The Waves: Chapter Two (Catherine)

I’ll start by responding to yours from last week:

 

I thought about that early memory from SOTP too, and the way that an awareness of the outside air coming inside resonates with the movement of the waves.

 

Thank you for the photo of Portminster Beach! I wondered last week as I listened to the SC waves what image of a beach and of waves might be in Woolf’s head, and I figured it would be St. Ives, but I’ve never been. And for the Sea Holly too—a flower I did not know.

 

And your evocation of a phenomenological approach seems just right. I’ve been thinking for a variety of reasons, largely coming out of the Salon and readings for that and in preparation for the conference that I would like to read more of the theory underpinning that approach, so that my understanding might be deeper.

 

I have a number of your materials from your blog flagged for reference and consideration as I go. Thank you for those!

 

I see that VW divides The Waves into nine chapters, which makes sense with what I have read connecting the book with maternity. I’m paying attention to how this means that the “day” presented by the interludes is also divided into 9 parts, not a framework through which I am used to seeing a day.

 

The thing intriguing me the most from chapter 2 is Neville’s thinking about Bernard turning their moments into stories. “Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence” (27). Yes, this is literally true, and indicative of the larger role that Bernard plays, and his complete dominance (I gather) of the last chapter. But here what strikes me is how this comment accentuates the present-ness of all the narration (?) thus far, how each character is so much in the moment that the “narrative” is more like a stringing together of moments in the consciousnesses of different characters present, witnessing, sensing (this chapter is still very sensory in its emphasis). A sense of time passing through a day, then a year, and then through school career comes through these moments strung together, and always with different characters looking back at one another. And of course through the characters’ reactions to Percival, what they adore and despise about him, how they understand him. And amidst all of this is Bernard trying to make sense of moments, feelings, experiences by finding just the right words, and then, presumably, listing them in his notebooks. “That will be useful” (26).

 

And of course Neville’s not wanting Bernard to use his feelings to ‘make a “story”’—not wanting to be material for the writer and so lose control over his own moments and emotions and situation.

 

In this chapter even more than in chapter 1 is the combination and contrast of characters’ inner worlds and how they are perceived by others—and in the case of the girls, how they think of others perceiving them.