5 - The novel and The Waves

Summary

Our detailed examination of The Waves has uncovered many of the book's salient features – in particular its formal, abstracting drive to move away from novelistic conventions, its structural division between the sensitive and insensitive, human awareness and ‘what we are not’, and its thematic tension between stasis and process, the meaningful ‘moment’ and ‘life itself going on’. With a grasp of these essentials, we can now refine some of the points raised in the analysis and consider some interesting and unusual perspectives suggested by the work, in particular its complex and ambiguous relation to ‘the novel’.

The plot of narrative

It is often said that The Waves has no plot in the ordinary novelistic sense. This observation is linked with the fact that few of Woolf's novels, at least her modernist or experimental works, have much in the way of a ‘story’. An ageing Westminster hostess plans and throws a party, a group of summer residents gather in a house by the sea, a village pageant is put on one summer afternoon – such is the unadventurous basis of some of her most famous works. Thus Elizabeth Hardwick's claim that for all their formal extravagance Woolf's novels ‘aren't interesting’, a view echoed by those critics who charge that ‘nothing happens’ in a Woolf novel. They mean of course that any sense of action or event in the work is trivial compared with the emphasis which is thrown on the internal, mental sphere; there is no ‘story’ in the usual sense since all the weight has been placed on the ‘luminous halo’ of consciousness.