Donations

09 January, 2015

Woolf’s 'The Waves'; Modernism, Realism and Post-Structuralism

Discuss the ways in which Modernism, Realism and Post-Structuralism have shaped the form of the novel, in reference to Woolf’s The Waves (1931).
                
                                 
Through the course of this essay I will look at Woolf as a modernist writer and how she uses the Waves (1931) to rebel against and address issues in the design of realist novel, this primarily being that they are unrealistic to life, therefore unrealistic to the novel. However, this novels lack of realism, in the conventional sense, should not question its place with in the form of the novel, even though critics such as Watt (1968) would argue that realism is one of the defining features of the novel form. Woolf appears to be employing post-structuralist ideas within the text in order to address her problems within the standard, realist novel. I will be arguing that Woolf’s novel is with the product of the experimental idea of trying to form life into an accurate narrative, which was initiated by the post-structuralist arguing that language, therefore the novel, is a representation of life.

The Waves (1931), as a modernist novel, pushes the boundaries of the standard novel form. In the Waves ‘Introduction’, Parsons (2000) writes how this is supported in the way that this text is read differently to the conventional narrative, its arrangement being much closer to the medium of music, writing to a rhythm not a plot; it is due to this key factor that this novels true literary form is often questioned.  This novel was labored over much more than Woolf’s previous novels in which two full drafts were made, reflecting Woolf’s ‘ever-increasing concern with the inflexibility of language and the need to accomplish a greater elasticity of expression with the novel form’ (Parson, 2000, p.iv). This novel, through its conception to its creation, was an experimental text, which Woolf feared would be incoherent, due to its contrast to the standard novel, to the majority of readers. Keep, McLaughlin and Parmar writes;
In literature, the movement [modernism] is associated with the works of Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, [etc.] in their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices. […] Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning […] the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form.                                                                        (Keep, McLaughlin & Parmar, 1993)
            With this in mind, this texts form is clearly a modernist attempt of addressing the function of realism within the novel. In this novel, Woolf is questioning the fundamental role that realism has within the novel, seeing it as a contradiction. She is viewing the structural techniques used within these realist texts to be an unrealistic processing of the written word and of human experience. Indeed, through the use of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique in the Waves (1931) she is endeavoring to re-create the true realism of the mind. However, the result is that the Waves (1931) is a novel that is rather unstable in form, as it struggles to fit within any single form of literary text; with Woolf often referring to it as a ‘Play-poem’, that address the unconscious aspects of being, rather than a novel. However, there are many aspects of the text that place it within the form of the novel, such as its use of ‘dialogism’ (many voices within the text, rather than one singular voice of the author) that helps to create reliability which is lost though the lack of realism in the text, which build upon the novels essential goal of exploring the reality of selfhood and life.

In the novels, interludes are used at the beginning of each of the nine parts, setting the scene of the time of day and the stage in the lives of the six characters, acting as waves that push the flow of the narrative. The interludes provide boundaries that help to shape the text, which can appear to be a collection of soliloquies or monologues through its use of its characters dialogue. Parsons writes that ‘the metaphor of the waves provides the formal structure for the presentation of these lives’ (Parsons, 2000, The Waves ‘Introduction’, p.vi), aiding the suggestion that these interludes are to help engage the reader with the text by Woolf framing her experimental writing within small sections of more standard and realistic writing in order to achieve clarity and foot hold for the reader that it searching for plot. Yet, these interludes can interfere upon the narrative and its rhythm, thus pointing out the flaws of realism within texts. Undeniably, the interludes create a contradicting duality towards realism in the novel. Watt writes that realism;
Is the distinctive narrative mode of the novel. [It is] the sum of literary techniques whereby the novel’s imitation of human life follows philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth. The novel’s mode of imitating reality may therefore be equally well summarized in terms of the procedures of another group of specialists in epistemology: the jury in a court of law. Their expectations and those of the novel reader coincide in many ways: both want to know all the particulars of a given case.’
(Watt, 1968, the Rise of the Novel, Chapter I).

In this sense the Waves (1931) largely challenges realism place within the novel, as it contests this direct relationship between author, content and reader (which links to my point about Kristeva’s, 1986,  three textual dimensions, p. 5). This novel never fully addresses ‘truth’ as it favors observations of the ‘truth’ which, paradoxically, is more realistic to life. Furthermore, its use of ‘stream of consciousness’ this text is insistent on creating a hyper-reality that is as close to first hand human perception as is possible within the written word. In this respect, Woolf’s text is questioning how a realist novel could be labeled as realistic as the language and form of realist text are not realistic in the logic of the human mind and experience. Yet her text is not coherent within the logic of the standard novel form.
Indeed, Woolf is using her novel to explore the essence of realism of self and what it is to be an individual. Moreover, she is using this form to highlight contradictions found in life and selfhood by putting a ‘true’ realism into the form of the novel. We can see this in her use of characters;
In the Waves she considered the six monologists as facets of one, larger complex identity, writing to G.L Dickinson that. ‘I did mean that in some way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one’, and continuing, ‘I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia…’
(Parsons, 2000, The Waves ‘Introduction’, p.x)

By Woolf using six characters in her novel, she relates to the ways in which selfhood is divided. In the text Woolf intentions are shown in the character of Barnard who affirms that; ‘I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am – Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis: or how I distinguish my life from theirs’ (Woolf, the Waves, 1931, p.156). This split of character/personality is in order to follow the many paths that an individual could journey, a task that realistically can not happen, hence why Woolf may have been inclined to create an anti-realism text.
Moreover, as a result of this, Woolf is addressing the centrifugal forces (unbalanced events of life that are beyond control) in life and the novel that pull away from selfhood. Structuralists believe that the novel was void of centrifugal forces, however Bakhtin (1975) wrote otherwise, saying that the novel was much more complex and was under constant shaping by theses centrifugal forces due to the novel being the literary expression of life (The Dialogic Imagination, 1975, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p.271). With this in mind, we can see how a modernist writer would utilize this theory that challenged the form of the novel in their own writing, in order to further the exploration and experimentation with the novels form in order to further explore their topic, life.
The Waves (1931) relates heavily to Kristeva’s (1986) theories of ‘dialogism’ (the theory that all novels are a multitude of voices) which she constructed from the work of Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination 1975, ‘Discourse in the Novel’). Before the work of Bakhtin (1975), structuralism was the common method of interpreting a novel. Structuralism is a method towards interpreting the novel as a methodical, narrow structure which has a set path through which authors explore life through their texts. They viewed and critiqued the novel with fundamental ideas that the novel was monologic (a single voice, i.e. the authors). As Bakhtin (1975) was a Russian writer, his ideas did not reach the west until Kristeva (1986) wrote and elaborated upon them, arguing that the novel was in fact dialogic (many voices) due to her idea that even the singular word was dialogic (see below, three textual dimensions). Modernists, such as Woolf, explicitly illustrate in their text how this ‘dialogism’ is present through their use of experimental forms. As this text uses the voices of six personas to create a wave of consciousness, wherein the voice is constantly changing through the dialogue and prospective of the characters, Woolf is creating an apparent ‘dialogism’. All characters represent different life directions and backgrounds which influences the readers’ expectations of the character. This relates to Bakhtin’s (1975, p. 271) argument that the language of the novel, as with the language of life, is shaped by the heteroglot national language (colloquial speech, dialects etc.), rather than the ideological and monologic official language. However by the Waves (1931) being rather difficult for the average reader due to its form, Woolf somewhat questions the use of a heteroglot national language, as her book, like the official language, alienates lower classes. But by creating characters that represent very different roles and ambitions in life we can see that Woolf is attempting to represent the national heteroglot and the diversity of language.
Woolf may be exploring the three dimensions of textual space that Kristeva Word, Dialogue and Novel (1986) addresses.  In the quotation, Kristeva writes that the “three dimensions [of language ] are writing subject, addressee, and exterior texts” (Kristeva, 1986, p.36), meaning that the word and therefore the novel is a product of word definition, which is unstable due to the perceptions of the writer, literal definition and reader. We can see that Woolf is exploring this in her work by having each character deal with similar and overlapping ideas/themes. Indeed in a sense, all six characters represent an exaggerated example of how in all novels there are an overlapping of ideas and themes that is deeper than plot.

The Waves (1931) is not a standard example of Novel, however it is a crucial example of how the novel is shaped and re-shaped over time, representing the era of the modernists and the need to allow different formats and techniques within the novel form. It is a model of how this form shouldn’t rely upon ridged, structuralist rules over language and structure, as the novel is a written representation of life and selfhood, which I believe is the main effect that the form of the Waves (1931) creates for the reader. It is through experimentation that the novel should both explore and evade from the techniques found in realism novels,  in order to evolve into a written ‘truth’ that is as close to life as a work of literacy can become.



Bakhtin, M (1975). The Dialogic Imagination. Texas; University of Texas Press.
Blackburn, S. (2008) Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, second edition revised. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keep, C. McLaughlin, T. Parmar, R. (1993). Modernism and the Modern Novel. Accessed [Internet] < http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.html> Last accessed; 10th May 2013.
Kristeva, J (1986). Word, Dialogue and Novel. New York; Columbia University Press.
Parsons, D (2000). The Waves ‘Introduction’. Wordsworth Classics, Hertfordshire.
Woolf, V (1931). The Waves. London; Hogarth.

Watt, I (1968). the Rise of the Novel. Chatto and Windus Press, London. ‘Realism and the novel form, Chapter I, p.9.



Thank you for reading. Please show your support by clicking like, commenting and following.

© Kate Ruston and Happy Little Narwhal 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kate Ruston or Happy Little Narwhal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.


Like us on Facebook

My e-Books:

The Blind Kings Sons 

Harry Potter and the Gothic Genre 

No comments:

Post a Comment