The Search for an Imperceptible “Something”
In her diary entry for Saturday, February 27, 1926, Virginia Woolf ponders the “restless searcher” that exists within her, and she goes on to state, “I have a great and astonishing sense of something there” (Diary 86). The exact nature or form of that “something,” however, eludes definition for Woolf, existing more as an amorphous feeling or intuition resulting from an influx of perceptions. This sense of something more similarly dominates Woolf’s novel—or as she deemed it, “play-poem,” The Waves. Straddling the abyss between perception and articulation, The Waves swells with the interior soliloquies of six characters, three men and three women. Given that The Waves conveys the consciousness, both individual and collective, of its characters, the text can be viewed through a phenomenological lens.
Perception as the Stimulus for Language in The Waves
Like phenomenology, which “studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view,” Woolf’s text draws upon an interior landscape (Smith). It is perception, the attempt to articulate perception, and the ever-shifting nature of what and how we perceive that lures The Waves forward. According to one definition, perception is “a single unified awareness derived from sensory processes while a stimulus is present” (“Perception”). However, in The Waves, Woolf strives against singularity, instead seeing perception as a nexus of possibilities. Perception is neither “single” nor “unified” due to the endless ways of experiencing the moment and the infinite possibilities of assigning meaning to that moment through language.
In The Waves, the ominous cloud persistently hanging overhead is the question of how to articulate perceptions and, through this articulation, come to a clearer understanding of the self. Language’s paradoxical nature is explored as the six intricately linked but painfully disparate voices demonstrate how objectivity never fully surrenders its relation to subjectivity; as the self struggles to formulate a concrete understanding of existence through language, it is not a singular identity which surfaces, but a multifaceted self capable of innumerable transformations.
Language’s Enduring—Though often Latent- Possibilities
The Waves confronts language’s shortcomings, recognizing that the infinite permutations of words and phrases inevitably fall short “of finding some perfect phrase that fits this very moment exactly” (Waves 69). Despite this ineptitude, however, language still prevails as fecund, full of possibilities, and capable of illuminating experience. Bernard, the character who struggles most painfully with language’s contradictory nature, recognizes at the end of the text how “in me too the wave rises. It swells,” and ultimately, it is the fluidity of experience and the ever-transforming condition of being—subject to both perception and its many forms of articulation- that endures (Waves 297).
Sources:
Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1975.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. London: Harcourt, Inc. 1931.
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