“An Unfinished Phrase”: Philosophy of life and language in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, is an expression and exploration of an authorial and philosophical crisis. The crisis is authorial, in that Woolf expresses deep uncertainty about the relation of the act and product of writing to life, and the crisis is philosophical, in that Woolf grapples with problems that are epistemological, ontological, aesthetic, and linguistic. Woolf’s authorial and philosophical crisis can be understood as part of the broader crisis of modernity. I argue that the crisis of modernity can be read as a crisis of “imaginaries,” and that the project of Woolf and the Modernists was to imaginatively develop new vocabularies with which to express, understand, and make, modern life. I suggest that the character Bernard pursues the central imaginative project of The Waves – to find the set of “perfect” phrases with which to tell the “true” story of life. I examine his attempts to find a semantically meaningful vocabulary by moving away from prose towards poetry. Correspondingly, I examine Bernard’s dissatisfactions with “telling” life through narratives, and consider whether the characters’ lives are better understood as episodes, or through Woolf’s profound “moments of being.” I explore the characters’ attempts to form a fulfilling vocabulary shared amongst a narrowing circle – as friends, as a couple, or as individuals. I also discuss the important role of silence in The Waves. I conclude by analysing Bernard’s final soliloquy, which closes the novel. I argue that his soliloquy presents a complex and philosophically compelling vision of life as vacillation, as evidenced by the “wave” motif, which runs through The Waves.