Who is Percival? Intertextuality, Monologism and Heteroglossia in Virginia Woolf’s "The Waves"

Abstract

The essay “Who is Percival?” discusses the complex questions which arise from the obvious contradictions between the ideals of the hero Percival in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves and the political opinions which Woolf herself expressed in some of her other texts. The author acts as an invisible narrator; the reader cannot be sure of her point of view. The insecurity forces the reader to take an active part in the interpretation of the voices of the six friends, whose soliloquies, in which they describe their different views on life and their common friend Percival, form the text. The reader becomes an active part in the dialogue between ideas, texts, ideals and thoughts. Applying M. M. Bakhtin’s terms monologism, heteroglossia and dialogism together with Woolf’s and Bakhtin’s theories about the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I use intertextuality as a method to interpret The Waves by focusing on the contradictory heroes Percival and Bernard. My thesis, which I develop by comparing different texts of Woolf and by intertextual and postmodern critics (Bakhtin, Clements, Caughie), is that the hero Percival, who embodies monologic, static, out-of-date ideals, is bound to die. The future belongs to the inconsistent, anxious and self-conscious hero Bernard. His fragmentary phrases describe a changing reality of contradictory views which form the basis for an interacting community and for the development of each individual person. I also suggest that the similarities between Woolf’s and Bakhtin’s views on Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s heroes could be a result of connections between the Bloomsbury Group and the Bakhtin Circle.