Spatial Form and Color in The Waves

Abstract

color occurs in the soliloquies also, but there it is subtly tinged with perceptual and emotional values. This is one way the characters show the light through: 'Look,' said Rhoda; 'listen. Look how the light becomes richer, second by second, and bloom and ripeness lie everywhere; and our eyes, they range round this room ... seem to push through curtains of colour, red, orange, umber and queer ambiguous tints, which yield like veils and close behind them, and one thing melts into another' (W, p. 96). Here Rhoda's awareness of color is heightened by the glow that pervades the group in response to Percival's presence. But Rhoda's hypersensitivity is more often sign of vulnerability. She sees colors and shapes in acute isolation, rather than integrated parts of whole design. 'The gold has faded between the trees ... and slice of green lies behind them, elongated like the blade of knife seen in dreams, or some tapering island on which nobody sets foot' (W, p. 153). Words themselves become abstract colors: white words,' said Susan, 'like stones one picks up by the seashore.' . .. 'Those yellow words, those fiery words,' said Jinny (W, pp. 14-15). Numbers become spatial, rather than intellectual, forms: as [Rhoda] stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodges in those white circles; it steps through those white loops into emptiness, alone (W, p. 16). Sounds, colors, shapes are churned into one sound, steel blue, circular (W, p. 97)-a synaesthetic image that recalls Rimbaud or Kandinsky.31 Bernard, the writer, is more detached observer of phenomena of light and color (and of his own ego) that Rhoda is. 'The great red pot,' he observes, 'is now reddish streak in wave of yellowish green. The world is beginning to move past me ... like the waves of the sea ...' (W, p. 134). Seen in juxtaposition to Bernard's mandala image of a six-sided flower; made of six lives, Rhoda's constructivist image of a square ... stood upon the oblong (W, p. 162) expresses the awkwardness of her effort at integration.32 Susan's abstract image of a slab of pale yellow . . . spreading away until it meets purple stripe (W, p. 6) comprises the essential colors and lines of her beloved wheat fields and sky. Freedman (The Lyrical Novel, p. 248), who points out this symbolic dimension, nevertheless observes that such motifs place fig-