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The Re-Enchantment Way Temporal Experime
The Re-Enchantment Way Temporal Experime
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Key MacFarlane
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Key MacFarlane
Submitted for English Honors
Colgate University
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Professor John Connor
Professor Michael Coyle
ABSTRACT
Though all novels are inextricably tied to time, modernist novels formally thematize and
problematize time’s passing. As Ann Banfield points out, “in literary modernism it is the novel,
almost alone among genres, which is typically linked to time” (“Remembrance” 48). Such a
claim is evidenced by some of the major fictions of European modernism: Mann’s Magic
Mountain investigates the subjective and altering tempo of time; Proust’s À la recherche du temps
perdu replaces the linear narrative of development with one of recollection; Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
reduces the temporal frame of the novel to a single day in June; Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
explores the theme of arrested development and endless youth, as does Kipling’s Kim. As Jed
Esty points out, these novels—through their forms of “[m]etamorphosis, dilation, truncation,
and progressive temporality of the individual and the nation-state (Esty, “Colony” 72).
With this in mind, I explore and analyze the critical explanations as to why modernist
novelists felt the need to reinterpret and experiment with time. These explanations are grouped
into four theses—“the Great War Thesis,” “the Culture and Technology Thesis,” “the
Imperialism Thesis,” and “the Secularization Thesis”—all of which, I go on to argue, are limited
in their causal scope and restrict an explanation of modernism’s temporal experimentation to the
which treats the thematization of time as a formal and thematic tool used by writers to produce a
text that not only represents but that also meaningfully rehabilitates an ontologically depleted
discourse on time away from a debate about specific historical causes and towards an awareness
of the ways in which writers use temporality in a re-enchantment program to recover value in a
modern world stripped of meaning. Such a program, I suggest, is implicit in the conceptions of
iii
time in the works of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. For Woolf, I focus mainly on Mrs.
Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and for Proust, I examine his À la recherche du temps perdu. In these
novels, I explore the ways in which Woolf and Proust use time—formally and thematically—to
redeeming and resignifying the world. Time is also a function, moreover, of these writers’
generating artifact that fills the gaps of an impoverished universe. This re-enchantment
program, however, despite its attempt to remedy the problem of meaning in modernity, fails to
provide a political vision that supports a practical and collective solution to this predicament,
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iii
Abbreviations vii
IV. Conclusion 77
Works Cited 81
v
vi
ABBREVIATIONS
vii
viii
I. Critical Interest in Modernism’s Thematization of Time
Modernism’s preoccupation with temporality has long been a subject of much critical
interest and debate. A wide range of scholars have sought to explain why conceptions of linear
modernism, the nineteenth century was marked by a secure belief in teleology and in
metanarratives of progress: history was seen as an even temporal hierarchy of the past
determining the present, the present determining the future. It is for this reason that Stephen
Toulmin and June Goodfield call the nineteenth century, the “Century of History”: “Whether
we consider geology, zoology, political philosophy or the study of ancient civilizations, the
nineteenth century was in every case the Century of History—a period marked by the growth of
a new, dynamic world picture” (232). This world picture is implicit in the teleological and
historicist systems of Hegel and Marx. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel views history as the
dialectical process of spirit coming to know itself. Marx adopts a similar dialectical view of
history in which the proletariat seizes control of the capitalist means of production. This belief
in linear temporality and in evolutionary progress is also apparent in the works of Comte,
Darwin, and Spencer. With Hegel and Marx, these figures, as Stephen Kern argues, “shared the
idea that philosophies, nations, social systems, or living forms become what they are as a result
of progressive transformations in time, that any present form contains vestiges of all that has
In the novel, this notion of linear time manifested itself in the nineteenth-century
bildungsroman, which used the master trope of youth to represent the continuous
transformation of industrial society and the growing mobility of middle-class individuals (Esty,
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“Colony” 73). This genre, in other words, analogized social and national development through
the linear trajectory of an individual’s life, from childhood to his eventual assimilation into the
middle class. With the advent of modernism in the late nineteenth century, however, the belief
in teleological, progressive time began to break down, as novelists, like Woolf and Proust,
explain this epochal shift in temporal awareness, scholars have presented a variety of models and
theories, four of which are outlined below as the “Great War Thesis,” the “Culture and
Technology Thesis,” the “Imperialism Thesis,” and the “Secularization Thesis.” While these
models overlap and identify similar issues, they each cite and depend on different aspects of
am calling the “Great War Thesis,” which attributes the change in temporal apperception to a
solitary historical event: the First World War. The major writers to present this argument are
Paul Fussell and Samuel Hynes. The years of 1914-1918, they argue, drastically altered the way
in which individuals thought about, related to, and experienced the world around them,
including how they conceptualized time. According to Samuel Hynes, “war had created a new
reality” (109); it constituted an unfamiliar type of experience that some writers felt was difficult
to express in terms of the “language, the images, and the conventions that existed” prior to the
war (108). As a soldier at Ypres in 1916, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford)
complained of his inability to write about his war experience: “I have asked myself continuously
why I can write nothing […] And why cannot I even evoke pictures of the Somme or the flat
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lands round Ploegsteert” (79). To represent and make sense of such an irregular event, soldiers
hierarchies and fixed ideas concerning the nature of reality—such as time. The experimentation
with time in the modernist novel is consequently, according to this thesis, an attempt to
analogize and mimetically capture a world that—due to the First World War—had become
That the Great War changed the way people sensed and conceived of time is evident
in the drastic discrepancy between individuals’ expectations of the war and the war’s
unanticipated realities. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argues that “the image
of strict division clearly dominates the Great War conception of Time Before and Time After,
especially when the mind dwells on the contrast between prewar idyll and the wartime nastiness”
(80). Such an incongruity is what Fussell identifies as the “irony” of warfare: “every war is worse
than expected” (7); the Great War, however, “was more ironic than any before or since,”
blatantly defying the “Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for a
century. It reversed the Idea of Progress” (Fussell 8). One reason for its irony, Fussell suggests,
is that more than any other war “its beginning was more innocent” (18): “All imagined that it
would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided” (21). This sense of
naiveté is symbolically captured in the summer of 1914, the last before the war, which “has
assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost”
(Fussell 24). Out of this summer “marched a unique generation” that “believed in Progress and
Art and in no way doubted the benignity even of technology” (Fussell 24), a belief soon
3
As both Fussell and Stephen Kern have argued, pre-war Europe believed that the
“future would resemble the past” (Kern 286), that the hierarchical structures of meaning in place
today would remain fixed tomorrow. In Fussell’s words, the First World War took place in a
“static world, where the values appeared stable and where meanings of abstractions seemed
permanent and reliable” (21). In such a world, individuals possessed a firm sense of temporal
continuity, positing an unproblematic and linear relationship between the past, present, and
future: “the Great War was perhaps the last to be conceived as taking place within a seamless,
purposeful ‘history’ involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to
future” (Fussell 21). In this “static” pre-war world, the Western ideology of linear progress was
The experiences of the war, however, soon rendered any coherent or teleological view of
reality obsolete: “In four years the belief in evolution, progress, and history itself was wiped out
as Europeans were separated from the ‘pre-historic days’ of the prewar years by the violence of
war” (Kern 291). In fact, the Great War, for many soldiers, demolished all sense of temporal
continuity, making them unable to organize events in time (Kern 290-1). Eric J. Leed, for
instance, argues that the “roaring chaos of the barrage” induced a mental state among soldiers
“often described in terms of a loss of coherence and disappearance of any sense of temporal
sequence” (129). The phenomena of the battlefield, he argues, “shatter those stable structures
that can customarily be used to sequentialize experience” (Leed 129). The reality of war was
therefore far removed from Fussell’s static and coherent pre-war world; for this reason, Kern
argues that the war “contradicted the historicist thrust of the preceding century that conceived
of the past as a continuous source of meaning for the present” (293). For Kern, the meaning of
wartime experience, due to its novelty, became severed and independent from the past: “[t]he
4
strange newness and overwhelming force of experience clamped the soldier in the present as if
Much of this “strange newness” can be attributed to the ways in which the Great War
temporality. Kern, Fussell, and Hynes trace these changes to an array of technological and
strategic innovations that led to a new experience of war. First of all, inventions prior to the
war—such as the telegraph, railroads, telephones, the wireless, automobiles, and airplanes—
produced a contraction of distance which allowed nations to mobilize massive armies (Kern
303-4). During the war, Kern argues, these innovations led to an unprecedented “sense of
simultaneity” (295). Soldiers and events, miles apart, were united through electronic
communication, and people at home were able to read, view, and discuss a multiplicity of
The equipment and weaponry of war also underwent drastic changes that threatened the
traditional understanding of war. Among the innovations include the first use of modern tear
gas by German soldiers near Ypres on October 27, 1914 (Fussell 10), and the first use of tanks
in the autumn of 1916 (Fussell 16). Soldiers were also issued wrist watches for the first time,
which were synchronized before battles “to maximize the effectiveness of bombardments and
offensives” (Kern 288). What’s more, the war witnessed the replacement of the old military
innovation that Kern connects with Cubism. Both camouflage and Cubism, he argues, “leveled
the older hierarchies” of society and “implied that the traditional ways are not necessarily the
5
Conventional conceptions of reality and time were also challenged by new battle
strategies, as well as the new organization and outlook of the warfront. The spatial dimensions
of war changed: fortifications were replaced by miles of zigzagging trenches (Kern 303);
submarines added a new “up-down axis” to naval warfare (Kern 310) and, along with zeppelins,
“carried the war into new regions” (Kern 310). Tactical maneuvers that ensured success in the
past were now obsolete: holding the line in battle, which once led to victory, now led to massive
slaughter (Kern 305). Success itself become problematized: Fussell argues that, in the First
World War “successful attack ruins troops. In this way it is just like defeat” (17).
Such a reordering of warfare was evident, not only on the battlefield, but also on the
home front. According to Kern, the war “blurred the distinction between soldier and civilian,
front and home, safety and danger” (311). This blurring was, in many ways, caused by the start
of aerial raids on cities, initiated by the Germans on August 6, 1914, when a Zeppelin dropped
bombs on Liège (Kern 310). For the English, moreover, until the Great War, “the fighting and
dying had been done somewhere else” (Hynes 100). England also experienced a drastic change
at the beginning of 1916, when it passed the Military Service Act and trained its first conscript
army, “an event,” according to Fussell, “which could be said to mark the beginning of the
These changes in warfare all suggest that the Great War could not be understood or
conceptually grasped through traditional means. In Hynes’ words, the war presented a
“valueless, formless experience that could not be rendered in the language, the images, and the
conventions that existed” (108). Fussell, too, points to a “collision between events and the
language available […] to describe them” (169). The problem with this language, he argues, is
that it is inextricably tied to the idea of progress (Fussell 169), a notion outmoded by the realities
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of war. Such a language that implicitly supports a linear and coherent temporality, fails to
capture the chaotic and disjointed events of battle (Kern 303). Thus, Hynes concludes that to
“represent the war in the traditional ways was necessarily to misrepresent it” (108); instead, he
argues, artists needed to produce art that was “freed from those conventions (‘inevitably
romantic’) that invoked familiar responses to familiar actions” (107). They needed to demolish
Modernists’ obsession with time, under this view, is therefore a response to the
reordering of individual experience brought about by the Great War. Their experimentations
with temporality are a way of addressing or reflecting a new sense of reality, unrepresentable
through the traditional linguistic structures that implicitly maintain a conception of coherent,
linear time. Because the war rendered any unproblematic, conventional conception of
historical event, but to technological changes and cultural developments. Such a thesis has been
formulated by several scholars including Stephen Kern in The Culture of Time and Space, Michael
Whitworth in Einstein’s Wake, and Ronald Schleifer in Modernism and Time. It is also supported by
the recent critical interest in the relationship between modernism and science (cf. Mark
Morrisson’s 2002 article “Why Modernist Studies and Science Studies Need Each Other”).
According to this second thesis, advances in technology, as well as in scientific and philosophical
7
theory, changed the way in which individuals were able to perceive temporality. In Kern’s
words, “from around 1880 to the outbreak of WWI a series of sweeping changes in technology
and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space”
(1). These conceptual changes, in turn, led writers to question and problematize temporality;
modernist experimentations with time, as with the Great War Thesis, therefore constitute an
Kern’s words, “the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and
airplane,” among others (1). Similar advancements are discussed by Friedrich Kittler in his
book, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. All of these innovations, according to the Culture and
instance, that the cinema and the phonograph altered individuals’ conceptions of the past: these
two inventions “brought the past into the present more than ever before, changing the way
people experienced their personal past and the collective past of history” (Kern 38). The sense
of the present, furthermore, was drastically changed by the advent of electronic communication
which created the “vast, shared experience of simultaneity” (Kern 314), making “it possible for
the first time to be in a sense in two places at once” (Kern 88). Other inventions challenged the
conventional notion that “time is irreversible and moves forward at a steady rate” (Kern 29).
For instance, the electric light (the first commercially practical lamp was invented by Edison in
1879) suggested that “the routine alternation of day and night was subject to modification”
(Kern 29). Cinema, moreover, around the turn of the century “portrayed a variety of temporal
phenomena that played with uniformity and the irreversibility of time” (Kern 29): specifically,
8
camera stoppage and film editing enabled time to be “compressed, expanded, or reversed”
(Kern 30).
For Kern, these advances include “the stream-of-conscious novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and
the theory of relativity” (1), as well as the institution of World Standard Time (2), which was
slowly adopted around the turn of the century (12-13). This conception, however, needs to be
slightly altered: in dealing with the problem of modernists’ conception of time, the Culture and
Technology Thesis argues that artistic developments—like Cubism and the stream-of-conscious
relativity. Thus, out of the cultural advancements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
this thesis only attributes causal power to scientific and philosophical, and not artistic, developments.
One of the most significant of these developments, as cited by both Kern and
Whitworth, is that of Einstein: his Special and General Theories of Relativity were published in
1905 and 1916, respectively, receiving their greatest publicity in England between 1919 and 1931
(Whitworth vii). Thus, as Whitworth points out, Einstein’s work on relativity coincided with the
careers of modernist writers (Whitworth vii). These two theories, moreover, rejected absolute
time (Kern 19), and provoked the contemplation and theorization of private time: “every
reference-body,” Einstein writes, “has its own particular time” (32). This new scientific theory,
the Culture and Technology Thesis argues, was exploited by modernist writers, enabling them to
perceive and represent temporality in formally innovative ways that subverted the conventional
9
Another important body of work for this second thesis is that of the French philosopher
Henri Bergson, who plays a significant role in the critical literature on both Woolf and Proust.
In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), Bergson argued that absolute time, accessed by intuition
rather than reason, consists in “a succession of states, each of which announces that which
follows and contains that which precedes it” (IM 25). The true nature of time and reality, in
other words, is an organic whole of interpenetrating past, present, and future events—what
Bergson calls durée (duration). As a result, Bergson subverts a linear and hierarchical
conception of time; instead, Bergsonian pure time is a qualitative flux, incapable of being
Other cultural innovations adduced by the Culture and Technology Thesis include the
work of Ernst Mach, who in 1883 rejected Newtonian views of absolute space, absolute motion,
and absolute time (Kern 18); as well as Emile Durkheim, who posited the social relativity of
time, which challenged, according to Kern, the “temporal ethnocentrism of Western Europe”
(35). Also important for Kern is the figure of William James who in 1884 conceived of the mind
as a stream of thoughts rather than a collection of separate faculties or ideas, thus supporting the
notion of time as a flux rather than a sum of discrete, hierarchical terms (24). Sigmund Freud,
too, emphasized nonlinear conceptions of time insofar as he was interested in the temporal
According to the Culture and Technology Thesis, these philosophical and scientific
like Proust and Woolf, that is, experimented with temporality in an effort to mimetically
developments.
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The Imperialism Thesis
For a Marxist account of superstructural change, perhaps it is the most satisfying to link
imperial capitalism. Such an argument has been formulated by Jed Esty in his 2007 essays
“Virginia Woolf’s Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction” and “The Colonial
Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe.” Building primarily off
the works of Hannah Arendt, Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Esty’s
argument hinges on an analysis of the ways in which colonial novels—such as Woolf’s The
Voyage Out, Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Kipling’s Kim—problematize and rework the bildungsroman,
Prior to modernism, for much of the nineteenth century, the bildungsroman used the
trope of youth to represent the continuous development of industrial society and the growing
mobility of the middle-class (Esty, “Colony” 73). Such an analogy between individual and state,
however, as M. M. Bakhtin argues, was only possible within the chronotope or spatio-temporal
matrix of a bounded nation (i.e., “national-historical time”), which allows the narrative “to
reconcile the open-ended time of an expansive modernity and the cyclical time of local tradition”
(Esty, “Colony” 75). In other words, under industrialism the emerging nation contained the
interminable forces of capitalism, bringing them into synchronization with culture and with the
11
therefore effectively analogize the social and economic workings of a nation-state through the
economic complexity, and uneven development presented strong contrasts to the (putatively)
stable and linear emergence of the nation-state. Borrowing from Hannah Arendt, Esty views
colonialism as “a newly unrestrained capitalism operating outside the national boundaries and
moral limits of middle-class progress” (“African Farm” 409); because of this unbounded logic,
the bildungsroman can no longer map the linear development of the individual onto the
workings of the state. Fredric Jameson, in fact, interprets this economic shift to global
capitalism as a “loss of meaning” for the subject of the metropolis: “colonialism means that a
significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere,
beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country”
(“Imperialism” 50-51). The economy as a whole, in other words, has become deeply opaque to
individual citizens insofar as it is now ungraspable when viewed solely from within the bounds
of the nation-state. As opposed to national capitalism, Jameson writes, the colonial economic
missing; it can never be fully reconstructed” (“Imperialism” 51) since parts of the system are
In addition to this loss of meaning, Esty points out that the colonial world develops
“arrhythmically” (“Colony” 78), with a logic antithetic to the Western ideology of linear, even,
positive progress. The economic success of the imperial nation depends on the exploitation of
its colonial holdings; such a process of profiteering necessarily keeps these colonies
underdeveloped and in a state of permanent youth. Consequently, as Esty argues, the modernist
12
world is marked by a paradoxical “dissonance between hypermodernization in the metropolitan
core and underdevelopment in the colonial periphery” (“Colony” 72). Different sections of the
of the colonial periphery, linear biographical development—once an efficacious analogue for the
insofar as colonialism breaks “the Gothean bond between biographical and ‘national-historical’
time” (“Colony” 76). Such a formal rupture and loss of synchronization is exactly, in Jameson’s
seek to “thwart the realist proportions of biographical time that had, from its inception, defined
the bildungsroman” (Esty, “Colony” 72). What’s more, many modernist novels—like Woolf’s
The Voyage Out and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—include protagonists whose
development is arrested, stunted, or uneven: they fail to grow up (Esty, “Colony” 73). This
experimentation with biographical time, Esty suggests, is part and parcel of the author’s reaction
to the under- or uneven development of the colonial periphery and the unintelligibility of
imperial economy: “The modernist version [of the bildungsroman] assimilates the temporality of
a global and imperial era when nations spilled beyond their borders and when the accelerating
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yet uneven pace of development seemed to have thrown the time of modernity out of joint”
(“Colony” 87).
thesis. This thesis is most notably put forward by Max Weber in his theorization on the
the secularization of society are also evident in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor
Adorno. Such a secularization thesis, moreover, has been appropriated by Fredric Jameson to
disenchantment: “the fate of our times,” he writes, “is characterized by rationalization and
intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (Sociology 155). Modern
Western society, under Weber’s view, has become “increasingly administered and rationalized”
(Greisman 498) in the spheres of “religion, science, economy, and state” (Angus 142). The
of meaning for the individual. “Rational calculation,” Weber writes, “reduces every worker to a
cog in [the] bureaucratic machine” (ES lix). For Weber, as critic Lawrence A. Scaff explains,
individuals’ “lives, choices, opportunities, and cultural values are constrained by the ‘iron cage’
of material goods and acquisitiveness” (100). This “iron cage” of rationalization, moreover,
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leads to the disenchantment or secularization of the world insofar as it extirpates beliefs in
magic, superstition, and myth, replacing them “with a ‘realistic’ approach to the world”
(Greisman 496). In Scaff’s words, the bureaucratized modern world “represents a loss of the
sacred sense of wholeness and reconciliation between self and world provided by myth, magic,
tradition, religion, or immanent nature” (105). Under the forces of modernity, that is, “the
intellect becomes the sole arbiter of meaning and judgment”; sacred myths and beliefs in magic
are eliminated from life, as the mind attempts to rationally resignify the world in the service of
The processes of rationalization and disenchantment not only remove the sacred, but
they also undermine a belief in ultimate, objective values (Lassman 97), and obsolete the
necessary unity of truth (Whimstir 214). As Bryan S. Turner explains, “rationalization destroyed
the authority of magical powers, but it also brought into being the machine-like regulation of
bureaucracy, which ultimately challenges all systems of belief” (Turner xxiv). In this way, the
modern world, for Weber, has created a “problem of meaning” (Scaff 105), rendering life
essentially meaningless for many individuals (Greisman 498). Weber, therefore, reads modernity
as catastrophe insofar as it, in Jameson’s words, “dashes traditional structures and life-ways to
pieces, sweeps away the sacred, undermines immemorial habits and inherited languages, and
leaves the world as a set of raw materials to be reconstructed rationally” (Seeds 84). Like the first
three models outlined above, the Secularization Thesis thus posits an impoverished and depleted
existential experience; yet it represents this depletion though a different theory of cultural
15
Jameson uses Weber’s thesis to explain the advent of experimental conceptions of time:
the disenchantment of the modern world, he argues, caused individuals to experience and
apperceptions of temporality, stripping away “the traditional representations with which human
temporality was disguised and domesticated” (Jameson, Seeds 84). According to Weber, modern
science—part of the rationalization and disenchantment of the world—has removed itself from
the religious metanarrative of progress (Whimster 214). In this way, the modern individual is
able to perceive and construe time in ways external to the traditional, linear temporal attitude,
which previously pervaded religion and myth. As Jameson argues, secularization creates a “rift
in experience” (Seeds 84) in which individuals may attain a glimpse of the “time of Being itself”:
preconceptions.
Jameson argues that these “new and unadorned” experiences of time—caused by the
processes of disenchantment—produced “the first expressions of the modern in the West” from
Baudelaire and Flaubert to Heidegger (Seeds 84-5). These writers attempt to represent or
theorize the “vegetative time of Being itself” that has been unconcealed in modernity. In fact,
Western modernism, in aesthetics and philosophy alike, can then, following Heidegger’s
figure […] be characterized as the repeated attempt to remember, like the word on the
16
tip of the tongue, that inaugural glimpse of Being at once shoveled over by the
production of commodities as into a mass grave. (Seeds 86)
Under this argument, modernist novelists’ temporal treatment is therefore a function of the
secularization of society. That is to say, writers like Woolf and Proust experiment with time in
hierarchies.
While all four of the above theses are extremely useful and individually persuasive, none
can assert its primacy as the sole argument for explaining the thematization of temporality in
modernist fiction: each is problematic or restrictive in its own right. The Great War Thesis, first
of all, confines modernists’ obsession with time to a specific historical moment. An objector to
this thesis could make the case that modernist temporal preoccupation occurred in response to a
much wider cultural shift in the way individuals perceived and thought about temporality—a
shift that occurred well before the Great War. Such an argument is perhaps most clearly
evidenced by Proust, who began work on À la recherche du temps perdu in 1909 (Pugh 202),
publishing Swann’s Way in November 1913 (Watt 14). If Proust started writing about time and
memory before 1914, it would be unsatisfactory to consider the Great War as the absolute cause
The Culture and Technology Thesis is insufficient because it is vague and indefinite in
alterations of time through a plurality of cultural and technological innovations, rather than
17
seeking to formulate a cohesive argument. Kern, in fact, argues that “[i]t is impossible to
identify a single thesis that properly encompasses all changes in the experience of time and space
that occurred in this period” (8). Each cultural and technological innovation, moreover, is not
an absolute explanation in itself, but can be explained and causally accounted for by further
historical developments. One might seek to explain Bergson’s philosophy or Edison’s invention
of the light bulb, by analyzing these individuals’ historical situation or by tracing their intellectual
experimentation, the Culture and Technology Thesis runs the risk of creating a chain, ad
the opacity and arrhythmic nature of the colonial economic system. Such a thesis is ultimately
problematic because it precludes other, seemingly plausible, causal factors, such as the Great
War or Einstein’s theory of relativity. In a similar way, the Secularization Thesis restricts an
account of temporal experimentation to the devaluation of magic, myth, and mysticism, failing
to account for other possible explanations—like the uneven tempo of the colonial periphery—
None of these four theses, therefore, can be isolated as the exclusive argument for the
thematization of time; such a claim is supported by the fact that these models overlap and
interconnect. Technology, for instance, spurred the development of a global market, providing
the means for nations to colonize and expand beyond their borders. For example, the telephone
connected individuals in countries miles apart: in Kern’s words, this invention “brought the
voices of millions of people across regional and national boundaries” (318). Advances in
transportation and weaponry, moreover, enabled the imperialist nation to exploit its territorial
18
holdings, keeping the colonial periphery in an arrested state of underdevelopment and
subjugation, while amassing vast levels of wealth in its hypermodern metropolitan core.
A reverse process is thus also the case: imperialism supplied the capital necessary to fund
technological innovations. It also supplied the wealth—and therefore the technology—to fund
war. In fact, as I hope to have shown, the new and traumatic experiences of the First World
War were in many ways indebted to changes in technology. Many scholars have also argued that
the Great War was the result of imperialist ideologies. Furthermore, innovations in technology
caused an increase in the processes of scientific and bureaucratic rationalization, which for
Weber, led to the disenchantment of the world. As these overlaps show, the four theses
outlined above are deeply and complicatedly interconnected, and therefore indivisible: a
These overlaps also suggest a unitary reading of the four theses: they all posit ontological
gaps in individual and social experience—gaps which modernists seek to represent and
overcome through their use of time. In other words, all of the historical phenomena presented
by these models—the Great War, technological and cultural advances, colonialism, and
increasing rationalization—led to a loss of meaning for the individual and a rupture in the ability
experimentations with time, according to all four theses, allow modernists to formally reproduce
hierarchies. Modernists experiment with time, then, in order to mimetically represent the
predicament of modernity, a predicament that the four models theorize in different ways.
19
But what the four theses overlook are the ways in which the modernist artwork
endeavors, through its use of time, not only to capture, but also to solve or remedy this problem of
meaning—to construct new meaning, to resignify reality, and thus to re-enchant modern
experience. This modernist re-enchantment project is theorized in what I call the “Modernist
Production Thesis,” which sees the thematization of temporality as a novelistic tool rather than an
end in itself insofar as it is part and parcel of an attempt to generate a text that simultaneously
seeks to represent as well as fill ontological abysses—spaces devoid of values and meaning.
Through temporal experimentation, that is, modernists intend to theorize a loss of meaning, but
they also seek to reorder and re-hierarchize the world, constructing new constellations of
meaning and thereby reclaiming experience. The modernist artwork, then, endeavors to
The Modernist Production Thesis is deeply indebted to the work of Fredric Jameson,
who argues in his article “Joyce or Proust?” that modernist novels—like À la recherche du temps
perdu and Ulysses—are self-conscious attempts to manufacture a text that constitutes a totality or
“Book of the World” (Jameson, “Joyce or Proust?” 171). Modernist writers, in other words,
seek to produce an authentic and all-inclusive modernist artifact or commodity, one which is a
“mode of the production of language […] which seeks tirelessly to assimilate all the materials of
the outside world into a specific style or medium” (Jameson, “Joyce or Proust?” 172).
Such a project is part and parcel of the modernist effort to re-enchant reality—to
construct stable meaning in a world of instability. Since a modernist totality seeks to shape the
entire outside world into a unified artistic medium, it creates and maintains the conceit that
cohesive meaning is possible. But such a conceit is ultimately produced by way of illusion: the
20
project of producing a totality is clearly impossible: “the text cannot include everything”
(Jameson, “Joyce or Proust?” 177). The aim of a modernist novel, in Jameson’s view, is
therefore not to produce an actual totality but to create a totality-effect by concealing its inevitable
elisions (“Joyce or Proust?” 178) and as a result, formally excluding questions and doubts
concerning the text’s completeness (“Joyce or Proust?” 181). In Jameson’s words, the
“constructional problem posed by any totality is not that of inclusion but that of the inevitable
and necessary leaving out of content, and thereby that of the masking of those omissions (“Joyce
or Proust?” 172).
The totality-effect, in other words, is achieved through the use of formal operations
which prevent the reader from questioning its all-inclusivity: in Jameson’s words, modernists
employ “form production, and the elaboration of mechanisms designed to exclude questions
about the text’s inclusions and its completeness” (“Joyce or Proust?” 180). Temporality is a
crucially important formal tool in producing a text that conveys a sense of totality. Jameson in
fact argues that Proust’s ability to produce a seemingly autonomous artifact—À la recherche du
temps perdu—is a function of the author’s use of time within his linguistic production process.
Time, in other words, is a formal requirement of the text in its attempt to achieve autonomy or
totality: the thematization of temporality allows modernist authors to create the illusion of
a kind of sacred or scriptural status” (Seeds 88). They endeavor, through sleight of hand, to
provide access to the entirety of reality and to thus enable the reader to meaningfully redeem
modern experience. As a result, these texts present themselves as incantatory objects or magical
artifacts, through the contemplation of which the reader may come to re-enchant the world.
21
Modernists thus seek to provide a mystical remedy to the problem of meaning under modernity—
22
II. Woolf’s Temporal Experimentation
The Modernist Production Thesis provides the most satisfactory model to explain the
thematization of time in two of Woolf’s major works, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, as well
as in Proust’s colossal novel, À la recherche du temps perdu. These two writers use temporality, that
is, in an effort to represent and to re-enchant an impoverished reality. In much of the scholarly
literature critics have tended to overlook such an explanation, attributing Woolf’s and Proust’s
school. For Woolf, the influence has traditionally been seen to be that of Bergson, although
more recently it has been ascribed to the Cambridge philosophers of the early twentieth century,
i.e., Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For
While the identification of influence helps to place Woolf’s and Proust’s temporal ideas
in historical and intellectual context and can certainly assist in the explication of their texts, it
modernist thinkers, in the spheres of both literature and philosophy, felt the need to thematize
temporality. While Woolf’s ideas may be traced to Russell and Proust’s ideas to Bergson, such a
mapping of intellectual connections does nothing to illuminate the reasons behind this historical
conjunction; it does not explain the adopted parallels between aesthetic and philosophical
treatments of time. What’s more, a debate of philosophical origins simply shifts the explanation
of temporality back in time—to historical figures and causal factors in need of additional
explanation. The question of influence could thus be prolonged indefinitely by reaching further
influence insufficient in addressing the issue of time in Woolf’s and Proust’s fiction.
23
If a discussion of academic influences is to satisfactorily address and explain Woolf’s or
Proust’s temporal conceptions, it must seek to establish and support a larger cultural theory for
modernists’ preoccupation with time; such a theory is provided by the Modernist Production
Thesis. Genealogies of intellectual influence, that is, can be appropriated to demonstrate and
elucidate the ways in which both philosophical and literary thinkers attempt to confront and fill
ontological gaps in human experience. In this way, although they cannot be taken for arguments
in themselves, critical constructions of influence can be adapted and recuperated in order to help
assert and bolster an adequate argument for modernism’s obsession with time.
As Ann Banfield points out in her essay “Remembrance and tense past,” “[m]ost
modernists have been called Bergsonian at one time”; Virginia Woolf is no exception (48-9).
Despite Leonard Woolf’s claim in 1949 that Virginia Woolf “did not read a word of Bergson”
(Gillies 195), the critical consensus, since the 1930s, has been to explain and make sense of
Woolf’s conception of time in terms of Bergson’s philosophy (Gillies 107). Some of the first
scholars to trace this line of influence were French, including Floris Delattre in his 1932 article
“La durée bergsonienne dans le roman de Virginia Woolf” (Gillies 107). The first major work to
address Bergson’s putative influence, according to Mary Ann Gillies, was Shiv Kumar’s Bergson
notions of durée (duration) and intuition. According to Bergson, absolute reality is an ineffable
states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it” (IM
24
25). Within durée, the past and present are therefore inseparable and coexistent, forming an
“organic whole” (TFW 100). According to Bergson, rational analysis—which divides reality into
separate elements or states—fails to grasp this whole and can only result in relative knowledge.
To obtain absolute knowledge of reality an individual must adopt a method of intuition, in which
he places himself within durée, within the flow of time: “there is one reality, at least, which we all
seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis” (IM 24).
“Woolf’s moments of being are instances of pure duration, moments during which past and
present time not only literally coexist, but during which one is aware of their coexistence” (109).
“They are moments,” she insists, in which we “enter into an intuitive relationship with the
essence of ourselves” (Gillies 109). Such a Bergsonian construal of Woolf’s moments of being,
however, overlooks a major difference between these two individuals: while Bergson conceives
of pure time as a “flow of interpenetrating moments” (Banfield, Phantom 48), Woolf represents
the flow of time as a series of arrested and isolatable moments. Bergson objects to, in Bertrand
Russell’s words, “the absurd proposition that motion is made up of immobilities” (OKEW 162),
Gillies attempts to explain away this discrepancy by arguing that Woolf’s “brief moments
appear to arrest the flow of time, but they also bring about a conflation of times as each
individual moment is related to previous moments that are resurrected almost instantaneously”
(109). Certainly it is true that many of Woolf’s immobilities contain moments of the past. In
Mrs. Dalloway, for example, Peter Walsh involuntarily receives memories of Mrs. Dalloway while
he is “on board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things” (MD 149).
25
Nevertheless, unlike Bergson, neither the entirety of the past nor the “essence of
ourselves” is always resurrected or accessed in these arrested events. On the contrary, Woolf
stresses the separability of temporal moments and the limitations inherent in seeing the world
through a set of momentary perspectives. She frequently muses, for instance, on the skeptical
difficulties in positing a consistent or essential identity when we seem to possess dissimilar selves
at different moments in time. Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, comments on the effort required to
gather her disparate selves into a unified ego: “That was her self when some effort, some call on
her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and
composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond” (MD 36). Each individual
moment, then, for Woolf, is representative not of an “organic whole,” but of a fractured and
reproduces Bergson’s notion of duration: her characters never achieve a stable connection with
their myriad identities or with those around them; there is always a “gulf” (MD 117) between
disparate selves and between disparate people. And if anything resembling a Bergsonian
(MD 149)—it is impermanent. Woolf’s temporal ideas, then, unlike Bergson’s conception of
These incongruities between Woolf and Bergson are taken up by Ann Banfield in her
book The Phantom Table, in which she traces Woolf’s novelistic universe—as well as Bloomsbury
more generally—to the ideas of the “the Cambridge Apostles,” a philosophical society in many
ways diametrically opposed to Bergsonian thought. While Bergson favors intuition over
26
rationality, Cambridge analytic philosophers like Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Alfred North
Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein champion logic, mathematics, science, and geometry. With
the aid of Banfield’s book, I hope to show that these latter philosophers, particularly Russell, not
only elucidate Woolf’s notion of temporality, but that they help to support the thesis that her use
Bloomsbury thought, but that these two groups—one philosophical and one artistic and
literary—were part of a “more general shift” (Phantom 11) in thinking about the world. In this
way, Banfield’s work supports the claim that modernists, by virtue of their use time, responded
to an alteration in the way in which individuals perceived reality. For Banfield, this alteration—
implicit in the ideas of both Bloomsbury and Cambridge—occurred “in the first decades of the
[twentieth] century” (Phantom 5). Woolf, in fact, noted that “in or about December 1910 human
character changed” (CE, I, 320). Such a notional change, according to Banfield was, for both
Cambridge and Bloomsbury, “a turn to the external world”—a newfound “preoccupation with
For Cambridge, this shift towards theory of knowledge was a development of the new
philosophical Realism which, in the late nineteenth century, replaced the German Idealism that
had formerly pervaded the university (Banfield, Phantom 6) and that continued to assume
precedence at Oxford (Banfield, Phantom 4-5). According to this new philosophical orientation,
the external world was the physical world of science (Banfield, Phantom 9): “reality [was] physical
reality” (Banfield, Phantom 5). For philosophers like Russell and Whitehead, then, philosophy
adopted a new role in the pursuit of knowledge: in Banfield’s words, “[p]hilosphy was […] the
27
foundation, strengthened by logic and mathematics. Science’s knowledge of the external world
(Banfield, Phantom 5) concerning, in Russell’s words, the “gulf between the world of physics and
the world of sense” (Matter 222). “The problem arises,” Russell writes, “because the world of
physics is, prima facie, so different from the world of perception that it is difficult to see how
one can afford evidence for the other” (Matter 6). This problem of knowledge, as Banfield
points out, “became acute with the breakthroughs of physics in the last decades of the
nineteenth century,” including, among others, “the kinetic theory of gases and the wave theory
of light, Max Plank’s discovery of the quantum in 1900 […] Einstein’s formulation of the special
theory of relativity in 1905 and of the general theory in 1915” (Banfield, Phantom 5-6). Such a
claim supports the Culture and Technology Thesis insofar as these scientific advancements
suggest, as the Cambridge philosophers realized, that reality “is beyond immediate
knowledge”—that the external world is extremely disparate from what our senses tell us
(Banfield, Phantom 6). Thus, in the face of scientific discovery, the Cambridge philosophers
revived a skeptical problem that Descartes first recognized and that Berkeley later used to form
his Idealism: if all knowledge is received immediately through the senses, then how can we know
anything about reality outside of ourselves? How do we know that the external world even exists?
(Banfield, Phantom 6). For Banfield, this turn to knowledge—which occurred around 1910—was
not circumscribed within Cambridge but was instead part of a greater epistemological shift that
included Bloomsbury (Banfield, Phantom 11). Bloomsbury and Cambridge, in other words,
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shared a common fixation with questions concerning the knowledge of the external world
(Banfield, Phantom 9). For Woolf, this preoccupation is apparent in a representation of time that
revives a set of old skeptical concerns, the same concerns that Russell and Moore sought to
empiricist tradition that includes Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. These philosophers, especially the
latter two, identified and pursued several skeptical problems symptomatic of a philosophical
orientation that limits knowledge to the senses: how can we know things outside of ourselves?
Woolf’s representation of time asks the same questions: in her world of discrete sensory
objectivity is uncertain, and solipsism is possible. By themselves, these skeptical concerns were
not new to the early twentieth century: they can be traced back to Descartes in his 1647
Meditations. What is significant, however, is the revival of these questions in the philosophical
realm, as well as their application and adoption in artistic forms like the novel. Until modernism,
that is, these concerns were largely confined within the boundaries of philosophical discourse.
The fact that both philosophers and authors, like Woolf, felt the need to ask these questions
demonstrates that in the space of modernity experience was no longer clearly and
unproblematically expressible.
But Cambridge and Bloomsbury did not simply attempt to register or represent an
epistemologically problematic reality; they sought to overcome these perceived gaps in experience.
In reaction to scientific discoveries that created voids between individual experience and the
external world, Russell and the Cambridge philosophers sought to find a way to bridge this gap
29
with logic and mathematics and to find a stable and reliable basis for knowledge in a world in
which “objective knowledge […] rests on subjective foundations” (Banfield, Phantom 6). Woolf,
too, through her use of time, endeavors to construct stability through the creation of a textual
she shares with the Cambridge philosophers—that seeks to simultaneously register and
concerns, Woolf depicts a world of discontinuous and arrested temporal instances: her novels
present an atomized and perspectival universe consisting of a myriad possible worlds and
possible sensory moments—a sort of Leibnizian monadology “in which each atom is a
perspective” (Banfield, Phantom 109). Many of these fragmented perspectives, moreover, are
points of space and time unobserved, unoccupied by any subject” (Banfield, Phantom 1). While
her characters occupy specific points of reference, Woolf maintains the possibility for different
perspectives: for Clarissa Dalloway “there were so many doors, such unexpected places” (MD
186)
While Woolf’s perspectival world represents the problems of solipsism and Idealism, it
simultaneously seeks to find a solution, one that she shares with the Cambridge philosophers.
This solution, for both Woolf and Cambridge, suggests a particular philosophical theory of
knowledge which seeks to find, from an empiricist perspective, unity and objective stability in a
fractured world. According to Banfield, “[t]his theory begins with an analysis of the common-
sense world. Objects are reduced to ‘sense-data’ separable from sensations and observing
subjects to ‘perspectives.’ Atomism multiplies these perspectives” (Phantom 1). While we receive
30
immediate knowledge of the world through our senses, these collections of sense-data, for
Woolf, are ultimately separable from the observer. Such a conception allows for the possibility
of stability: if subjective perspectives are subjectless, then they can persist outside of
consciousness, they can be occupied by separate individuals, and they can be recovered after they
data are called sensibilia. Because sensibilia exist outside of individual awareness, they allow
Russell to construct and posit the existence of public objects (Banfield, Phantom 98) and cohesive
biographies (Banfield, Phantom 99). Sensibilia, as a result, provide a bridge or ladder to entities
existing outside of the limited perspective of private consciousness; they allow the individual “to
break free of the prison of privacy” (Banfield, Phantom 107). This theory of knowledge, for both
Woolf and Russell, thus creates the possibility for stability insofar as it allows for the persistence
and recovery of perspectives. In this way, unity or continuity—rather than being a pre-ordained
conferred ahead of time by authorial intention. It is constructed ex post facto via a style and an
modernist fiction. Such a preoccupation with influence seeks to explain how Woolf came to
understand time rather than why she felt the need to problematize temporality. Nevertheless,
Banfield’s argument can be used to support the Modernist Production Thesis insofar as she
shows how both Woolf’s and Russell’s ideas seek to simultaneously register and provide a
31
solution for a solipsistic problem of meaning. That being said, Banfield’s argument is most
But the scholarly literature on Woolf is not limited to the Culture and Technology
Thesis: critics have explored two of the other theses as well. Considering the representation of
the First World War in the second section of To the Lighthouse—“Time Passes”—as well as the
depiction of veteran Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, many critics have explored Woolf
in relation to the Great War. More recently, scholars have written about Woolf and Empire.
Most relevant is the work of Jed Esty, who argues, in “Virginia Woolf’s Colony and the
Adolescence of Modernist Fiction,” that Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), analogizes
the arrhythmic and opaque logic of a colonial economy through the arrested development of its
While not yet completely realized, Woolf’s modernist style is implicit in The Voyage Out
temporal compression and expansion, and the uneven tempo of the colonial periphery. These
modernist temporal innovations are most evident in Woolf’s depiction of Rachel’s stunted and
unsuccessful growth, which, as scholar Christine Froula argues, enabled Woolf to go on to create
If Rachel's death records the failure of Woolf's imaginative project in The Voyage Out, it is
also a symbolic, initiatory death that precedes the rebirth of Woolf's authority in the
more powerful representations of female creativity in her later female K nstlerromane
(63).
32
Esty, too, sees a “connection between Rachel’s ego dissolution in the colonial setting and the
Rachel’s stunted and arrhythmic biographical trajectory subverts the Western ideology of
linear progress inherent in the bildungsroman and reflects the chronotope of the novel’s South
American colonial setting, the “unevenly developed coastal enclave, Santa Marina” (Esty,
“Colony” 78). As Esty argues, the colony is a “figurative index and causal agent” for Rachel’s
nonlinear history, temporal qualities that challenge the traditional conception of a progressive
and purposeful passing of time (“Colony” 79). Woolf describes the development of Santa
Maria, for instance, as complex and non-teleological: over the course of its history it oscillates
between Spanish and English possession before it is ultimately converted into a vacation spot
(VO 96-98). Furthermore, like Rachel, the settlement exists in a state of suspended and stunted
youth: “in arts and industries the place is still much where it was in Elizabethan days” (VO 97).
This description directly parallels Rachel’s arrested growth insofar as “her mind was in the state
of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth” (VO 31). Rachel’s
perpetual state of youth is further evinced by her extreme innocence and lack of worldly
knowledge. Despite being twenty-four, for instance, she is terribly frightened by Mr. Dalloway’s
kiss and “scarcely knew that men desired woman” (VO 86). Moreover, the trajectory of her
growth throughout the novel is one of “fits and starts”: whenever Rachel shows signs of
developing an adult maturity or a level solidarity with others, Woolf quickly denies any
Woolf’s portrayal of arrested development in The Voyage Out prefigures her concern for
capturing “life or spirit, truth or reality” (MF 149). She experiments with time, that is, in order
33
to recover a complete sense of reality or experience under the global market of imperial
capitalism. As Esty argues, Woolf uses Rachel’s nonlinear development to reflect the uneven
logic of colonial outposts (“Colony” 79). In this way, Woolf’s experiment with time endeavors
capitalism.
This desire to grasp reality in its totality or essence is apparent in the modernist style
Woolf employs in her major novels, including Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. In her essay
“Modern Fiction,” Woolf advocates those literary methods which seek to capture “life or spirit,
truth or reality […] the essential thing” (MF 149). “Is is not the task of the novelist,” she writes,
“to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or
complexity it may display […]?” (MF 150). In capturing this spirit, the author must therefore
adopt an approach to the world that resembles T.S. Eliot’s notion of the poet in his essay
“Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The mind of the poet, according to Eliot, is “a receptacle
for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images,” which are then used as material
ordinary day the mind “receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved
with the sharpness of steel” (MF 150). The task of Woolf’s novelist, like Eliot’s poet, is to
reproduce this pure flux of impressions, to present a literary medium which “record[s] the atoms
as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall” (MF 150). The novelist should
therefore avoid following pre-established novelistic codes and instead “base his work upon his
own feeling and not upon convention,” creating a work with “no plot, no comedy, no tragedy,
34
no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style” (MF 150). Woolf believes, in other words,
that the writer ought to present human experience, stripped of literary conventions, “however
Because Woolf adopts a literary method based on “feeling and not upon convention,” it
comes as no surprise that her novels subvert traditional conceptions of temporality. To present
a conventionally linear plot would be to misrepresent the “uncircumscribed spirit” of life and to
limit “the infinite possibilities” of fiction (MF 154). Like Fussell’s and Hynes’ view of the
experience of the Great War or Esty’s argument about the functioning of a global economy,
Woolf believes that the novelist cannot reflect life through commonly established means; instead
he must “discard most […] conventions” (MF 150)—he must experiment with temporality. In
fact, according to Woolf, there is no set of pre-scripted rules governing how a novelist should
represent time: “‘The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist” (MF 150). In this way, Woolf’s
an objective representation of life. Her treatment of novelistic time rather than a function of
modernist style therefore supports the Modernist Production Thesis insofar as she uses
temporality as an instrument to grasp the “essential thing”—to capture in novelistic form the
Moments of Being
The ways in which Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse conceptualize time seek to
represent, as well as to mend, an epistemological rupture of meaning for the individual. Human
experience, as Woolf suggests in these novels, cannot be grasped in a linear temporal fashion;
35
instead, in Ann Banfield’s words, “time passes through the series of discrete, arrested moments
[…] in a still sequence of timeless positions” (Phantom 118-119). Such a momentary conception
of time, as I have argued, raises a set of skeptical dilemmas. Each of these immobile temporal
positions, that is, constitutes a solitary and isolated sensory perspective. Sally in Mrs. Dalloway,
for instance, muses on the isolation of individual consciousness: “what can one know even of
the people one lives with every day? […] Are we not all prisoners?” (MD 188). Nevertheless,
Woolf’s treatment of temporality not only poses this problem of knowledge, but it
This solution is theorized in Woolf’s notion of “moments of being,” which, in her essay
consciousness. For Woolf, these moments constitute the minority of human experience—“[a]
great part of every day is not lived consciously”—as they are “embedded in many more
moments of non-being” (MB 70). Most temporal moments, that is, occur outside of the
individual’s consciousness, forming “a kind of nondescript cotton wool” (MB 70). Moments of
being, however, seem to “come to the surface unexpectedly” (MB 71). She describes
‘That is the whole,’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it
seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was part of the earth; that a ring
enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part
flower. (MB 71)
In an instant of mental acuity, Woolf transforms sense-data into a meaningfully cohesive and
unified picture, perceiving an interconnection between the flower and the earth. Moments of
being, then, constitute a re-enchanted perception of one’s quotidian surroundings; they theorize
an ability to perceive interrelations amongst the “myriad impressions” the mind receives in an
36
Moments of being, however, are not wholly positive experiences. Woolf recalls two
such instances of awareness that “ended in a state of despair” (MB 71) and left her “powerless”
(MB 72). After hearing about an individual’s suicide, for instance, she experienced “a trance of
horror […] My body seemed paralysed” (MB 71). On the other hand, her experience with the
flower, she muses, did not cause an adverse reaction because she “was conscious […] that I
should in time explain it” (MB 72). The “shock” of these instances, she explains, “is at once in
my case followed by the desire to explain it” (MB 72). As a result, Woolf argues that her
inclination to write stems from the experience of moments of being: “the shock-receiving
capacity is what makes me a writer” (MB 72). Only through documentation is she able to turn a
particular moment into a revelatory experience: “[i]t is only by putting it into words that I make
it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me” (MB 72). Not only does the
act of writing strip these moments of their hostility, but it allows Woolf to see “some real thing
behind experiences” (MB 72), revealing “that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that
we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art”
(MB 77). In writing about life, in other words, Woolf seeks to recover its essence and to
recuperate a stable sense of meaning and connection in a world of fragmentary moments. But
such a modernist re-enchantment program is made possible only through the thematization of
time, which allows Woolf to represent an ontologically impoverished reality and to theorize a
In her major novels, Woolf rehabilitates meaning—on both the level of form and the
37
constellations are made possible, moreover, by her conception and thematization of time. In To
the Lighthouse, Woolf thematizes this construction of unity through an emphasis on creative
actions that amalgamate the fragmentary material of reality and that “give form to life” (Lee 24).
Such an act occurs in the opening scene of the novel: James Ramsey, upon hearing from his
mother that he may be able to travel to the lighthouse the following day, attributes a feeling of
joy to the fragmented pictures he cuts from a magazine: “James Ramsay, sitting on the floor
cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the
picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss” (TL 3). Physical objects, the
novel suggests, become “coloured” (TL 3): they assume phenomenological shape through
creative efforts. “Without creative action,” critic Hermoine Lee writes, “there is only space”
(24): without being meaningfully claimed or formed, reality exists as a chaotic jumble of
inaccessible atoms. Thus, like Russell, Woolf suggests that we must actively construct physical
This creative act is both dependent on and theorized through Woolf’s momentary
conception of time. Not only does a disjunctive temporality provide the fragmentary material
for shaping reality, but this shaping itself occurs during moments of being. This claim is
elucidated in the portrayals of two of the novel’s main characters: Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe.
The former, critic Hermoine Lee points out, possesses the “power of creating harmony and
radiance,” and the “ability to reconcile ‘scraps and fragments’” (20). At her dinner party, for
instance, Mrs. Ramsey assumes the task of fusing together the disconnected personalities of her
guests. In Lee’s words, she “merges disparate entities—hostilities, reservations, her own
38
Woolf writes, Mrs. Ramsay’s guests “all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging
Mrs. Ramsay thus mirrors Clarissa Dalloway insofar as both characters adopt creative
rolls at their respective parties, seeking to unite disparate individuals into a common medium.
As Mrs. Ramsay strives to create continuity between isolated personalities, Mrs. Dalloway
endeavors to bring together—in a single spatio-temporal point—people who never would have
otherwise met: “she felt if only they could be brought together, so she did it. And it was an
These creative acts not only combine disparate fragments, but, as symbolized by the
limited duration of a party, they occur in temporal instances that recall Woolf’s moments of
being. Similar to the way in which Woolf scrutinizes “a plant with leaves” (MB 71), Mrs.
Ramsay, during her dinner party, intensely focuses on the table’s centerpiece, “a yellow and
purple dish of fruit” (TL 97). Like Woolf, she makes the object of her perception “whole” (MB
72): “it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s
staff” (TL 97). This acute awareness seems to allow Mrs. Ramsay to grasp a sense of unity or
interconnection among isolated individuals insofar the centerpiece serves as a sensory anchor for
her guest’s disparate perceptions: “Augustine too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit […]
That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them” (TL 97).
In this way, Mrs. Ramsay’s encounter with the centerpiece, like Woolf’s moment of being, seems
to reveal that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—
are connected with this” (MB 72). In an instant of awareness, Mrs. Ramsay produces a sense of
wholeness and interpersonal unity where before there was blank space—“cotton wool.”
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Directly following this moment, “all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides
of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the
twilight, into a party round the table” (TL 97). In a single temporal instance, the cohesion and
solidity of the party is creatively constructed around a central perception—either the awareness
of candlelight or the consciousness of a fruit dish. Mrs. Ramsay and her guests, in other words,
achieve a sense of solidarity in the fragmentary universe by organizing and anchoring disparate
elements and isolated people around a common momentary axis: “they were all conscious of
making a party together […] had their common cause against that fluidity out there” (TL 97).
The present moment of being thus acts as a receptacle for incongruent sense-data: “[e]very
moment,” in Woolf’s words “is the centre and meeting place of an extraordinary number of
Such a notion reflects Russell’s idea that humans “view the world from a center
consisting of the here and the now” (Banfield, Phantom 115). Individuals, Russell suggests, make
sense of or organize the universe around a momentary perceptual center. Moments of being,
similarly, allow Mrs. Ramsay to creatively organize fragments and to produce stable unities
which assume aesthetic, even revelatory, significance. According to critic Frank Gloversmith,
the dinner party scene is an instance of the “extended ‘moment.’” “Disparates,” he writes, “are
said to be reconciled, and social communion rendered poetry and music, or even as a
transcendent, sacred communion” (Gloversmith 106). Mrs. Ramsay’s act of combining creates
Lily Briscoe is artistically influenced by Mrs. Ramsay’s ability to create permanence out
of solitary moments. When brooding on the “meaning of life,” she concludes that stable shape
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and form occur in short, evanescent revelations: “there were little daily miracles, illuminations,
matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” (TL 161). Mrs. Ramsay, in Lily’s eyes, is adept at
creating these moments of stability insofar as she is able to say “Life stand still here” (TL 161).
She is able, in other words, to make “of the moment something permanent” (TL 161). In the
realm of painting, Lily, too, tries to produce momentary unities, attempting to balance and
connect shapes: “It was a question, she remembered, how to connect this mass on the right
hand with that on the left” (TL 53). She endeavors, like Mrs. Ramsey, to fill chaotic space
through the arrangement and composition of objects: “I shall put the tree further in the middle;
permanent—a “feeling of completeness,” like the one she experiences when looking at the
Ramsey’s house: “A washer-woman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and
grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling held the whole” (TL 192). But she continually
struggles to find a means to represent this notion of harmony in her painting; it is not until the
last lines of the novel that she achieves “the proper balance of shapes” (Lee 23) by placing “a
line there, in the center” (TL 209). Woolf thus stresses, once again, the idea that impressions are
ordered and receive form around an axis, a central point in time or space. Once Lily’s painting is
balanced, she arrives at a moment of vision—“I have had my vision” (TL 208)—which may be
compared to the vision of the “real thing behind appearances” that Woolf receives in her
moments of being.
Woolf’s conception of time as a series of discrete moments therefore not only represents
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specific temporal moments of being; unities of meaning are constellated around central positions
in time and space. In an intensely conscious instant of time, Woolf suggests, we are able to
perceive and creatively order the world in new ways. Ironically, however, these moments of
stability and seeming permanence are fragile and fleeting. As soon as a moment of vision is
completed, it is already past. As Lee points out, Lily concludes “I have had my vision,” not “I
have it” (Lee 23). Meaningful insights, Lilly suggests, do not last: “the vision must be perpetually
remade” (TL 181). This conceit is further supported by the scene of Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party
which suddenly changes when she leaves: “she waited a moment longer in a scene which was
vanishing even as she looked […] it changed, it shaped itself differently” (TL 111). For Woolf,
unities of experience, while feigning permanence, never endure: “the search for ‘significant form’
This momentary integration of dissimilar elements into coherent wholes is precisely what
Woolf seeks to achieve on the level of form. As she argues in “Modern Fiction,” Woolf strives,
in the act of writing, to capture or recreate the “myriad impressions” that a mind receives in an
ordinary temporal instance. In reconciling and documenting disparate sense-data, she therefore
endeavors to construct a literary medium that reproduces a unified moment of being, revealing
the veiled interrelation of all things. As Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party “renders social communion
poetry and music,” Woolf wants to create a novelistic form which demonstrates that, despite the
fragmentary nature of reality, “the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of
art” (MB 72). In Banfield’s words, Woolf’s universe displays “an aesthetics where art holds
together an otherwise fluid experience” (Phantom 128), creating the appearance of solidity.
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To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway represent two such attempts to formally produce
solipsistic and perspectival universe. The transience of these moments paradoxically enables
authoritative unity of meaning, then the reader is invited to construct (and reconstruct)
sense of all-inclusivity and autonomy by creating a textual medium in which every perspective,
every possible connection, seems to be accounted for. Woolf therefore uses temporality—i.e., the
totality. In this way, she is invested in the paradoxical project of using time to simultaneously
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf seeks to construct formal cohesion with the use of a temporal
gap—the ten-year interval of “Time Passes.” This middle section of the novel, in Banfield’s
words, “bridges the occupied worlds of parts one and three” (Phantom 147). It creates this
textual continuity, I will argue, ironically due to its lack of form, its fluidity and emptiness.
During this temporal interval, the main characters of the novel disappear—Mrs. Ramsay, Prue,
and Andrew die—and Woolf presents “an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of
time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to” (Diary, III, 76). She confronts the
reader with an array of unoccupied perspectives concerning the Ramsay’s vacation home, which
has been given over to “the insensibility of nature” (TL 138): “The house was left; the house was
deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it”
(TL 137). Woolf, moreover, describes sets of empty and subjectless forms: “What people had
shed and left—a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those
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alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and
animated” (TL 129). Lacking the major consciousnesses of the novel, Woolf called this section
an “impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends, the flight of time, & the consequent
between “The Window” and “The Lighthouse.” “Interludes,” Woolf writes in reference to The
Waves, are “essential; so as to bridge and also to give a background – the sea; insensitive nature –
I don’t know” (Diary, III, 285). Textual intervals present glimpses of reality outside of the isolated
private perspectives that constitute the rest of the novel. For this reason, “Time Passes”
148) for positing connections between perspectives. With its unoccupied perspectives and
“impersonal fabric” (Lee 21), “Time Passes” demonstrates—in opposition to the Idealist’s
conceit—that objects persist outside of sensory perception and that our private perspectives are
By thematizing loss and the passage of time, Woolf’s interlude calls into doubt the
stability of physical reality—“Will you fade? Will you perish?” (TL 129)—but it simultaneously
provides an answer to this doubt through its representation of impersonal objects like the
“clammy sea airs” which endure: “we remain” (TL 129). By validating the existence of the world
outside of individual perspectives, “Time Passes” thus creates the possibility for establishing
meaningful connections between these perspectives—and thus between parts one and two of
the novel.
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Phantom 146). In order to build a public world out of private perspectives, Russell posits
sensibilia “on the ground of continuity and resemblance” (ML 148-9). Without sensibilia,
individuals are confined to their private sensory viewpoints; there is no way of positing public
“ghostly sensibilia” provide the substratum necessary “for building no less ghostly logical
constructions” (Banfield, Phantom 107). Subjectless perspectives, that is, provide the framework
needed to move from the private world of particulars to “the reality of public objects” (Banfield,
Phantom 107). In Russell’s words, sensibilia “build a logical bridge from such [sense] data to the
abstract and imperceptible objects of our mathematical formulae” (CPBR, IX, 263). Woolf’s
interludes, Banfield argues, function in much the same way: they collect “the thematically
exploited images of sensibilia and erect them into an explicit formal expression of the geometry
in the external world” (Phantom 147). The “ghostly” subjectless points of view in “Time Passes”
create the “impersonal fabric”—the geometric framework—against which one may posit
As Banfield points out, Woolf’s interlude functions much like Wittgenstein’s notion of
“scaffolding” in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The logical scaffolding round the picture
determines the logical space” (3.42). “Scaffolding,” according to Wittgenstein, allows one to
grasp the “logical space” in which he may determine relations between facts in the world.
Woolf, too, constructs a kind of impersonal and formless “scaffolding” of sensibilia around the
private and momentary perspectives of her novel in order to create the logical space necessary
for the construction of meaningful relations between these perspectives. As Banfield puts it,
“Time Passes” fills “the interstices between characters’ points of view” (Phantom 147); its empty
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perspectives and formlessness ironically create a sense of durability and connection in the text,
giving “rigidity and permanence to the fleeting event” (Banfield 128). “What lacks form,”
Banfield writes, “is what “creates form” (Phantom 128). In this way, Banfield argues that a
Woolf’s interlude is thus “at once destructive and constructive” (Banfield, Phantom 128)
insofar as it attempts to create continuity by way of discontinuity. In critic Gillian Beer’s words,
Woolf attempts to conjoin “the experience of family life and culture, before and after the first
world war. She [holds] them together by separating them” (77). Woolf uses the ten-year lapse
of “Time Passes” to temporally distance the pre-war and post-war experiences of the Ramsay
family, but in doing so she intends to fuse these experiences. Thus, Woolf’s interlude provides
an example of how modernist novelists are invested in using time to represent the discontinuity
of modern reality, while simultaneously seeking to create continuity, to re-enchant this reality.
Passes”—demand to be filled and made sense of; they create the possibility for new
combinations of form. Thus by using “Time Passes” to achieve “a break of unity” in To the
Lighthouse’s design—by dividing the novel into three separate parts—Woolf encourages the
reader to read and understand the text in multiple and nonlinear ways. As critic Perry Meisel
points out, we may reorder and re-hierarchize the novel’s parts so as to construct different
unities of meaning: “its three component parts may be shifted and rearranged in their relations
to one another. Thus entirely different meanings may be inflected by the same parts” (141).
Disunity—achieved by a temporal gap—thus provides the means for re-enchantment: like Mrs.
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Ramsay, the reader is invited to engage in a constant creative effort of reconciling scraps and
fragments.
questions of exclusion. The novel’s multiple configurations of form, that is, maintain the sense
that any unitary critical interpretation fails to capture the sum of the text’s possible significance.
Woolf, therefore, creates a text that can never be grasped in its entirety nor condensed to a
solitary combination of meaning. The reader, while understanding the text in one manner, is
constantly aware of the possibility of its being understood in another. For this reason, To the
Lighthouse creates the sense of plenitude, the illusion of abundant meaning; the reader is thus
Like To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway uses the passing of time to both sever and adhere
disparate perspectives. Throughout the novel, Woolf constantly refers to the striking of Big
Ben—“The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (MD 4, 47, 92, 182)—a sound which, as Peter
Childs argues, “breaks up the novel into hours and sections” (171). Furthermore, as in many of
Woolf’s novels, there is an “extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the
mind” (O 72): clock (or public) time works in counterpoint with private (or psychological) time.
The relationship between these two temporal conceptions in Mrs. Dalloway, moreover, allows
On one hand, the novel’s explicit awareness and measuring of clock time highlights the
separability and subjectivity of individual points of view by indicating what Anna Benjamin calls
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“the simultaneity of certain acts” (217). At exactly the same hour of the day, different characters
have drastically disparate experiences. At twelve o’clock, for instance, “Clarissa Dalloway laid
her green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street. Twelve was the
hour of their appointment” with Sir William Bradshaw (MD 92). And concurrent to Peter’s
experience in India, Clarissa was, in his mind, “mending her dress; playing about; going to
parties” (MD 40). Woolf thus uses the backdrop of clock time to demonstrate the cotemporality
of different characters’ experiences; this sense of simultaneity, in turn, highlights the isolation of
The sounding of Big Ben, then, emphasizes the relativity of time’s passing, indicating the
ways in which a single temporal segment may be experienced in subjectively distinct ways. Thus,
as Sir William diagnoses Septimus’ “madness” against a perceived sense of proportion (MD 94),
a background of public time allows Woolf to affirm and underscore the existence of private
time. In this way, Woolf’s conception of time resembles Russell’s ideas in The ABC of Relativity
about the functioning of a post-Einsteinian universe in which “[f]or each body, there is a definite
order for the events in its neighbourhood; this may be called the ‘proper’ time for that body”
(31).
Yet Woolf does not concede the complete isolatability of temporal experiences. While
which to fuse together isolated perspectives and to unite disparate experiences of private time.
Clock time, that is, allows Woolf to posit a subjectless conception of time, creating an objective
temporal framework in which “characters are bound together” (Benjamin 217). As Peter Childs
writes, “time […] links characters because the narrative uses the distribution of the clock chimes
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in the air to form links across space: different places can be connected by a common
chronology” (172). For instance, while shared time emphasizes the separability of Clarissa’s
experience of laying out her dress from the Warren Smiths’ experience of visiting Sir William
Bradshaw, it simultaneously connects these two events, linking them under a common temporal
scheme. Thus, in the same way that “Time Passes” seeks to create an impersonal fabric that
allows for meaningful relations between perspectives, the “indifferent, inconsiderate” (MD 47)
striking of Big Ben aims to suggest the possibility for interpersonal connection. For this reason,
Mrs. Dalloway uses time to posit meaningful unities between perspectives and to thus rehabilitate
Mrs. Dalloway also uses to time to rehabilitate meaning through the creation of a totality-
effect. This effect is a function of Woolf’s effort to capture—as she writes in “Modern
Fiction”—the “myriad impressions” that a mind receives in an ordinary day. Woolf, that is,
limits the temporal scope of the novel to a single day in June, intending to represent and include
all of the sensations and phenomenological content inherent in such a moment. Clarissa
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the
carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass
bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some
aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (MD 4)
Formally, Woolf endeavors to produce a similar vision of “this moment in June”—and to thus
Different characters in the novel, like Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, present different experiences
The novel, of course, fails to include all possible impressions, yet it masks this failure—
and thus creates the illusion of totality—by preventing the reader from questioning its
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completeness. In order to achieve this effect, the text resists being reduced to a single
perspective. Because Woolf thematizes the simultaneity of different characters’ experiences, the
novel generates the conceit that a single temporal moment yields an array of sensory
perspectives. For this reason, during any specific, perspectival event in the text—like Clarissa
buying flowers—the reader maintains the sense that other perspectives are possible. The text
therefore inhibits the reader from grasping the text in its perspectival entirety, preventing him
from doubting its completeness. As a result, Mrs. Dalloway generates an artificial sense of
wholeness, creating the illusion that it represents and conjoins, in a solitary moment, the entire
solidarity and collectivity—and thus practical social action—are possible. As with “Time
Passes” and the striking of Big Ben, the formal constructions of unity that Woolf proposes as
bridges between individual perspectives are ultimately founded on and inseparable from
representations of disunity, ontological vacuums, and the failure of meaning. In this way, the
meaningful constellations Woolf’s novels offer do not provide adequate solutions to the
meaning loss they seeks to reconcile; they fail, in other words, to give an account of
But Woolf’s re-enchantment project fails to yield a politics of solidarity for another
“aesthetic appreciation” of moments of being that potentially distracts the individual from
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(MD 149) in Mrs. Dalloway. While speaking to Peter Walsh on a bus ride, Clarissa suggests that a
coherent knowledge of other people and of ourselves may be achieved through an active process
of recovery:
she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat;
but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So
that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even
the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in
the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns. (MD 149)
Mrs. Dalloway expresses an idea that, as I will later show, was very important to Proust—that
recovered. Mrs. Dalloway is convinced, for instance, that she is part “of the trees at home; of
the house there […] part of people she never met” (MD 9).
This transcendental theory allows Clarissa to obtain knowledge outside of the immediate
to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the
part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of
us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to
this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death…perhaps—perhaps. (MD
149)
identities, of objects, of other people; yet Woolf suggests that the possible or former
perspectives—“the unseen part of us”—that exist outside of these moments persist somehow,
embedded in other people and in other places. And since these disjunctive fragments endure
outside momentary consciousness, they may be repossessed and constructed into coherent and
unified biographies.
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While providing a putative solution to the problem of solipsism, Clarissa’s
meaning. Instead of fostering solidarity and praxis, Woolf’s re-enchantment project promotes a
religious remedy: it advocates and prioritizes the individual’s contemplation and appreciation of
the need for actual communication, replacing it with moments of private investigation of arrested
time. The success of Woolf’s re-enchantment project is thus called into question: while she
simply distracts the individual from his historical situation, causing him to forget the original
problem of meaning.
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III. Proust’s Temporal Experimentation
Like Woolf, Proust uses time in an attempt to resignify and recover meaning in an
impoverished world. Rather than focusing on this use of temporality, however, many scholars
have attempted to explain his ideas on time—as they do for Woolf—as a novelistic realization of
the philosophy of Henri Bergson: in L. A. Bisson’s words, the “influence of Bergson has
become an axiom in Proust criticism” (104). But a scholarly concern with tracing intellectual
influences distracts us, as it did for Woolf, from the fact that Proust’s and Bergson’s work both
grapple with a shared problem of meaning within modernity, a predicament which they seek to
solve through the recuperation of reality, or, in Proust’s words, through the “renewal of the
world” (GW 324). Thus, mapping and theorizing Proust’s indebtedness to Bergson is only
useful insofar as this connection reinforces the claim that both thinkers were involved in a
The desire to reduce Proust’s temporal ideas to Bergsonism is certainly temping, as the
evidence for Bergson’s influence on Proust is much less tenuous than it is for Woolf. Proust
came into direct contact with Bergson’s ideas: he attended the philosopher’s lectures at the
Sorbonne between 1891 and 1893 (Lehrer 78), and he heard Bergson talk at the Collège de
France in 1900 (Landy 7). In addition, Proust also read and annotated Bergson’s Matière et
mèmoire by 1911 (Landy 7), thus while he was working on Swann’s Way (Lehrer 78). The
married Proust’s second cousin (Bisson 104). Yet, as Bisson points out, even despite this direct
contact, “in Paris during the nineties a young and sensitive mind [like Proust’s] could hardly
escape” Bergson’s philosophy, which was “very much in the intellectual air” (104).
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The attraction of explaining Proust’s temporality in terms of Bergson’s work revolves
around the fact that both figures espouse general similarities. At the broadest level, as critic Julia
Kristeva points out, Proust and Bergson deemphasize “quantitative time,” in an attempt to
underscore subjective, “qualitative time” (313). Bergson, in Time and Free Will, distinguishes
between “two kinds of multiplicity” of conscious states: “one qualitative and the other
past and present states—demarcates the temporal logic of Bergson’s durée: “pure duration
might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one
another, without precise outlines” (TFW 104). This qualitative multiplicity of states, for Bergson
However, one cannot access this multiplicity or pure duration through the rational
and it retains its form [as quality] so long as it does not give place to a symbolic representation
derived from extensity” (TFW 128). Bergson’s project aims to reverse this process—to
recuperate the qualitative nature of time through intuition: “we no longer measure duration, but
we feel it; from quantity it returns to the state of quality” (TFW 126). Thus, for Bergson,
qualitative reality can neither be understood objectively nor rationally, but in Jonah Lehrer’s
words, “is best understood subjectively, its truths accessed intuitively” (79).
and quantitative time. During moments of involuntary memory, the narrator, Marcel, perceives
reality as a flux in which the past returns to and coexists with the present—a conception that
generally resembles Bergson’s notion of durée. Proust’s notion of involuntary memory also
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resembles Bergson’s philosophy insofar it enables Marcel to grasp the essential nature of reality;
in fact, during moments of involuntary memory, Marcel achieves “the contemplation of the
essence of things” (FTA 184). And similar to Bergsonism, Marcel accesses this essence, not
through “intelligence” or any kind of rational effort, but through passive “instinct” (FTA 188).
Marcel also reflects that “essence is, in part, subjective and impossible to communicate” (FTA
193), just as Bergson argues that durée cannot be measured or objectively understood.
While a case for Bergsonism can be made, such a straightforward line of influence is
a letter to Henri Ghèon, “without trying to turn the philosophy of M. Bergson into a novel”
(Landy 163). In fact, several scholars—like Kristeva, Bisson, and Joyce N. Megay, among
others—have identified major differences between Proust’s and Bergson’s works, calling into
question the reliability of this putative influence. As Kristeva argues, “Proust’s work can never
Proust, himself, in a 1913 interview for Le Temps, identifies a difference between his and
Bergson’s conceptions of time: “My work is dominated by the distinction between involuntary
memory and voluntary memory, a distinction that not only is missing in M. Bergson’s
philosophy, but is expressly contradicted by it” (Le Temps 4). Bisson agrees that “Bergson makes
no real distinction […] between two kinds of memory” (107). Instead, Bisson seems to suggest
that Bergson denies the relevance of involuntary memory because he values the “functioning of
consciousness in the ‘active man’” (107). For Bergson, Bisson argues, the “right use of memory
is an indispensable process in satisfactory human conduct; the man of action consults his
memory consciously and voluntarily before acting, selecting precisely those memories that have a
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spontaneous memory fail to lead to “satisfactory human conduct,” Bisson concludes that the
Instead of arguing that Bergson fails to distinguish involuntary memory, scholars like
Kristeva and Megay have attempted to show that Proust’s notion of temporality is inconsistent
with Bergson’s idea of durée. Kristeva, for instance, argues that Proust’s view of qualitative
time, unlike Bergson’s, necessary involves spatial discontinuity. While Bergson’s duration
discontinuity” (Kristeva 315). Proust’s notion of duration during involuntary memory, in other
words, does not perfectly represent Bergson’s idea of a qualitative multiplicity of states insofar as
these states are enumerated, logically isolated, and “invariably spatialized” (Kristeva 318). In
fact, “spatial differentiation is indispensable” for involuntary memory. (Kristeva 315). Thus,
Proust differs from Bergson, under this view, in a manner resembling the way in which Woolf
differs from Bergson: while Bergson asserts that the essence of time is an “organic whole” of all
past and present terms, Proust maintains the discontinuity and separability of individual states
and moments. As Joshua Landy writes, “Whereas for Bergson time merely appears (erroneously)
to consist in a succession of isolated instants, for Proust time really is a succession of isolated
instants” (8).
A discussion of Proust’s connection (or lack of connection) to Bergsonism runs the risk
device for re-enchantment. Similar to Woolf’s modernist style, Proust experiments with time in
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an effort to access the essence of reality. For him, as for Woolf, reality is captured through a
rejection of realism: in Finding Time Again he writes: “the sort of literature which is content to
‘describe things’ […] despite calling itself realist, is the furthest away from reality […] because it
unceremoniously cuts all communication between our present self and the past” (FTA 193). In
order to authentically portray reality, then, a novel must necessarily emphasize recollection—a
any linear or realist conception of time. In other words, similar to Woolf’s attempt to capture
the nonlinear flux of impressions in an ordinary moment, Proust seeks to reveal reality through
the representation of synchronous moments between past and present events: “an hour,” Proust
writes, “is not just an hour, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmosphere. What
we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which
The writer’s task, for Proust, is to “rediscover” (FTA 198) this harmonious relationship
between the past and present by creating connections between separate temporal instances and
between different objects. In Proust’s words, the writer uncovers the essence of reality insofar
as he “takes two different objects, establishes their relationship […] and encloses them within
the necessary armature of a beautiful style” (FTA 198). Marcel, for example, recognizes “the
beauty of one thing only in another, noon at Combray only in the sound of its bells, mornings at
Doncières only in the hiccupping of our water-heater” (FTA 198). The objects and sensations
in Marcel’s past are thus conjured by and conjoined with objects and sensations in his present;
these synchronicities, moreover, allow Marcel to authentically recover the material of the past,
and in doing so, to re-enchant reality: “the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the
present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time” (FTA 180).
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Such a project of recovery necessary entails the formal problematization of the linear
flow of time, since reality is recovered at the juncture between the past and the present. This
emphasis on remembrance allows for the seeming infinite dilation and expansion of the text,
resulting in a novel that is unfinished and unfinishable. A stark contrast to Mrs. Dalloway, the
events of À la recherche du temps perdu extend over a period of many years (spanning over 3,000
pages in the Penguin edition): the narrator Marcel recollects his past life beginning with his
childhood experiences at his family’s summer home in Combray and concluding with his
decision to write down the experiences he has hitherto remembered. This extreme passage of
time, however, is neither linear nor evenly paced. As Landy points out, “[t]ens, sometimes
hundreds of pages are spent on a period of hours (such as the matinee Guermantes), while the
intervening weeks, months, and sometimes years […] are simply overlooked, held off until later,
or […] dealt with in a few lines” (Landy 131). For instance, in Finding Time Again, Marcel uses a
single sentence to describe the time he spent in a sanatorium before returning to post-war Paris:
“[t]he new sanatorium to which I retired cured me no more than the first; and many years passed
inordinate number of pages and words to describe and detail individual experiences, objects, and
people. Many of these subjects cause the narrator to remember past events and to describe
other objects, thus forming unified groupings of subjective associations, rather than a linear
progression of events. At the beginning of Swann’s Way, for instance, the narrator spends many
pages detailing the experience of falling asleep, recalling in the process a night at Combray in
which he endeavored to receive a goodnight kiss from his mother. Proust’s verbosity and
distension, Alain de Botton points out, frustrated his early publishers: in 1913 Alfred Humblot
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wrote that he failed “to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in
Despite aggravating initial readers, the novel’s ornate level of description suggests a
conception of time in which the instant is infinitely expandable. Brief events—like falling asleep
or the tasting of madeleine and tea—trigger or become linked with chains of remembered
objects, people, and past events. Proust thus amalgamates and organizes separate temporal
moments into associative configurations; a solitary instance becomes a constellation of past and
present sensations, forming a temporal monad, which Jameson defines as “the absolute present in
which in Proust reality alone exits” (“Joyce or Proust?” 190). In other words, rather than
representing a conception of linear time, À la recherche depicts moments that revive or make
present former sensations and memories. But as Kristeva points out, for Proust “[m]emory does
not stop opening itself up in order to compile new details” (304). Each individual temporal
monad, she suggests, could be expanded to link with or recall alternative anecdotes, which could
in turn connect with other memories and observations, ad infinitum. As Jameson argues,
“Proust’s digressive/interpolative form allows for the folding in of new material virtually
The text’s capability for infinite dilation is apparent in Proust’s writing method, as he
constantly revised and augmented his work. According to Jonah Lehrer, Proust “scribbled in
the margins of his drafts and then, when the margins overflowed, he supplemented his pages
with paperoles, little cut pieces of paper that he would paste onto his original manuscript” (86-7).
This plethora of written material and desire for expansion bolster the claim that À la recherche is
an inherently unfinishable text: because of the novel’s emphasis on recollection, each moment
contains the potential for modification and extension. Such an infinitely dilatable form,
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moreover, is a function of Proust’s re-enchantment project: the representation of expansible
temporal monads allows Proust to construct moments in which the past and present conjoin,
Voluntary Memory
essential experience through his thematization of temporality, namely, through his discussion of
involuntary and voluntary memory. These two forms of memory access the past in different
ways: Proust draws a distinction “between the true impression we have had of a thing and the
ourselves” (FTA 177). Whereas the former, authentic impression is rendered by involuntary
memory, the latter is rendered by voluntary memory. In this way, voluntary memory allows
Proust to conceive a loss of meaning for the individual insofar as this form of recollection
involves a conscious and intentional act of recollecting impressions and events. “For me,” Proust
wrote in a 1913 interview, “voluntary memory, which is primarily a memory of the intelligence
and of the visual sense, only gives us unconvincing pictures of the past” (Le Temps 4). Such a
deliberate act of remembrance, in other words, necessarily distorts and simplifies the material of
the past, preventing the individual from grasping its essence or perceiving it in its entirety.
In Guermantes Way, Marcel discusses the blinding effects of this form of recollection: “we
thought we remembered [the past] when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole
past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary
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memory” (GW 6). This kind of memory, then, is intrinsically and importantly related to Proust’s
notion of Habit: involuntary memory normalizes and weakens the intensity and authenticity of
past sensations in the same way that Habit blinds us to present sensations. Both faculties render
aspects of reality entirely invisible. In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, for instance, Marcel
discusses how individuals become acclimatized to certain visual phenomena: “the fumes from
the samovar […] which may still be given off nowadays but which, because of habit, nobody
every sees” (SYGF 168). Living according to voluntary memory or Habit therefore constitutes
an incomplete perceptual experience: “We commonly live with a self reduced to its bare
minimum; most of our faculties lie dormant, relying on habit; habit knows how to manage
Proust’s restricted awareness of reality, as critic Richard Durán points out, constitutes a
(75). Durán explains that perceiving time unidimensionally—“one point, one instant, at a
time”—limits reality “to the present instant since the past no longer exists” (76). In contrast, the
temporality Marcel grasps during moments of involuntary memory—“time in its pure state”
(FTA 180)—is fourth-dimensional time, a temporal scheme which “posits the ‘simultaneous’
existence of all possible time—the past, the present, and the future” (Durán 76).
Proust theorizes unidimensional time through voluntary memory and Habit. As Durán
points out, if an individual perceives temporality one instant at a time, he is “limited to the
present instant since the past no longer exists and the future has yet to exist” (76). This
despite seeking to recover the past, “preserves nothing of the past itself.” (SW 44). Instead, this
rational form of recollection merely views the material of the past in terms of its utility for the
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present moment: in Young Girls, for instance, Proust writes that “the mind eliminates from our
memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily
dealings with the person” (SYGF 527). In this way, the temporal perception implicit in rational,
voluntary memory perceives only the present—treating the essential past as something that “no
longer exists.” “[T]he mind sees as real,” Marcel argues, only that “which we live during the
Durán points out, a fourth-dimensional universe contains not only all possible time but also all
possible space insofar as the perceiving subject would be able to experience multiple locations
simultaneously. Habit, however, restricts the possible spaces of present experience: at Balbec,
Marcel’s Habit “unfurnishes” (SYGF 245) his hotel room, stripping the location of its newness
and of its sensory possibilities. While this process of unfurnishing allows Marcel to live in his
bedroom without anxiety, it also causes him to “[stop] seeing” (SYGF 504) this space in its
entirety. “Habit,” Marcel ruminates, “relieves us of the need to experience, we eliminate the
Habit and voluntary memory, moreover, assume an important role in Proust’s re-
enchantment project insofar as they make possible the initial phase of what I will call Proust’s
dialectics of forgetting. These faculties cause Marcel to misrepresent and to forget the
nonutilitarian phenomenological content of his past and present experiences; ironically however,
this content is simultaneously preserved through the act of forgetting. That is to say, it is only
because Marcel forgets or fails to register aspects of his experience that he is able to achieve
have forgotten,” Marcel muses, “that we can now and then return to the person we once were”
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(SYGF 222). Since habitual memory registers only the utilitarian and practically significant
aspects of the past, it leaves untouched—and thus preserves the authenticity and potency of—
insignificant sensory experiences: “Habit weakens all things but the things that are best at
reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten,
and which have therefore lost none of their power” (SYGF 222).
Involuntary Memory
These “insignificant” features of the past are recovered during the second phase of
Proust’s dialectics of forgetting. After Habit and voluntary memory cause Marcel to disregard
forgetting or destabilizing the opinions, ideas, or appearances that these two faculties have formed
This level of forgetting occurs during moments of involuntary memory, which allow
Marcel is able, during these moments, to perceive the past and the present simultaneously, and
to recuperate and appropriate former sensations, impressions, and feelings. In this way, Proust
Unlike voluntary memory which uses intelligence to consciously access the past, this
completely out of his conscious control. But it is this very passivity, this lack of deliberate
rational effort, which allows involuntary memory to access an essential vision of the past. In
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Finding Time Again, for instance Marcel stumbles on two “unevenly laid paving-stones” in the
Guermantes’ courtyard, triggering past memories of Venice, specifically, the “sensation I had
once felt on the two uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St. Marks […] along with all the other
sensations associated with that sensation on that day” (FTA 175). Marcel theorizes that it was
precisely the unplanned and unexpected nature of the event that allowed him to recapture the
past: “the very fortuity, the inevitability of the manner in which the sensation was encountered,
Thus, the recuperation of the past via involuntary memory depends not on conscious
effort, but on the serendipitous contact with physical objects—like two uneven stones—that
trigger former constellations of sensations. “The past,” Marcel contends in Swann’s Way, “is
hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the
sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect” (SW 44-45). By the
end of À la recherche, Marcel modifies this claim to argue that the past does not actually reside in
external objects, but rather in ourselves: he identifies “the illusion that these bygone impressions
had an existence outside of me” (FTA 185). Nevertheless, solitary objects and actions allow
Marcel to experience involuntary memory and to recover his individual past insofar as they act as
receptacles or “vessels” (FTA 178) for past impressions. Most famously, the taste of tea and
madeleine cake revives within Marcel a matrix of childhood impressions about Combray: “all of
Combray and its surroundings” acquired “form and solidity, emerged, town and gardens alike,
occur during moments of destabilization, when he is “wrenched out of [his] habits” (FTA 173).
The madeleine scene, for instance, occurs after Marcel decided “contrary to my habit” to “have a
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little tea” (SW 45). When Marcel’s Habit is “found wanting,” all of his “faculties […] come
flooding back to stand in for it” (SYGF 235), and he is able to perceive the previously hidden
allows Marcel to forget the impressions of reality and of the past rendered by Habit and voluntary
memory. As a result, Marcel is able to remember the essential nature of past experience that
Such a “departure from habit” (SYGF 100), however, does not simply allow Marcel to
capture the past, but instead enables him to perceive new connections between things and thus to
meaningful rehabilitate a universe that has been stripped of its phenomenological fullness. In
enables “us to see analogies” (SYGF 392) between sense-data, that is, to posit linkages between
past and present sensations. In The Guermantes Way, for instance, Marcel notes that “a change in
weather is enough to create the world and ourselves afresh” (GW 342). The mist of a Sunday
morning in autumn causes him to feel “reborn” (GW 342) insofar as this weather not only
triggers but also renews his memories of Doncières: “the new world into which I had plunged by
morning mist was a world already known to me […] and forgotten for some time (which
restored all its freshness)” (GW 342-343). The “change in the natural scene” (GW 342) thus
allows Marcel to recover the past and in doing so, to experience and resignify the present from a
new perspective. In this way, Proust’s re-enchantment program resembles T. S. Eliot’s assertion
in “Little Gidding” that “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started /And
know the place for the first time” (Tristan Fecit). Forgetting Habit, in other words, allows Marcel
to meaningfully repossess the past and to acquire the “feeling of just having discovered” (SYGF
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Involuntary memory thus constitutes a new and meaningfully rehabilitating experience,
ironically, through its recovery of past information. As Marcel muses in Finding Time Again, this
form of recollection,
suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is an air we have breathed
before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and
which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been
breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost. (FTA 178-9)
Reality is re-accessed and renewed, for Proust, during temporal instances in which we recover
the forgotten details of our past lives. The “feeling of renewal,” in other words, occurs during
“moments of identity between the present and the past” (FTA 179). It is this synchronous
instant that reveals the “essence of things” (FTA 179) or the true nature of reality, enabling us to
attain a more complete phenomenological experience and to thus meaningfully resignify and re-
envision the world. The past therefore provides the material for the redemption and
rehabilitation of present reality. Involuntary memory, then, does not simply access former
memories, but it brings these memories into the space of the present, and in doing so, re-
enchants the present moment. In Jameson’s words, “the moments of involuntary memory are
mere transitional devices and organizational hinges: far from opening up the past all over again,
they make it present ‘for the first time’” (“Joyce or Proust?” 185).
“moments of being”: as Woolf’s moments reveal a “hidden a pattern” of life, Proust’s instances
uncover the veiled essence of reality. Both writers, that is, outline moments that meaningfully
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memory—in which the individual fails to grasp the world as an interconnected, unified whole.
way: whereas Woolf’s moments of non-being are instances of unawareness, Proust attributes
constitute acts of intense consciousness, Proust’s examples of involuntary memory are fortuitous and
Despite these differences, both writers seek to reveal the essence of—and consequently
moments of involuntary memory exist outside of intelligence, he seeks to “stabilize” (FTA 184)
them through the conscious act of writing. As Woolf seeks to recover life’s essence in writing
about moments of being, Proust seeks to access reality through the novelistic representation of
involuntary memory: “[r]eal life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence
lived to the full, is literature” (FTA 204). Through the process of writing, life may be
“illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth
But, for Proust, reality is not merely uncovered by writing, it is recovered: “the greatness
of true art […] lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, making us recognize reality” (FTA 204).
Recovering and repossessing the past allows us, as I have argued, to experience the present from
a new perspective. In Proust’s words, the memory takes “snapshots that are quite independent
of one another” (SYGF 454); these snapshots in turn need to be developed or appropriated by
the writer in order to create a meaningful work of art. An individual’s “past is cluttered,” Proust
writes, “with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their
intellect has never ‘developed’ them” (204). The writer, that is, needs to create unities or chains
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of association between past and present events, revealing the interconnectedness of phenomenal
consciousness.
Thus, unlike Woolf, Proust’s moments of being emphasize and are defined by the
synchronicity between the past and present. Whereas Woolf’s moments reveal the putative
interconnection of all individuals and things, Proust’s moments reveal the interrelation of personal
communication unfeasible: he argues that the essence discovered during these moments of
awareness is “in part, subjective and impossible to communicate” (FTA 193). Thus, moments
of being or involuntary memory, for Proust, constitute temporal experiences in which the
individual is isolated from those around him, as he contemplates the coexistence and
the formal constellation of past and present moments into temporal monads. In Swann’s Way,
for instance, a single moment shatters into a collection of anecdotes: the tasting of madeleine
and tea causes Marcel to remember and recount his childhood experiences at Combray,
including his discovery of the writer Bergotte, as well as his first encounter with Gilberte Swann.
These formal monads, moreover, are thematically reflected in Elstir’s paintings, which capture
what Marcel refers to as “luminous moment[s]” (GW 417). Elstir depicts fixed temporal instants
in which there are “numerous reflections between the various elements in the painting” (GW
The marvelous shimmer on the dress of a woman who had stopped dancing for a
moment because she was hot and out of breath was reflected, too, in the same way, in
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the cloth of a motionless sail, in the water of the little port, in the wooden landing stage,
in the leaves on trees and in the sky. (GW 417)
In the same way, Marcel perceives harmonious connections between his sensations, and between
present moments and past memories. For instance, he associates Albertine with the seashore at
Balbec (GW 348), and when she returns to Paris in The Guermantes Way, Marcel is “not quite sure
whether it was the desire for Balbec or for her that took hold of me then” (GW 348).
experimentation with nonlinear time, which allows him to separate and subsequently connect
different temporal instances. “The artists’ genius,” he writes, “functions like extremely high
temperatures, which can dissociate combinations of atoms and reshape them into a totally
opposite order, one that corresponds to a different pattern” (SYGF 441). Likewise, Proust’s
dissociates the flow of linear time. Marcel’s life is consequently shaped, not into a chronological
order, but into collections and patterns of associative anecdotes and memories. As a result,
similar to Woolf’s style, Proust creates meaningful unities by way of disunity, that is, by
deconstructing the conventional hierarchies of time and re-arranging separate events into
Proust’s construction of temporal monads, like Woolf’s attempt to create formal unities,
experience of the present moment through this moment’s analogous connection to other
instances in time. Each event of À la recherche, that is, contains the possibility of its being
meaningfully linked and connected with an infinite number of other temporal incidents. As a
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result, the solitary moment is infused with new meaning—meaning that is borrowed from and
In order to formally achieve this rehabilitation program, Proust seeks, like Woolf, to
create a totality-effect, giving the text the illusion of all-inclusivity and of providing access to the
words, allows Proust to generate a novel that purports to appropriate and to access—and thus to
re-enchant—the entire content of the outside world. As for Woolf, Proust’s production of all-
inclusivity is, for several reasons, a function of and dependent on his implementation of time.
exclude queries and doubts about the all-inclusive nature of the text. Proust forestalls these
questions of completeness through his use of temporal distension, which creates a text that can
never be grasped in its entirety nor reduced to a unitary configuration of meaning. In Young
Girls, Marcel argues that “a great book” is “made out of something which, because it lies
somewhere beyond that existing sum, cannot be deduced simply from acquaintance with it”
(SYGF 235). In the same way, À la recherche consists of moments and events that can never be
fully isolated or stabilized since they are associated with or placed in inextricable relation to other
moments in time. This formal effect is thematized in Marcel’s inability to establish a firm
conception of the women who interest him: “women who tend to be resistant and cannot be
possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at
all, are the only interesting ones” (GW 359). When Marcel kisses Albertine in The Guermantes
Way, for example, he accesses “all the possibilities” of her individuality, perceiving “ten
Albertines” (GW 361). In a similar manner, the temporal distension of the novel generates
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multiple possibilities of meaning: a single temporal moment yields and is connected with a
These constellations of moments create a text that is, as I have argued, inherently
unfinishable: each temporal monad could be further dilated to include additional recollections.
As a result, each moment in the text appears to possess the possibility of additional meaning and
of generating further associations. This infinite possibility for expansion thus defers questions
of completeness and all-inclusivity insofar as it prevents the reader from attaining a full or total
grasp of the text. Since every moment has the potential for further dilation, the novel exudes
greater possible significance than it actually contains, creating the illusion of wholeness.
Jameson argues, moreover, that Proust achieves the totality-effect on the level of
outside world, its “inevitable worldliness, ”which reminds us that “the object of the work’s
language is always to be found somewhere outside itself” (“Joyce or Proust?” 181). This
“impurity of the aesthetic totality” is most evident in “the form of the external listener always
posited by the speaker, of the receiver always posited by the linguistic act” (Jameson, “Joyce or
Proust?” 181). The language of a novel, that is, normally requires an audience or auditor
autonomous; instead of achieving the status of all-inclusivity, the text is inextricably linked to an
outside source.
the replacement of the external receiver with the simulation of an internal one” (Jameson, “Joyce
or Proust?” 185) In other words, Jameson argues that Proustian language suspends “the pole of
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the receiver” (“Joyce or Proust?” 190) and in doing so, creates the illusion of an autonomous
text which is self-contained and independent of external address. The novel’s language achieves
This phenomenon is demonstrated in Finding Time Again when Proust examines a pink
house:
[T]o put my mind at rest, I pointed out to myself, as to somebody who might have
accompanied me and might have been more capable than I of taking pleasure from it,
the fiery reflections in the windows and the translucent pink of the house. But the
companion to whom I had pointed out these curious effects was of a nature no doubt
less enthusiastic than plenty of good-natured people who would be ravished by such a
view, for he had registered the colours without a trace of pleasure. (FTA 164)
In this passage of self-reflexivity, Marcel’s consciousness is divided into two selves: a listener and
a sender. According to Jameson, the sender possesses the responsibility of making and
formulating an observation: “the fiery reflections in the window and the translucent pink
house.” The listener, on the other hand, is intended, yet fails, to receive this observation with
“pleasure.” However, this pleasure is “in reality the redoubled joyousness of the sender, who
isolates a new object, a new color, a new tactility or material surface, and simultaneously
expresses it by way of designating it” (Jameson, “Joyce or Proust?” 185). That is to say, the
pleasure that the listener is intended to receive is only accessed through the act of language
production, or, for Proust, through the act of writing. In this way, Proust’s sentence production
suspends the pole of reception insofar as the pleasure and significance of individual experience
cannot be meaningfully accessed by an external receiver (“Joyce or Proust?” 185). Proust’s text,
therefore, communicates with itself, meditating in reflexivity. And concealing the notion of an
For Jameson, Proustian time is a “formal consequence” (“Joyce or Proust?” 190) of the
suspension of the listener: it is a function of the text’s language production and thus of the
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autonomous artwork itself. Suspending the receiver creates “a mirage of the sender as a kind of
transcendental subjectivity […] always present, always speaking, inexhaustible” (Jameson, “Joyce
or Proust?” 190). The ubiquitous presence of the speaker, for Jameson, formally results in
Proust’s notion of “the absolute present in which […] reality alone exists” (Jameson, “Joyce or
Proust?” 190). The self-reflexivity of the novel’s language production creates a text that records
the remembered world of the individual rather than the real, external world; what results is a
conception of time—the absolute present—in which the past is contained within the current
moment.
Proustian time, however, as Jameson goes on to argue, does not simply advocate the
excavation of one’s past. Instead, “[w]hat is energizing about Proust,” Jameson writes, “is
indeed not some mystical inward spiral into the fascination of one’s past” but rather “the
liberation of Goethean forces of praxis and sheer activity (“Joyce or Proust?” 186). As Marcel
seeks to document his moments of involuntary memory, Proust stresses and thematizes the
process of active creation; he insists on, in Jameson’s words, an “allegorical dimension in which
writing itself is grasped as a figure for sheer activity and for production as such” (“Joyce or
Proust?” 186). Thus, whereas Woolf’s moments of being run the risk of producing political
apathy, Proust generates a potentially progressive politics insofar as his emphasis on the forces
of praxis enable one to see labor as a precondition for social change. Proust, under this view,
seems to espouse a political vision that guards against the adoption of passive consumerism, of
inactivity.
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Yet such a progressive vision, as Jameson argues, is obstructed by the problem of the
future tense. That is to say, Proust’s radicalized absolute present—the temporal monad—does not
allow for any final or stable sense of the future. As I have argued, Proustian time creates a text
that is infinitely expandable; in fact, Michel Butor argues that, if Proust had not died, he would
have not only gone on writing and supplementing his novel, but he would have formulated a
new ending for the text (Butor 289). Whether or not this is true, Butor’s claim, in Jameson’s
words, liberates “the productivity of new futures of the Proustian present” (“Joyce or Proust?”
196). Proust’s conception of time allows for a multitude of possible futures to the ending of the
novel, but none of these futures holds stable status in Proust’s universe: Butor’s proposed
addition “even as a future, loses its claim to be the final form of some Proustian ‘Real’” (“Joyce
or Proust? 196). Proustian time therefore prevents an objective or stable future tense, and
without an agreed upon future, any kind of solidarity or progressive politics is impossible. A
collective movement towards social change requires a common goal, a shared vision of the
future—a vision that Proust’s conception of time would disallow. In eliminating the possibility
of a stable future, Proust thus eliminates the possibility of an organizing principle for social
action.
Proustian time, therefore, renders a politics that fails to support a collective solution to
the perceived loss of meaning in modernity. This form of politics is perhaps inherent in Proust’s
living situation: after 1907 and until his death in 1922, Proust inhabited a cork-lined room on
Boulevard Haussmann, sleeping by day and working on À la recherche by night (Proust’s bio in
Penguin editions). This isolated existence prioritizes private investigation over interpersonal
communication. In this way, Proust and Woolf advocate a similar politics: as Woolf supports
the personal contemplation of moments of being, Proust endorses individual reflection on the
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past and on the act of writing. This endorsement is thematically reflected in À la recherche
does not require interpersonal communication. In fact, Marcel argues that his experiences of
essential reality are in part subjective and incommunicable. This incommunicability, as I have
argued, is apparent in Proust’s self-reflexive language production insofar as the text communes,
not with an outside source, but with itself. Such a mobilization of language, as Jameson points
out, leads to the failure of the Proustian aesthetic “which ought to culminate with an injunction
to the reader to write his own book and take possession of his own experience” (“Joyce or
Proust? 185); instead the self-reflexive Proustian present fails to relay anything to an outside
observer.
memory is intended to resignify reality, such a resignification is purely subjective and can only
occur at the level of the individual. And for the same reason, while Proustian time advocates
praxis and creative activity, this action cannot be shared or communicated among multiple
meditation—pleasures that distract the individual away from any sort of collective action and
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IV. Conclusion
In order to account for modernists’ obsession with time, critics have formulated a
number of models, four of which I have explored and critiqued, namely the Great War Thesis,
the Culture and Technology Thesis, the Imperialism Thesis, and the Secularization Thesis.
While these arguments open up powerful and elucidatory readings of texts, they are ultimately
limited in their theoretical scope, and they only theorize half of modernists’ intentions in
temporal experimentation. These theses, that is, argue that writers, like Woolf and Proust, use
time to mimetically capture a loss in individual experience. What they fail to do, however, is to
account for the ways in which modernists employ time in order to fill this perceive meaning-
i.e., the re-enchantment project—is theorized by the Modernist Production Thesis, which
focuses on the ways in which modernist novelists manufacture meaning through their
experimentation with time. This fifth model allows for a different set of formal readings of the
texts: it requires an investigation of the ways in which writers employ temporality to generate
unities of meaning and to create totality-effects, thereby infusing reality with significance.
Woolf and Proust are therefore both re-enchanters. They experiment with time in an
attempt to fill or solve the experiential gaps that they perceive in the modern world. As Woolf
recognizes an epistemological breach of meaning for the individual concerning the possibility of
interpersonal communication and of a consistent identity through time, Proust theorizes the loss
of complete or essential personal experience. Both authors attempt to overcome these issues by
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Yet time is functional for these authors in different ways. Woolf’s moments of being
serve to unite disparate perspectives and to connect formerly isolated persons, thus remedying the
alienated and solipsistic existence of the individual under modernity. On the level of form, she
viewpoints. In To the Lighthouse this division and unity is accomplished by the interludinal “Time
Passes,” while in Mrs. Dalloway it is achieved by the simultaneity of events. Proust, conversely, is
instances of involuntary memory—emphasize the recuperation of the personal past into the
personal present, a synchronization that infuses reality with new meaning. Formally, Proust
achieves these moments of recovery and resignification through the creation of temporal
monads. And whereas Woolf amalgamates disparate persons, for Proust these monads are
constructed from the material of a single individual’s past. As a result, while Proust and Woolf
are both re-enchanters, they seek to re-envision the world in incongruent ways, as evidenced by
These discrepancies stem, in part, from the fact that Woolf and Proust are both totality-
thinkers. They both intend to produce a “Book of the World”—an autonomous and original
artwork that appropriates the entire content of the outside world, thus allowing the reader to
grasp reality in all its parts, as a cohesive whole. Experimental time, as I have argued, is a
function of this autonomization: it enables Proust and Woolf to formally conceal the text’s
wholeness, one that re-enchants the world. The author’s treatment of temporality, then, is
contingent on the creation of a new unity or original artifact, and is thus specific to each novel.
This explains the difference between Proust’s and Woolf’s conception of temporality: they
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endeavor to use time to generate an original way of perceiving and redeeming reality. In fact,
because of its functionality, time differs between Woolf’s novels: To the Lighthouse seeks to
generate a sense of wholeness between many years, while Mrs. Dalloway endeavors to grasp the
As totality-thinkers and re-enchanters, Proust and Woolf seek to mend the loss of
meaning experienced by the subject under modernity; nevertheless, their modernist re-
enchantment programs fail to make possible a collective politics that would address the social
and economic roots of this absence of meaning. Rather than offering practical solutions, Proust
and Woolf leave us with mystical remedies. With Woolf’s moments of being and Proust’s
involuntary memory, both novelists support the pleasures of private contemplation. Meditating
on time, they suggest, allows us to achieve a transcendental awareness of reality: for Proust, by
recovering the past we are able to re-access the essence of things, and for Woolf, by ruminating
on moments of being we are capable of connecting with other people. Both novelists,
moreover, intend to create autonomous texts which provide, for the reader, a similar awareness
of reality; in this way, À la recherche, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse are intended to function
as religious objects, generating meaning and allowing readers to grasp the world in its totality.
problem of meaning.
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