Over and again in The Waves, words are described as being like bubbles. It is Bernard who speaks of them thus, almost obsessively using the metaphor of bubbles lifting into the air or moving through water to illustrate how words fill his mind. There is an unbidden quality in the way they arise, and there are nearly always more than enough of them.
Words are round things therefore – full of air and possessed of a lovely weightlessness that means we cannot keep hold of them. We find that a word can also be a balloon “that sails over treetops”. Words can be smoke rings, rising just as bubbles do and containing an empty centre (which perhaps leaves room for other words to pass through). And in a passage of almost disturbing strangeness, a sentence is a string of six little fish, drawn from a boiling cauldron where millions of others wriggle like boiling silver. These words are most definitely alive – all movement and squirm and shimmer.
Halfway through the novel Bernard describes the pressing need “to free these bubbles from the trap-door in my head”. Perhaps it is their plentifulness that is too much to bear. Perhaps this is what Woolf herself found too. What could be more unbearable than too many words, other than there being none at all?
*
Bernard knows himself well enough to associate his personal charm with his “flow of language.” He remembers how his friends used to love listening to him describing things under the elm trees on the playing fields at school, exclaiming “that’s a good one, that’s a good one” with childish delight. He calls himself “a natural coiner of words, a blower of bubbles through one thing and another” which might sound frivolous if it were not so terribly necessary.
Is all this too easy to be meaningful? On the next page it seems that the answer might be yes:
“I am embarrassed by my own fertility. I could describe every chair, table and luncher copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and thither with its veil of words for everything.”
I’m intrigued (and slightly mystified) by the proximity of bubbles and veil. They seem to me to be such opposite things. Bubbles glisten and shimmer; they hold light and reflect it. A veil is dull and lightless – more likely to obscure and blur and deaden. When we draw a veil over something we turn away from uncomfortable and painful detail, from the precision of the truth of the matter. I don’t think I understand how these two metaphors can both be true.
Although (and I am writing this later) might it be the case that words form themselves into a veil when there are too many of them? Might an easy tumbling flow of words mean that there are suddenly too many possible versions of the Thing (the table or the chair or the luncher)? The particularity is lost in a sort of foggy congealing.
We know how keen Woolf is on the solid matter-of-factness of objects (the thingness of things etc). Might words that won’t stop bubbling up become the opposite of themselves – a dull cloud that thickens and obscures? The shimmery lightness is gone. There is no more delight.
I will have to leave it there. I can find no other way of understanding it.
*
And when we come to the very end of the book – to the unbearable bleak wordlessness and extinction – thickness/opaqueness and light/transparency surface again in three short sentences:
“But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red – even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through.”
Everything is here: the urgent necessity of describing the world, the presence/absence of language, the world disappearing because the words are gone, the self disappearing because the words are gone… Reading these sentences we could not possibly imagine seeing a bubble or a balloon. There is a heavy, clotted feeling – made of monosyllables and harsh consonants. The veil smothers all of the world with its opaqueness and deadness.
I wonder if this is the only way the novel could be made to stop – with language itself giving up as if to clear the path for what is next. And what is next is the very last thing: to ride against Death on a thrashing horse – a horse which is no different from the one in India from which Percival fell and found his own ending.
we have scarcely broken into our hoard 