I’ve since read the intro to my edition (by Kate Flint) and the chapter in The Interrupted Moment (which you recommended—thank you!), but when I read the first chapter of The Waves, I tried to let the prose flow over me and not freak out about what I don’t understand.
I love the way that in the first part of chapter the voices of the different characters became a kind of chorus, or like a variety of birdcalls, where I don’t recognize the voices of individual species but they all come together to make a beautiful environment. As the chapter goes on and I start to get small senses of who the characters are and what drives them, I enjoy going back to those initial short statements, to see what they tell me that I missed on the first, more flowy read. I like the way those initial voices move from something like pure observation to sentences that create something more like narration, little stories about the islands of light or grey-shelled snails. Then a movement to something more like individual consciousnesses, with feelings and lacks, and narration of what various characters are doing.
I love that the action happens in the present tense, so that it all becomes part of a scene rather than real time passing. I love the imperatives—“Put your foot on this brick. Look over the wall” and “Run!”
I love the way that even as their consciousnesses start to cement, so that Neville is the sickly one and Bernard creates imagined worlds and Susan is agonized by Louis and Jinny kissing, they can also blend together into one being. Louis: “When we are sad and trembling with apprehension it is sweet to sing together, leaning slightly, I towards Susan, Susan towards Bernard, clasping hands, afraid of much, I of my accent, Rhoda of figures; yet resolute to conquer” (18).
To come back to the italicized opening (what are these called?): I love the way Woolf describes the gradually more visible waves, and what it is to start to see that water before the sun is up. The gradually, gradually, gradually of the second paragraph. An image that stands out: “Gradually the figres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue” (3). I suppose that woollen grey resonates with the cotton wool of everyday life.
I love the way “The birds sang their blank melody outside” transitions into the initial statements of the main chapter.
And of course there are pauses: “As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thing veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously” (3). This resonates with Edmund de Waal’s description of a pause as “a turn of the breath.” The next pause appearance here is more a part of the narrative: “One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down” (3). Or is this pause like that of the wave, a caesura (again, de Waal’s word) between chirps?
I think it helped me to start this book looking out over the ocean, to remind myself of how waves move—and something that I think you see and hear on your regular walks. This novelpoem is making me think a lot about time, patience, unfolding.
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