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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 1992, pp.

631-650 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.0328

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THE POLITICS OF MODERNIST FORM;OR, WHO RULES THE WAVES?

rrfr Patrick McGee

After the recent publication of Jane Marcus' essay, "Brittania RulesThe Waves," interpretations of Virginia Woolf s novel cannot legitimatelyignore its political content. As for myself, before I had the opportunityto read the essay, I had already written briefly on the implicit critiqueof imperialism in The Waves (McGee 116-120) in such a way as to suggestmy agreement with Marcus that the novel is about "the submerged mindof empire" (the words of J. M. Coetzee, cited by Marcus 136). Still,

Marcus goes beyond my understanding of an implicit and partial critiqueto argue that an explicit critique of imperialism constitutes the center andorganizing principle of the novel. Marcus has articulated a new spacefor reading The WavesÂ—a space that should become the enabling groundfor future readings of the novel. By articulating this space in the formof a political interpretation, she also makes visible the internal boundaryor blank space that any interpretation hollows out of itself. This blank space allows me to pose the question of literary form that Marcus failsto address adequately with her emphasis on the transparency of socialcontent and literary references. She does not claim, of course, that themeaning of the novel is obvious but that it becomes obvious once thetext has been plugged into the specific dimensions of the historical con-

text from which it derives. Marcus wants to reverse the critical historyof The Waves which has tended to identify the novel as a static representa-tion of upper-class culture and forms of identity. On the contrary, Marcusinsists, "the project of cultural studies . . . now allows one to read TheWaves as a narrative about culture making" (139). I agree with this state-

Modem Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 3, Autumn 1992. Copyright Â© by Purdue Research Founda-tion. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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ment. Still, by subordinating the novel's form to its context without payingsufficient attention to the process of mediation, Marcus tends to overlook

the politics of literary form at the heart of The Waves and possibly of themodernist project itself. In order to explain this politics, I will need tointerrogate some aspects of Marcus' interpretation in detail.

For example, in part at least, she hinges her claim that Woolf intendedto produce a full-blown critique of imperialism in The Waves (indeed, thatthe novel "records a precise historical momentÂ—the postcolonial carnival -esque" [144]) on a particular reading of the poetic interludes. Marcusnotes that these interludes "take the form of a set of Hindu prayers tothe sun, called Gayatri, marking its course during a single day. These(Eastern) episodes surround a (Western) narrative of the fall of Britishimperialism" (137). Woolf supposedly got the idea for using this metricalform found in the Rig Veda from her cousin Dorothea Jane Stephen's 1918

book, Studies in Early Indian Thought. However, the term "Gayatri" doesnot appear in this book, and Stephen's chapter on the Rig Veda is verygeneral and does not offer any concrete indication that Woolf was im-itating Indian verse. If one thumbs through the Rig Veda itself, it doesnot seem altogether clear that Woolf s interludes have any direct relationto the Sanskrit hymns. Although the interludes trace the path of the sunduring the course of a day, they are not exactly invocations of the sun,like the Gayatri, nor do they conform to the expanded significance of the Gayatri as a recitation leading to the fulfillment of human desire.Woolf certainly does not imitate the Gayatri meter of twenty-four syllables,usually in triplets of eight syllables each. I would not deny that Woolf may have had her cousin's study in mind when she wrote the interludesand may have wanted "to call up Indian philosophy and its emphasison astronomy and the randomness of the universe" (Marcus 155). Shemay have wanted to create an echo of or resonance with the idea behindone of her cousin's summary statements: "In early Indian thought wehave the boldest and the most consistent effort that the human mind has

ever made to show that it is nothing" (cited by Marcus 155; see Stephen172). Nevertheless, these borrowings from and echoings of Europeanscholarship on Eastern philosophy hardly constitute a critical challengeto imperialist ideology. On the contrary, assimilating Eastern thought inthis vague, imprecise manner seems to me a rather typical gesture withinmodernist art and literature. Marcus herself refers to Yeats's approvalof echoes of Eastern thought in Woolf s novel (156), an echoing Yeatsdid himself on a much more grand scale. Yet, despite his nationalistalignments in Ireland, Yeats was not a profound critic of the imperialistsystem.

Another of Marcus' historical reductions fails to do justice to theformal complexity of The Waves. She reads the novel as a roman Ã clef, particularly in making its structure pivot on the relationship between thetwo characters, Percival and Bernard. "Bernard," we are informed, "is

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Desmond [MacCarthy] and Percival is J. K. Stephen, the patriarchal imperialist makers of British culture" (153). She blatantly projects the per-

sonal characteristics of these two historical figures onto the characters of Bernard and Percival in a way that completely overstates what Woolf ac-tually puts into the novel. For the most part, I agree with her main point:' ' The Waves is about the ideology of white British colonialism and theRomantic literature that sustains it. Its parody and irony mock the com- plicity of the hero and the poet in the creation of a collective nationalsubject through an elegy for imperialism" (145). Although the relationto Percival surely does link all the characters in this novel to the patriarchal-imperialist subject as the form of their collective identity, this relationis not the only defining one in the novel, nor is it the last word on theconcept of the subject. The critic Desmond MacCarthy, Woolf's friendfrom the Bloomsbury group, may have possessed the qualities Marcus

applies to Bernard: "rigid Tory politics, imperialistic hero-worship, and barely repressed homosexuality" (157). He may well have been a modelfor Bernard (as well as Neville). But I would insist that the Bernard inThe Waves is not so easily pinned down as Marcus's labels would suggest.Although Bernard mourns for the death of Percival in the elegiac mode,he hardly repeats in his discourse the trivial and emotionally indifferenttone of Desmond MacCarthy's "portrait" of J. K. Stephen. In fact,MacCarthy's portrait of Woolf s cousin reads more like a parody thandoes Bernard's elegiac passages on Percival. (MacCarthy's conclusion sug-gests a more muted admiration than Percival receives in The Waves:"J.K.S. belongs to those dim, romantic figures, who have loomed muchgreater in intimacy than in performanceÂ—only he was not so lucky inhis generation" [224].) More important, however, there is no indicationin The Waves that Bernard ever actually becomes the poet he plays at being or that his sentences and perpetually unfinished stories ever amountto anything more than reverie, social chatter, and jottings in his notebook.Are the references to his biographer anything more than stereotypical formsof intellectual vanity? Again, I do think the novel implicates literaturein the imperialist process but not exactly in the transparent and reflectivemanner upon which Marcus insists.

Another figure in the novel who is pinpointed by Marcus as anemblem of the male artist's evasion of the social responsibility of art isthe "lady writing." Bernard "authorizes his role as an inheritor of civiliza-tion by summoning a recurring vision of a 'lady at a table writing, thegardeners with their brooms sweeping.' This is a vision in which Englishculture is represented as an aristocratic female figure in a grand countryhouse called Elvedon, leisure for creativity provided by the security of the fixed class position of servants" (139).

After reading Marcus, I would have to revise partially my previousreading of this figure of the female writer at Elvedon as one that disruptsthe patriarchal order (that is, the order of the school which the children

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are attending when Susan and Bernard first see the woman in the window). Now I would see this figure as more ambivalent and the site of a social

contradiction. For Marcus accurately stresses that Woolf, "who urgedthe thirties poets to convert members of their own class to divest themselvesof privilege, rather than become missionaries to the lower classes," wouldnot have endorsed an aesthetic "which figures English culture as a lady,not a woman, and insists on the unalterable relationship between thegardener and the lady, the working class and the writing class" (154,my emphasis). Yet if the choice of the word "lady" is to carry such weight,it should at least be noted that Bernard uses the word "woman" or

"women" to describe the "lady writing" in the window on four occa-sions in the text (124, 241, 255, and 285). These observations suggestsome ambivalence in Woolf s understanding of this figure. In Three Guineas,Woolf attacks the patriarchal concept of "the lady" as an ideological

justification of economic oppression: "It was the lady who could not earnmoney; therefore the lady must be killed" (133). Yet the Woolf who wroteA Room of One's Own could not have been blind to the fact that, under the capitalist system, the production of women's writing, like the produc-tion of men's, requires some economic privilege and that this privilegeis structurally at the expense of the working classes, which would include

both the gardeners and Mrs. Moffat, Bernard's housekeeper. Further-more, Woolf respected the potential power of the working classes whenshe suggested in Three Guineas that educated women, like herself,

are weaker than the women of the working class. If the working women of thecountry were to say: "If you go to war, we will refuse to make munitions or

to help in the production of goods," the difficulty of war-making would be seriouslyincreased. But if all the daughters of educated men were to down tools tomorrow,nothing essential either to the life or the war-making of the community would be embarrassed. Our class is the weakest of all the classes in the state. We have

no weapon with which to enforce our will. (13)

Woolf's analysis of the social power of the working class based on itsrelation to the means of production simply leaves out all kinds of other factors, including lack of education and of the symbolic authority resultingtherefrom, that keep working class men and women from realizing their

power in actuality. As Eric Hobsbawm observes, during the critical period before the First World War and leading up to the achievement of women'ssuffrage after the war, "there was little enough change in the condition

of most women of the labouring classes anywhere," except for a declining birth rate in the "developing" countries alone (193).One cannot read Woolf s mind, but to me it makes sense that she

would construct the image of the woman writing with the gardeners sweep-ing as the figuration of the social contradiction underlying her own creative

process. Bernard encounters this vision as a child and it haunts him for the rest of his life. It is not a part of the official program that he learnsin school, but it has in some ways a more profound impact in that it




represents a dimension of his social experience that cannot be easilyassimilated and then forgotten as a conventional attitude. Woolf

understood, as do more contemporary feminists like HÃ©lÃ¨ne Cixous, thatthe political significance of women's writing, wherever it comes from, isaffirmative; but her common sense about the economic conditions necessaryfor the production of writing would not have allowed her to ignore thesocial contradictions that necessarily underlie such a symbolic act. Thegardeners who sweep or those like Mrs. Moffat who clean up after theupper-class men and women, and the women who write (from any class,although a woman from the upper classes will be forever inscribed asa "lady" on the mind of an upper-class Victorian boy) threaten thecapitalist class system that could also be said to have created them inthe first place. As the history of the twentieth century demonstrates, thisthreat can be contained and managed by capitalism itself. Nevertheless,

I believe that Woolf inserts this figure into her text not only to vilifyBernard as a character but to signify the social contradictions of modern-ist aesthetics and to take responsibility for her own social emplacement.

The whole point of my dissent from these aspects of Marcus' argu-ment can be summed up in one final contradiction. In the last paragraph,she paraphrases a remark by Andreas Huyssen that "the mark of modern-ism is fear of contamination." Then she concludes:

This is Bernard's fear (Mrs. Moffat will sweep it all up). Rhoda fears the puddleand all human beings; Neville fears the recurrence of murder; Louis fears the"great Beast stamping" in the East; Susan hates Ginny [sic] all her life for havingkissed Louis. The contamination of kisses and classes, the fear of dirt, disorder,and dying, the fear of Africa and India, is the recurring theme of the speakers'

monologues. (159)

Marcus is mostly right in this summary. But she also replicates the "mark of modernism" by insisting that Woolf completely transcends the imperialist ideology that interpellates her characters and thus remains un-contaminated by the process she represents. This fear of contaminationforces Marcus to argue repeatedly that all the negative aspects of aesthetic politics in The Waves are "historically specific to Bernard in England inthe early 1930s" and in no way endorsed by Woolf (154). I believe thatWoolfs novel is critical of the aesthetics of modernism, but it does not

seem to me that Woolfs relation to her characters is one of completedetachment and impersonal dissociation. For one thing, the Bernard who

says in the last section that he does not know if he is man or woman(The Waves 281) makes a rather odd figure for the fear of contamination by others. Similarly, Rhoda's fear of puddles and Neville's fear of murder (or "death among the apple trees" [The Waves 24]) were also Woolfsfears as she recorded them in her late autobiography, "A Sketch of thePast" (71, 78; see also Dairy 2:113). There would seem to be other echoes of Woolfs autobiography in Rhoda's pervasive feeling of aliena-tion and exclusion; and while the other characters are less direct represen-

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tations of Woolf's own life, I have no doubt that she distributes piecesof herself in all of them. In fact, I do not see how it is possible to separate

the voice of the author from the voice of the character in this crucialmoment of Bernard's final monologue, a moment that virtually rootshuman identity in a process of social contamination:

And now I ask, "Who am I?" I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny,Susan, Rhoda, and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do notknow. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; weare divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. Thereis no division between me and them. As I talked I felt, "I am you." This dif-ference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome.Yes, ever since Mrs. Constable lifted her sponge and pouring warm water over me covered me with flesh I have been sensitive, percipient. Here on my browis the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on my neck is the kiss Jinny gave

Louis. My eyes fill with Susan's tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread,the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.(The Waves 289)

I suspect that when Bernard says, "Who am I?," Woolf is producinga double-voiced discourse in which the content of the subject has becomeso unstable as to subvert the normal relationship between the reader andthe author as textual functions. "Bernard" as the name of a character

no longer centers Woolf's novel, if he ever did. His name is just onein a series. Insofar as his final story describes the mortality of the humansubject, it foregrounds the isolation of that subject, which, as Freudunderstood, seeks to master and possess death in its own way. But death,which seems to create a final and irreversible separation, is also the truest

signifier of that radical alterity which inhabits the subject as its materialground, as the impossibility of any metaphysical difference that wouldtranscend history and culture and root the authority of the subject in someversion of the Absolute. The "I" who says, "I am you," is not Bernardin any conventional sense but the Other who has no Other. It could bethought of as Woolf's signature, but that signature would be one thatinsists on displaying the absence of any metaphysical authority. Only inthat sense is difference overcome.

Mrs. Constable, the boy Bernard's nurse, is a maternal figure whogrounds for a lifetime his relation to his own body. She has the functionof what Ellie Ragland-Sullivan calls the m/Other, a formula expressing"the idea that the human subject first becomes aware of itself by iden-tification with a person (object), usually [but not necessarily] the mother"(11). Shari Benstock clarifies this Lacanian mirror stage as one revealing"a (false) sense of mastery and wholeness, a notion of the body as a unity"(12). Furthermore, in her reading of Kristeva, Benstock emphasizes thesubject's ambivalence toward this process of separation/individuation:




The pre-Oedipal, pre-mirror stage infant experiences itself as coextensive withthe mother. This state of apparent at-oneness with the mother is thrown into crisis

when the child misapprehends itself as separate, whole, complete, and in controlof itself. The joy (jouissance) in discovering separation and difference is coupledwith pain in the loss of an Imaginary identification with the mother. (30)

For Marcus, Mrs. Constable plays a crucial role in Bernard's formationas a patriarchal subject: "She is his muse, and the primal scene of writingis for him the memory of her turning over pages of a picture book andnaming the objects" (157; see The Waves 239). On the one hand, Mrs.Constable prepares the child to enter the symbolic order of names andidentities; on the other, she stands for the Other that is simultaneouslyrecognized and lost in the process of individuation, in discovering the"arrows of sensation" (The Waves 26, 239) that construct the body asa unified ground for the patriarchal subject that it must become. "Tothe nurses of other newborns," Bernard "could implore them not tosqueeze the sponge over that new body" (239). For Marcus, "Woolf islaying out a psychological trail to explain Bernard's origin as the self-appointed arbiter of British culture" (157). The passage I have quotedabove, however, suggests that the developmental models used by Ragland-Sullivan, Benstock, Marcus, and, to some extent, Lacan himself may notdo justice to the symbolic process Woolf is recording.

Bernard's ambivalence toward the process of individuationÂ—the pleasure-pain he associates with itÂ—points toward the ambivalence of thesubject itself. The subject, even the patriarchal subject, is not a stableformation that is autonomous or that, from the outside, ever completely

dominates the other (including the sexual other) who seems to stand apartfrom it. On the contrary, the subject is already constructed by the culturalsystem that makes the subject's representation of the other a form of self-representation. Bernard is the subject constituted in contradiction. Hisidentity as a patriarchal male constantly wavers, that is, oscillates betweenthe contradictory poles of his social being, on the waves, so to speak.He cannot stand apart from those others who have made up his life; andhe cannot merge with them either. He is both in love with death andfearful of it, in love with Rhoda and Percival and fearful of what theyrepresent in himself. Rhoda, the subject without a face who kills herself,and Percival, the imperialist subject who has no voice, represent the polar opposition inside Bernard's own identity. The others are gradations of

the same process. Neville embodies not only Bernard's homosocial loveof Percival but his pretentious assertion of the ideology of art withoutthe uncertainty or self-doubt that constrains Bernard's ability to master the other with words. Jinny and Susan taken together represent the two

poles of the patriarchal woman as a social construction: the woman whogives sexual pleasure (though I do not agree with Marcus that Jinny isliterally a prostitute [146]) and the natural woman, or mother, who nur-tures. They articulate the relation to m/Other in the composition of the

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patriarchal subject (Bernard) as a historical formation. Louis is the subject of the capitalist system that translates patriarchal law into an ideological

defense of economic violence.All of these characters would make up Bernard if Bernard were iden-

tical to himself. But, if anything, Bernard represents the nonidentity of the subject. The ambivalence of his gender points to the ambivalence of the genre or literary form of The Waves. It suggests the ambivalenceunderlying the author-function itself in this novel. If, as Marcus argues,the interludes are Woolfs attempt to articulate the repressed of the im-

perialist social order as the frame of the novel, they also make a signifi-cant return of the repressed in the main body of Bernard's final monologue. No longer italicized, no longer safely confined to the margins, the voiceof the interludes erupts from within the discourse of the imperialist subject:

I can visit the remote verges of the desert lands where the savage sits by thecampfire. Day rises; the girl lifts the watery fire-hearted jewels to her brow; thesun levels his beams straight at the sleeping house; the waves deepen their bars;they fling themselves on shore; back blows the spray; sweeping their waters theysurround the boat and the sea-holly. The birds sing in chorus; deep tunnels run

between the stalks of flowers; the house is whitened; the sleeper stretches; graduallyall is astir. Light floods the room and drives shadow beyond shadow to wherethey hang in folds inscrutable. What does the central shadow hold? Something?

Nothing? I do not know. (The Waves 291-292)

Quite simply, what is the reader to think? Has Bernard been the nar-rator all along? Was it Bernard who intended to subvert his own patriar-chal and imperialist authority by framing the autobiography of his social

class with a voice from Eastern culture (if we accept for a momentMarcus's reading of the interludes as imitations of the Gayatri from theRig Veda)? Has the whole novel been the contradictory and sexually ambivalent internal monologue of a Western patriarchal subject? It seemsto me that in The Waves Woolf successfully produces an implicit ideologycritique that may have a special significance for contemporary feminism.She calls into question the assumption that the Western patriarchal sub-

ject is transparent as to its meaning and social effects, not to mentionas to its gender. In fact, she questions the common sense view of thegender of patriarchy. (Perhaps this is the reason why so many feministcritics, including Jane Marcus until recently, have avoided reading TheWaves, which is frequently declared to be Woolfs masterpiece and yet,

like Finnegans Wake, suffers from a dearth of significant criticism.)Bernard's final monologue, when it fuses with the poetic interludes,calls into question any simple understanding of the author-function inthis text, including the principle of its intentional structure, by dramaticallyforegrounding the undecidability of the boundary-line between the textand its context. Indeed, in the passage I have cited, there is an inscrip-tion of this undecidability. Everything up to the reference to a sleeper more or less corresponds to the material in the interludes. But who is




the sleeper? This figure seems to suggest that beyond the self-conscioussubject of modernist art that produces its fictional mouthpiece in Bernard

(and to different degrees in the other characters) lies another subject or the subject as the Other. This "sleeper" is the unconscious subject of the discourse of the novel, the subject of those effects that exceed theovert message that the monologues of the six characters and the poeticinterludes want to convey. It is possible to say that the interludes makeup the dream of this sleeper which somehow constitutes the frame of theentire novel. Still, if Bernard's final monologue is explicitly contaminated

by the voice of the interludes that are supposed to frame it, then theentire set of monologues, by virtue of the abstractness of Woolfs style,is implicitly contaminated by such a frame. The monologues of thecharacters become a dream within a dream. As Derrida stresses, "Theframes are always enframed ... by a given piece of what they contain"

(The Post Card 485n).This instability of the frame is also an instability of the center which

is suggested by the image of light driving "shadow beyond shadow towhere they hang in folds inscrutable" (292). Ironically, if the infusionof light brings about an awakening of the sleeper who now stretches, itdoes not efface the shadows of the dream but rather foregrounds the in-scrutable boundary that they constitute within the economy of the sub-

ject. "What does the central shadow hold? Something? Nothing? I donot know." The boundary constituted by the central shadow is not thesite of a stable identity but of the instability of identity which is alwayscontaminated by the unconscious processes from which it emerges. Thereis no strict division between the unconscious and the conscious, betweenthe sleeper who dreams and the speaking subject who narrates. Finally,if Bernard is not identical to himself but one more member of a series

without closure, then Woolf's name has to be added to the series as the

frame that is also a part of what it frames. The Waves subverts the inten-tional authority of its own author-function.

According to Marcus, the figure of Brittania in the title of her essay"is meant to convey the national anxiety of the former colony about thecolonizing process itself (140). Brittania was originally a figure on aRoman coin celebrating the Roman colonization of Britain, but she wascarried over the waves of historical process to become the symbol of Britishimperialism in the nineteenth century. In The Waves, as Marcus reads

it, she becomes a figure for the ideological containment of the writing process itself:

The Lady at a Table Writing serves as a "Brittania" figure and an allegory for Bernard. But in order to read it this way, one has to be open to irony in Woolfsvoice, particularly toward Bernard, the writer figure, and be aware of and opento Woolfs critique of class and empire. Bernard is a parody of authorship; hiswords are a postmodern pastiche of quotation from the master texts of Englishliterature. (140)

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It seems to me that Marcus gives too much credit to Bernard and notenough credit to the subtlety of Woolf s unstable irony. The lady or woman

writing is not just Bernard's projection, although she may very well bea figure of the woman who rules The Waves. To solicit the (unintended?)

pun in Marcus' title, the woman who rules The Waves is not only theemblem of British imperialism but also the woman who rules in another senseÂ—the last three senses given to the verb rule in the O.E.D.: 1) toarrange or set in order; 2) to mark (paper, etc.) with parallel straightlines drawn with a ruler or by a machine; and 3) to form or mark out(a line) with or as with a ruler. The woman who rules The Waves is theone who draws the lines that determine its form or arrangementÂ—whodecides what is inside and what is outside. In the case of Woolf s novel,she is also the one who draws the lines in such a way as to call attentionto the undecidability of those limits, to the very arbitrariness of modern-

ist form. To say that Bernard is a parody of authorship is to grant author-ship an authority that Woolfs novel calls into question by insisting onthe artificiality or constructedness of the frame that gives the author power over the text he or she writes. This is not to say, of course, that thereis no parody in Woolfs construction not only of Bernard but also of allthe other characters in this fiction. But this parody is only a technique,not the ruling principle. The lady/woman writing is not simply an algebraicsymbol of Bernard's patriarchal fantasies but a signifier of the ambivalent

process that rules Woolfs novel. On the one hand, it displays the captureof the woman writer in the frameÂ—the window as the frameÂ—of a patriar-chal culture that rules or constructs her as a "lady"; on the other, itsituates the author of the text, the one who rules The Waves, that is, draws

the lines that constitute its form, in a margin or on the borderline of the text she writes. She is framed by the text she framesÂ—she is ruled

by the text she rules. In this way, she discloses the contradiction in theideology of modernist form by making visible the social machinery thatenables its production. In seeking to transcend historical process, modern-ist form is captured by it.

Astradur Eysteinsson describes one common view of modernism,foregrounded in the Brecht-LukÃ¡cs debate, that may have bearing on the present discussion: "the aesthetic proclivities of modernism seem boundto go against the very notion of narrativity, narrative progression, andstorytelling in any traditional sense. One way to define modernism would

be to say that it resists reality-fabrications that are recuperable as 'stories'or as situations that can readily be reformulated in sociopragmatic terms"(187). Such a statement does not mean that modernist texts have no rela-tion to reality but that they challenge the view that reality can be cap-tured or adequately mapped by a traditional narrative which privilegescoherence and continuity between the representation and the represented.On the contrary, modernism suggests that reality is not reducible to a"seamless 'totality' " (Ernst Bloch's description of Georg LukÃ¡cs's con-




cept of reality) that can be numerically reproduced even in a critical fic-tion that discloses the grounds of class struggle and social change. One

of the conditions of modern literature, as Bloch suggested for GermanExpressionism, may be the knowledge that "authentic reality is also discon-tinuity" (22). LukÃ¡cs generally saw European modernism as a form of decadence because it emptied art of any social content or relation to themovement of real history. On the other hand, Fredric Jameson, who doesnot reject LukÃ¡cs's argument so much as he tries to recuperate its implicit critique of modernist form, reformulates the argument to suggestthat modernism is not

a way of avoiding social contentÂ—in any case an impossibility for beings likeourselves who are "condemned" to history and to the implacable sociability of even the most apparently private of our experiencesÂ—but rather of managing andcontaining it, secluding it out of sight in the very form itself, by means of specifictechniques of framing and displacement which can be identified with some preci-sion. (138)

It seems to me that Jameson describes a particular modernist strategythat is not accurately understood if we think of it as "a way of avoidingsocial content." Rather than suggesting that social content is secludedout of sight by modernist form, it could be argued that, on the contrary,social content is no longer contained by literary form but rather represented by it. In fact, Jameson's aside about beings condemned to history andthe "implacable sociability" of private experience may be the central pointthat needs to be stressed in this context.

Although it is always dangerous to make universal judgments about

literary form, it still should be said that the significance of modernist formlies in its revelation of the social and symbolic nature of private experience,which leads to the secondary recognition that history determines the for-mation of human subjectivity precisely through the mediation of sym-

bolic structures. In other words, modernism, at least in some of its prac-tices, is not a retreat from the social into the private but an insistenceon the sociality of the private. However, it may be more useful to insiston the duality of modernist form as to its effects. In writers such asHemingway and Fitzgerald, for example, the effect of self-conscious styleand form may be exactly what Jameson says: a way of avoiding content

by reducing it to the objectivity of an aesthetic gaze. The form containsand decontextualizes the subject matter. In writers such as Woolf and

Joyce, on the other hand, social content is no longer safely contained by the objective boundaries of the frame; since the frame is unstable,the content becomes a social force and a ground of political contentionthat any reading must confront if it is to make sense out of the work.

In alienating narrativity in the traditional sense by destablizing itsframe, Woolf produces an effect in The Waves that resembles a kind of Brechtian epic theatre, at least as Brecht has been rewritten in contem-

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porary critical terms by Terry Eagleton. For Brecht, acting should be"hollow or void," which leads to "a kind of Derridean 'spacing,' rendering

a piece of stage business exterior to itself, . . . dismantling the ideologicalself-identity of our routine social behavior." The dramatic gesture

represents such a behavior

in all its lack, in its suppression of material conditions and historical possibilities,and thus represents an absence which it at the same time produces. What thestage action represents is the routine action as differenced through the former'snon-self-identity, which nevertheless remains self-identicalÂ—recognizableÂ—enoughto do all this representing rather than merely to "reflect" a "given" non-identityin the world. (Eagleton 167)

In Woolf's novel, of course, the place of the actor is occupied by thelinguistic signifier that produces a character or social identity without ever

effacing its own materiality. Marcus, therefore, correctly rejects previousreadings of The Waves that describe it as "ahistorical" (144); but in myopinion she ought to give these errors some credit for pointing towardthe very historicity that Woolf wants to represent. Woolf suppresses"material conditions and historical possibilities" in order to reveal the

process of history in those conventional gestures and activities that makeup the life of the subject as an intersubject, as a composite or hybridin the symbolic order of everyday life. By oversimplifying the relation-ship between text and context, Marcus virtually tames Woolfs text bymaking it a far more naÃ¯ve representation than it actually is. Woolf suppresses the family romance and straightforward references to the socialand historical background in order to foreground or make present the

historicity of language itself: like Brechtian theater, she "deconstructs social processes into rhetoric, which is to say reveals them as social practices"(Eagleton 168). Let me rewrite Eagleton's sentence about Brecht to fitWoolf: what her literary-linguistic actions in The Waves represent are socialidentities as ideological constructions which can be articulated as differentialforms through the "non-self-identity" of the signifier, which neverthelesscan be recognized as self-identical in a set of social positions that virtuallyhail or interpellate (in Althusser's sense of the word) social beings whichare not simply "reflected" or exposed as non-identities but called intoidentity by the process of representation itself. For example, the signifier of gender calls a woman into being as a social construction through aself-identical linguistic structure that is nevertheless rooted in the non-

self-identity or arbitrariness of the material signifier. As in Lacan'snotorious example of the signifiers "Men" and "Women" on the doorsof unisexual lavatories, there is no escaping the self-identity of the signifier as a structure of social determination that requires every human beingto line up on one side or the other of the gender line. Still, representationas the differentiation and symbolic ordering of the real (which can be




thought of as an undifferentiated process without natural demarcationssince, as Lacan stressed, the real has no order [H]) is only possible becausethe signifier is arbitrary and thus can operate as an element in a culturalsystem. Such an element assumes value or meaning as an effect of thesystem itselfÂ—the system of differences.

Perhaps Marcus' most productive observation for understandingWoolf's complex representation of the European system of cultural dif-ferences lies in her linking of Indian philosophy, with its emphasis onthe randomness of the universe, with relativity theory and the new physics.In a note, she cites Woolfs diary for the evidence that Woolf had been"reading and discussing Sir James Jeans's books and listening to his lec-tures on the radio" while she revised The Waves (160). The book-formof Jeans's lectures, The Mysterious Universe, was published in November 1930, a month before Woolf referred to it in her diary (3: 35-36). While

this book could hardly have influenced Woolfs original draft of The Waves,it surely contains ideas that Woolf would have been familiar with andmight have influenced her thinking about how to represent human iden-tity in her novel. Consider these passages from Jeans's book:

Light, and indeed radiation of all kinds, is both particles and waves at the sametime. . . . Now it behaves like particles, now like waves; no general principle yetknown can tell us what behaviour it will choose in any particular instance.

Clearly we can only preserve our belief in the uniformity of nature by makingthe supposition that particles and waves are in essence the same thing. ... Aduality has recently been discovered in the nature of electrons and protons similar to that already known to exist in the nature of radiation; these also appear to be particles and waves at the same time. (42-43)

Woolf may have taken the cue from contemporary science for the doublefocus of her book. On the one hand, The Waves is organized around agroup of discrete individuals: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, andRhoda. Each discourse or monologue has a speaker or subject who literallyrepresents the interpellated form of social being. There can be no discoursewithout a subject, and there can be no subject without the subject-objectrelationship that solicits the other as the receptacle of a message. However,as critics have pointed out before, this relationship is not stable in TheWaves (Minow-Pinkney 172-173). The line of demarcation thatdistinguishes the addresser from the addressee has been effaced so thatthe difference is undecidable. Just as Bernard's final monologue subverts

the difference between the frame (that is, the poetic interludes) and themain body of the text, the abstraction of style in all the monologues tendsto efface the conventions of character that would govern the articulationof voice throughout the novel. In effect, the characters as individual psychesare both present and absent. The reader cannot do without them as heor she tries to make sense of the novel by identifying the contents of themonologues with different characterological types. But the boundariesmarked out by these conventions are constantly being transgressed by

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a style that has the effect of "emptying syntax of its function of articula-tion" (Minow-Pinkney 172). The characters as individual particles or elements, in other words, are subordinated to the wave-structure of thenovel as a whole. The function of articulation is framed in such a way as todramatize its dissolution into the symbolic process that could be said toconstitute the historical itself. Still, the wave is not more real or moreunreal than the particle or the discrete body of the individual. The waveand the particle symbolize one discontinuous process. Although irrecon-cilable as concepts, each is the effect of a symbolic mediation that is never reducible to, or a transparent window on, the real. In this view, historyis neither identical to the real nor self-identical.

The Waves is a historical novel in this unconventional sense. It presentsthe European subject as a differentiated structure of relationships thatare irreducible to a unitary or transcendental signifier. In a sense, Per-

cival discloses the impossibility of that signifier by representing the presencein absence of the magisterial or imperialist subject. Percival has no voicein the novel and only exists as a fiction in the discourse of the others.He virtually gives a name to what Gayatri Spivak would call, after Derrida,the "blank part of the text" ("Can the Subaltern Speak?" 294), thatinternal boundary that locates what has been excluded from representa-tion as the historical condition and limit of representation. Percival em-

bodies those "standards of the West" that effectively solve "the Oriental problem" through the use of "violent language." After this speech inwhich Bernard celebrates Percival as the God of eurocentric ideology,Rhoda chimes in with this figure of his relation to the social microscosmof the novel: "He is like a stone fallen into a pond round which minnows

swarm. Like minnows, we who had been shooting this way, that way,all shot round him when he came. Like minnows, conscious of the presenceof a great stone, we undulate and eddy contentedly" (The Waves 136).Almost literally, Percival is a speechless monument; and if his death oc-cupies the center of the novel, it can be said that he is really dead even

before he dies because he seems to manifest the death principle at theheart of European subjectivity. In a moment expressing the utopia of classidentity, when, according to Louis, "the circle in our blood, broken sooften, so sharply, for we are so different, closes in a ring"Â—at this momentJinny describes this social bonding as a "globe whose walls are madeof Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so deep sunk withinus that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man again"(The Waves 145). Woolfs novel implies, however, that the European culturethat produced Jinny and the others will have no difficulty coming up withanother Percival since he represents not a living presence but a symbolic

position that can be occupied by almost anyone. As a god, if he didnot exist, he would have to be invented. Again, just before the speechwhich identifies Percival with the "standards of the West," Neville com-ments that "Percival is going. . . . We are walled in here. But India lies




outside" (The Waves 135). Percival is the wall or boundary that deter-mines the form of the European subject. The voiceless unity he represents

is belied by the voices of the others which are so interwoven as to suggestthat the individual subject is an effect of the discourse of the Other or the symbolic process itself. The unity of the European subject and of Euro-

pean culture is an imaginary construction, but this construction justifiesimperialist authority and power by enabling the "violent language" of imperialist rule.

Of course, the violence of imperialism is not merely linguistic, arecognition which points toward the political limit of Woolfs novel andto what destabilizes its formal unity as a critique of imperialism. The Wavesas a cultural text is organized like a language. The boy Neville says asmuch in the first section when he responds to the process of schooling:"Each tense . . . means differently. There is an order in this world; there

are distinctions, there are differences in this world" (The Waves 21). Thenovel as a whole maps out a system of gender and class differences notthrough the dynamics of struggle between contradictory class positions but through the articulation of a set of relatively homogeneous subjectswho constitute a class formation. There are obvious and subtle differences

of gender and class among the six characters, but all of them are shaped by the imperialist ideology into which they are fitted and into which theyfit. Louis may be the boy "with a colonial accent" who becomes a globalcapitalist (The Waves 52); Rhoda may resist the rules that chain her "toone spot, one hour, one chair" until she takes her own life (204); andthe others may follow different social trajectories within their class as the

homosexual artist (Neville), the natural and nurturing mother (Susan),the sensuous woman of high society (Jinny), the man of culture (Bernard),or the official representative of imperialism (Percival). Nevertheless, theyall accept the rhetorical parameters of a world view that could be con-sidered the other side of Conrad's representation in Heart of Darkness. For example, in the same monologue in which she describes Percival as thegreat stone, Rhoda continues by describing the cultural unity of the group:

One, two; one, two; the heart beats in serenity, in confidence, in some tranceof well-being, in some rapture of benignity; and lookÂ—the outermost parts of the earthÂ—pale shadows on the utmost horizon, India for instance, rise into our

purview. The world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces arefetched up out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men,

and the vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of our proud and splendid province, since Percival, riding alone on a flea-bittenmare advances down a solitary path, has his camp pitched among desolate trees,and sits alone, looking at the enormous mountains. (137)

The collective identity of all these individualized characters depends onthe ethnocentric mapping of the world into areas of light and areas of darkness, the same economy of representation that operates in Heart of

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Darkness, however self-reflexive that work may be, and in most colonialfiction, including Forster's A Passage to India.

The "trance of well-being" that these privileged Europeans feel isfounded on the construction of non-Europeans as the other, captured bya world of darkness that can only be illuminated by the European gazeand the manipulation of the European will to knowledge. The world out-side European civilization becomes the object of European science andcommerce. (Later, Louis, who resembles Conrad's Kurtz in this instance,refers to rolling "the dark before me, spreading commerce where therewas chaos in the far parts of the world" [168].) The ultimate extremeof this ideology is the belief that the end of Western history is the endof history itself, the subversion of light by darkness. Marcus claims that"Woolf surrounds the text of the decline and fall of the West (the

transcendental self striving and struggling against death) with the text

of the East, random natural recurrence." By the text of the East, of course,she means the interludes as "a Western imitation or homage to the HinduGayatri" (155). But this reading still would have Woolf dividing the worldalong ethnocentric lines into a zone of light associated with culture (theWest) and a zone of darkness associated with nature (the East).

Such a view corresponds rather closely to what Louis says abouthistory: "But listen ... to the world moving through abysses of infinitespace. It roars; the lighted strip of history is past and our Kings andQueens; we are gone; our civilisation; the Nile; and all life. Our separatedrops are dissolved; we are extinct, lost in the abysses of time, in thedarkness" (The Waves 225). In this view, the "random natural recurrence"of the East and of all the non-European world is the realm of darknessfrom which the light of European civilization has torn itself away. Historywould be the exception to the rule of darkness and death, a "lighted strip."Such a description more or less corresponds with Marlowe's view of theCongo as "a prehistoric earth," a "night of first ages" (Heart of Darkness37), that is, the darkness that precedes history and that will presumablyfollow it. To the extent that the East is associated with "random natural

recurrence," it is also associated with death and the absence of history.Even in Marcus's reading, therefore, Woolf cannot be said to escape theethnocentrism of a European system of representation.

My purpose in this reading of a reading is not to make Woolf outto be an imperialist or a racist. There is no question in my mind thatin The Waves she struggles toward a critique of the European culturalsystem that she knew and that her family had participated in making.Her great grandfather, grandfather, and father were culture makers, andWoolf understood that the machine of imperialism could not operatewithout the conscious or unconscious cooperation of the many familymembers, friends, and acquaintances who made up her world. As Bernardrealizes after the death of Percival, the mechanisms of imperialist culturehave a life of their own: "The machine then works; I note the rhythm,




the throb, but as a thing in which I have no part, since he sees it nolonger. . . . About him my feeling was: he sat there in the centre. Now

I go to that spot no longer. The place is empty" (The Waves 153). Ineffect, Bernard says that his identity as a hegemonized subject of imperialism has died with the death of Percival; the center is empty. LikeWoolf herself in A Room of One's Own, he feels the "sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being thenatural inheritor of that civilisation," he becomes "outside of it, alienand critical" (Room 101). Bernard's alienation is not permanent, however;and he later has the fantasy of receiving a telephone call requesting him "toassume command of the British empire" (The Waves 261). Woolf, oneimagines, would never have dreamed of or desired to receive such a call.For her the center of the imperialist machine is always empty, but thatdoes not prevent it from operating with cold-blooded efficiency. Woolf

does not have to identify with or support imperialism to be implicatedin it, and she does not escape implication simply by representing (evenin a critical or alienated form) the ideological system that underpins theEuropean consciousness of the more privileged classes. In Heart of Darkness,Marlow comes to the realization that "All Europe contributed to themaking of Kurtz" (50). Marlow has also contributed to the making of Kurtz; and Conrad's novella ends with his telling a lie that puts the finaltouches on the historical construction of the Eurocentric subject. Marlowis a good company man who uses his talent for decentered and impres-sionistic storytelling to evade the responsibility of hearing any other voiceoutside the circle of European men sitting on the deck of the Nellie. Bytransferring to Marlow his own storytelling powers, Conrad is also im- plicated in a discursive order, the stylistic force and literary power of whichis rooted in the silence of the other. Conrad can say with Marlow, "Mineis the speech that cannot be silenced" (Heart of Darkness 38). Woolf can-not be silenced either, nor should she be. But it would be historicallynaÃ¯ve to separate Woolf the subject from the historical context that musthave exercised some determination on her literary production. It is con-tradictory to argue that, on the one hand, The Waves must be read asa fiction rooted in the historical context and, on the other, that the author fully transcended that context in order to produce an objective critiqueof it. The Waves must be read not only for what it says and represents but for what it does not represent or create a subjective space for.

Gayatri Spivak has argued that "the tropological deconstruction of masculism does not exempt us from performing the lie of imperialism"("Imperialism and Sexual Difference" 234). It seems to me that this "lieof imperialism" remains to be confronted in the politics of modernist form.Today it is possible to describe a political modernism that would includeat least the work of Woolf and Joyce and portions of other oeuvres byauthors as different as Conrad, Forster, Stein, Faulkner, H.D., and JeanRhys. All of these writers employ modernist style and form to frame Euro-

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pean culture in such a way as to exhibit its historical constructedness andnon-universalizability. The rule of modernist form is that no formÂ—not

even the form of realismÂ—is natural or self-evident and, for that reason, beyond history. Nevertheless, the form that modernism rules or drawsthe lines of, so to speak, does not exempt it from appealing to the sourcesof authorization and legitimacy in the culture of imperialism itself. Evena feminist-modernist like Woolf has to be situated by a critique such asthe one Spivak has tried to conduct in a dialogue with European andAmerican feminism. Her caveat is that

feminism within the social relations and institutions of the metropolis has somethinglike a relationship with the fight for individualism in the upwardly class-mobile

bourgeois politics of the European nineteenth century. Thus, even as we feministcritics discover the troping error of the masculinist truth-claim to universality or academic objectivity, we perform the lie of constituting a truth of global sisterhood

where the mesmerizing model remains male and female sparring partners of generalizable or universalizable sexuality who are the chief protagonists in thatEuropean contest. ("Imperialism and Sexual Difference" 226)

That modernist works have exposed the limits of European culture doesnot necessarily mean they have articulated the space in which the voiceof the other can be heardÂ—the other whose exclusion from the discourse

of modernism is one of the grounds of its authority. The lie of imperialismstill survives, even in the most radical deconstructions of Western culturelike The Waves and Finnegans Wake, in the belief that Western culture isable to know itself from the outside, is able to produce its own self-critiquewithout entailing the exclusion of the others who have traditionally suf-

fered from the construction of European subjectivities. Postmodernism,although it should never be read as a complete break with modernism,must be situated within the historical framework of postcolonial revolu-tions and struggles (McGee 169-171). This new historical situation enablesus to recognize the limits of modernist form in its implicit belief that formalrevolutions can bring about social revolutions by transforming the con-sciousness of the European subject.

In the postcolonial situation, form is always a matter of politicalstrategy that must be related to a larger historical context and specific

political goals. For example, African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugiwa Thiong'o, and Bessie Head use realism, allegory, and other modesof literary representation to produce a literature that is participatory in

the process of decolonization. These decisions are based not on a naÃ¯veunderstanding of language but on a commitment to the political effectsof writing that require an author to consider the social impact of literaryform. Achebe chooses realism and rejects the inward gaze of modernism; Ngugi writes historical fictions in English but then shifts to allegories and parables in a native African language; Bessie Head (in A Question of Power)employs what might be considered a modernist style to examine the con-




flict between colonizing and decolonizing forces in the mind of an Africanwoman. Still, even for these writers, there is no simple way out of the

historical contradictions that are the legacy of colonialism and the contin-uing reality of neocolonialism. The difference between their literary actsand the acts of modernists is that postcolonial writers cannot not hear theother, cannot fail to take into account the cultural difference that wouldconstitute the relation to knowledge in the postcolonial world. It is not

just feminism that runs the risk of reinscribing the lie of imperialism butany discursive practice that tries to generalize the grounds of its own pro-duction and value. For the moment, the only way beyond the politicsof modernist form is through the recognition of cultural difference andthe commitment to perpetual negotiation across the borders of that dif-ference without any appeal to universal grounds or authority. Transla-tion of cultural difference is both necessary and impossible. It is therefore

interminable.

Perhaps the greatest lie of imperialism is the belief that self-criticismand self-knowledge lead to self-liberation and knowledge of the other. InThe Waves, Woolf succeeds in articulating a perspective on Western culturethat challenges any reductive concept of its self-identity or universality.The value of Marcus's reading of The Waves is that it foregrounds theway Woolf has circumscribed her representation of European culture withdeterminations of class, gender, and race. There is no unified subject of Europe as a generalizable human essence. The characters in the novelare abstract constructions, not universal types. Like the waves of the sea,their lines of individuation are the illusions of a world in historical mo-

tion where nothing is ever the same except the difference of difference.

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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1988.

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Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. New York: Pantheon, 1987.

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Jeans, Sir James. The Mysterious Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1930.Lacan, Jacques. "Le sinthome." Ornicar? 10 (1977): 5-12.MacCarthy, Desmond. "J. K. Stephen." Portraits. London: Putnam, 1931.

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