Initial bearings

An analysis of The Waves must begin with an acknowledgement of the difficulties that stand in the way of our initial approach to the work, difficulties of a rather peculiar kind. A comparison with James Joyce, an author with whom Virginia Woolf is often linked, may be helpful here. In its formal experimentation, its implied attack on conventional aspects of the novel, The Waves is analogous to Finnegans Wake – though there is no evidence that she read the ‘Work in Progress’, as it was called at the time, or that the acute consciousness of Joyce which stimulated her earlier efforts extended to this work. The comparison is revealing, however. Like the Wake, The Waves deliberately strives for the palm of innovation so assiduously courted by modernist art; and, like it, Woolf's book has inspired a debate about whether or not it can be called a novel. There is the further similarity in that, while agreeing that The Waves represents her highest aesthetic endeavour, few readers are willing to claim it as her most satisfying effort; there remains something unsettling in the dazzling display of technique, something which, as in the case of Joyce's final work, renders the book overly enigmatic and elusive. Both fictions might thus be said to illustrate another great modernist desire, in the words of Wallace Stevens to ‘resist the intelligence, almost successfully’ – and in both cases that success has been too close for comfort. Considered opinion continues to plump for Ulysses as Joyce's masterpiece, just as Virginia Woolf's common reader prefers her earlier, more accessible novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.