triangular shadow that Lily paints Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay also identifies herself with the lighthouse beam-the third stroke: watching the strokes
in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw, and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke… She became the thing she looked at-that light. For example… She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed -808- to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised heself in praising that light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light.
The light represents her as a stare, and also a star; it expresses 'the sternness at the heart of her beauty,' a distant luminosity (the German word for «star» is stern). She thinks of the steady light as pitiless and remorseless, 'so much her, yet so little her'; yet it has brought her exquisite happiness, 'stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight,' till she exclaims, 'It is enough!'
When the expedition to the lighthouse is finally completed, both the Ramsays and Lily experience the rhythmic alternation between near and far, light and shadow, ideal and real, simultaneously. When she draws a line down the center of her painting, completing it, Lily both connects and separates Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay at the same time as she links them to and severs them from herself. With some anger and much love, she is able to see the Victorian past, shattered by the war, as both crippling and entrancing, and she is finally able to put its beauty and tyranny, with her painting, away.
To the Lighthouse relies primarily on metaphors of art and architecture to illustrate and contain the past; the past is a house and a picture, a blurred image to be recalled and exorcised. Woolf's next serious experimental novel, The Waves (1931), focuses not on the past but on the present, and relies not on images but on voices. Furthermore, her analysis of identity is even more fragmented: instead of isolating two protagonists who reflect and complete each other, she features six characters who collectively make up and disrupt a compound identity. As one might expect from the use of voice and soliloquy, the arts that Woolf draws upon and critically reshapes are those of drama and especially narrative. For it is in The Waves that she launches her most sustained attack against stories.
If the novel is defined as an interweaving of stories, then The Waves is not a novel. In the second draft of The Waves, Woolf wrote, 'The author would be glad if the following pages were read not as a novel.' (In her diary entry of February 19, 1928, she wrote: 'I doubt that I shall ever write another novel after O. I shall invent a new name for them.') The alternating voices that make up The Waves not only fail to constitute a story; they deny the very presuppositions upon which stories are -809- built-that our experience of life is logical, consecutive; that characters are autonomous, unique, and therefore susceptible of characterization; that the best language is a full, rounded encapsulation of life. Instead, the «characters» in The Waves are not fully separate, either from one another, from parts of the landscape they have inhabited, or from odd moments in history. Each voice is both a fragment and a microcosmic composite of its world, seen in a momentary light, from a particular perspective, in a transitory mood.
Although the six main characters seem to take turns speaking, their monologues are far from realistic; they say things that aren't typically verbalized, especially in the first person. When Jinny wins a game, she says, 'I must throw myself on the ground and pant. I am out of breath with running, with triumph.' Woolf has attributed the «speech» of the body, its triumphant panting, to Jinny's consciousness; at other moments, it is the unconscious that speaks through the six characters, or the seasons, or the dead. By giving voice to all kinds of normally silent influences, Woolf underscores the «lie» of «common» language; here, the characters' representations of experience ring significantly false, not because they are false, but because we are not accustomed to think in the present moment, or to register consciously in language the range of feelings and connections that the voices of The Waves repeatedly articulate. The voices of the book say too much, which in turn exposes «realistic» representation as radically oversimplified. (As Rhoda asks, 'What is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?'). Woolf suggests that what we need to replace the story, with its artificial, thin line of logically connected, consecutive events, is a way of registering the moment's overload, its abundance, its waste, as well as a new, more dynamically multiple conception of being and a more halting, imperfect language.
The Waves unfolds in nine parts, each of which is introduced by a brief description of a single scene of waves breaking against a shore. On the beach is a spike of sea-holly, the ribs of an eaten-out boat, a rusty cartwheel, a white bone, and a black boot without laces half mired in sand; a white house and garden with bird-laden trees stand nearby. The book begins in spring, just before dawn breaks over the waves, and it ends with waves of autumn darkness engulfing houses, hills, trees, streets, and girls. The waves are sometimes erotic-a girl's jeweled waves of hair as she lifts a lamp from a green mattress-sometimes hostile: turbaned black warriors throwing javelins at the sand. But their -810- most important function is rhythmic and symbolic; they represent the contradictory unity of physical nature that continues only through rhythmic ruptures, like those of day, the seasons, and human life.
The structure of The Waves falls into two unequal parts: sections one through eight, after the initial description of the waves that begins each section, are all composed of monologues or brief dialogues in the present tense; everything is 'current.' The focus of individual sections varies, but the general movement is chronological, from childhood to school, college, and the departure and death of a mutual friend, Percival, whose fall from a horse in India marks the progressive erosion of the friends' youth. The second part of the book is the last section, entirely narrated by Bernard, who begins the «story» of their lives all over again, telling it more conventionally in the narrative past tense to an unknown interlocutor with whom he is having dinner. For readers who were disoriented by the immediacy and apparent disconnectedness of the book's first part, Bernard's monologue will come as a relief, but along with belated clarity he delivers a warning: he is the storyteller, but the stories he tells aren't true. The one new piece of information we get in Bernard's section-that Rhoda has committed suicide-is dropped almost in passing; it comes as a shock, but lacks the immediacy, the vividness with which Rhoda herself describes her yearning to jump off a precipice in Spain. Described from the outside, in retrospect, things are not the same; narrative needs, instead, the immediacy and personal utterances of drama without its deceptively tight, distanced, consecutive structure.
The characters in
The characters relate to one another with a changing calculus of resemblance. Jinny is a flame, living in and through the body, unattached to any one person; she does not dream. Rhoda, in contrast, feels that she has no body, and no face; she is purely a dreamer. Her element is water; for her all moments are violent, separate-her fear is that nothing persists. Society breaks her into pieces; she hates the details of individual life and yearns after geometrical abstractions and images of statues with no features. She longs for 'alcoves of silence where we can shelter under the wing of beauty from truth.' Susan opposes Rhoda in her solidity and hardness; the only fragility she admits is that of her children, represented as eggshells held between her knees. Hers is the realm of nature; she thinks sometimes, 'I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground, I am the seasons…; the mud, the mist, the dawn.' What differentiates Susan from Jinny's more erotic physicality is her rootedness, her fertility, her attachment to one person and one place. 'Debased and hide-bound by the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity,' she sees life as 'a dwelling place made from time immemorial after an hereditary pattern.'
Susan's single-minded attachment is differently reflected in Neville, who always seeks out 'one person,