Authors: Ruth Gruber
Where the party is the goal of adherence, Big Ben is the ineluctable clasp between the characters, the great unity, symbol of time, of the present. It strikes inexorably. Each one hears it, in a different place, in a different mood, in a different action, yet for that one second all are linked consciously together.
“Big Ben struck the half-hour.
“How extraordinary it was, strange, yes touching to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go—but where? …
“Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the last relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to break, like the spray of an exhausted wave, upon the body of Miss Kilman standing still in the street for a moment to mutter ‘It is the flesh’.”
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The fifteen minutes between a quarter of twelve and noon consume fifty pages of elucidation, of tracing the mental reversions to the past. As in Proust, the interest in time evinces a peculiar philosophic trend in Virginia Woolf’s mentality; it is her problem of mortality. Between the flowing cycles of life and death, time is irrevocable. “The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him; with all this going on … She felt somehow very like him—the young man
who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.”
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To her feminine perception, the philosophic enigma of time offers another stimulus of poetic beauty. Time is an experience more than a concept. She describes it not as a dialectic thinker but as a poet, sensitive to its lyrical associations. The simple stimulus “ ‘It is time’ ” given by Septimus’ Italian wife, evokes fanciful reactions which play with the word as well as its concept. “The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time.”
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This feminine impressionism, content to experience time simply as a sensation, is deepened in “Orlando” where time becomes a philosophic experiment. The hypothesis of one life developing through three centuries shows a new phase in Virginia Woolf’s temporal concern; a cerebral rather than sensory excitement. A subtle reversion has occurred in her picture of the march of time; in “Jacob’s Room” it is the inevitable succession of one day, one measured interval by another; it is the normal ascendency in time which had characterized the first two novels. In “Orlando” the normal is variated; Orlando moves forward with the same inevitability with which Jacob matures, but at a different tempo. An arbitrary ratio of one year to civilization’s ten might be erected; Orlando lives through a time succession of more than three hundred years, growing approximately thirty years old. This fitful redisposition of time is not only a romantic conjecture but is founded upon the maxims of philosophy. Einstein, disproving an absolute time-concept and making relativity of time absolute, demonstrated that since two lightrays can move at a different speed in relation to each other, so two men can move at a relatively different tempo in space. Thus it is conceivable that while one man may move very rapidly and reach an age of eighty sun years, another may remain in inertia with eternal youth, or move relatively slower. While the measured calendar time progresses from Shakespeare to the present and more than fifteen generations of men live and die, Orlando progresses in a time peculiar to himself through the same
space. It is a poetization of Einstein’s hypothesis: “Nicht der Raumpunkt, in dem etwas geschieht, nicht der Zeitpunkt, in dem etwas geschieht, hat physikalische Realität, sondern nur das Ereignis selbst. Zwischen zwei Ereignissen gibt es keine absolute (vom Bezugsraum unabhängige) räumliche und keine absolute zeitliche Beziehung, wohl aber eine absolute (von der Wahl des Bezugsraumes unabhängige) zeitraumliche Beziehung.”
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Orlando is a physical possibility in a time-space continuum. Ignorant of the relative speed in which the average man matures, he is naturally unconscious that his motion is retarded. Apprehending only his own time-progress, he perceives no discrepancy in knowing Queen Elizabeth, as a child, Pope and Johnson at thirty, and Victoria and the contemporaries only a few years later.
The possibilities which such a dislocation of time offer to imaginative literature have been acknowledged before, with most acclaim perhaps in Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. John Lloyd Balderston’s drama, “Berkeley Square” appearing in the same year as “Orlando”, employs a plot also founded in relativity. A man of the twentieth century returns to the eighteenth, like a refracted or retarded lightray. By retracing two hundred years of space, he possesses knowledge of the completed actions and spoken words existing permanently in space. He can predict with surety all that the characters are yet to do. The future for them is a completed past in his experience. Like “Orlando” and “A Connecticut Yankee”, “Berkeley Square” is a fantasy; the play of time lends itself to humor. In Virginia Woolf’s personality, laughter is a vital element.
But tragedy and hopelessness are implicit also in her scrutiny of time. Despite creative mental variations, there are cycles of seasons and years and, more sorrowfully, of deaths. All striving, all individual ambitions and creations seem as nothing in the face of eternity, when “the very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”
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The law of the universe builds the vast background of “To the Lighthouse”. The uncontrollable procession of ages of time, broods over the two living days described. The Bergsonian problems of personal and physical time have been swept into the boundless problems of infinity. The past and present, all-important before, now lose their meaning, as Virginia Woolf grows more conscious of their ultimate fate.
The timeless cycles of life and death, speculations of the earliest religions, lie at the basis of all her thought. It is not
the immediate problem of “to be or not to be”, but a remoter enigma of how long to be—of eternal existence or transitory-fame. The present is vital, is not to be annihilated; it is the foundation upon which personal immortality must rest. But tragedy is deep-rooted wherever the will for fame is greater than the power. Mr. Ramsay, the scholarly professor, is tragically aware of his limitations, of his puny temporal fame. Yet in the face of futility, Virginia Woolf makes him persevere, obstinately, admirably. In a dramatic struggle, he “consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid mind.
“It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q—R—Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the ram’s horn which made the handle of the urn, and proceeded. ‘Then R … ’ He braced himself. He clenched himself.
“Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?”
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Genius? Who is a genius—the riddle Virginia Woolf delves into her own mind to fathom, is significantly threshed out by Mr. Ramsay, who “could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish; on the other the gifted, the
inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash—the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R …
“Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.”
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The victim of time and mortality.
Where “Jacob’s Room” was built upon a normal succession of recorded days, and “Mrs. Dalloway” upon a static unit, one day through which the past became dynamic, “To the Lighthouse” is a synthesis of both. The one day is expanded to two, suggesting an interim in the common course of time. The children of the first day are grown in the second, many have married, the war has been fought, many are dead. The two days described appear as the summits of two ocean waves, bound together by the fall and reascent of time. With stylistic adaptation, the flowingness of time is echoed in the writing. The darkness of night is symbolic of this interim where all shapes appear in their primal amorphousness. Sleep is synonymous with death; the accidents of living form are shrouded.
“So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a down-pouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say ‘This is he’ or ‘This is she’. Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.”
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In the wider voids of space, of “nothingness”, time loses its significance. There is a poetic fatalism, and yet Virginia Woolf does not lose her active interest in life. Decay is inevitable, but only through new life is it apprehensible. In the interlude between the two days, she depicts the mortality in time, yet it is “certain airs”, vestiges of life, which repudiate a complete non-being. “Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and
swollen sea-moistened wood-work certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room, questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking. Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?
“So some random light directing them from an uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs, that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy.”
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The bed is, with curious mysticism, protected from decay. It is the symbol of organic life.
This is no pessimism, “no literature of negation to the point of being nihilist”,
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which Harold Nicolson describes as typical of Virginia Woolf. Some flash of hope appears within the deepest chaos, the most desperate doubt. Futility is a passing attitude; it only “seems impossible” from the wrecks of physical and inner storms, to compose once more “a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.”
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Even where a philosophy of futilitarianism seems most compelling, traces of residual hope appear. “
Almost it would appear
that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.”
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A shattering hopeless nihilism would not modify itself with “almost” and “it would appear”. Virginia Woolf? nocturnal questioning of the universe, loses its pessimistic despair in the coming of day. “Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its clear image on the wall opposite … Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs,
rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—‘Will you fade? Will you perish?’—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.”
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