Brian Dillon on What Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Means to Him

In time he will say that The Waves by Virginia Woolf has been the most important novel in his life; but at twenty he does not use the word of this or any book, and would think it pompous, embarrassing, imprecise, conventional. The novel invites and shrouds and protects, then presses on him for years in recollection, worrying the edges of imagination.

On November 28, 1928, Woolf wrote in her diary about The Waves. The novel, she said, had surfaced or materialized while she was finishing To the Lighthouse at Rodmell in Sussex: she looked from her window towards the marshes and was struck by the image of “a fin in a waste of water.” Or perhaps The Waves arrived two years earlier, when she wondered what it would be to conceive and write a certain life: “Yet I am now and then haunted by the semi-mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident—say the fall of a flower—might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist—nor time either.” Or was the origin of The Waves, which Woolf published in 1931, to be found much further back, in the pages of The Voyage Out, where Terence Hewet wishes to write a novel about silence, “the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” Difficult also to say where a book begins, or if it begins, and has not been washing or breaking over you from the start.

It is tempting to say of this novel that it is Woolf ’s most abstract—on first reading, he recalls the little he knows about Cubism—or, as at least three of the half-dozen copies he will eventually own declares on its cover, the most poetic. In her earliest draft, which Woolf completed on April 20, 1930, poetry and abstraction have not yet lit everything up, clarifying and confounding in the same moment. In this first iteration of the novel Woolf had been calling The Moths, she is herself still too present, too obviously working out, and even theorizing, how this book should be. The breakthrough: realizing she had to give the novel over to her characters, who are at times hardly characters, barely distinguishable, and give it up also to an interrupting—or is it invigilating, knowing and directing?—voice, a narrator who speaks from nowhere and says nothing about the six speakers (and one non-speaker) who make up the cast of The Waves. We start with this voice, its plain past tense which he will always misremember as an insistent present: “The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.”

The Waves does not teach but confirms that everything is also something else.

Perpetually, but only nine times in the course of the novel, the waves return, with them the light and the land, this voice attending, watching, listening, coining further images to describe the images it finds, turning every element in the scene into its luminous stand-in: “the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire.”

The Waves does not teach but confirms that everything is also something else. He has this lesson already by heart, in his bones, learned first from Roland Barthes, for whom meanings proliferate, the more oblique the better. He has not yet thought of this tendency, taste or doctrine of RB’s in terms of metaphor: a term drilled and defined into dullness at school—crudely and artificially distinguished from simile. Instead, RB’s habit is a kind of bravado or affront, a refusal of the way things are, the way they ought to be. It’s not that the veil of appearance—of advertising, common sense, literature itself or photography—is torn away, as Dennis Potter’s review over-insisted on the back of B’s copy of Mythologies. Something else: unwarranted meanings off to the side—per RB, connotations. (He never reads the word without for a moment thinking: contaminations.) The world of things, bodies, texts and sensations as a plane or a web of connections and diversions, all of it on the signifying surface.

Depths are obfuscating, Sontag says in her essay on RB. Turning one thing into another, reasoning and revealing that this is in fact that, is what he considers his task as a reader, student, critic, theorist. And as a writer? A difference between RB and VW, between thought and poetry: in The Waves, metaphoric becoming, mundane and secular transubstantiation, happens anew in almost every sentence, whereas RB seems to pursue a figure more thoroughly but it remains an event in his prose, not the pure texture of the writing. Transformation is how VW’s writing proceeds: like and like and like. It is one of the reasons (rhythm is another) she could not herself, so she wrote to Vita Sackville-West, tell prose from poetry.

The Waves is above all a book of images. These images can seem peculiarly static, ingrained or imprinted, especially when they sink from one character’s soliloquy only to resurface elsewhere, as if these six, maybe all seven, can read each other’s minds. (A collective telepathy when it comes to imagery is also a special power, or a curse, of characters in Shakespearean tragedy.) A fin in the waste of waters, such as Woolf had seen or imagined through her window at Rodmell. An orientalist image of women with red pitchers on their heads, camels by the Nile. Scenes pictured in childhood through the greenery: a grand house where gardeners sweep the lawn with huge brooms. The merest details, pictures in the mind that are made of almost nothing: the wet metal of fish scales, a chain of silver bubbles rising from the bottom of a saucepan, white ships that are petals floating in a basin, the silver and glass (the persistence of things) above with six or seven faces float in turn, like petals . Image on top of image.

Later, the book will seem a test of sorts, both in his own mind and the minds of various (male) writers and critics.

Alongside these images, a profusion of metaphor, metonymy, simile: a richness of substitution, conjuring one thing out of another, proving all things subtly or strangely not themselves. This is also that. The narrator of the interludes is the novel’s first coiner of comparisons: an addict of like and as if. “The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine bottle has sunk and left the glass green.” Bernard, the fabricator of phrases, is the book’s second devotee of metaphor, therefore also the first to beguile the others with the potential and pitfalls of figural language. Neville, the future poet: “Bernard goes on talking. Up they bubble—images. ‘Like a camel’  ‘a vulture.” The camel is a vulture; the vulture is a camel; for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose but seductive. “Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over one; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels.” But metaphor’s flight is also a trap, and Rhoda for one wants to get out of it: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?”

He does not know it yet, but the extravagant metaphorical strain in Woolf, the feeling that all objects or bodies or views might translate at any second into any other, this quality is general across her work, essays as well as fiction, and will one day exercise and occupy him to an almost vexing degree: many hours of wonder and learning, years of envy and aspiration. At the same time, no ambition to read all of Woolf, no urge towards expertise or exhaustion, and always a hampering fear that the wrong text will ruin her whole oeuvre or that of any other writer he loves. What if the same intensity of image cannot be found elsewhere in the work, what then? Decades later, because he has been avoiding it for decades, he will read in the pages of Orlando: “Trees were withered hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in fact, was something else.” Woolf ’s love of metaphor—her suspicion and mockery of it too.

The strange unity of voice among the six speaking characters in The Waves, their tendency to mimic, repeat or rhyme with each other—how, if at all, does he understand this? As a pure and total aesthetic pattern, as a plane of iteration and recall, he finds it hypnotizing. A fascination and rapture, close to boredom, unlike anything he has read, so that it occurs to him he might open the book at any random page and start reading. He will never actually do this, compelled instead, when he finally rereads the novel in his fifties, to start over from the first page, and, having finished, start again, and again. After a certain point, he will probably be reading The Waves for the rest of his life.

He does not speak to his father about The Waves. Among the peculiarities of the novel’s depiction of childhood, youth, the procession into adulthood, is this: unlike many or most such portraits (including Joyce’s Portrait) here is a book in which parents are minimally present, as if they live in a separate, parallel world only now and then touching the lives of Woolf ’s characters—like the droning grown-ups in Charlie Brown cartoons. The Waves is the only novel by Woolf that his father owns, but is it the only one he has read? The son does not think to ask. Later, the book will seem a test of sorts, both in his own mind and the minds of various (male) writers and critics, some of whom consider The Waves unreadably extreme among Woolf ’s writings. You’ve read The Waves? You’re a better man than I am! Which means: You’ve been taken in by this obvious sham, this pretentious and failed experiment? What is wrong with you? The temptation exists to consider this hostility essentially English: an aspect of embarrassment, a century later, at the very fact of Woolf ’s modernism.

But then he hears the same more baldly stated and without the element of comic Anglo self-deprecation, from an older (male) American writer. Unreadable, makes no sense. Thirty-five years after first reading The Waves, he is teaching an essay by Woolf—“On Being Ill” (1929)—when one of his students announces that The Waves is Woolf ’s greatest novel, much “weirder” than the others, and half the class eagerly agrees. What are they seeing, or hearing, that the wisdom of certain elders refuses? Formal audacity? A democracy of voices? Figural verve and peculiarity? Or is it the curious youthfulness of a novel in which even when old and near death its characters seem young?

Somewhere in his reading he registers that Woolf lost her mother early—Julia Stephen died in 1895, when her daughter was thirteen—but he thinks nothing of it. He has not yet begun to wonder if the fact of his own mother’s death affects him or signifies, except as embarrassment, except as an aspect of his past to be escaped as soon as life will allow. And then he learns that Woolf ’s father died when she was twenty-two.

1989—he is reading The Waves in the back garden at home, which has just passed from the green overgrowth of early summer (exam time) to the burned aspect of high season. As he reads, and perhaps for the first time in his life, he too feels sunlit and gorged with time, with nostalgia for a period just passed. He has never before imagined that childhood, his kind of childhood, might be a subject for serious writing. The early pages of The Waves are liquid with green light, the garden or grounds a place of languor and surprise, sudden kisses, bright animal eyes, solitary daydream and jealousy. The mood into which the novel puts B is unlike any provoked in him before, not by a book at any rate: the lazing, rapt aesthetic inventories of Wilde and Huysmans now seem tasteless and immature, RB’s verbal and syntactic joys and rigors remain at some mental distance from the reading body, which with Woolf (or this version of Woolf) feels thrilled and lulled at the same time, stunned and debilitated in the exercise of a supreme concentration that verges often on boredom, somnolence, a sinking in and out of himself, towards and away from the page. He cannot swim, but feels himself fully immersed in this book. He has read difficult novels since his mid-teens—though not yet for university, not really—and strangely voiced, abstractly attentive poets (his father’s cool blue Faber collection of Emily Dickinson) outside of any academic situation. He could not say that Woolf ’s novel interests him as he has been interested by some of the writers he is asked to read at college: certain Jacobean revenge tragedies, the odes of John Keats, A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”, the Anglo-Saxon “Wife’s Lament.” These and others ignite an intellectual vigilance and formal inquiry or adventure in him—he hardly thinks, for example, about the emotional import of the odes, or the actual mystery in Poe—instances of which amount over years to a training, a body of learning, though he never experiences it as such. No writing has done this to him: for the duration of his reading The Waves he goes down into a reverie or stupor, about which some remaining lucid part of him is uncertain how to feel. Is this a depth of literary experience to which he must give in, or an aesthetic spell verging on kitsch? Has he construed all this beauty incorrectly, falling for it fully when he should be alert to formal experiment, the dissolution of character, diminution of plot, the austere adventure of Modernism? And what of a certain sociological aspect? Why is he reading about these sad but gilded English lives of a century (is it a century?) ago, succumbing at the end of the 1980s to this gorged and gorgeous sensibility so remote from his own time and place? He is painfully aware of the novel as wholly new and unnervingly old-fashioned.

It is the first novel he has ever read that makes him consider seriously the form of a human life.

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From Ambivalence: An Education by Brian Dillon. Copyright © 2026. Available from New York Review Books.