The Distinguished, Indistinguishable Self

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

The newest episode of Something We Read, the Podcast™ is here after an unjustly long wait.

For those of you who don’t follow our Instagram, please follow it here :):) I have promised myself that I will be better about posting updates and fun things there, and so far, I’m doing a good job! Pretty soon I’m going to give Kathryn the password and set her loose, and you definitely won’t want to miss that.

If you’re just learning about this podcast right now (possible), so you missed The Waves, I recommend you still read it, but I also recommend that you hop on this train and join us for February’s book: White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

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Now onto the good stuff:

Back in December, Kathryn and I read, yes, The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I didn’t really know what to expect, and if I’m being wholly transparent, the blurb, which advertises a novel that “follows” six friends “as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival,”¹ doesn’t quite do justice to the dissociative experience readers are in for! If you haven’t read anything by Woolf before, this would not be the novel I’d tell you to start with. Unless you’re looking to dive headfirst into deep waters, pun intended.

I put “follows” in quotation marks because I don’t think it’s the most accurate choice of words. Like all Woolf’s novels, but to the extreme, the action of The Waves takes place in the minds of her characters. The novel is not separate from them, it is the physical manifestation of their inner lives. To rip a simple example from the first page, with Woolf, it’s not “the birds are chirping,” it’s “I hear a sound…cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp.” In The Waves, the “I” could be one of six people—the aforementioned friends we’re “following:” Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. The one who hears the cheep chirps is Rhoda, for curious minds.

But okay, okay, these six characters live and grow and love and lose. They experience joy and pain and all the other things in between and on either side. And we “follow them.” To mark and open up each chapter of their lives, Woolf intersperses a short vignette describing a seaside scene at the corresponding time of day, from childhood through to old age, from break of dawn to end of day. At the beginning the world is dark. Until,

“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 there 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.”

Subsequently, the first chapter begins with our six characters in the sunrise of their lives. Little seeing, hearing, feeling blobs. Not fully formed, but forming.

As they get older and more formed, the situations they find themselves in and their subsequent emotions and reactions become more complex and more difficult to keep a grasp on. As discussed on the podcast, the amount of time the reader spends in each character’s mind grows longer as they age. Instead of quickly jumping from one to the next, Woolf goes deeper. If you’re like Kathryn (sorry, Kathryn), you might miss the less-frequent jumps, which Woolf marks with a simple “said Rhoda,” or Bernard, or Susan, Louis, Jinny, Neville, as the case may be. I liked her use of “said.” Of course, the characters aren’t really saying these things aloud, but rather saying them with their beings, their existences. Their souls are saying these things out loud inside of them.

One thing that helped immensely with keeping my wits about me as I moved through the text was noting down key character markers for each of the six in the earlier (easier to digest) chapters. After the first chapter, I wrote down the following in my composition notebook (I know, I know, cute):

Bernard - follows Susan into the trees, loves phrases and stories, active, bubbling
Susan - runs to the trees when she sees Jinny kiss Louis, loves and hates and is tied to the earth
Rhoda - floating rose petal boats in a basin, wants to be alone, wants to be someone else
Neville - Bernard took his knife, gentle, easily tired and sick
Jinny - kisses Louis in the bushes, is pretty and very in her body
Louis - hides in the bushes, his father is a banker in Brisbane, and he has an Australian accent

It turns out that these early childhood feelings, inclinations and impulses proved indicative of what was to come. Maybe Woolf did it on purpose…

In adolescence and young adulthood, Bernard proves to be a social creature with a knack for storytelling. He wants to be a writer. Susan lives in a very black and white world. She spends her time at school wishing she were home in the country, touching the dirt. Rhoda lives in another world completely, compares herself to the normal ones and struggles to integrate. Neville is loving and pure, but never quite in with the crowd he so adores. Jinny is still pretty. She’s skinny, no one can help but love her, she wants to dance in the night through a crowd of admirers. And Louis is serious and insecure because his father is a banker in Brisbane. He wants to be a poet but will do business, vaguely.

I would be lying if I said I was always fully following. I found it easiest with Bernard and Susan and Jinny, more challenging with Neville and Louis, and extremely difficult (yet beautiful & rewarding!) with Rhoda. For the first three, the lucky ones, the internal and the external are most closely (which is not to say completely) linked. There is less distance between the them that exists inside and the them that exists outside. With Neville and Louis, and particularly Rhoda, the distance is greater.

This is, of course, Woolf’s central theme. How do our internal selves interact with the outside world? How do our external selves do well to represent us, or do bad to break with what we truly are? Who in the world out there sees the small but urgent world in here? How can we make them? How can we stop them?

Woolf’s characters each consider these questions from their own vantage points, as well as in relation to each other. Bernard early on wonders which version of himself is the true one, and knows “it depends so much upon the room.” Without the “stimulus of other people,” he sees the “thin places” in his own stories. Neville too finds relief in the altering influence of company and thinks, “how curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us.”

Poor Rhoda on the other hand, feels attacked by the presence of others, and struggles to navigate the breech between her lone self and her other selves—the version in public that is “broken into separate pieces” by the “tongues that cut [her] like knives, making [her] stammer, making [her] lie.” Louis too feels harassed. Sitting in a cafe, the people passing by unsettle him: “Yet I cannot. (They go on passing, they go on passing in disorderly procession.) I cannot read my book, or order my beef, with conviction.” His insecurity becomes heightened when others are there to witness him.

Not harassed, but steadfast and sturdy, Susan “cannot be divided or kept apart.” She may wonder who she is, she may compare the “hard thing” that had formed inside her to Rhoda’s elsewhere-ness or to Jinny’s pirouetting, but she knows that whatever she is, her hard thing “cannot float gently, mixing with other people.” And of course, then there’s Jinny, who pirouettes, floats mixes, and feels empowered by the fragmentation that takes place when she’s beheld by others. She says, “I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way, flowing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to me.” It is the others that fill her up.

So, Woolf shows us all these different feelings and possible perspectives, and what does she think? Is it a delight to be perceived, discovered and known? A pleasure to be influenced and hum collective with those around you? Or is it agony, pain, invasion? Insurmountable confusion? It is both of course, but Woolf tips the scales a bit towards the collective. She wants her reader to know that we need each other. That while the inner life must be protected and treasured—not exposed to any and all—it is essential to our happiness that we bridge the gap between our true selves (in so far as we can believe that a true self exists) and the ones we choose to trust. She wants her reader to know that it is not always easy, but it is possible.

It is what Bernard and Susan and Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis try to do and do. Of the nine chapters of the novel, there are three where all six characters are physically together. The first, which I’ve already referenced, is when they are young—nursery aged. The second comes towards the middle, when they are still young but now adult. They gather for dinner in London to send Percival off to India, where he will die. The third comes at the end when they meet at Hampton Court and spend the day together. They are older, middle-aged. They come together for old-time’s sake, to remember who they were and are, and because Bernard has asked them to come.

These three chapters were, for me, the easiest to follow and the richest. The interplay between the isolated internal and the unified external is most clearly displayed when all six characters are in the same place. It may be unsettling for them still, they may still imagine things in each other’s eyes that aren’t there, they may still struggle to fit their jagged edges together—some more than others. But at the same time, things make more sense. They form some seventh thing that proves they are alive and not alone. Everything becomes tethered to that not-aloneness, which is a comfort, a power, a victory in the fight for permanence and a forced cessation of time’s march.

As Bernard, who is the storyteller and narrator he always wanted to be, so aptly puts it when he tells us how the tale ends:

“I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis: or how to distinguish my life from theirs.”

May we all be so lucky, at the end of life, to be indistinguishable from those we love dearest.

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1. Percival to me is not a central character so much as he is a plot point for the others. We never hear from him directly. He is another friend, a glowing, lovely friend, and he goes to India, and he dies there. That’s kind of a spoiler, but it’s not really. His death grows the rest of the lot up. It breaks the world into before and after. Death does not exist, and then death does. I would say more on this but I’m choosing not to.