Virginia Woolf
PART TWO of my real-time review of ‘The Waves’ continued from HERE
.
1931
My previous reviews of classic books HERE
When I review this novel, my comments will appear in the thought stream below…
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
…That tempting hint of Hanging Rocks again.
Read up to: ‘Let us hold it for one moment,’ said Jinny; ‘love, hatred, by whatever name we call it, this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man again.’
The apotheosis of one moment, the one with Percival.
Followed by an italicised mid-coda of poetic nature, birds, colours, plants…
Read up to: Behind their conglomeration hung a zone of shadow in which might be a further shape to be disencumbered of shadow or still denser depths of darkness.
This is the first time anyone has written about this book and mentioned the word ‘spoiler’ in what they wrote. Yet to not know that Percival dies is to know more than most others think they know. Death as spoiler, but as the making of life’s plot.
‘I will not lift my foot to climb the stair. I will stand for one moment beneath the immitigable tree, alone with the man whose throat is cut, while downstairs the cook shoves in and out the dampers. I will not climb the stair. We are doomed, all of us.’
Neville and Bernard speak of death’s pivotal Percival as a glitch between one step and the next. God’s ideal hero dead and those still growing older without him have inadvertently already given him life by dint of their poetically consuming prose ‘speeches’. Especially if they loved him, each in their own ways. The Woolfian weaving is deeply akin to the preternaturalism of creation in gestalt real-time reviewing, hawling, dreamcatching, träumtrawling…
Read up to: ‘I will go straight, then, down the stairs…’
‘“Ah, ah!” she cried, and again she cries “Ah!” She has provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And what is a cry? Then the beetle-shaped men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the dance of olive trees and their myriad-tongued grey leaves when a seafarer, biting a twig between his lips where the many-backed steep hills come down, leaps on shore. ‘“ Like” and “like” and “like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing.’
Read up to: ‘…we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity.’
That was Susan.
Read up to: ‘The wind washes through the elm trees; a moth hits the lamp; a cow lows; a crack of sound starts in the rafter, and I push my head through the needle and murmur, “Sleep”.’
Neville (to the dead Percival): The descent into the Tube was like death.
[…]
Some spray in a hedge, though, or a sunset over a flat winter field, or again the way some old woman sits, arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a basket—those we point at for the other to look at. It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.
[…]
I cannot tumble, as you do, like half-naked boys on the deck of a ship, squirting each other with hosepipes.
[…]
and dancing grasses and summer breezes and the laughter and shouts of boys at play—of naked cabin-boys squirting each other with hosepipes on the decks of ships.
[…]
Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.
Read so far up to this point.
I think our characters are now in their thirties.
The round-headed clouds never dwindled as they bowled along, but kept every atom of their rotundity. Now, as they passed, they caught a whole village in the fling of their net and, passing, let it fly free again. Far away on the horizon, among the million grains of blue-grey dust, burnt one pane, or stood the single line of one steeple or one tree.
The red curtains and the white blinds blew in and out, flapping against the edge of the window, and the light which entered by flaps and breadths unequally had in it some brown tinge, and some abandonment as it blew through the blowing curtains in gusts. Here it browned a cabinet, there reddened a chair, here it made the window waver in the side of the green jar.
All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity, as if a great moth sailing through the room had shadowed the immense solidity of chairs and tables with floating wings.
Bernard opens a new chapter as it were, this new stage of encroaching age. A drop, a hanging hair-trigger Paradox of Zeno, I suggest back at the exquisite text just absorbed? His ability, while abroad, to build a gestalt from individual items of scenery and thought – and people – reminds me of my own real-timing with fiction books such as this one.
Read up to: ‘Larpent is that man’s name.’
[…] Now I measure, I preserve. At night I sit in the armchair and stretch my arm for my sewing; and hear my husband snore; and look up when the light from a passing car dazzles the windows and feel the waves of my life tossed, broken, round me who am rooted; and hear cries, and see other’s lives eddying like straws round the piers of a bridge while I push my needle in and out and draw my thread through the calico.’
The above fixity of Susan’s reached age, her gathering of achievement, yet this book’s moving WAVES, too, as Jinny below, has her WAVES, too, and MOVING STAIRS, those steps down, those drops, those lifts, those ‘dying falls’ of unparalleled raptures or rhapsodies in the music in words.
‘Millions have died. Percival died. I still move. I still live. But who will come if I signal?
[…] catching sight of myself before I had time to prepare myself as I always prepare myself for the sight of myself,
[…] I admit for one moment the soundless flight of upright bodies down the moving stairs like the pinioned and terrible descent of some army of the dead downwards and the churning of the great engines remorselessly forwarding us, all of us, onwards, made me cower and run for shelter.
[…] Lifts rise and fall; trains stop, trams start as regularly as the waves of the sea. This is what has my adhesion. I am a native of this world, I follow its banners.’
Read up to: ‘Let the silent army of the dead descend. I march forward.’
cf Elizabeth Bowen’s shoals of the dead after Blitzed London…
[…]
He says, she says, somebody else says things have been said so often that one word is now enough to lift a whole weight. Argument, laughter, old grievances—they fall through the air, thickening it. I take a book and read half a page of anything. They have not mended the spout of the teapot yet. The child dances, dressed in her mother’s clothes.’
The word of hawled weight, of recurrent grievances, falling through the electronic air today, thickening it?
Read up to: ‘One comes in, one goes out. There are sobs on the staircase.’
Followed by Louis thinking of Rhoda and Percival, both gone in their different ways.
“O western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?”
… that he found in a random book he picks up.
Is that a recurring Shelley?
Then Rhoda herself speaks again from afar, as they all now perhaps share an unrequited life…
Look at life through this, look at life through that; let there be rose leaves, let there be vine leaves—I covered the whole street, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, with the blaze and ripple of my mind, with vine leaves and rose leaves.
[…]
I have longed to see the cupboard dwindle, to feel the bed soften, to float suspended, to perceive lengthened trees, lengthened faces, a green bank on a moor and two figures in distress saying good-bye. I flung words in fans like those the sower throws over the ploughed fields when the earth is bare. I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.
How can anyone resist such passages? There are so many more I am not sharing with you here. I am a selfish gestalt reviewer.
Read up to: The wave has broken; the bunch is withered. I seldom think of Percival now. ‘Now I climb this Spanish hill;
After another italicised interval, our characters have a meeting-place among their middle-age (they were evidently not so aged as I thought in the previous section, although they seemed to act (speak) that way!) Now they are getting used to each other again, raw edges to raw edges, as they take off their coats in an inn near Hampton Court.
‘My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales—huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive. Beneath my eyes opens—a book; I see to the bottom; the heart—I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.’
Read up to: ‘…quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes.’
The synaethesia of their body and dream (ambitions, fantasies, nostalgia) and their life so far, all mix in rarefied wings of words – leading to this section that I’ve read up to now. So utterly uttersome. Read it to yourself aloud. BE it.
‘But since these rolls of bread and wine bottles are needed by me, and your faces with their hollows and prominences are beautiful, and the tablecloth and its yellow stain, far from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual. I must start when you pluck at me with your children, your poems, your chilblains or whatever it is that you do and suffer. But I am not deluded. After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.’
Neville: “I am beginning to be convinced, as we walk, that the fate of Europe is of immense importance, and, ridiculous as it still seems,…”
‘Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once, I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it to you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, “Take it. This is my life.” But unfortunately, what I see (this globe, full of figures) you do not see. You see me, sitting at a table opposite you, a rather heavy, elderly man, grey at the temples. You see me take my napkin and unfold it.’
But we were all different. The wax—the virginal wax that coats the spine melted in different patches for each of us. The growl of the boot-boy making love to the tweeny among the gooseberry bushes; the clothes blown out hard on the line; the dead man in the gutter; the apple tree, stark in the moonlight; the rat swarming with maggots; the lustre dripping blue—our white wax was streaked and stained by each of these differently. Louis was disgusted by the nature of human flesh; Rhoda by our cruelty; Susan could not share; Neville wanted order; Jinny love; and so on. We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies.’
Read up to:
‘On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points; who whispers as he whispered to me that summer morning in the house where the corn comes up to the window, “The willow grows on the turf by the river. The gardeners sweep with great brooms and the lady sits writing.” Thus he directed me to that which is beyond and outside our own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent, if there is any permanence in our sleeping, eating, breathing, so animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives.’
‘But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights—elm trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing—that rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner. While one straightens the fork so precisely on the tablecloth, a thousand faces mop and mow. There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event. Yet it is alive too and deep, this stream. Immersed in it I would stop between one mouthful and the next, and look intently at a vase, perhaps with one red flower, while a reason struck me, a sudden revelation. Or I would say, walking along the Strand, “That’s the phrase I want”, as some beautiful, fabulous phantom bird, fish or cloud with fiery edges swam up to enclose once and for all some notion haunting me, after which on I trotted taking stock with renewed delight of ties and things in shop-windows.‘
Old age approaching death. The most exquisite poetic prose written originally in English. His appointment with the hairdresser (cf Dirk Bogarde in DEATH IN VENICE) and his final apotheosis via the Dome of St Paul’s is literature’s own apotheosis in many ways. This book should not be the last book one reads in one’s life but if you only read one book it should be this one.
Should this be the end of the story? a kind of sigh? a last ripple of the wave?
But I now made the contribution of maturity to childhood’s intuitions—satiety and doom;
After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows.
It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.
it is not one life that I look back upon; 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.
‘Was this, then, this streaming away mixed with Susan, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, Louis, a sort of death?
who have heard the same lullabies for a thousand years.
This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth. I am the swathed figure in the hairdresser’s shop taking up only so much space.
Thin as a ghost, leaving no trace where I trod, perceiving merely, I walked alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to speak save in a child’s words of one syllable;
What does the central shadow hold? Something? Nothing? I do not know. ‘Oh, but there is your face. I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, unconfined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see—an elderly man, rather heavy, grey above the ears, who (I see myself in the glass) leans one elbow on the table, and holds in his left hand a glass of