Bernard as the Vortex

I'll admit, since reading (on pg xliv of the introduction) what Woolf noted in response to early reviews of The Waves (“Odd, that they . . . shd. praise my characters when I meant to have none.”), I've been searching for an alternate way to read the various speakers. Bernard, particularly in his final “summing up” (hmm...) provides an interesting opportunity to do so. As I mentioned in class, I'm half tempted to read his final soliloquy less as a soliloquy and more as a plurivocity (though not an equivocity, perhaps, since the narrative seems inadequate in it's unequal representation of each speaker's perspective); I'd like to develop this further; like Louis, give it a name:

The various “speakers” of the text, including the mysterious narrator of the interludes, seem to collapse in on Bernard, instantly losing their individuation––which is strange since we've led to expect after the flower metaphor that, as petals, they would eventually fall into the perfect singularity of death. But in a sense, they have; every voice achieves oneness in the moment of “Oh, Death;” a simultaneous dissolution and solution. Bernard, then, becomes an allegory for “phrases,” for language itself, for that which is “in excess” (to quote Dr. Stuber) of the individual, imposed by society, and ruthlessly narrativistic in it's framings. But here, language transcends and undermines itself by questioning that very narrativization, a further dissoulution.

It seems that time and space are inevitably, inextricably involved; here's where the Vortex coils. If we trace the directionality of narrative time (and thus, narrative space) as linear, albeit fragmented, then Bernard's summing-up, as a self-reflexive narrative, is something of a spiral, recalling Rhoda's characteristically(?) prophetic exclamation on pg 164: “...and the table cloth and its yellow stains, far from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual.” This spiraling directionality of narrative/understanding is both entropic (narrowing to the individual fragment), and cubist ("embracing" each fragment). The spiral geometry also stands in contrast to all the rings of the novel and their unfulfilled promises of perfect wholeness or completion.

Furthemore, it seems worth noting that the Vorticists (a literary and artistic movement which included Ezra Pound and busied itself with representing the Vortex by combining cubism and futurism) were supposedly acquainted with Woolf's Bloomsbury Set, although from what little I've been able to dredge up from the great intellectual sewer that is the internet, they didn't have the best of relations. I can also see a certain Vorticism in Rhoda's oblong and square (which calls to mind the abstractions of Cubist representation), as well as her petals in a bowl.