GHOST ANIMAL

"Yes, but The Moths?" Woolf wrote in her diary in November of 1928, reflecting upon an early draft of what was to become The Waves. "That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem" (D 3: 7 November 1928). Woolf's thought on her own work prefigures much of the anxiety couched between the fragmented and disjunct narratives in the published version of The Waves, a novel made up of nine interstitial "impersonal" narratives describing the course of a day by the sea and six interweaving "soliloquies." The novel and the characters imagined within it constantly engage in the search for the "eye" but also for the "I," a pun Woolf suggests in her description of the early drafts of the novel. Not only should the novel be ungrounded, existing in the mind of the subject rather than the object ("abstract") but also wholly composed of its own logic ("mystical"). Further, the book is to be "eyeless," an evocative suggestion not only of a novel blind to the outside world, incapable of perception outside of itself, but also a novel from which the "I" as the guiding author-figure responsible for the construction and presentation of the novel and as the necessary self-consciousness of character , is absent. The Waves is, among many things, a book (a novel, a playpoem) concerned with and entirely conscious of its own construction, as an artifact or work created by a guiding force, by the "I" of the author-figure (which is absent). On a purely narrative level, the novel centers around six characters who mourn the death of their friend Percival, alternatively telling their own stories and elegizing their fallen friend in quoted soliloquies. These soliloquies are set against impersonal italicized narrative describing, in rich and metaphoric detail, the course of the sun throughout a day against a backdrop of the sea. Structurally, the novel attempts to problematize and work through the anxieties inherent in the symbolic connection between the two modes. The interstitial narratives suggest an idea of something eternally recurring: the sun will rise, peak, set, and rise again; yet punctuating this metaphoric eternity is the attempt to narrative (or narrativize) a life-story through the logic of narrative (and thus the logic of mortality in which a thing has necessarily a beginning and thus an end; something finite). These disjunct and disjointed narrative moods (pure space and pure character) suggest an absence that the novel is constantly in the process of attempting to reclaim: that of the author, figured in the novel as the silent, brooding Percival. Percival's presence (or absence), however, is a kind of red herring, something that only serves to signal to something else deliberately absented by Woolf. Elegizing Percival, within the novel, is merely an indication of the novel's attempt to reclaim a loss. Percival's death orients the novel, symbolically echoing the way the figure of the author constructs and organizes a narrative. This figure of authority, however, is absent, leaving the characters themselves incapable of being represented but through their own quoted voices. The Waves, then, uses elegiac conventions to dramatize the struggle of the subject to regain the "I" in the absence of the author.





also i cannot stop listening to the pixies.

xo
m