The Waves as Exploration of (An)aesthetic of Absence

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves demonstrates how an (an)aesthetic of absence might be dramatized in a work of fiction. It presupposes a vast impersonal memory bank that stores everything that has ever happened, every thought or feeling of every person. This data bank, however, is absent, inaccessible to direct experience. The thoughts and feelings it stores, moreover, are always already turned into appropriate language, complete with figures of speech for sensations and feelings that cannot be said literally. These vivid memories are involuntary, to borrow a word from Henri Bergson’s memory theory. They have been forgotten completely and suddenly “come to the top” and begin re-enacting themselves as present occurrences in vivid detail before the mind’s eye. All the characters in The Waves, to different degrees and in different ways, are haunted with the sense of a secret absent centre to which they are attached and that they glimpse but cannot reach.