The Waves

The subtractive test passes at the level of design and strains at the level of the paragraph. Remove the interludes and the soliloquies lose their measure of time: the sun’s one day is what makes six lives one span. Remove Percival and the six have no centre to circle and no death to fail to understand. Remove Bernard’s summing up and the book never turns from many voices to the one who tried to hold them. Each of the six is required, defined against the others: Louis’s accent against Neville’s ease, Rhoda’s facelessness against Jinny’s body, Susan’s earth against them all. What holds the axis down is density within the parts. The soliloquies restate their images, Louis’s chained beast, Rhoda’s puddle, Jinny’s dancing body, more often than each section needs, and the sixth and seventh sections circle without advancing as sharply as the first five. A tenth of the book could go without loss.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a self is not a thing but a making, continually remade in the presence of others, so that friends compose one another and a person exists partly in what others hold of them. Bernard says it of himself, “I am made and remade continually”, and the book shows it in Rhoda, who without others has no face, and at Hampton Court, where the six feel themselves for a moment one flower of six lives. A second disclosure lies beside it, of the English educated class and its empire, carried by the silent hero who goes to India to put things right and dies falling from a horse. Held below 9.0 because much of the book’s force is the rendering of states of feeling rather than of claims, and because its social disclosure is inferred by readers more than built into its own course.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Elevation is the book’s normal register, and the risk is that height so constant flattens. It does not, because the interludes reset the scale each time and the soliloquies rise from small particulars: the sponge squeezed over Bernard in the bath, the boot boy, the lady writing at Elvedon while the gardeners sweep. The summits are many. The opening interlude, “The sun had not yet risen.”, with the sea wrinkled like a cloth. Neville’s and Bernard’s answers to Percival’s death. Rhoda’s last descent toward the sea. And the close of the summing up: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”, answered only by the waves. Held a step from the top because the soliloquies keep one pitch through the middle sections, and some heights there sound like the ones before them.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Myth built, not evoked, and built into the structure. The sun’s one day over the sea is the course of the six lives, from dawn in the nursery to dark at Bernard’s last speech, and the reader is made to read every section against its hour. The waves are the book’s figure of single lives rising out of one sea and falling back into it, and the last line seals the figure. Percival is a built archetype: the hero with a grail knight’s name, silent and adored, sent to the edge of empire, killed by an accident and remembered as a god by those who stay. Bernard’s charge against Death is the knight’s ride turned to an old man in a restaurant. Held below 9.0 because Percival’s myth is ironised as much as built, and the frame can feel laid over the soliloquies rather than grown from them; interlude and speech do not always touch.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance was the novel of social life, which Woolf had already bent in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse through free indirect consciousness. Here she broke with it. No narrator, no scene in the ordinary sense, no dialogue; characters known only through formal soliloquies in one idiom that none of them would actually speak, framed by prose poems with no people in them. The stake was real: she had a following won by To the Lighthouse and by Orlando, her best seller, and she put it on a book she feared would go unread. Held off the very top because the stream of consciousness and the lyric novel were already in the air, in Joyce, in Dorothy Richardson and in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) with its rotating monologues. Neither Joyce nor Faulkner gave up plot, scene and individual idiom together; this book did, and it is the most extreme term of a movement rather than alone in it.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes, which is the book’s whole claim. Narrated, the six would be six separate people seen from outside. Given as soliloquies in one shared idiom, they are six ways of being one consciousness, and the reader cannot tell where the common voice ends and the person begins. That is what the book knows. The interludes, impersonal and timed by the sun, give what the soliloquies cannot: a world without a self, which the selves pass through. The last section turns the form on itself. Bernard, the maker of phrases, tries to make one story of the six and admits he has no phrase for it, and the form at that moment becomes the failure it describes: one voice where there had been six. Held a tenth below the top only because the regular alternation, kept across nine sections, becomes at points a frame more than an instrument.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: ninety-five years of reading have not exhausted it. The criticism runs from early readings of its form as poetry, through J. W. Graham’s transcription of the two holograph drafts (1976), to readings of it as a critique of empire and class, and as a study of the self, of mourning, of queer desire in Neville, of the body in Jinny and Susan. Its questions stay open. Are the six one person, as Bernard comes to suspect? Is his summing up the book’s verdict or its last illusion? Is Percival mourned or exposed? Held below 9.0 because its rereadings are fewer and narrower than those of To the Lighthouse, and its depth lies more in form than in event.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The field is the English novel of the twentieth century and, through it, modernist prose fiction in Europe and America. The intrinsic force is high: the book proves that a novel can be built from soliloquy and lyric interlude alone and still hold six lives and their time, a reorganisation of what the form allows. What holds it below the top is the distance between that force and its descent. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book became the type of the poetic novel and of the polyphonic novel of voices, it stands behind later books that lay many interior voices side by side, and it is taught as the extreme term of English modernism; but its direct line of heirs is thin beside Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses, and later novelists more often admired it than built on it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is weighed over ninety-five years. Form: the text is whole and stable, in print without a break since 1931 and carried in the Hogarth uniform edition, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: read and taught throughout, and translated widely. It has outlived its conditions: the public school, the Raj and the London of the 1920s are history, and the book is read for what passed through them. Its presence reaches past the page, in Katie Mitchell’s staging Waves at the National Theatre (2006) and in the third part of Wayne McGregor’s ballet Woolf Works (2015), to Max Richter’s score. Held below the widest presence because it is read less than Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and more within the academy than outside it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. Command of the medium is complete, and it bears the load. The six share one idiom and are still told apart, by their recurring images, Louis’s chained beast stamping on the shore, Rhoda’s petals sailing in a basin, Susan’s fields, Jinny’s dance, Neville’s precision, Bernard’s phrases, and by the shapes of their sentences. The interludes are among the most exacting prose in English: each advances the sun, the light on the waves, the birds and the objects in the house by exact degrees, so that the reader feels the hour without being told it. The opening speeches are one designed movement, each child seeing one thing: “I see a ring,” said Bernard. The summing up sustains a single voice across the whole last section without slack. Charged a step from the top for the uniform pitch, which at times muffles the differences it means to keep, and for stretches in the middle where the images repeat more than they deepen.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: an interlude with no human in it, the sun on the waves at noon, and the close, a tired old man in a restaurant talking to a stranger about his life. One law governs both: the single wave rising out of the sea, breaking and drawn back, as the self rises out of the common life and falls back into it, and the day turning toward dark. The range held under that law is wide: childhood sensation, a schoolboy’s love, sex, grief, empire, work in an office, marriage and a farm, suicide and old age, all in one idiom. Held below the top because the sameness of voice that makes the law also narrows what the book can hold: no speech but this one is heard, and the servants and the boot boy are seen only from outside. Narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Held, though less than listed. Consciousness is the ground, given six ways. The family stands at the edge: Susan’s farm and children, Louis’s father, a banker in Brisbane. Labour, in Louis’s office and his shipping, and in Susan’s land. The state and history: the public school, the empire, India, and the passage of an era through a generation that came of age on either side of the war, felt without being named. The natural order, the sea, the sun, the birds and the seasons on Susan’s farm, is given in the interludes with an exactness that makes it an order of the book in its own right. The sacred is present as absence: no god, only the six against death. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the vantage: the social and political orders are held through six private minds and never shown as agents, and the war that divides their generation is not in the book.

Score: 8.3 / 10