slow Chap 1

 

EKS

The Waves: Chapter One.

(I hadn’t written my reaction before I read yours, so some of this is at least partially answering you.) 

I began by listening to the audio book of the first Interlude and Episode; then listened again; then again…during which incantation I fell asleep.  I am finding it quite difficult to disengage from my analytic mind and the magpie collection of mental hyperlinks practically every sentence is loaded with for me. 

Written above the first sentence in my copy is the note “cotton wool displaced by color” -- this passage reminds me of several different places where Woolf describes the color returning to earth after an eclipse, most notably in her 1928 essay “The Sun and the Fish,” which Jane Goldman spends several chapters discussing (in The Feminist Aesthetics of VW).  But as I listened to the Interlude, I concentrated especially on visual impressions-- running a movie in my head.  The first few paragraphs remind me so much of that part of Fantasia (1940) where music is set to abstract forms that I am tempted to go run the video.  I absolutely cannot help seeing the sun rise over this view of Portminster Beach (wh is directly below Talland House) even though the view is to the West, not East (especially the line about the “thin veil of white water”). 

 

The mention of the sun resting upon a white blind, made me think of the opening of “A Sketch of the Past” where Woolf describes lying in the nursery of Talland House and listening to the sound of the blind as it blew in and out with the breeze and little acorn moved back and forth across the floor (MOB 64-5).  (The first few pages of Sketch are perhaps my deepest touchstone with Woolf.  I read TTL in my freshman writing class, but picked up Moments of Being for some reason in an English language bookstore in Athens the summer of 1979 (after I finished my diss in 78, my parents gifted me with a summer in Greece staying with a friend who was wrapping up her diss at the American School)). Anyway, this time I thought of the “couchant woman” as the young Virginia, lying in bed and watching the light come up.  Much more personal than the “Rule Britannia” figure” that is often conjured by critics. 

I always read The Waves as something of a phenomenological exercise in rendering the opening and maturing of consciousness, and that is so especially obvious in this first chapter. I have done an analytical plot outline of the entire book along these lines, and here’s what I say abt the first Chapter (it’s on-line at my StudyWoolf Blog, but I assume you won’t want to see the whole thing as it has a tendency to usurp the personal reading process):

i. Relating to Objects (Watch the growth in perceptions, awakening of consciousness, impressionism)

• Starts out by describing simple objects in simple language (I see..)
• Then Objects in motion, in relationship, simile, metaphor images of circularity.  Perspective shift (Louis and Jinny and Susan and Rhoda get down and see from the ground as in "Kew Gardens”)
• Sensations: lights flash, stones cold, hand burns, spurt of water .. increasing multiplicity and complication of sensations
• Move to house: more things, chains of things (first human: Mrs. Constable)
• time established, early morning: sequence.  Louis identifies a rhythm.
• Rhoda's visual exaggeration; Neville's aural exaggeration; Jinny's extreme sensation

ii. Relating to People (Childhood negotiations of alliances: alone, together, jealousy, etc.; imaginary games -- creating other worlds: Elvedon -- first world is Eden, garden; ships in bowl; symbol-making: knife is an emperor; awareness of class, shame)

But this distillation also usurps my personal reading process, jumping ahead too fast to big generalities. I too am fascinated by how even just the first few pages set up so clearly parameters of each character while also linking them to each other.  One thing that catches my inner eye is the careful display of geometrical shapes, like building blocks: Bernard sees a ring inside a loop (foreshadowing his final rounding up of everyone’s experiences); Susan sees a slab (rhymes with Biddy smacking the bucket down on the kitchen flagstones); Neville sees a globe; Jenny sees a manufactured object, a tassle; foreshadowing their later closeness, Rhoda and Louis hear rhythm rather than seeing shapes, though Louise see a shadow like a bent elbow (triangle?) and Rhoda sees islands of light, a fragmented gathering of shapes, and is also associated with the spiral of the snail’s shell.  Bernard’s spider’s web strikes me as an emblem of the book’s rhizomic construction.  Susan is the first to mention plants; she sees leaves like ears, perhaps picking up on Louis and Rhoda’s sounds.  The leaves also remind me of the escallonia hedge wh formed the lower border of the garden at Talland House. Woolf often describes its leaves as pear-shaped; isn’t it fascinating that Susan is repeatedly associated with pears, and, twice is said to have “pear-shaped” eyes.”

Louis intrigues me because I always think of him as aligned with T.S. Eliot. The great elephant stamping on the shore doesn’t work into that identification, but the line about “When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist” always seems to me like a playful reference to Prufrock, and his subsequent hearing of the church bells seems to relate to Eliot’s search for order in the church.  But the strongest Eliot resonance for me is on p. 6 where Louis says “My roots go down to the depths of the world”  -- one of my favorite lines in an Eliot essay is in “Ben Jonson” where he says that Donne and Webster are great because “Their words have often a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires” (SE 135).  I have long believed that is the source of Eliot’s particular genius, and I feel that Woolf recognized that in him too.

Gosh.. .I’ve had so much fun exuding impressions, but I feel I’d better stop here, partially because I’ve forgotten to eat and my blood sugar is spiraling, and partially because I don’t want to overwhelm you with a firehouse of impressions.

 

Eagerly anticipating Chap 2.