Discuss Woolf's evocation of time and space in the captured 'moments' of art and consciousness.

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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.”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 particularise 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 Lucrezia, 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.)

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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 achronological novel as an anti-chronological novel, which dismisses physical time and space entirely (with ...

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