"Identity failed me."
It has been a little over a week since I've been done with Woolf's cherishable work of art, and it is not one that lingers on long after. Its beauty rests, on my account, during the reading, not after. It doesn't talk a lot about events, but feeds on human perceptions instead. In a nutshell, The Waves proceed through the monologues (even when they're talking to each other, we're being introduced to the conversation through one of the participants such as "Here, my poem" being followed by something like "neville now has given me his poem") of the 6 main characters: Neville, Bernard, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and Susan.
I come to think of it as a long piece of poetry, its perfection in prose many times comprimises the reality of it all. Either Woolf had lived in a world full of poets, or she wished to live in one, I don't know, though I've read somehwere that one of the characters (Louis) was based on the wonderful T.S.Eliot. So I guess it isn't that far off for Woolf to have people with honey dripping of their tongues any given time of the day, for me, it stands as a utopian long-time dream to have people around who are unattached and vivid, saying something like "But if I find myself in company with other people, words at once make smoke rings--see how phrases at once begin to wreathe off my lips" in the middle of our daily lives.
So if anything was to me a bit less impressive it would be that. It comes to a point that you lose completely who is who, I myself read about 2 pages of Neville thinking he was Bernard. See, if you read a book for the reading's sake, The Waves is nearly perfect. But me, I seek the living through the pages. I sort of like feeling Rodya's fever on my forehead, the irony of Sydney pinching me through my shield, all in all, I like "people" in the stories, I like them ripe, I like them burning and alive, I like them with their ups but more with their downs, I like them when they are capable of standing on their own--had I ever closed the page on them. The Waves lack that, in my opinion. It blurs the vision a bit too much, and if that was the aim at it (Woolf had said that they should not be taken seperately, but as layers of perception), I'm cool with that, but none of the characters leave a mark--say, maybe Bernard and Neville, a little, but not that much.
Moving on--about those characters who chase one another through the autumn fog--my favorite, favorites more like it, are of course, Neville and Bernard. Possibly because I saw them as two seperate pieces of what I come to think of the greater spirit of the creative creed.
Seperately I'll start with Neville--since he is to me the most clearly defined one of the lot. His arrogance shrug at the rest of the folks is appealing to one similar to his kind, and understandable, since one way or the other, the poet feels off base among the others, "his wings get in the way," as Baudalaire would say. So I applauded him, and understood silently--even though it is all fragments of one's own imagination--you catch phrases here and there that make you feel like you're among those who understand. Anyways, returning back to Neville, what makes him delicious is not just that pompousness, but simultaneously existing self-degradatiton. His willingness to throw himself at the feet of whomever he loves, dragging his otherwise superior existence to the pits of shame and desparation, that right there, makes one not just interesting, but also beautfiul. He's similar in that way to the great Dostoyevskien gods, whose sudden virtuousness gets torn apart with vices of the worst kind. What can i say, i chase those swan songs in the dark. They're hard to find, but ones like Neville, they give you a hundred swan songs in a life time.
"Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person."
My second favorite obviously is Bernard, with his obsession of stories and constant deisre to find phrases to fit the dullness of life is not at all uncommon to my inner self either. I think it would have worked out perfectly if Woolf had told the entire story through Bernard, I wouldn't have minded at all. His resentment towards his quest by the end of the book is what finally makes everything, to me, realistic. People like Bernard, they don't survive for long. Their beauty goes unappreciated, their opennes scorned. At the end of their life, they realize not much have changed. The words that made them joyfull like children betray them at the end of the road. Hell, they betray them long before that. Every poet-man knows that maybe a handful will see the true face of their stories, and maybe not even that.
"But you understand, you, myself, who always come at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come, that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubc--they have given up calling for a self who does not come) you understand that I am only superficially represented by what I was saying tonight!"
I don't have a whole lot to say on the rest--I believe Rhoda's constant fearful state lands a fatal blow to her air of greatness, I could not see her as anything but a vague child, her so called strength fails to shine through. Louis' worry of not fitting in makes you want to somewhat accept him, but he too, only makes himself visible through pastel, fading colors. Jinny and Susan are too one-dimensional for my taste. Percival, though constantly being told as the god-like inspiration, that too in my opinion (and this time on Woolf's account) fails to create that atmosphere. Salinger's Stradlater should be remembered here, and his air of existence, compared to that of Percival's.
Overall--I do have to end this sooner or later--The Waves is a graceful work of art. Sometimes though, that grace blocks true life from showing itself. For true life is rarely graceful. And we ourselves seek not the graceful but those smothered in Catullus and misery at the final hour. For the graceful is beautiful to look at, but rarely ever leaves a mark.
