The Waves

”The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves. […] Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises.” (A Writer’s Diary 141)


The Waves was published in 1931 and may be Woolf’s most experimental work; a dense weave of narratives from six different perspectives, tracing the lives of a group of friends from childhood to middle-age.
From the beginning of her work on the text, Woolf thought about it in terms of its aurality. In one of her earliest diary entries relating to The Waves, she ponders: ”Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises.” (A Writer’s Diary 141) 
We hear bird choruses, drunken Oxbridge boys singing in the dark of night, soundscapes of ”wheels; dogs; men shouting; church bells; the chorus beginning“, but most of all, we hear the chorus of Woolf’s protagonists: The multi-perspectival narration of earlier novels like Mrs Dalloway is intensified in The Waves’ to become a tight weave of voices which makes up almost the entire fabric of the text. The chorus indeed seems an appropriate form for the negotiation of personal and collective identity which is central to The Waves: In antique Greek theatre, subjectivity emerges as it is offset against the chorus, the modern subject is heard in the singularity of their voice. Contemporary post-dramatic theatre explores forms of choric speaking as a metaphor for precarious and fluid post-modern subjectivities. 
Woolf is poised along this continuum as she gives the individual subject a clearly discernible voice while making this voice part of a narrative structure that continually recasts the Self as Other. As Woolf has one of her characters say about the others: ”With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness.“ (The Waves 87)