John’s Comments (group member since Oct 13, 2019)

John’s comments from the A Season for Woolfs: A Virginia Woolf Reading Challenge group.

Consummatum Est
(Some thoughts on the last three sections of The Waves)

We seem to have finally found out what the “waves” are — they are Neville, Louis, Bernard, Susan, Jinny, and Rhoda. In the last three interludes the waves merit only short references, mostly with the implication that they are declining or failing. This is the longest of the three reading subdivisions, and offers the most meta information concerning the actual meaning of the book (if any).

These sections also offer the clearest internal indication of how Woolf intended the book to be read — as poetry. This is reinforced by her reference to it not as a novel, but as a “playpoem”.

Section 7 is relatively short, and starts with another extended monologue from Bernard that relates the passing of time. Susan follows, then one of the infrequent monologues from Jinny. Then it gets much more interesting in Neville’s passage. In the second paragraph he says “This is poetry if we do not write it” — which seems highly self referential. Shortly thereafter, there is “They want a plot, do they? They want a reason?” This seems to come directly from the author’s mouth. The entire monologue is full of meta references:

“...things are said as if they had been written.”
“Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort.”
“To read this poem one must have myriad eyes...”
“The poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn.”

From Neville we proceed to Louis, a character often seen to be based at least partly on the poet T. S. Eliot. His monologue is constructed around a medieval poem, and Woolf doubles down on her poetic diction and style. Rhoda starts her section talking about dreading life, perhaps foreshadowing her later suicide.

One does wonder what Jinny’s name signifies, being phonetically a diminutive of Virginia. She does not seem to resemble the author very much, but the naming may be aspirational rather than factual.

Section 8 starts with Bernard again. Noticed that Bernard starts every section except 5 (Neville announcing Percival’s death) and 6 (Louis). The characters are meeting at the Inn at Hampton Court, and Bernard arrives to find the others already there. This section contains a lot more character interaction than the others, and more closely resembles what one might expect to see in a conventional novel. It is also the last we hear from any character other than Bernard, so it is useful to take note of what each character says as a summation of their presence.

The interlude following section 8 seems to reflect the same time of day that the section closed with.

Section 9 is all Bernard. This was the hardest section for me to read - Bernard is wordy and more than a little tedious, but there are some important parts. A little ways in, he talks about Percival, perhaps in irony showing Woolf’s feelings about the “golden boy” myth. They loved Percival, but that does not mean that he would have been out of the ordinary at all. The point is made (that their regard of Percival is sentiment, rather than fact): “No lullaby has ever occurred to me capable of singing him to rest.” Later, he epitomizes Jinny: “There was no past, no future; merely the moment in its ring of light, and our bodies; and the inevitable climax, the ecstasy.”

There are a couple of themes that recur in this section. One is quoting poetry, including (from Shakespeare) “come away, come away, death” (Twelfth Night) and “Let me not to the marriage of true minds...” (Sonnet 116). The other is the idea of Tuesday following Monday, followed in turn by Wednesday. The latter is repeated four or five times, and seems to signify the ordinary passage of time.

This section is also quite poetic in style. Reading it aloud will illustrate this. Indulging in a bit of meta, Woolf puts these words in Bernard’s mouth: “...standing by the window looking at a sky clear like the inside of a blue stone, ‘Heaven be praised,’ I said, ‘we need not whip this prose into poetry. The little language is enough.’” Is poetry indeed the larger language? Is prose, well, prosaic? Following this is a very poetic examination of Percival’s death (again). A couple of pages later, he may be alluding to the idea that he is the last remaining of the six:

“Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one's life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets.”

On the next page, we have “... an impulse again runs through us; we rise, we toss back a mane of white spray; we pound on the shore; we are not to be confined.” The characters are the waves.

On the idea that the characters are aspects of one individual: “... when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call "my life", it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am--Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.” And “We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget.”

A few pages later we learn that Rhoda has killed herself; she has gone before them. As Rhoda is the character that tends to be associated with Woolf herself, this seems particularly tragic. “... Rhoda, always so furtive, always with fear in her eyes, always seeking some pillar in the desert, to find which she had gone; she had killed herself.”

From that point, the section seems to build momentum, gathering as a wave about to hit the shore. Bernard alludes to this several times, including “...there is a gradual coming together, running into one, acceleration and unification.” I think that Woolf’s own voice also comes out in this section, with passages like “Heaven be praised for solitude. Let me be alone. Let me cast away this veil of being.” As the section ends, Bernard refers a final time to the wave analogy, and mounts a symbolic charge against Death. Noble or foolish? This is the would-be novelist who never finished a book. When a wave hits the shore, it ceases to be. “The waves broke on the shore.”

That’s “...could *never* have been...” in the first paragraph.

Another War Poem Reference

The lines that Mr. Ramsay mutters as he paces the terrace are from The Charge of the Light Brigade, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This is another poem that glorifies war, and in particular senseless slaughter. The poem itself acknowledges that the charge was a mistake. No matter how brave the soldiers, the charge was futile and could ever have been anything but futile.

So, what is Woolf saying with this reference? It is hard to imagine that it is anything positive about Mr. Ramsay. It seems, rather, that she is aligning her pacifism against the society of the time, much as she does with her feminism.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

1.
Half a league, half a league,
⁠Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
⁠Rode the six hundred.
"Charge," was the captain's cry;
Their's not to reason why,
Their's not to make reply,
Their's but to do and die,
Into the valley of Death
⁠Rode the six hundred.

2.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
⁠Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well;
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell,
⁠Rode the six hundred.

3.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd all at once in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
⁠All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Fiercely the line they broke;
Strong was the sabre-stroke;
Making an army reel
⁠Shaken and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not,
⁠Not the six hundred.

4.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
⁠Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
They that had struck so well
Rode thro' the jaws of Death,
Half a league back again,
Up from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
⁠Left of six hundred.

5.
Honour the brave and bold!
Long shall the tale be told,
Yea, when our babes are old—
⁠How they rode onward.

The End

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Some Thoughts on “Flanders”

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
  That mark our place; and in the sky
  The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
  Loved and were loved, and now we lie
      In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
  The torch; be yours to hold it high.
  If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
      In Flanders fields.

— John McCrae

This poem, published in 1915, was immensely populaT of the third stanza made it very useful as a motivational and propaganda piece. The popularity of the red poppy as a Remembrance Day symbol is in large part due to campaigns inspired by this poem. It would strain credulity to think that Virginia Woolf was unaware of it. As a committed pacifist, she quite likely despised it.

By naming the central character (it seems wrong to say “protagonist”) Jacob Flanders, Woolf could be referring to both the poem and the secnd battle of Ypres (in Flanders) which led to the poem’s composition. Second Ypres was particularly brutal, being the occasion of the first mass chemical attack of the war, using chlorine gas. The stark contrast between the uplifting mood of the poem and the brutal reality of the war would be a fertile source of inspiration.

Looking at the book, Jacob appears to be mostly missing right from the start. He was not heroic in life, and looking back after his death Jacob is seen mostly as a void. He appears primarily as the subject of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others. Even the title, Jacob’s Room, with a slight stretch becomes Jacob’s Space - which is what the book is really about. That space that Jacob occupied, but which he scarcely used and vacated by the end of the novel. The “honored dead” are nowhere to be found. They are less than meaningless, being in retrospect only holes that moved through the world.

At the end of the book, Jacob’s mother and his good friend (bon ami) are left to clean out his space. There is nothing meaningful there. The space that was Jacob is gone, and so the book ends. There is no torch passed, nor dead for whom the cause is to be pursued, nor heroes - only ordinary lives.