The word ‘world’ recurs ninety-six times in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a work more commonly understood as a Modernist experiment with temporality and voice, but which might also be thought of as one of the novel’s most self-reflexive engagements with world-making. The increasingly extended speech acts of six voices are encapsulated within typographically distinct interludes, whose description of the gradual revelation of sky and firmament and the movement of light and water over the course of a single day recalls the foundational world-creation of Genesis. In the effortful process of extracting character, context, narrative time and sequence from the continuous present of the voices’ attributed speech, the reader is invited to confront her co-implication in the taken-for-granted work of constructing novel worlds. Each articulation of ‘world’ contributes to distinguishing each voice as character. ‘The light falls upon real objects now. Here are knives and forks. The world is displayed, and we too, so that we can talk’, says Neville. ‘I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world’, says Bernard (Woolf, The Waves 58).

中文翻译：

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小说世界

“世界”一词在弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（Virginia Woolf）的《波浪》（The Waves）中重复出现了96次，该作品更通常被理解为具有时间和声音的现代主义实验，但也可以被认为是小说对世界的最自我反省的参与之一制造。六种声音的语音行为日益扩展，被封装在印刷上截然不同的插曲中，其对天空和穹苍的逐渐揭示以及光和水在一天的过程中的移动的描述使人们回想起创世纪的根本世界。在不断从声音归因的语音中提取人物，语境，叙事时间和顺序的过程中，邀请读者面对她在构筑新颖世界时应予的认可工作中的共同暗示。“世界”的每个发音都有助于区分每个声音作为角色。``现在，光线照在了真实的物体上。这是刀叉。内维尔说，世界被展示，我们也被展示，所以我们可以说话。``我需要一切都具体。伯纳德（伍尔夫（Woolf），《海浪》（The Waves）58）说，只有如此，我才向世界伸出了双手。