Reading group: The Waves by Virginia Woolf

This was the one book by Virginia Woolf that Margeret, who loved her work, had not read. Introducing it to the group, she joked that having now read it, she wondered what she had done in suggesting it, and everyone else - including former member Mark on a return visit - immediately said yes, they had found it extremely difficult to read. John had read only a few pages before giving up altogether and Mark hadn't read very much of the book at all. (It is recorded that on reading the newly completed manuscript, Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband, said that it was the best thing she had written, but that he doubted that many people would be able to read it.)

Famous as a key Modernist text, the whole book consists of a series of soliloquies by six people (apparently loosely based on members of the literary-artistic Bloomsbury Group to which Woolf belonged), made first when they are children, three girls and three boys playing in the garden of a boarding prep school by the sea, and then throughout their lives as they go their separate ways into late middle age, meeting up periodically. The sequential phases of these lives are prefaced by italicised descriptions of the phases of the sun from sunrise to sunset, light and shadow falling variously upon the garden and house in which the children first play. There is no plot apart from this progression: the major events of the characters' lives happen offstage; the substance of the book is their contemplations about themselves, each other and life, and indeed their own psyches, and the narrative development is the evolution of those psyches. The most significant offstage event, ie the most consequential for the group, is the death in India of the apparently charismatic Percival, a friend who was important to all six, and with whom the character Neville has always been  in love. The key theme is identity, and the difficulty for most of the characters of retaining a sense of a single identity. As Bernard says towards the end of the book:

I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am - Jimmy, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.

For this is not one life; nor do I always know that I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda...

Bernard (apparently loosely based on the novelist E M Forster) is the storyteller of the group, the 'phrase maker'. Here at the end of the book he tries to tell the story of his life to someone he has met by chance, but ends up pondering the difficulty of representing reality, the uncertainty of language, and indeed the uncertainty of reality itself:

But how to 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. How describe anything in articulate words again?

Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.

I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality here and now.

Doug said that there were beautiful sentences, but he couldn't get to grips with the book at all, and found it sentimental. Ann, a social historian, said that the one thing she liked about the book was the insight into the daily lives of that artistic upper-class set of people in the early twentieth century, but she said it as if in amelioration, and in fact she had failed to finish the book. Everyone agreed with her about this, but felt it was little consolation. The most critical, even damning, was Clare, who found the attitudes unforgivably snobbish, even prejudiced. She pointed to the moment when one of the male characters complains about the irritation, the disruption to his peace of mind, of the existence of the 'shop girls' in the street, and there are other less negative but certainly patronising references to the 'little shopkeepers'. I had very much the same reaction to this as did Clare. Margeret, who was staunchly defending the book against the rest of us, said, 'But the book was of its time!', an argument that has been used before in the group but can usually be demolished by reference to other, contemporary authors.

When the boys are at public school their soliloquies are objectionable in their (educated) developing sense of importance and social status, and the prose is very inflated. However, I pointed out that when the novel then moves on to the girls at their finishing school, the characters are more sympathetic and the prose less overblown, which contrast makes for criticism of patriarchy on the part of Woolf. In addition, although there is a certain contempt among the other characters for Louis, whose father is 'only' a banker, Woolf allows us, through Louis' soliloquies, to see the damaging effect on him. Percival, the person who has been so significant for all six of the characters, is a supreme example of the patriarchal male of Empire, admired by the boys when they are at school for his obvious militaristic and ruling future. We noted that there is no criticism of Percival, or of what he stands for, in any of the soliloquies; however, the author serves him an ironically ignominious death in the India he has been sent to help rule: he dies 'in the dirt' falling from his horse, rather than on any glorious battlefield as envisaged by the boys when they are young.

Margeret jumped on the difference in authorial treatment of the two sets of children/adults, and said, 'Yes, of course, Woolf was a feminist, she wrote A Room of One's Own!' Clare replied that it's very possible, even common, to hold radical views in one area (in this case sexual politics) and to have a blind spot in another area (in this case class prejudice). Some of the characters consciously struggle with their own prejudice, most notably Bernard with his novelistic interest in other people and things going on around him, but there is indeed an overall sense of other people as somehow threatening or contaminant to the sensitive souls of these six people. After Percival's death, as she walks along Oxford Street, Rhoda, the character closest to Woolf herself (and who commits suicide, prefiguring Woolf's own) is plunged into a sense of humanity as ugly and alien, a sense she embraces but which however reveals a certain prejudice:

...faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions [note that word 'scullions']; coarse, greedy, casual, looking in at shop-windows with pendent parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched by their dirty fingers. [Note the 'our', with its Us and Them implication.]

I said that I would always make a point of not judging upper-class characters in novels simply for being upper class, but this novel was solipsistic - in the characters' obsession with themselves and their own psyches - to an extent that only the privileged can afford to be, so that it seemed like an upper-class indulgence. Ann pointed out that (unlike Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway) this novel makes no reference to the First World War, which ought to have affected the characters' lives, and this increases the novel's solipsism. (In fact, the First World War was a great catalyst for the Modernist movement of which the experimental form of this novel is an example.)

A big complaint right from the beginning of our discussion was that for a long time - indeed for most of the novel - you could not tell the characters apart, as they all speak in the same voice. Everyone said that they'd had to keep looking back to remember which character was supposed to be speaking. Even when the characters are children they speak in the same adult voice - abstract, Latinate and metaphorical. (Prep-schoolboy Neville decides to make a 'survey of the purlieus of the house' and declares 'the ripple of my life was unavailing'.) John said that this was one reason he gave up on the book so soon, and he could see that the rest of the book was the same. Ann said that she thought the novel would be improved by being read aloud by actors - this would distinguish the voices; but as Clare said, I think rightly, that would completely belie the nature of the novel: the whole point, as Bernard spells out, is that the characters are 'fuzzy', their identities in question and blending one into the other.

Unlike Doug, I didn't find the novel 'sentimental', more overinflated in its prose, and I found some of the sentences tortuous rather than beautiful. There is a tendency to pile one metaphor on top of another, and for the metaphors to be over-literal or over-elaborate to the point of clumsiness or distraction from the situation:

The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep.

What exactly are the turbans meant to represent (the crests of the waves, I suppose, though it's a bit of a stretch), or the poisoned assegais, or, especially, the white sheep? This slippage from reality through and out of metaphor and into fanciful imagination and away from the original focus, seemed to me a little unhinged. John now commented that the early single-sentence soliloquies of the children had reminded him of nothing more than the patients he had observed as a psychologist, stressed professional men who sat around a table making things from cardboard boxes and speaking in the same kind of disjointed sentences without referring to each other. Ann then wondered if this whole novel was indeed an expression of Woolf's problems with mental health. Margeret said strongly that that hardly mattered, she liked the result. And it is certainly true that whatever mental state powered this book, it resulted in a strikingly original form and in striking insights into the existential problems of identity and reality. 

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here  

Reading group: Wildlife by Richard Ford

Some time ago we read Richard Ford's The Sportswriter and I was surprised to find it, along with most of our group, fairly tedious and even in some ways objectionable. My surprise stemmed from the fact that I had previously read Ford's Wildlife and had liked it very much, so much that it had inspired one of my short stories.*

Wildlife is the story of an autumn in Great Falls, Montana when sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson's life with his parents is turned upside down. Wildfires rage in the mountains around the town; Joe's father, a golf pro who has lost his job, decides on impulse and without apparent consultation with his wife, to go off and help fight the fires, and while he is gone Joe's mother falls in love with another man. The story is told by Joe himself, a first person retrospective narration.

This time around (many years after my first reading) I found myself altogether less satisfied with the book, though some in the group who were new to it - notably Margeret and Clare - had the same reaction as my earlier one. They loved the depiction of sixteen-year-old Joe's confusion about what was happening, which is indeed psychologically very real - largely due, I think, to Joe's authentic, somewhat demotic voice (which is what inspired me) (and which may indicate that the stuffy, sexist voice of The Sportswriter we all disliked was after all a similar, if dubiously successful, act of ventriloquism on the part of the author).

However, quite a lot of the discussion circled around interpretations of the characters. People asked: what exactly was Joe's father's motive in taking off for the hills and the fires? Towards the end he appears to indicate a midlife crisis, but was that all? What had been going on in the parents' marriage? And what exactly was Joe's mother's motivation in involving Joe in her affair, sometimes in what seems a bullying way, sometimes pathetically? And what did she see in her lover, Warren Miller, who seems an especially unattractive man? It was hard to get a grip on those things. Margeret and Clare said, Well, we can't know because Joe doesn't know, that's exactly the point: we are inside his confused head. The fact is, however, that people were left wanting to know. Clare pointed to the film of the book, which makes things clearer, but others countered that such interpolations by a scriptwriter and/or director would of course be necessary for a film, and the fact remains that they are interpolations of things absent from the book. 

I pointed out, to strong agreement from Anne and John, that, taking account of the overall structure of the novel, it's not exactly true that we are simply inside the teenage Joe's head. The book opens (and ends) with a much later, retrospective, adult viewpoint:

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom...

This sets one up to expect a more adult insight into the story and the characters - and maybe a more ironic or detached view of Joe's confusion - than is provided by the shift, as the story gets going properly, to his contemporary unknowing perspective.

At the end, the adult Joe states in a final sentence: 'God knows there is still much to it that I myself, their only son, cannot fully claim to understand.' It seems to me that this is an acceptable statement for a memoir, but not for a conventional fiction (which this is), where we require a certain insight and resolution of meaning or significance - unless the narrator is being ironised by the author, but that is not the case here: there's a close identification of narrator and author.

John commented that one result of this lack of authorial detachment is that we never see Joe from the outside or through the eyes of any of the other characters, so in fact it's quite hard to get a grip on him as a rounded character. He also seems strangely to have no friends, or much life beyond the hermetic setting of the family, though of course he was at school. Such elisions and omissions are more suitable to short stories, and John thought that this general lack of roundedness made the book an inflated short story rather than a novel. Wildlife is indeed a short book, and in fact Ford had previously written a short story, 'Optimists', about a similar situation also set in Great Falls and also featuring a family called Brinson.

Anne also pointed to what seems like a mismanagement of time. We get the impression that Joe's father is away at the fire for some time, indeed weeks, but after he returns we discover that he's only been away a day or so. We are also given the impression, through Joe's teenage perspective, that after the denouement, his mother goes away and leaves him with his father for a long time - the impression created is for years. It comes as a surprise when, as the prose moves back to the retrospective viewpoint, we are told that 'at the end of March, in 1961' - ie, only six months later - 'my mother came back from wherever she had been.'  It's perhaps acceptable, as Clare I think said, that the troubled boy should have experienced the period in this distorted way, but the shift from the contemporary teenage viewpoint back to the retrospective adult one, occurs, like the shift at the beginning, subtly, so subtly that this seemed like an inconsistency. But perhaps it is this subtlety that made Clare and Margeret declare that they had hardly noticed that narrative frame, and were simply happy to share Joe's teenage experience. 

* The story I wrote after first reading Wildlife is 'Holding Hands' which is included in my collection Balancing on the Edge of the World.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here