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MLenarduzzi - 5 A - Modernist Fiction: Moments of being and moments of non being by V.Woolf
by - (2012-01-31)
Up to 5 A - Modernist Fiction: V. Woolf and J. Joyce
MOMENTS OF BEING by Virginia Woolf. Paralysis by James Joyce.
Virgina Woolf came naturally into the profession of writing. She had the opportunity to come into contact with the most read people of her time.
However she wanted to experiment new ways of writing novels. She rejected the standards of the novelists she considered materialists because she wanted to focus the attention on the subjectivity of the character, on their consciousness.
She thought that only subjectivity or consciousness could convay the truth of human experience, yhe truth of life.
In order to reach her aim she tried to create novels that rendered the flow of the consciousness, its stream, that explains for the rhythm of her prose and the use of language remanding the language if poetry.
Flashback and flashforward are the meaning through wich she convays the inner life of her character because this is the way the mind works.
She adopted and was a skilled exponent of the stream off consciousness tecnique given through free indirect style, the eclipse of the narrator and the shift of the point of view and last but not least the interior monologue.
Her idea of life is well expressed in her The Common Reader where she invited the reader to look within and to look the life. Here she wants the reader to examine what happens in a mind, an ordinary mind on an ordinary day, (the life of Monday or Tuesday).
She explains that the mind receives impression of a different nature (trivial or banal also very important).
Such impressions are incessant and they create the shape of a day.
Since it is such impressions that make up people's ordinary life, it is such impressions that the writer has to convay to the reader.
It follows that "there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy..."
According to Virginia Woolf thought therefore, life cannot be returned to the reader in "a series of gig lamps simmetrically arranged".
Virginia Woolf concludes the essay highlighting the concept that the novelist's task is to convay the unknown spirit of one's consciousness.
MOMENT OF BEING (V. Woolf)
V. Woolf is recognized as one of the greatest innovators of modern fiction. Her experiments with point of view have influenced many writers that followed her.
But one particularly interesting tecnique that doesn't seem to reach much attention is her use of moments of being.
To wonder why some moments are so powerful and memorable - even if the events themselves are unimportant- taht they can be vividly recalled, while others are eeasily forgotten.
She concludes that there are two kinds of experiences:
A-moments of being;
B-moments of non being.
Moments of non being appear to be moments that the individual is not consciously aware of even as she/he experience them.
V.Woolf notes that people perform routine tasks such as walking and shopping without thinking about that.
This part of life is not lived consciously, but instead is embodied in "a kind of non descript cotton-wool"
It is not the nature of the action that separates moments of being from moments of non-being.
One activity is not intrensically more mundane or more extraordinary than the other.
Instead, it is the intensity of feeling, one's consciousness of the experience, that separates the two moments a walk in the country can easily be hidden behind the cotton-wool for one person, but for V.Woolf the experience is very vivid.
V.Woolf asserts that these moments of being, these flashes of awareness, reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton-wool of daily life and that we "I mean all human beings- are connected with this-that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art".
But the individual artist is not important in this work.
Instead, V.Woolf says of all people:" We are the words; we are the work of art; we are the music; we are the thing itself".
Thus for V.Woolf a moment of being is a moment when an individual is fully conscious of his experience, a moment when he is not only aware of himself but catches glimpse of his connection to a larger pattern behind the opaque surface of daily life.
Unlike moments of non-being, when the individual lives and acts without awareness, performing acts as if asleeps, the moment of being opens up a hidden reality.
Moments of being can be found throughout Woolf's fiction...
Examine examples from her novels, Mrs Dollaway to the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, these are often moments of intence power and beauty.
Unlike Joyce's ephiphanies, the moments do not reveal something important for the character.
But they provide moments of energy and awareness that allow the character who experiences them to see life more clearly and more fully, if only breafly and some of the characters share the vision that they glimpse making the work of art that is life.
Mrs Dollaway presents the two characters who are the most receptive in all of V.Woolf's fiction: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith.
Clarissa experiences her moments of being while in the middle of what appears to be trivial acts, indicating that it is not the action, but her awareness that sets a moment of being apart from her other experiences.
For example, as Clarissa watches taxi cabs pass by, she finds them "absolutely absorbing".
Her thoughts reveal that "what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her, the fat lady in the cab...did it matter that sme must inevitably cease completely or did it not become consouling to believe somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and the flow of things, here, there, she survived".
Throughout the day Clarissa is particularcly aware of these threads of connection between herself and her surroundings.
The moments of being are marked by particularly vivid and powerful language because they are moments of exact feeling, the language used to convay them must naturarly be evocative and precise.
THE FORM AND CONTENT MUST BE IN PERFECT SIMMETRY. In her moments of being V.Woolf uses a language that approches poetry.
Clarity is precisly what V.Woolf achieves in a moment of being.