NOTES 31.01.2012

Virginia Woolf and James Joyce

Virginia Woolf: the moment of being

James Joyce: paralysis and epiphany

To come naturally into: venire naturale

Virginia Woolf came into contact with people who read more. She wanted to experiment in art, like the other modernists. She rejected the canons/standards of the novelists she considered materialistic --> Bennet and Galsworthy. WHY? Because she wanted to focus the attention on the SUBJECTIVITY OF HER CHARACTERS, 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 consciousness in its stream. That explains for the rhythm of her prose and the use of language reminding the language of poetry. Flash backs 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 TECNIQUE given through free indirect style, the eclipse of the narrator and the shift of point of view, and last 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 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”, from the text). She explains that the mind receives impressions of a different nature (trivial or banal, but 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 comedy or tragedy” lines 31-32. according to Virginia Woolf’s thought therefore life cannot be returned to the reader in “a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged” lines 34-35. Virginia Woolf concludes the extract highlighting the concept that the novelist’s task is to convey the unknown spirit of consciousness.

• MOMENT OF BEING: Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the great innovators of modern fiction. Her experiments with point of view have influenced many writer 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 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 of, even as 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 it 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’s consciousness of the experience, that separates the two moments.

NOTES 1.02.2012

A walk in the country can easily be hidden behind the cotton wool from one person, but for Virginia Woolf the experience is very vivid. She 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 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 CATCHES A GLYMPSE OF HIS CONNECTION TO A LARGER PATTERN HIDDEN BY THE OPAQUE SURFACE OF DAILY LIFE.

Unlike moments of non-being, when the individual lives and acts without awareness performing acts as asleep, 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 Dalloway, To the Light-House and Between The Acts: 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. Mrs Dalloway presents the two characters who are 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 a trivial act, 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, on the 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 they are moments of the exact feelings; the language used to convey them must naturally be EVOCATIVE AND PRECISE. THE FORM AND THE CONTENT MUST BE IN PERFECT SIMMETRY. In her moments of being V. Woolf uses a LANGUAGE THAT APPROACHES POETRY. Clarity is precisely what Virginia Woolf achieves in a moment of being.