The Medium of Art

Abstract

The Waves carries to its logical extreme Twain’s determination to have no plot and no moral,¹ as well as Stevenson’s insistence that the writer’s true calling is to words as medium not as meaning. That belief had dominated the experience of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, for whom words are a form of play: ‘Alice had not the slightest idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but she thought they were nice grand words to say’ (AW, 27). Even the disposition of individual letters can be arbitrary: ‘Do cats eat bats?’ or ‘Do bats eat cats?’ (AW, 28). Woolf repudiates in The Waves the author’s right to construct out of language a shaped vision of the future such as she allowed to Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Instead she explores other ways of using words² and of defining their relation to the passage of time as it conditions the development of the self from childhood to old age. Some writers for children realised that the rejection of the moral and improving tale implied a rejection of cause and consequence, of destinies worked out in time. Sully and many others recognised that the idea of sequence was foreign to the young child, who had to learn that concept through the body and through the acquisition of language.³