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

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Lisa Marie Lucenti

Louis roots himself between open envy of those with the right legs and tongues and an uncritical admiration for the larger structures of inheritance and tradition within which those legs and tongues work. The well-paved paths of society give him a sense of security by clearly demarcating the correct direction. He thinks, "Blessings be on all traditions, on all safeguards and circumscriptions! I am most grateful to you men in black gowns, and you, dead, for your leading, for your guardianship" (58). Significantly, these are the same "men in black gowns" that have flapped their wings at Virginia Woolf to keep her off the grass and out of the library in A Room of One's Own (6-8). Louis, in sharp contrast, wishes for even more circumscriptions, more proper paths. Ironically, these very structures of social class and inheritance are the same barriers which marginalize Louis. Yet, in the end, he is forced to admit that, "after all, the problem remains. The differences are not yet solved" (58). The differences, within himself and within the society he helps regulate, are disruptions which prevent any simple reckoning; they are the accents from which Louis will never escape.

With his "lips tight pressed" to seal out as much difference as possible, Louis sets himself the task of being the "eye" of history (66). His envy takes the form of an inflated, even hyperbolic relationship to the very history and community from which he is excluded. Surrounded by his colonial maps and the order they represent, Louis says to the world in general, "I will reduce you to order" (95). The "reduction" is a blasting away of difference, either through extermination or colonization. As the eye that surveys and tallies all values, Louis seems to restore himself, to grant himself the credit which society refuses him. He has, in fact, effectively transformed himself into an agent of the same system which made him "an alien, external" (94). Yet this transformation comes only at the price of being "perpetually torn and distressed," the enforcer, in effect, of his own permanent exclusion (93). Ultimately, the "order" he seeks is one in which he, as its necessary other, could have no proper place.

While Louis's mapping and accounts do not provide the "open sesame" to truth or redemption, Neville thinks he has found the magic entrance in the form of the beloved other. Like Louis, Neville longs for deep roots in a firm soil. At first, he thinks he will find them in school where he "shall explore the exactitude of the Latin language, and step firmly upon the well-laid sentences, and pronounce the explicit, the sonorous hexameters of Virgil; of Lucretius; and chant with a passion that is never obscure or formless" (31-32). In his search for "exactitude," Neville will repeatedly attempt to eradicate the "obscure or formless." Extreme precision would provide him with a center by which he could orient himself. But sentences, no matter how "well-laid," can never completely exclude the "obscure or formless." So Neville repeats his chant, his desire, in the form of devotion to the beloved Percival who "cannot read" (48).