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POINT OF VIEW IN THE WAVES: SOME SERVICES OF THE SITLE J. W. GRAHAM I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning - if The Waves is my first work in my own style. A Writer's Diary, p. 176 (16 Nov. 1931) As early as 1928, Virginia Woolf began to formulate in several essays her conception of a new kind of fiction which would combine elements of drama, poetry, and the novel.1 Although she had no name for this new form, she saw clearly and stated repeatedly that it could not be called a novel. While she was writing Orlando, she twice recorded her certainty that she would never write a novel again;' and in the manuscript of The Waves she scribbled at one point the following request: "The author would be glad if the following pages were not read as a novel.'" After The Waves had been published, she looked ahead and recorded her intention to "write another four novels: Waves, I mean" (p. 178, 13 Jan. 1932); as if to say that, since this new form of fiction had no proper name of its own, she would call it, for her own purposes, by the name of the work which was her first attempt to create it On a large scale. All this evidence only verifies what the text of The Waves makes manifest on every page - that it is a radically a-novelistic work of fiction and that attempts to regard it as a novel will yield very little. For this reaSOD, such critical tenns as Hplot," "character," and "setting" are the wrong instruments for explOring its nature as fiction. But the term "pOint of view," so commOn in discussions of the novel, is of course still relevant, simply because The Waves is a narrative. In the present discussion, I shall analyse the point of view in this work, tracing its gradual development through two holograph drafts and concentrating on the ways in which it is finally established through the agency of style. In the episodes' of The Waves, Virginia Woolf rigorously follows two conventions for rendering direct speech: the use of "said" to indicate a speaker, and the use of quotation marks to set off the speech itself. Volume XXXIX, Number 3, April 1970 194 J. W. GRAHAM Although these familiar conventions may lead us to assume that we are to hear the dialogue of the speakers, a page or two is enough to make us realize that even the most precocious children would never talk like this. Because Virginia Woolf makes nO attempt to distinguish the style of one speaker from that of any other, it is difficult to read the speeches as stream-of-consciousness; and this difficulty is increased when we perceive that the rhythm, sentence structure, and vocabulary of anyone speaker do not change noticeably between childhood and middle age. Yet most critics approach The Waves as an example of stream-of-consciousness writing. Melvin Friedman describes the method as internal monologue; but the style does not satisfy his insistence that internal monologue must express a character's identity in "words and syntactical units proper to his mentality."· Robert Humphrey defines the method as soliloquy, which seems closer to the mark because that is what Virginia Woolf called it; and yet it does not follow his rule that soliloquy must "communicate emotions and ideas which are related to the plot and action.'" These soliloquies are the plot and action of The Waves, and if they render anything, it is surely the psychic life of the speakers, the communication of which Humphrey assigns to internal monologue. Both of these critics are searching in their analysis of the methods used in fiction which renders a stream of consciousness. It is perhaps more fruitful to assume that The Waves is simply not this kind of fiction than to assume that their analysis is at fault. The most striking departure from prevailing narrative convention is the handling of verb tenses. For most of the book, the characters speak in the pure present (l go), a form of the present tense...

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