Virginia Woolf’s distinct way of writing----stream of consciousness may seem challenging by some reader, since it is a difficult technique due to the fact that it does not obey the rules of traditional narratives such as plot, chronology, and characterization. Reading her work is like collecting the puzzles from all kinds of places, and then putting those pieces together make the whole of one character.
My first impression of the section ‘Time Passes’ is that although Woolf is famous for her constantly shift of vantage points style of writing, but one may never expect that there would be a whole section written from the point of view of the passage of time.
My second impression would be that Woolf is trying to present to her reader a fiction with the quality of a film, where all the senses are stimulated except olfaction. More than one thing happens at once. Her way of capturing the muse seems to determine the way she writes. She said in an article that, with
‘a sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing, one has to recapture this, and set this working and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.’
This way of writing is just like a director making a film, he or she will draw a storyboard first and then write down all the details he/she wanted in the script, ‘Time Passes’ is like a two hour movie consists of a series of still images and with brilliant montages and clever cuts, as well as a none-linear narrative.
It was known that Woolf struggled the most in constructing the section ‘Time Passes’. She had a clear structure in mind before she wrote To the Lighthouse. In her notebook (‘Notes for Writing’), the notes for To the Lighthouse begin: ‘All character-not a view of the world. Two blocks joined by a corridor.’ The shape on the notebook looks like an H. We also notice that her obsession with shape throughout the book actually started with the structure of the book.
We can also say that like a painter transforms vision into design, that Woolf transforms her impressions into words and stories. It is discussed by many critics that Woolf started To the Lighthouse with series of stories. Then the role of the middle section ‘Time Passes’ is an interlude which transforms the stories into novel by connecting the past and the future.
Time Passes is also a break from the narrative down the middle of the book, like lily’s line down the middle of her painting, is a break from traditional way of writing as well as Woolf’s own childhood.
The core of the first half of Time Passes is death. Death of the house, of people, and of the objects.
‘The house was left; the house was deserted.’ ‘The sauce pan had rusted and the mat decayed’ ‘The place was gone to rack and ruin.’ P.150.
Almost indicentally we learn of Mrs. Ramsay’s death, and the death of Prue and Andrew. ‘Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before…’p.140.
This section marks a new beginning, a reborn; raised from the dead, a new form of language and shape of fiction is invented. After the first half of the section where all is dead and quiet, Mrs. McNab came into the house and brought a breath of fresh air. She is an intruder of the silence. When she opens the Windows which framed the past, it signifies a beginning of another era. Since then, the objects in the house are given lives. However, the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay keeps coming back and speaks to Mrs. McNab, being an old woman, at one point she lacks the strength to fight with the old, mouldy past.
‘The books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished. It was beyond one person’s strength to get it straight now.’ p.147.
Then Woolf continued to say that
‘People should come themselves; they should have sent somebody down to see.’ P.148. Later on when more people came to help, the house is clean again. Is Woolf saying that to clean the old way of writing and embrace the new need not only one person’s contribution but people’s collaborative work?
Woolf’s style is all about rhythm. Rhythms of perceptions, of emotions and of atmosphere. Woolf uses asyndeton on purpose in order to accelerate the pace of the movement of time, so that the reader feels the time flies in this section. For example, ‘the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking…’ p.138.
Woolf is a master in the use of anaphora as well. Her use of anaphora appears all over the section:
‘Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room…’p.150 and in p.139
‘at length, desisting, all sighed together; all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an…’1 which also has the quality of polysyndeton. Anaphora serves to tie multiple sentences or paragraphs together, which causes the continuity in the flow of images and thoughts in the narrative. This also supports the technique stream of consciousness as it is based on the flow of thought in the mind without permitting any interruption.
One interesting quote from Allen McLaurin I thought is enlightening is this: ‘Virginia Woolf uses parentheses as something more than a mere device in the novel, for the whole form can be seen as a parenthesis. The first and last sections, being parallel, form brackets around the central section, seeing the novel as a "whole shape,"2 McLaurin connects this section with Lily Briscoe's problem of painterly form: "the thin central section is like a vertical line, as well as being an empty space bracketed by the first and last sections." Her intent here is thus to "make the novel approximate as nearly as possible to the visual effect of a painting."2
Discussion point: Minta's song, "Damn your eyes," suggests the precariously enabled limit of any one person's judgment: the other's gaze. How can we know or represent the "truth" of something not only if we are subjectively positioned in space and time, but if the social frame we want to criticize or evaluate is the one that determines the limits of our vision?
Footnotes 1.V. Woolf. To the Lighthouse, Penguin Group, Australia, 2010 2. J. M. Haule, V.Woolf, C.Mauron "Le Temps Passe" and the Original Typescript: An Early Version of the "Time Passes" Section of To the Lighthouse, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 267-311, Hofstra University Viewed on,29/03/2011 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/441468
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