Explore Woolf's Use Of Language In The Waves.

"Of primary importance to Virginia Woolf was the problem of rendering aesthetically with words what the process of living felt like"; she is "uninterested in fake solidity, and shows us the true chaos within - reflected in the way her style breaks up the consolidation of syntax".1 Mitchell Leask argues that Woolf`s aesthetic problem inevitably culminated in the reconfiguration of language itself, since her concept of reality fundamentally contradicted the rigid structure of traditional syntax and the singularity of expression it encourages. She believed that "the proper stuff of fiction" would reflect "every feeling, every thought, [and] every quality of brain or spirit",2 conveying the chaotic flux of daily life, since the mind ("the most capricious of insects - flitting, fluttering")3 is a myriad of disparate emotional impulses, that oscillate wildly from moment to moment. To capture this in language, a construct that stabilises external reality and encourages singularity and clarity of expression, is a significant problem, and one Woolf attempted to address throughout her writing career, most prominently (and successfully) in The Waves. Critics have interpreted this novel using the theories of Jacques Lacan, who highlight language`s inherent inability to reflect experiential reality, thus confirming the necessity for Woolf to create a language outside of conventional understanding, to "to a rhythm and not to a plot".4 But beyond reconfiguring language to more accurately reflect "what the process of living felt like" in her own writing, Woolf also sought to highlight language`s alienating quality within her narrative, as her characters` momentary illuminations - the "moments of being" that infuse daily life with glimpses of salvation - transcend language and exist purely in abstraction; their numerous attempts to document life`s meaning, via the completion of a poem, are unfulfilled. Bernard`s final reflections on his life result in the rejection of his notebook; as he accepts the impossibility of capturing life onto the page, Woolf confirms to us the Lacanian impossibility of language truly reflecting life. Yet simultaneously, by writing a novel in which words are felt as music, in which experiences are described as colours, she creates a language that in its abstract lyricism bypasses the symbolic realm and achieves the ultimate fusion of language and thought.

The Waves is saturated with attempts by the protagonists to capture the multiplicity of emotional experience in language, "so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another",5 thus calming the tumultuous waves of existence. In a universe where "all is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph" the difficulty of conveying experience in language is obvious, and yet during the moments of unity when "the shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception"(p21) - the lucid "moments of being" that provide temporary illumination and harmony amidst the chaos of existence - the characters are desperate to capture the experience in a phrase. Woof`s fiction centres around these moments of clarity, where "with intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea"(p35), providing "a hint at some other order, and better, which makes a reason everlasting"(p21). Bernard and Louis desperately to try to "fix in words" these sensations, or force themselves to state it "if only in one line of poetry", in the hope that by doing so they will infuse these transcendental moments with permanence, and thus defy the overwhelming sensation that life is "imperfect, an unfinished phrase"(p160), an incomprehensible "eternal renewal, [an] incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again"(p167). Woolf`s characters are never rewarded for their efforts, and instead made to recognise that these moments of illumination are necessarily temporary, and that their vision`s ephemeral nature accentuates life`s instability, rather than offering the possibility of a lasting pattern. "What is the meaning of life?" asks Lily Briscoe in To The Lightouse: "the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark".6 Bernard eventually succumbs to the same conclusion, recognising that his attempt to write the poem that encapsulates life`s meaning was destined for failure; "life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it".7 The phrases in his notebook cannot be organised into a coherent totality, but are merely "shadows", leaving the protagonist with a "displeasure with the notion of ordered sequences and neat phrases, and a sense of how little they reveal of life"(p163). The world loses significance without any perceived order imposed upon it, as the uncontrolled chaos of life submerges Bernard intermittently in the playpoem`s final passage. Unlike Bernard`s desire to "find the one true story"(p106) Woolf is aware of life`s wavering instability; whilst her protagonist`s vision of capturing life is unfulfilled, Woolf manages to convey the "process of living" accurately within her text. One of Woolf`s inspirations for The Waves was an experience similar to those inexplicable moments of clarity that strike her protagonists:

"One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think. Life is, soberly and accurately, the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel this as a child - couldn`t step across a puddle once, I remember, for thinking how strange - what am I? Etc. But by writing I don`t reach anything. All I mean to make is a note of a curious state of mind."8

Both of these images - the fin and the puddle - occur in The Waves with emotional significance similar to Woolf`s experience, accentuating the profound loneliness of existence and yet illuminating something deeper. The fin appears to Bernard as a "bare visual impression unattached to any line of reason",9 whilst the puddle continually re-emerges in Rhoda`s mind, conveying a moment of purity ("Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said")10 that saturates her perceptions of reality throughout her life. This synthesis of the character and the novelist against suggests a similar goal in writing, and yet whilst these images send her characters "dashing like a moth from candle to candle"(p165) until "no fin breaks the waste of the immeasurable sea"(p160), Woolf is successful. Her diary entry suggests "I don`t reach anything", but the emotional clarity of her prose contradicts her own insecurities, particularly with regards to The Waves. Woolf`s characters attempt to capture a coherent and lasting `meaning` to existence from these singular "moments of being", and find themselves disillusioned when this goal eludes them. In contrast, Woolf embraces the "rise and fall and fall and rise again" pattern of life - so incomprehensible to the fragmented Bernard - and attempts to "record the atoms as they fall upon the mind".11 Bernard`s final understanding of why his own attempts have failed make him "understand that life is not totally constraint or freedom but a highly impure mixture of both, embracing the decaying body as well as the growing, transcendent imagination",12 an attitude Woolf has accepted from the beginning of her literary career.13 More substantially than this though, is the fundamental difference in the language that they use. Bernard uses conventional syntax in an attempt to render life structured and coherent (as exemplified by the rigid alphabetization of his phrases) whereas Woolf fundamentally reconfigures our relationship with language in order to transcribe the wave-like rhythm of existence directly onto the page, in a way that traditional language and sentence structure are simply incapable of doing.

As Bernard finally accepts the futility of his attempts to create the perfect poem and make life coherent, he yearns for "a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak", thus returning the reader to the novel`s opening, in which the children`s language "refuses to be embedded and committed to the socio-temporal, symbolic order".14 It is within this opening passage that Woolf breaks conventional syntax and reconfigures language most successfully, penetrating through traditional representative order. Woolf`s descri ption of the raw emotional ferocity of childhood is overflowing with imagery beyond the conventional symbolic realm, as her protagonists conflate reality and illusion in a world incoherently vibrant; "I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world[...] through veins of lead and silver.[...] I do not wish to come to the top and live in the light of this great clock".15 In Lacanian terms, the novel "inscribes the emergence of subjectivity and the process of its consolidation",16 since the child is "not yet regulated into patterns of signification, though the world is pregnant with the possibility of meaning".17 Jacques Lacan theorized that subjectivity is formulated during early childhood, in which the individual begins to recognise difference, thus severing them from the initial totality of self.18 This emergence of the individual coincides with the acquisition of language, because "in psychoanalytical terms, subjectivity is achieved with the acceptance of the comprehension of mediation, the separation of word from the thing itself".19 Once the individual has `split` from this initial totality, they must recognise the existence of others, and take on a language that inherently represses personal desires in order to successfully function for the benefit of society as a whole.20 Consciousness is, therefore, fundamentally informed by language, a structure which "necessarily fails to give the moment whole, for the `I` exists in discourse only by repressing the body, the unconscious, desire and pleasure".21 Lacan posits that language is formulated "entirely in a process of gap", and consequently is unable to fully articulate the multiplicity of thought; instead "we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. We have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising the fissures".22 Although Woolf`s writing does not deliberately address Lacanian notions of language, her novel is absorbed in the attempt to pass beyond the singularity and impersonality of the socio-symbolic order. In line with Lacan`s theory of the emergence of individuality, the children are curiously preoccupied with recognising difference, currently existing in a world where "the sea is indistinguishable from the sky"(p3) but beginning to emerge as a subject within the social world. It is only in later life that the characters recognise the significance of childhood, when feeling is immediately comprehensible and untainted by the acquisition of language: "speech is false" declares Rhoda, since "we have tried to accentuate differences from the desire to be separate"(p76), when in truth the individual yearns for the unselfconscious, undifferentiated feeling of childhood: "we only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from whom we have been severed"(p131). It is vital, therefore, that Woolf`s fiction reaches beyond conventional symbolic order that is informed by a language severed from the real individual experience. It is for this reason that Bernard lets his notebook fall, it being full of highly structured phrases that keep him "blind to the intractable, discontinuous, haphazard stuff of reality which is all about him",23 whilst Woolf emerges triumphant in her attempts to speak a language more immediately in tune with emotional intuition. Bernard eventually "wishes to get back behind the construction of language, to `a howl; a cry` which would be prior to syntax",24 and yearns for the non-language of "rushing streams of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half finished sentences",25 but whilst it is too late for him, his cry is for the very process of symbolic distortion that Woolf captures in her novel, written to "a rhythm, and not to a plot".

Since Woolf uses the English language to write this novel, a full return to the semiotic appears impossible, but what differentiates Woolf from other writers (such as Bernard) is that she writes to convey rhythm, rather than attempting to simply transcribe feeling using "false phrases"(p167). The reader absorbs the multitudinous and chaotic thought processes of the novel`s protagonists by letting the rhythmic waves of the language wash over, suggesting emotion rather than concretely defining it. The thoughts of the characters in the opening section of The Waves are expressed in a "highly artificial language that is altogether different from the way people either think or speak",26 displaying the "primitive or child-minds mode of thought, which expresses itself directly in pictorial images that symbolize emotion, rather than in word sequences".27 Their relationship with imagery and metaphor is beyond immediate logical comprehension, and thus successfully evokes the "rushing streams of broken dreams" that answer more coherently to the fluctuations of human emotion. "I see a slab of pale yellow[...] spreading away until it meets a purple stripe" is a typical opaque image from the opening section,28 although the enigmatic use of metaphor is not confined to the opening passage; it shudders through the rest of the novel, which speaks in a voice that belongs neither to the narrator, nor specifically to the direct thoughts or speech of the characters: "The flames of the festival rise high[...] Their horns spill blue smoke; their skins are dappled red and yellow in the torchlight. They throw violets. And while it passes, we are aware of downfalling, we forebode decay[...] note how the purple flame flows downwards. Death is woven in with the violets"(p78). The recurring image of violets defies the linearity and singularity of language; the same symbols continually re-emerge throughout, reflecting the "shower of innumerable atoms" of memory that frame life. Harvena Richter describes these repetitions of images as " a way in which the infinite series of impressions enfolded in memory might be simultaneously conveyed by a single image, a symbol which gathered about itself a host of related images, and would abstract an intricately woven network of remembered relationships and feelings".29 Rhoda`s violets evoke the white lilies of her youth and her offering to Percival`s memory, so that the recurring image of flowers instantaneously evokes a multiplicity of memory in the reader, and thus revives complexities of feeling in a way akin to real life. It is this style of repetition that creates the wave-like rhythm of the prose, as memories of childhood events shimmer throughout, emerging and re-emerging like "waves beating upon the shore".30 This effect is taken even further by the "short sentences strung loosely together by semi-colons and the juxtaposition of nouns",31 as well as the iambic recurrence of "he said" and "she said", as the ordered pattern of the soliloquies rise and fall, again, like the waves. Each sentence seems equally concerned with this rhythm, as "tidal ebb and flow or the rise and fall of emotion seem echoed in passages[...] which combine outward visual movement with a carefully arranged series of iambs and falling trochees and dactyls".32 Virginia Woolf`s descri ption of Rhoda`s "moment of being" at the cliff edge is a compelling example of how the limitations of language can be transcended, leaving an abstract impression that feels closer to music than literature:

"The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing, I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me".33

The actual event that takes place in this passage is a mystery; it is either a suicide, or a moment of absolute isolation that embraces the comfort of nothingness, or it is both. However, if the concrete meaning of the signifiers are ignored, in favour of simply feeling the rhythm and flow of the sentences themselves, the myriad of emotions that constitute her mental state are illuminated. Rhoda`s "I touch nothing" instantly evokes her constant need to "touch something hard" to remind herself that she "cannot sink" in moments of despair (p14), whilst her petals "darkened with sea water" alludes to the bucket of lily petals, a childhood memory that represents her own loneliness and the constant threat of submergence. Rather than elaborate on a specific emotion, Woolf layers the text with repetitive images so that a multitude of remembrances fall over the reader, mimicking the complexity of sensations in real life. These images arrive at the reader with a ghostly calm, rippling across the page in a tidal motion; "The white petals will be darkened with sea water" alternates between iambs and trochees, creating the effect of waves, rising and falling, as her imagery washes over the reader.

Whilst Bernard attempts to capture life`s meaning by analysing the temporary moments of harmony, when the world seems suddenly coherent and complete, Woolf recognises that this is merely the crest of the wave, and instead attempts to capture the "incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again" as the mind oscillates between emotional states. Mrs Ramsay`s experience in To the Lighthouse - when the momentary harmony of her dinner party melts away "even as she looks" - produces a frustration that is felt by so many of her protagonists,34 and yet for the author herself, to capture the essence of life is to write something that contains both the peak and the trough of existence. Despite never using language to directly articulate what constitutes those momentary visions, Woolf rightly asserts, on completing the novel, "I have netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me".35 When Woolf declared she was writing "not to a plot", she meant more than simply to reject narrative drive, but to reject the concept of linearity itself; "conventional plot is the macrostructural equivalent of the sentence in linguistic microstructure, and Woolf is similarly dissatisfied with the linearity of language itself, which is powerless to render the polymorphous nature of experience".36 In many respects the Lacanian "gap" between sensory experience and articulation is impossible to breach, but Woolf`s reconfiguration of language strips it of a stable, coherent meaning. Relying on a multi-layered, rhythmic structure, she almost returns us to the pre-symbolic order, where emotional experience