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Discuss Woolf? s Evocation Of Time And Space Discuss Woolf? s Evocation Of Time And Space In The Captured? moments? Of Art And Consciousness. ? A match burning in a crocus? (Mrs.
Dalloway)? The white spaces that lie between hour and hour? (The Waves) Discuss Woolf? s evocation of time and space in the captured? moments?
of art and consciousness. Forged from the duality between solitude and communion, Woolf? s novels are rich in struggles for, and reflections on self-identification. This recurrent idea can take many forms.
Social identification is one of the most obvious: take Mrs. Dalloway? s party, or Jinny? s affirmative: ? This is my calling. This is my world. ? [ 1 ] A modification of that brings identification in regard to a tradition: Lady Bruton?
s Victorian past, or Mr. Ramsay? s desire to be among those thinkers who reach the latter letters of the alphabet. Consider also familial identification, particularly James?
hatred, or Elizabeth Dalloway? s trip on the omnibus. Sexual identification (the latent homosexuality in Mrs. Dalloway, or the reverberating childhood kiss of The Waves) and emotional identification have a more personal edge. Yet underpinning all of these is a form of metaphysical self-identification, summed up in all its ineffable futility by Lily Briscoe; ? The old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question, which was apt to particularize itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her.
What is the meaning of life? That was all? a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.
Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. ? (To The Lighthouse, p. 236) The image of the traversed sky and the instant of a lighted match is telling: time and space are the crucial parameters which Woolf exploits. They reach to the very root of our being? our spatio-temporal identity? and open a disconcerting dialogue with time and space as perceived. The misalignment between the physical world and consciousness runs to the very heart of her work. Woolf evokes time and space as a flux: through narrative, through memory and vision, and through symbolism.
One of the most effective and yet basic techniques she employs is to simply remove the omniscient narrator. The narrative consciousness of the realist impulse, which tabulated all perspectives down to a common horizon, was suddenly absent. There is no authoritative voice with which to make sense of the opening of To The Lighthouse? the reader is forced to share in the puzzlement of the boarders at the Ramsay?
s marriage? for example. The narrative, although third person, is strongly filtered through the perceptions of individuals, in Woolf? s own form of the?
stream-of-consciousness. ? Instead of attempting to capture the raw spontaneity and disjunction of thought (as Joyce does) Woolf? s? stream-of-consciousness? is like a reflective? over-soul?
which creates a poetic monologue from sense-data and emotions, and which each individual character possesses. It is a unique fusion of the literary and the psychological; and the line between narrator and character often blurred: does the vision of Roman night (Mrs. Dalloway, p. 28) belong to the Italian Lucretia, Woolf, or both? We also see ambiguities of tense, such as in the closing: ? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. ?
Such ambiguity is even more apparent in To The Lighthouse, where the third-person presence has even less to do (barring the Time Passes section. ) Woolf? s? technique is taken to its avant-garde conclusion in The Waves, which is a series of intensely poetic first-person monologues, interspersed with impressionistic italicized sections. It is dense with uniform imagery? water, light, sensation, the body? whilst each individual has a recurrent set of tropes (such as Louis?
idea of ancestry, or Jinny? s heat / fire imagery. ) This gives the impression of circularity rather than linearity: it is a novel with no real plot, and very little external action. It is not so much an a chronological novel as an anti-chronological novel, which dismisses physical time and space entirely (with the exception of the symbol coastline, narrated impersonally. ) The form has become the content; the structure is the monologues. ? Yet this fusion was the culmination of a progression in experimental structuring.
For example, Mrs. Dalloway is unusual in having very few breaks, and no chapter headings. The action is set on a single day, ? la Ulysses.
This enables Woolf to introduce? clock time? , via the bells motif, to contrast against the flux of psychological and subjective time. The phasing of the lighthouse in To The Lighthouse and the wave segments in The Waves serve a similar function in marking ordered time. Feminist critics, such as Minow-Pinkey[ 2 ], have been particularly keen to point out that both the lighthouse and Big Ben are phallic, and thus complicit in the masculine side of the order / flux , intellect / intuition , subjugation / freedom polarities.
Meanwhile, the twin narratives of Mrs. Dalloway are unusual in having no linkage. Naturally, motifs become the hidden linkage, and this is symptomatic of a deeper tendency throughout Woolf? s work. Making a-temporal connections in the purely Idealistic realm of metaphor and image furthers Woolf? s intention to evoke flux.
For example, take the images of pools and tables[ 3 ] in To The Lighthouse or the idea of phrases and phrasing in The Waves. The spatio-temporal web of connection is undermined by an impressionistic and fleeting one. ? David Daiches[ 4 ], in a penetrating technical analysis of Mrs. Dalloway? s narrative, reveals how Woolf engages with time and space. In the monologues, space is stilled, and time becomes fluid: memories and present sense-data coalesce. ?
In descriptive sequences, time is pushed to the background, and Woolf ranges across the spatial axis of her characters; particularly easy since the novel is set in London, with its clearly definable street-names, parks and other location. This technique is also at work to a more limited extent in To The Lighthouse (particularly the final section, which switches between Lily and the boat), and The Waves, where Woolf commonly circling all six characters around a single event, such as the gathering before Percival leaves. Closely related to this technique is Woolf? s use of a two-tier narrative. Some innocuous everyday activity functions as a superficial narrative, underneath which a deeper narrative will be layered? the substrate of interior consciousness.
It is particularly effective in conversations, where the reader is afforded a glimpse at the psychological communication (or lack of) between characters. The Waves? entire structure is in fact a vivid example of two-tier narrative, but the technique is also used extensively throughout her other novels. Consider the dinner-scene and on the boat in To The Lighthouse, the encounter between Miss. Kilman and Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway. ?
A particularly striking example of such a thought-narrative overlaid by inconsequential, often tense, pleasantries, is the first meeting of Peter Walsh and Mrs. Dalloway: ? How heavenly it is to see you again! ? she exclaimed.
He had his knife out. That? s so like him, she thought. He had only reached town last night, he said; would have to go down into the country at once; and how was everything, how was everybody? Richard?
Elizabeth? ? And what? s all this? ? he said, tilting his pen-knife towards her green dress. He? s very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticises me.
Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here? s she been sitting all the time I? ve been in India. ? (Mrs. Dalloway, p. 46) The two-tier narrative is approached from a wider angle through Woolf?
s treatment of memory. Not restricted to single encounters, memory forms a deep a chronological narrative that runs alongside the? clock-time? plot. ?
Mrs. Dalloway sees virtually characters apart from Elizabeth drawing from a common fund of memories. Peter? s entire function is to gradually unfold the history of himself and Clarissa as he wanders around London in-between meeting Clarissa and attending her party in the evening.
This narrative is given an ironic twist when the radical feminist firebrand Sally Seton? non-conformist and openly sexual? arrives as the middle-aged mother Lady Rosseter. Septimus is bound up by memories in an altogether more sinister way, as he is haunted by the death of his friend Evans. Memories in To The Lighthouse seem altogether more ambiguous until Part III? ?
The Lighthouse? ? when Part I provides the source of memory, ten years later. Woolf? s point is that the characters have still not escaped their past any more than Clarissa, Peter Walsh and Septimus have. The chimes of the London bells, and the even sweep of the lighthouse may drag on, but subjective time is still in a flux. As Lily points out: ?
was it? that all one? s perceptions, half way to the truth, where tangled in a golden mesh? ? [ 5 ] The Waves, too, as a profoundly anti-temporal novel, manages to juxtapose memories with? clock-time? , the latter being very inexact in the impressionistic flux of the narrative.
Jinny remarks: ? the common fund of experience is very deep? [ 6 ] whilst Neville notes? we are all phrases in Bernard? s story. ? [ 7 ] In a fragmented symphony of lines marking Percival? s departure to India, the characters manage to reprise the entire plot thus far. A similar exercise is mounted by Bernard in his final, sustained monologue.
Their childhood, which Woolf recounts in the first two segments, continues to have a lasting effect, whether it is the kiss between Jinny and Louis, Neville? s? death among the apple trees? or Louis?
vision of an ancestral memory: ? down there my eyes are the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. ? [ 8 ] This ancestral vision traverses both memory and dream, which is less than surprising, since the two are often entwined in Woolf? s fiction. If her narratives throws time and space into flux, and memories flow along the time axis, then visions, dreams and revelations play across both spatial and temporal; concentrating perception into the mind alone.
It is Neville who says: ? when darkness comes I put off this unenviable body? and inhabit space. ? [ 9 ] Septimus is the first of three major characters who receive visions: deluded and mentally unbalanced due to his shell shock, he sees Evans (who is probably lying in an Italian grave) through the railings of a London park. He believes he is receiving secret and profound messages, and writes them down in a frenzy.
Naturally, his perception of space becomes distorted: ? leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body. ? [ 10 ] Lily Briscoe is the second major figure. She too, has a vision of a dead person: Mrs. Ramsay, as she is finishing her painting a decade after she first started it. It also Lily who has the vision of Mr.
and Mrs. Ramsay watching their children playing catch suddenly leap into a transcendental symbolic realm. She too experiences a distorted perception of space, both in the earlier and later visions: ? so much depends, she thought, upon distance? her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay.
It seemed to be elongated, stretched out. ? [ 11 ] Finally, there is Rhoda. Throughout The Waves, her monologues are surreally lyrical, and she thinks and feels in images: the empress fantasy, the leaping tiger, falling into water, visualizing Percival in India, and so forth. As a result, her temporal perception becomes a series of violent moments, she experiences the same elongation that Lily speaks of, and her very self loses physical solidity: ? I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one. ? [ 12 ]Septimus, Lily and Rhoda, as madman, artist and dreamer, are marginalised figures, but Woolf does not restrict the visionary capacity solely to them. For example, Peter Walsh has two very vivid hallucinations in Mrs. Dalloway?
the solitary traveller vision, and that of the old woman begging outside the tube station. Both throw time and space into chaos. Even Mrs. Dalloway, the very mark of respectable bourgeoisie womanhood, is chained to her subjective perception, and the passage where she looks in the mirror has some characteristics of a vision: ?
all this she saw as one sees a landscape in a flash of lightening. ? [ 13 ] This is an intelligent tactic from Woolf, since it is little more than a sophisticated result of the removal of omniscient narration. By revealing both Septimus, Walsh and Clarissa are essentially bounded by their consciousness, the assumption that one subjective vision is truer than another becomes destabilized. Woolf exploits this further by using Septimus as something of a social critic, particularly against the medical establishment. Septimus reveals that madness is not a separate? other? but a part of a continuum that everyone?
s mind is somewhere along. Into this flux, where time and space are liable to become fluid, and where everyone? s mind is potentially implicated in madness, Woolf lets her characters strive for self-identification. Most of them realise their predicament in some way or another. The culmination of Walsh? s visions ends: ?
to whom does the solitary traveller make reply? ? [ 14 ] This foreshadows very clearly Rhoda? s? I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them? oh, to whom? ? [ 15 ] This sentiment runs strong throughout Woolf? s novels? that of solitude, of the inability to communicate, and the fear that existence is disordered and incomprehensible; nothing more than an?
infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf by leaf. ? [ 16 ] It is palpable in Clarissa? s pangs of loneliness and terror throughout her single day, and in Lily? s fear that someone will see her half-finished canvas. Supremely, it runs through every page of The Waves, in which time, space and identity are considered obsessively.
Each character has his or her own construction of the flux, whether it is Bernard? s narratives, Neville? s reflective mindfulness, Jinny? s beauty, or Rhoda? s anguished disintegration.
The juxtaposition not only creates a sense of community among the six, but reveals the empty spaces of solitude and difference. Throughout, the imagery of decay and renewal recurs. The evocative? Time Passes? section of To The Lighthouse uses the empty house motif to represent this. The italicized sections in The Waves work in a similar way, and water imagery is also heavily used in To The Lighthouse and even Mrs.
Dalloway (when Elizabeth envisages the omnibus as a fast-sailing ship. ) Another figure that Woolf re-uses, both within and between novels, is that of sewing torn cloth. ? Loneliness and an inability to communicate are the keynotes: consider the skywriting motif in Mrs. Dalloway, or Rhoda? s unfinished and contradicted phrases. Yet most of Woolf? s novels, despite this solitude amongst the ebb and flow of time and space, carry a redemptive message.
Mrs. Ramsay? s essence is concentrated into a sonnet. The first section of To The Lighthouse concludes: ?
She had not said it, yet he knew. ? [ 17 ] Lily has her vision, finishes her painting; and James finally reaches the lighthouse. The Waves is fundamentally a series of revelations, such as Neville? s? let us abolish the ticking of time? s clock with one blow? [ 18 ] or Jinny? s?
life comes; life goes, we make life. ? [ 19 ] Although the disillusion of age sets in, their last meeting proves a moment of communion in Bernard? s image of the six-sided red carnation. In Mrs. Dalloway, Walsh sees Clarissa at the doorway (recalling the solitary traveller vision) and has an instant of metaphysical identification.
Clarissa herself experiences a similar epiphany on hearing of Septimus? suicide, concretized by Shakespearian intertextuality functioning as motif. ? The revelations all subscribe to the Romantic concept best expressed by Blake in? Auguries of Innocence? , intensified by the Modernist crisis of time. The moment becomes eternity: ? beauty had this penalty?
it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life? froze it. ? [ 20 ] The object becomes infinity: ? this room seems to me central, something scooped out of the eternal night. ? [ 21 ] These paradoxes are the matches that Lily speaks of, the far edges of the flux wrapped round on each other into some kind of unity.
This is how Woolf? s characters transcend, in art or consciousness, the threatening fluidity of time and space. As Bernard narrates: ? Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Susan and myself, our life, our identity? we? against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant.
The moment was all, the moment was enough. ? (The Waves, p. 214) Bibliography Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927) Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931) Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (1977) Makiko Minow-Pinkey, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of Subject (1987) Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (1983) Clarissa Dalloway, ed. Harold Bloom (1990) [ 1 ] The Waves, p. 75 [ 2 ] Makiko Minow-Pinkey, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of Subject (1987) [ 3 ] The pool generally represents a circular whole, a non-contingent perfection? ? solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window? (To The Lighthouse, p. 193) and the table represents the hardness of philosophical discourse. [ 4 ] David Daiches, extract from Virginia Woolf: The Novel and the Modern World (1960) collected in Clarissa Dalloway, ed.
Harold Bloom (1990) [ 5 ] To The Lighthouse, p. 78 [ 6 ] The Waves, p. 134 [ 7 ] Ibid. p. 51 [ 8 ] Ibid. p. 7 [ 9 ] Ibid. p. 38 [ 10 ] Mrs. Dalloway, p. 26 [ 11 ] To The Lighthouse, p. 280 [ 12 ] The Waves, p. 79 [ 13 ] Mrs.
Dalloway, p. 41 [ 14 ] Mrs. Dalloway, p. 65 [ 15 ] The Waves, p. 41 [ 16 ] To The Lighthouse, p. 247 [ 17 ] To The Lighthouse, p. 186 [ 18 ] The Waves, p. 138 [ 19 ] Ibid. p. 134 [ 20 ] To The Lighthouse, p. 260 [ 21 ] The Waves, p. 136
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