LIT 3023 Modernism - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

LIT 3023 Modernism

Time and Consciousness in

Mrs

DallowaySlide2

Time

Clock time (Big Ben)

Internal time (Interior monologue)

Past – present – future (Deep past and deep future suggested in portrayal of the present moment)Slide3

Structural organisationText is chronologically structuredAdheres to the three unities of time, place and action – maybe?

Big Ben marks the passing of time, and punctuates the accumulation of events, large and small.

But a more subtle suggestion of time’s passing is also present.Slide4

RicoeurAs the narrative is pulled ahead by everything that happens – however small it may be – in the narrated time, it is at the same time pulled backward, delayed so to speak, by ample excursions into the past, which constitute so many events in thought, interpolated in long sequences, between the brief spurts of action

Paul

Ricoeur

,

Time and Narrative

Slide5

TimePresent experienced by characters is enriched by memory of the past, and projection into the future“…the past is not in contrast with the present but involved with it” (Hermione Lee)

Interior monologues represent subjective time.Slide6

Big BenBig Ben represents objective time – also rather ominous “leaden circles dissolved in the air” (p.4)Symbolises ‘official’ time – attached to parliament and Richard D’s world

Used as structural device – e.g. 12 noon is the midpoint of the day, and the novel – as if novel is

unravelling

in real time: see

p

. 80Slide7

Big Ben and the late clockContrast the certainties of Big Ben with the eccentricities of the ‘late clock’ (p.108)Two aspects of clock-time presented, with one marking time, but doing so inaccurately

Two states of mind – Clarissa and

Septimus

?Slide8

Past Present and FutureAll aspects presented immediately -See opening passage, as Mrs

Dalloway anticipates her party, fusses over the arrangements, and is transported momentarily back to

Bourton

.

Note also the more

sombre

intimations of the future as

Mrs

D. muses on her own death – see refs to

CymbelineSlide9

Deep timeAnticipation of almost unimaginable future:…greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold

stoppings

of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known.Slide10

…and deep pastThrough all ages — when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise, the battered woman — for she wore a skirt — with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love — love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple-heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.Slide11

Consciousness of timeClarissa is conscious of own mortality, but also of living in the momentTwo aspects of time encountered simultaneously…plunged into the very heart of the moment..Slide12

Past, present, futureCo-existing in Clarissa’s mind:All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!— that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .Slide13

ConsciousnessInterior monologue – Woolf presents unfiltered thoughts of charactersAlso, passes on the dominant consciousness to different characters, often very minor, without

signalling

the change

Example – beginning of 3

rd

paragraphSlide14

Co-incidenceConsciousness is passed on via the co-incidence of characters in time and spaceThey experience the same incidents, observe the same events – e.g. the car backfiring, the

aeroplane

skywriting

Maisie

Johnson: “she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent’s Park on a fine summer’s morning fifty years ago.”Slide15

Time’s elasticityRezia after the death of Septimus

Time’s passage indicated by the ticking of the clocks, but becomes metaphorical time:

The clock was striking — one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering; like

Septimus

himself. She was falling asleep. But the clock went on striking, four, five, six and Mrs.

Filmer

waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the body in here, would they?) seemed part of that garden; or a flag. (p.127)Slide16

Bergson on memory…memory

conserves the past and this conservation does not imply that one experiences the same (re-cognition), but difference. One moment is added onto the old ones, and thus, when the next moment occurs, it is added onto all the other old ones plus the one that came immediately before. In comparison, therefore to the past collection of moments, it cannot be the same as the one immediately before, because the past is “larger” for the current moment than it was for the previous moment. Although Bergson does not say this, one might say that Tuesday is different from Monday because Monday only includes itself and Sunday, while Tuesday includes itself, Monday, and Sunday. This first image, therefore, implies that duration is memory: the prolongation of the past into the present.Slide17

Modernist view of timeWoolf:The time of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer elements of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.

Orlando

,

p.95