The Re-enchantment Way: Temporal Experimentation in Woolf, Proust, and the Modernist Novel

Key MacFarlane Submitted for English Honors

Colgate University Spring 2011

Professor John Connor Professor Michael Coyle

             

    iii          

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,

consumption, inversion”—undermine traditional nineteenth-century conceptions of the linear

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

mimetic representation of a loss of meaning. Instead, I suggest a reading of modernist novels

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

reality. This reading—called the “Modernist Production Thesis”—seeks to move modernist

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

iv  

 

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

produce constellations of meaning and to theorize a transcendental awareness of reality, thereby

redeeming and resignifying the world. Time is also a function, moreover, of these writers’

attempts to manufacture an authentic and seemingly all-inclusive modernist text, a meaning-

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,

promoting instead a mystical and private contemplation of pure time.

    v          

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iii

Abbreviations vii

I. Critical Interest in Modernism’s Thematization of Time 1

II. Woolf’s Temporal Experimentation 23

III. Proust’s Temporal Experimentation 53

IV. Conclusion 77

Works Cited 81

vi  

 

    vii          

ABBREVIATIONS CE Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays CPBR Bertrand Russell, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell Diary Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf ES Max Weber, Economy and Society FTA Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again GW Marcel Proust, Guermantes Way IM Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics Matter Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter MB Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being MD Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway MF Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” O Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography OKEW Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World Sociology Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology SW Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way SYGF Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower TFW Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will TL Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse VO Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

viii  

 

1  

 

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

time—prevalent in nineteenth-century discourse—became problematized and undermined in the

literary space of modernism. At the risk of oversimplification, prior to the advent of

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

gone before” (51).

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,

2  

 

“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,

experimented with and thematized nonlinear conceptions of temporality. In an attempt to

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

cultural history in order to account for modernism’s obsession with time.

The Great War Thesis

The simplest critical model explaining modernism’s problematization of time is what I

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

3  

 

lands round Ploegsteert” (79). To represent and make sense of such an irregular event, soldiers

and citizens—including modernist novelists—had to rethink and revise deeply ingrained

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

infused with new meaning and a new temporal logic.

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

eradicated by the realities of war.

4  

 

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

unproblematic insofar as it appeared to accurately reflect the logic of reality.

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

5  

 

strange newness and overwhelming force of experience clamped the soldier in the present as if

bracketed from past and future” (292).

Much of this “strange newness” can be attributed to the ways in which the Great War

shattered individuals’ conventional notions about warfare—and in turn their conceptions of

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

wartime events, virtually as these events occurred (Kern 295).

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

uniform—“so intimately associated with aristocratic society” (Kern 303)—with camouflage, an

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

best ways of ordering objects in pictorial space” (Kern 303).

6  

 

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

modern world” (11).

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

7  

 

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

entrenched hierarchies of order and to rethink the temporal organization of reality.

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

temporality artistically obsolete, modernists formally experimented with temporal notions—such

as dilation, truncation, compression, expansion—in an attempt to grasp or account for a “new

kind of human experience” (Hynes 105).

The Culture and Technology Thesis

A second model attributes modernists’ temporal experimentation, not to a specific

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

8  

 

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

effort to reflect or grapple with a notional reordering of reality.

The array of technological innovations adduced by this theoretical model include, in

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

Technology Thesis, undermined traditional understandings of space-time. Kern argues, for

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,

9  

 

camera stoppage and film editing enabled time to be “compressed, expanded, or reversed”

(Kern 30).

In addition to technological innovations, the Culture and Technology Thesis points to a

number of cultural developments that caused or contributed to changing perceptions of time.

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

novel—were caused by ingenuities in technology, as well as by other theoretical innovations like

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

view of linear time.

10  

 

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

rationally grasped or quantitatively measured (TFW 126).

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

distortions of dreams and fantasies (Kern 31).

According to the Culture and Technology Thesis, these philosophical and scientific

advancements, in addition to technological innovations, were exploited by modernists. Writers

like Proust and Woolf, that is, experimented with temporality in an effort to mimetically

represent the changes in temporal apperception caused by cultural and technological

developments.

11  

 

The Imperialism Thesis

For a Marxist account of superstructural change, perhaps it is the most satisfying to link

moderists’ experimentation with time to a shift in the economic base—from industrial to

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,

a genre preoccupied with biographical time. Such modernist reworkings—which necessarily

involve a revision of linear, developmental temporality—Esty attributes to the economic factors

of the colonial system.

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

temporality of individual experience. Within an industrial capitalist society, a novelist could

12  

 

therefore effectively analogize the social and economic workings of a nation-state through the

aesthetic education and linear development of a protagonist.

Colonialism, however, demarcated a new chronotope, one whose unboundedness,

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

system is undiscoverable within metropolitan existential experience—“pieces of the puzzle are

missing; it can never be fully reconstructed” (“Imperialism” 51) since parts of the system are

now located within the colonial periphery.

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

13  

 

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

colonial world develop—or fail to develop—according to different temporal logics; an

unadulterated belief in teleology or linear historical growth is thus no longer feasible.

Because of the opacity of a global economy, as well as the non-teleological development

of the colonial periphery, linear biographical development—once an efficacious analogue for the

stable emergence of nation-states under industrial capitalism—is no longer capable of accurately

representing the workings of imperialism. The traditional bildungsroman is therefore unfeasible

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

view, what “modernism seeks to solve” (“Imperialism” 51).

To “solve” or address this schism within imperial reality, modernist novelists—

according to Esty’s argument—formally altered and experimented with temporality. Many

adopted forms of “[m]etamorphosis, dilation, truncation, consumption, inversion,” all of which

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

14  

 

yet uneven pace of development seemed to have thrown the time of modernity out of joint”

(“Colony” 87).

The Secularization Thesis

A fourth model connects modernism’s problemetization of time to a secularization

thesis. This thesis is most notably put forward by Max Weber in his theorization on the

“disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of the modern world, although similar arguments concerning

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

explain modernist temporal experimentation.

Weber argues that the modern, rational-scientific world is marked by a process of

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

specific components of this rationalization include “standardization, commodification,

measurement in terms of efficiency, cost-benefit analysis, legalistic administrative procedures,

and bureaucratic coordination and rule” (Scaff 104).

This world of rationalization and bureaucratization, according to Weber, leads to a loss

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,

15  

 

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

commerce and profit (Jameson, Seeds 84).

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

explanation: the Weberian thesis of rationalization and disenchantment.

16  

 

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

represent temporality in a new manner. In The Seeds of Time, he writes,

What happens in the West to the existential—the deeper reference of Weberian Entzauberung or desacralisation—can most instructively be observed in the realm of time, which on the one hand is seized upon in its measurability […] and on the other becomes the deep bottomless vegetative time of Being itself, no longer draped and covered with myth or inherited religion. (84)

Within modernity, the processes of rationalization and disenchantment eliminate conventional

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”:

they may experience temporality unrestricted and unobscured by linear or teleological

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,

the entirety of Western modernism, Jameson argues, is marked by an effort to capture or

recreate this unconventional experience of time:

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

17  

 

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

an attempt to represent the temporal experience of a disenchanted world. This experimentation

therefore seeks to mimetically respond to a perceived deficit—one that is caused by the

destruction, at the hands of secularization, of traditional value-structures and temporal

hierarchies.

Problems with the Four Theses

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

of modernists’ thematization of temporality.

The Culture and Technology Thesis is insufficient because it is vague and indefinite in

assigning an original cause for modernists’ experimentation of time. It seeks to explain

alterations of time through a plurality of cultural and technological innovations, rather than

18  

 

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

indebtedness. Thus, instead of providing a firm explanation of modernists’ temporal

experimentation, the Culture and Technology Thesis runs the risk of creating a chain, ad

infinitum, of causal factors—tracing explanations increasingly further back in history.

The Imperialism Thesis, moreover, limits an explanation of modernism’s use of time to

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—

for why writers perceived a loss of meaning in the modern world.

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

19  

 

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

discussion of one necessarily entails the mention of others.

Modernist Production Thesis

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

to accurately represent and connect with private or social experience. Novelistic

experimentations with time, according to all four theses, allow modernists to formally reproduce

these experiential gaps by representing a world of discontinuous and unconventional temporal

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.

20  

 

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

manufacture a sense of meaningful wholeness and to provide access to a formerly depleted

reality; it seeks, in other words, to re-enchant the world.

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

21  

 

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

absolute inclusion by masking the processes of exclusion.

In striving to produce a totality-effect, modernist texts tend, as Jameson argues, “toward

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.

22  

 

Modernists thus seek to provide a mystical remedy to the problem of meaning under modernity—

a remedy that distracts us from the problem itself.

23  

 

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

temporal preoccupations simply to the influence of a particular philosopher or philosophical

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

Proust, critics have mainly focused on the influence of Bergson.

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

ultimately fails to provide—and even distracts us from—an adequate explanation of why

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

back in history to identify influences, ad infinitum, consequently rendering the question of

influence insufficient in addressing the issue of time in Woolf’s and Proust’s fiction.

24  

 

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.

Woolf and Bergson

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

and the Stream of Conscious Novel published in 1963 (107).

These critical projects attempt to connect Woolf’s representations of time to Bergson’s

notions of durée (duration) and intuition. According to Bergson, absolute reality is an ineffable

and continuous flux—which he calls “durée” or “pure time”—consisting of “a succession of

states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it” (IM

25  

 

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).

In an attempt to connect Woolf to these philosophical concepts, Gillies argues that

“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),

a temporal postulate central to Woolf’s novels (Banfield, Phantom 119).

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).

26  

 

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

epistemologically isolated perspective. Woolf’s conception of time therefore never fully

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

intuition is constructed—like Clarissa’s transcendental awareness of interpersonal connection

(MD 149)—it is impermanent. Woolf’s temporal ideas, then, unlike Bergson’s conception of

flux, maintain the isolation of perspectival moments across time.

Woolf and Cambridge

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

27  

 

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

of time serves both to capture and overcome gaps in experience.

Banfield’s argument is not simply that these Cambridge philosophers influenced

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

epistemological questions” (Phantom 9).

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

28  

 

foundation, strengthened by logic and mathematics. Science’s knowledge of the external world

was only expressible logically and mathematically” (Phantom 5).

This affirmation of physical reality, however, led to an “epistemological urgency”

(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?

To overcome this skeptical problem and to answer Idealism, Cambridge philosophers

sought to formulate a theory of knowledge that maintained the framework of empiricism

(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,

29  

 

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

overcome. These worries place Woolf—like the Cambridge philosophers—in a British

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?

How is a constant identity possible? Is objective knowledge obtainable if everything we receive

is through the senses?

Woolf’s representation of time asks the same questions: in her world of discrete sensory

moments interpersonal communication is problematic, continuity of the self is disputable,

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

30  

 

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

artifact that remedies or rehabilitates reality.

Woolf’s conception of time is therefore part and parcel of a theory of knowledge—one

she shares with the Cambridge philosophers—that seeks to simultaneously register and

overcome a set of skeptical questions concerning individual experience. To represent these

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

subjectless insofar as they exist outside of consciousness as logical possibilities, as “private

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

31  

 

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

have been lost.

In Russell’s theory of knowledge, these subjectless perspectives or collections of sense-

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

certainty—becomes a creative act, a construction whose possibility is afforded by the positing of

sensibilia. In Banfield’s words, Woolf’s “principle of unity is not a pre-established harmony

conferred ahead of time by authorial intention. It is constructed ex post facto via a style and an

art” (Banfield, Phantom 1).

By tracing Woolf’s temporal ideas to Cambridge philosophy, Banfield’s argument is in

danger of inadequately approaching, as well as distracting us from, the question of time in

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

32  

 

solution for a solipsistic problem of meaning. That being said, Banfield’s argument is most

obviously a manifestation of the Culture and Technology Thesis, attributing Woolf’s

problematization of time to cultural developments in the realms of science and philosophy.

Woolf and Empire

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

narrator, Rachel Vinrace.

While not yet completely realized, Woolf’s modernist style is implicit in The Voyage Out

insofar as the novel experiments—both formally and thematically—with anti-development,

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

a fully formed modernist style:

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).

33  

 

Esty, too, sees a “connection between Rachel’s ego dissolution in the colonial setting and the

development of Woolf’s modernist style” (“Colony” 81).

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

ego-dissolution: it shares with Rachel a “generalized unboundedness,” underdevelopment, and

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

possibility for substantial progress (Esty, “Colony” 78).

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

34  

 

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

to account for and to analogize—and therefore to grasp—the complex workings of global

capitalism.

Woolf’s Modernist Style

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

in constructing a particular poetic “medium” (“Tradition” 41). Similarly, for Woolf, in an

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,

35  

 

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

disconnected and incoherent” (MF 150) the product may be.

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

pursuit of reality requires a rejection of nineteenth-century realism, dismissing the possibility of

an objective representation of life. Her treatment of novelistic time rather than a function of

literary convention, is part of an effort to capture authentic human experience. Woolf’s

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

impressions of ordinary experience and in doing so, to redeem experience.

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;

36  

 

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

simultaneously seeks to provide a putative solution.

This solution is theorized in Woolf’s notion of “moments of being,” which, in her essay

“A Sketch of the Past,” she describes as temporal instances of extreme awareness or

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

experiencing such a moment in childhood:

‘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

ordinary temporal instance.

37  

 

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

way of rehabilitating meaning.

Unity in To the Lighthouse: Content

In her major novels, Woolf rehabilitates meaning—on both the level of form and the

level of content—through the construction of unities and wholes. These meaningful

38  

 

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

objects and biographies if they are to be coherent and meaningful.

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

reluctance to participate—into a coherent whole” (23). “Nothing seemed to have merged,”

39  

 

Woolf writes, Mrs. Ramsay’s guests “all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging

and flowing and creating rested on her” (TL 83).

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

offering, to combine, to create” (MD 119).

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.”

40  

 

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

perceptions” (CE, II, 229).

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

an artistic—as well as a transcendent—medium insofar as it reveals interpersonal relations and

accesses the “interconnection of all things” (Gloversmith 103).

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

41  

 

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;

then I shall avoid that awkward space” (TL 84).

Through this organization, Lily hopes to capture on canvas—and thus to make

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

an atomistic and solipsistic universe, but it paradoxically suggests a method of recouping

meaning in such a world. Re-enchantment—the creation of meaningful wholes—occurs in

42  

 

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’

must continue’” (Lee 23).

Unity in To the Lighthouse: 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.

43  

 

To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway represent two such attempts to formally produce

“fictions of unity” (Gloversmith 105)—to construct moments of connection and meaning in a

solipsistic and perspectival universe. The transience of these moments paradoxically enables

Woolf to produce, in Jameson’s terminology, a totality-effect. If there is no permanent or

authoritative unity of meaning, then the reader is invited to construct (and reconstruct)

meaningful “moments” in a multitude of ways. Such a phenomenon gives Woolf’s novels a

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

representation of fleeting and arrested moments of being—in an effort to produce a modernist

totality. In this way, she is invested in the paradoxical project of using time to simultaneously

separate and combine the disparate components of experience.

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

44  

 

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

break of unity in my design” (Diary, III, 36).

But it is precisely this break in unity—this temporal hole—which creates continuity

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”

provides an objective grounding, a firm “background” or “objective residue” (Banfield, Phantom

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

not wholly disconnected from reality.

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.

Banfield elucidates Woolf’s notion of interludes in relation to Russell’s idea that

“continuity” between individual perspectives is produced by filling in “intervals” (Banfield,

45  

 

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

objects and therefore no way of achieving meaningful interpersonal communication. But

“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

connections between occupied perspectives, thereby generating stable constellations of meaning in

a world of isolated fragments.

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

46  

 

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

“logical ‘fiction,’ made up of private elements […] is constructed by the formlessness

surrounding its units” (Phantom 148).

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.

Fragmentation and empty forms—like the myriad of vacuous objects in “Time

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.

47  

 

Ramsay, the reader is invited to engage in a constant creative effort of reconciling scraps and

fragments.

The invitation to read and reorder To the Lighthouse in a myriad of ways—afforded by

Woolf’s experimentation with time—produces a totality-effect by distracting the reader from

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

distracted from doubting the completeness or wholeness of the novel.

Unity in Mrs. Dalloway

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

Woolf to posit—as well as to remedy—a phenomenally fractured universe.

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

48  

 

“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

these experiences from one another.

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

clock time indicates by counterpoint the subjective nature of temporality, it simultaneously

offers Woolf an organizing device or scaffolding—like “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse—with

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

49  

 

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

an epistemological abyss in experience.

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

experiences this flux of impressions early in the novel:

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

create the chimera of all-inclusivity—through the fragmentation of sensory perspectives.

Different characters in the novel, like Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, present different experiences

and disparate configurations of sense-data.

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

50  

 

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

possible range of sensory impressions.

Clarissa’s Transcendental Theory in Mrs. Dalloway: Woolf’s Politics

Woolf’s re-enchantment project, nevertheless, fails to generate a politics in which

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

interpersonal communication that exists over-and-above or independent of disunity.

But Woolf’s re-enchantment project fails to yield a politics of solidarity for another

reason: her solution to the problem of interpersonal communication advocates a kind of

“aesthetic appreciation” of moments of being that potentially distracts the individual from

collective action. This type of appreciation is developed in Clarissa’s “transcendental theory”

51  

 

(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

phenomenological fragments of our identities exist outside of our immediate consciousnesses,

persisting in the external world around us—in people, objects, locations—waiting to be

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

sensations one perceives in a given temporal instance. It enables her,

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)

In a world of isolated sensory moments, we are confined to fragmented perspectives of our

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.

52  

 

While providing a putative solution to the problem of solipsism, Clarissa’s

“transcendental” awareness ultimately impedes a practical solution to the perceived loss of

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

moments of being, of instances of transcendental apperception. As a result, Woolf eliminates

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

employs temporality in an effort to overcome meaning-vacuums, this thematization of time

simply distracts the individual from his historical situation, causing him to forget the original

problem of meaning.

53  

 

III. Proust’s Temporal Experimentation

Proust and Bergson

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

similar remediation project.

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

connection between these individuals is further strengthened by a familial bond: Bergson

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).

54  

 

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

quantitative” (121). The first multiplicity—consisting of the continuous flux of interpenetrating

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

moreover, constitutes the absolute or essential nature of reality.

However, one cannot access this multiplicity or pure duration through the rational

analysis of temporal states. Once qualitative time is measured, it becomes a quantitative or

“numerical” (Kristeva 315) multiplicity: “the duration is presented to immediate consciousness,

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).

Prima facie, Proust’s À la recherche advocates a Bergsonian distinction between qualitative

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

55  

 

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

problematized by Proust’s denial of Bergsonian philosophy: “I have enough to do,” he wrote in

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

be reduced to Bergson” (313).

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

direct bearing on a particular situation” (106-7). Because the processes of involuntary or

56  

 

spontaneous memory fail to lead to “satisfactory human conduct,” Bisson concludes that the

they are “irrelevant or dangerous” in Bergson’s view.

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

accesses a qualitative multiplicity that is non-spatial—“continuous and irreducible to

numeration”—Proust’s involuntary memory “is contingent on spatial and perfectly numerical

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).

Proust’s Modernist Style

A discussion of Proust’s connection (or lack of connection) to Bergsonism runs the risk

of underestimating the ways in which Proust’s thematization of temporality acts as a formal

device for re-enchantment. Similar to Woolf’s modernist style, Proust experiments with time in

57  

 

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

“communication” between past and present selves—consequently subverting and disorienting

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

surround us simultaneously” (FTA 197).

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).

58  

 

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

before I left it” (FTA 162).

Contrasted to these gaps in time, Proust dilates temporally-limited events, dedicating an

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

59  

 

wrote that he failed “to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in

bed before falling asleep” (De Botton 33).

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

without limit” (“Joyce or Proust?” 195).

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,

60  

 

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,

thus creating the conditions for the rediscovery of reality.

Voluntary Memory

Similar to Woolf, Proust theorizes the loss and recovery of phenomenological or

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

artificial impression we give ourselves of it when we try by an act of will to represent it to

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

misrepresents and incompletely portrays the past.

According to Proust, voluntary memory is performed by “intelligence” (FTA 188) and

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

61  

 

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

without them” (SYGF 235).

Proust’s restricted awareness of reality, as critic Richard Durán points out, constitutes a

“limited temporal perception” (77), namely, an experience of “unidimensional or linear time”

(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

conception of time is represented by the utilitarian functioning of voluntary memory, which,

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

62  

 

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

present instant” (SYGF 527).

The limitations of unidimensional time are implicit in Habit in a different manner. As

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

pernicious elements of color, dimension, and smell” (SYGF 504).

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

revelatory—and unexpected—moments of fourth-dimensional time. “It is only because we

have forgotten,” Marcel muses, “that we can now and then return to the person we once were”

63  

 

(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

aspects of experience, he reclaims these aspects—and in doing so re-enchants reality—by

forgetting or destabilizing the opinions, ideas, or appearances that these two faculties have formed

and ingrained. “Remembering somebody,” according to Proust, “is actually a process of

forgetting” (SYGF 496).

This level of forgetting occurs during moments of involuntary memory, which allow

Proust to thematize a nonlinear experience of time—what Durán calls fourth-dimensional time.

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

uses involuntary memory—and thus nonlinear time—to theorize a method of redeeming

phenomenological experience and rehabilitating reality.

Unlike voluntary memory which uses intelligence to consciously access the past, this

second form of recollection is fortuitous: Marcel’s experiences of involuntary memory are

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

64  

 

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,

controlled the authenticity of the past that it resuscitated” (FTA 187).

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,

from my cup of tea” (SW 48).

Most of Marcel’s pleasurable experiences of involuntary memory, moreover, explicitly

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

65  

 

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

essence of reality. For Proust, involuntary recollection—the experience of nonlinear time—thus

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

unidimensional time has concealed.

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

other words, by ridding us of Habit and of “customary appearances,” involuntary memory

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

100) aspects of the world around him.

66  

 

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).

Proust’s Moments of Being

Instances of involuntary memory thus constitute temporal experiences similar to Woolf’s

“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

rehabilitate an impoverished world. This impoverishment, moreover, is theorized using similar

temporal conceptions—Woolf’s moments of non-being and Proust’s moments of voluntary

67  

 

memory—in which the individual fails to grasp the world as an interconnected, unified whole.

Proust’s representation of perceptual deficiency, however, differs from Woolf in a significant

way: whereas Woolf’s moments of non-being are instances of unawareness, Proust attributes

voluntary memory to rational consciousness. And conversely, as Woolf’s moments of being

constitute acts of intense consciousness, Proust’s examples of involuntary memory are fortuitous and

exist outside of intelligence.

Despite these differences, both writers seek to reveal the essence of—and consequently

re-enchant—reality through the documentation of moments of being. Thus, although Proust’s

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

of what it was” (FTA 342).

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

68  

 

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

temporal events. In fact, Proust’s involuntary memory seems to render interpersonal

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

synchronicity of his past and present.

Unity and Totality in À la recherche

Proust seeks to produce moments of involuntary memory, as I have suggested, through

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

416-7). For instance, in one of his paintings,

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

69  

 

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).

Formally, these chains of temporal associations are a function of Proust’s

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

emphasis on the fourth-dimensional temporality of involuntary memory disorients and

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

meaningful constellations, into temporal monads.

Proust’s construction of temporal monads, like Woolf’s attempt to create formal unities,

constitutes a modernist effort to formally generate meaning in a world lacking in

phenomenological content. Specifically, Proust seeks to meaningfully rehabilitate the existential

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

70  

 

result, the solitary moment is infused with new meaning—meaning that is borrowed from and

that relies on the excavation of the past.

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

complete phenomenological scope or essential nature of reality. This totality-effect, in other

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.

According to Jameson, an author achieves a totality-effect only insofar as he is able to

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

71  

 

multiple possibilities of meaning: a single temporal moment yields and is connected with a

myriad of anecdotes and past events.

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

language production by offering a solution to the problem of external communication. The

autonomization of a text, as Jameson explains, is impeded by its unavoidable reference to the

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

external to itself. Such a language is merely communicative or functional rather than

autonomous; instead of achieving the status of all-inclusivity, the text is inextricably linked to an

outside source.

To solve this problem of an external receiver, Proust’s “sentence production demands

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

72  

 

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

pure self-consciousness: it communicates not with others but with itself.

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

outside, À la recherche achieves autonomous status; it becomes a self-inclusive artifact.

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

73  

 

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.

Cork-Lined Room: Proust’s Politics

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.

74  

 

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

75  

 

past and on the act of writing. This endorsement is thematically reflected in À la recherche

through Marcel’s decision to document his experiences of involuntary memory. Such a

project—which is intended to re-envision reality—comprises an entirely private pursuit, one that

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.

As a result, Proust’s re-enchantment project, like Woolf’s, is invested in the elimination

of communication. While the thematization of nonlinear time and moments of involuntary

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

persons. Instead, Proust’s conception of temporality celebrates the pleasures of private

meditation—pleasures that distract the individual away from any sort of collective action and

towards the isolation of a cork-lined room.

76  

 

77  

 

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-

vacuum and to rehabilitate experience. This feature of modernists’ temporal preoccupation—

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

using time—formally and thematically—to produce meaningful constellations and to envision

reality in new ways.

78  

 

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

creates interpersonal connections by simultaneously severing and conjoining dissimilar

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

unconcerned with interpersonal communication; instead, his moments of being—i.e., his

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

the discrepancies between their formal and thematic treatments of time.

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

inevitable processes of exclusion and to thus generate a totality-effect or a false sense of

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

79  

 

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

completeness of one day in June.

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.

Ultimately, however, this sense of totality is artificial—thus distracting us from modernity’s

problem of meaning.

80  

 

81  

 

Works Cited Angus, Ian H. “Disenchantment and Modernity: The Mirror of Technique.” Human Studies 6.2

(1983): 141-166. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and Epistemology of Modernism.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. ———. “Remembrance and Tense Past.” The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Ed.

Morag Shiach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 48-64. Beer, Gillian. “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. 75-93. Benjamin, Anna S. “Towards an Understanding of the Meaning of Virginia Woolf's Mrs.

Dalloway.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6.2 (1965): 214-227. Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. T.E. Hulme. New York:

Macmillan, 1955. ———. Time and Free Will. Trans. F.L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Company, 1913. Bisson, L. A., “Proust, Bergson, and George Eliot.” The Modern Language Review 40.2 (Apr.

1945): 104-114. Butor, Michel. “Les Oeuvres d’art imaginaires chez Proust.” Répertoire II. Paris: Les Editions de

Minuit, 1964. Childs, Peter. Modernism. London: Routledge, 2000 De Botton, Alain. How Proust Can Change Your Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Durán, Richard. “Fourth-Dimensional Time and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.” South

Atlantic Review 56.2 (May 1991): 73-90. Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Trans. Robert W. Lawson. New York:

Henry Holt and Company, 1920. Eliot, T.S. "Little Gidding." Four Quartets. Tristan Fecit. Web. 22 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/gidding.html>. Eliot, T.S., “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode.

Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1974. Esty, Jed. “The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of An African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe”

Victorian Studies 49.3 (2007): 407-430.

82  

 

———. “Virginia Woolf’s Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction.” Modernism and

Colonialism. Eds. Richard Begam and Michael Vadez Moses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 70-90.

Ford, Madox Ford. “Arms and the Mind” Esquire 94 (Dec. 1980): 78-80. Froula, Christine. “Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia

Woolf’sThe Voyage Out.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5.1 (1986): 63-90. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. Gillies, Mary Ann. Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University

Press, 1996. Gloversmith, Frank. “Autonomy Theory.” Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Ed. Harold Bloom.

New York: Chelsea House, 1988. 95-117. Greisman, H. C. “‘Disenchantment of the World’: Romanticism, Aesthetics and Sociological

Theory.” The British Journal of Sociology 27.4 (Dec. 1976): 495-507. Hynes, Samuel Lynn. A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture. New York:

Atheneum, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. “Joyce or Proust?” The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007. ———. “Modernism and Imperialism.” Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: U

of Minnesota P, 1990. 43-66. ———.The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP: 1994. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. Kristeva, Julia. Time & Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. New York: Columbia

UP, 1996. Landy, Joshua. Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 2004. Lassman, Peter. “The Rule of Man Over Man: Politics, Power, and Legitimation.” The Cambridge

Companion to Weber. Ed. Stephen Turner. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. 83-98. Lee, Hermione. “To the Lighthouse: Completed Forms.” Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Ed.

Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. 9-26.

83  

 

Leed, Eric. J. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP:

1979. Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007 Meisel, Perry. “Deferred Action in To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Ed.

Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. 139-148. Morrisson, Mark S. “Why Modernist Studies and Science Studies Need Each Other.”

Modernism/modernity 9.4 (Nov., 2002): 675-682. Pugh, Anthony R. “The Ending of Swann Revisited.” Marcel Proust. Ed. Harold Bloom. Broomall,

PA: Chelsea House, 2004. 201-217. Proust, Marcel. Finding Time Again. Trans. Ian Patterson. London: Penguin, 2003. ———. The Guermantes Way. Trans. Mark Treharne. New York, NY: Penguin, 2005. ———. Interview with Elie-Joseph Bois. “Variétés littéraires: A la recherche du temps perdu.”

Le Temps 13 November 1913. p. 4.

———. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Trans. James Grieve. New York, NY: Penguin, 2005.

———. Swann's Way. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York, NY: Penguin, 2004. Russell, Bertrand. ABC of Relativity. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. ———. The Analysis of Matter. New York: Dover, 1927. ———. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. 12 vols. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985-92. ———. Mysticism and Logic. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1917. ———. Our Knowledge of the External World: A Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. London:

George Allen & Unwin, 1914.

Scaff, Lawrence A. “Weber on the Cultural Situation of the Modern Age.” The Cambridge Companion to Weber. Ed. Stephen Turner. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. 99-116.

Schleifer, Ronald. Modernism and Time: the Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and

Culture, 1880-1930. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Toulmin, Stephen, and June Goodfield. The Discovery of Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

84  

 

Turner, Bryan S. Preface. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. By Max Weber. Ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 1991. xii-xxx.

Watt, Adam. The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011. Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1978. ———. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxon, UK:

Routledge, 1991. Whimster, Sam. Introduction to Part III. The Essential Weber: A Reader. By Max Weber. London:

Routledge, 2004. 205-214. Whitworth, Michael H. Einstein's Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. 4 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1966-7. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1977-80. ———. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1984. ———. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego: Harcourt, 1985. ———. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005. ———. Orlando: a Biography. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006. ———. To the Lighthouse. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1981. ———. The Voyage Out. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Williams, Raymond. “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” The Politics

of Modernism. Ed. Tom Pinkney. London: Verso, 1989. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C. K. Ogden. New York: Barnes and

Noble, 2003.