Virginia Woolf speaks about moments of being while James Joyce of paralysis.

to come naturally into = venire naturale

She had the opportunity to the most read in England. Since she was a modernist she wanted to experiment in art like other modernists. She rejected the standards of the novelists which she considered materialist like: Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, because she wanted to focus the attention on the subjectivity of the character, on their consciousness. She thought that only subjectivity and consciousness could convey the truth of human experience: the truth of life. In order to reach her aim she tried hard to create novels that rendered the flow of the consciousness, it is stream that explains for the rhythm of her prose and the use of language reminding the language of poetry. Flashback and flashforward are the means through which she conveys the inner life of her character because this is the way the mind works. She adopted and was a skill exponent of the stream of consciousness technique given through free indirect style, the eclipse of the narrator and the shift of the point of view and last but not least the internal monologue.

Her idea of life is well expressed in her The Common Reader (1925) where she invites the reader to look within and 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 impressions of a different nature (trivial but also important). Such impressions are incessant and they create the shape of the day. Since it is such impressions that make up people's ordinary life it is such impressions 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...“

to examine = analizzare (analisi accurata)

According to Virginia Woolf's thoughts therefore life cannot be returned 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 ones consciousness.

Moments of being (Virginia Woolf)

Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the great innovations 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 ”moments of being“.

… to wonder wise same moment 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 not-being

Moments of not-being appear to be moments that individual is not consciously aware of even as (perfino nel momento in cui) she or he experiences them. Virginia Woolf notes that people perform routine tasks such as walking and shopping without thinking about that. This part of the life is ”not lived consciously“, but instead ”is embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool“. It is not the nature of the actions that separates moments of being from moments of not-being. One activity is not intrinsically more mundane or more extraordinary than the other. Instead, it is the intensity of feeling, ones consciousness of the experience, that separates the two moments. A walk in the country can easily be hidden behind the cotton wall for one person, but for Virginia Woolf the experience is very vivid. Virginia Woolf asserts that this moments of being, this flashes of awareness, reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton wall of daily life, and that we ”I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the all 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 Virginia 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 Virginia 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 catching a glimpse of his connection to a larger pattern hidden behind the opaque surface of daily life.

Unlike moments of not-being, when the individual lives and acts without awareness, performing acts as if a sleep, the moment of being opens up a hidden reality. Moments of being can be found through out Woolf's fiction...examine examples for all her novels, Mrs Dalloway, To the Light House and Between the Acts these are often moments of intense power and beauty. Unlike Joyce's epiphany, this moments do not reveal something important for the character but they provide moments of energy and awareness that allowed the character who experiences them to see life more clearly and more fully, if only briefly.

And some of the character try to share the vision that they glimpse, making the work of art that is life. Mrs Dalloway presents the two character who are most receptive in all Virginia 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 a part from her other experiences.

For example, as Clarissa watches taxi cabs pass by she finds them ”absolute 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 she must inevitably cease completely or did it not become consoling to believe that some out in the streets of London, on the abb and the flow of things, here, there, she survived“. Through out the day Clarissa is particularly awared of these threads of connection between herself and there surroundings. The moments of being are marked by particularly vivid and powerful language. Because they are moments of exact feelings, the language used to convey them must naturally be evocative and precise.

The form and content must be in perfect symmetry.

In her moments of being Virginia Woolf uses a language that approaches poetry.

CLARISSA IS PRECISELY WHAT VIRGINIA WOOLF ACIEVE IN A MOMENTOF BEING.

Everyone has sudden flashes of perception and life in sight. Writers have a name of them – epiphany. Epiphany is twelfth night – the sixth of January when Christ was visited by the Three Wise Men, and his divinity was revealed to world. It derives from Greek world, epiphainein, meaning ”to manifest“, and in pre-Christian times it was used to record appearances of God and Godness. Traditionally the world has capted this specific religion association, but in our century it has been secularized to refer to other non-divine forms of revelation.

JOYCE'S SECULAR EPIPHANY

The principal writer to extend the meaning of the world has a secular therm was James Joyce, who was interested in sudden, dramatic and startle moments which seem to have heightened significant and to be surrounding with a kind of magical aura. The well-known reference is in James Joyce's Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus is thinking to himself: ”Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world including Alessandria. Someone was to read them? There after a few thousand them. The notion of the Joycean epiphany was first outline in Stephen Hero (the early version of A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man when a casual incident in Eccles Street, Dublin strikes Stephen). A young lady was standing of the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leading on the rusty railings of the are. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of the colloquy he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely. This triviality made it think of collecting my such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant:

a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or

in a memorable phase of the mind itself.

He believed that it was for the man of the letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that themselves are the most delicate and evanescent moments.