Woolfs The Waves and the Empire Virginia Woolfs novel The Waves seems like an extreme experiment

in the use of the stream of consciousness technique and multiple voices echoing very differing subjectivities. The novel seems to be taking experimentation to a whole new level. The narrative technique employed by Woolf is hard to categorise in terms of narrative genre and text falls between prose and poetry, but what is striking is that the novel seems to have no coherent point of view. There is a lot of experimentation, probably too much. The novel apparently tries to construct reality in the ephemeral way in terms of very widely differing subjectivities. Her opinion on realist kind of writing which she seems completely to disagree with comes rather clearly towards the end of the narrative when instead of a babel of voices it is Bernard only who begins to speak. She calls it the biographical style and about it she says: if one begins letters
Dear Sir, ends then your faithfully; one cannot despise these phrases laid like Roman roads..since they compel us to walk in step like civilized people with a slow and measured tread of policemen though one may be humming any nonsense under ones breath at the same time..

She seems to be saying here(or Bernard) that this realistic mode of writing is like a habit and when she says that it compels us to walk in step she probably means that it is a means of repression because it lays down the parameters of good writing in such definite terms. She also seems to be saying, given her feministic views that it is a patriarchal mode of writing also in the sense of its rules and it being repressive. She seems to have used the word nonsense here in a positive sense implying what is nonsensical from the point of view of realist writing. Although this view of writing is radical and liberating but there is point in George Lukacs saying in his essay The ideology of Modernism that modernism through its excessive focus on what is personal, solitary and subjective tends to move away from a coherent perspective. Of course the dangers of realism has also been often talked about. In this context the postmodernist theorist Jean Francois Lyotards view that realism simply produces identifiable images which caters to an already assured audience or readership. The Waves is a radical narrative in the way it is able to talk of very different people and views but this aspect of the novel does not seem to work very well when it come to talking about India. India figures in the realm of the imagination of many of the characters from time to time especially when they talk of Percival who is said to have gone to India and unfortunately died there. The Waves is not an easy novel to interpret and the narrative is very poetic and fragmentary. A look at the few certainties in the novel might be

interesting. These aspects of the novel which can be pointed out or identified most easily are few. Some of the elements in the story which help the reader get some hold on coherence are the recurring elements in the story such as the mannerisms of some of the characters and their habits and obsessions. The connecting links can be said to be basically about character traits. One of the most easily identifiable aspects in the story is the way the character of Percival who seems to have died in India keeps evoking memories in the minds of the several characters in the story. Percival it seems had gone to India to make fortune but unfortunately seems to have died soon after leaving from England.

All the characters in the story are close friends who in spite of their very widely different subjectivities seem to be able to connect with each other intermittently. However the six friends seem to form a closed circle and there is hardly anything in the text which is outside their subjectivities. The character of Percival too is almost always seen through the eyes or minds of these characters when they think about him and about their relationship with him. It should be noted that though the characters hardly ever agree about anything except fleetingly sometimes their views about Percival seem to be not much different from each other. Each one of them think of him as a heroic figure and almost all of them seems to like him and nobody has anything much to say against him. Another element in the story which occurs with alarming frequency is the talk about Louiss Australian accent which he seems to be very conscious about. Through the kind of complexes he feels and the way he is almost never able to be comfortable is another element in the novel which keeps coming back again and again. He is said to be conscious even with servants. Although we hardly ever see any of the six friends making fun of him because of his accent he continues to brood about it all the time. Louis extreme consciousness about the way he uses the English language and the repeated references about his father being a rich banker in Brisbane seems to indicate the kind of racism prevelant in English society of that time. Louiss accent which is a big problem for him and the way Percival is talked about in the text can be looked upon in terms of the discourse of the other in the novel. The character of Percival although almost absent serves to highlight the orientalising tendencies in the characters and indicates a rare unity in their perceptions remarkably absent otherwise in the novel. The way the character of Percival unites the differing perspectives of the characters can be demonstrated from a passage from chapter four of the text:

He is conventional; he is a hero..Now, when he is about to leave us, to go to India, all these trifles come together. He is a hero. Oh yes, that is not to be denied, and when he takes his seat by Susan, whom he loves, the occasion is crowned. We who yelped like jackals biting at each others heels now assume the sober and confident air of soldiers in the presence of their captain. We who have been separated by our youth..who have sung like eager birds each his own song and tapped with the remorseless and savage egotism of the young..or perched solitary outside some bedroom window and sang of love, of fame and other single experiences so dear to the callow bird with a yellow tuft on its beak, now come nearer..

He is conventional and yet he is a hero because it is still considered even in modern or maybe we should say modernist times it is considered heroic by these group of young people who seem to be very conscious of not using false generalising phrases. What is rather surprising is that nobody disagrees or says something significantly different about Percival. They all are proud of his heroism. His being conventional which is still considered heroic is valued in such a united and even typical fashion because it is considered the right thing to continue the work of the empire. Just two pages after the above mentioned passage in the same chapter we again encounter Bernard saying that:
We have come together, at a particular time, to this particular spot. We are drawn into this communion by some deep, some common emotion. Shall we call it love? Shall we say love of Percival because Percival is going to India?

It is difficult to detect irony here. In the same chapter there is a conjuration once again by Bernard of what can surely be called an example of a highly stereotypical image about India:
I see India, said Bernard. I see the low long shore; i see the tortuous lanes of stamped mud that lead in and out among ramshackle pagodas..I see a pair of bullocks who drag a low cart along the sun-baked road. The cart sways incompetently from side to side. Now one wheel sticks in the rut, and at once innumerable natives in loin clothes swarm around it, chattering excitedly. But they do nothing. Time seems endless, ambition vain. Over all broods a sense of the uselessness of human exertion. There are strange sour smells. An old man in a ditch continues to chew betel and to contemplate his navel. But now, behold, Percival advances; Percival rides a flea-bitten mare, and wears a sun helmet. By applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. He rides on; the multitudes cluster around him, regarding him as if he were-what indeed he is-a God

The passage is clearly a typically orientalist conception of India and includes many of the typical biases associated with it. However there is some scope for ambiguity here. Woolf can be acquitted here from a postcolonial point of view if this particular passage is not unconscious but a deliberate attempt at marking out the reified images about India or the orient that has gained such wide currency in England and Europe in general. But this does not seem very likely to happen since the very next

lines issuing from the mouth of Rhoda are, Unknown with or without secret, it does not matter..he is like a stone under which minnows swarm. Like minnows, we who had been shooting this way, that way, all shot round him when he came. From these passages it is clear that in spite of the crisis of modernity captured so well by the several differing tastes and voices expressed by the characters, the opinion on colonisation and empire remain homogenous and simplistic. We see again and again how Percival is able to unite them somewhat in their unquestioned and unequivocal support for the colonial regime. The text of the novel is usually such that it does not allow meaning to stabilise or which allows for more than only a few readings. There is constant and shifting play between the signifiers(to speak of it in terms of linguistics) and does not allow reification to take place. But Woolfs text cannot be said to be consistent with itself. The views about colonialism can thus be said to be the problematic and ideological unconscious of the text. And the one thing we can know besides the significance of Percival the text is the fact that the friends belong to the somewhat elite sections of the British society who although alienated with several aspects of an urban modernity are yet able to identify easily with the interests of the empire. The ideology of the empire seems to have always already internalised(Althussers term) the discourse of colonialism which works by stereotyping the colonies. This is why it is not surprising when we hear something like this from the Indian-American poet and writer Meena Alexander in an essay titled The shock of sensation: On Reading The Waves as a Girl in India, and as a Woman in America:
How could I doubt that I would forever be part of that Oriental problem she alluded to in The Waves, the dark poor world Percival was riding into, the world of those who are pitiful.. and didnt she write of how the violent language that Percival uses solves the problem, sets things right? If I sensed the irony in Woolfs tone, it cut no ice with me, for I was clear on which side she stood, the side of those Gandhi had struggled against, those to whom India would forever be a series of flat pictures, dark natives, painted dancers, mud, heat, dust- all the fragility and decay of a lesser ontology, an elsewhere that could never compete with the English present, an India that seemed illusory never more than temporarily run up buildings in some Oriental exhibition.

Alexander seems to have encountered her cultural other as Aijaz Ahmad seems to have done when he read Frederich Jameson in his essay Thirld-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. The technique used in the novel which is very different from a linear narrative although not subversive when looking at the colony is affective in other ways most significantly by questioning the mode of writing widely popular as realism which often tens to be simplistic and not able to confront or

represent the complexities and the incoherence of modern existence and the ephemeral nature of human experiences. One of the clues to understanding her view on the colonies comes from this passage in the last chapter in the book when the Bernard narrative has already replaced the voices of the different characters. Here he talks of the colonies in general that, What is to be done about India, Ireland and Morocco? Old gentlemen answer the question standing decorated under chandeliers. One finds one surprisingly supplied with information. What is meant here that that these people old gentlemen talk about it without knowing much about it, maybe like E. M. Forster. But at the same time although these characters, these friends against whom these old gentlemen are surely intended to be the other are also not able to present any less demeaning view of the orient or India even if they dont think they know much about it and what they say about Percival might be ironical.