Moments of Being in Virginia Woolf's Fiction

Since she was a novelist she wanted to experiment art. She rejected the standards of the novelist. She considered materialists like Arnold Bennet and John Galsworthy because she wanted to focus the attention on the subjectivity of the character and 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 rhythm of her prose and the use of the language reminding the language of poetry. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are the means through which she conveys the inner life of her characters because this is the way the mind works. She adopted and was a skilled 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 interior monologue.

Her idea of life is well expressed in her The Common Reader (1925) 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 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 convey to the reader. It follows that "there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe". According to Virginia Woolf 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 once consciousness.

Moments of Being
Virginia Woolf is recognized as one the great innovators of modern fiction. Her experiments with a 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 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:

 Moments of Being
 Moments of non Being

Moments of non being appear to be moments that the individual is not consciously aware of, even as she or he experiences them. Virginia Woolf notes that people perform routine tasks such as walking and shopping without thinking about them. This part of the life is "not lived consciously", but instead is embedded in "a kind of not descript cotton wool". It is not the nature of the actions that separates moment of being from moment of non 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 wool for one person, but for Woolf the experience is very vivid.

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 she says of all people, "We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself".

Thus for 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 a glimpse of his connection to a larger pattern hidden behind the opaque surface of daily life. Unlike moments of non-being, when the individual lives and acts without awareness, performing acts as if asleep, the moment of being opens up a hidden reality.

Moments of being can be found throughout Woolf's fiction. These are often moments of intense power and beauty. Unlike Joyce's epiphanies, these 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 briefly. And some of the characters try to share the vision that they glimpse, making the work of art that is life visible to others.

Mrs. Dalloway presents the two characters who are most receptive to moments of being in all of Woolf's fiction: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa experiences her moments of being while in the middle of what appear 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 she must inevitably cease completely . . . or did it not become consoling to believe that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived,".

Throughout the day Clarissa is particularly aware of these threads of connection between herself and her surroundings. The moments of being are marked by particularly vivid and powerful language. Because tey are moments of exact feeling, the language used to convey them must naturally be precise. The form and content must be in perfect symmetry. In her moments of being, Woolf uses a language that approaches poetry in her moments of being.