Novel Worlds

The word ‘world’ recurs ninety-six times in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a work more commonly understood as a Modernist experiment with temporality and voice, but which might also be thought of as one of the novel’s most self-reflexive engagements with world-making. The increasingly extended speech acts of six voices are encapsulated within typographically distinct interludes, whose description of the gradual revelation of sky and firmament and the movement of light and water over the course of a single day recalls the foundational world-creation of Genesis. In the effortful process of extracting character, context, narrative time and sequence from the continuous present of the voices’ attributed speech, the reader is invited to confront her co-implication in the taken-for-granted work of constructing novel worlds. Each articulation of ‘world’ contributes to distinguishing each voice as character. ‘The light falls upon real objects now. Here are knives and forks. The world is displayed, and we too, so that we can talk’, says Neville. ‘I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world’, says Bernard (Woolf, The Waves 58).