The Waves and the Second Noble
Truth, part 2
“Louis was disgusted by the nature of human flesh; Rhoda by our
cruelty; Susan could not share; Neville wanted order; Jinny love; and so on. We
suffered terribly as we became separate bodies.” – Bernard’s summing up
First, an update: it seems like
as soon as I wrote that last post about my job search, the interview requests
started coming in. I was offered several classes and accepted two each at NYC
College of Technology and Marymount Manhattan College. Two more weeks to full
time teaching! I’m nervous, but very much looking forward to back-to-school (and
back to bringing in a paycheck…).
Meanwhile, back to our friends in
The Waves. If you’ll remember from
last time, I told you that the second Noble Truth in Buddhism is the truth of
the origin of suffering. Suffering comes from somewhere; it comes from our
inability or unwillingness to let go of desire. In The Waves, Woolf returns to
her characters’ desires again and again. Very often, they state their longings specifically
and straightforwardly, usually accompanied by the suggestion that desire,
and/or the character’s inability to fulfill desire, causes them to suffer.
For example:
Jinny
Jinny is a sensuous being,
attached to matters of the flesh, of sensation. From the very beginning, when
they are small children, Jinny is particularly aware of physicalality. “The
back of my hand burns, but the palm is clammy and damp with dew” (4). “I burn,
I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow” (6). In addition to what is
happening to her own body, Jinny is constantly monitoring how others respond to
her physical presence. In a way, she is detached from the worries and
preoccupations of the mind that plague her counterparts, yet she is not
completely free, after all; she must be wanted by men to feel secure. "Only
when I have lain alone on the hard ground, watching you play your game, I begin
to feel the wish to be singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by one
person who comes to find me, who cannot keep himself from me…" (32). This
need is what separates Jinny from complete happiness since, as she admits
freely, eventually she will grow old, and the male gaze will no longer be a
constant.
Neville
Like Jinny, Neville, too, wants
love. But the type of love he desires is different. A passing tryst is not
enough for Neville; he desires full possession of another, a soul-love: "But
by some inscrutable law of my being sovereignty and the possession of power
will not be enough; I shall always push through curtains to privacy, and want
some whispered words alone" (42). At first, his love object is the silent
Percival, admired by all the characters but particularly worshipped by Neville.
As my epigraph from Bernard suggests, another of Neville’s desires is “order,”
a quality he also finds epitomized by Percival. "The reign of chaos is
over. [Percival] has imposed order" (88). As we all know, order is not
something that can be maintained at every moment, thus, Neville’s grasping for
it gets in the way of his happiness. As, too, does the fact (or his perception)
that he “excite[s] pity in the crisis of life, not love” (93).
Susan
A good little hippie like me is
inclined, at first, to feel like Susan is the one who’s got it all figured out.
Her desires are so wholesome, so
natural, that initially they almost seem selfless. "I want to give, to be
given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions" (37). "I shall
go upstairs to my room, and turn over my own things, locked carefully in the
wardrobe; my shells; my eggs; my curious grasses. … So gradually I shall turn
over the hard thing that has grown here in my side" (38). How can one find
fault with a person whose prized “possessions” are shells, eggs, and grasses?
And yet, freedom from desire is not about desiring the right things, it’s about not clinging to desire at all. Susan
clings to the Earth and eventually to her children, whose lives are, naturally,
more dear to her than her own yet whose needs and wishes, one might argue,
usurp her ability to be free of wishes altogether. "I shall never have
anything but natural happiness. It will almost content me. … I shall be debased
and hide-bound by the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity. I shall push
the fortunes of my children unscrupulously. I shall hate those who see their
faults. I shall lie basely to help them. I shall let them wall me away from
you, from you and from you. Also, I am torn with jealousy. ... I love with such ferocity that it kills
me when the object of my love shows by a phrase that he can escape. He escapes,
and I am left clutching..." (95). Here Woolf’s language strongly echoes
that of Buddhism; Susan’s “ferocious clutching” keeps her from finding true
peace.
Louis
Louis constantly reminds the
reader, and himself, that he is different, isolated from the other characters
by his father, “a banker in Brisbane.” As an Australian, Louis, though
technically British, would have been seen by most in England in the 1930s as
inhabiting a lower position in the English class system than those who were born
on the British isle. The desire to be embraced as an equal among his peers is at
the forefront of Louis’s desires from a young boy: "Yet that [the boasting
boys] is what we wish to be, Neville and I. I watch them go with envy"
(32), to an old man: “Life has been a terrible affair for me. I am like some
vast sucker, some glutinous, some adhesive, some insatiable mouth. I have tried
to draw from the living flesh the stone lodged at the centre” (147).
Interestingly, Louis seems to realize that there is some benefit to ceasing to
desire, and even to exist, yet he expresses doubt that such peace will ever be
his. “Perhaps I shall never die, shall never attain even that continuity and
permanence […]” (148). He will likely not, I should think, until he stops
seeking continuity and permanence in a world that so rarely provides such
comforts.
But to fully appreciate the
extent to which Jinny, Susan, Neville, and Louis are caught up in the circle of
desire, thwarted fulfillment, and more desire, we must have something to
measure them against. Rhoda, Bernard, and the silent, off-stage specter of
Percival provide just such a contrast. Be looking for a post about them later
this week!
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