Levin the waves 1983 Flashcards
Virginia Woolf is reported to have said that her
books were conceived as music before she wrote them
the novel consists of a series of monologues
of six friends, occurring at various times in their lives
in the ninth section, on elf the six, Bernard seeks to weave their various
experiences and personalities into a final unity
in the diary, suggests she was thinking about musical structure mainly as a thematic device
and not as a ‘musical’ rendering if sensuous experience
the diary shows that her interest in Beethoven
was long standing. in 1921, for example, she attended performances of the quartets in the courseBeethoven festival in London
June 18 1927, in which Woolf records that she works on The Waves listening to Beethoven
sonatas on the phonogram
Sullivan
she clearly disliked him but probably respected him as a writer
Sullivans book contains statements that suggests major
themes of The Waves
Sullivan’s characterisation of the opus 130 fugue as the ‘reconciliation of freedom
and necessity or of session and submission’ suggests the major theme of the final section, our ‘freedom’ to experience the ‘eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again’
assertion and submission are key ideas in the novel, particularly in Bernards assertion of the power of life:
“against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding O Death’
and they for Sullivan essential to understanding the late quartet
[Sullivan] these terms, he continues, “suggest the state of consciousness that inform fugue, a state in which apparently opposing elements of life are seen as necessary
and no longer in opposition’
[Sullivan] his characterisation of opus 131 stresses its
‘mystical vision’ a reality where ‘problems do not exist’
a reality where all “discords” are resolved.
“in these quartets the movements radiate, as it were, from central experience. they do not represent stages in a journey, each stage being dependent and existing in its own right
they represent separate experiences, but the meaning they take on in the quartet is derived from their relation to a dominating, central experience’
in this final meditation that
Bernard identifies himself with Beethoven, whose picture he buys in a silver frame
‘not that I love music, but because the whole of life, its masters, its adventurers then appeared in long ranks
of magnificent human beings behind me; and I was inheritor; I the continuer; I, the person miraculously appointed to carry it on’
whether literary style or representation of experience can be musical or ‘fugal’
in any exact meaning of these words remains a serious question for criticism and it was a question for Virginia woolf
voices in the novel cannot be heard simultaneously
though images and phrases can pass from one monologue to another
To quote Arnold Schoenberg,
‘the unity of musical space demands an absolute and unitary perception’
‘the thing is to keep them running homogeneously in & out,
in the rhythm of the waves’ Woolf writes in another diary entry
” how to end, save by tremendous discussion, in which every life shall
have its voice- a mosaic […] I do not know’ VW diary
The style of the waves is musical at least in the human and
natural rhythms it connects, as in Bernards insight at the end
[Bernard] “nothing neat nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. none of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve ending to nerve in our
breast making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases’
the implication is that the musical experience is finally one of unresolved
dissonances
we have connection without
consonance or resolution
in fugal style a single theme generates motifs heard throughout
in different voices entering the fugue at the different moment and ending in perfect accord
in the Waves we are given multiple voices, personalities, attitudes and momentary consonance in Bernard’s
final affirmation, but a single theme is never really ‘heard’ throughout
it exists instead as an idea- the tension between freedom and necessity,
assertion and submission noted earlier, and emerging in the final pages
given this characteristic, a better description of the musical style of the novel is
‘pantonal’- in which tonalities or six characters each becomes the thematic centre at the moment of expression but are absorbed into a whole which the novel discloses gradually
considered in this way, each character represents a phenomenal self that has a
distinctive ‘tonality’ and yet grows in experience
thus Neville is precise, Susan Jealous, Rhoda terrified, Jinny loving, Luis lonely, Bernard curious: these are their qualities in childhood. Bernard
restates these qualities in light of how they lived
but the phenomenal self is not only the self
alone, each responds in this distinctive way to experience; together they move into potential communion
‘we melt into each other with
phrases. we are edged with mist. we make unsubstantial territory’
Percival is sometimes apprehended through
sounds of various kinds
Rhoda seeks the meaning of Percival’s death in the music of a quartet which states
‘what is inchoate” by giving feelings a structure
music is, like the sea, the single experience (the fin, the wave) seen in distant water, general experience
sustaining the individual, the patterns that define single sounds and tonalities, the solvent of single moments and experiences
each character finds rapture in each separate perception of death, Bernard states at the end, and he finds his own momentary
unity in merging their awareness in his own- unlike Rhoda who seeks a unifying pattern that obliterates personal distinctions and kills herself to find it
“all had their rapture” he said
“their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead”
there is then, a double awareness throughout the novel- of unity of feeling,
“the swelling and splendid moment created by us from Percival”
and of individual unhappiness
and incompleteness
the whole novel suggests that only reconciliation with nature- in its aspect of change and death
can bring resolution
bernard choses to accept death as necessary unification, but paradoxically he also desires
to confront it, like Percival “unvanquished and unyielding”
but as we have seen it is spurious unity
an idea merely
in the movement of these fragmented personalities toward everything
different from themselves is to be discovered the ‘it’ that Woolf refers to in her diary: the ‘astonishing sense of something there,’ ‘the sense of my own strangeness, walking the earth”- indefinable yet undiscoverable in consciousness, in the process of living
the form of The Waves is the form of evolving consciousness out of silence, each character increasing in self awareness of themselves and one another
As Bernards final words on death show, experience is paradoxical. Separation from our denial of experience is extinction, a merging into clear sky, blue water
as objects of perception become extinct, like the waves
they simultaneously become indistinct, then they are lost. the edges of experience blur and feelings change. consciousness is all that can be maintained
the essential idea is that of music itself:
the impulsion toward unity achieved, the music resolving into silence and beginning again,
Sullivan’s “apparently opposing elements of life… seen as necessary and no longer in opposition”
yet as we have noted that that unity is achieved in the consciousness of Bernard only
the unity of experience to which each character contributes is finally the sum of their
perceptions and experiences, in Bernards mind, never merging or bleeding
experience and feeling are to be understood rather as process, the musical
equivalent of which is better described as ‘pantonal’ than fugal
in pantonal music as Schoenberg formulated in the 1920s and produced it,
continuous variation replaces thematic repetition, essential to fugal style
it is the unbroken variation that gives the impression of ongoing process.
more significantly, the thematic structure in pantonal music is identical with this variation
we do not, in other words, hear a theme foreground as in tonal music
even in fugue
the experience is one of continuous variation
from the basic set but also one of delayed completion
this postponement contributes also to the
sense of ongoing experience or process
it creates continual experience, each moment having
the same value as any other
Bernard’s final mediation, with its acceptance of death and change and assertion also of the power of living is the fullest approach to unity
but is at the end only an approach- a challenge to death itself
Woolf was moving in a new direction of musical style
the movement of awareness represented in each section for each character is, in musical terms, a discrete tonal centre, but without a fixed “background”
the novel moves overall through continuous variation, not through a repetition of experiences and perceptions
towards a final “resolution of forces”- without finally achieving it in actual experience
the waves is to maintain this sense of ongoing experience
through a structure that seems to never end
