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4.13 AVERAGE
4.13 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
"It is strange that we who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering."
adventurous
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
It's difficult for me to write about this novel, which is almost a sacred artifact to me. I've read it at least four times, probably more--and even tried to teach it--and yet I find it impossible to contain, to retain, or to explicate in the clever literary critical idiom in which I've been trained. I suppose I can retreat into a formal analysis of sorts and perhaps explain a bit of the way The Waves achieves what it achieves.
It's a novel whose narrative remains fugitive because it creates the illusion of being wholly without authorial manipulatation--it doesn't tell a "story" as we've grown accustomed to defining that word in the tradition of novel writing. Therefore the novel --again--creates the illusion of being about a real life (actually five lives) rather than a plot created in a novelist's head and artificially re-constructed on the page.
Generally speaking, such narrative experiments usually come under fire for being boring, since they fail to communicate a secondary level of meaning (the moral of the story) above and beyond the illusion of telling a "real" story. Hence the tried and true aesthetic measure of the GREAT NOVEL (satirical caps) as one that has a plot verisimilar enough to appear real that, at the same time, through symbolism, thematic motifs, and hints at a moral appraisal of the evens, also tells us what we think the author is trying to communicate to us via theme etc. This is where I have such trouble trying to convince students that what we, as readers, take from a narrative has a lot more to do with how we ourselves read, interpret, and (re-)construct this second layer of meaning, and how our assigning that agency to the author's intentions is both a fallacy and an educated guess at best.
Since The Waves has so little story or plot outside of five middle-class, rather uneventful lives and their interactions, it would seem to fail the first rule of narrative, to tell an entertaining and engrossing tale, but that rather enhances than detracts from this particular novel. I suppose one could argue that this is because of Woolf's amazing facility at the linguistic level--practically every sentence is a precious gem to be savored (as my relatively long reading time on this one betrays, I did savor rather than rush through it to simply have done with the plot)--but I believe there's a bit more to it than that. Rather, by reducing the plot to the mundane lives of only marginally remarkable people, by stripping away events of note in favor of dinner parties and children playing, and by following the characters through their whole lives rather than focusing in on a string of consequential events that begin and conclude a process of life (the way most 19th century novels follow a woman from coming out to marriage for example) creates a kind of heightened realism that makes the plots of most other realistic novels appear silly and pretentious.
Therefore the anti-plot actually works in The Waves favor, and, although I haven't yet looked, I imagine almost every positive review on this page will call the novel "poetic" because indeed it does what is mainly done in lyric poems--it remind us of the importance of the everyday through small, often symbolic, abstractions out of the mundane elements of everyday human life. (That and it also adds a shit-ton of similes, [another familiar poetic technique] as my friend Christopher, the rhetorician, noted when we were discussing The Waves.) As the quotation I posted at one juncture of my reading, when either Bernard or Neville (I've forgotten which), says something about the mundane and then comments, "This is poetry if we don't write it." The novel is about the importance of the significance of the insignificant ephemera of life, and that is a rare message in a 200+ page narrative, for they almost always falls back on plot in order to keep the reader interested. (I also therefore imagine that a positive or negative review of this novel will pretty much divide itself along the lines of those who read for plot and those who read for theme.) Did Woolf set out to say this? How should I know, but it's certainly what I take from The Waves and what I love about it.
This is also why it's perhaps the most re-readable novel of all time: it's easier to remember the arc of a plot than 200+ pages of observations and details and meditations upon their inner significance to the cumulative experience of five "narrators." And I put "narrators" between quotation marks because this is the novel's most deceptive technique: we think (well, we're told) that we're reading five interlaced monologues, but really we're reading a third person narrative in quotation marks and attributed to the inner monologues of the five characters. I hate to bare this technique in this way because it's like denuding something so beautiful I'd rather not be disillusioned as to how the effect was achieved, but I do think that's the novel's emperor's new clothes so to speak. But we believe it. And that, my friends, is what art can do.
It's a novel whose narrative remains fugitive because it creates the illusion of being wholly without authorial manipulatation--it doesn't tell a "story" as we've grown accustomed to defining that word in the tradition of novel writing. Therefore the novel --again--creates the illusion of being about a real life (actually five lives) rather than a plot created in a novelist's head and artificially re-constructed on the page.
Generally speaking, such narrative experiments usually come under fire for being boring, since they fail to communicate a secondary level of meaning (the moral of the story) above and beyond the illusion of telling a "real" story. Hence the tried and true aesthetic measure of the GREAT NOVEL (satirical caps) as one that has a plot verisimilar enough to appear real that, at the same time, through symbolism, thematic motifs, and hints at a moral appraisal of the evens, also tells us what we think the author is trying to communicate to us via theme etc. This is where I have such trouble trying to convince students that what we, as readers, take from a narrative has a lot more to do with how we ourselves read, interpret, and (re-)construct this second layer of meaning, and how our assigning that agency to the author's intentions is both a fallacy and an educated guess at best.
Since The Waves has so little story or plot outside of five middle-class, rather uneventful lives and their interactions, it would seem to fail the first rule of narrative, to tell an entertaining and engrossing tale, but that rather enhances than detracts from this particular novel. I suppose one could argue that this is because of Woolf's amazing facility at the linguistic level--practically every sentence is a precious gem to be savored (as my relatively long reading time on this one betrays, I did savor rather than rush through it to simply have done with the plot)--but I believe there's a bit more to it than that. Rather, by reducing the plot to the mundane lives of only marginally remarkable people, by stripping away events of note in favor of dinner parties and children playing, and by following the characters through their whole lives rather than focusing in on a string of consequential events that begin and conclude a process of life (the way most 19th century novels follow a woman from coming out to marriage for example) creates a kind of heightened realism that makes the plots of most other realistic novels appear silly and pretentious.
Therefore the anti-plot actually works in The Waves favor, and, although I haven't yet looked, I imagine almost every positive review on this page will call the novel "poetic" because indeed it does what is mainly done in lyric poems--it remind us of the importance of the everyday through small, often symbolic, abstractions out of the mundane elements of everyday human life. (That and it also adds a shit-ton of similes, [another familiar poetic technique] as my friend Christopher, the rhetorician, noted when we were discussing The Waves.) As the quotation I posted at one juncture of my reading, when either Bernard or Neville (I've forgotten which), says something about the mundane and then comments, "This is poetry if we don't write it." The novel is about the importance of the significance of the insignificant ephemera of life, and that is a rare message in a 200+ page narrative, for they almost always falls back on plot in order to keep the reader interested. (I also therefore imagine that a positive or negative review of this novel will pretty much divide itself along the lines of those who read for plot and those who read for theme.) Did Woolf set out to say this? How should I know, but it's certainly what I take from The Waves and what I love about it.
This is also why it's perhaps the most re-readable novel of all time: it's easier to remember the arc of a plot than 200+ pages of observations and details and meditations upon their inner significance to the cumulative experience of five "narrators." And I put "narrators" between quotation marks because this is the novel's most deceptive technique: we think (well, we're told) that we're reading five interlaced monologues, but really we're reading a third person narrative in quotation marks and attributed to the inner monologues of the five characters. I hate to bare this technique in this way because it's like denuding something so beautiful I'd rather not be disillusioned as to how the effect was achieved, but I do think that's the novel's emperor's new clothes so to speak. But we believe it. And that, my friends, is what art can do.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Very beautiful. Virginia I love you.
This was a rough read. I had to abandon the idea of understand any kind of plot and just enjoy the prose. I still have to give this 5 stars, as it's an incredible piece of literature.
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There is life and death woven together in a tapestry. We live, we suffer, and we strive, all the while knowing that the waves wash in and out, erasing all traces of our existence.
There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.
I desire perpetuity; the moment fades. We are the mouth of the river; we breathe together, and we die together, and yet I cannot explain the meaning of our separate lives.
I sat in awe staring at the blank pages at the ending. Virginia Woolfs poetic and fluid approach to writing about daily human life was so beautiful I often found myself saying wow out loud. Initially I found the unusual narrative structure and metaphorical language hard to follow and I felt that I needed full concentration to truly enjoy it. However this will be a book I return to again and again and each time I feel I will relate to different characters and gain new insights. The reflections on the passing of time, the meaningful meaningless of life and human emotion and consciousness will stay with me for a long time after reading this.
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
reflective
medium-paced