VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY

VIKTORIJA MIČIŪNAITĖ

SHIFT OF TIME AND SPACE IN THE MODERNIST NARRATIVE

OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

MA Paper

Academic Advisor: Assoc. Professor Dr. Izolda Rita Genienė

Vilnius, 2011

VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY

SHIFT OF TIME AND SPACE IN THE MODERNIST NARRATIVE

OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

This MA paper is submitted in partial fulfilment of

requirements for the degree of the MA in English Philology

By Viktorija Mičiūnaitė

I declare that this study is my own and does not contain any unacknowledged work

from any source.

Signature

Date

Academic Advisor: Assoc. Professor Dr.Izolda Rita Genienė

Signature

Date

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CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ……………………………….……………………………………………………… 2

INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………………….. 3

CHAPTER 1. THE ROOTS OF MODERNISM…………………………………………………... 8

1.1. The Historical Overview of Modernist Movement ………………………………….. 12

1.2. The Literary Context of Modernism ……………………………………………....... 17

1.3. New Values and Insights into the Representation of Modernist Reality……………... 21

CHAPTER 2. THE FEATURES OF MODERNIST LITERARY DISCOURSE AND ISSUES

OF PSYCHOLOGISM ….…………………………………………………………………………26

2.1. The Language Revolution, Stream of Consciousness, and Free Indirect Discourse ..... 28

2.2. The Evolution of the Notion of Time in Literary Discourse.......................................... 36

2.3. The Fragmented Time Philosophy in Modernism.......................................................... 40

2.4. Alterations of Time Due to the Deictic Centre………………………………………... 43

CHAPTER 3. THE INTERFACE OF TIME AND SPACE IN MODERNIST LITERATURE….. 48

3.1. The Linguistic and Literary Perspective of Time ………….. ……………………..... 56

3.2. Represented and Representational Time ….……………………………………….... 59

3.3. The Relation between Time and Space in Modernist Discourse ………...….…….... 62

3.4. A General Overview of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction and Concept of Time ..................... 66

CHAPTER 4. SHIFT OF TIME IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE ...……….. 71

4.1. Psychological and Ideational Relations between Time and Space in the Discourse of the

Novel .................................................................................................................................... 72

4.2. The Temporal Perspective of Themes and Structure in the Novel …...………….…….. 75

4.3. The Conceptual and Contextual Metaphor of Time and Space in the Novel ………..... 82

CONCLUSIONS ……………….………………………………………………………………... 88

SUMMARY …….……………………………………………………………………………….. 93

REFERENCES ……………….………………………….…………………………………………95

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ABSTRACT

The purpose of the present paper was to explore a new approach to the notions of time, temporality,

and space within modernist literature, the distinction of the natural, conceptual, and fictional time as

well as the alterations of time due to the deictic centre. The investigation of the above-mentioned

issues was based on the modernist novel To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The main method

chosen for the study was content analysis. The research of time and space shift in the given novel is

grounded on several overlapping critical theories: Practical Criticism, which comprises Formalist

and New Critical ideas, Psychoanalysis, and the Theory of Narratology. The research demonstrated

that Virginia Woolf attempted to structure her novel outside the conventional clock of time

treatment because it was too inflexible to be suitable for a writer who believed that time represented

in fiction should reflect the way time influences and is influenced by human lives. The given novel

is a conspicuous example of an innovative concept of time and space presented by the author who

gave preference to the abstract inner time rather than to that of the outer world and who come

closer than any other writer to expressing time as it actually is experienced in human mind. The

present study extended the existing knowledge of the psychological background, the transitivity and

variability of time issues, and of the specific features the modern narrative in the novel. Further

studies of the representation of time and space alterations in modernist fiction furnish new

possibilities which determine the influence of time and space conceptions in a literary narrative and

in the processes of breaking with linearity of the fabula, concentrating on its deviations and

Psychologism that had a formative impact on modernist literature. .

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INTRODUCTION

The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by new ideas, social and cultural

developments, and remarkable changes in literature and linguistics. New historical, political, and

socio-cultural crises and upheavals raised the idea of the changing time that was best expressed in

literary works of the modernist movement, which rose as a revolt against old stereotypes used in the

life and in the literature of Realism. Modernism emerged at the end of the nineteenth and the

beginning of the twentieth century as an affirmation of the human power to invent, create, and

evolve in response to the revolutionary advances in science and technology. According to the

theorist Randall Stevenson (1998:56), this new trend was an attempt to break free from the accepted

norms of logically arranged unsophisticated narrative in Realism. Modernists denied the way

realists portrayed reality and argued that Realism did not depict real life as everything happens in

the mind. Thus, for modernists, reality is a mirror that reflects human thoughts, feelings, and

reactions exactly as they occur in their mind. It is possible to claim that Modernism was a revolt

against the conservative values of Realism. The term encompasses the activities and output of those

who argued that the traditional forms of art, literature, religious faith, social relationships, and daily

life were becoming obsolete in the context of new economic, social, and political conditions in the

modern urbanized and technologized world.

The Modernist movement also questioned the belief that human abilities and achievements

were based on loyalty to stable undeniable traditions. The theorist Chris Baldic emphasizes the fact

(1996:49) that new insights, developments, and great changes in the sphere of art arose as a

response to the meaninglessness of the war that led to the crisis of accepted norms and standards in

human consciousness and in their world understanding. According to the critic, it became obvious

that the institutions of government that had to protect people and ensure a safe life disappointed the

civilized world and led it into a terrible confusion. Consequently, modernist writers no longer

considered the reality as reliable means to portray the meaning of life, and therefore turned within

themselves to discover the answers. In their literary works, modernists showed a rebellious new

way of thinking and acting, their masterpieces were a way of leading a life, not just experimenting

in style. Besides, according to Stevenson (1998), modernists severely criticized the Formalist

approach that aimed to carry the analysis of literature only in terms of close reading, the plot, and

textual structure. In modernist literature, symbols, themes, and patterns of depicting the complex

human nature gradually become more important than the logical plot or flat one-dimensional

characters, preserved from Formalism and Realism. As stated by Susana Onega and Jose Angel

Garcia Landa (1996:21), “the modernist revolution had deep consequences for the writing and

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criticism of all literary genres.” Indeed, in the linguists’ opinion, the new modernist narrative

emphasized the role of psychology and the power of human mind that resulted in representation of

life through psychological perception that also was reflected in language revolution.

The issues mentioned above lead us to the following hypothetical assertion: modern art and

fiction thus acquired a new impetus: to portray human mind and consciousness. For instance, in the

well-known novel of the modernist writer Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse, the concept of literary

narrative was quite revolutionary, breaking with linearity of the fabula, changeability of the

narrative sequence, and concentration on Psychologism that had a formative impact on her novels,

influencing both characterization of agents and structural development. The problem statement of

this study can be worded in the following question: what are the nature and the peculiarities of this

completely new approach to the notions of time, temporality, and space within the novel, the

writer’s distinction of the natural, conceptual, and fictional time as well as the alterations of time

due to the deictic centre?

The interest of field of the investigation covers the use of the notion of temporality in To the

Lighthouse and includes thoughts on time and space in fiction that were but fleetingly mentioned in

the critical literature. In the present study, I formulated the following hypothetical premise: in her

works, Woolf establishes the new rebellious, questioning, and contemplative type of narrative that

reflected a radical change in the belief about humanity, the power of mind, the structure of the

universe, the presence of God, and the role of a modern man in the world facing the shift from the

world of stability to an ever-increasing society of revolutionary changes. In Woolf’s fiction, art

became philosophically doubtful of the previous assumptions and values within society. There

began a huge aesthetic transition based on the historic and literal time. In my investigation, I aimed

to prove that the underpinnings of the modernist narrative in To the Lighthouse are based on time

variability in its conceptual and linguistic representation. In the novel, the features of modernist

writing are represented by linguistic deviations, violations, thus encouraging new thinking and

rejection of gradual linear realistic description of time and space in a piece of fiction. Thus, in my

paper, I have chosen the aforementioned novel as a conspicuous example of modern writing in

which the innovative philosophical, psychological, and linguistic representation of time and space

alterations stands out as the most important peculiarity of modernist fiction.

The novelty and significance of present exploration consist of the theoretical analysing of time

representation in literature and its practical application on the material of the analyzed novel. The

present thesis contributes to the knowledge concerning the peculiarities of modern narrative as well

as those of modernist literary discourse. The historical study of the changing notion of temporality

in literature entails the relationships between natural, conceptual, and linguistic rendering of time in

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fiction. Thus, the present study extends the existing knowledge of the psychological background,

the transitivity and variability of time issues, and of the specific features the modernist narrative in

the novel possesses.

The present paper is based on theoretical and practical investigation, the purpose of which is

the analysis of the notion of natural, conceptual, and fictional time as a conceptual metaphor and as

a mirror of inner and outer reality. The theoretical basis for my investigation of the time and space

shift in the aforementioned novel is based on several overlapping critical theories: Practical

Criticism that comprises formalist and new critical ideas together, Psychoanalysis, and the Theory

of Narratology which foregrounds the narrator’s role. The purpose of the study contains four

objectives that are designed in order to disclose the main four aspects, or steps, of the research. I

foreground the following objectives in the given investigation:

1. To provide a general overview of the roots and development of the movement of Modernism

and its literary context.

2. To analyse the features of modernist literary discourse and the issues of Psychologism in

order to reveal their remarkable influence on the literary works of Virginia Woolf and other

modernist writers.

3. To disclose the linguistic and literary perspective of time and space in modernist narrative

and to discuss the nature and difference between the represented and representational time

as well as the notion of temporality as factors which determine the psychology, motivation,

and the behaviour of the characters.

4. To focus on the temporal perspective of the themes and structure of To the Lighthouse as

well as psychological and ideational relations between time and space in the discourse of the

novel and to extend existing knowledge of the shift of time in context.

The studies of my paper are based on a qualitative perspective and focus on the meaning and

understanding of chosen literary sources rather than on measurement and search for scientific

relationships among studied critical data. The application of content analysis including interface

linguistic and literary dimensions is also based on several overlapping literary theories such as

Formalism, New Criticism, Psychoanalysis, and Narratology. The study discusses theoretical

approaches of Walter Allen, Chris Baldic, Susana Onega and Jose Angel Garcia Landa, Randall

Stevenson, Izolda Rita Genienė, Peter Verdonk and Jean Jackues Weber, Hermione Lee, to mention

but some of them. Some more theoretical material for the study is taken from a number of

encyclopaedias and dictionaries, namely : Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture;

The Encyclopaedia of Science; The Ultimate Book of Science: Everything You Need to Know; The

Illustrated History of the World: From the Big Bang to the Third Millennium, and others.

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Structurally, the present paper consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 presents a basic theoretical

overview of the roots and development of the movement of Modernism and its literary context. In

the chapter, the extralinguistic and linguistic factors that caused the rise and growth of the

movement of Modernism are introduced and analyzed. Besides, the features of modernist literature

influencing the modernist fiction such as stream of consciousness, Psychologism, transitivity, cliché

elements, and others are described and compared in detail with the help of conspicuous examples.

Chapter 2 aims to focus on the features of modernist literary discourse and on the issues of

Psychologism in order to reveal their significant role in the literary works of modernist writers. In

this chapter, Modernism is represented as a revolution of language that manifested itself through

new features of narrative such as the use of represented speech as a modern form of literary

discourse, free indirect speech, and inner monologues. The fragmented reality portraying technique

and innovative interpretation of time and temporality are analyzed in great depth on the basis of the

insights and comments of linguists and philosophers. Besides, this chapter of the paper reveals the

practical study of the alterations of time due to the deictic elements and emphasizes the importance

of the role of the deictic centre in To the Lighthouse. Finally, this chapter identifies the literary

representation of time and space relationships that constitute part of significance of the novel and

perform its semantic nucleus.

Chapter 3 deals with the study of the linguistic and literary perspective of time and space in

modernist narrative, it discusses the nature and difference between the represented and

representational time, and covers the relation between time and space in modernist discourse. This

chapter describes Virginia Woolf as a central figure in the modernist literature and in literary

criticism of the early twentieth century and focuses on the analysis of her novel To the Lighthouse.

The main stress is given to the notion of temporality in the narrative of Virginia Woolf in order to

disclose the writer’s radically new understanding of time and the literary techniques she chooses to

express it in the discourse of her fiction.

Chapter 4 scrutinizes themes and structure of To the Lighthouse as well as psychological and

ideational relations between time and space in the discourse of the given novel. The

multidimensional notion of time is investigated on the basis of examples from Woolf’s fiction. It is

examined how time influences the structure of the novel and how its dimensions, past and present,

are treated. Past experiences effecting present situation and present moments reminding past

memories are of the greatest importance.

Indeed, as stated by Onega and Landa (1996:22), “critics from the 1930s to the 1950s paid

particular attention to the modes of representation of inner life developed by the modernist novel,

by Joyce, Woolf, or Faulkner. Terms such as ‘free indirect style’, ‘interior monologue’, ‘camera

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eye’ narrative or ‘stream of consciousness’ occupy the centre of critical stage”. Moreover, the

linguists argue convincingly that modernist literature has a tendency to lack traditional

chronological narrative, break narrative frames, or move from one level of narrative to another

without any warning through the words of a number of different narrators. Modern discourse often

purposefully violates linguistic norms in order to achieve the effect. Indeed, the means of

representation become more important than the represented issues. It may also be self-reflexive

about the process of writing and the nature of literature. Stevenson supports Onega and Landa’s

ideas and claims (1998:52) that unlike the literature of the nineteenth century, there is a breaking

down of the traditional linear narrative in the modernist novel, especially in the works of Woolf,

leaving an impression of mystery and open-endedness of the literary work. Thus, all these

aforementioned theoretical problems of modern literature in conjunction with the modernist period

are thoroughly studied in my paper.

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CHAPTER 1. THE ROOTS OF MODERNISM

Our knowledge of the rise and development of Modernism, especially of specific features of

this movement, is based on many separate discoveries and conclusions made by scientists in many

fields. Philosophers find and study original works of modernist artists that tell us a great deal about

the beliefs the modernist outlook was based on. Linguists specialize in the literary works of

modernist authors, study and interpret these findings, along with records and documents from

ancient, medieval, and modern times, to compare them and to build an overall picture of the

changing values in society before, during, and after the period of Modernism. According to

Gertrude Stephens Brown , Ernest W. Tiegs, and Fay Adams (1983), indeed, scientists are helped

by new techniques and methods of data analyses such as content study or comparative analysis of

chosen pieces of art or, in particular, literature. Consequently, specialists from the areas of history,

philosophy, psychology, and linguistics have pieced together enough evidence to develop

convincing theories to explain the origins of Modernism and to account for the stages of its

development. (Jean – Paul Sartre 1969: 179)

According to linguists, the roots of Modernism can be considered as reaching back to the early

decades of the twentieth century. However, accounting for the exact beginnings of this period is

undeniably complicated. As Stevenson suggests (1998:3), modern art that was produced between

the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be divided into a number of intermingled art

movements, styles, and techniques. The main feature that unified the number of modern innovative

ideas was the fact that different arts, literature, visual art, and architecture began to be produced

merely for art’s sake. Marshall Berman (1988:79) supports Stevenson’s ideas and specifies them by

saying that modernist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Paul Cezanne expressed their

feelings in their works and used them to establish the connection with the world. They sought to

show their attitude towards life, their personal beliefs and values with the help of innovative means

of creating art, namely: bright colourful surfaces, strong geometric shapes, and asymmetry of forms.

What is more, these modernist innovations “were followed by an upsurge in abstract art, including

geometric shapes and action painting, and new styles also developed in commercial design”. (Neil

Morris et al. 2004:252). In the visual art, primary colours and straight lines were predominant. By

comparison, before the period of Modernism, art was mainly created for religious and social

purposes, and the main task of artists was to depict reality in the way it exists with no additional

imaginary shapes or forms.

According to Andrew Sanders (1994:335), some historians believe that the modern period

actually begins during the movement of Romanticism that was called the earliest modern art

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movement. It is well known that romantic artists expressed strong feelings in their paintings of

nature and landscapes. This kind of art was a complete break from the ancient and medieval

traditions of images of human figures with perfect bodies but calm expressionless faces. Besides,

romanticists rejected the ideology of the period of Enlightenment, according to which, as Sanders

explains (1994 :337), “law, government, property, inequality, and marriage would be abolished as

part of a gradual process by which human perfectibility, conditioned by human reason, would

transcend existing limitations and impediments to fulfilled happiness”. Indeed, in the works of the

romantic artists, short movements and unexpected combinations of forms and colours were used in

order to capture the ever-changing look of natural light and shadows, beauty of nature, and mystery

of unknown places or signs of it. According to Patrick Swinden (1973:58), in the early years of the

twentieth century, innovative painters and other artists began questioning traditional artistic views.

Interestingly, Swinden disagrees with Sanders and argues convincingly that in their works,

modernists rebelled against Naturalism and Romanticism, and expressed the power and diversity of

human emotions, aimed to break with the past and celebrated modern technology, dynamism, and

progress. These artists produced the pieces of abstract pollysemantic art, which emphasized the

illogical and absurd in order to overcome complacency. In Swinden’s words, modernists claimed

that “all external actions are symbols, vivid simplifications of wishes, intentions and

predispositions”. Thus, it was important to free the creative powers of the unconscious mind and to

overcome reason. The concept, or idea, not external details, was considered to be the essence of art.

The notion of unconscious mind had deeply influenced new tendencies in literature,

philosophy, and psychology. In his study, Stevenson (1998) introduces some more important ideas

contradicting the ones expressed by Sanders and Swinden. According to Stevenson, the intellectual

underpinnings of Modernism emerge during the period of Renaissance when, on the basis of the

study of the art, poetry, philosophy, and science of ancient Greece and Rome, humanists believed

that human being is the nucleus of the existing world and that only human mind is able to measure

the width and depth of physical and spiritual reality. Indeed, for humanists, the world was an

ambiguous place full of dangers and mysteries, but a person was able to defend himself and to fight

for his rights with the help of physical and mental power that he possessed. In other words,

humanists were concerned with trying to understand human actions and with riving to improve

themselves. Undoubtedly, Stevenson recognizes in Renaissance a humanistic expression of that

modernist confidence in the potential of humans to shape their own individual destinies and the

future of the world. He agrees with Izolda Rita Genienė who also notices that the majority of

humanist philosophers claimed that humans are able to learn to understand nature and natural forces

by means of mental cognition, and can even understand the mysterious nature of the Universe. The

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modernist thinking which appeared in the Renaissance can be treated as an important aesthetic

background for the pattern of thought in the twentieth century, during the period of Modernism.

(Genienė 2007:162)

Peter Verdonk and Jean Jackues Weber (1995:104) agree with Stevenson and claim that we

can come across the first signs of modern thinking in the philosophy of ancient Greece. In the

linguists’ opinion, the variety of cultural and philosophical innovations transformed human

conscience a great deal as a new way of leading life was introduced. A great interest in classical

learning coincided with painting and sculpture showing real people in real places. Artists and

writers were seen as important figures in society, and they were supported by noble families who

wanted to display their own wealth and importance. Indeed, philosophers, mathematicians, and

other scientists discussed new ideas concerning the issues of human nature and human role in the

world and wrote them down in books and treatises, many of which were studied in the periods of

Renaissance, Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. There is enough evidence to claim

that growing interest and study of people’s thoughts, feelings, and other processes happening in the

mind was the feature unifying the scope of science and art of all the aforementioned periods.

The deepest problems of modern life questioned and analysed by modernists derive from the

claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of

overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

Indeed, Verdonk and Weber (1995:86) interpret the picture of anxious and hesitating modern

human presented in modern art as a manifestation of social disillusionment and lack of cohesion in

the world. Besides, the critics say that the feelings of despair and hesitation do not only depict the

individual human characteristics but portray the state of consciousness of the whole society during

that period as well. However, as the linguists believe, these problems have always existed; they are

not specific or unique for the period of Modernism. As we can see form above-mentioned

Stevenson’s ideas concerning the periods of Romanticism and Renaissance, people perceived life as

a constant struggle many years ago, and the same conceptions are valid in the philosophy of

Modernism. On the other hand, Stevenson notices that in modern art reality changed its face as

modern humans see the entire existing world as intangible and full of ambiguities more than ever

before. The new concept of fragmented and shifted time becomes more and more important as it

characterizes the fractured nature of person. Interestingly enough, theorists Vassiliki Kolocotroni,

Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou in their interface study support Stevenson and suppose that

“Modernism is not a movement. It is a term that masks conflict and upheaval and any number of

contradictory positions”. (1998:17) By comparison, according to Verdonk and Weber (1995), there

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is enough evidence to claim that modern reality actually becomes invisible as the art mirrors human

himself, not the outer world.

In his study, Michael North (1998:14) draws a parallel between the authentic modernist

features of art and the ones that Modernism inherited from the period of Realism either denying or

modifying and employing them practically. Interestingly, North believes that modernist literature

attempted to move from the norms and standards of realist literature and to introduce concepts such

as freedom of literary form commonly received as understanding of plot, time, and identity.

According to the theorist (ibid.), Realism in literature can be understood as a strict direct

representation of reality. The main aim of realist fiction is to imitate and mimic everyday life, to

evoke the impression that the fictional characters really exist and that the events narrated are the

events of ordinary experience that could happen to every person. Besides, in Berman’s words,

Modernism “enables us to see all sorts of artistic, intellectual, religious, and political activities as

part of one dialectal process, and to develop creative interplay among them. It cuts across physical

and social space, and reveals solidarities between great artists and ordinary people, and between

residents of what we clumsily call the Old, the New, and the Third Worlds”. (1988:5) It is also

worth remembering, as North claims, that the concept of Realism dominated during the Victorian

era when writers assumed that readers will be interested in fiction which seems convincingly to be

real. The effect of the realist novel is making the reader believe that what is being narrated is true or

has really happened. Thus, obviously, the basic impetus of art in Realism focuses on the detailed

presentation of daily life.

Onega and Landa ( 1996 :25) support North’s ideas and claim that the specific feature of

Modernism is its attempt to break free from retelling the events that happen in reality and to create

an imaginary world of dreams, illusions, visions, symbols, and memories. Besides, according to the

linguists, modernist literature can be viewed largely in terms of its formal, stylistic, and semantic

movement away not only from Realism but from Romanticism as well. In the theorists’ opinion,

modernist characters often suffer from the feelings of fear, hesitation, and pessimism; they refuse to

believe in the bright future. Nevertheless, they desperately seek for consolation and hope, and the

picture of bright imaginary future is apparent in the literature of Modernism. To prove this, let us

consider the following example from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1996):

(1) He wanted to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his

senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house

made full of life – the drawing- room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the

kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished; they must

be filled with life. (44)

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It is clear from the aforementioned extract that a typical modern character is disillusioned,

dependant, and needs comfort and protection. As the phrases in bold show, he feels imprisoned in

his own life and suffers from inability to change his destiny. Furthermore, Nicholls believes that

many modernist works are marked by the absence of a central, unifying figure, or narrator.

Consequently, modernist works reject the personal individual association of the subject with

collapsing narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices.

In order to extend and complement the above-mentioned statements, it seems useful to adhere

to the theorist Walter Allen, (1954) who provides one more definition of Modernism that

encompasses philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects. He describes the movement of

Modernism as modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the linguist claims that this

term includes both a set of cultural tendencies and a number of associated cultural movements,

originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes in the society in the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries. Modernism rejected the clear objective certainty of Enlightenment

thinking, diminished the power of undeniable reason and empiricism. The victory of intuitive

variable interpretive human philosophy was celebrated in all the spheres of modernist art. Thus,

Allen gives enough evidence showing that modernist world can definitely be called decentralized

world that lost its basis and, thus, is chaotic and full of misunderstandings.

However, by comparison to Allen, Verdonk and Weber’s pessimistic insights, Stevenson

argues (1998:15) that it would be wrong to say that all modernists or modernist movements denied

the importance of science and reason. In Stevenson’s opinion, we can view Modernism as a

penetrating of the viewpoint of the previous age. Similar ideas can be traced in the study of Alex

Davis and Lee M. Jenkins who simply describe Modernism as “an unfinished project” (2000:4), or

as an attempt to reformulate the old versus the new by refuting the picture of ominous outer reality

and carrying a deeper analysis of the inner human possibilities. As a result, the most important

characteristic of Modernism is the attention to the peculiarities of human self-consciousness. It

seems clearly that this growing interest in the unknown and unexplored fields of human mind

resulted in various modernist experiments with form and with innovative literary works that draw

attention to the processes and materials used to create as much abstraction and versatility as

possible.

1.1. The Historical Overview of Modernist Movement

Indeed, as can be seen from the above-mentioned theorists’ attitudes, the term Modernism

covers a range of spheres, cultural movements, and aesthetic tendencies. Originally, the rise and

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development of this phenomenon established their initial steps in a series of radical aesthetic and

cultural changes in Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Morris et

al. 2004:212). According to Baldic (1996), although the new modernist point of view did not reject

all the formalist prejudice and norms, during this period traditional forms of art, architecture,

literature, religious beliefs, social conventions, and daily life experienced a significant break and

were changed by the new economic, social, and political beliefs of the modern world based on

improving technology innovations.

Onega and Landa (1996) define Modernism as a certain philosophy that is difficult to put

between strict historic or temporal boundaries. The linguists speak of this period of changes in

human philosophy, in the cultural, political, and social spheres of human life on the basis of its

specific features. Indeed, Modernism is marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition that

manifests through a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views. Onega

and Landa explain (1996:48) that modernists believe the world can be understood in the act of

perceiving it; that is, the world of the notions, places, events, and experiences that people see, hear,

feel, or describe verbally. Indeed, as the critics say, the absence of the absolute truth and the

understanding of all the existing things as relative show that modernists feel no connection with

history or social institutions. Their experience and constant state of mind is that of alienation, loss,

and despair, and they basically see history as a constant deterioration leading the world to a total

loss and degradation. However, Stevenson claims convincingly that modernists fight for the

individual rights and possibilities; they appreciate inner strength and praise the power of mind.

Indeed, according to modernists, life is chaotic and vague, and can be endured only with the help

of the analysis of the sub-conscious human nature. (Stevenson 1998)

Allen (1954:249) broadens the definition of Modernism provided by Stevenson by adding that

besides being a human philosophy, Modernism is also a widely understood as a style of art. Modern

artists made the assumption that colour and shape, not the depiction of the natural world, formed the

essential characteristics of art. Interestingly enough, modernist architects and designers believed

that old styles and forms no longer met the needs of developing and changing society because of the

possibilities and innovations that the new technology introduced. They typically rejected small

decorative details and elements and emphasized the general innovative shape and image. In other

words, as Peter Nicholls says ( 1995 :16), modernist art revealed simplicity and clarity of forms,

variety of interrelated elements, and tried to create new forms by combining separate pieces of

traditional already existing details.

Baldic (1996:8) complements Allen and Nicholls by expressing the opinion that in literature

and visual art some modernists wanted to make their art more vivid and to force the audience to

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reflect on their own personal experience, individual strength and weaknesses, to clarify their own

aims and objectives in life. Consequently, modernist art can be treated as a significant contribution

to the process of growth and development of human mental abilities. In Baldic’s words (1996:11),

“readers need to be unsettled and challenged by unfamiliar forms of narrative and language, not

reassured with easily digestible meanings”. Indeed, in his study, the theorist argues convincingly

that we can understand this aspect of Modernism as a natural reaction to the increasing consumer

culture, which developed in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. Despite the

fact that most manufacturers aimed to make products that would be popular and would make

reasonable profit, high modernists rejected such materialistic attitudes in order to reformulate and

reshape conventional thinking which the was basis of the theory of Modernism. Nicholls (1995:16)

associates these innovations in art with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism and consumerism

and argues convincingly that modernist art was a new powerful way of increasing people’s interest

in the psychological and mental power hidden in each human being instead of just scanning and

mimetically portraying devastated areas of daily life.

According to Nicholls (ibid.), the modernist movement is clearly associated with the term of

modern art, both characterized by a departure from emphasis on literal representation. Indeed,

modernists rejected tradition and discriminated between relevant and irrelevant issues in life.

Moreover, they made a collaborate effort to redefine and rediscover the fundamentals of art tracing

back to the prehistoric times. Modernist artists embraced their newfound freedom of expression,

experimentation, and radicalism. For instance, Paul Cezanne, who is often called the Father of

Modernism, believed that the nucleus of art consists of the appropriate choice of colour and form,

whereas depiction of the natural world can only diminish the value of the work of art. Nicholls

believes that modernist architecture, which developed as a reaction to the one-dimensional style of

the Victorian and the Edwardian period, also put the main emphasis on simplified, unornamented

building styles and forms inspired by the idea of aesthetics. Modernists determined the form of a

building according to its functional requirements and the materials to be used. Typically, modernist

architects gave priority to light materials like glass, steel, and iron, which were widely used in the

constructions. Besides, strict geometrical forms were preferred, and all unnecessary details were

banished in order to reflect the idea of transparency and minimalism.

Interestingly enough, Berman (1988) contradicts Nicolls’ statements about the simplicity of

the modernist art and architecture and argues convincingly that in general, modernist culture was an

attempt to recover the variety of different component of human nature that the Victorians had

sought to suppress and, at the social level, on bringing together all that the nineteenth century had

struggled to keep apart. Viewing Victorian life as totally incoherent with reality, modernists sought

15

to reorient human existence toward the cultivation of direct experience, no matter how

discomforting that might be. Inspired by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, they insisted on reconnecting

the abilities of the mind governing rationality and logic with those subconscious forces governing

the senses and emotions in order to rediscover the value of unique human character, conscience, and

mind. In Sigmund Freud’s opinion (1964:84), it is possible to say that modernists rejected the

importance of the Victorian conception of a stable, predictable Universe controlled by a certain

divine power, putting in its place an abstract notion of endless unfinished Universe characterized by

constant and unforeseeable change. Consequently, knowledge of the empirical world would always

be imperfect at best, and the moral values constructed on the basis of that knowledge would remain

debatable, evolving to keep pace with the ceaseless evolution of historical circumstances. It seems

clearly that the one thing of which human beings can be sure is that they can never obtain certainty

about anything. (Freud 1964:85)

There is enough evidence to claim that the reality discovered by Modernism may have been

filled with innovations and fragmentations, but the foremost impulse within the culture manifested

in constant human struggle for integration in all aspects of life, namely: one’s identity, origin,

values, beliefs, and mission in life. Indeed, Peter Trudgill believes (2000 :68) that modernists

attempted to neglect and reject the many divisions that the Victorians had established in their life

and art, from those separating mind from body and thought from emotion to those involving race,

social class, and education. Besides, as Berman claims, “the maelstrom of Modernism has been fed

from many sources; great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe

and our place in it, the industrialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into

technology, creates new human environments and destroys the old ones, rapid and often

cataclysmic urban growth”. (1988: 16) Thus, although some linguists still argue if Modernism

truly represented a new cultural entity or was in fact better understood as an extension and

exaggeration of basic modernist precepts, remained a matter for further analysis and debate. It

seemed obviously that anyone seeking to understand the essence of Modernism must pay more

attention to its broader social, cultural, economical, and political context.

In Allen’s mind, although human nature preserves the same basic features, human

understanding of that nature is constantly changing, thus, the natural interest into human

psychology in modernist art was justifiable and understandable. Similarly, according to Peter

Faulkner et al., “a general tendency in modern literature is to focus on the contents of a character’s

mind, the inner, mental life of the experiencing subject”.(1977:31) Indeed, art in Modernism

became independent from the real world; it rejected the mimetic and didactic functions and

established the priority of the form over the content. Verdonk and Weber (1995), who state that the

16

main purpose of modernist literature was to reveal characters’ individual inner world, their

psychological characteristics, as well as their constant fluctuation of mind, share Allen’s views.

Indeed, as they say, it was important to describe life at the moment it is being lived paying attention

to the smallest details that a human being perceives: smell and sound, colour and shape, movement

and stillness. Although modernist characters try to escape from reality and neglect the past, at the

same time they aim even stronger to stick in the present moment, to perceive some moments of the

personal experience in their memories.

Verdonk and Weber (1995:89) develop their insights in the changing role of history and time

in modernist literature by stating that there is enough evidence to claim that during the period of

Modernism, the notion of time underwent notorious changes. The linguists agree with Tim

Armstrong’s claim that “the dynamization of temporality is one of the defining features of

Modernism: past, present, and future exist in a relationship of crisis. Being and time are split”.

(2005:9) Indeed, Armstrong foregrounds the fact that in Modernism, people recognized that the

flow of time was fragmented and thus, the present was discontinuous with the past. It became

obvious that through a process of social and cultural change life in the present was fundamentally

different from life in the past: human existence was seen as a constant chain of periods of

improvement and decline. Modernists view history and the current of time as a destructive and

hopeless process. In their opinion, human existence is a tragedy, a continuous moral, cultural, and

psychological degradation. Therefore, Allen argues (1954: 255) that Modernism rejects the

conception of real time representation in literature and introduces a radically new psychologically

based notion of broken or fragmentary time, which later penetrates into the world of art and brings

its influence to bear on the concept of broken narrative in Modern fiction.

Indeed, the powers of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the

aid of practical experimentation; scientific knowledge or technology denied the linear

Enlightenment thinking in literary discourse. In her study, the psychologist Judith Greene (1973:

39) suggests that the period of Modernism was full of oppositions: the assessment of the past as

different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more versatile and

chaotic, and that the authorities of reason, science, and government were subject to deep critical

analysis. Modernists wanted to reformulate the existing world by revealing and contemplating on

everything that was painful or meaningless in order to lessen the misery and to make human mind

and soul free from the sense of being guilty, disappointed, and exhausted from the experience of

reality. Thus, as Greene characterizes it (ibid.), the period of Modernism was marked by the

rejection of the false subjective rational harmony, and by the impetus to create everything new: new

aims, values, relationships, traditions, new life, and new future.

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1.2.The Literary Context of Modernism

There is enough evidence to claim that modernist literature is an opening up of the world in all

of its forms - theoretically, philosophically, aesthetically, and politically. As stated by the theorist

Juri Talvet (1998:327), before Modernism, people treated life and art from the realistic perspective.

In other words, philosophers and artists aimed to project the world in an objective fashion and to

mimetically portray every detail in the way it was. Modernist writing, however, takes the reader into

a world of unfamiliarity, a deep introspection, a cognitive thought-provoking experience, scepticism

of religion, and openness to different cultural awareness, technology innovations, and rebellious

ideas. Indeed, the most important characteristic of modern world literature may be its struggle with

the failure of traditional sources of moral authority. Here I adhere to Chana Kronfeld’s remark that

“Modernism can be defined as a dynamic semantic hierarchy”. (1996: 22) In Kronfeld’s opinion, it

is obvious that modernist literature has inherited scepticism not only of revelation and traditional

religious standards but also of reason and community consensus as sources of meaning. Indeed,

Onega and Landa in their study support these statements and claim (1996: 69) that a typical modern

writer describes a state of disconnectedness in which the individual lacks real belonging, has no

ultimate purpose in life, and is controlled by norms and standards rather than guided and fulfilled by

sincere hopes and expectations. The globalization of modernist literature, in expanding the number

of competing authorities and encouraging the readers all over the world to reflect on their own

experience while reading about the lives of fictional characters, has reinforced the idea that no

particular tradition can be accepted as universal and unquestionable.

In fact, experimenting with language and breaking the traditions were typical characteristics of

modernist literature. Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as

well. Modernist writers were supposed to create something new and attractive instead of simply

employing an objective one-dimensional third-person narrative and portraying everything from the

single perspective. As the theorist Robin Walz argues in his study, in modernist literature, “a high

value is placed upon innovation and novelty, to make new art that transcends contemporary life and

elevates the viewer, reader, or audience above the mundane”. (2008: 9) Thus, it is possible to claim

that the way the story was told became more and more significant as it shaped the very essence of

the story. Indeed, Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh complement Walz (1996:171) by saying that

Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other modernist writers became popular among the

readers mainly because they experimented with innovative fictional points of view. For instance,

James often portrayed the fictional reality of his novels and short stories from a single character’s

subjective viewpoint, while Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) logically divided the

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narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character. In the theorists’

opinion, this was done purposefully, in order to give the reader different perspectives and

evaluations of the same situation described.

Rice and Waugh develop their insights about the peculiarities of modernist literature and say

that the famous Irish novelist and poet James Joyce also applied a number of technical innovations

in his masterpieces and claimed that all these experiments were in a way the expression of the

modernist novel that represents a break with the traditional naturalistic novels of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries written by Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding,

and many other writers. Allen complements Rice and Waugh by saying that “even in James and

Conrad, the novelist figured as reporter or historian, recounting a sequence of actions ended before

the reader takes up the novel to read. But with Joyce, readers are at the cutting edge of the

characters’ minds; we share the continuous present of their consciousness. There is, obviously, an

immense gain in intimacy and immediacy”. (1954:214) Thus, as can be seen from the evidence

above, Modernism was a revolt against traditional literary forms and subjects that manifested itself

strongly after the destruction of the First World War changed human history and philosophy. As a

result, the traditional norms and standards of arranging a literary work assumed a relatively

coherent and stable social order that could not harmonize with inner world of human beings.

Indeed, modernist novels and poetry had to be analyzed on the basis of new criteria, thus, a

school of New Criticism was established in the United States, which aimed to deal with a range of

modernist innovations in literature. For instance, the theorists Norman S. Greenfield and William

Champlin (1965) state that the notion of epiphany, which can be defined as a moment in which a

character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, gained much attention from the critics

who sought to examine literary works and to clarify their insights. A remarkable part of linguists’

attention was paid to the innovative modernist manners of producing narrative with the help of the

methods of Free Indirect Speech and Free Indirect Thought .To demonstrate this, let us consider the

following example from Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel Mrs. Dalloway (1964):

(2) Now it was time to move and as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak,

her gloves, her opera – glasses and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she

rose from the sofa and went to Peter.

And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power as she came

tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the mood

which he detested, rise at Bouron on the terrace in the summer sky. (55)

As can be seen from the short passage above, linguistic deviations, violations, breaking of the

old cohesive sentence sequences, and rejection of gradual linear realistic description actually

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established a new aim of literature: to reveal the picture of human mind, to portray the

subconscious, and to depict the natural flow of thoughts in one’s mind (as illustrated by the part of

the extract in bold) which was the essence of a modern human being. The present extract from Mrs.

Dalloway demonstrates the subtle manner in which the narrative voice shifts and how this shift can

affect a reader’s perspective, but it can also serve as a criterion by which we can measure Woolf’s

innovative style of writing. The predicates in bold serve to move the reference time of the narrative

forward, however, the superficial temporal incoherence occurs in the given extract, which actually

represents a purposeful violation of the common linear narrative sequence: present moments are

intermingled with short flashbacks, memories, and impressions.

Indeed, although at first glance the style of writing in modern literature may seem chaotic and

obscure, this emphasis on absurdity actually help to show the picture of the world from the point of

view of a modern human. Purposelessness of cruelty, destructivity of progress, alienation and

loneliness, nothingness of self-important moments of personal experience replicate in human

consciousness and leave a footnote there. In her novels, having two possible techniques that would

allow her to enter characters’ consciousness and present their personal impressions, namely, direct

and indirect style of representation, Woolf chooses to reveal her characters’ interior monologues

and widely uses the method of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) Thus, it seems certainly that

modernist literature provides valuable insights of human mind and investigates various patterns of

thought in different literary discourse. (Jen Green at al. 1999:65)

Interestingly, Green (1999) develops the insights about the peculiarities of modernist fiction

by drawing a parallel between the radically new representation of history, temporality, and time in

literature which has not received much attention in the theoretical and practical analysis of literary

works. In the theorist’s opinion, time, in modernist literature, is a very important issue that acts both

as internal or external circumstances and as an active participant in a piece of fiction. Indeed,

modernist concept of temporality may take the reader through a day in the life of a narrator,

whereas in Realism, the reader is taken into a year in the life of the characters, as pointed out by

Stevenson. In his words (1998 :4), “departures from the serial, chronological construction of

storytelling, for example – its usual beginning, middle, and end – are by no means uniquely the

invention of modernist fiction.” In Modernism, time is viewed as disjointed and cyclical, and the

reader is moved from one image to another rather than in a start to finish manner - a juxtaposition of

events may unfold at once. Similar ideas are expressed by Onega and Landa who foreground the

fact (1998:207) that the representation of external temporal reality in modernist fiction became

“atrophied, or, at least, stylized as the focus of attention shifted to the characters’ inner processes -

imaginative and psychological”. Interestingly, Armstrong characterizes modernist literature as “the

20

notion of uneven and competing temporalities” (2005: 7) and states that unlike in Romanticism

which celebrated the beauty and the value of feelings, modernist authors put emphasis on the

interrelation of details, separate elements, and pictures, and portray the world as a certain mosaic

which consists of different experience, spatial, and temporal extracts. By comparison, the theorist

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1965:124) argues that this belief in a cyclical time also encourages a

cognitive exploration of the subconscious because the reader can see the attempt to place every

detail inside the characters’ mind, away from the body and feel free to explore the inner working of

one’s mind and subconsciousness.

Allen (1954: 65) complements Armstrong, Richards, and Stevenson’s statements by arguing

that experimenting with language and breaking the norms of traditional writing bring about a

fascination with the way in which one projects reality within the workings of the mind. Besides,

Stevenson alleges that the distinctive feature of Modernism in all spheres of art including literature

is its diversity. Through a close interface study and analysis of Modernism as a cultural, aesthetic,

philosophical, and literary movement, he explores the connections between the new stylistic

developments and the shifting politics of reason, mind, and consciousness. Indeed, these

Stevenson’s insights provide a detailed and useful overview of the twentieth century human

philosophy and the changing system of norms and values. For instance, according to the linguist,

the questioning of human life with or without God is one of the most important theoretical and

philosophical assumptions developed in the period of Modernism. Besides, a modernist human

being expresses a constant wish to escape from his past and to consolidate in the future, but sees no

constructive steps that would help him to do this. According to Stevenson (1998:9), “many

contemporary commentators confirm the extent of new challenges to the period’s life and thinking,

indicating how inescapable the effects of the new industrialized, technologized modernity of life

seemed at the time.” Thus, we can arrive at a logical conclusion that all these psychological issues

were based on the multidimensional character of human mind that was one of the main interests of

modern writers.

From above considerations it could be preliminarily concluded that the questioning human

spirit could be seen as part of a necessary search for ways to make sense of a broken world both in

the literary works of Romanticism and Modernism, modernist literature often moves beyond the

limitations of the realist fiction with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical

emergence of city life as a central force in society. In addition, an early attention to the described

object as an independent entity became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form. Where

Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, modernist writers were more acutely conscious

of the objectivity of their surroundings. In Modernism the object is described, analyzed, and

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revealed by means of the spatial and temporal circumstances the characters are surrounded by. This

is a shift from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift

from a philosophy based on knowledge and experience to an intuitive philosophy shaped by human

mind. Indeed, this significant shift is the basis of the art and literature of Modernism. (Genienė

2007:164)

1.3.New Values and Insights into the Representation of Modernist Reality

As maintained by the theorist Hendrik Marinus Ruitenbeek (1962:147), the controversial

movement of Modernism revealed a number of new insights into the portraying of reality and

changed the traditional scope of values. Indeed, it reversed reality and fiction by raising the

problematic question of reality. Modernist literary works were mainly based on the experimental

representation of human consciousness and the detailed exploration of the individual identity.

Undoubtedly, modernist authors seek to represent the conscious and unconscious mental activities

and to analyze the complexities of the human psyche. In Berman’s words (1988: 15), “modern

environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and

nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But

it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual

disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.” Indeed,

Berman believes that the issues of psychology such as dreams, visions, and memories become the

central focus of attention in the novels of modernist writers, such as James Joyce, V. Woolf, and

T.S. Elliot.

For instance, in his masterpiece Dubliners Joyce portrayed the peculiarities of life in the city

that he loved and hated at the same time. He created a number of stories that all represent a certain

stagnation of mind: all of the principle characters encounter some type of obstacle that they seem

more than capable of overcoming but typically, they fail to find the right solution. Rene Wellek and

Austin Warren (1993:165) argue that the characters of the stories in this book are in a constant

search for their identity, or their lost inner worlds, they suffer from the feelings of hesitation and

guilt, low self-esteem, and often make wrong decisions because of inner fear of changes and

positive progress. Thus, in Dubliners, the reader can see a convincingly realistic depiction of

society that suffers from inappropriate or debatable moral, cultural, and social boundaries and

norms. Indeed, the role of the reader here changes as reading Joyce’s fiction is not an easy process

or comfortable experience; the reader is forced to control, to organize, to interpret, and to make his

or her own judgements. One of the kernel questions in Dubliners can be foregrounded in the

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following words: Why are the characters so depressed and passive? In Wellek and Warren’s view,

the city Joyce depicts for us in each of Dubliners’ short stories is a place suitable for active

habitants who want to improve the quality of their life, however, the described people are constantly

fighting with negative feelings and there is no time or chance for those positive innovations left.

Stevenson(1998:49) supports Wellek and Warren’s insights and develops them by adding that

Dubliners is a collection of stories that are “realistic, sometimes satirical, portrayal of drab lives in

a city Joyce shows suffering from paralysis of will, energy, and imagination”. Here I believe that

the short analysis of one short story from this collection could serve as evidence supporting the

critics’ view. For instance, I think that at the first glance, one of the short stories from this book,

The Dead, focuses around the mind and inward experience of Gabriel Conroy at an ordinary party.

Nevertheless, beneath its surface, the story subtly illustrates many ways in which realistic characters

of the story lose their confidence and motivation, their wish to seek for something in their life, and

become psychologically broken. They have no further expectations, plans, or aims. At the end of

the story, for instance, after Gabriel’s wife has told him about a romantic and tragic love story from

her youth, he realizes that their relationship lacks true sincerity and mutual understanding, which

leads him into disappointment and apathy. I believe that Joyce here portrays the great drama of a

passive hesitating modern human who prefers reflecting on his own feelings and problems but never

finds the solution and remains deep in apathy, choosing instead to fixate passing life. Indeed, in my

opinion, this scene in a piece of literature can be understood as a convincing conclusion to the

whole semantic nucleus of Dubliners that depicts the overarching depression and paralysis which

damages modern human’s life, as can be clearly seen from the following short extract from the

same story The Dead (2006), which reveals everlasting despair and disillusionment in the

characters’ souls:

(3) One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other

world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

(168)

It is interesting to draw a brief parallel between Joyce and Woolf’s treatment of the workings

of human mind. In her close study of the novels of the modernist writer Virginia Woolf, Hermione

Lee (1977: 337) presupposes that Woolf’s psychological novel To the Lighthouse serves as one

more convincing example of the modern insights into human mind. Basically, the plot of the novel

is simple as there is little action and events. The whole novel is based on the Ramsay family’s daily

life: the complicated relationships between the family members and their plans to visit a lighthouse.

However, Lee believes that this book presents the picture of human mind in a visually meaningful

way and changes prevailing beliefs about the simplicity of the nature of human interaction on

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various occasions. In the critic’s words (1977:349), “in “To the Lighthouse”, apart for the

beautifully suggested relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and her husband and children, a powerful

unifying factor is the lighthouse itself, which becomes a symbol carrying many meanings”. One of

the primary themes of the novel is the complicated nature of the process of creation that the painter

Lily Briscoe faces while trying to express her feelings by means of painting in the chaos of the

family drama. The novel is also contemplation upon the lives of a nation’s inhabitants during the

period of war, and the people left behind. In Lee’s opinion, the novel also explores the passage of

time and suggests relationships between such phenomena as past and future, movement and

stillness, and even life and death. The statements presented above naturally lead us to the

convincing conclusion that Sanders makes (1994:515) in his study when analyzing the works of

Woolf. In his words, “ the supposedly random picture of the temporal in Woolf’s later fiction is

also informed and ‘interpreted’ by the invocation of the permanent and the universal , much as the

‘arbitrary’ in nature was 'interpreted’ with reference to post-Darwinian science, or the

complexities of the human psyche unravelled by the application of newly fashionable Freudian

theory.”

It is obvious from Lee’s and Sanders’ words that in modernist fiction, writers create strange

and unusual characters that are not so easy to believe and to understand. However, there is enough

evidence to claim that they are convincing and interesting. Indeed, as Lee suggests (1977:14), the

reader is usually astonished and attracted by the personalities of modern characters who are

portrayed as dull and suffering from apathy, almost completely incapable of looking at anything

fairly, getting involved in it more than superficially, examining it in some detail, remaining honest

about what he observes, and deciding for himself based upon accurate personal observations. This

reduction in mental and observational ability is also a result of modern educational experiences.

Without doubt, these practices are direct descendants of modern psychological theories that view

man as a certain social organism, and tend to ignore his intellectual and cognitive abilities and

development of the mind.

As stated by Swinden (1973:135), Virginia Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators

in the English language whose novels are strongly influenced by the insights of Psychoanalysis. In

her works, she experiments with the stream of consciousness technique and the underlying

psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. By comparison, Stevenson says (1998:50)

that the core of Woolf’s fiction is based on her reflection of the human consciousness, inner

discourse, or the peculiarities of its characters’ mind. Indeed, in Joan Bennett’s words (1964:103),

“there are two different kinds of meaning in her novels: the prose plane (interest in human

character, relationships, events) and the symbolic plane (the whole novel is treated as a symbol, as

24

light and shadow of the lighthouse metaphorically symbolizes the joy and sorrow, bright and dark

moments in human life and in relationships”. Bennet provides evidence that when the source of life

itself for the individual and society is denied, oppressive practices parading as science surface and

the quality of life and sanity rapidly deteriorates. As Woolf shows convincingly in her novels, this

is the exact condition of modern civilization.

Sanders (1994:515) complements Stevenson, Swinden and Bennett’s ideas about Virginia

Woolf as an experimental modernist writer and claims that “her novels attempt both to ‘dissipate’

character and to reintegrate human experience within an aesthetic shape or ‘form’. She seeks to

represent the nature of transient sensation, or of conscious and unconscious mental activity, and

then to relate it outwards to a more universal awareness of pattern and rhythm”. The linguist

thinks that similarly to other modernist writers, Woolf did not intend to analyze real events and

those occurring in the mind separately, as if dividing the personalities of her characters into purely

physical and spiritual figures. In her pieces of literature, she aimed to show the psychological

underpinnings of human behaviour and to reveal specific changes in human psyche influenced by

the personal experience gained or knowledge achieved. To illustrate this, let us have a look at the

following extract from To the Lighthouse (1927):

(4) Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now ( but this cannot

last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were all talking

about boots) just now she reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like

a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and

sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all

eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this

profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more and

peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to

stay here like a smoke, like a fume rising upward, holding them safe together.

Nothing need to be said; nothing could be said. (120-1)

The passage describing the protagonist of the novel Mrs. Ramsay at her dinner party illustrates

Woolf’s capacity of exploration of the human consciousness with the tool of indirect discourse and

stream of consciousness technique. The writer employs banal conversations and ordinary services

at the party in order to strengthen and emphasize the fact that Mrs Ramsay is actually mentally

dissociated from the moment, free to float like a hawk, flag, or fume (as seen from phrases in bold).

These similes describe the character’s mind rather than recording thoughts plausibly arising within

it, but there is much in this passage which represents more directly the particular influence of the

character herself, and her complicated fragmented pattern of thought. In other words, the example

25

serves as conspicuous evidence that Woolf provided an innovatory representation of modern world

perceiving and seizing reality on the basis of mind, not reason and logical judgment. Thus, it seems

plausible to support Sanders’ conclusion that reveals the semantic nucleus of modernist writing by

claiming that “the twentieth – century novelist should evolve a new fictional form out of a

representation of the ‘myriad expressions’ which daily impose themselves on the human

consciousness”. (1994:515)

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CHAPTER 2. THE FEATURES OF MODERNIST LITERARY DISCOURSE

AND ISSUES OF PSYCHOLOGISM

According to Sanders (1994:514), people have always been interested in the studies of mind.

Ancient philosophers believed that there is a strong relationship between human experience, power

of mind, and language as a means of social interaction. I suggest showing the mysterious and

nevertheless stunning way these three notions are constantly influencing and complementing one

another in the following figure:

Figure 1. Dimensions of Human Social Interaction.

1.EXPERIENCE

(social – physical dimension)

2.REFLECTION 3. LANGUAGE

( psychological dimension) (verbal – communicational dimension)

Figure 1. Dimensions of Human Social Interaction.

As can be seen from the figure above, first of all a human being gains some experience on the

basis from the physical environment and social interaction with other humans he or she faces in the

moments of success or failure, happiness or disappointment, hope or disillusionment. The

experience gained is reflected and thoroughly reconsidered in the conscience, whereas the power of

reason enables a person to discriminate between meaningful and unimportant moments, so that the

later ones could be forgotten easily while the significant information is saved in the memory.

Finally, the important information needs to be preserved and shared with other people, thus, as a

socially intelligible creature a person expresses his or her thoughts verbally, via the system of

linguistic sounds known as language. This linguistic activity, on its own behalf, causes new

experience and requires a particular reaction of its addressees, and the influence these three

dimensions of human social interaction have upon one another continues in a certain chain reaction,

or endless circle. Thus, it seems certainly that it is possible to suggest the presence of clear

important relationships between the three aforementioned phenomena, namely: experience,

reflection, and language.

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Indeed, my assertion provided above can be supported by modern philosophers such as

Descartes, Locke, and Kant, who made collaborative effort in order to develop the studies of mind

within their own philosophical frameworks. They claimed that every human being has to

accomplish specific individual tasks in his or her life. Trudgill (2000: 125) maintains Sanders’ ideas

about the influence that our mind has on our language and complements them by stating that the

natural sciences, which had been based of the doctrines of philosophy, gradually developed as

independent disciplines and influenced the rise of Psychologism as a separate field of scientific

studies. Indeed, Psychologism can be treated as a branch of philosophy that was established on the

basis of the methodological research that combined an empirical and naturalistic approach to the

nature of man and extended existing knowledge about the unexplored possibilities of human mind.

According to Trudgill, psychologists supported the view that the meanings of words are primarily

shaped as certain concepts in the mind because of certain external influence, thus, human thoughts

can be materialized and thoroughly expressed in the metaphysical reality by verbal or non–verbal

means of communication. The difficulty of interpreting the powers of human mind with confidence

was emphasized and indeed, this belief questioned the complexity of the mechanism of human

thought and reasoning.

In his study, Sanders argues convincingly (1994:516) that there is constant activity within the

mind. Human beings are each in some way constantly thinking: they are analyzing problems or

following a line of investigation, recalling some significant events or experience from the past,

making important decisions, discriminating between significant and insignificant moments in their

daily life, or simply dreaming and planning certain activities in the future. Thus, it seems certainly

that there are ever changing feelings and emotions related to everything that people experience, and

an endless variety of judgments and commentaries about the world they visually perceive. Actually,

as Greenfield claims, for many modern humans, mind is “the seething morass of cell circuitry that

has been configured by personal experiences and is constantly being updated as we live out each

moment” (2000: 13). Greenfield argues that the mechanism of the mind goes on and on and never

seems to stop. It is a constant source of images, memories, and ideas intruding themselves upon our

awareness. This endless process is impossible to control and it is wise to accept this continual

versatility of images and ideas appearing across the landscape of our mind as an inevitable mental

process.

Although human mind usually conceals painful experience and flashes of unpleasant

memories, it is undesirable to ignore or deny the influence it has on people’s lives. (Bryson Gore

2005:20). According to Lee (1977:13), the majority of modernist pieces of literature are based on

the belief that if the processes happening in the mind are constantly neglected, the character of

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human nature becomes poorer as there appears a decrease in the power of creativity, self-

determinism, responsibility, morality, reason, and a value of life itself. The linguist emphasizes the

fact that the current decadent notion of man without a mind or inner personality, considered only as

an animal or a biological organism has been institutionalized into the theories and practices of

modern civilization in the spheres of media, sociology, education, economics, and psychology. As

Lee claims (ibid.), “Modernism is usually described as a response to an era whose political and

social developments invited nihilism, scepticism, and despair”. Therefore, modernist authors seek

to explore the deepest levels of human mind and to visualize the feelings hidden there in order to

represent the ambivalent modernist reality and the most important problems modernist people face,

namely: the sense of loss and disillusionment.

Is it so easy to depict the complexity of human mind and to portray it in the works of

literature? Definitely, modernist writers have applied a number of innovative methods and

techniques to disclose the essence of human psyche. Modernist fiction basically relies upon the

subjective moments of experience, flashes and visions, dreams and hallucinations which seem to be

illogical and absurd, but still conceal a deep value and meaning. Stevenson argues convincingly

(1998 :24) that any possible interpretations and ways of analysing modernist novels derive not only

from their subjects or topics under discussion but from the haziness and unreliability of their telling.

The constant search for notional, cultural, and personal identity becomes the core question and task

for the modern character, whereas the main task of the modernist writer can be worded in the

following way : to explore unknown layers of the inside world existing in our minds with the help

of deep psychological analysis. (Robert B. Pippin 1999:47)

2.1. The Language Revolution, Stream of Consciousness, and Free Indirect Discourse

Indeed, innovations of modern literature mainly focus on the radical changes in the nature of

narrative. The comparison of the traditional and modern narrative distinguishes several significant

differences. Traditional narrative is based on the chronological order of events; it is interested into

particular characters, their actions, places, and temporal circumstances. This kind of narrative tends

to be chronological and linear, and it is easy for the reader to follow the text from the beginning to

the end. Besides, the essential characteristic of traditional way of writing is marked by the

simplicity and one-dimensionality of the situations presented. The reader comprises everything

from the single angle with no vague hypothesis or polysemy of hidden details, such as symbols or

allusions. In other words, language in traditional works of literature is straight forwarded and the

reader gets a realistic delineation of the thoughts, words, and actions of literary characters.

29

By comparison, modern narrative rejects the mimetic and linear arrangement of events.

According to Onega and Landa (1996: 24), language in modern narrative is not simply a tool for the

objective representation of reality; it is an inseparable part of reality, as every word carries its own

meaning that manifests itself in the wider linguistic context of a particular literary work. As stated

by Kathryn VanSpanckeren (1994:62), “vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the

modernist novel as well. […] The way the story was told became as important as the story itself”.

VanSpanckeren believes that Modernism embodies the notion that a narrator has only a limited

knowledge; the reader is thus presented with different points of view from the consciousness of the

characters. In many modernist literary works, it is a challenging task for the reader to decide which

character‘s subjective impressions are revealed in a particular passage. Sometimes it may even be

impossible to decide whether a particular passage is told by a particular narrator or simply seen

through a character’s eyes. Such ambiguous passages are common in the novels of Woolf, Joyce

and other modernist authors. Besides, according to Stevenson (1977: 57), Woolf is one of the

prominent writers famous for her time and space philosophy that manifested itself via the stream of

consciousness technique or interior knowledge of her characters. Stevenson comes to the conclusion

that in this writer’s novels we are thus presented with a character’s subjective point of view: the

characters’ ” thoughts are carefully organized, clearly expressed, and show a sophisticated capacity

to find metaphors for states of mind and the various pangs of contact between consciousness and

the intractable world around it”.

Typically, narrative events are narrated only once in a text, and the order in which they are

presented in the text corresponds to their order of occurrence in the real or fictional world.

However, Onega and Landa (1996:31) focus on the fact that modernists purposefully violate this

basic narrative convention: for instance, some events may be described twice or even more times in

the text, some other events may be unmentioned at all or portrayed by means of very short remarks.

To prove this, let us consider the following extract from Woolf’s fiction (1996):

(5) ‘No going to the Lighthouse, James’, he said as he stood by the window, speaking

awkwardly but trying in deference to Mrs Ramsay to soften his voice into some

semblance of geniality at least.

This going to the Lighthouse was a passion of his, she saw, and then as if her husband

had not said enough with his caustic saying that it would not be fine tomorrow, this

odious little man went and rubbed it in all over again. (18)

As can be seen form the extract above, obviously, the second or third mention of going to the

Lighthouse is not simply a flashback but gives the reader the possibility to see the same question as

new from a different perspective. Violations of chronology do not invalidate the notion of a

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narrative form or prototype. It seems certainly that Woolf wants to provoke the reader and to

encourage him to make his or her own judgements related to the situation described, instead of

trying to convince him by objective arguments. Her logic is logic of emotions, dreams, and images,

rather than of reason. Thus, the result is an overlapping of literary persuasive aims and styles,

combined with an expressiveness that is due to her unique manner of writing. (VanSpanckeren

1994:56) Here I intend to show the chronology in the novel and the temporal interrelation of the

chapters by means of the following diagram:

Figure 2. Temporal Chronology in the Novel To the Lighthouse

PRESENT

PAST FUTURE

Figure 2. Temporal Chronology in the Novel To the Lighthouse

As can be seen in the suggested figure, the flow of time in the novel is rather unconventional and

consists of a number of smaller parameters. I would like to claim that the protagonist of the novel,

Mrs. Ramsay, serves as the major connection between the notions of the past, the present, and the

future, as all the three temporal dimensions are included in her inner world of thoughts. Her present

feelings intermingle with memories from the past and projections from the future. The following

example from To the Lighthouse (1996) can serve as a great piece of evidence explaining the

essence of the diagram I proposed above:

(6) she kept looking back over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out, and she was

certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the lighthouse tomorrow; and she

thought, he will remember that all his life. (57)

As can be seen from the extract, the reader perceives the flowing time in the way it passes in Mrs.

Ramsay’s mind. Although her attention is focused on the present events around her (looking at her

son) , she constantly keeps thinking about the future going to the lighthouse and experiencing the

MOMENTS ACTIVITY

DREAMS PLANS

VISIONS FLASHBACK

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disappointment her little son is going to face the following day. The present activities such as

sewing, watering flowers, or reading, serve as the starting point from which a mental journey into

the world of past visions and memories begins. Besides, the present moments, as the extract

suggests, become the psychological basis for Mrs. Ramsay’s future dreams, plans, and fears. She

cannot stop worrying about the influence that the future disappointment will have on her son’s

personality and even believes that this sorrow can never be forgotten. Thus, as VanSpanckeren says

(1994:54), it is obvious that in her novel, Woolf depicts time on the basis of human psychology and

individual subjective treatment of reality.

Stevenson complements VanSpanckeren and claims convincingly (1998:57) that one of the

great innovations of modernist novels is the stream of consciousness technique, used by the writer

in order to capture a character’s natural flow of internal thoughts. Free Indirect Speech and Free

Indirect Discourse involves both a character’s speech and the narrator’s comments or presentation,

or direct discourse and indirect discourse. Indeed, Free Indirect Discourse (FID) is an effective and

comprehensive method of representation the literary world because it enables the reader to perceive

the thoughts of the narrator and the thoughts of a character at the same time and thus, extends the

reader’s existing knowledge about the situation described. Consequently, in To the Lighthouse, this

method typically involves the use of the past tense, yet cannot be imitated by traditional

grammatical rules and norms.

(The Ultimate Book of Science: Everything You Need to Know 2008: 98)

Similarly to Stevenson and VanSpanckeren, Genienė explains that in expressing people’s

minds there are several kinds of discourse forms, namely: direct thought, indirect thought, free

direct thought and free indirect thought. It is interesting to compare the theorist’s understanding of

the FID technique with VanSpanckeren and Stevenson’s insights. Genienė believes that in FID,

pronominal elements play a significant role. Interestingly, according to her, personal pronouns such

as he, she, and one can be possibly used instead of directly naming characters. The following

example is one of the actual uses of the pronoun one in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1996):

(7) But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her design which made

her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or so, Oh the dead! she murmured,

one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them.

(166)

Indeed, if we examine the given extract, it is obvious that free indirect style differs enormously

in effect from the often unsettling, seemingly disjointed picture of characters’ mind. In the present

passage, the verbs in the past tense, namely “pitied”, “brushed” and “had”, clearly provide

evidence that the passage is indirectly seen through the narrator’s eyes. It seems certainly that

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characters’ feelings are a great deal more important than the very characters, as the emotions

described are typical for all human beings, especially if we treat people from the aesthetic modernist

perspective. Generally, indirect thought that is also often used in modernist literature tends to

employ pronouns he or she instead of one. As Regina Rudaitytė suggests, in modernist fiction,

“characters are abolished in favour of pronouns in the text: they, he, she. These unidentified

pronouns point to undifferentiated beings, and what is crucial is the removal of even the remotest

possibility of identification, instead, the reader is invited to supply his own version, to participate in

this perpetual creation unfolding right before his eyes, simultaneously with the process of reading”.

(2000:13) To illustrate this, let us now have a look at one more example of indirect thought from

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1996) which illustrates Lily’s thoughts:

(8) She had always found him difficult. She had never been able to praise him to his

face, she remembered. (162)

As can be seen in the given extract, despite the fact that Lily thinks about herself, she tends to

characterize the doer of the actions in an indirect way, by means of the pronoun she, as if creating

the invisible participant in the situation. It seems that the character wants to evaluate the situation

objectively, from the neutral narrator’s point of view. At the same time, however, the reader

perceives the emotional colouring of the sentences, which discloses the character’s inner state and

feelings. In Lee’s words, the difference between direct and indirect thought appears when we

presume original words Lily may have actually thought. It may be just an assumption, but the shift

is possible in the way of transferring the indirect form to the direct.

Obviously, it could be stated that in To the Lighthouse, among the characters, Lily Briscoe is

described most frequently with the help of Free Indirect Discourse. Lee says that Mrs. Ramsay’

thoughts are also mainly characterized by means of this technique. Why does Woolf choose this

technique of disclosing the characters’ thoughts? In my opinion, this innovative way of portraying

characters’ mind and inner world can be treated as evidence that these two women are the most

important characters in this novel, and this is the reason why their consciousness description seems

to occupy most of the parts where they appear in the novel. Indeed, as Lee (1977) believes, the high

frequency of pronouns he, she, and one seems to be something particular in the majority of Woolf’s

novels. In her use of FID, Woolf usually purposefully violates the traditionally accepted use of

grammatical tenses. In fact, the choice of personal pronoun depends on the narrative form. For

example, the third person narrative employs personal pronouns such as he or she, and the first

person narrative employs personal pronouns such as I. To illustrate this, consider the following

brief description of Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts from To the Lighthouse (2006):

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(9) She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like

her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her

mind and her heart, purifying out the existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in

praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was

beautiful like that light. (53)

In my opinion, in this passage, the thorough employment of personal pronouns instead of

using names helps to transform narrative forms in each sentence or even in one long sentence

without giving readers any discomfort about the changed manner of character representation. I

support Lee’s claim that it is clear for the reader which character is described and, what is more,

there is no redundant repetition or ambiguous naming. Indeed, all the given evidence can lead us to

the hypothetical premise that in Woolf’s fiction, the personal pronouns he, she, and one play a

significant role in expressing characters’ minds, although this does not mean that the

aforementioned pronouns are always employed in consciousness describing scenes. (Lee ibid.)

Thus, as can be seen from the above statements, an author can describe the verbally

unexpressed thoughts and feelings of a character without the devices of objective narration or

dialogue. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf makes constant use of this technique, and it is established as

the predominant style from the beginning. In this novel, the action mainly occurs not in the outside

world but in the thoughts and feelings of the characters as exhibited by the ongoing narrative.

Although there is a narrative voice apart from any of the characters, Peter Widdowson (1999: 147)

emphasizes the fact that a large part of the narrative consists of the exposition of each characters’

consciousness. The theorist explains this interesting thought by saying that some sections use entire

pages without letting an objective voice interrupt the flow of thoughts of a single character.

With no doubt, as it has already been mentioned in previous chapters, the employment of the

stream of consciousness technique in modernist fiction has a reliable psychological background.

Onega and Landa believe (1996) that as a literary device, stream of consciousness was highly

influenced by Sigmund Freud who was interested in the nature and function of the human

unconscious. In the critics’ words (1996:25), modern fiction “is often combined with early

psychoanalytical approaches. Sigmund Freud himself devoted some attention to the

psychoanalytical interpretation of narrative literature as well as to the narrative dimension of

psychoanalysis. Early analyses based on Freud’s work lay more emphasis on the former, that is, on

mechanisms of identification in reading, the writer's fantasies of sexuality and power, or the

'pathological' origin of plot structures and patterns of images or motifs.” Indeed, the linguists

claim that Freud provided an innovative interpretation of the theory that there is a part of the mind

to which we do not have complete access, with the implication that we cannot know all of our own

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thoughts, fears, motivations, and desires. Thus, modernist writers were intrigued by this concept,

and they sought in various ways to depict and illuminate the human unconscious. Stevenson (1998)

supports Onega and Landa’s statements and remarks that although stream of consciousness is the

illumination of thoughts and feelings that characters consciously experience, Woolf carries a great

deal deeper analysis of the human mind than a conventional narrative about the past, providing an

intimate view of a character’s interior world. In Bennett’s opinion (1964: 103), it is possible to say

that with the help of the stream of consciousness, the writer not only expresses the flow of each

character’s thoughts, but she also combines them into a narrative that flows fluently from the

picture of one character’s mind to another’s without any boundaries. Indeed, Woolf foregrounds the

importance of memories and flashbacks into the past and remarks in her novel Orlando (1928:55)

that “memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out,

up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the

most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand

towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments… our commonest deeds are set

about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights”.

Some theorists and literary critics tend to characterize modernist discourse as a literary

revolution because of its literary and linguistic innovations. North (1998:98) clearly supports Lee

and Stevenson’s considerations about the role of FID in Woolf’s fiction as well as in modernist

narrative in general and ponders the conclusion that Woolf can be a master of the aforementioned

literary form, in which the identity of the narrator is not entirely clear. According to North (ibid.),

her novels abound with dialogue that is not indicated by quotation marks, as well as phrases and

passages that could easily be spoken or merely thought. This form of narration is told in the third

person, but it conveys a sense of the character’s internal thoughts from the character’s own

experience, thereby expressing these thoughts somewhere between a first-person and third-person

mode of narrative, as the following extract from To the Lighthouse (1927) demonstrates:

(10) […] her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows of the

fruit… putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape…

until, oh, what a pity that they should do it – a hand reached out, took a pear, and

spoilt the whole thing. (125)

North‘s insights lead us to the premise that Woolf‘s use of stream of consciousness and FID

enhance the themes of the novel To the Lighthouse. Indeed, in the novel, the author forcefully

conveys the subjective experience of reality, and the intensive use of stream of consciousness

indicates that a person‘s experience cannot be truly understood and interpreted through the

objective scope of a neutral objective narrator. Instead, Woolf suggests that reality is more like the

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mirror of the various perspectives and experiences of individuals. One person in one particular

situation for instance, cannot accurately describe the protagonist of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay. The

reader can perceive the picture of her character only when a number of other characters express

their contradictory impressions of her. In North’s opinion, this protagonist of the novel is a

convincing representation of every modern human, of his complex nature and multidimensional

mind. Throughout the novel, she is constantly searching for her own self, her lost identity, and at

the same time, despite her weaknesses, she manages to serve as a solid moral support to other

characters that need her. (North 1998:102)

Similarly to North, Verdonk and Weber (1995:56) say that the narrative chain that Woolf

creates in the novel, linking the consciousness of various characters in an unbroken flow,

emphasizes the connections between people that Mrs. Ramsay always tries to establish and

maintain. In Verdonk and Weber’s opinion, she serves as a symbolic link in the alienated modernist

surroundings, and though each character seems to be a separate individual, their influence and

dependence on one other is undeniable. Thus, their interrelated thoughts and activities form the

narrative eiderdown, and they all shape one another’s experiences and emerge from one another’s

perspectives. For instance, when one of the characters of To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe sees the

drawing-room steps in the third part of the novel, she thinks that they look empty and gloomy. She

asks, “How could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there?”

(1996:265). The theorist Geoffrey Leech (1974:9) claims that in order to understand Lily’s

questions the reader should recall that this emptiness can be interpreted as both physical and

metaphysical space. In the linguist’s words, “that is mistaken to try to define meaning by reducing it

to the terms of sciences other than the science of language: e.g. to the terms of psychology or

chemistry” (Leech, ibid.) The room is empty as there are no people in it, but this emptiness is also

present in Lily’s mind, in her thoughts, and the words uttered by her in a way reflect her inner state.

Thus, it is logical to claim that the emptiness that Lily sees can be understood only through the

perspective of the character’s emotions and feelings, not logical judgments.

Benjamin Nelson (1965 :157) complements Leech and believes that the notion of emptiness

described by Lily can be treated as a psychological dimension of physical and emotional existence

rather than as an ineluctable metaphysical condition, as here Woolf constitutes innovative narrative

based on the analysis the physical world of the characters. What is more, as Nelson points out

(ibid.), her narrative includes the double meaning of every single element and moment of life.

Woolf’s narrative, which exists between her characters’ fictional world, discovers and reveals all its

peculiarities and mysteries. In short, it seems certainly that in her novels, including To the

Lighthouse, Woolf raises eternal questions by the humankind of death and presence, speech and

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silence, time and space by means of the linguistic technique of FID that enables readers to observe

the nature of human inside.

According to Morris (2004:7), in this world there are a lot of unanswered questions and

unknown mysteries, as well as that the fragmented self in a disordered and rapidly changing world

is not going to have its hopes for closure, for an end to alienation, satisfied. However, every human

being experiences moments of insight, flashes of meaning, in which something important is caught

in the imagination, as if in the glare of the lighthouse beam. In addition, if that moment inevitably

passes by almost as soon as it has been realized, something has been discovered which one can at

least remember. In this sense, it is possible to claim convincingly that we can subjectively

understand the essence of life, even if what we consider to be undeniable evidence will never

accurately account for the real meaning of the experience.

2.2.The Evolution of the Notion of Time in Literary Discourse

There is enough evidence to claim that in their works, modernist writers formulated a

completely new approach to the treatment of the notion of time and temporality. Consequently, it

seems wise to overview the development of the notion of time over centuries in the spheres of

science, art, religion, and philosophy in order to see what new unexplored challenging dimensions

and layers of this wide entity have been discovered and described so far. Indeed, according to

Stevenson (1998:106), modernists believed that conventional understanding of time does not reflect

the way in which time actually influences and is influenced by human lives. Indeed, time seems to

be incapable of being measured by such symbolic representations as hours, days, or months.

Consequently, a writer cannot refer accurately to such arbitrary divisions as past, present, and

future. Time flows in uninterrupted chain; yet the individual carried along by time is not restricted

to one dimension; with the help of memory, a person can travel back and exist in the past before

being swept along toward the future. Since modernists felt that the real understanding of the depth

of time exists only within the individual, they often chose experimental patterns of time for their

literary works.

Baldic (1996:86) complements Stevenson’s thoughts by adhering to the opinion that the

traditional method of handling time sequence in literature was followed by centuries of writers

before Virginia Woolf and other modernist authors introduced their own understanding and

interpretation of this issue. According to the traditional view of time, the past, present, and future

exist in a succession, along which man moves the whole his or her life, because the present moment

is moving steadily forward, revealing what once was the future. Baldic develops his ideas by

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claiming that these meaningful present moments discovered by man’s successive motion, form the

medium that runs regularly from birth to death for the traditionalist. It is, therefore, of necessity to

him that fiction expresses this orderly progression of time. In the traditional novel, the structure is

based on the chronological order of events. Interestingly enough, Lee (1977:56) notices that the

most popular images that express the traditional view of time in art are the descriptions of nature:

natural phenomena such as rain or snow or water bodies such as rivers as if comparing passing time

and flowing streams of water. For instance, in the novels of Woolf, in particular in To the

Lighthouse, Lee treats water as a symbol a steady, regular, and inevitable passing of hours, days,

and years.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the majority of scientific experiments were

based on practical observation. Besides, many thinkers and writers contributed to the methods of

science and argued that knowledge can only be gained from experience. For instance, according to

Gore (2005:34), the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes claimed convincingly

that “world was made up of two basic things: mind and matter”. He considered mathematics to be

the supreme science, and calculations of numbers were named the best way of investigating and

understanding things. Naturally, under the influence of these scientific ideas, people were

concerned with time as a measure of duration as to other conventional thinkers; time has but one

dimension, a linear order from an indefinitely stretching past to an indefinitely stretching future. By

comparison, Baldic shares his view with Gore and declares that in the seventeenth century,

scientists measured and analyzed time by means of experimental methods as an entity that can be

limited, divided, and, in a way, even controlled. Isaac Newton supported this concept of time in his

the scientific theories of the seventeenth century. Indeed, philosophers and writers always face

undeniable influence of the events and changes occurring in the world in the fields of science and

art; thus, it is possible to achieve the conclusion that the same attitudes shape the scientist the writer

of literature. (Baldic 1996:205)

Genienė (2007:256) complements Gore and Baldic’s study by stating that the seventeenth

century marked the emergence of the modern world with its scientific and technological advances.

Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers and writers were, however, still interested in the

past only as the history leading up to the present moment, rather than as a part of the human history

that is a continuous process, or a chain of experiences and events. Stevenson (1998:11) calls this

new understanding of time “a kind of epistemological shift, from relative confidence towards a

sense of increased unreliability and uncertainty in the means by which reality is apprehended”.

During the period of Classicism, philosophers and scientists had confirmed a spatial sense of time,

and humans viewed the past as a unity of completed events that have no direct connection with the

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present. Later, in the context of the Romanticism innovations, the emphasis shifted to the value of

nature and human development putting emphasis on the presence of organic unity including both

the process of history and the growth of the individual. Indeed, the literature of the Romanticism

often expressed the sense of continuity and relationship with the past. Romanticists treated the past

as the period of mystery and glorious events, the time of great victories and discoveries. At the

same time, though, they were disappointed by the picture of the reality they faced and past was not

only a beautiful memory but also a way to escape from the depressing reality. Lee claims (1977:56)

that the romantic literature convincingly mirrors the theme of transcendentalism, as in romantic

songs, poems, and novels natural forces such as the changing seasons and weather remain

unchanged by the influence of time. Thus, transcendentalism aims to ignore the barriers between

past, present, and future and attempts to find the unity underlying an individual’s growth from

childhood to old age. (Lee, ibid.)

Without doubt, new theories in the fields of science and psychology in the latter nineteenth

century have directed modern thought regarding time and have influenced trends in modern fiction.

There is enough evidence to claim that the formulation of the theory of quantum mechanics raised

the dilemma of time, scientists no longer treated time as an abstract absolute entity. According to

modernists, the amount of time an event takes is dependent upon the observer’s frame of reference;

in other words, time is relative, a concept which, in T.S.Eliot’s words (1975: 177) , serves as “ a

way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of

futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”. As the theorist Michael H. Whitworth called

it, modernists believed in “psychological time and clock time”. (2007:123) Thus, the notion of time

began to be understood from several different angles: there is time measured by clocks and a certain

abstract universal time that no human being is able to determine, divide, or stop.

Indeed, Stevenson (1998:182) claims that in the nineteenth century, sociology and

anthropology began investigating the past and seeing its significance for human beings. For

instance, Carl Jung, under the great influence of the insights of Freud, formulated an innovative

theory of the collective unconscious, and, consequently, provided support for the modern writer’s

thoughts about cohesion between individuals living in the present and those of the historical past. In

Stevenson’s words (ibid.), artists and philosophers then aimed “to see life and reality as fluid,

continuous, perpetually creative, but falsely apprehended by the divisive, dissecting apparatus of

the intellect – clocks, calendars, concepts categories”. These innovations lead us to the natural

conclusion that the scientists and psychologists of the nineteenth century established new theories

studying and interpreting the influence the peculiarities of modernist temporality, while writers and

39

philosophers aimed to popularize these new attitudes towards the notion of time related to the

changing conception of human reason and mind.

Various technical advances were occurring so rapidly that with no doubt, man was not able to

predict his life in the future; the future, as well as the past and present, remained unpredictable, a

human being had, therefore, lost his sense of stability as he participated in the increased mobility of

modern life and in rapid social and economic change. Besides, to quote Stevenson (1998: 11), “new

concerns with space and time, however, were symptoms of still more fundamental changes of

outlook apparent in the early twentieth century”. The theorists Anna Snaith and Michael H.

Whitworth (2007: 168) support Stevenson and Lee and emphasize the fact that modernist writers

aim to focus on the phenomenological relations between time and space in order to portray the

modernist human who is aware of passing time that shapes human life. Besides, Snaith and

Whitworth believe that the accelerating speed of life and growing intensiveness of physical and

mental experience also serve as meaningful factors that change man’s relationship with the past and

with present time.

As inferred by Baldic, Virginia Woolf was born in the twentieth century society and thus, she

had a great opportunity to borrow some ideas related to the notion of time from the works of

Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and other authors that had been dealing with the problematic

nature of temporality over centuries. To quote Baldic (1996 :112), “Woolf reviews the question of

women’s literary achievements in the context of the obstacles – economic, social, ideological – that

stand in their way, and in so doing she exposes major injustices distorting the worlds of learning

and literature themselves”. She felt it was necessary for the modern fiction writer to show the

existing reality in the new light and from new angles, to deny or at least to contradict conventional

attitudes towards time and history, reason and mind, life and death. Indeed, in her novels, Woolf

views time as a highly personal, subjective, and fragmented entity, in contrast to time measured by

the clock, which is limited by physically perceived boundaries. Lee supports Baldic’s ideas and

notices (1977: 87) that the writer rebels against the role of the clock time in human beings’ life

since, for them, time based on observations of physical science is not natural. According to the

clock time, every day is the same length, and every hour is exactly one twenty-fourth of this

interval. This concept is the time of matter in motion; it knows nothing of the human being who is

not governed by the same laws as objects without life or spirit. Indeed, the clock time is based on

repetition of a spatial nature, whereas time in the mind gains form from its repetitive nature, but on

a personal level, in a man’s inner world. Woolf’s major interest is to express time as a changing

vague entity that cannot be clearly measured or defined on the basis of stable background. Thus, as

40

Lee explains (1977: 89), the repetition of these permanent, or stationary, moments adds a lot to the

specific treatment of time and space in her novels.

According to the analyst Leon Surette (1993:22), in her novels “Woolf devoted much energy to

the problem of history – of the relation between the present, the past, and the future”. Without

doubt, the stream of consciousness method and the new structural patterns employed this modernist

writer affect her characters to a great extent, remote from conventional operations of time, her

characters move in a complex ever – changing world, and they are, for the most part, aware of its

implications. Interestingly, there is evidence to claim that in each Woolf’s novel, there is one

character who understands time better than the others do: the central figure of a particular novel

helps other characters bring their own time concepts into perspective. Thus, indeed, there is enough

evidence to claim that Woolf’s fiction gives priority to the personal subjective metaphysical time

existing in human mind that is opposed to the easily measured, divided, and controlled clock time.

2.3. The Fragmented Time Philosophy in Modernism

Indeed, as can be seen from the evidence provided above, one of the most important

innovations in modernist literature was a completely new interpretation of the notion of time from

the angle of its stability and duration. Modernists believed that they lived in the world that was

fractured or broken into pieces both physically and psychologically. The loss of traditional values

and denial of norms caused chaos in life. People lost their roots to the past claiming that this was the

right way of breaking free from gloomy memories and painful experience, however, at the same

time they lost a part of their own identity. It is not surprising that many modernist fictional

characters are depicted as rebellious personalities neglecting their family relationships, rejecting the

value of the historical heritage, and external culture, as this destructive attitude towards the

surrounding world was the direct reflection of the reality modernist humans faced in their real life.

As a result, people felt disillusioned and disappointed, as their life seemed to consist of meaningless

bits and pieces that could have possessed a certain meaning only if they had been collected into one

entity.

Modernist writers aimed to complain about the absurdity of reality and pointlessness of life in

their works. In order to show everything that happens in the mind of a modern person who

conceives large amounts of information but is not always capable of distinguishing between the

important details and the unimportant ones, modernists introduced the style of discontinuous

narrative in their books. This style is based on moving the narrative back and forth through time

paying no attention to logical temporal or spatial boundaries. This particular style, which seems to

41

be a convincing and effective way of representing the concepts of modernist existence, is mainly

associated with Modernist literature. According to Davis and Jenkins (2000: 56), modernists

believed that by passing his temporal life man views all things in relation to himself and his life on

the earth. Nevertheless, it is rather difficult to lead one’s life from birth to death, as man

permanently organizes his experience into rather relative formulations of interweaving time and

space. For instance, reality, as viewed by Woolf, includes the whole expanse of space and time, and

every living form brings its historic and prehistoric past into the ever-flowing stream of life.

Stevenson says (1998:103) that “Woolf finds associations with the past triggered powerfully yet

almost arbitrary by events in the present”. In her To the Lighthouse (1927), for example, the

present moment is never isolated, because it is filled with very preceding moment, and is constantly

in the process of change. In the novel, while painting her picture, one of the characters Lily recalls

in her mind a sudden memory of Mrs Ramsay sitting on the beach and asks:

(11) D’ you remember?... Why, after these years that had survived, ringed round, lit

up, visible to the last detail, with all before it blank and all after it blank, for miles and

miles? (194)

As the quotation alleges, in the novel, time flows as a constant ever-changing stream, having

neither beginning nor end. Stevenson thinks that in her fiction, Woolf portrayed reality as timeless

and spaceless, because it is impossible to measure and contains all space and all time, all the

eternity. Memories carry the characters into the past, while the present moments seem to vanish or

melt in the flow of time. According to Lorraine Sim (2010:137), Woolf’s treatment of time

“encompasses various states of feeling, from ecstasy to the absurd”. Sim argues that believing in

the everlasting processes all over the physical and psychological world, Woolf also demanded a

revolution in literary technique and subject matter. She reconsidered and reshaped the notions of

personality, language, plot and structure in a new light. Personality was continuously in the process

of taking shape and could not be accomplished by external descriptions. Language in her works

became a means of conveying the emotions and perceptions of different levels of awareness all at

the same moment, revealing the unconscious as well as the conscious things. Interestingly,

Stevenson believes (1998:78) that Wolf purposefully denied the conventional understanding of plot

with an introduction, a linear development, growing suspense, approaching climax, and a logically

constructed ending. Instead of retelling events and well-known experiences in daily situations,

Woolf in her novels provided an elaborate study for the nature and changes in human psyche. Filled

with the significant moments of being and feeling, personal inner life revealed to a person the

pattern behind the mysterious curtain of existence and through it, connected him to the other people

and the outer world.

42

It seems certainly that for some theorists and philosophers this desire to represent

consciousness was a debatable issue and became the nucleus of discussion. They believed that

during the period of Modernism, people faced the cruelty of wars and the meaninglessness of the

new technological innovations applied for the destruction of humanity, but at the same time it

seemed wrong to portray this dramatic reality in the works of fiction. Why did modernist writers

want to show the darkest sides of life in their books? Why did not they attempt to create something

brighter and more optimistic in order to raise the spirit and to enhance hope of the readers? Indeed,

it seems that the answer is closely related to the importance of the fragmented time philosophy that

existed both in life and in fiction. In modernist fiction, “the characters function as faceless labels

rather than individualized portraits of human-beings with well-defined psychological essence”

(Rudaitytė 2000:11). In other words, characters lose their individuality and serve as representations

of certain values of character features common in modernist world. They are shown as suffering and

searching for consolation, neglecting any absolute truths, and supporting wrong beliefs. However,

this openness in literature was seen as a way of breaking free form personal limitations and finding

new ways of solving problems that the characters faced.

Stevenson supports this interesting idea suggested by Rudaitytė and develops his own insights

into modernist experiments with narrative chronology and alterations of linear order in the works of

fiction. He analyzes Woolf’s novels as a conspicuous example of the representation of fragmented

time in literature. According to Stevenson (1998), critical appraisal of the work of Woolf has tended

to focus on her treatment of time and on psychological issues in her novels related to the influence

that temporal and spatial boundaries have in people’s life. The theorist suggests (1998:16) that in

Woolf’s modernist fiction the dimensions of time and space are closely connected as they enable

the writer to “hold up the mirror of art not to reflect nature and the world without, but to illumine

the mind within, to portray consciousness”. The critic strongly believes that here attention of the

reader is naturally oriented not only to the time but also to the space of a narrative as the two

intermingled dimensions help the reader to understand the focus of the narrated events and to follow

their development. Indeed, the notion of space in a literary work becomes especially important

when the distinction of internal and external perspective is concerned. Woolf aims to capture a

sense of permanence in one of two ways: in her pieces of fiction, she returns to the past by means of

flashbacks, or, on the other hand, in some of her novels, including To the Lighthouse, she tends to

employ visions or dreams in order to portray not only present events, but the future perspective too.

Even in the conventional novel, time treatment determines the structure of the work, as well as how

the characters will be presented within that framework. The traditional structure is based on a

chronological pattern divided into beginning, middle, and end. Stevenson emphasizes the fact that

43

time has a particularly profound influence on the structure of the Woolf’s novels. The theorist

foregrounds the fact that in general, a modern piece of literature does not depend on a chronological

pattern, but, rather, foregrounds the role of the patterns within time that do not depend on

chronology. The structure of this new pattern is formed by the use of unifying devices which occur

repeatedly in the modernist narrative, whereas the moment of return to the past also helps create the

logical sequence of narrated events by repeating the same memory in the minds of different

characters. (Stevenson 1998)

Although some linguists believe that Woolf’s interest in the passage of time was necessarily

influenced and shaped by numerous philosophical phenomenological reflection, philosophical

concerns have, in general, not played a large role in her manner of writing. Interestingly, the theorist

and literary critic Roger Poole (1995:56) argues that some of Woolf’s best-known works, especially

To the Lighthouse, exemplify a concern for time, reality, and a sense of interior life that is obviously

philosophical in its construction, and even somewhat impossible to define in exact wording.

Furthermore, Poole claims that such an innovative interpretation of the notion of time and

temporality is part of Modernism as it is ordinarily conceived to address these issues in some

fashion, even if, in many cases, they are not addressed as thoroughly as they are in Woolf’s work. In

Poole’s words, (1995:10) “To the Lighthouse” is the simple picture of her distilled childhood

experience”. However, the majority of critics and theorists tend to agree that even if the reader can

be certain that a great deal of Woolf’s stories, essays, and novels were simply created in her

imagination and had no real connection with the reality we all are surrounded by, it still does not

detract from the power with which she was able to use depictions of human inner world.

2.4.Alterations of Time Due to the Deictic Centre

The process of communication, which involves the speaker and the addressee, occurs in a

specific spatial-temporal situation. The participants of social interaction wish to convey and to

obtain the information and both the speaker and the addressee have the similar status; they both are

partners in this information exchange. Any situation, real or fictional, necessarily involves the

identification of entities, processes, and circumstances, which may be revealed by means of deixis.

According to Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (1998), deixis is a term used to

denote a word or a phrase that directly refers to entities. Deictic centre, by comparison, includes

certain spatial, temporal, and psychological coordinates establishing a deictic perspective in the

narrated world. In other words, it is possible to say that deixis obtains its meaning from the situation

because every language utterance is made in a specific place, at a specific time, and by a specific

44

person and centres around one deictic centre, or the reference point, which leads the situation of

interaction. In other words, deixis usually functions when a certain subject exists who perceives

time or place where it is articulated and, then, it evokes a speaker’s figure.

I think that in Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, the notion of time has various aspects that

change on the basis of the personal, temporal, spatial, and social deictic centres. Thus, in this

subchapter I aim to carry a deeper analysis of these variations. As mentioned in the previous

chapters, Woolf was highly interested in both the conscious and the subconscious part of the human

mind. The study of consciousness in her fiction, including To the Lighthouse, is represented in two

major ways: either characters express it verbally, or they employ non – verbal means of interaction.

Naturally, a consciousness is supposed to belong to a person. However, Verdonk and Weber believe

(1995:83) that Woolf, like some other modernist authors, usually purposefully hides the speaker or

thinker form her readers’ eyes and thus, the ideas expressed are identified and understood but their

sources, or speakers, are not so easily recognized. As Poole infers (1995:3), Woolf aspired to “to

master people and states of mind and states of embodiment”, in order to concentrate her readers’

attention to the characters’ inside world, not to the voice narrating these experiences. Indeed, in her

fiction the speaker’s figure usually remains vague and in a way interpretive, as called by Stevenson

(1998:56). In such cases the passage is narrated by the third person narrator and there are no

characters at the scene, as the anonymous observer is present behind the scene. I believe that such

way of telling a story encourages readers to make their own judgements and predictions, which

means that both the writer and the reader act as creative participants in the production of a piece of

literature.

How does Woolf apply the “unseen” narrator and what role does this technique play in her

fiction? Let us consider the following example from To the Lighthouse (1996), where Mrs.

Ramsay’s thoughts are revealed:

(12) “The stocking was too short by half and inch at least, making allowance for the

fact that Sorley’s little boy would be less well grown than James. ’It’s too short,’ she

said, 'ever so much too short.'

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in

the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell;

the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody

look so sad.

But was it nothing but looks? People said what was there behind it - her beauty, her

splendour? Had he blown his brains out they asked, had he died the week before they

were married - some other, earlier lover, of whom rumours reached one? (33)

45

In the present quotation, the reader learns about Mrs. Ramsay’s reflections. However, there

are thoughts in bold that seem to be uttered by an unseen omniscient observer who knows how the

character feels. Perhaps this is other people’s attitude towards Mrs. Ramsay that she is

reconsidering now? Alternatively, could we say that this is the way in which she characterizes

herself? I suppose that neither of the two versions serves as the right interpretation of the words in

bold. Thus, it is possible to say that although this speaking voice exists in the room near Mrs.

Ramsay, it is not identified and clearly recognized. To my mind, the use of such unusual narrator

may serve to emphasize that someone, though invisible, should exist inside the fictional world of

the novel. Indeed, I can adhere to the theorist Michael Whithworth (2005:5) who calls such Mrs.

Ramsay’s considerations “philanthropical excursions” and believes that this is her own inner voice,

or consciousness expressing itself. In his words, the reader learns Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts that even

she herself is not always conscious about, as Woolf opens her characters’ minds more than a person

is able to reveal by means of the human forces.

Why does the writer chose this strange, even mystical voice telling us about the characters’

lives? As stated by Lawrence Rainey, Woolf provides “an extraordinary record of an especially

observant contemporary one acutely responsive to almost every aspect of the world around her”.

(2005:827) According to the critic, the first and third chapters of the novel lack an omniscient

narrator and the plot unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character’s stream of

consciousness. This lack of an omniscient narrator means that, throughout the novel, no clear

personal deictic centre exists for the reader and that only through character development readers can

formulate their own opinions and views as it is not always clear whose opinion or thoughts they

perceive. I would like to claim that the first chapter the novel is concerned with illustrating the

relationship between the characters’ experience and the actual surroundings. By comparison, the

second part, which has no characters to relate to, presents events differently: instead, Woolf wrote

the section from the perspective of a displaced narrator, unrelated to any people, intending that

events be seen related to time. Thus, from this perspective it is possible to say that in the book, the

specific speaker is not so easily identified, thus, the deictic centre is that of rather debatable nature.

According to Verdonk and Weber (1995:83), in her literary works Woolf emphasized the

significance of an altering deictic centre, or the semantic core of a novel. The novelist began writing

in a new experimental style that usually embodied Freud’s approach to human mind in which there

is always an invisible but active “self”. Freud insists that unconsciousness exists under the layer of

consciousness in each human mind, and in alongside the individual unconsciousness, collective

unconsciousness exists. According to Freud (1964: 89), collective unconsciousness can be defined

as the whole of human experiences that have been acquired and passed from generation to

46

generation. Woolf was strongly interested in anonymous consciousness and unconsciousness which,

in her opinion, served as reliable evidence explaining the peculiarities of individual characters’

minds. Thus, the author’s interest in the human minds seems to lie not only in an individual entity,

but also in a collective unity of human mind, which has existed universally as the subconscious or

unconscious since primitive ages. Indeed, in my opinion, this innovation focuses on character’s

consciousness and subconsciousness that enable the writer to portray allusive and difficult world of

the twentieth century in a more convincing manner. To ground this idea, I suggest reflecting on the

following example from Woolf’s fiction (1996):

(13) Judging the turn in her mood correctly – that she was friendly to him now – he was

relieved of his egotism, and told her now how he had been thrown out of a boat when

he was a baby; now his father used to fish him with a boat hook; that was how he had

learnt to swim. One of his uncles kept the light on some rock or other of the Scottish

coast, he said. He had been there with him in a storm. This was said loudly in a

pause. They had to listen to him when he said that he had been with his uncle in a

lighthouse in a storm. Ah, thought Lily Briscoe, as the conversation took this

auspicious turn, and she felt Mrs Ramsay’s gratitude.

(106)

It is obvious that in the passage, the complexity of one of the character Lily Briscoe’s mind is

presented. However, it is possible to see under a more elaborate analysis that the deictic elements of

this passage are interestingly interrelated and complement one another. The first sentence of the

extract serves to move the reference time of the narrative forward, while the other five sentences

seem to complement the designated events with the help of discourse. The temporal deixis

obviously cover a wide scope from the moment of character’s speaking up to the past events, when

the speaker was a baby. I believe that this temporal incoherence is used purposefully, in order to

create a certain stylistic and rhetorical effect. Obviously, as the example convincingly illustrates, the

stream of consciousness technique involves recording character’s thoughts and feelings exactly as

they occurred in her mind, without any comment or explanation. Modernist discourse demonstrates

a particular interest into the subconscious mind that is constantly changing and portrayed it by

means of fragmentation and zigzagging. Consequently, as Stevenson says (1998:160), all of the

peculiarities that are found in Modernism are a result of the complex identity of the person that is

often damaged by the disintegration of social cohesion.

In my opinion, there is enough evidence to claim that in To the Lighthouse, there are the

connections between space, time, objectivity, and consciousness that closely resemble to those

expressed by the scientist Albert Einstein. Here I adhere to the insights of Morris N. et al

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(272:2004), who claim in their encyclopaedia that Woolf’s representation of space and time is

closely linked with the scientist’s understanding of relative universe, time and space. Albert

Einstein aimed to prove scientifically that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

According to Morris et al. (ibid.), Einstein “believed there is no true division between past and

future, there is rather a single existence”. The scientist rejected other physicists’ hypothesis that

there is clear the separation between past, present, and future and called such understanding of

reality an illusion. Einstein made radical innovative conclusions declaring the existence of a

timeless perspective of the universe, which clearly denied Newton’s theory of absolute time.

Similarly, Woolf in her fiction and especially in To the Lighthouse portrays time via her characters’

consciousness, thus, one character is able to cover several days or months in his or her mind while

another simultaneously experiences only a few hours or minutes. Events in Woolf’s novel are

revealed exactly in the way they occur in human mind because as Richard Ruland and Malcolm

Bradbury notice in their study (1991:1), modernist fiction can be called “art of modern

footlessness” as it allows the writer to see the world as boundless, existing free in the context of

everlasting time and space.

As can be seen from all the evidence above, the variability and complexity of the deictic

elements in To the Lighthouse is a powerful means of showing that every fictional world is

inhabited by characters who can evoke memories, create fantasies, express their beliefs and wishes,

state their intentions, and so create their own worlds in the text world. However, I am convinced

that it is difficult to understand the essence of such divisions if these fictional worlds are not

accessible to the reader. Thus, to make herself understandable, Woolf employs a universal language

of symbols and metaphoric images of time and space that help the reader see and understand what is

not written or directly said in the novel. As George Lakoff (1987:303) claims in his study, “in

domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import

such structure via metaphor. Metaphor provides us with a means of comprehending domains of

experience that do not have a preconceptual structure of their own”. Consequently, in the following

chapter of my research I am going to carry the detailed analysis of the interface of time and space in

the literary works of Woolf and other modernist writers and add to the existing knowledge of

Woolf’s time and space treatment.

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CHAPTER 3. THE INTERFACE OF TIME AND SPACE IN MODERNIST LITERATURE

It is clear from the evidence provided in the previous chapters that the notion of time and

temporality was the object of interest since ancient times up to the period of Modernism. However,

although it was thoroughly studied and portrayed in various forms of art, its definition and true

nature remain vague and debatable. I believe that it is high time this notion was redefined in a

clearer and more detailed way. In general, what is time? What layers does this abstract notion

consist of? Indeed, there are many possible definitions and explanations. For instance, in Longman

Dictionary of English Language and Culture the notion of time is scientifically defined as a

continuous measurable quantity that continues from the past, through the present, and into the

future. James F. Luhr (2003: 43) believes that time is a purely scientific term and, interestingly, he

says that such notions of time and space “make us realize that our planet exists within a context”.

As the quotation implies, Luhr aims to define the notion of time from the cosmic perspective. He

also states that we use our concept of time to place events in sequence one after the other, and to

compare how long events last, what events are prior and what follows them. Belinda Gallagher

shares similar beliefs about the importance of time and space in our lives. She says that time is an

abstract constantly changing concept: in her words, time “stretches out in every direction and goes

on forever – no one knows where it ends”. (2000: 50). In accordance with Onega and Landa (1996:

131), during history, a variety of answers was given to the question of whether time is like a line or,

instead, like a circle. On the one hand, there is an underlying process of motion and forces from

which time emerges, thus, what we perceive as time is a certain real current that influences our life.

On the other hand, it is impossible to measure time, thus, speaking of the representation of time in

fiction, we can say that our memory creates the illusion of the future or the past. Conscious

perception of events gives the feeling of present, while future is a mental construct patterned on

memory experience of the past. Indeed, the present time is the only real notion, while the other

temporal dimensions are imaginary and false. The clash between the two opposite beliefs does not

seem to terminate as no solid evidence for any of these theories has been found yet. (Gore 2005)

The concept of time with human mind and claims that the concept of time emerges as our mind

tries to make sense of the world around us that is filled with continuous change. According to

Norman S. Greenfield, William Champlin (1965:45), to understand time we have to understand the

very mechanism which is responsible for this continuous change from which our mind creates the

illusion of flow of time. Time becomes evident through motion and it is possible to measure it by

comparison with other motions. The world around us is constantly changing, and the changes in

49

nature, the growth of all living organisms, and the endless movement of the smallest parts of the

bodies are all clear undeniable signs of continuous change.

In their study, Onega and Landa (1996:112) provide one more conspicuous explanation of

time comparing it to history that has a beginning, a period of development and growth, and an

ending. In their words, every situation or event in both real life and fiction is bounded by temporal

norms that indicate how long a certain activity lasts, what stages or periods it covers, and how it

affects other elements of natural or fictional reality. The sequence of actions always assumes great

significance and disregard for the logicality of the sequence causes discrepancy and

misunderstandings.

The notion of time may also be classified into natural, conceptual, and fictional. (Genienė

2007:157). I would like to propose the following figure to illustrate this idea:

Figure 3. The Notion of Time.

THE NOTION OF TIME

NATURAL CONCEPTUAL

(clock-time) (mind-time)

FICTIONAL

(story-time) Figure 3. The Notion of Time.

As can be seen in Figure 3 above, natural time is public time, it is the time indicated by clocks.

By comparison, it could be added that conceptual, psychological time, or phenomenological time, is

private time. It is perhaps best understood as awareness of physical time. Psychological time passes

relatively quickly for people while they are enjoying an activity, but it slows dramatically if they are

waiting for some unpleasant event to occur or to be completed. This totally different speed of

passing time can be explained by that fact that the clock is measuring physical time and is not

affected by anybody’s awareness. Conceptual time, as Genienė explains (ibid.), is rather abstract

and related to mental human abilities. In addition, psychological time is completely transcended in

the mental state of happiness and enlightenment, that is often called nirvana, and we might interpret

this as implying that psychological time stops completely. Conceptual time shows temporal reality

in the way human beings perceive it in their mind, whereas natural time simply indicates neutral

50

parts of the time as a whole that is divided into longer or shorter periods, namely: minutes, hours,

days, months, seasons, etc. However, Onega and Landa (1996: 112) argue that physical time is

more fundamental even though psychological time is discovered first by each of us as we grow out

of our childhood, and even though psychological time was discovered first as we human beings

evolved from our ancestors.

By comparison to the two aforementioned kinds of time, fictional time is a device created to

attain certain psychological effects. Onega and Landa (1996: 110) assume that this is imaginary

time describing the life of the characters in a particular piece of fiction. Indeed, in literature, the past

can be subsequent to the present, it can merely be a remote past that never actually dissolves into

the recent past, the point from which the narrator is narrating, as in most classical traditionally

arranged novels. In addition, in Genienė’s opinion (2007:24), literary works usually include an

eternal present without either past or future, or a certain labyrinth in which past, present and future

coexist, at the same time complementing and annihilating each other. Typically, novels have a

beginning and an end and, and in the fictional world life has a perceptible meaning, as the reader

can see the narrated events from a perspective never provided by the real life. Without doubt, as

Stevenson says (1998:19), this way of presenting events sometimes “limitates the capacity to grasp

what is happening” and thus, it becomes more complicated for the reader to understand the essence

of the literary work. Indeed, it is possible to agree with Stevenson’s idea that sometimes modernist

fiction simply betrays life, portraying everything from the subjective, interpretive, and unreliable

perspective . Thus, as Genienė concludes (2007), the reader is given a number of different occasions

to guess, interpret, or to doubt if his or her understanding is correct, which is both good for

imaginative readers willing to draw their conclusions and bad for those who prefer exact neutral

descriptions.

As can be seen from the evidence above, the notion of time is rather complicated and can be

divided on the basis of different criteria. As Eman Chowdhary and Kirti Kaul say (2006:6), even

today, man knows a little about how the origin and nature of this notion. However, both scientists

express hope that with the help of science, much has been written about space and time explorations

and thus, these notes are a significant means help for every person interested in the studies of these

two concepts. In general, time is an abstract notion, which is impossible to measure, control, or to

stop. On the other hand, people have invented a number of ways of dividing and naming

theoretically measurable and practically experienced parts of the temporal whole that surrounds all

the living creatures. Time can be universal and private, neutral and subjective, real and fictional.

Overall, adhering to the aforementioned explanations by Stevenson, Onega and Landa, and

51

Genienė, I would suggest depicting the relationships between these kinds of time in the following

figure:

Figure 4. The Dynamics of Relationship between Different Time Systems

E

X

T

Conceptual E Natural

time R time

N

A

L I

Recalled N Present

Time T Time

(memories) E

R

N

A

L

Figure 4. The Dynamics of Relationship between Different Time Systems

As demonstrated in the figure above, in general, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of time,

namely: internal time and external time. Internal time is the time occurring in the mind; it is the

time that each person possesses in his or her thoughts. The time of memories and flashbacks

contains our experience, while the time of plans and dreams is mainly related to the future

perspectives. Internal time also includes the time of decisions and considerations, hopeful moments

and sorrows. Although this explanation may sound strange at the first glace, we must accept the fact

that people treat passing time in different ways on the basis of their own experience, attitudes, and

beliefs. On the other hand, external time is the time of reality that is more or less the same for the

entire human race and is independent from personal factors: experience, attitudes, and beliefs. This

time, which is usually understood as history of the world, includes all the historic events and the

ever changing circle of natural phenomena (seasons, the division of time into years, months, and

days).

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Moreover, it is possible to claim that both internal and external time may be further

subdivided into conceptual, natural, recalled, and present time. Recalled time is closely related to

memories and flashbacks into the past, whereas present time deals with the impressions or reaction

to the present situation, events, and human experience. For the definition of conceptual and natural

time, see Figure 3. at the beginning of Chapter 3.

In her study of Virginia Woolf’s fiction, Lee points out (1977:86) that that the treatment of

time is kernel issue in the writer’s novels as she broke with the traditional chronological narration.

Without doubt, it is necessary to understand that time itself is and has always been a problematic

concept which has been subject to philosophical discussion. People have been obsessed with control

and domination of time. They measure it and create linear segments, such as days, minutes, and

seconds. The theorist John Ginger (1973:86) complements Lee by adding that in Modernism, new

concepts of time appeared and especially the concept of fragmented time influenced modernist

writers. Woolf as a modernist writer and critic was also strongly influenced by these new concepts.

This can be seen in her experimental fiction and her usage of time in her novels. Indeed, Woolf

concentrated especially on the distinction between moments of being and non-being that she

defined as the basis of human life. Thus, all her literary works can possibly be analyzed with a

special focus on the innovative treatment of time.

The theorist Christine Froula (1997:12) supports Lee’s ideas about the important role that time

has in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Froula complements Lee by stating that indeed, time is an

essential component of experience and daily reality, thus, it is possible to say that the whole novel is

about the passage of time. There is enough evidence to claim that at the first glance the elaborate

and systematic study of the notion of time and of the ways if affects characters’ life in the novel

seems no less than accurate repetition of the modernist philosophers’ insights and conclusions

achieved long before the period of Woolf’s writing. Probably the most important application of

philosophy occurs in the portrait of the protagonist of the novel Mrs. Ramsay whose spiritual

development and declines are shown throughout the book. However, I would like to claim

repeatedly that as a modernist writer, Woolf does not represent time in a traditional way. In the

novel, she rejects conventional understanding of steady unchanging time and depicts the everlasting

constantly changing flow of time that has immeasurable influence on people’s decisions and

destinies.

With no doubt, we can call To the Lighthouse great representation of literary Modernism.

Judging from the external temporal perspective, the novel encompasses a period of ten years. The

first section takes place on one day before the First World War, the middle period in which all the

action is not described and remains hidden form the reader’s eyes occurs during the war , while the

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last section again covers the period of only one day after the war. Indeed, the text, centring on the

Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland skilfully manipulates temporality and

psychological exploration.

Although To the Lighthouse is a radical departure from the conventional nineteenth-century

novel, it is, like its more traditional counterparts, intimately interested in developing characters and

advancing both plot and themes. In Lee’s opinion (1977:54), Woolf’s experimentation was

influenced by great scientific developments and technological inventions that occurred during the

period of her life. One of the most important innovations that reflected itself in Woolf’s fiction was

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The scientist rejected an unquestioned faith in God that had

been nearly universal and suggested a completely new understanding of the history of the world. By

comparison, the rise of Psychoanalysis, a movement led by Freud, introduced the idea of an

unconscious mind. Such innovation in ways of scientific thinking had great influence on the styles

and concerns of contemporary artists and writers like those in the Bloomsbury Group which Woolf

belonged to. I agree with Lee’s insights and dare to claim that To the Lighthouse exemplifies

Woolf’s style and many of her concerns as a novelist. All things considered, Lee argues

convincingly that in the pictures of her characters, the writer offers some of her most penetrating

explorations of the workings of the human consciousness as it perceives and analyzes, feels, and

interacts.

Indeed, according to Lee, Woolf wrote innovative pieces of fiction where she used the stream

of consciousness and experimented with different point of views. In To the Lighthouse, she does not

directly describe the physical appearance or important features of the characters but shows her

readers how the characters characterize one another by revealing their thoughts by application of

both internal and external time dimensions. This can be clearly seen in the following extract from

the given novel (2006):

(14) She could not say it. . . . As she looked at him she began to smile, for though she

had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not

deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself,

Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)—

“Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow. You won’t be able to go.” And

she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he

knew. (105)

I believe that in his passage, the writer convincingly depicts the complicated human nature

and shows how people and their fragmented emotions can come together. This detailed description

of Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts indirectly characterizes the woman as led by emotions and intuition

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rather than by reason and logics so important for her husband. It seems that Mr. Ramsay relies on

what can be studied and proven verbally or in any other way. Thus, as we see in the extract, he

wants to hear Mrs. Ramsay declare her love for him. Mrs. Ramsay, however, relies on the language

of feelings and mimics; she does not want to verbalize her inner thoughts. Indeed, she is incapable

of expressing her love for her husband through words, but she does in fact love him. However, her

love does not need to be expressed in words in order to be understood by her husband.

According to Poole (1995), the way in which the novel is structured is also very important for

the understanding of its major theme of time. The first part covers the end of a day, from the

afternoon to the night. In my opinion, it is possible to treat the first part of the book as the

foundation for the characters and the core ideas and issues within the novel. It is dominated by Mrs.

Ramsay’s prescience, while in the last third section of the novel Mrs. Ramsey does not appear

because, as the reader learns, she is dead. In the first part, little action is involved, and thus, little

real time passes, however, much unmeasured and time is left for Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts, memories

and reflections. Thus, Poole (1995:7) believes that Woolf “had the power of seeing where human

problems were likely to arise and delicately averted them if she could” and implies that perhaps by

portraying this clash between physical and psychological temporality in this section the writer in a

way wanted to presuppose the inadequacy between the protagonist’s point of view and values and

the outer world which is hostile and mysterious. By comparison, the second part, which covers a

period of ten years, is most influential in exploring the effects of time. In the second part of the

novel, we also learn that due to the World War, the Ramsay’s family no longer stays at their

summerhouse, which remains deserted and forgotten, full of dark empty shapes and strange sounds.

To my mind, the abstract relationship between shapes and space is very important in the novel

because the interior of the house reflects both the deserted living place and deserted human souls

damaged by the cruelties of the war. To prove this statement, let us consider the following example

from the novel which could serve as evidence proving the above-mentioned statements (1996):

(15) What people had shed and left – a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded

skirts an coats in wardrobes – those alone kept the human shape in the emptiness

indicated how once they were filled with animation [. . .]

So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a

form from which life had parted. (147)

As the passage clearly demonstrates, the personified image of the house echoes the influence

that time has on the existence of every living or non-living being. Time here is shown as a

destructive force that nobody is able to control or to overcome. Certainly, this foregrounding of

time as active participant in the narrative events is necessary for modernist Woolf’s fiction. Indeed,

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in To the Lighthouse, the writer attempts to portray internal time, as it exists in the mind, free from

the arbitrary divisions of past, present, and future; as in the mind, these dimensions flow together.

At the same time, she employs the notion of external time in order to disclose the contrast between

the current of events in the characters’ mind and in the reality of the novel. Here I can adhere to

Faulkner who claims that Woolf’s time philosophy is closely connected to her stream of

consciousness technique. The critic draws an interesting parallel between the ways Woolf and Joyce

choose to depict temporal elements in their fiction. In Faulkner’s view, Woolf does not actually use

the stream of consciousness method in the same way as Joyce, who attempts to record the complete

thoughts of his characters, however disorganized, temporally fragmented, and confusing they might

seem to the reader. As the theorist alleges in his study (1977 :32), “consciousness, as James and

Joyce had shown before her, is not the passive reception of impulses from the outer world but is

creative; perception itself, and not just its representation in novels, is intentional, implying the

activity of making meaning, structuring reality“. He continues his insights by saying that the

thoughts of Woolf’s characters are obviously revised; only a small portion of the character’s

thoughts appears. The voice of the author frequently interrupts the chain of characters’ thoughts as

additional remarks such as “she thought“ or “ he understood“ are constantly repeated. The

employment of these elements can be illustrated by the following short examples from To the

Lighthouse (2006):

(16) So they sat silent. Then she became aware that she wanted him to say something.

Anything, anything, she thought, going on with her knitting. Anything will do.

(99)

(17) There it was before her – life. Life: she thought, but she didn’t finish her thought.

She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it here, something real, something

private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband.

(50)

As can be seen from the extracts, with the help of these intrusions, Virginia Woolf manages to put

more direction and unity into her fiction than other modernist writers do, and Lee (977) believes

that the stream of consciousness technique undoubtedly can be called representative of our modern

age because it is a revolt against the power of passing time. According to the theorist, it is possible

to distinguish the linguistic and literary perspective of time in Woolf’s fiction. How can these kinds

of time be defined and what functions do they perform in the novel “To the Lighthouse”? In the

following subchapter, I am going to focus on the different theorists and analysts attitudes toward the

above- mentioned time division in language, literature, and in particular, in the given Woolf’s

novel.

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3.1. The Linguistic and Literary Perspective of Time

Scientists have always claimed that the notion of time can be defined from various angles,

namely: linguistically, semantically, scientifically, and literarily. Indeed, what is the difference

between the linguistic and literary perspective of time? As Anna-Teresa Tymienecka states in her

study (2007:56), linguistic perspective of time deals with the ways in which time is expressed in

language. One way in which language encodes time relates to the range of linguistic phenomena of

known as aspect. Linguistically, time can be seen as a wide abstract entity, while different aspects

are responsible for relating to the way in which action is distributed through time, as encoded by

language. Nevertheless, aspect is not a homogenous category, and even an individual language has

a range of ways of encoding the distribution of action through time.

There are two major aspects related to the expression of time in language, namely:

grammatical aspect and lexical aspect. Grammatical aspect characterizes the particular action or

activity described in a situation and shows if that action is already completed, or continuing.

Grammatical aspect manifests itself via the use of tenses in a language. Let us now have a look at

the following extract from Woolf’s fiction:

(18) But what she wished to get hold of was the very jar on the nerves, the thing

itself before it has been made anything. (2006: 158)

As seen in the quotation, Perfect tenses in Woolf’s novels are typically applied in order to

indicate the completeness of the action, while Continuous or Perfect Continuous tenses typically

indicate the duration of an activity. In other words, it is possible to say that activities expressed via

Perfect tenses are temporarily bounded, or limited, while the activities described by means of

Continuous tenses cover a wider scope of time and thus, are said to be relatively free as far as their

temporality is concerned. I would like to foreground that in To the Lighthouse, Perfect tenses are

use more often than the Simple ones, which, in my opinion, shows the writer’s choice to transcribe

her characters’ minds in the form of temporal mosaic consisting of completed bits and pieces of

experience. Although in the novel past, present, and future moments are intermingled and

sometimes even difficult to recognize and to distinguish, each of them is from its own perspective

finished and limited by the whole of the passing time.

In addition to the grammatical aspect, we have to pay attention to the phenomenon of lexical

aspect. Indeed, time both in language and in the chosen Woolf’s novel is expressed not only with

the help of particular tenses, but it is also incorporated in the meaning of words. Linguistically,

words have different denotative and connotative meaning, and notions related to time and

temporality should not be considered as an exception. In his research, Sanders (1994:245) reveals

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that temporal experiences are complex, multifaceted, and subjectively real, which is to say directly

experienced. For instance, such verbs as “like, love, hate, seem” express long lasting states, while

the words “open, explode, fall” are typically chosen to speak bout short, sudden, or unexpected

actions which do not last long. As can be seen from the following short examples from the novel

(1927), the lexical aspect of linguistic time is closely related to the semantic side of the word as it

denotes the meaning of a lexical item by indicating the type of action it characterizes:

(19) At the same time, she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs Ramsay on the beach… as

if a door had opened, and one went in and stood gazing silently about (194-5)

(20) A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among

them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous. (152)

(21) Mr Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn (42)

(22) Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. (120 – 1)

Typically, the grammatical aspect of time described above is claimed to carry no interpretive

meaning and serve only as a representation of the grammatical peculiarities in a particular language.

However, some linguists do not support this point of view. The lengths to which they have gone in

order to throw light on this question are truly remarkable – if only the accounts are to be believed.

One of the best known reports concerns Stevenson’s insights. Indeed, his way of determining the

types of the notion of time is that of a close interrelation between the grammatical, lexical, and

semantic sides of time. According to Stevenson (1998: 75), in general, the importance of time in

Woolf’s fiction is very important because in Modernism, people spontaneously react to the events

in the world and try to understand them by establishing certain physically measured and empirically

based boundaries, such as distance in time and space. The main evidence would be the application

of the systems of measurements for time and space, namely: years, months, days, and hours as

pieces separated from the temporal whole, as symbolic ways of dividing time and space into smaller

units. Thus, grammatical time, or tense, serves as a means of expressing time in different situations

described in the novel so that the meaning of the time conveyed could be understood with the help

of these general rules, grammatical features, or peculiarities, officially accepted in grammar.

Obviously, the most important peculiarity of aspects is the fact that they show how a situation or

action occurs in the temporal context of the novel. By comparison, the lexical and semantic time are

not so closely related to the basic objective meaning, but to the specific emotional colouring of the

time occurring in the particular situation. As said by Kostas Aleksynas et al. (2001:263), in

language, semantic time typically reflects the intentions, feelings, and emotions of the person, who

uses this time in oral or written expression; whereas lexical time deals with the particular

vocabulary items that the speaker or write uses in order to express his or her ideas. The three kinds

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of time complement each other and sometimes it is even difficult to distinguish between them in a

piece of literary work or in a longer speech.

As can be seen from the evidence presented above, time is a dynamic ever changing and

developing notion. The change of time is one of the main issues in literary works. Indeed, similarly

to linguistic time, literary time can also be analyzed in many different ways. Every literary work is a

representation of a particular historic period including social, political, cultural peculiarities of that

time. Thus, Verdonk and Weber (1995) state that natural historic time influences the message that

the writer wants to convey in his work, shapes the personal beliefs and values of the writer and,

thus, shapes the form, style, and peculiarities of a literary work. A writer creates his own imaginary

time as a boundary and direction of his work on the basis of which he portrays multidimensional

personalities of his characters, their life, alterations in their mind, their relationships, conflicts, and

problems. Stevenson, by comparison, claims (1998:93) that modernist narrative “is shaped and

ruled by the randomness of memory’s ordering as much as by chronological sequence”. Baldic

(1996:84) supports Stevenson, Verdonk and Weber’s ideas and complement them by adding that

characters, especially in modern literature, usually conceal a mystical world in their mind that

consists of interrelated time and space fragments. Thus, the reader also needs time to convey and to

reflect on a particular text, which means that the process of reading is also temporally bounded. The

ideas listed lead us to the claim that, undeniably, time is a wide and controversial issue that has

received considerable attention in the works of linguists, philosophers, and scientists.

Onega and Landa argue convincingly (1996:103) that “every work establishes its own time –

norm and that there is a logical correlation between the amount of time devoted to an element and

the degree of its aesthetic relevance or centrality.” In other words, a literary work is always

spatially and temporally bounded, as it establishes certain relation between the amounts of time

spared to the description of particular elements as it actually represents the historic, cultural, and

ideological peculiarities of its historic period. The theorists (ibid.) enlarge their reflections on the

notion of time in literature by claiming that time is a dimension, an object, and an indicator of detail

selection, order, and relations of elements in a literary work. Every piece of literature is a kind of

narrative, thus, logically; a narrative presents characters in action during a certain fictive period of

time. The period is usually divided into different stages, or time sections, thus, the question of clear

linearity remains problematic. According to Lee (1977:55), time in literature serves as a certain

quantitative indicator that helps to measure and to understand the general tendency, or message, of

the text and to clarify its particular shades of meaning. Indeed, there is a logical correlation between

the amount of space devoted to a particular element and its centrality, or importance in the text. The

reader always measures the importance of elements in the text on the basis of his subjective interest.

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Typically, the most important details or events in a text are described in a great width, their spatial

and temporal surroundings and circumstances are thoroughly indicated. The events that are believed

not to carry great importance are portrayed briefly by means of general comments. However,

sometimes in modernist narrative this traditional rule of informativity is purposefully violated in

order to encourage the reader to think and reflect upon the material being read. For instance, the

most important moments, or climaxes, in modernist fiction are usually not described at all, and all

the reader learns about is the outcome of the particular event. Although this style of presenting

events may seem a bit disappointing at the first glance, it gives more freedom for the reader’s

imagination and strengthens his or her mental abilities such as creating hypotheses or making

decisions. As a result, Lee believes (ibid.) that the consciously motivated reader may spend more

time analyzing minor details than studying and calling into question and the most important

elements.

3.2. Represented and Representational Time

In their study, Onega and Landa distinguish two more kinds of time which are employed in

works of fiction. According to the theorists(1996:109), “even within the framework of a single

work, therefore, we generally discover different ratios of represented time (i.e., the duration of a

projected period in the life of the characters) to representational time (i.e., the time that it takes the

reader, by the clock, to peruse that part of the text projecting this fictive period).” This statement

leads us to the premise that indeed, the clear quantitative difference between represented time and

representational time exists. Here I propose the following figure:

Figure 5. Represented and Representational Time

Represented MEANING Representational

time time

Figure 5. Represented and Representational Time

As Onega and Landa explain further (1996: 110), represented time is used to indicate the

amount of time a certain imaginary activity takes in the work of fiction, while representational time

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shows the period of real time which a reader needs to read the text and to reflect of it.

Representational time can be easily measured by clock. By comparison, represented time is usually

fragmented, non-linear, as some events in the life of the characters are emphasized and rendered at

great length, others are simply summarized in a couple of sentences, some details are even

unmentioned in order to give the readers more possibilities to think, reflect on the text, and to make

their own conclusions. Representational time does not necessarily stand in direct proportion to

represented time because the readers each with his own conception of life grasp the essence of the

text in different ways. The more importance an element carries, the more accurate and detailed its

picture is. However, this peculiarity is applied more to represented time which describes life of the

fictional characters. Onega and Landa (1996:111) note that the reader raises many questions and

wants to know who the centre of interest of the work is, how themes, motifs, characters, and

incidents coincide, what role every single detail has in the text. Indeed, the text usually does not

provide explicit answers to these questions, thus, the reader is forced to follow numerous

implications in order to get the answers.

Although represented and representational times indicate different aspects of time in reality

and in fiction, they should not be analyzed separately. The two notions are closely interrelated and

thus, the meaning of a literary work can be achieved only by combining them. According to Onega

and Landa (1996:112), during the period of Modernism, there was a tendency to over-estimate the

importance of represented time that focused on the narrative in fiction. On the one hand, it was

natural because modernist writers aimed to carry the analysis of human inner world and human

mind the mechanism of which was based on the subjective personal concept of time. On the other

hand, the external temporal context, or representational time, added a lot to the value of a literary

work because it provided a better understanding of the message that work carried. For instance, in

Woolf’s fiction, the psychological analysis of human mind is carried, thus, represented time has a

lot of importance. To ground these statements, let us now consider the following examples from To

the Lighthouse (1927) which describes Lily s memories concerning Mrs Ramsay.

(23) Mrs Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment

something permanent(as in other sphere Lily tried to make of the moment something

permanent) – this was of the nature of a revelation. (183)

I believe that in this extract, the writer celebrates the power of memories and their influence on the

present moments. Indeed, as seen from the words in bold, Lily manages to bring the mythical Mrs.

Ramsay’ s picture back by her creative effort to fill space and time with the meaning. Before she

does it, all the things she sees around her seem “like curves and arabesques flourishing round a

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center of complete emptiness” (205). Lily feels that the language of memories and its emotional

intensity can bring people back to the presence, back to life, even if they are far away or are dead.

Indeed, according to Stevenson (1998:103), Woolf “uses the memory as a seamstress to cut and

reshape sections taken out of the ordinary, sequential passage of time”. Thus, in the critic’s

opinion, the writer emphasizes the importance of represented time in the depiction of her

characters’ lives, which can be clearly seen in the following passage from To the Lighthouse (1927):

(24) The space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape, if they

shouted loud enough Mrs Ramsay would return. ‘Mrs Ramsay!’ she said aloud. ‘Mrs

Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face. (205)

Here, the represented time in the novel covers the past, present, and future periods. Lily goes

back to the times when Mrs Ramsay was present and now she expects to make these moments

present by the power of wish and intensity of her emotions. In my opinion, here Woolf foregrounds

the importance of sustaining intimate relationships between Lily’s yarning for Mrs Ramsay and the

immortal picture of Mrs Ramsay that will always remain in Lily’s mind.

With no doubt, it would be difficult to understand the mission of temporality of Woolf’s

novels without wider knowledge of the literary context of the books. According to Surette

(1993:23), in Woolf’s fiction, the tragedy of modern human lost in modern world is convincingly

depicted in the context of the war, urbanization and industrialization of the world, and dramatic

changes in the traditional values. Without general understanding of these important factors, a reader

will not be able to comprehend fully the semantic core of Woolf’s fiction. Thus, as Onega and

Landa conclude, having all these facts taken into account, there is no single answer to the question

‘Which kind of time, represented or representational, has more significance?’

It is possible to compare the represented and representational time to two more types of time

indicated by Onega and Landa. They carry an elaborate analysis of the time of narrating and

narrated time. How do the two kinds of time differ? As the linguists say (1996:130), “on the one

hand, what is narrated and is not narrative is not itself given in flesh and blood in the narrative but

is simply ‘rendered or restored’. On the other hand, what is narrated is essential the temporality of

life.” Thus, the nature of the time of narrating is a great deal similar to that of the representational

time. It is a real period of time sacrificed for producing a piece of fiction. By comparison, narrated

time is a fictional time, or the temporal setting that embeds the elements of a particular story or

novel.

Stevenson complements Onega and Landa’s insights and compares the two aforementioned

notions, namely, represented and representational time, in a greater detail. In his opinion (1998:91),

“modernist fiction rarely abandons story altogether, or smashes up the clock entirely, but it often

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abandons the arrangement of events in their time sequence – the kind of mechanical succession of

day following day”. Besides, he points out the differences between natural, or astronomical

physical, and historical, or social time in literature. On the one hand, time is understood as a real

natural phenomenon, an ontological concept that has been explored by philosophers since the times

of deep antiquity. Then time was defined as the movement that is measured by certain periods that

nature invents, namely: days and nights, months, seasons. The man divided the passing time

according to his needs into hours, days, weeks, or months. On the other hand, the historical time is a

much more complex and wider concept, which includes long decades and centuries in history. This

time includes all human history and the social changes occurring in society such as relations

between peoples and cultures, intercultural and intergenerational conflicts and other interactions of

human realities. The historical time is difficult to limit, to break, and to describe; it goes by itself, as

a matter of changing human nature. Thus, al in all, as Stevenson concludes, time is a wide

multidimensional issue and should be understood “by means of intuition, able to apprehend the

permeation of conscious states; the seamless flow of creative evolution and becoming”. (1998: 107)

3.3.The Relation between Time and Space in Modernist Discourse

At the beginning of Chapter 3, several general characteristics of the relation between time and

space in modernist literature were fleetingly mentioned. Indeed, it is worth analyzing more

conspicuous information related to the two aforementioned issues that is provided by linguists and

scientists. People always have their experiences at some particular time and place, thus, it seems

only natural that whenever we analyze something happening we tend to conceptualize the

background situation comprising the temporal and spatial circumstances of the event as well as

people and objects positioned in it. Onega and Landa (1996) claim that in fiction, the author and

the reader are separated in time and space but still they both operate as active participants in an

interpersonal communicative event which unites them, that is, in a discourse. In the

multidimensional discourse, both the author and the reader are responsible for coding and decoding

the meaning, or the embedded message, of a particular piece of fiction. Naturally, all the

participants in such literary situations, all the discoursal constituents invite the reader to

convincingly co-operate with the author in constructing a possible world of fiction consisting of a

conceptual space and time in which all the fictional affairs occur. The reader is disposed to make

inferences, to draw conclusions from logical reasoning, and to derive certain information from

textual cues in the discourse.

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How can the reader contribute to the process of establishing temporal and spatial context in a

piece of fiction? Indeed, the answer can be based on the claims of psychoanalysis. I adhere to Clara

Thomson (2002:143) who believes that “society is not a static set of laws instituted in the past […]

but is rather a growing, changing, developing network of interpersonal experiences and

behaviour”. Thus, as the psychologist’s words imply, each person in society is a changing

multidimensional being who is constantly shaping the world and is being shaped by the world as

well. When reading a work of fiction, a person complements its content by interpreting everything

from his or her subjective point of view, and it is not strange at all that one and the same piece of

literature may be understood in totally different ways by different readers. Thomson points out that

in spite of being subjective and debatable, such personal remarks, presuppositions, or interpretations

always have a considerable input into the primary original version of the work because they reveal

the way literary message is echoed and reflected on in human conscience.

Indeed, Verdonk and Weber support Thomson’s ideas and complement them (1995: 87) by

adding that “like the actual world, the text world of literary fiction has its own complex structure of

modalities, in which some situations are factual and some are impossible or hypothetical“. As this

quotation implies, literary works are typically created because of some real events or personal

writer’s experience. When analyzing a piece of literature, linguists pay a great attention to the

social, political, educational, religious, philosophical, and literary context in which a work of

literature was produced because it often leads to a deeper understanding of the work itself. For

instance, understanding the philosophical innovations in the value system of Modernism can

provide a greater insight into the depiction of the human mind in Woolf’s novels. Besides, context

includes wider descriptions of the characters, places, and fundamental meaning in the story, the

overview of the structure of the presented society and its social norms, and the aspects of people

making choices that help to lead a life.

In every work of fiction, temporal and spatial boundaries are closely interrelated and play a

significant role. For instance, in To the Lighthouse, Woolf focuses on the synchronic moments of

time, and as a result, she frees herself from the limitations of ordinary linear time. She describes

important events in detail and length, whereas entire years of insignificant experience are simply

omitted and not mentioned at all, there is no clear distance between the mental images and physical

action, as in the following extracts from To the Lighthouse (1927):

(25) …when the search party comes they will find him dead at his post, the fine figure

of a soldier. Mr Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn.

(42)

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(26) A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among

them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous. (152)

In the first passage, it seems that Mr Ramsay participates in the imagery that is used in a way

to satirize him. As Lee says (1977:119), this thought of heroic death is “a part of his train of

thought” which is the way in which Woolf presents people’s thoughts naturally flowing in their

mind. Indeed, people tend to overemphasize and rethink of the events that seem to carry much

significance for them, while unimportant daily events usually are not recalled at all as if they had

never occurred in their lives. By comparison, in the second extract, the reader learns about one of

the character’s tragical death during the war, but no detailed descriptions of the circumstances of

this event are given. In my opinion, the synchronic dimension of the temporal structure is what

allows Woolf seemingly to immobilize an event or an experience, to meditate on it in depth, and to

convey more effectively the numinous or sacred nature of that event or experience. If Woolf simply

rendered discrete events occurring on the diachronic plane, she would not have the same

opportunity to engage with and examine the sacred nature of everyday life.

According to Paul Sheenan (2002:148), time and space in Woolf’s fiction are measured by a

philosophical dimension, which he characterizes as the representation of “soul time”, or “nonhuman

time”. In his opinion, the writer purposefully intermingles the real, physical time and the time that

can be felt only by the person himself, as this time exists in his or her soul. This “soul time” crosses

the boundaries of any kind of temporal experience and entangles spiritual growth and inner changes

in mind, spiritual blindness and moments of understanding, even the notions of life and death.

There is enough evidence to claim that in To the Lighthouse, the majority of events occur in the

characters’ mind: they reflect upon the essence of life, reconsider encounters or conversations they

once were involved in, make decisions and experience eternal cognition of the truth. In Sheenan’s

opinion, the very lighthouse may be treated as a symbol of the time and temporality as it provides

flashes of light that prevent travellers from getting lost in their journeys, and finally understanding

that in this life, all the utterances and signs are usually so much simpler than the complex meanings

they contain: it is always necessary to understand that , as James claims in To the Lighthouse (1927

:211), “nothing was simply one thing”. Similarly, as the theorist says, characters’ meditation upon

life helps them not to lose their inner strength and to act as a support for one another. For instance,

in Christine Froula’s words (2007:129), one of the character Lily Briscoe’s modernist painting

“aims to depict realities beneath appearances”. In other words, painting for Lily is not a mere

hobby or leisure activity but it is the way she expresses herself and shows her relation to the

existing world. In her canvas, she portrays the world she would like to see and thus, preserves moral

strength and hope that there is light, beauty, and meaning in life. By comparison, I dare to suppose

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that Mrs. Ramsay, the protagonist of the novel (1927), who is at the same time a fragile woman and

a strong loving mother and wife, is also the moral centre of the novel around which all other

characters are gathered. Nevertheless, a certain satirical tone is used of the writer who employs

secondary literary clichés when describing this character:

(27) There was something in this of the essence of beauty which called out the

manliness in their girlish hearts. (9)

(28) Had she not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if slightly mythical, Italian

house, whose daughters … had lisped so wildly, and all her wit and her bearing and

her temper came from them. (11)

(29) Like some queen who, finding her people gathered in the hall, looks down upon

them, descends among them, acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their

devotion and their prostration before her … she went down. (95)

It seems to me that in the passages, a clear association is made between Mrs Ramsay and the

kind of sentimental, luxurious, and a bit exaggerated image of a Victorian woman (this can be seen

from the extracts in bold). Is this done purposefully? Undeniably, Woolf aimed to show that the

protagonist of the novel is a morally strong determined person who clearly understands her

importance in her house and thus, in a way feels responsible for her family, guests, friends, and all

the people she meets. In much of Woolf’s prose the subjective impressions about characters emerge

even though the narrative is performed by a narrator who is distinct from the characters and who

brings into light different aspects of the characters’ personalities: Mrs Ramsay, as we can see from

the examples above, is seen both as a caring mother and a proud queen, a fragile woman and a

strong responsible housewife, an ordinary woman and an almost mystical figure of light, hope, and

power. Here I adhere to Erich Auerbach (1968:536) describes Woolf’s style of depicting characters

in the following words: “The essential characteristic of the technique represented by Virginia Woolf

is that we are given not merely one person whose consciousness (that is, the impressions it

receives) is rendered but many persons, with frequent shifts from one to another”.

Indeed, all the evidence provided above lead us to the logical conclusion that in her fiction,

the modernist writer Woolf did not simply show the way people act or think. Instead, by the means

of spatial and temporal delimitations she provided her readers with a convincing picture of the

depth of human mind changing because of external experience that human faces. I agree with

Stevenson (1998:103) who claimed that the writer “used the memory as a certain seamstress to cut

and reshape sections taken out of the ordinary, sequential passage of time”. In her novels, the

reader sees how an ordinary trip, family dinner, or a party can serve as a support for character’s

reflections upon their past, which usually lead to a better understanding of oneself and of the outer

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world. Unexpected encounters and planned gatherings provoke Woolf’s characters to analyze one

another and ask the following questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? What does this or that

event mean? Indeed, the way Woolf answers to these questions through her characters’ lips can be

better understood only after having overviewed her fiction based on the conception of time.

3.4. A General Overview of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction and the Concept of Time

According to Lee (1977:23), with no doubt, one of the most prominent literary figures of the

twentieth century, Woolf is widely admired for her technical innovations in the novel, most notably

her development of stream-of-consciousness narrative. Woolf’s writing reveals her literary talent as

well as her interest in the multidimensional nature of human existence. Indeed, her original and

innovative literary works explore the structures of human life, from the nature of relationships to the

experience of time. As Stevenson adds (1998), her writing also deals with the issues relevant to her

living epoch and the literary Bloomsbury circle. Throughout her works, she celebrates and analyzes

the major Bloomsbury values of aestheticism and independence. Moreover, as Allen suggests

(1954), her stream of consciousness style was influenced by, and responded to, the ideas of the

thinker Henri Bergson and the novelist James Joyce, whose impact on Woolf’s novels I have

foregrounded in the previous chapters.

Baldic (1996) raises the opinion that in her literary works Woolf always questions whether all

this surface detail in fiction makes literature valuable. She expresses hesitation related to the notion

art and aims to focus of the deep layer analysis of literature. Similarly to Baldic, in Froula’s words

(2007:13), influenced by the ideas of Bloomsbury Group, Woolf believed that “art must submit its

judgements to moral law”. In her opinion, a writer’s mission, or task, is to analyze the depths of the

present inner and outer reality instead of just inventing some unreal debatable details. Indeed, the

new technique of stream of consciousness was applied in her narrative in order to express new

revolutionary concepts. The consciousness of the characters in Woolf’s fiction was not simply

described as in the works of Realism, but elaborately filtered through showing the way the

characters are thinking and interpreting events. The feelings of the characters and the inner

perceptions of life acquired a totally new meaning and in order to achieve this, the omniscient

narrator was introduced throughout her novels. For instance, in the sentence “Had there been an axe

handy …seized it” from To the Lighthouse(1996:7) the writer employs straightforward omniscient

narrator in order to describe James’ anger at his father who does not want James to go to the

Lighthouse. Although James does not utter these words aloud, the reader perceives them through

the voice of narrator who knows everything that characters feel or think. Why is such way of

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representing characters’ thoughts effective? Well, it is obvious that Woolf’s characters arerarel

described directly; instead, they are depicted via their thoughts. Lee believes (1977:86) that the aim

of all these strange techniques of description was to express continuity and mutability of the

individual identity at the same time.

Indeed, in their literary works both Joyce and Woolf analysed the depth of human mind with

the help of the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness, which enabled the writers to

explore memories, desires, dreams of their characters, who could be observed in their external and

interior appearance. However, Froula (2007:13) thinks that this way of handling the protagonists of

Woolf’s works was even deeper than that of Joyce. Whereas Joyce examined the depths of the ego,

or human essence, Woolf never let her characters’ thoughts flow freely. Instead, she maintained

logical and grammatical organization of every single sentence so that every reader could understand

the essence of the characters’ words or thoughts. In other words, her narrative technique was based

on the synthesis of streams of thought into a third-person, past tense narrative. She gave the

impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world, the past and the

present, speech and silence. As Mrs Ramsay says in To the Lighthouse (1927:55), the whole human

life consists of “little separate incidents which one lived one by one” and which she then describes

as “curled and whole like a wave”.. On the basis of Froula’s insights I would like to claim that the

reader’s attention is attracted because the moments of being described in Woolf’s fiction are rare

moments of insight during her characters’ daily lives when they can see reality from a totally

different perspective and understand the importance of details that typically seem inconsequential

and vague.

In her analysis of Woolf’s fiction, Lee (1977) also says that the novels of Woolf were deeply

influenced by other writers and philosophers who had been experimenting with a new approach to

time treatment years before she was born, and she was aware of their successes and failures. For

instance, according to Stevenson (1998:107), Woolf’s ideas were strongly influenced by the

philosopher Henri Bergson, who believed that the difference between time measured by a clock and

time actually experienced is the distinction between a time patterned upon space and a time

patterned upon pure duration. Indeed, Stevenson invites us to compare these two opinions

concerning time and temporality. Bergson based his whole philosophy on the idea that

chronological or clock time is unreal and that reality can be found only in man’s inner sense of

duration, which is a state of constant flow existing within the mind in which the present, past, and

future are intermingled and impossible to separate. By comparison, we can find similar ideas in

Woolf’s fiction and especially in her essays where she expresses the claim that all states of time

intermingle together, ignoring the unnatural succession which clock time attempts to impose. In her

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diary, she often meditates upon the question of human life and the amount of time each person

possesses and asks (1953:140): “Is life very solid or shifting? I am haunted by the two

contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world –

this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the

waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we

are somehow successive and continuous we human beings”. As the example illustrates, in Woolf’s

opinion, internal time is pure duration, which may, in a single moment, contain the experience that

gives significance to a lifetime.

Obviously, Woolf borrowed some ideas not only from Bergson but from Joyce as well.

Influenced by the ideas of Joyce, she maintained that real time is not the time imposed upon man by

space, but the time that occurs within his mind. Sanders emphasizes the fact (1994) that Joyce’s

writing puts emphasis on instants of recall, the central theme of all his novels; the past is

rediscovered many times. Indeed, Woolf supported Joyce’s understanding and use of the notion of

time and thus, she can be called a novelist of multidimensional time, based on certain involuntary

memory, which gives past persons and scenes a symbolic depth they never had before. For instance,

in her masterpiece To the Lighthouse, the writer puts emphasis on memory as a method of

interrupting the passing time. In the novel, as Sanders argues, a sound that the characters heard or

an odour they caught long ago can be sensed once more in their memories, simultaneously in the

present and the past, real without being of the present moment, and the past is felt by means of

senses, visual and audible images. This can be clearly seen in the following short extracts from the

novel (1927) describing the deserted family house during the war:

(30) […] certain airs entered the drawing room, questioning and wondering. (144)

(31) […] the wind sent its spies about the house. (151)

(32) Weeds tapped methodically on the window pane. (151)

(33) The Lighthouse with its pale footfall upon stair and mat… the stroke of the

lighthouse laid itself with such authority on the carpet in the darkness. (144)

In the short passages above, Woolf employs a style of personification which endows mere objects

with certain attributes – such as will, emotion, or reason, apparently appropriated from the

modernist unconscious alienated humanity. I believe that the sounds of the blowing wind, moving

air, tapping weeds, and especially the pale colour of the house draw a clear parallel between the

empty house and a living being which is lonely and forgotten. Nothing happens inside the house, it

seems as if the time passage has stopped. Here the writer uses the figure of empty house represents

the effects of time and the effects of war. The temporal context here covers both the decay of the

house and the destruction and decay caused by war.

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Interestingly, in Sanders’ words, (1994:516) Woolf’s “narratives are variously punctuated

by clock – readings and clock – soundings, by the measurement of tides and the altitude of the sun,

by history and archaeology, by ageing and dying.” A single minute released from the chronological

order of time has been recreated in the mind of the human being, similarly released in order that he

may sense that moment. Thus, Sanders argues convincingly (ibid.) that Woolf “explores the

consequences and processes of waiting, learning, and ageing, she elsewhere shapes her fiction by

means of the larger consciousness of a narrator alert both to historical calibration of time, and,

more significantly, to an imaginative freedom from time”.

As described by Swinden (1973), the writings of Joyce influenced Virginia Woolf’s creativity

and development of her novels, including To the Lighthouse. Indeed, in her fiction, she justified

Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique when portraying the multidimensional characters, by

examining every moment in the mind on an ordinary day. It is worth mentioning that Woolf was

also influenced by the French novelist and critic Marcel Proust’s ideas about time and temporality.

However, she contradicted Proust’s opinion in many ways. Proust elaborated a relationship between

time and memory, including such processes as remembering or forgetting which are closely

connected and complement one another. The critic claimed that memory gives meaning to circular

time. On the other hand, Woolf revealed a connection between the periods of duration (past,

present, and future) and the moment (the instantaneous duration). According to her, the real

meaning and value of the moments of human life become visible only if people could interpret

those moments from three different temporal angles. Without the influence of the unconscious,

hidden experience people actually lose the connection to the real events their lives are based on.

(Swinden 1973:156)

There is evidence to claim that Woolf borrowed some ideas from the existential philosophers.

In her fiction, the writer concentrates on the following two types of time: existential or historical

time and personal time which exists and develops in the mind, and usually is not the exact

equivalent of the real time of the outer world. Stevenson suggests (1998:87) that Woolf and other

modernist authors, “are typical of Modernism’s general concern about the reification and

mechanization of the modern industrial and financial world; they also introduce a particular –

related – dislike of time on the clock”. Personal time in Woof’s novels is depicted as the span of

life, rather than the indefinitely stretching entity measurable by clocks. Consequently, every human

being is responsible for using his time wisely, he is aware of the end of his time, death, and its

beginning.

As can be seen from all the critics’ insights and remarks, a number of fiction writers and

philosophers undoubtedly were influential on Woolf’s time philosophy that she foregrounded in her

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literary works. However, to my mind, this statement does not mean that she lacked her own attitude

towards time and other issues discussed in her books and simply repeated the ideas suggested by

other writers. Predominantly, as VanSpanckeren claims (1994:65), the writer merely affirmed and

further solidified ideas that were already taking form in her mind, ideas that were to have their own

profound effect on a new generation of writers. Indeed, Woolf’s novels are prominent illustrations

of the development of modernist philosophy and art. Her meditative style allows the subjective

mental processes of Woolf’s characters to determine the objective content of her narrative. In To the

Lighthouse, one of her most experimental works, the passage of time, for example, is adjusted by

the consciousness of the characters rather than by the clock. As Stevenson says (1998:87), the

author celebrates the power of “time in the mind rather than time on the clock”. The events of a

single afternoon constitute over half the book, while the events of the following ten years are

condensed into several pages. As a result, any readers of To the Lighthouse, especially those who

are not used to reading modernist fiction, often find the novel strange and difficult because of its

nebulous structure and complicated language which is based on metaphorical images and symbols.

Compared with the traditional plot-based novels, To the Lighthouse seems to have little in the way

of action. Indeed, almost all of the events take place in the characters’ minds. (Baldic 1996:168)

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CHAPTER 4. SHIFT OF TIME IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

According to Lee (1977:12), the modernist novel To the Lighthouse follows and extends the

literary tradition of modernist novelists like Proust and Joyce, where the plot is secondary to

philosophical introspection and the typical characteristics of narrative is purposefully broken

chronology and fragmentation of events. The novel includes short dialogues and long pages of inner

monologues and reflections, there is much thinking and almost no action; most of it is written in the

form of memories, thoughts, and observations. In my opinion, this piece of Woolf’s fiction recalls

the power of feelings and emotions and highlights the multidimensionality of human relationships.

Consequently, I would enlist the basic themes in the novel in the following way: complicated

human interaction that results in the feeling of loss, subjectivity of the treatment of reality, and the

problem of reasoning and perception. All those issues are united under one major theme that is the

understanding and representation of time.

How are those topics revealed in To the Lighthouse? Indeed, large parts of this Woolf’s novel

do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather investigate the means of reasoning

and perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking. I think that in this particular

piece of fiction, the writer uses stream of consciousness narration that, unlike traditional linear

narration, records thoughts in the order in which they arise without bringing them in a rational or

chronological context. Besides, To the Lighthouse and its characters often display elements of the

Modernist school of thought. As mentioned in the previous chapters, modern humans compete,

search for their identity, and want to find their place in the world, while, certainly, some outer

forces influence their lives every single moment. It seems obviously the inside of man is

emphasized as a central theme alongside nature as an eternal and sometimes menacing force with

the ubiquitous potential to devastate humanity. (Lee 1977)

Why is it so important to speak about the role of time and temporality in this novel? The

ordinary life of an ordinary family is described, thus, it may seem that no interesting or innovative

aspects can be traced here. However, linguists do not support such a sceptic attitude and invite the

reader to have a deeper insight into the semantic core of the book. According to Swinden (1973), To

the Lighthouse is a deeply psychological novel that focuses on the study of human consciousness.

The whole human life here is shown as a mosaic of moments and flashes of experience. How can

these moments be characterized in the novel? In Sanders’ words, “Woolf insists that the twentieth –

century novelist should evolve a new fictional form out of a representation of the ‘myriad

expressions’ which daily impose themselves on the human consciousness”. (1994:515) Thus, in

order to convincingly portray human consciousness, Woolf chooses three main methods of

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describing moments of temporal experience, namely: the moment can occur within the event, it can

be relational (it is time to change, to face new experience), and there can be a spiritual moment (it

includes faith, belief, and understanding). Indefinite periodicities of time are used to reflect

characters’ experience. For instance, the division of days into mornings, afternoons, evenings, and

nights is related to changing atmosphere in the novel that is created on the basis of the characters’

inner state.

Both Swinden and Lee point out that when reading and interpreting this book, we must not

forget the importance of symbols and motifs in the writings of Virginia Woolf, because time here

also has an interpretive shade of symbolic meaning. In To the Lighthouse, morning is the period of

activity, while evening is the period that changes the whole day, and the majority of unhappy or

tragic events occur then. The evening is the time for reflection and meditation, dreams and visions,

memories and future hopes. By comparison, night is extraordinary, mystical, strange, and specific

period of time that is suitable for spiritual openness, intensive search for lost self and

reconsideration of values.

As can be seen from the overview of the structural delineation of the novel, this piece of

writing does not simply describe a period in people’s life, but it also serves as a convincing and

believable picture of the complexity of human mind. It seems certainly that the three structural parts

of the novel represents temporal and spatial setting the characters are surrounded by and,

interestingly enough, at the same time that setting affects and shapes people’s consciousnesses and

understanding of the world. Thus, I believe that it is worth carrying a deeper analysis of the

temporal and spatial perspective of the novel that the whole meaning of this book is based on.

4.1. Psychological and Ideational Relations between Time and Space

In the Discourse of the Novel

According to Lee (1977), To the Lighthouse is widely considered one of the most important

literary works of the twentieth century. With this innovative novel, Woolf established herself as one

of the leading writers of modernism. Indeed, the novel develops original literary techniques to

reveal dramatic human experience in the modern shifting world and to disclose different views of

inner and outer reality. On the surface, the writer here tells the story of the Ramsay family.

However, I am sure that in its heart, the novel is a deep psychological study of time in which the

writer reveals how humans are influenced by its endless passage. To illustrate this statement, I

propose the following figure:

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Figure 6. Psychological and Ideational Layers of Portraying Reality in the Novel

Figure 6. Psychological and Ideational Layers of Portraying Reality in the Novel

In my opinion, the semantic core of the novel is based on the trivial understanding of time and

space that can be subdivided into three interrelated layers. First of all, it is possible to speak about

the historic context and natural time that the characters are surrounded by. The real or historical

time in the novel can be understood in two ways: on the one hand, the action of the novel covers

more than ten years, on the other hand, all the action fits into the temporal interval of one day, or

twenty-four hours. The first and third chapters are composed as a number of moments, in which the

various characters are occupied with daily activities - reading, knitting, painting, eating, sailing -

giving them plenty of time for introspection and reflections. Significantly, the only real events, or

action, in the book take place in the second part where ten years are summarized in a couple of

pages: the Ramsays leave their house, later the reader learns about the death of Mrs. Ramsay and of

her two children. It seems that the book divides time into passive and active periods, into the

periods of simply being and actively participating in the processes of life. In my opinion, the

descriptions of The Window and The Lighthouse are set up as mirror images, separated by time, and

dominated by the presence and absence of Mrs. Ramsay. During the first part of the book there is

talk of visiting the lighthouse, on a small island on the coast, an expedition marvelous for the

children, especially for the youngest Ramsay’s son, James. Nevertheless, circumstances and the

weather conditions prevent the family from going on this trip. Ten years later, the remaining family

members do go to the lighthouse, but it is not the same as they had once imagined it. James, now

being a teenager, realizes, comparing the lighthouse of his childhood to the one he is sailing

towards, that everything in this world has a great deal more meanings and unknown connections

than it seems at the first glance. Thus, there is enough evidence to claim that in To the Lighthouse

Woolf skillfully shows how different characters, at different points in time, see things in different

ways: for children, the lighthouse was similar to a fairytale, something fabulous, mystical, and

HISTORY

STORY

VISION

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powerful. However, for their parents, the trip was an ordinary event which at the same time

appealed to their forgotten dreams and plans, visions and flashbacks form their youth and invited

them to look for the eternal meaning and the truth in life.

What conclusions could we make from this temporal overview of the novel? I would like to

claim that it is impossible to understand the meaning of this interestingly contracted and prolonged

natural time without having discussed the second layer of the dimensions of time and space in the

book, namely, the layer of story. The whole situation of the novel can be understood as a product of

imagination, as it portrays the lives of people who stand as individual figures and as icons of certain

universal values at the same time. I adhere to Lee (1977) who presupposes that Mrs. Ramsay, the

main figure of the book, seems to represent romantic Victorian ideals combined with a questioning

rebellious modernist human spirit, Mr. Ramsay, by comparison, stands for the victory of reason and

empirical cognition of the surrounding world, while the painter Lily seems to embody the

complicated nature of art and artist. Thus, having all these considerations taken into account, the

whole temporal scope of the novel may be treated not only as a collection of single moments from

people’s lives but as a universal symbol of time, namely, of the temporal span of human life. The

duration of the action covers twenty four hours, from the evening up to the morning of the other

day. Thus, having analyzed the suggestions made by Stevenson, Lee, and other critics, I adhere to

the idea that from the temporal perspective, the novel may serve as a depiction of human life. The

first chapter, thus, may be compared to the period of childhood and youth, when a person if full of

future dreams and intentions, but is inexperienced and dependent on his family to seek for their

fulfillment. What is more, grown up people usually admit recalling only a few moments or events

from their early days, that is why this part of the novel also mainly consists of small pieces of

experience, encounters, and daily activities.

Indeed, reality, when conceived of as a collection of fleeting moments, seems as chaotic and

unpredictable. Each of the main characters struggles with this realization, and they all grasp for

symbols of permanence and stability despite their understanding of the transience of experience. I

believe that for Mrs. Ramsay, the steady stroke of the Lighthouse light represents stability and

permanence. For this reason, she connects herself to it, unites herself with it, in the hope of gaining

a similar sense of connection both to her present and to eternity. In fact, she seeks not only to unite

herself with the permanent objects in the physical world, but also to unite her friends, family, and

guests in the creation of lasting beauty.

The second chapter may be compared to the period of adulthood when our consciousness, our

perceptions, thoughts and ideas, that impose order on the world-a subjective order to be sure, but

this is the power that makes people lead their lives. Indeed, this is the period of growing self–

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respect and independence, or, in some case, of personal tragedy because of inability to shape

oneself in the way one would like to. Thus, as seen from the second chapter in the book, the

characters face cruelty and unpredictability of reality, meaninglessness of war and sorrow of loss,

loneliness, and death. However, this period also serves as a time of reshaping the characters’ world

understanding, reformulating values and growing inside. According to me, this is a story about a

modernist man, who faces both the destructive force of innovations and the new possibilities to

move further in spite of loss and alienation.

I would like to claim that the third layer of temporality in the book is related to visions,

something unreal, difficult to achieve, and at the same time mystical and scary. If we agree that this

novel may serve as a symbolic chronology of human life, the last chapter then naturally depicts an

elderly person’s situation and point of view. As the reader learns, towards the end of the novel, the

characters reflect upon their experience in the past, compare the present with the past of ten years

ago, and make the best of what’s left (they concentrate on finishing a painting, finally going to the

lighthouse). In my opinion, his is the chapter of memories and nostalgia. The characters aim to

make the final sense of the world. To my mind, towards the end of the novel, Woolf shows reality

to be nothing but a shifting constellation of subjective experiences, of people alone with their

thoughts, guarding themselves against the vast emptiness and chaos that surrounds them. The

disintegration into chaos of life is shown most clearly in the ten year period when the family house

stands empty. But it is also visible in those problematic passages of the last part which convey the

empty space between people into which all human experience is threatened to disappear without

any footnote like a tear into water. Consequently, I am convinced that all the trivial thoughts and

perceptions that make up our consciousness can be seen as attempts to control that chaos. More than

just trying to realistically describe human consciousness, Woolf shows human beings in an

existential nakedness and simplicity: our trivial, subjective experience is all that we possess in this

life, and no human being so far managed to reveal the chaotic meaning of existence which consists

of the periodicity of life and death.

4.2. The Temporal Perspective of Themes and Structure in the Novel

There is enough evidence to claim that modernist narrative, as a semiotic representation of a

group of events, meaningfully connected on the basis of particular spatial and temporal boundaries,

uses a number of innovative signs and constructions that convey meaning and help the reader to

understand the text. In Onega and Landa’ words (1996:133), in modern fiction, “the arrangement of

scenes, intermediary episodes, important events, and transitions never ceases to modulate the

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quantities and extensions. To these features are added anticipations and flashbacks, the interlinings

that enable the memory of vast stretches of time to be included in brief narrative sequences,

creating the effect of perspective depth, while breaking up chronology. We move even further away

from a strict comparison between lengths of time when, to flashbacks, are added the time of

remembering, the time of dreaming, and the time of reported dialogue, as in Virginia Woolf.“

Indeed, as fleetingly mentioned in the previous chapter, the structural peculiarities of the novel To

the Lighthouse can serve as a hint leading the reader to a better understanding of the meaning

conveyed in this book. This, in this chapter I will carry a more detailed analysis of the trivial

structure and themes of the novel on the basis of the temporal perspective which exists throughout

the book. According to Lee (1977:24), after the publication of this novel, “Woolf is often praised

for sensitivity and lyricism and criticized for ineffectuality and preciousness.” Lee emphasizes the

fact that in To the Lighthouse, vivid and convincing portraits of characters are created by means of

the successful use of stream of consciousness narrative, nonlinear plot, and interior monologue,

which convincingly identifies characters without the formal structure of chronological time and

omniscient narration, as well as subtly depicted fictional reflection on the issues of mortality,

subjectivity, and the passage of time. In Lee’s words (1977:28), “clearly Virginia Woolf inherits

something of the Romantic idea of the potency of the imagination, working at a depth below the

conscious mind. [...] But she can find no other way to express the truth of life and character than

through natural images and physical perceptions”. Thus, this novel is thought to be a complex and

poetic character study, incorporating all aspects of personality, including feelings, emotions, values,

beliefs, plans, intentions, and other mental processes which inevitably occur in every human mind.

I would like to claim that the literary context of To the Lighthouse leads us to a better

comprehension of its thematic and stylistic peculiarities. Indeed, it is worth remembering that this

innovative novel was written and published during one of the most creative and innovative periods

of development in English literary history. The period of Modernism gave rise to many remarkable

and innovative literary works, such as Joyce’s Ulysses or T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. This was

also a period of rapid intellectual development and intellectual experiments in life and art, thus,

Woolf’s emphasis on the issues of consciousness is consistent with the scientific and psychological

ideas posited by the majority of modernist philosophers, scientists, and artists. For instance,

influenced by Sigmund Freud who explored theories of consciousness and subconsciousness,

Virginia Woolf wrote a novel that mainly foregrounded the richness and complexity of mental

interiority and rejected the significance of the external reality. Besides, I can adhere to Lee who

adds (1977 :29) that “Virginia Woolf not only felt that the expression of the life of the mind through

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physical images was the most accurate equivalent that art can make for reality; she also believed in

the relationship between people and non – human objects as being life – enhancing”.

Thus, to convey this sense of human consciousness, Woolf’s narrative departs from the

traditional structure of the novel that is based on the logical linear delineation of the plot and

focuses on highly innovative linguistic and literary devices in order to unveil the peculiarities of

thoughts, such as stream of consciousness and FID, described in the previous chapters. It is obvious

that the novel also focuses on the subjectivity of reality, experience, and time. Indeed, I would like

to claim that To the Lighthouse represents a number of various intermingling perspectives and

individual patterns of thought that, existing together, support and complement one another in a clear

cohesive whole. As already stated in the first paragraphs of Chapter 4, structurally, the novel can be

divided into three parts: The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. Each section is fragmented

into certain stream of consciousness contributions from various narrators and covers a different

period of time.

The first section of the novel, The Window, introduces the members of the Ramsay family

and describes their complicated relationships. Lee believes that in this part of the book, the narrative

mainly concentrates on the stream of consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay, the protagonist of the book.

Interestingly, Ginger contradicts Lee’s opinion and suggests that here the events are seen not only

through Mrs. Ramsay’s eyes, but rather through those of Woolf’s. That is how he explains his

insights (1973: 128): “Virginia Woolf reveals the reactions of her characters by identifying herself

with them, and leaves us to reconstruct those external events to which they respond. She does not

appear in her own person, […], she tells us nothing about her characters but tries to show us

everything”. Ginger thinks that in To the Lighthouse, Woolf aims to be nearer to her readers than to

her characters and appeals to the readers’ intelligence rather than to subjectivity of her own

emotions. Thus, the temporal setting of the first part of the novel serves as a symbolic frame that

limitates characters’ activities and thoughts and provides a certain clearness of them so that the

reader could learn the message hidden between the lines. According to Ginger (ibid.), Woolf’s

depiction of time in the first section of the novel convincingly shows how its passing is conceived

and reflected by the individual people: rational and calm Mr. Ramsay, his sensitive, romantic, and

emotional wife, to enlist but some of the characters. Indeed, The Window is the shortest part of the

book as it covers events of only one day. However, I think that in this part the reader learns the

major information about the most important characters of the book and thus, is ready for making

further judgement and remarks. To prove this, I would like to consider the following example from

the analyzed novel describing Mr. Ramsay’s thoughts (1990):

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(34) One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely,

not a single village for miles on end. […]It sometimes seemed to him that in a little

house out there, alone - he broke, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight

children. […]Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a

beauty, her mother said. (64)

As can be seen from the given extract, despite the fact that the narrative of the first section covers

only a day, within this, Woolf depicts a wide variety of times, including the past, the present, and

the future. The first two sentences of this longish example depict some details from Mr. Ramsay’s

past memories: he recalls the days when he used to spend much time alone and enjoyed this

loneliness and calmness. Then suddenly, the character brings his thoughts into the present and

understands that now, being a father of eight children, he no longer has the right to privacy and

freedom of behaviour. Finally, as the words in bold in the last two sentences show, Mr. Ramsay

projects his thoughts into the future and draws a beautiful picture of his children already grown up,

beautiful and wise. Indeed, I would like to claim that to my mind, this extract does not simply

depict the changing nature of human mind, but it also enables the reader to learn more about the

character whose thoughts are expressed. It is obvious that for Mr. Ramsay, the past is the period of

positivism and pleasant experience, thus, he mentally returns to those days in order to escape from

the discouraging and problematic present reality. On the other hand, he expresses some hopeful

dreams about the future by seeing his children as better people than he is, and perhaps he even

expects his son to have the ambitions that Mr. Ramsay was not brave or determined enough to fight

for.

What else can we learn from the extract? In Ginger’s words (1973:128), “Woolf’s method is

to reproduce the moments at which experience is caught and reflected in the mind”. Thus, there is

enough evidence to claim that as a typical modernist man, Mr. Ramsay perceives the flowing time

from dual angle. On the one hand, he tends to neglect the past because, as reason implies, it cannot

have meaningful influence on his present life situations. On the other hand, the character attempts to

cover his confusion and disappointment caused by the present situation by concentrating on the past

memories. Thus, Ginger comes to the logical conclusion (ibid.) that Mr. Ramsay attempts to make

sense of his confused feelings to which the present situation gives rise by setting his life

interchangeably in the past and in the future situations that both are in a way unreal and thus, cannot

serve as solution of effective help.

It seems to me that the second section of the novel provides the greatest amount of the

material for analysis of time in the book and endows with a very interesting interpretation of spatial

and temporal factors that influence characters’ life. Here Woolf foregrounds the notion of temporal

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changeability and the rapid passing of time through impressionistic language combined with

accurate descriptions concerning the fates of the characters we have been introduced to in the first

part of the novel. The reader learns that one of the Ramsay’s children, Prue, gets married but dies

after childbirth, while another child, Andrew, is killed during the war. Mrs. Ramsey’s death only

adds to the painful occurrences concentrated in the second part of the novel. What role does time

play in the context of these events and experiences? Let us consider the following extract from To

the Lighthouse (1990):

(35) As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the wakeful, the

hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind - of

flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind. (126)

As can be seen form the extract, time here is shown as a cruel destructive force damaging people’s

lives, the force that nobody can overcome or to make profit from. Indeed, time is depicted by means

of natural images of the changing seasons and universal natural phenomena (this can be seen from

the phrases in bold). It is possible to say that here Woolf’s sensitiveness to changing human

experience manifests itself in new ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe.

(John Anthony Bowden Cuddon, 1991:551)

Indeed, we can presuppose on the basis of the way of temporal representation in this extract

that much of the text of Time Passes is dominated by abstract pieces and fragments of human

presence. The characters’ lives are portrayed in the subtle context of time passing and only the

house and lighthouse remain unchanged, as symbols of reliability and memory. In my opinion, in

this part of To the Lighthouse, Woolf portrays the temporality that is beyond the human

psychology; as the slow compressed nature of the first section can be treated as a hint to the

growing speed with which years pass and events occur in the second section, as the following

extract from the novel convincingly illustrates (1996):

(36) “night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses were bright

and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into this silence”.

(178)

In the third part of the novel The Lighthouse time regains its slow meditative passage, and the

events are seen from different characters’ points of view, similarly to the narrative perspective

provided in The Window. It is foregrounded that whereas Mrs. Ramsay’s search for permanence lies

in the emotional realm of experience, her husband bases his life on the power of reason and

intellect. As far as I am concerned, this character longs to transcend his lifetime with an important

philosophical contribution, yet feels practically certain that this goal is unachievable. One more

character Lily suffers from a similar fear that people will not appreciate the value of her paintings

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and will be throw them into the attic, never to be fully understood and never to make a lasting

impression. It seems to me that Lily treats her canvasses as a certain final solution of all the spiritual

problems, while painting she wants to show the beauty and the meaning that is still present in life so

that it would stay forever unrestrained by the destructive passage of time.

By the culmination of the novel, however, Lily manages to overcome her fear and uncertainty

and fulfils her need for permanence and meaning. Thus, she is finally able to accomplish her artistic

vision. In my opinion, this final scene suggests that Lily can only achieve a sense of implementation

because she is able to surrender her need for a permanently significant existence. She finally

understands the multidimensional nature of human existence, and her painting serves as a mirror in

which all these fractures of life find their place and compose the whole mosaic of life. To prove

these statements, let us now consider the following example from To the Lighthouse (1996) that

enables the reader to learn how Lily feels after having finished her picture:

(37) With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line

there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her

brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (306)

In the extract above, the reader’s attention is focused on the final stage of Lily’s painting, or

more precisely, on the very product of her long lasting effort. In the process of painting, as it was

mentioned in the previous subchapters, Lily referred to the reality in such a way that people looking

at her painting could identify it successfully. However, this process of identification involves more

that the simple mimicry of the world in the way it is, it is a great deal wider and requires much more

reflection and meditation upon the question of life. I believe that Lily’s painting, as well as the

eventual trip to the lighthouse; disclose the very value of life. It seems that something important is

finally completed. Indeed, although in the novel, the writer convincingly demonstrates the power of

time to destroy everything; this does not lessen the importance of positive experience gained by

means of successfully acted performances in numerous situations. Indeed, every action, however

insignificant or vague it may be, carries some deep meaning and importance in its nature, which

must be disclosed and purposefully employed. Let us study one more example from the novel

(1996):

(38) So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a

ball [...] And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all [...] descends on people,

making them symbolic, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in

the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an

instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again,

and they became [...] Mr and Mrs Ramsay watching the children throwing catches.

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(84)

I believe sincerely that this extract revealing Lily’s thoughts draws together the three thematic

centres of this novel, namely: the Ramsay’s family life, the mystical symbolical outline, which

transcends the real figures of the characters for a moment, and Lily’s attempt to master both symbol

and reality. On the one hand, she simply sees the family spending time together: children playing,

their parents watching them and talking. On the other hand, in this picture of family, Lily treats Mr.

and Mrs. Ramsay as symbolic figures of husband and wife, father and mother and questions herself

if these figures reflect the picture of family Lily has in her mind. I would claim that in her painting,

Lily wants to portray this symbol of family, thus, not so much attention is paid to the real people

that the family consists of. Originally, she shares similar concerns with Mr. Ramsay, wondering if

her paintings will amount to anything and whether anyone will ever see them. By the final section

of the novel, however, her thoughts are located more in the past and in her memories of Mrs.

Ramsay. Partially the effect of these memories enables her to move forward and brings her vision

into focus.

How do critics interpret these moments of experience? The theorist Alex Zwerdling thinks

that the extract above provides evidence that the characters in the novel are sometimes given

symbolic identities. In his words (1987:182), “such passages underline the novel’s thematic

concerns by shifting the reader’s attention away from the particular details of character and action

to the general issues that concerned Woolf in writing “To the Lighthouse”. By comparison,

according to Lee (1977:85), the consummation of the trip to the lighthouse and Lily’s completion of

her painting, with a single line down the centre representing Mrs. Ramsay, signify the triumph of

order over disorder and life over death. Stevenson, by comparison, foregrounds the role of narrator

in this novel. He says (1998:56) that the omniscient narrator remained the standard explicative

figure in fiction through the end of the nineteenth century, providing an informed and objective

description of the characters and the plot. In the twentieth century, modernist writers basically

aimed at reflecting a more truthful account of the subjective nature of experience. Thus, in

Stevenson’s view, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is the convincing example of this innovation, creating

a reality that is completely constructed by the collection of the multiple subjective interiorities of its

characters and presented by means of stream of consciousness technique. As stated by Lee (1977) ,

who agrees with Stevenson, Woolf creates a fictional world in which no objective, omniscient

narrator is present. The majority of events are narrated from different perspectives in order to reflect

the peculiarities of the inner processes of her characters, while there is an insufficiency of

expositional information, expressing Woolf’s foregrounding of the thoughts and reflections that

comprise the world in To the Lighthouse.

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All the evidence provided in this subchapter lead us to the natural conclusion that time is the

kernel component of experience and reality and, in many ways, the novel is about the passage of

time. However, as the reader can see, Woolf does not represent time in a conventional easily

understandable way. I totally agree with Lee (1977) who claims convincingly that in The Window

and The Lighthouse, time is conveyed only through the consciousness of the various characters, and

moments last for pages as the reader is invited into the subjective experiences of many different

realities. Indeed, The Window takes place over the course of a single afternoon that is expanded by

Woolf’s method, and The Lighthouse seems almost directly connected to the first section, despite

the fact that ten years have actually intervened. However, in Time Passes, the period of ten years is

described in a fragmentary way with much information unspecified, thus, the changes in the lives of

the Ramsays and their home seem to flash by like scenes viewed from the window of a moving

train. This unsteady temporal rhythm convincingly conveys the broader sense of instability and

change that the characters strive to comprehend, and it captures the fleeting nature of a reality that

exists only in the mind and as a collection of the various subjective experiences of reality.

4.3.The Conceptual and Contextual Metaphor of Time and Space in the Novel

According to the theorist Lakoff (1987:302), human life consists of various kinds of

experience that is structured in the mind and in the memory by certain “directly meaningful

concepts”. These basic concepts are based on associations and links between places, events, and

experiences that people tend to classify and analyze on the basis of their subjective understanding of

reality. In Lakoff’s words (ibid.), concepts arising in the mind are important for our cognition

because they provide “certain fixed points in the objective evaluation of situations”. Indeed, these

structures of cognition can be divided into basic-level structures and image-schema structures:

basic-level structures are characterized “as a result of our capacities for gestalt perception, mental

imagery, and motor movement” (ibid.) and manifest as the basic feelings of hunger or pain, whereas

image schemas are certain spatial mappings that consist of the source, path, and goal, or the central

and peripheral elements. In general, Lakoff believes that the variety of concepts that occurs in the

mind gradually forms certain patterns of thought, which “derive their fundamental meaningfulness

directly from their ability to match up with preconceptual structure. Such direct matchings provide

a basis for an account of truth and knowledge”. (1987:303) Preconceptual structures are mapped

from source domains to target domains and thus, influence the rise and development of conceptual

metaphors that play a vital role in our ability to think in abstract terms like knowledge.

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Zoltan Kovecses (2002: 36) supports Lakoff’s insights about conceptual metaphors in life and

art and complements them by saying that in literature, conceptual metaphors enable writers to

represent in linear language complex nature of the human consciousness including feelings,

emotions, dreams, memories, and other mental phenomena. In his opinion, the psychological reality

and multidimensionality of conceptual metaphors provide readers with a better understanding of the

piece of fiction they are reading and thus, encourage them to think in a creative critical way by

making their own judgements, interpretations, allusions, and presuppositions. By comparison, Jurga

Cibulskienė believes ( 2006) that within the context of a particular book, the conceptual metaphors

are not used merely to illustrate one thing in terms of another; instead, they are both cohesive

mechanisms of evoking emotions and conveying means of representing consciousness that would

have been impossible to express in ordinary language. According to Kovecses (ibid.), structurally,

conceptual metaphors can be characterized as the duality of two elements, namely A and B, which

complement one another and complete a certain formula, where “the target domain (A) is

comprehended through a source domain (B).” In linguist’s opinion, the semantic core of a

conceptual metaphor can be fully understood only via the relationships that exist during the two

aforementioned domains.

Indeed, as I have already mentioned in previous chapters, Woolf’s style of writing has been

defined as innovative and experimental because of her attempt to reveal the original nature of the

individual consciousness by numerous verbal means. Lee believes that the writer purposefully uses

allusive emotional vocabulary as well as stylistic means that enable her to express the most secret

and subtle feelings of the human beings.According to me, in To the Lighthouse, Woolf uses a

number of interesting conceptual metaphors which play a vital role in her readers’ ability to

rediscover the meaning of abstract terms like life and death, happiness and sorrow, time and space.

The notion of time, in my opinion, perceives the majority of attention in the novel and

consequently, I suggest analyzing three conceptual metaphors that serve for discourse organization

and construction as well as representation of varying consciousness styles. In the novel, the writer

seems to extend, elaborate, and even reformulate well-known conceptual metaphors related to

travelling, growing, changing, and discovering. Hence, judging from the temporal perspective, I

would show the following kernel conceptual metaphors that enhance the issues of time and space in

the figure below.

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LIFE

ART

TIME

Figure 7. Conceptual Metaphors of Time and Space in the Novel To the Lighthouse

JOURNEY

Figure 7. Conceptual Metaphors of Time and Space in the Novel To the Lighthouse

What is the essence of the figure? Indeed, as I have already stated in the previous chapters, the

novel consists of three parts each of which centres around a particular semantic core, or idea that the

whole novel can be treated like a symbolic metaphorical journey through human life and human

mind. In general, it is possible to claim that in The Window, Woolf describes common daily family

life; Time Passes convincingly deals with the passing time and its influence on human lives,

whereas the last chapter, The Lighthouse seems to celebrate the power and meaning of art in life.

Indeed, throughout the novel, we see the characters leading their lives that have a beginning and an

end, as if travelling to their destination that is unique and specific for each person in the book.

Therefore, I aimed to formulate the three conceptual metaphors characterizing the message of the

novel on the basis of the aforementioned ideas, as seen in the figure. The metaphors can be worded

as follows: life is a journey, time is a journey, and art is a journey. Adhering to several critics’

opinions, I would like to ground my choice of metaphors by analyzing them one by one.

In my opinion, there is enough evidence to claim that the most important conceptual metaphor

in the novel says that life is a journey. Indeed, it is possible to understand a journey as a search that

has several temporal stages: the past period, or departure, the present situation, or passage of events,

and the future perspective, or the idea of return. In the novel, these are the characters’ intentions,

preparations, thoughts, and dreams to reach the lighthouse which in their wholeness create the

whole novel as a contextual metaphor. I can adhere to Lakoff who believes (1987:308) that every

journey is a dynamic process as it takes time, maybe even a whole life, and involves constant

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moving from one position to another. I would complement this idea by adding that every journey is

also a social event as travellers meet other people along the way; and this gives rise to new

experiences, contacts, and relationships. Besides, a journey implies a transition to another world,

facing tasks and trials, alone or with the help of others. Having survived various challenges and

having acquired important knowledge, the person involved in a journey must then decide whether to

go back with this experience to the ordinary world and to transfer it to others, which faces him

again with new challenges and difficulties; although he knows for certain that this new knowledge

will improve the world. To my mind, in the novel, all the characters can be treated as travellers who

have their purposes, or destinations, and means of reaching them, or routes. Their journey covers

both physical and metaphysical reality because they face obstacles both in their real lives (the

cruelty of war, the complexity of human relationships) and in their mind (the disharmony between

totally different human characters, their plans, and intentions, to mention but some of them). During

their journey, the characters make important judgments, as it is necessary to choose friendship or

alienation, love or hatred, hope or disillusionment. Indeed, these decisions can be described as

certain symbolic crossroads in their journey, while their achievements and small victories serve as

landmarks. For instance, it seems to me that Mrs. Ramsay is constantly searching for her lost self

and thus travelling through her experiences that enable her to grow spiritually. The protagonist of

the novel seeks to find the golden middle among her social roles (such as being a mother, a

housewife, and a lady) and her inner wishes, as well as her seek for a better world where closer

relationships among people filled with more warmth and sincerity would be possible. I believe that

Mrs. Ramsay, who is the opposite of her practical and rational husband, reaches beyond the

limitations of individual isolation in her efforts to care about other people: her children, her

husband, friends and all the people she meets. Symbolically, we can call her the true lighthouse of

the novel that provides warmth and light overall the family. Interestingly, this spiritual power and

light continues to illuminate and connect the family members even after the protagonist’s death

because all the memories related to Mrs. Ramsay’s personality enable other characters grow in their

minds and become stronger.

In my opinion, the second conceptual metaphor that unites the three chapters of the novel

could be worded like this: time is a journey. Indeed, it seems to me that although physically the

characters stay fixed in a limited scope of time and space, their consciousness moves freely in time:

in the characters’ mind, everything happens in the present, which can extend to infinity or contract

to a moment. This concept of inner time, which is irregular and disrupted with respect to the

conventional conception of time, is preferred to the real physical external time, since it shows the

relativism of a subjective experience. Indeed, I admire the way Woolf discloses the private thoughts

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of her characters in her novels and would like to claim that her innovative narrative and stream of

consciousness technique both enables her to move easily from one character to the next and allows

her reader to have a curious insight into each character’s mind. In addition, Woolf’s narrative leaves

one mind and enters another, travelling between the interior worlds of the characters. Thus, if we

support the belief that human consciousness transcends the limitations of individual minds, it will

be natural and reasonable to treat the whole temporal surroundings as a metaphorical journey from

the past to the future. As mentioned in the subchapter The Temporal Perspective of Themes and

Structure in the Novel, we can say that this novel describes ordinary people’s journey in the flow of

time and covers all the periods of human life, namely: childhood, youth, maturity, old age and

death. Thus, from this perspective, time in the novel becomes an active participant that develops

and alters people’s lives, reshapes their decisions, and influences their inner and outer changes.

As the last metaphor that I intend to analyze states, art can also be understood as a

metaphorical journey. In my opinion, in the novel Woolf describes the characters’ lives by means of

the portrayal of fragmentary moments occurring in characters’ mind on ordinary days. It seems

certainly that their mind receives a flow of various impressions that are at the same time

inconsequential, unbelievable, and momentary. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf provides the

description, transformation and psychological analysis of her characters that attract her readers’

attention because of the openness of their psyches. Consequently, I tend to believe that Woolf’s

characters are rarely described directly by means of their physical appearance or concrete activities,

as very often they are surrounded by a sense of inexplicability and mystery. Art plays a significant

role in their lives. According to Julia Briggs (2006:103), “at the centre of “To the Lighthouse”,

stands the painter and her portrait whose structure epitomizes that of the novel itself”. Briggs says

that one of the major characters Lily believes that art connects human conscious with the

subconscious and allows people to explore their inner selves and to understand their ever changing

body, mind, and the world that they are surrounded by. Indeed, I support this idea and think that art

reflects the most important part of every human being.

In the novel, we learn that it takes more than ten years for Lily to complete her single

painting. Thus, it is obvious that art is a long journey through imagination, aiming to heighten and

focus people’s inner mind and to see beyond the ordinary details. Indeed, I believe that although

people see different things and acquire different experience, their emotions and the ability to

represent are the most important forces that create and enhance art. Lily’s picture in the novel

clearly grounds the claim that there is no greater happiness for a human being than to be clear

sighted and to know this miracle when it happens. This makes for great art as it explains the

differences in impressions we receive from art works of different artists. I suppose that Woolf

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shows in Lily’s character that to be an artist is to live and feel and only then to express, and to

become aware of things in everyday life that people usually do not notice. By comparison,

Elizabeth Abel (1989) thinks that art is important for all human beings because it enables people to

do as much as possible in the everyday bits of their lives. With each work of art that he or she

creates, the artist gains a greater feeling of life and understanding of himself, which will affect his

or her mind forever. Indeed, according to ancient Greek legends, it is believed that these feelings

represent moments of the purest freedom of the divine spirit that is present in every human. Once an

artist creates an image which truly represents that emotional state of mind, the work becomes

precious to him. That is why towards the end of the novel, when Lily finally finishes her painting,

she experiences a great deal stronger feelings than effortless happiness of satisfaction. I think that

the following example from To the Lighthouse (1996) shows that instead, she feels exhausted both

physically and mentally and relieved as if she has just completed the most difficult task in her life:

(39) With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there,

in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her

brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (209)

As can be seen form this passage, Lily is satisfied with her canvas as she finally sees the picture that

she had been creating for years in front of her. Although the picture portrays something unreal and

not fully understandable, something which cannot be merely physically measured and is only

realized as a vision, it is possible to feel the beauty of this work of art which is in the work itself, the

feeling it creates. Without a doubt, during the long journey towards the realization of her vision,

Lily had a chance to reconsider events and experiences in her life as well as reflect on her beliefs.

This idea is supported by the theorists Ruland and Bradbury (1991:219) who argue that indeed,

Woolf “portrayed human consciousness struggling for pragmatic definition […], while

consciousness was not a chain of linked segments”. Consequently, I would like to claim that her

picture can be understood as the allusion to her life and to human life in general, as the whole life

can be treated as a picture that improves on the basis of the collaborative effort of the humankind

and nobody knows what the final version of this painting will look like.

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CONCLUSIONS

The twentieth century was marked by remarkable changes in all the spheres of life and art.

People understood it was impossible to reproduce the complexity of the human mind using

traditional techniques, and looked for more suitable means of expression. Thus, modernist art often

explores the concepts of time, memory, and people’s inner consciousness, and is remarkable for its

humanity and depth of perception. On of the best-known modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s novels,

however, emphasized patterns of consciousness rather than sequences of events in the external

world. Influenced by the literary works of French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James

Joyce, among others, Woolf aimed to create a literary form that would convey inner life.

The purpose of the present paper was to explore a completely new approach to the notions of

time, temporality, and space within modernist literature, the distinction of the natural, conceptual,

and fictional time as well as the alterations of time due to the deictic centre. In my research, I aimed

to ground the statement that Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a deeply psychological novel that focuses

on the study of human consciousness.Throughout all her novel, Woolf attempted to express reality,

as she perceived it. In particular, she was interested in experimenting with new methods of dealing

with the time medium which shapes all human experience. It seems that Woolf was highly

interested in time and spared much time and effort for description and analysis of differences

between external and internal time. She rejected traditional handling of time as it did not reflect the

real way time influenced human lives and altered their experiences, relationships, and behaviour.

By means of content analysis, I provided evidence that in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

attempted to structure her novel on the basis of time in the mind rather than time measured by

clocks.

The theoretical basis for this investigation of the time and space shift in the studied novel was

based on several overlapping critical theories: Practical Criticism Psychoanalysis, and the Theory of

Narratology. Adhering to numerous critics’ opinions, I aimed to demonstrate in my research that the

images Virginia Woolf uses establish her idea of true reality and reject a whole tradition of

literature. As Meyer Howard Abrams says (1993:118), Woolf, as a “trail-blazing modernist”,

experiments with the impression that external events make on the characters that experience them.

In Woolf’s novels the omniscient narrator disappears and the point of view shifts inside the

characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, and momentary impressions presented

as a continuous flux. In Woolf’s best fiction, plot is generated by the inner lives of the characters.

Psychological effects are achieved through the use of imagery, symbols, and metaphors. Thus, the

inner lives of human beings and the ordinary events in their lives are made to seem extraordinary.

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What conclusions can be made? I foregrounded the following ten insights:

1. In my research I proved that the innovative notion of unconscious mind had deeply

influenced new tendencies in literature, philosophy, and psychology. The deepest problems of

modern life questioned and analysed by modernists derive from the claim of the individual to

preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces,

of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. In the research, I aimed to

compare the peculiarities of the art and treatment of reality in various époques. It became obvious

that during the periods of Romanticism and Renaissance, people perceived life as a constant

struggle many years ago, and the same conceptions are valid in the philosophy of Modernism. On

the other hand, in modern art reality changed its face as modern humans see the entire existing

world as intangible and full of ambiguities more than ever before. The new concept of fragmented

and shifted time becomes more and more important as it characterizes the fractured nature of person

and there is enough evidence to claim that modern reality actually becomes invisible as the art

mirrors human himself, not the outer world. The main aim of realist fiction was to imitate and

mimic everyday life, to evoke the impression that the fictional characters really exist and that the

events narrated are the events of ordinary experience that could happen to every person, while

modernist literature attempted to move from the norms and standards of realist literature and to

introduce concepts such as freedom of literary form commonly received as understandings of plot,

time, and identity. As a result, the most important characteristic of Modernism is the attention to the

peculiarities of human self-consciousness. It seems clearly that this growing interest in the unknown

and unexplored fields of human mind resulted in various modernist experiments with form and with

innovative literary works that draw attention to the processes and materials used to create as much

abstraction and versatility as possible.

2. Modernist literature and art were new and powerful creative stimuli increasing people’s

interest in the psychological and mental power hidden in each human being instead of just scanning

and mimetically portraying devastated areas of daily life. The reality discovered by Modernism was

filled with innovations and fragmentations, but the major attention concerned the nature of constant

human struggle for integration in all aspects of life, namely: one’s identity, origin, values, beliefs,

and mission. It was important to describe life at the moment it is being lived paying attention to the

smallest details that a human being perceives: smell and sound, colour and shape, movement and

stillness. Although modernist characters try to escape from reality and neglect the past, at the same

time they aim even stronger to stick in the present moment, to perceive some moments of the

personal experience in their memories. Modernists wanted to reformulate the existing world by

revealing and contemplating on everything that was painful or meaningless in order to lessen the

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misery and to make human mind and soul free from the sense of being guilty, disappointed, and

exhausted from the experience of reality. Thus, the period of Modernism was marked by the

impetus to create everything new: new beliefs, norms, traditions, new life, and new future.

3. In the research, I demonstrated that experimenting with language and breaking the

traditions were typical characteristics of modernist literature. Vision and viewpoint became an

essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. Modernist writers were supposed to create

something new and attractive instead of simply employing an objective one-dimensional third-

person narrative and portraying everything from the single perspective. Linguistic deviations,

violations, breaking of the old cohesive sentence sequences, and rejection of gradual linear realistic

description actually established a new aim of literature: to reveal the picture of human mind, to

portray the subconscious, and to depict the natural flow of thoughts in one’s mind which was the

essence of a modern human being.

4. I grounded the claim that Virginia Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the

English language whose novels are strongly influenced by the insights of Psychoanalysis. I

provided evidence that in her works, she experiments with the stream of consciousness technique

and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. The core of Woolf’s

fiction is based on her reflection of the human consciousness, inner discourse, or the peculiarities of

its characters’ mind. Woolf did not intend to analyze real events and those occurring in the mind

separately, as if dividing the personalities of her characters into purely physical and spiritual

figures. In her pieces of literature, she aimed to show the psychological underpinnings of human

behaviour and to reveal specific changes in human psyche influenced by the personal experience

gained or knowledge achieved. In other words, Woolf provided an innovatory representation of

modern world perceiving and seizing reality on the basis of mind, not reason and logical judgment,

and her modernist narrative rejected the mimetic and linear arrangement of events.

5. The research revealed that in her masterpiece To the Lighthouse, Woolf formulated a

completely new approach to the treatment of the notion of time and temporality. She believed that

conventional understanding of time does not reflect the way in which time actually influences and is

influenced by human lives. The writer believed that the real understanding of the depth of time

exists only within the individual, they often chose experimental patterns of time for their literary

works. Without doubt, new theories in the fields of science and psychology century have directed

modern thought regarding time and have influenced trends in modern fiction. There is enough

evidence to claim that in Woolf’s fiction, time was no longer considered as an abstract absolute

entity. According to the writer, the amount of time an event takes is dependent upon the observer’s

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frame of reference; in other words, time is relative, a concept which reflects the modern writer’s

view of time.

6. It is obvious that in the given novel, the notion of time is presented as a rather complicated

notion that can be divided on the basis of different criteria. Time in To the Lighthouse serves as a

certain quantitative indicator that helps to measure and to understand the general tendency, or

message, of the text and to clarify its particular shades of meaning. Indeed, there is a logical

correlation between the amount of space devoted to a particular element and its centrality, or

importance in the text. The reader always measures the importance of elements in the text on the

basis of his subjective intrinsic interest. In the novel, this traditional rule of informativity is

purposefully violated in order to encourage the reader to think and reflect upon the material being

read. For instance, the most important moments, or climaxes, in To the Lighthouse are usually not

described at all, and all the reader learns about is the outcome of the particular event. Although this

style of presenting events may seem a bit disappointing at the first glance, it gives more freedom for

the reader’s imagination and strengthens his or her mental abilities such as creating hypotheses or

making decisions. As a result, the consciously motivated reader may spend more time analyzing

minor details than studying and calling into question and the most important elements.

7. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf focuses on the synchronic moments of time, and as a result,

she frees herself from the limitations of ordinary linear time. She describes important events in

detail and length, whereas entire years of insignificant experience are simply omitted and not

mentioned at all, there is no clear distance between the mental images and physical action. Indeed,

large parts of this Woolf’s novel do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather

investigate the means of reasoning and perception, attempting to understand people in the act of

looking. I think that in this particular piece of fiction, the writer uses stream of consciousness

narration that, unlike traditional linear narration, records thoughts in the order in which they arise

without bringing them in a rational or chronological context.

8. In this piece of fiction, time is the kernel component of experience and reality. However, as

the reader can see, Woolf does not represent time in a conventional easily understandable way. In

my research, I arrived at the conclusion that in To the Lighthouse, time is conveyed only through

the consciousness of the various characters, and moments last for pages as the reader is invited into

the subjective experiences of many different realities. This unsteady temporal rhythm convincingly

conveys the broader sense of instability and change that the characters strive to comprehend, and it

captures the fleeting nature of a reality that exists only within and as a collection of the various

subjective experiences of reality.

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9. It is impossible to understand the meaning of this interestingly contracted and prolonged

natural time without discussing the relationship of the dimensions of time and space in the book,

namely, the layer of story. The whole situation of the novel is representation of reality. Thus, the

whole temporal scope of the novel may be treated not only as a collection of single moments from

people’s lives but as a universal symbol of time, namely, of the temporal span of human life. The

duration of the action covers twenty four hours, from the evening up to the morning of the other

day. Thus, having analyzed the suggestions made by Stevenson, Lee, and other critics, I adhere to

the idea that from the temporal perspective, the novel may serve as a depiction of human life. The

novel consists of three parts each of which centres around a particular semantic core, or idea that the

whole novel can be treated like a symbolic metaphorical journey through human life and human

mind. In general, it is possible to claim that in The Window, Woolf describes common daily family

life; Time Passes convincingly deals with the passing time and its influence on human lives,

whereas the last chapter, The Lighthouse seems to celebrate the power and meaning of art in life.

Indeed, throughout the novel, we see the characters leading their lives that have a beginning and an

end, as if travelling to their destination that is unique and specific for each person in the book. Thus,

I aimed to formulate the three conceptual metaphors characterizing the message of the novel on the

basis of the aforementioned ideas, as seen in the figure. The metaphors can be worded as follows:

life is a journey, time is a journey, and art is a journey. Adhering to several critics’ opinions, I

grounded my choice of metaphors by analyzing them one by one.

10. The present research has demonstrated that in “To the Lighthouse”, Virginia Woolf

attempted to structure her novel on the basis of time in the mind rather that time measured by clocks

because conventional treatment of time did not reflect the way time influences and alters people’s

behaviour, feelings, and experiences. The study extended the existing knowledge of the

psychological background, the transitivity and variability of time issues, and of the specific features

the modern narrative in the novel. Further studies of the representation of time and space alterations

in modernist fiction cloud be productive in exploring the influence of time and space dimensions in

modernist literature, while investigating the thematic core, the structure and meaning of its

discourse with the focus on the Psychoanalysis underlying the interpretation of human relationships

and their representation in literary works.

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SUMMARY

Šio darbo tikslas buvo ištirti visiškai naują požiūrį į laiko, laikinumo ir erdvės sampratą

modernistinėje literatūroje bei analizuoti gamtinio, konceptualiojo, ir literatūrinio laiko kaitą dėl

deiktinio centro ypatybių. Analizei buvo pasirinktas Virdžinijos Vulf moderinistinis romanas „Į

švyturį“, kuriame atsispindi modernistinis požiūris į žmogų ir jį supančią tikrovę. Kurdama savo

veikėjų paveikslus, rašytoja įtaigiai atskleidė ir parodė, kad žmogaus gyvenimą pirmiausia lemia ne

išorinė aplinka, bet mintyse, pasąmonėje vykstantys virsmai, kutrių fizinę išraišką parodo konkretūs

veiksmai ir poelgiai. Modernizmo žmogus parodomas kaip praradęs tradicines pasaulio suvokimo

atramas, likęs akistatoje su savo intymiausias patyrimais, išgyvenantis savo būtį kaip izoliuotą,

atskirtą nuo viso pasaulio, pasimetusią tarp fantazijos ir realybės. Savo tyrimu siekiau įrodyti, kad

Virdžinijos Vulf veikėjai analizuojamame romane save iškelia kaip esminį būties centrą ir

didžiausią vertybę, nepavaldžią laiko ir erdvės matmenims, bet tuo pačiu metu susiduria su savo

sudėtingu ribotu vidiniu pasauliu – suskilusiu, nuolat kintančiu, klaidinančiu, susidedančiu iš

subjektyvių greit kintančių patirties fragmentų. Romane autorė atskleidė ir modernistinio naratyvo

ypatumus - jos rašymo stilių galima laiktyi savita kalbine revoliucija, kuri padėjo atskleisti

giliausius veikėjų sąmonės klodus pritaikant sąmonės srauto techniką bei vidinius monologus.

Šiame kūrinyje nebėra nuoseklaus siužeto bei vientisų charakterių, o pagrindiniu vaizdavimo

objektu ir pasakotoju tampa žmogaus sąmonė, valdoma tiek jausmų, tiek proto galių. Pagrindinis

metodas, taikytas tyrimo metu, buvo giluminė turinio analizė. Tyrime buvo bandoma analizuoti

romaną iš dar netyrinėtų pozicijų, laiko ir erdvės žiūros taško, kuris suponavo kompleksinius

analizės metodus, apimančiuis diskursinius, literatūrinius ir kalbos flosofijos kriterijus. Tyrimas

remiasi ir naujausiomis literatūros teorijomis, kurios papildė, o kartais ir iš esmės pakeitė požiūrį į

literatūros kritikas. Darbe buvo remiamasi keliomis literatūros teorijomis: Formalizmu, Naujuoju

Kriticizmu, Psichoanalize bei Naratologijos teorija, nes tik jų dermė gali užtikrinti gilesnę kūrinio

interpretaciją. Mano tyrimas parodė, kad romane „Į švyturį“ Virdžinija Vulf rėmėsi ne laikrodiniu

laiku, bet vidinio, žmogaus sąmonėje egzistuojančio laiko sąvoka, nes tradicinis fiziškai

išmatuojamas laikas buvo pernelyg vienpusiškas ir neatitiko lūkesčių šios rašytojos, kuri tikėjo, kad

literatūros kūrinys turėtų tikroviškai atspindėti, kaip laikas veikia žmogų bei keičia jo gyvenimą. Iš

tiesų, atliekant šį tyrimą paaiškėjo, jog romane įtaigiai atskleidžiamos naujos, iki tol neaptartos

laiko ir erdvės sąvokų savybės, kurias rašytoja meistriškai pritaikė savo veikėjų vidiniam pasauliui,

kintančiam pagal nematomą laikrodį, pavaizduoti. Romane laikas ir erdvė pateikiami subjektyviai,

fragmentiškai, o dažnai - simboliškai ir filosofiškai. Iš tiesų, galima visą šį romaną suvokti ir

interpretuoti tarsi vieną konceptualiąją metaforą: jo struktūra tarsi atspindi viso žmogaus gyvenimo

94

laikotarpius ir juose įgyjamą savitą patirtį. Romane visi įvykiai turi dviplanę vaizdo struktūrą: jie

aprašo įprastus įvykius veikėjų gyvenime ( susitikimus, pokalbius, keliones, kasdienę veiklą) ir

drauge tarsi nejučia pakylėja veikėjus į aukštesnį, metafizinį bei simbolinį, suvokimo bei veikimo

lygmenį, kur jų žmogiška tikrovės pasalio samprata praplečiama ir papildoma iliuziojomis, sapnais,

vizijomis bei kitais pasąmonės vaizdiniaias, atskleidžiančiais tikruosius veikėjų elgesio ar

kalbėsenos motyvus ir paslėptus ketinimus. Galima drąsiai teigti, kad šioje knygoje rašytoja siekė

priartėti prie giluminės laiko ir erdvės sąvokų prasmės ir parodyti, kaip savitai, asmeniškai ir

įdomiai kiekvienas žmogus suvokia jį supančią realybę.Laikas ir erdvė romane - ne tik abstraktūs

konteksto elementai, bet ir estetiniai filosofiniai faktoriai, darantys didžiulę įtaką vaizduojamų

veikėjų mintims, planams ir elgesiui. Šis tyrimas praplėtė jau turimas žinias apie laiko sąvokos

prigimtį ir savybes bei jos pritaikymą šiuolaikinės literatūros kūriniuose. Daug dėmesio skiriama ir

modernistinio naratyvo savybėms aptarti vertinant viską iš erdvinės ir laiko perspektyvos. Iš tiesų

šiame tyrime buvo išnagrinėta tik nedidelė dalis klausimų, susijusių su laiko ir erdvės esmėkaita

tradicinės bei modernistinės literatūros darbuose. Reikėtų atlikti daugiau išsamių tyrimų bei skatinti

studijas, kuriose būtų toliau domimasi laiko ir erdvės sampratos ypatumais bei jų svarba

naujoviškame šiuolaikiniame naratyve, kur sąmoningai pažeidžiamas linijiškumo ir nuoseklumo

principas siekiant atskleisti vidinio žmogaus pasaulio daugialypiškumą ir savitumą.

95

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