The Politics of Modernist Form; or, Who Rules The Waves?

Abstract

After recent publication of Jane Marcus' essay, Brittania Rules The Waves, interpretations of Virginia Woolf s novel cannot legitimately ignore its political content. As for myself, before I had opportunity to read essay, I had already written briefly on implicit critique of imperialism in The Waves (McGee 116-120) in such a way as to suggest my agreement with Marcus that novel is about the submerged mind of empire (the words of J. M. Coetzee, cited by Marcus 136). Still, Marcus goes beyond my understanding of an implicit and partial critique to argue that an explicit critique of imperialism constitutes center and organizing principle of novel. Marcus has articulated a new space for reading The Waves—a space that should become enabling ground for future readings of novel. By articulating this space in form of a political interpretation, she also makes visible internal boundary or blank space that any interpretation hollows out of itself. This blank space allows me to pose question of literary form that Marcus fails to address adequately with her emphasis on transparency of social content and literary references. She does not claim, of course, that meaning of novel is obvious but that it becomes obvious once text has been plugged into specific dimensions of historical context from which it derives. Marcus wants to reverse critical history of The Waves which has tended to identify novel as a static representation of upper-class culture and forms of identity. On contrary, Marcus insists, the project of cultural studies . . . now allows one to read The Waves as a narrative about culture making (139). I agree with this state-