William Faulkner

Virginia Woolf is definitely someone who writes from a literary point of view. Her characters imagine themselves to be literary characters which make her novels about people who see themselves through the lense of literature "trans-literary." T.S. Eliot imagines himself to be Polonius in the Waste Land. People live under the shadow of literary creations who seem to provide a mask for their sense of failure and shame. This is the woman who wrote Orlando, a book about a woman who meets various literary personalities through various reincarnations. She's very much a literary Picasso in this novel. If you go to the MFA in Boston and look at Picasso's woman, you can see Picasso's redo-ing of the Mona Lisa. In her other novels, she redoes Shakespeare. She is Shakespeare's sista? I loved the "Waves" because it was the first novel that explored the relationship between personal narrative, experience, and language. Each personality is a wave that influences the movement of the other waves and moves relentlessly toward the shore which is death and home at the same time. The surreal image of monkeys on the shore, I don't know if this is an actual image from the novel, is terrifying for it is an image of time gone mad, drumming a violent and cruel heartbeat. The "Waves" seemed to me to be a redoing of Hamlet, except that each character is Hamlet, under the shadow of some foreboding figure, compelled by a strange desire to destroy those around them, cruelly, psychologically, and even vainly.