Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves': to defer that "appalling moment."

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Lisa Marie Lucenti

The ultimate abyss in the text, for each character, is the threat of self-absence, coded as that "appalling moment" when the sequence of narrative fails (39). There is always a moment in Bernard's stories where he finds himself unable to continue. Imagining the life of another, he can only go so far before he reaches a blank wall: "stories that follow people into their private rooms are difficult. I cannot go on with this story. I twiddle a piece of string; I turn over four or five coins in my trouser pocket" (51). Faced with his own silence, what, exactly, is Bernard left holding, what does he extract from those "private rooms"? Merely a piece of string and a few coins. The "wandering thread" that promised to connect all things turns out to be a bit of string stuffed in his pocket. As the mark of the "I" in language, this thread, rather than providing coherence, simply becomes something to "twiddle"--a toy. Even the coins, which should function in a regulated economy that adds up, are merely another form of play. Both the string and the coins are elsewhere symbols of order, but here they are remnants, leftovers, things to turn over and over. In spite of their promises, they don't deliver you anywhere.

Bernard's repeated failure to get the story straight is a subversive testimony to the fractures within his--or any--subjective positioning. Ultimately, while he may desire complete continuance and autonomy, he cannot enter the private room of the other; his language fails him. Bernard conceptualizes this limitation as the difference between a mirror and a fountain pen: the mirror is a form of "natural" writing in that it merely reflects a pre-existing state and waits to be transcribed, while the fountain pen is a more complicated metaphor. Bernard is not the mirror--he has, according to his own account, "little aptitude for reflection"--but the pen: "I fill my mind with whatever happens to be the contents of a room or a railway carriage as one fills a fountain-pen in an inkpot" (68). Ink in a pot is a formless puddle, unreadable; only in its passage through the shaft of a pen can the ink be cast into recognizable shapes. Bernard's mind acts like the pen in its mediations, its transformation of perception into representation. He does not "reflect" the Other; he creates it, marks it into existence through his ink. Yet encrypted in Bernard's metaphors is a more fundamental question about the nature of language: Do phrases and words copy reality or inscribe it--are they a mirror or a fountain pen?

In Bernard's earlier description of language as "speculation," we might find the two metaphors entwined (117, 218). Etymologically linked to "speculum," speculation is not only a risk, a chance investment, but also an inversion through reflection.(16) The self that speculates--in language, in a beloved, in the State--ultimately discovers its own image projected onto that "other." So the characters find themselves in the uncomfortable dilemma of being the same ground upon which they stand. End, origin, and the negation of each--the myth of full presence propels a certain speculation that will never pay out. When the self is its own pledge, its own guarantee, then the distinction between "being" and "seeming to be" cannot be determined by some authoritative standard like Truth or Objectivity. How can we then distinguish between the authentic being and its mere semblance? The Waves suggests that we cannot. As Minow-Pinkney argues in her analysis of Orlando, "`Disguise' is a play with the boundary between seeming and being, blurring their sharp distinction and opening up a space of heterogeneity within unitary being" (132). It follows, then, that if identity is corroborated only by itself, if it is metaphorically not a face but a performative mask, then that "identity" is already something other than itself. "Being," in the sense of absolute and transcendent self-presence, may be nothing more than seeming to be.