Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf wanted to experiment in art. She rejected the standards of the novelists she considered materialist like Bennet and Galsworthy because she wanted to focus the attention on the subjectivity of the character, on the consciousness; she thought that any subjectivity and consciousness could convey the truth of human experience, the truth of life. In order to do this she tried hard 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 reminding the language of poetry. Flashbacks and flashforwards are the means from which she conveys the inner life of the characters because this is the way the mind works.                                                                           

She adopted and was a skilled exponent of the stream of consciousness technique given truth free indirect style, the eclipse of the narrator and the shift of the point of view and, last before list, the interior monologue.                                                                                                                                 Her idea of life is very expressed in her The Common Reader where she invites the reader to look within and to look at 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 impressions of different nature. Such impressions are incessant and they create the shape of the day. Since it is impressions that make up people’s ordinary life, it is such impression that the writer has to convey to the reader. It follows that “there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style”. According to Virginia Woolf’s thought, therefore, life cannot be return to the reader in a “series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged”. Virginia Woolf concludes the essay highlighting the concept that the novelist’s task is to convey the unknown spirit of consciousness.

Moment of being

Virginia Woolf is recognize as one of the great innovators of modern fiction. Her experiments with point of view have influenced many writers that followed her. But one particularly interesting technique that does not seem to reach much attention is her use of “moment of being”.                                                                                   

To wonder why some moments are so powerful and memorable –even if the events themselves are unimportant- that they can be vividly recalled while others are easily 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 even as she/he experiences them.                                                                                                         

Virginia Woolf notes that people perform routine tasks such as working and shopping without thinking about them. 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 actions that separates moments of being from moments of non-being. One activity is not intrinsically more mundane or more extraordinary than the other. Instead, it is the intensity of feeling, one consciousness of the experience, that separates that two moments.