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

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Lisa Marie Lucenti

In dialogue with himself almost all of the time, Bernard fabricates a profusion of identities: "I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am this, that and the other.... I am more selves than Neville thinks" (89). When he quotes his own biographer, he refers to himself as not just "I" but as "you" and "he," objectifying and multiplying himself at once (76-78). He resents the way in which Neville can only fashion him through a reduction, confining him to a narrow singularity: "To be contracted by another person into a single being--how strange" (89). Yet this proliferation of selves is categorically different from the joyful performativity imagined, for example, in Orlando. Orlando seems able to slide between genders, centuries, and literary styles without relying on some transcendent essence that would then negate this performative play. Bernard, in contrast, does believe in a principal ego: "Underneath, and, at the moment when I am most disparate, I am also integrated" (77). The roles he assumes--as Byron, for example, or even as his own biographer--are self-conscious, deliberate, and stylized and they never succumb to the outrageous forces which dominate the subjective shifts of Orlando. Bernard never escapes his Cartesian faith in the self-governing cogito. His "semblances" and "familiars" are studied acts designed to serve a primary self-possession which encompasses and exceeds them (89). Bernard takes pleasure not in diffuse and uncontainable multiplicity, but in a highly regulated miming of it. Ultimately, however, he must admit that, "When I say to myself, `Bernard,' who comes? ... Myself, merely" (81), "Myself" is always "merely"--slightly less grand than one could have hoped, not quite as intentional as one had imagined.

Facing this "merely" again and again, Bernard becomes increasingly disillusioned with language and narrative. While he is excited by the "uncertainty . . . possibility . . . [and] speculation" of language, he also doubts that he is getting the proper return on his investments or speculations--language is not delivering up the true "I" (117). What Bernard ultimately comes to question is the value of the qualifier, "true": "But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then another I do not cling to life" (218). Bernard's phrases are similar to Neville's beloved "you"--like clothing, they can be worn by almost anyone. Unable to get out of this endlessly illogical substitution, who could possibly extricate one true story, one true "I" from among the rest? Woolf is quick to respond: "Certainly, not I."

This lack of certitude is echoed in Bernard's self-queries: "what am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word?" (118). Neither simple inscription nor the power of the voice can promise a timed delivery--the word is always just on the edge of our fingertips. Each language act is, then, essentially a speculation--a risk.(14) Moreover, the risk is doubled and tripled by the inherent capacity of language to riddle and deceive: it is "made up of ... evasions and old lies" and is a "meretricious" thing (133). How can one possibly find one's self in the span of this confusion? Bernard gives up the chase and throws his catalogued phrases away. His disillusionment comes out of his increased awareness that language possesses endless funds, a balance which he could never completely account for, let alone equal: "How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground!" (238). Like a cat, language never loses its footing, its balance. Any gap can be filled, any slack taken up, if only for a moment. The ability of language to always land on its feet is an irredeemable threat to the speaker or writer who becomes, in his or her individuality, superfluous. Another "I" can step in at any time. Bernard's response to his own inconsequence is to wish for "some little language such as lovers use," a transparent language that would preserve the actor as if in amber (238). But he is left, finally, where he began; confronting the "insubstantial territory" of identity in language. His words just get in the way: "But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red--even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through" (287). Like Neville and Rhoda, Bernard believes that language should unveil its hidden core, transforming the obscure into the clear, the absurd into the sublime. But "the world seen without a self"--that transparent world of sublimity--is certainly only absurd after all."