Letting The Waves Wash Over: The Rhythm of Non-being

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is a rhizome—a Gestalt project to the extreme. The novel is an exercise in simultaneity. The characters are both one and many through Woolf and the self-aware narrator. They direct the wormholes between people, descriptions, and feelings. Scholars, like Molly Hite, will point out that each character in The Waves is also one of Woolf’s close friends, family members, or idols. Louis might represent T. S. Eliot, Susan as Vanessa Bell, Perival as Thoby Stephen, et cetera. Yet, what makes this novel so delicately layered is how the characters are not just Woolf herself, not just representations of people in her life, but also manifestations of her own philosophical theories. Woolf’s philosophies are her friends and her friends are outlets for her philosophies. From The Waves’ dramatis personæ, one character sticks out the most: Rhoda. She is by far the most complex and mysterious out of the group. The rest of the cast is still important, but they lack as much dimensionality and err toward archetypes. When we examine Rhoda’s complexities, we understand them to be representations of  “non-being” or the banality of life in between important moments in our lives. By analyzing the character’s leitmotifs in phrase, tone, and rhythm, her manifestations of non-being become clear. After having experimented with being and non-being in novels like The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway, or in essays like On Being Ill, it is fitting to embody these ideas as characters in their own right. 

“Being” and “non-being” appear across Woolf’s work, but are explicitly defined in her 1939 essay “A Sketch of the Past.” These are terms she uses to describe her relationship between an ever-modernizing, more stimulating world and existing in her own body. According to Woolf, “moments of being” are the intense, sensually fruitful moments of life. They are what we remember most about a moment in our lives. It is generally what people write about and what Woolf believes makes her a writer; she describes these moments as “shocks” (“Sketch” 72). Most of what we read and watch is made up of only “important” events, or moments which contribute to the plot or are captivating to the reader. A story where we hear about every time a character eats, uses the restroom, or sits around is often considered boring. Often, they are implied, so we filter them out. Non-being is precisely what we filter out. It is the in-between moments, the fluff, or what Woolf calls “cotton wool.” Shocks reveal “some real thing behind appearances” and we see “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this” (72). We are united through bureaucracy, mundanity, and banality. A writer’s job, according to Woolf, is to juxtapose being and non-being. In addition, a significant distinction between being and non-being is how the former is considered more or less positive and the latter, negative. To better frame this within Woolf’s alleged history of bipolar disorder, these oscillations are like periods of mania and depression (Boeira 70). Cotton wool can be incredibly enlightening when we understand it as a way to see the invisible, but it is also representative of an evil of ennui. Ironically, there is a heaviness to cotton wool— despite how it is supposedly around us all the time. Where we slough off non-being, Woolf always returns to it. 

Rhoda is often epitomized as the “outcast” because of her affinity for moments of non-being. She prefers to remain in the background of the narrative and illuminate the character dynamics unfolding behind the scenes. Personally, I always have a vivid picture of characters, yet I struggle with Rhoda. Evidently, Rhoda proclaims she has no face (29; 88). In her description of Percival’s funeral, she tells us modernity has stripped us down to anonymous, platonic, and cubist “oblongs” buried in “squares” (The Waves 118). Like how modernism tried to distill mechanically perfect forms from the real world, Rhoda tries to see the functional meaning behind life’s dramaturgy: “—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” (118). There is no doubt Rhoda is looking to illuminate “some real thing behind appearances” of her own cotton wool (“Sketch” 72). Additionally, Percival is not given a voice, but we have an easier time imagining who he is as the stereotype of an overconfident, heroic colonial British soldier (The Waves 98). Rhoda describes the world more than she does herself. It is not that she does not want to be seen; she does not think she is valued, so why would the reader want to picture her? Archetypes and caricatures struggle to go beyond one-dimensionality; even if Percival had a voice, can’t we infer what the colonial hero-type’s perspectives on the world would be? The goal of an archetype is to reinforce preconceived notions and provide a comfortable narrative without challenging our worldview. As someone who persistently describes the overlooked, Rhoda cannot fit into an archetype. From the outset, Rhoda establishes herself as a kind of background score; Rhoda is like a bass note under the story and works contrary to Bernard’s pervasive voice in the narrative. More specifically, she is intent on uncovering what happens behind the scenes. First, her descriptions of nature show us she is in the weeds, so to speak, rather than interested in popular versions of reality. Her foremost line, “‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down,’” is a background noise (The Waves 4). She is the only one of the six narrators to sense the world through sound as opposed to sight in their opening line of the playpoem. Rhoda continues, noticing how “‘[someone] sings by the bedroom window alone’” (5). She is inherently a different kind of observer, painting a soundscape of thunder, clocks, and waves throughout the novel. Sound is invisible, yet reaches all of us like cotton wool. 

Rhoda’s approach to the world is “zoomed-out” and macroscopic, which connects to the second way she explores the background: her tendency toward distance. I mean physical distance, such as when she did not join the others catching butterflies in the garden or appearing “from nowhere” having “slipped [into the dinner party] while we were not looking,” says Louis (8; 86). Rhoda is meticulous about how she does not want to be close to others, even her dearest friends—“You did not see me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do—I cannot make one moment merge in the next” (94). In this quote in particular, we learn how Rhoda’s discomfort with shocks is indicative of how she is unable to pull herself out of non-being. She is afraid a moment of being might challenge her position as a supreme noticer. Despite her critical, acerbic eyes and ears she never turns to introspection or self-amelioration. She cannot admit she is an equal to her friend group, nor can she agree with them. There is comfort in her awkwardness. Through noticing what others do not, Rhoda can claim a moral high ground. I also mean emotional dissociation. Woolf includes lines about how Rhoda must “bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to the body” and “I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back’” (30; 94). A combination of sound and tactility (i.e. rhythm) returns Rhoda to stasis and to our shared world. She also enjoys “[lying] suspended on my bed above the world” which is a nod to Woolf’s essay, On Being Ill, about a horizontal position granting a new perspective (The Waves 18; 34; On Being Ill 12). She is in the background of her own body. Rhoda believes a refusal to participate in society and be in touch with her physical self is an act of transcendence. 

Rhoda describes others’ intentions with confidence. She reveals to the reader the “real” motivations behind the appearances and actions of others. Walking down Oxford Street in London, she steps into a store to buy new stockings for a party. A girl’s voice “wakes” Rhoda’s train of thought and a moment of peace is quickly turned into a spiral of anger and catastrophizing: “I shoot to the bottom among the weeds and see envy, jealousy, hatred and spite scuttle like crabs over the sand as she speaks. These are our companions” (116). Then at a following luncheon, she fixates on how the people she dines with hide or obscure their appearances: “Decorous, portly—we have white hair waved under our hats; slim shoes; little bags; clean-shaven cheeks; here and there a military moustache, not a speck of dust has been allowed to settle anywhere on our broadcloth” (117). But it is the start of her walk which encapsulates her expectations as an outcast, where she states: “I want publicity and violence and to be dashed like a stone on the rocks. […] I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy” (115). As a manifestation of non-being, she justifies an impulse to intrude on the boundaries of other people. Rhoda is a great uniter, but only under her worldview. There is comfort in deviation because Rhoda uses it as a justification for a moral high ground. Let’s not forget, Rhoda said it best: “I conquer” (39). Thus, there is irony in Rhoda wanting to do away with veils and appearances, but never putting in the effort to do so for herself. Yet, by noticing the little things, the cotton wool of entangled lives, she makes the narrative whole again. She provides what the narrator, or Bernard, choses to discard or overlook. Rhoda makes these connections because no one else is willing to make them; no one else is willing to go beyond what their type has ascribed to them. 

Rhoda’s non-being is ultimately manifested in her relationship to rhythm and nature. We might think of non-being or cotton wool as sound. Specifically: waves. Rhoda is the sound of the novel, the invisible and anonymous, yet permeating omnipresence. She is the wormhole who connects the naturalistic interludes with the playpoem’s dialogue. This leitmotif starts at the beginning of the novel where Rhoda is playing with a basin. She imagines a whole ecosystem of flora and ships within this basin akin to the interludes’ landscapes, all the while reflecting on her spatial relativity to her friends. In this scene, she is calling herself the deictic center of her friends while “[rocking] the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves” (11). Rhoda is the generator of waves and an implicit uniter. Not only is Rhoda the waves’ origin, she tells us she is subsumed by her own creation at the end of the section: “Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; […] I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths […]” (18). These are the first images the reader is given of Rhoda communicating from beneath the waves or the cotton wool. Later, she starts to describe her own body as “porous” and a “deep tide” (40). She is a fluid being both in her subtle omnipresence and emotional gush. She eventually describes herself as a wave while returning to the basin motif; here she also questions Susan’s “assurance” in how she “draws the white cotton through the eye of her needle” as if drawing our attention to how Susan is unaware of the cotton wool around her (76–7). While I recognize “A Sketch of the Past” was published eight years after The Waves, the fact that Woolf uses this specific visual is striking. It is a comment on Susan’s ability to control the overwhelming sense of non-being, despite her bitter attitude. Susan is not drowning under the waves like Rhoda. As for when the rhythm section comes in: waves themselves are pulses, a backbeat. 

Woolf sees rhythm as an innate attempt to order and be ordered. Like the wave motif in her fiction, “rhythm” appears all over Woolf’s non-fiction writing and letters. Hite points us to a comment Woolf wrote to composer Ethel Smyth while revising The Waves where she says she is “writing to a rhythm and not to a plot”—this book was musical and operatic from the get go (The Waves xxxix). Furthermore, Hite reiterates: 

Background, however, is a visual term, and for Woolf metaphors from music are even more important structural principles of this novel written “to a rhythm.” The sound of waves permeates the descriptive passage, to which Woolf gave the theatrical and musical name of interlude […]. (xi)

Woolf presents us with a symphony more than a book. I was disappointed—but also excited—when I discovered Hite likewise sees waves as a “bass line” because I thought I had made that connection first as a bassist myself and was privy to a position of awkwardness and in-betweenness and keen sense for groove (I thought Woolf and I shared a secret, but don’t we all? (xi). The soliloquies are much like songs too in that they do not have much factual information, but evoke vivid details and emotions (Varga ch. 2). Varga likens The Waves to Beethoven’s fugues (which I don’t doubt is correct given Woolf’s obsession with classical western music), yet I find it more like jazz (ch. 2). This is because of the way there is an underlying rhythm while melodies run sophisticatedly amok in organized chaos and how jazz was gaining popularity in Europe in the 1930s. Jazz is modernism: if Woolf wasn’t getting it through concerts and records, she was getting it via cubists (Nicholson 129). Doesn’t Bernard sound like a major pentatonic, the most prominent and celebrated? Or Rhoda like a blues scale with all the chromatic “in between” notes? In this sense, too, we might think of the characters as modes in music theory where the same series of notes and ratios between said notes can be played in different contexts to provide different feelings (The Waves xlvii). Odd how there are also seven diatonic modes…. The letter to Smyth additionally indicates that rhythm was supposed to be what ordered the smattering of characters, sentence fragments, and visuals. Rhythm gives shape and form to things which might otherwise appear unrelated. The letter is indicative of Woolf wanting to make the novel emotionally resonant, even if that meant sacrificing logical comprehension. In a letter to Vita Sackville-West, she wrote rhythm “goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words fit it” (Barletta ix). Sound is capable of capturing large swatches of feelings and complexities we might not be able to transmute into words. Woolf continues in her 1905 essay “Street Music”: “The beat of the rhythm in the mind is akin to the beat of the pulse of the body; […] and it is for this reason too that music is so universal and has the strange and illimitable power of natural force” (Barletta x). Rhythm is synonymous with unspoken rules and laws. We are under the regime of our hearts pumping blood, so to speak. Rhythm is the only thing sticking all of the different characters together in The Waves. Moreover, Woolf is explicit about the prominence of rhythm in this work—this book is not like Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood which references a Beatles song for its aesthetic rather than its content. Then again, aren’t we all stuck together by rhythm? Yes, the music in our headphones, but what about our trains to work? Our uniforms? Our colleges? Our tribes? Collective memories? Collective traumas? What shared and/or repeated thing is not a kind of rhythm? In rhythm, order is belonging.  

Despite Woolf’s persistence about rhythm in her life and work, she likely drew her interpretations from other thinkers. It is no secret she was a superfan of Richard Wagner given at one period while writing The Voyage Out she watched his operas nearly every night (Sutton 149). Wagner, evidently, features prominently in that novel. She wrote reviews of Wagner’s work for the London Times, even one show in 1909 of Wagner’s Parsifal where Hite believes Woolf got the name for Percival in The Waves (TW 229). Wagner’s narrative style is similar to Woolf’s fragmented and shock-like sentences in that the repeating phrases in The Waves are like musical phrases (or leitmotifs) in his operas: 

In Wagner’s musik-drama, characters and major feelings or ideas are signaled by musical passages that recur in different keys and modes and can be interwoven with other leitmotivs. In The Waves, similar verbal motifs introduce a charter and bring certain of her or his concerns to the fore in various contexts. (TW xlvi–i)

The scholarship connecting Woolf and Wagner is overabundant—most work on music and Woolf will connect the two. The relationship between Woolf’s methodology and Wagner’s operas becomes obvious when juxtaposed, but the composer was not the only inspiration for her philosophy on rhythm. Stéphane Mallarmé and his theories on poetry and meter likewise had a significant impact on Woolf. Mallarmé poses how music is both “inborn in us” (like the heartbeat) and how “tout âme est un nœud rythmique” (Barletta x; Hambly 59). Mallarmé was concentric with Wagner as well (Michon). Rhythm is just as much about a consistent beat as it is how we play between its peaks and troughs or the Mallarmenian “nœud.” Characters in The Waves are beating to their own drums, but continue to be in each others’ lives. They are an inseparable emotional mass whose dialog is reminiscent of a call and response or closer to “trading fours” in jazz improvisation. Looking to Woolf’s interest in antiquity, Plato’s Republic resonates for its reflections on character development. Plato sees rhythm as synonymous with making “graceful” character where “music and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul” (Plato 30). Plato likens types of characters—sorrowful, indolent, warlike—to modes. He argues modes have an inescapable, prophetic emotion which can be used to reflect on past events and instill said qualities into others. The dramatis personæ in The Waves employ phrases which riff throughout the novel and come to define their subjectivity (xlvii). These are emotional and colorful impressions from their youth which evolve with the characters and change context over time. Rhoda’s fascination with waves and water in her early childhood later become symbols of non-being, omnipresence, and dissociation. Lacoue-Labarthe elaborates on Plato’s explanation of rhythm which he reverts to the original rhuthmos. Plato discusses how lyric, melody, and rhythm are the three components of a song. Rhythm’s discussion comes last because it is dependent on the lyrics and melody; rhythm in ancient Greece was synonymous with “form” or skhema or shape (Lacoue-Labarthe 200–1). To be honest, the rhythm of Lacoue’s “Echo of the Subject” is quite muddied, but one quote stands out: “[…] it should perhaps be recognized that rhythm is not only a musical category. Nor, simply, is it the figure. Rather, it would be something between beat and figure that never fails to designate mysteriously the ‘ethical’” (202). Rhythm is an attempt to categorize an identity—of a character, of a song, of a feeling—in a predictable and approachable manner. Rhythms repeat and entrance. They are part of what makes music tangible, groove-able. Rhythm is a connector in that it is a common thread we can all latch onto despite different instruments or appearances or perspectives. As long as one drum keeps beating, we can do our own thing in time with said drum; as long as Rhoda keeps time one way or another, the group is given a space to speak their melody and soliloquy. Rhoda creates the environment and ecosystem for her friends to exist. 

Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle might give some insight into theories contemporary to Woolf. While Woolf didn’t think of Freud highly, it does not mean she was not involved in discourse surrounding the psychoanalyst. Freud brings up the concept of a primordial pulse inherent in all organisms. In this work, he ponders the origin of the “vacillating rhythm” (Freud 41). Of course, it is a sexual impulse or a sexual rhythm. Waves in Woolf’s work are often attributed to sex or erotic euphemisms, but I am unsure about cotton wool. However, Freud theorizes how rhythm is a simultaneous march toward and away from death (40). In the same vein, cotton wool is just as much about interconnectivity as it is about a shroud of depression in Woolf’s life and characters. Up to this point in this essay, I have broken down as many interpretations of Rhoda and non-being as I can. But do they overlap well? We know non-being is always around us, we know waves and rhythm provide order and shape—so is there order and shape in Woolf’s/Rhoda’s depressive episodes and suicidal ideation? Is there a depressive comfort in the waves’ rhythm? A soothing rock? Or are they merely a foreboding, prophetic beat that keeps Rhoda composed while pushing her closer to death? When Rhoda dies, is there any rhythm left in The Waves? 

There is much, much more to say about Rhoda and rhythm—like the alliteration between those two words. These paragraphs are riffs and improvisations to the beat Woolf provided me. Rhoda teaches us to look for shape and sound in the negative space. Her outcast personality allows us to see the invisible and hear the unacknowledged in the novel, in the real world, in Woolf’s life. If there is any quote which encapsulates Rhoda, it is when she tells us: “I am fixed here to listen” (The Waves 76).