SOURCE: "Design in Motion: Words, Music, and the Search for Coherence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Arnold Schoenberg," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 5-22

Academics, alas, can be surprisingly narrow-minded. Shaped by our institutions, we have a tendency to divide ideas into neat little teachable, publishable packages, defining ourselves and our thoughts in terms of time periods, genres, continents, languages, theories, departments, and disciplines. Such separations certainly make the work of knowing easier, but they often lead us to read only part of a complex story. The period now roughly defined as "modern," from the late 1800s to the Second World War, happily and frustratingly resists every arbitrary boundary the academy attempts to draw. Modernism, modernist literature, call it what you will, occurs in vastly different forms in many different countries. Authors borrow freely from other arts and across disciplines, experimenting in a variety of languages and media. Poetry becomes prose, literature becomes music, music mimics painting, American writers live in England, France, Italy, and Germany, and the "beginning" and "end" of modernist writing remain tantalizingly elusive and ambiguous. T.S. Eliot's poetry speaks to the slipperiness of academic distinctions. His poems serve scholars as examples of both British and American verse, his plays appear in both drama and poetry courses, his work is read as both staunchly elitist and decadently subversive, he remains a Monarchist Anglican from London and a rebel from St. Louis, Missouri. Attempting to determine the general tendencies of such a lively period and such perplexing authors boggles the mind. To think about the "modern period" at all, one must think broadly and widely, just the sort of thing that we scholars seem to hate most.

The fact remains, however, that thinking broadly and widely is just what many modernist authors did best. Fed up with the conventions governing their work and their lives, they wandered across boundaries of time and place, borrowing from sister arts, rummaging the cupboards of the distant past, exploring non-western cultures, casting and recasting themselves and their art in an ongoing intellectual journey that demanded and valued change. One of the most vigorous such explorers of the modern period was Virginia Woolf. Like many of her modernist colleagues, Woolf did not divide her life into disciplines. Hungry for new forms that would not duplicate past repressions, Woolf embarked on an experimental interdisciplinary voyage that eventually led her to consider words as music.

It is certainly nothing new to say that from 1925 to 1931, roughly the years between her completion of Mrs. Dalloway and her creation of The Waves, Virginia Woolf became increasingly dissatisfied with the conventional form of the novel. Woolf's criticism, letters, and diaries of the period all reveal her growing distaste for the constraints of chronological plot—this happened, then that happened—and detailed narrative. In her much-quoted 1925 essay, "Modern Fiction," Woolf paused to consider her artistic development in light of her paunchier Victorian contemporaries. Leveling her pen at the literary abuses of Arnold Bennett and the "materialist" school, Woolf's now famous commentary shows her deepening sense that the novel must evolve to fit the fragmentation of the time.

Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this? (The Common Reader)

Clearly, the answer from Woolf's perspective is no, novels need not be "like this," they need not adhere to a single chronological narrative full of boring details that leave the characters more dead than alive. Woolf pictures Bennett and company as vassals of an autocratic dictator who insists that there must be one kind of order, one definition of "real," one plot to govern the whole. "Done to a turn," such novels follow a given recipe to perfection, but they result in a monotonous mental meatloaf. Woolf continues:

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being "like this." Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.

Using Bennett as a foil, Woolf throws off her chains only to face a further dilemma in the question of form. Given Woolf's picture of "life going on," how does the author ever shape such fragmentary experience into a "novel"? The work Woolf pictures as a replacement for Bennett's (and by implication, to some extent, her own) misguided efforts, is a study in negativity. The perfect novel has no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest, no catastrophe, no solidity. Woolf distinctly lists the conventions that authors must abandon, but offers little concrete advice about what a potentially liberating new order might look like. Woolf's essay ends on a vague note of "anything goes." "Nothing," she writes, "no 'method,' no experiment, even of the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence." Woolf couches her affirmation of experimentation in negative terms. Her amorphous protonovel remains a matter of "what if," a consummation that, sensing its difficulties, Woolf herself appears hesitant to enact and equally unwilling to prescribe.

1925 thus found Woolf in a quandary. On the one hand, she believed that the imposition of a causal chronological system upon the random play of experience was a potentially deadly thing. On the other hand, she recognized the enduring need for some kind of artistic order to generate meaning and save the author from utter chaos. The problem Woolf faced was to create a new, more protean form that could move beyond complete negativity without duplicating the oppressive sins of novels past. In response to the problem, Woolf produced increasingly experimental novels that comment on their own creation. In Mrs. Dalloway, the conflict Woolf creates between Dr. Holmes and Septimus Smith mirrors to the letter the conflict between Bennett's solid autocratic realism and a liberated art of a "myriad impressions." A lover of rational systems, Dr. Holmes, as Septimus notes, reflects "human nature," that part of us that wants desperately to believe that life operates according to a prescribed pattern, that every effect has a discernible cause, that order and normalcy can be discovered and maintained. Septimus, on the other hand, remains open to an incessant shower of innumerable atoms that score upon his consciousness. Past, present, and future meld together; dogs become men; the dead peer out from behind bushes; nothing can control the flood of life coming in. Septimus lives in a state of imaginative freefall, his thoughts the embodiment of Woolf's plotless, conventionless, non-chronological fiction.

Septimus, however, is also mad as a hatter—a state, as Woolf well knew, incompatible with writing a good book. His visionary nature leaves him unable to communicate, and he ends his life by leaping out a window to avoid the ministrations of the ever persistent Holmes. Septimus' flight from the window constitutes an image of artistic liberation, but Woolf sees such complete freedom as ending in isolation and death. Woolf kills off Septimus, an act that reflects her own reluctance to reject completely the Bennettian constraints on the novel.

Indeed, the form of Mrs. Dalloway mirrors the anxious nature of its content. Periodically throughout the book, Woolf throws off the control of causal plot and retreats into moments of mind-time where the flow of events ceases. During segments of mind-time, Woolf sets various time streams loose at once, either in the mind of one character, who retreats into internal solioquy, collapsing past, present and future, or in the simultaneous perspectives given by several characters recording a single moment. The result of either technique is that plot time stands still; Woolf replaces conventional chronological narrative with a simultaneous internalized expression of "life going on."

Yet for all of its experimental tendencies, Mrs. Dalloway, by Woolf's definition, remains a conventional novel. Mrs. Dalloway has a plot, a love interest, and an omniscient narrator who gives play to a privileged authorial perspective. Woolf grounds Mrs. Dalloway solidly in the world of causal events. Despite Clarissa Dalloway's detours into mind-time, her day moves from morning to night with steady regularity, a progress marked by Big Ben, who tolls ominously in the background, "first a warning, musical; then the hour irrevocable," an image of inescapable chronology. The novel begins in the middle of June; the War is over; Clarissa is over fifty; she has lived in Westminster for over twenty years; it is Wednesday morning, 10:30 a.m. Woolf endows Mrs. Dalloway with a distinct "air of probability," a particular time and a definite place, rooted in the tradition of the "one plot."

Mrs. Dalloway, then, poses a serious question for Woolf as an artist. How does one write a novel without becoming either a Septimus or a Holmes? To record life as a series of jumbled impressions that score upon the mind poses the threat of literary madness. To record life as a plot, however, makes the author into a Holmes, a mono-narrative bully who insists that everything cohere in a particular way. Woolf's response to the problem reveals the working of a distinctly interdisciplinary mind. In To the Lighthouse Woolf turns her attention to the visual arts in the work of Lily Briscoe, projecting a new aesthetic order to counter Bennett's autocratic reign. For all her grace and elegance, Mrs. Ramsay takes the place of Dr. Holmes. A purveyor of comfort, a singer of lullabies, a constant reassuring force, Mrs. Ramsay embodies a Victorian confidence in "ideal completeness," or, as Woolf put it in her essay "How it Strikes a Contemporary," "the conviction that life is of a certain quality" (The Common Reader). Shore-bound and short-sighted in both a literal and figurative sense, Mrs. Ramsay's brand of order is safe, but limited. Lily's canvas, however, poses a distinctly different kind of coherence. Abstract rather than mimetic, Lily's work moves away from a conventional, representational form. Like Woolf's projected prefect book, Lily's painting does not succumb to an air of probability or a wealth of stultifying detail. Like Woolf's projected perfect author, Lily records atoms as they score upon her consciousness, creting a simultaneous expression of "life going on." Confident in Lily's experiment, Woolf successfully kills off Mrs. Ramsay without any fear of impending chaos. To the Lighthouse ends with Lily's triumphant claim, "I have had my vision."

Woolf thus closes To the Lighthouse with a statement of faith that the artist can offer a new form to capture the essence of "life going on." In spite of Lily Briscoe's triumph, however, To the Lighthouse again reflects Woolf's definition of a conventional novel. Woolf herself speculated that the critics would find To the Lighthouse "sentimental" and "Victorian" (The Diary of Virginia Woolf III). The book has a definite beginning and a definite end, held together by the steady chronological progress of Lily's artistic process. Where Lily achieves a simultaneous record of atoms, Woolf stays rooted in the realm of causal teleological chronology, the world of the "one plot" and the omniscient narrator. The most adventurous part of Woolf's novel shows her persistent fear of the potential chaos behind a frame of causal plot. In "Time Passes" Woolf collapses time into a formless pool, relegating "events," such as Mrs. Ramsay's death, to sentence-long afterthoughts separated from the rest of the text by brackets. A stab in the direction of Woolf's perfect book, "Time Passes" has no plot, no love interest, at times, no characters at all. Yet "Time Passes" is also a space of things unmade rather than made. Woolf pictures the text in which night and day, month and year, run shapelessly together as the potential space of "idiot games," mad Septimus-like ramblings that can only reflect the chaos they wish to record. At the end of "Time Passes," Woolf retreats back into the realm of conventional causal chronology, forming a protective frame around the disruptive, achronological space within. Formally, To the Lighthouse struggles against the abstract experimental possibilities posed by Lily's picture.

Woolf's reluctance to look to the visual arts as a sustaining experimental model, however, perhaps reflects the fact that Lily's picture, too, presents problems in terms of Woolf's perfect book. Woolf closes her novel with Lily's "vision," and the atoms of experience stand ordered in one particular way. Lily finishes her painting and sets down her brush, Mr. Ramsay reaches the lighthouse. The form of the book implies that Lily's ordering task ends and that, behind the mask of metanarrative coherence, there lies a particular single set of atoms to be seen. Her vision is static rather than changing, an end point of causal chronology that contradicts Woolf's professed artistic ideal of art as continuous process, "life going on." Lily's new order threatens the birth of a new dictator. Lily herself notes the similarity between her task and that of Mrs. Ramsay.

This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, "Life stand still here"; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. "Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!" she repeated. She owed it all to her.

Both Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe seek to make the moment something permanent. Lily, like Mrs. Ramsay, wants to shape the flow of chaos, the clouds going and the leaves shaking, into something fixed and lasting. Woolf thus grappled with the fact that a picture, while creating a moment of simultaneity, can never sustain simultaneous expression over time.

Faced with a further crisis of form, Woolf longed, as she wrote in her diary, not for the visual arts, but for poetry and music, for a compact, nonchronological, simultaneous expression of "life going on" to take the place of Holmes's restrictions and Lily's vision. In 1928 Woolf set to work crafting The Waves, and from the very start of her experiment Woolf felt she was making something different. "Never in my life," she wrote in her diary,

did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others and though I could go on ahead easily enough, I am always stopping to consider the whole effect.… I am not quite satisfied with this method … yet I can't at the moment devise anything which keeps so close to the original design & admits to movement. (The Diary of Virginia Woolf III,)

Woolf thus conceived of The Waves not as a sequence of events or a causal thread, but as an intricate interconnected whole, a pattern of particles that had to be considered both backwards and forwards during its creation, each mark in relation to a dozen others rather than simply the one that came before.

Woolf envisioned the book not as a story, but as a "shape," a "design," or, Woolf's most popular metaphor, a "method." As in To the Lighthouse, the characters in The Waves comment on the artistic experiment at hand. Like Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, the voices Woolf presents attempt to order a world of random experience with varying degrees of success. Woolf constructs six "characters" that represent competing systems of imposed conscious order. Neville, Louis, Bernard, Susan, Jinny, Rhoda—each voice constructs an internal narrative that shapes the self and orders experience. Jinny, Susan, Neville, and Louis all choose to define themselves and interpret experience through a single artificial system. Each of the four selects a single "story," a single end to life which serves as a buttress against the waves. As Rhoda says, Jinny, Louis, Neville, and Susan choose to live life "wholly, indivisibly, and without caring in the moment." Louis is the man of business who "forms unalterable conclusions upon the true nature of what is to be known." Neville is the limited poet who clings to the words and the myths of the past, believing that "change is no longer possible." Susan chooses a life of unchanging "natural happiness"; Jinny cries her single sexual call of "come, come, come." Adopting distinctly chronological, teleological views of existence, all four see the end of life even as they live the beginning. All four characters, however, also suffer for their imposed stability. Louis, Neville, Susan, and Jinny lead ordered and focused lives, but they become the static, constricted, dull victims of their own narrow interpretations of self and experience. The imposition of a single narrative upon random experience creates order and meaning, but, like Bennett's solid narrative, it ultimately destroys life.

Along with her four failed, or anchored "characters," however, Woolf presents two protean figures in The Waves who remain open to random experience, Rhoda and the author, Bernard. Both Rhoda and Bernard exist without unifying singular stories to govern their lives. Rhoda lives in the crushing waves of experience without a narrative anchor to shape her self and stabilize the atoms that score upon her consciousness. "I cannot make one moment merge in the next," she says, "to me they are all violent, all separate." Unable to form fictions, to string experience together with "like and like and like," Rhoda collapses into the disordered realm of her own dreams, eventually choosing death as a release from chaos.

Like Rhoda, Bernard the author exists without a stultifying imposed mono-narrative. Yet, unlike Rhoda, Bernard has the ability to create meaning. Bernard spins stories and makes phrases. Where Rhoda cannot make one moment merge with the next, Bernard sees endless sequences. Drawing images together in an alphabetized notebook, Bernard effectively orders experience within the pages of a never-ending fictional catalogue, pellet by pellet of bread, drop by drop of water, moments and fragments linked together in a creative and active chain. For Bernard, life is a story that he never stops telling himself, an ever-changing artistic process. Bernard states:

I took my mind, my being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object and lashed it about among these odds and ends, sticks and straws, detestable little bits of wreckage, flotsam and jetsam, floating on the oily surface. I jumped up, I said, 'Fight.' 'Fight,' I repeated. It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together—this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit. The trees, scattered, put on order; the thick green of the leaves thinned itself to a dancing light. I netted them under with a sudden phrase. 1 retrieved them from formlessness with words.

Faced with a choice between fiction and emptiness, Bernard consciously embraces fiction. The process of putting together ends only with the end of life itself.

Thus, Woolf gives us one consciousness that manages to stay afloat in the waves without submitting to the paralysis of mono-narrative or the terror of chaos. Bernard escapes both forms of death by approaching life as a protean artistic process. His stories offer a theoretical alternative to both Bennettian constraints and experimental lunacy, a changing artistic order that offers coherence yet insists that there is no one true story, no one final vision. Yet The Waves is not merely a triumph of theory, it is a triumph of form. Woolf's design successfully mimics in structure what Bernard preaches in content. Throughout The Waves, Woolf clearly rejects both the chronological plot and the omniscient narrator. Woolf crafts the entire book into a series of nine time pools in which her six voices register experience simultaneously in the same, utterly consistent, narrative voice. Within the pools the six voices chart six perspectives, six different versions of "life going on." No one voice gives the "privileged perspective," no one acts as the governing omniscient consciousness, no one offers a restrictive true story. Within the time pools, causal chronology ceases; Jinny speaks, Susan speaks, Rhoda speaks, Neville speaks, Bernard speaks, Louis speaks—Woolf's six voices form a changing pattern that she orders and reorders from pool to pool. Woolf thus creates a clear "method" that substitutes for the stultifying coherence of causal chronological plot. Woolf's continuously reordered time pools stress the fact that artistic coherence is a matter of process rather than product, a necessary on-going linking and relinking of random particles to form an endless number of stories rather than a single story.

For such formal and theoretical experiments, Woolf frequently earns the critical label, "postmodern." Drawing on the old notion that modernist writers value unity, coherence, completeness, and authority, critics find Woolf's antiauthoritarian aesthetics of process and Bernard's acceptance of meaning as multiple to be sure signs of her subversive difference. Such critics "rescue" Woolf from the oppressive modernist canon by enshrining her as a postmodern author ahead of her time. Yet Woolf's ever-shifting stance and attention to process rather than product do not necessarily indicate a "postmodern" approach. Such provisionalizing strategies are a hallmark of works of modernist music. Looking again across disciplines, The Waves reveals a musical sensibility common to that of many twentieth-century composers, particularly that of the founding father of atonal expression, Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's push toward new forms in music—his ultimate rejection of functional tonality and his creation of the method of composing with twelve tones—resembles, in both rhetoric and ideology, Woolf's rejection of chronological causal narrative and her subsequent creation of a "design in motion" to hold the text of The Waves together. Broadening the scope of critical vision to include modernist music suggests that Woolf conceived of The Waves, like To the Lighthouse, in a distinctly interdisciplinary context.

Indeed, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that Woolf's aesthetic longing for music during the creation of The Waves was not simply an idle wish. As Quentin Bell notes in his biography of Woolf, Leonard Woolf began working as a record critic for The Nation in 1927, roughly the time that Virginia Woolf first began to conceptualize The Waves (Virginia Woolf: A Biography). To assist Leonard's new post, the Woolfs purchased the finest gramophone money could buy and, as Bell notes, Woolf became immersed in a flood of music that accompanied her own creation. Bell claims that Woolf, who had a "fairly catholic taste" in music, developed a particular preference for Beethoven's late string quartets, quartets that test the very boundaries of tonal music, quartets of "rhythmic violence" and complex chromaticism that pre-figure many of Schoenberg's techniques. Schoenberg himself presents Beethoven's late quartets as an antecedent to his own more radical systems in his widely read essay "Composition with Twelve Tones" (Style and Idea).

Also during the composition of The Waves, Woolf met Ethel Smyth, Britain's foremost female composer. Energetic and aggressive, Smyth stormed into Woolf's life and the two quickly became friends and eventually, lovers. Entirely conversant with the modern music scene throughout Europe, Smyth was friends with the great conductors Bruno Walter and Thomas Beecham, both of whom she petitioned frequently for aid in getting her works performed. As Louise Collis notes in her biography of Smyth, Impetuous Heart, Smyth also knew well the work of Schoenberg, whose music she disliked and used as a frequent point of negative comparison with her own compositions. Given Smyth's consistent desire to talk about herself and her work, Woolf gained a great deal of information (as much unsolicited as requested) about both musicians and musical forms. Woolf attended Smyth's rehearsals at the BBC and listened to her broadcasts on the radio (Collis 123). Woolf's letters and diaries are filled with comments such as the one she wrote to Smyth on February 27, 1930: "I want to talk and talk and talk—About music" (The Letters of Virginia Woolf IV).

Given the cultural climate of England at the time, it appears that Woolf would have had ample opportunity to fulfill her desire to "talk about music," particularly avantgarde music. The late 1920's were a time of increasing difficulty for modern composers working in proto-fascist countries. Schoenberg's work, scorned by the Viennese public and rejected by the cultural elite, remained virtually unplayed in Europe in the years between the wars. Ironically, however, Schoenberg's music gained some exposure in England, a country traditionally musically conservative. As early as 1921, Edward Clark, the head of the BBC Music Department, made a policy of broad-casting concerts of new music to the British public that was being repressed and ignored throughout Europe. As British musicologist Leo Black notes with gratitude, Clark was almost single-handedly responsible for creating a public forum for the work of Schoenberg and his circle:

Edward Clark, who left the BBC in 1936, should have a key place in any history of twentieth-century British music. It was he who knew everything that was going on in the world of contemporary music—particularly in Europe—and everybody who was engaged in it. The BBC was involved from the 1920's onwards in the hazardous enterprise of introducing to the British listeners Schoenberg and Webern as well as Bartok and Stravinsky.

Clark, a composer himself, was Schoenberg's only English-speaking pupil before the First World War, and he took it as a personal trust to bring Schoenberg's compositions to the British public at a time when virtually no one else was listening. The results, by today's standards, were amazing. On January 28, 1928, Schoenberg came to Queen's Hall in London to conduct a concert of his own works. The hall was packed to overflowing; the concert was relayed, thanks to Clark, to all British radio stations. After the concert, Schoenberg was greeted by a cheering crowd of hundreds of British followers who waited out-side in the streets until the concert was finished. Clark generated a level of public acceptance for Schoenberg's music in the late twenties that Schoenberg was never to see again.

Thinking in such a musical and historical context, the potential similarities between Woolf's and Schoenberg's experiments come into focus. Schoenberg, like Woolf, was a rather cautious innovator who balked at the constraints of conventional tonal music even while he clung to hierarchical tonal systems to order his art. Functional tonal music is directed music, music with a destination, a home base, a tonic key that serves as an anchor for the harmonic motion of a particular piece. Tonal music operates through a strict hierarchical system: dominant triads (triads built on the fifth of the scale) resolve to tonic triads; subdominant triads (triads built on the fourth note of the scale) resolve to dominant traids; median triads (triads built on the sixth scale degree) resolve to sub-dominant triads; and so on. All tones have a particular function and an acknowledged proper direction, tending toward tonic through a carefully mapped set of harmonic relationships or "progressions." Translated into literary terms, tonal music has a causal chronology, a series of tonal events (this leads to that) dictated by an exacting conventional system, a specific teleology that imposes a "one true story" that orders all tonal materials. Tonal music implies the expectation and fulfillment of a single impressed rubric.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, composers such as Wagner and Mahler began to experiment with breaking the constraints of conventional tonal music. Increased chromaticism, lengthy excursions from tonic through remote key areas, prolonged cadences that evade a return to tonic and destabilize tonal expectations—Wagner and Mahler's tonal innovations led to richly chromatic compositions that Schoenberg and his contemporaries labeled products of "extended tonality." Like Wagner and Mahler, Schoenberg began his career writing lush chromatic music that, for all its complexity and extended techniques, was distinctly tonal in conception.

Yet like Woolf, Schoenberg soon became dissatisfied with the conventional restraints of his task. Schoenberg longed to be rid of the causal, chronological "one plot" of functional tonality. Schoenberg's early work, like Woolf's, was motivated by a clash between a musical Septimus, who wished to break the bonds of tonal music, and a musical Holmes, who insisted that the system of tonal hierarchy stay in place. The result was a radically extended tonality, moments of densely chromatic, virtually atonal, music held together by an imposed tonal superstructure—music, like Woolf's novels prior to The Waves, at war with itself.

In Schoenberg's case, however, the pull of the musical Septimus was too great to resist. In 1908, Schoenberg broke free from tonal conventions and began to write music that consciously defeated tonal expectations. Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, generally considered the first truly atonal utterance in Western music, bids farewell to a coherent tonal base. As Schoenberg notes in My Evolution,

In the first and second movements there are many sections in which the individual parts proceed regardless of whether or not their meeting results in codified harmonies. Still, here, and also in the third and fourth movements, the key is presented distinctly at all the main dividing points of the formal organization. Yet the overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be balanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent a key. It seemed inadequate to force a movement into the Procrustean bed of a tonality without supporting it by harmonic progressions that pertain to it. This was my concern, and it should have occupied the mind of all my contemporaries also. That I was the first to venture the decisive step will not be considered universally a merit—a fact I regret but have to ignore.

Leaving functional tonality behind, Schoenberg reconceptualized the musical universe as a world of atoms scoring, a vast unrelated pool of potential tones outside the constraints of an imposed hierarchy. Stripping away conventions, Schoenberg reached the musical equivalent of the atomistic space behind Bennett's Victorian metanarrative of "ideal completeness."

In 1909, Schoenberg took a further step into chaos and composed Erwartung, an operatic mono-drama that has since its inception plagued musicologists who relish the challenge of discerning hidden orders. Within Erwartung, Schoenberg pushes atonal expression to its furthest limits, generating the musical equivalent of Woolf's perfectly negative book. Erwartung contains no classical formal structures, no motivic recurrences, no rhythmic patterns, no themes, no clear repetition of any kind. To save himself from utter disorder, Schoenberg ties Erwartung together with the thin thread of a text, an imposed literary plot to substitute for the missing musical plot of functional tonality. Schoenberg, like Woolf, realized that Septimus alone could not create art. Afraid of the implications of his own formless rambling, Schoenberg retreated into his study and emerged, eleven years later, with a new, more protean, technique for ordering tones.

Schoenberg's method of composing with twelve tones was the result of his withdrawal, a carefully controlled musical technique designed to generate purely non-hierarchical, atonal, acausal music that utterly defeats, through a coherent system, all tonal expectations. Schoenberg's method divides the octave, not into a diatonic key presentation of eight notes, but into twelve equal half steps. Twelve-tone music consists of varied presentations of a basic "tone row," a set of twelve different notes that forms a complete egalitarian expression of all musical material contained in the octave. The twelve notes in the row are sounded twelve at a time, without repetition of any one note, a technique that leads to the highest possible chromatic density and completely disorganizes the tonal expectations of the listener. Schoenberg varies presentations of the tone row from set to set through the musical techniques of "inversion" (the row turned upside down), retrograde (the row presented backwards), retrograde inversion (upside down and backwards), and pure transposition. Yet from presentation to presentation, the row always consists of twelve half steps, taken twelve at a time, without repetition. In twelve-tone music there are no "leading tones," no fifths or fourths, no one note leads or tends toward any other. No one note is more important than any other.

Thus Schoenberg's twelve-tone music replaces functional tonality with a tightly-ordered chromatic barrage that overturns the very idea of directional dissonance and consonance. Twelve-tone music disrupts the causal hierarchical "plot" of tonal music and allows for, as Schoenberg put it, "the emancipation of the dissonance." Schoenberg writes in "Composition with Twelve Tones,"

But while a "tonal" composer still has to lead his parts into consonances or catalogued dissonances, a composer with twelve independent tones apparently possesses the kind of freedom which many would characterize by saying: "everything is allowed." "Everything" has always been allowed to two kinds of artists: to masters on the one hand, and to ignoramuses on the other.

Schoenberg, thus, saw his technique as a highly complex, protean structure that defeated tonal causality without succumbing to chaos.

Working across disciplinary boundaries, I believe that Woolf's "method" for composing The Waves, her "design in motion," shows some striking similarities to Schoenberg's method of composing with twelve tones. Translating The Waves into musical terms, Woolf's rejection of a single causal chronological plot (this leads to that), her rejection of the "one true story," leads her to write fiction which is basically "atonal" in conception. Like Schoenberg, Woolf abandons the causal impetus of her art and creates a form which defeats both chronological causality and functional hierarchy. In place of the causal stream of tonal music, Woolf presents six voices, the rough equivalent of a Schoenbergian "tone row," that are ordered and ordered again. Woolf discards a single plot in favor of a process of, as Schoenberg put it, "continuous variation" that disrupts the idea of any one proper musical movement.

Woolf essentially creates pools of six voices taken six at a time in a shifting array that defeats expectations and prohibits the question "what happens next?" Woolf's "row," her ever-changing pattern of six particles, has the same destabilizing effect on Woolf's fiction as the tone row has on Schoenberg's music. Six characters, offering six perspectives, six at a time, defeats the idea of any one privileged perspective or, in musical terms, any one privileged harmonic base. Woolf's serial presentation of voices defeats the convention of the omniscient narrator in the same way that Schoenberg's serial presentation of tones defeats a tonic key. Woolf's voice pools are adirectional spaces of simultaneous presentation that provide for the emancipation of all perspectives, a literary corollary to Schoenberg's "emancipation of the dissonance." The Waves uses distinctly Schoenbergian serial techniques to disrupt the ideas of the "one true story." The antiauthoritarian, ever-changing presentation of voices mat lies at the heart of Schoenberg's twelve-tone music is also the motivating force behind Woolf's The Waves.

Reading Woolf's words as music, the very first "movement" of The Waves shows an attention to ordered disruption worthy of the best of serial composers. The order of voices in the opening of the first voice pool of The Waves reads as follows:

Bernard-Susan-Rhoda-Neville-Jinny-Louis
Bernard-Susan-Louis-Rhoda-Neville-Jinny
Susan-Rhoda-Louis-Neville-Jinny-Bernard

In the opening of her first movement, Woolf presents all six of her voices, six at a time, without repeating any one voice until the entire set has been used. No one presentation of the voice row is privileged, no one voice is privileged. Woolf's organization disrupts standard narrative expectations. All the voices seem equally important, all the visions of the childhood equally true. The ever-changing non-causal array defeats the wish for a stable chronological narrative with a definite direction. Woolf's presentation guarantees that, in Bernard's terms, "there is nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an even." In musical terms, nothing you can walk out humming. Although Woolf, like most serial composers, does indeed deviate from the strict row presentation set out in the opening movement (voices repeat, interruptions intervene) at many points in The Waves, the patterns of carefully controlled rotation remains the same. "Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand others," says Bernard at the end of The Waves,

How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole—again like music.… Each played his own tune, fiddle, flute, trumpet, drum or whatever the instrument might be.

Woolf's six voices sound as distinct musical tones, each different, each separate, each playing his or her own tune. Yet each adds to a musically conceived simultaneous serial whole.

This essay thus ends with a web of probability rather than an actual proof of influence. Yet I think that the ideological similarity between Woolf's and Schoenberg's work is helpful in defining the period and the sensibility we loosely term as "modern." Both Woolf and Schoenberg inherit a late-Victorian abyss. They each look out into the random sea of particles behind the metanarrative coherence of a bygone age and realize that art must order the world in a new way without becoming a new dictator. Both respond to a late-Victorian confusion and artistic breakdown by creating protean artistic systems to substitute for the loss of old beliefs. Both create controlled forms, born of artistic confidence, that assert the beauty of artistic process over potential chaos or static product.

Given the work of Woolf and Schoenberg, the "modern" period may be seen as one of provisionalizing action rather than formalist oppression. Perhaps Woolf herself says it best in "A Sketch of the Past."

It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scheme come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare; there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

For modernists like Schoenberg and Woolf, art is the thing that "makes it come right." There is no pattern behind the cotton wool, no God, no ultimate Beethoven, no cosmic Shakespeare to order this vast mass that we call the world; the patterns we make on our side of the carpet are pure imposition. Yet, without the one God, the one order, the world becomes our palette, our keyboard, our stage—a place where beautiful patterns can be made and made again.