The Waves, Virginia Woolf

Plot in the novel

Artificial and only conventions

Lack = There is a pattern instead

Things that are lacking in the novel (compared to traditional ones)

Lack of common landmarks, especially a plot

What mattered for Woolf is not what takes place in the material world, ordinary events, series of actions, a plot that has a crucial point

Absence of verisimilitude (the world does not seem concrete and existing; there is no effect of reality (realist writers use apparently superfluous details within their narratives))

Giving you the pretend that what you read is out of reality

Absence of time and space (we do not know where these things are taking place. She doesn’t even need to explain those things)

The characters could be defined as:

Distant, evanescent

The novel

Is unfamiliar

Boiling down novelistic conventions to their bare minimal/essential characters

Process of concentration and saturation

To include what is only essential

Explains deliberate lack of ‘reality effect’

Modernists move away from Realism

Partial inadequacy of terms

Such as characters, plot, setting, etc.

Characters → voice

Plot → rhythm

Woolf and the plot

Was more concerned to create a satisfying formal pattern as to create recognisable characters

The word ‘pattern’

Was a key word for Woolf

She used it to refer to a more vital and vibrant form, emerging from the chaos of perceptions and modern life; ‘pattern’ in this sense takes the place of traditional ‘plot’ — Patterns emerge in her novels through repetitions of imagery and vocabulary, and less frequently, repetitions of action

Pattern implies:

Interplay of difference and similarity

Regularity of all forms

Example: Vanessa Bell’s fabric designs

Repetitions and echoes as organising principles

Alternation of the soliloquies and the interludes

Differentiated discourses

Succeed by turns

Soliloquies

First-person narration

Direct speech

From childhood to maturity

Interludes

Third-person narrator

Cycle of the day (from ‘The sun had not yet risen.’ (p.3) to ‘Now the sun had sunk.’ (p.169)

No characters

How does the connection between the soliloquies and the interludes are made?

Cycle of the day/characters’ lives

Alternation interludes/soliloquies: one of the main patterns or ‘rhythms’ in the novel → wave-like movement

Soliloquies, interludes and waves

→ Binary pattern (=wave first crashing then pulling back)

→ They overlap, like waves (e.g. the house)

→ Sections are untitled and unnumbered = absence of progression or technology (finally, purpose) = waves

→ The characters step forward in succession in order to deliver their speeches = creating a wave-like effect of apparence and withdrawal at an immediate level which recapitulates the larger, rhythmical pattern of the whole

→ Grouping of interludes + soliloquies = 9 (like the number of sections)

Other pattern

The six ‘voices’ and Percival

‘Stages’

In human life

In the cycle

Recurring elements (points of reference)

The characters themselves

In the interludes

The sun (trajectory)

Structure not driven by plot, but:

Incremental

→ Regular consecutive additions

→ Each stage adds new layer of time

Novel unfolds through iteration

No point pf arrival/conclusion/telos

Rather: organic growth

Sense of time expressed in the novel

Course of the day/of human life → linear time

Symmetry of the structure

Stages 1-4: upward movement the sun

Stages 5: sun at its ‘full height’

Stages 6-9: downward movement of the sun

Conclusion on structure, plot…

This structure allows us to question the vision of time in the novel

Course of the day/of human life → linear representation of time

One long soliloquy at the end of the novel

But, in the last section (stage 9):

→ Bernard becoming the narrator

Revisiting events of the preceding stages

Narrative folding back upon itself (a loop)

Cyclical dimension of time

+Last sentence: ‘The waves broke on the shore’

→ Announcing a new cycle (beginning of new interlude to come)?