presented in a unique way.

Woolf's use of the present tense is another well-done experiment; it sort of puts the novel outside of time. The only reason we're able to parse out where the characters are in their lives are by the intermittent interjections on the path of the sun. This allows the characters to simultaneously tell and comment on the story without being bogged down with the restrictions of the universe's internal time. But, the prose is not so incomprehensible that we don't know what's going on, which is in itself a remarkable accomplishment. The whole thing seems to me a trip through the unfettered mind. It doesn't matter the individual educational level or sesquipedalian flair of the characters in real life, because "The Waves" looks through their minds outside of earthbound restraints. Its more the basic essence of the characters that is talking, rather than their actual brains, which also helps uplift the tense conceit and the fact that very little actually happens: most of what we learn about the character's lives has already taken place, and the characters are just ruminating on it, such as school, college, etc.