Assignment on Time and Structure of To the Lighthouse

Name :- Rajdip.P.Gohel

Roll. No:- 27

Paper No:- 9- The Modern Literature

Class:- M.A Sem-3

Topic:- Time and the Structure of To The Lighthouse

Enrolment No:- 2069108420190017

College:- Smt.S.B.Gardi Department Of English

Email Id:- Grajdip5@gmail.com

Submitted:- Department Of English M.K.University, Bhavnagar

Introduction:-

                    To the Lighthouse, which Virginia Woolf published in 1927, was her fifth novel. In her two previous works, Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925), she had already tested readers’ expectations about the nature of fiction. In them, as in To the Lighthouse, the centre of consciousness shifts from one character to another, and from their perceptions of the external world at any given moment to their inner life, their associations and memories. As Woolf wrote in her 1921 essay ‘Modern Fiction’, she wanted to show how ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ receives and organises ‘a myriad impressions’. She abandons the neat ordering of life into fictional chapters, and sidelines the usual staples of novels – marriage plots, death bed scenes, coincidences and suspense. The overt story of To the Lighthouse, indeed, is slender. It is set on a Hebridean island, in a holiday house occupied by a large family and their guests.

Time and the Structure in To The Lighthouse:-

                One of the most striking features of To the Lighthouse is the unequal lengths of time covered by each of the three sections. The first and the third The Window and The Lighthouse each occupy less than a day. On the other hand, the middle section, Time Passes deals with a span of about ten years.

        It is in relation to her treatment of time that Virginia Woolf’s experimental and innovatory qualities as a writer can be particularly well seen. To the Lighthouse was not the first work in which she attempted such experimentation. In Mrs Dalloway the time covered by the whole action lasted, on one novel, only one day. Nor was she the only experimental novelist of her time to adopt this idea James Joyce’s Ulysses is based on the same short time span. One thing which Woolf and Joyce had in common was their belief in the importance of representing human consciousness, and in showing the part which memory and association plays in this. The belief went hand in hand with the acknowledgement of the simultaneity and multiplicity of countless aspects of life, something which we saw clearly in the opening paragraphs describing the dinner party. Hence, rather than attempt the illusion of presenting a complete, chronological history of the external events in a fictional character’s life as, say, did Bennett or Galsworthy they preferred the detailed examination of the complexity of everyday events and the whole process of living and thinking.

    Whilst such novelists as Woolf, Joyce, and the French writer Marcel Proust hesitated to impose upon life and order which it does not have in itself by means of plot or other artificial ways of arranging experience they had, after all, to begin and end their writing at some point. The period of a day provides am apparently random, but none the less useful, space within which to move. Erich Auerbach, in a very illuminating chapter on To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf, in his book Mimesis, explains very clearly the reasons and advantages which prompted Woolf and her contemporaries to choose this short span of time.

     He who represents the course of a human life, or a sequence of events extending over a prolonged period of time, and represents it from beginning to end, must prune and isolate arbitrarily. Life has always long since begun, and it is always still going on. And those people whose story the author is telling experience much more than he can ever hope to tell. But the things that happen to a few individuals in the course of a few minutes, hours, or possibly even days these one can hope to report with reasonable completeness.

      What is more, this bringing together of elements of consciousness will, such writers as Woolf believed, lead to a new, and far less artificial, form of unity: a unity on the power of an individual’s mind to bring all elements of living and feeling together and make sense of them. She is trying to represent, in her fiction, the organizing, sifting, recording and analysing processes by which we attempt to make sense of our own lives. And this was always an aim in her work. As early as 1908, she had written that she hoped to. Achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind’s passage through the world achieve in the end, some kind of the whole made of shivering fragments to me this seems the natural process the flight of the mind.

    If, by way of example, we look at section 5 of “The Window” we can see the way in which Virginia Woolf incorporates this notion of clock and personal time in To the Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay commands the fidgeting James to stand still whilst she measures the stocking she is knitting for the lighthouse keeper’s boy against his leg. Then she gazes round the room, her mind seizing on the shabbiness of the furniture, the reasons for renting this Hebridean house, the delights of books, the flapping wallpaper, the Swiss maid and her anxieties over her dying father. Then she snaps at James for not standing still, and we learn that she has measured the stocking and found it too short. There are two different levels of time operating here the clock duration of measuring the stocking, and the space travelled in the mind whilst Mrs Ramsay thinks of first one thing, then another.

Time future:-

   Of course, to report what’s going on the consciousness of even one individual over a short period of time is going to involve referring to time other than the present. In ‘The Window’, the immediate future is continually being brought into the moments through which the characters live. Mrs Ramsay is guardedly optimistic about the proposed trip, “But it may be fine I expect it will be fine”. Her husband’s continual opposition to this optimism is brought into use as a dramatic device. It both stresses the way in which the Ramsay personalities counterbalance each other in marriage, and shows that this marriage is not without its friction. The degree to which disagreement over this relatively simple issue highlights the tendency of members of different sexes to take different sides is emphasized by William Bankes, who, sulking at the dinner table, resenting what he interprets as being ‘condescended to by these silly women’, finds it ‘necessary to assert himself’ by siding with the gloomy masculine certainties of his host. ‘No going to the Lighthouse to-morrow, Mrs Ramsay,’ he asserts aggressively.

Time past:-

   But it is memory of the past rather than anticipation of the future which, Virginia Woolf emphasizes, goes to make up the present moment. Thus, during the dinner party, Mrs Ramsay remembers a cold day fifteen, twenty years ago at Marlow on the banks of the Thames. In her mind, this time was still, on one level, going on: she glides in her imagination among the chairs and tables of the drawing room, ‘and it fascinated her, as if, while she had changed, that particular day, now become very still and beautiful. Had remained there, all these years’. It seems impossible to Mrs Ramsey that they should now be adding a billiard room to the house. The moment is suspended in time, containing to future to worry about. Whereas life is shooting out like cascades from the dinner table, rippling in all directions, the past ‘was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks’. The essential quality of a moment is that it is free from change, thus Mrs Ramsay can use the act of remembering to disassociate herself from the dinner table, instead of being part of its flowing life, and looking at her husband, children and friends she has an illusory feeling of eternity, of being outside time. She feels a ‘coherence in things, a stability, something, she meant, is immune from change’.

Remembering Mrs Ramsay:-

  Memory of Mrs Ramsay herself is a crucial, shaping factor in the final section, ‘The Lighthouse’, whilst Mrs Ramsay is no longer physically there in person, she remains as a continuing presence in the minds of the other characters. Partly, this is because she is automatically connected in their minds with the location when Lily arrives, tired, ‘she had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs Ramsay, presumably’. One reason that Mrs Ramsay is so keen on going to the lighthouse is that his wife ‘used to send the men things’.

       But Mrs Ramsay is far more than a ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night because she also had the ability to put her hand out from the past, and writing the heart. For Lily values the memory of the older woman since it provides an image of wholeness, some kind of answer just in its very existence, to the painful question of the meaning of life. In a small way, Lily is seeking to find and represent unity by organizing shapes on a canvas hence part of the value she derives from remembering Mrs Ramsay lies in admiration for the way in which she could bring people together. It is only after her death that Lily realizes what a power was in the human soul!...... That woman   …  resolved everything into simplicity. She had made out of what would otherwise have been miserable silliness and spite Lily and Charles Tansley squabbling at the dinner table, for Example ‘something .  .  . which survived, after all these years, complete. . . and . . . stayed in the mind almost like a work of art’. Importantly also Lily realizes that Mrs Ramsay had the ability to make of the moment something permanent this was of the nature of revelation. But it is in the creation of an actual work of art that Lily tries to make of the moment something permanent herself. Having remained unmarried, her triumph is to be found in her own, personal achievement not in the identification of her life with that of another, the illusory idea towards which Mrs Ramsay’s own manoeuvres were always tending.

Conclusion:-

We must consider, too that it is not just Lily who is trying to capture the sense of the moment, of the solid and the shifting, through an aesthetic bringing together to some extent, Virginia Woolf is here talking about her own practice in writing the novel.