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
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.
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