Psychological Duration In Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

"For time is the destroyer not just of all that we are proud of, even pride itself, it threatens the realization of many a philosophical ideal. Time is the possibility of corruption at the deepest level. And yet without organized temporal extension, there would be nothing to be corrupted. Time makes as well as breaks. Time giveth and it taketh away." (Wood, 1)

TIME INTRO

Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway deconstructs the perpetual experience of time. She investigates the persistence of temporal actuality as a mode of exploring the sporadic nature of human existence. Woolf’s modernist perspective also fabricates and critiques modernity’s persistent concern with time. Bauman states, "indeed modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps even more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has history" (110). Modernity’s fundamental violation of the authority of the past, contributes in producing a holistic vision of a limitless and infinite future. The novel incorporates a inexhaustive expansion on the inevitable process of impersonal and psychological aspects of time and envisages an externalisation of the multi directional perspectives of the subconscious. Woolf’s boundless perspective on time, presents a dialectical image that utilizes the concrete, material and objective manifestation of time in conflict with the ephemeral, internal and subjective nature of its reality. The novel unites both representations of the temporal continuum through Woolf’s technical and stylistic innovations.

TIME IN GENERAL

Kumar remarks on Woolf’s aesthetic inclination on the conceptualization of duration, "Time with her is almost a mode of perception, a filter which distils all phenomena before they are apprehended in their true significance and relationship."(68) Woolf’s reaction to the origination of cognition within duration provides an experimental literary embellishment to her literature. Through Woolf’s tentative perspective a radical deconstruction of the nature of unrelenting time is manifested. The cyclical and durable elements of chronology are disrupted by the unconventional, unfixed and wavering psychological time of the mind. Homogeneous time is in constant conflict with the private flux of heterogeneous time. This uniform, public and universal durability is delineated and intensified by the instability of personal, incongruent endurance. Her writing compels a revolt against the sequential chronology of time and also rebels against the mathematical nature and mechanical movement of its instant. She examines how the contemporary moment can materialize the essence of time. According to Tymieniecka Mrs. Dalloway exhibits three conflicting representations of the moment. The "moment within the event" (162), "the relational moment" (163) and "the spiritual moment (163). All three situational aspects of the moment guide Woolf’s temporal index through continuous fragments of narration while providing a unique production of actuality. Woolf’s Modernist aesthetic encumbered a new radical awareness of experience as continuity and through the exploitation of the narrative she incorporated this innovative perspective. Time acts as a medium of transition that unites all characters collectively and simultaneously. All characters are subjugated and fixed mutually by the limitations of time. Perhaps Clarissa Dalloway’s allegorical statement "we are a doomed race chained to a sinking ship" (86) incites Woolf’s own introspective speculation on the nature and repression of the universal temporal connection of time. This is simular to Morson’s argument that time has humanity "chained to the wheel of fate". (18) Woolf’s proclamation has a more considerate note of pessimism "chained" to its deconstruction. The metaphorical "sinking ship" signifies Woolf’s desolate and melancholic perspective on the reality of human nature. It engenders the notion that "it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning" (98) and the human race may inevitably become "drowned sailors"(103) cast from "sinking ships". The chains of time have inexorable constraints on human temporality and the characters of Mrs Dalloway are notoriously aware of the impeding and pervasive force of this continuing temporal index. Woolf’s time also is represented through a circular structure that merges past, present and future occasions into an indirect passage that presents a cyclical manifestation of time. The conflicting dimensions of time utilize a fluid and perpetual projection of an evanescent and fleeting vision of actuality. The temporal range of narrative is extended by the addition of interior monologues that also allocate the past and contemporary moments of being into a spherical time frame. Her perspective of time as continuity of past present and future are indivisible and conjoined within the realm of the characters interior experience. This creates an impenetrable medium in which even the chimes of the clock within the narrative cannot infiltrate. Woolf exemplifies this notion by suggesting," shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks… nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority" (113) The clocks illustrated throughout the progression of the narrative " shred and slice" external phenomena, while remaining peripheral and detached from the interior fluctuations of the conscious states of the characters. Woolf critiques this particular notion in relation to the materialization of reality and the inadequacy of concrete chronological time in relation to the instantaneous sustenance of the interior clock. She presented a modern philosophical ideal that exemplifies the notion of reality as an eternal process of fluctuation and flexibility. The fixed boundaries of chronological narrative are interspersed with this dissolution of a subjective reality. This withdrawal from the material and external is a prominent feature of the narrative discourse in Mrs. Dalloway. The immedial became a subjective economy. Bergson’s durational flux became a quintessential structural fabrication in Woolf’s narrative.

BERGSON INFLUENCE

Woolf offers a complex and philosophical ideology on the aspects of inner duration in her novel Orlando: a Biography. She originates a dialectical observation on the transitional phrases of the mental process where the exposure of the intellect to time encompasses an illusory and deceptive speculation on the judgement and evaluation of times intensity. "The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element 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."(47) The dichotomy between the dimensionality of duration and mathematical time is in constant conflict within the psychic environment. This critique actualizes the vast and unlimited expanse of times culmination within the metaphysical, rational and subjective areas of cognition. It burlesques Aristotle’s and Newton’s encapsulation of absolute time, where the material clock is the fundamental object of calculation that measures the intervals of time between events. Woolf’s philosophical principles develop as a critique on the scientific rationalism of the systematic and logical ideologies of the Victorian era. Russel became the prominent rationalist who evaluated the Bergsonian model of durational flux in an absolute mathematical manner. He proclaimed that "continuity is a purely mathematical subject and not, strictly speaking, part of philosophy."(Pearson, 25) Woolfs model of intuition present a dynamic contrast to this linear and numeral representation of temporal continuance. Woolf’s focus here is on the psychological determination and magnitude of time. Woolf also adheres to the notion of the self and the idea that the intuitive and organic awareness of time is inseparable and indivisible from the concept of the psyche. She promotes the ideology that the intellect is always consciously aware of the changeability of time.

This is illustrated in Bergsons depiction of inner duration in his Creative evolutions, "My mental state, as it advance on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration it accumulates: it goes on increasing-rolling upon itself, as a snowball in the snow" (Bergson, CE, 2)

Henri Bergson’s vast ideologies concerning the conceptualization of time, has had monumental ramifications on Woolf’s composition of Mrs Dalloway. Bergson orchestrates the philosophical notion that time in itself is phenomena that prevails and endures in the psychological and internal realm of human consciousness, and exerts a process of rapid renewal and incessant becoming. In Bergson’s Time and Free Will, the notion of duration is described in relation to its complex constitution. "Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states" (100). He exercised the notion that time I s experienced as a constant flow and succession of ideas as well as multiple changes that are experienced and endured. Absolution is a principle characteristic of Bergson’s ideology. The ego transcends and liberates itself from the conditioning of the past and present and fabricates a new and organic moment. This intrinsic and unitary state of consciousness embodies the structural and thematic register of the narrative in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf utilizes this unprocessed mode of reflection and exemplifies its complexity throughout the psychic landscapes of her characters. The scaffolds of this conscious state unfold and melt into each other creating a fusion and synthesis of sensory images that incorporate and harmonize immediate perception. This Bergsonian model of flux and change has employed a mobile and portable representation of reality within the narrative of Mrs Dalloway.

PAST AND PRESENT

The indivisibility of the past present and future is exemplified through Woolf’s mode of narration. In Bergson’s Creative Evolution, he makes reference to duration as an intrusive force encroaching upon the different modes of temporal and past chronology by using its multifarious dichotomy. "Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances."(4). Mrs Dalloway envisions this method by conjoining the past experiences of Clarissa with the constant succession and persistence of the unfolding day. Kuhlken captivates this particular presentation of Clarissa’s experience as the "culmination of her biographies in the autobiographical present."(342) This exerts the notion that the past manifests and materializes part of who she is now.

The clock itself within the narrative preserves and perpetuates the dialectical perspectives on the past and present oscillations of time. The panoramic instant involving St. Margaret’s clock chiming through the metropolitan landscape, is a quintessential example of this transitional ideology. St Margaret’s clock performs as a pivotal nexus that connects and guides the characters in and out of the past and present domain. The narrative vacillates through the historical past and current contemporary experiences of the characters in order to captivate Bergson’s aesthetic ideology of psychic being. The characters occupy a state of flux and instability where the present of the narrative looses its static character and diminishes and fades into the past and future. St Margaret’s clock materializes as a portal of transition into the past. The bell becomes a signifier that remobilizes the past recollections and memories of Peter Walsh’s and Clarissa’s relationship. It animates and electrifies nostalgic recollections of their……….. "as if the bell had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some moment of great intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and had left, like a bee with honey laden with the moment" (56) the simile that engender the natural image of the bee and honey captivate times purposefulness while potray in the evolutionary qualities of life that in order for time to survive it must nurture and find nourishment in the human temporality.

Furthermore material phenomenon such as Peter Walsh’s pocket knife acts as a locus of flux that transfers the character into past and future divisions. In the narrative when he returned to his hotel Peter pulled of his boots and emptied his pockets of his pocket knife and immediately "a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah" (172) materialized. This material object transfigures and dislocates Peter from the present experience of being to the retrospective and obsolete sphere of the past. It acts a medium that exchanges and appropriates memories into the present realm of the temporal continuum. In this scene the past present and future model is explored dynamically through the

CLOCKS

According to Bergson’s theory in Time and Free Will, the clock simply measures time by counting the simultaneities that occur between the movement of hands and the oscillations of the pendulum. (108). It fundamentally allocates the mathematical instant of being. The clock as a material object is preoccupied with the substantial reality and illustrative qualities of time, it is not a medium that can register the measurability of inner duration. Clocks materialize as a standardized system that offers synchronicity while providing a global uniform temporal continuum. In Meyerhoff’s Time in literature he acknowledges that clocks measure and delineate the "simple, primitive data of human time."(91) In Mrs Dalloway Woolf resits this single standard system of temporal measurement and offers an idiosyncratic exploration of her introspections of human temporality. She dislocates the mechanistic clock time from the internal and organic clock. the narrative the presence of Big Ben dictates the cosmopolitan time of the global spaces of the entire world. Time itself becomes politized. Woolf’s anti imperialistic perspective is also advocated throughout the narrative discourse. Woolf encapsulates this particular concept as she presents the sequential chiming of Big Bens ticking clock as a scaffold that constructs the linear chronology of the narrative while remaining as an external object outside the internal reality of the main characters. The sustained and unrelenting presence of the clock rules and dominates the figuring of the instantaneous and perpetual moment. It acts a as a transitional phenomena guiding characters through past, present and future experiences. the discrete fragments of the frequent interruptions of the "leaden circles" dissolving in to air is repeated various times throughout the narrative essentially becoming a symbolic chime itself, separating dividing and navigating the novel through its exposition .

Furthermore the clock also extends its significance as an authoritarian figuration through its masculine associations. Woolf also critiques the artificial utility of time presented through the political realm. In 1884 at the Prime Meriden conference in Washington the concept of universal and standard time was addressed. (Kern, 12) it proposed that Greenwich was to become the zero median that determined the length of the day, divided the earth into twenty-four time zones and introduced the permanent beginning to the universal day. From this Greenwich became an international symbol of British imperialism and the foundation and basis of all socioeconomic activities. London the capital of the British Empire became the origin of all meaning. It essentially materialized as the solitary cosmopolitan and universal time of modernity According to Dowling the name Big Ben also has phallic analogies. (58) "the sound of Big Ben striking the half hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that" (54)

SEPTIMUS SEES REALITY AS BERGSONIAN FLUX

Bergson’s durational flux generates and assembles the structural design and architectural framework of Woolf’s war veteran Septimus Smith. His reality complex escapes the bondage and constraints of time and inherits and cultivates a more apocalyptic sense of duration. It is evident from the beginning of the fluctuating narrative that Septimus’s consistent obsession with time is unrelenting. He becomes the "giant mourner" (78) of temporality who has "lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead." He is also reminiscent of Eliot’s Phlebas the Phoenician the drowned sailor from "The Wasteland" Death by Water where his corpse is mutilated by

"A current under sea [that]

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his youth

Entering the world pool." ("The Wasteland" line)

This particular vision is evocative of Septimus experience of social cohesion in Victorian society where he felt that after the war humanity " hunt[ed] in packs" and like the current in Eliot’s poem "picked his bones in whispers." The metaphors here are suggestive of animalistic qualities centring upon the disintegration and deterioration of human nature into the primitive swamp of its prehistoric primordial ancestors. Perhaps Woolf is hinting at Eliot’s concerns on degeneration theory that society may collapse into chaos.

Woolf’s novel is also structured and arranged like a "current under sea" where the rivulets of contemplation represent the cascading flux and the affluent meandering of the characters sea of consciousness. The sea acts as the spatial realm in which the physicality of the characters occupy and the landscape of the characters domain. The presence of aquatic images saturate and filter through Woolf’s poetic prose almost diluting objective reality while providing a connection with Bergson’s ideology on durational flux."The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the new"(Bergson CE 11) the water imagery suggest regeneration growth and a creative evolution.

Bergson also questions the rationalization between the material representational structure of time- the clock versus the interior unstationary and liquid movement of the minds duration.

"we project time into space, we express duration in terms of extensity, and succession thus takes the form of a continuous line or chain, the parts which touch without penetrating each other"(Bergson, 101) this visionary aspect tries to embrace time as a persistent and sustaining entity that we conceptualize in mental landscape by ensuing and preserving the psychic kaleidoscope.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

"The theory that time is a flux and not a sum of discrete units is linked with the theory that human consciousness is a stream and not a conglomeration of separate faculties or ideas" (Kern, 24) This theory establishes an instable, unresting and liquid modification of time that produces a sporadic and cohesive representation of actuality. Woolf uses the "Stream of consciousness" technique to exhibit the cohesion of sensory images and transitional phases of the intellect, as they materialize within the narrative as momentary experiences of the human psyche. She encapsulates the fictional fabrication of continuance which in turn emphasizes the fluidity and transience of time. Woolf dissolves the delineation of objective reality by blurring the distinction between direct and indirect vocality. The transitions between thought and speech bleed into one another exemplifying a subjective focal point while creating a process of dynamic being. This illustrates a cinematic montage where Woolf’s impressionistic like images are melded together to build the textural landscape of the subliminal intellect.

Mrs Dalloway captivates the philosophical aspects of memories, conceptions, feelings, the imagination and sensations, and exposes them through the discontinuous irrationality of Clarissa's private interiority. Transitions between speech and thought reflect the unfixed flexibility and fluctuation of actual subjective experience. The stream of consciousness technique explores the dynamic embryonic and inchoate stages of private reflection. The indeterminate and illogical aspects of consciousness are cultivated to form a fabric of time and being as the primordial immediacy of the moment. As reported by Dainton "the view that consciousness itself occurs in short pulses, each of which is experienced as a whole, from which it is but a short step to the view that a stream of consciousness consists of a succession of such pulses, each a short lived total experience." (128) This develops the ideology that time is not jointed or fragmented but rather a flowing concurrent and harmonious manifestation of temporal succession. This holistic perspective propagates a supreme unparallel and transcendental formation of consciousness. Daintan also critiques the metaphorical significance of the actual image of the stream of consciousness. "Consciousness does not consist of a stream running beneath a spot of light, nor of a spot of light running along a stream; consciousness is the stream itself, and the light extends through its entire length. (237) This sublime and radiant image of being is closely associated with Woolf’s incandescent image of life and consciousness that she formulates in her essay "Modern Fiction", "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end" (9) the perceptive and discernment

"Time is the economy of being" (Wood 2)

NARRATIVE CONTROL

According to Ricouer "narrative is the guardian of time." (Wood, 4) In Time and Narrative Ricoeur originates a philosophical theory that involves and deconstructs the human experience of time within the dominion of narrative. According to his ideology the exhibition and understanding of experienced time engenders two different modes of temporal actuality. The first is a cosmological time that develops from the linear expression and succession of time. This actualizes how the experience and channelling of time is activated through the passing of days and hours and also measures the depiction of the continuance and endurance of the instant. The second is a phenomenological time that incorporates a reflective illustration of time where time is experienced in terms of past present and future. Ricoeur argues that both representations of time are interconnected. Phenomenological time engenders the order and succession of past present and future which is characteristically inherent in the invariable cosmological structural and direction of time. Cosmological time embodies the phenomenological orientation of past and future along its instants of time that helps to contribute in identifying with time as before or after. This temporal narrative framework governs Woolf’s philosophical model of time within the fiction of Mrs Dalloway. Ricoeur also proposes in his narrative theory the notion an role of "emplotment" (21Life in quest of narrative wood) Emplotment revolves around a production of narrative material in relation to sequential events. Wood descries a "synthesis of heterogeneous elements" (21). The linear chronology of "emplotment" produces conflicting experiences of time. In Woolf’s narrative it is evident that the disjunction and fragmentation of past and the present within the narrative does not correspond to the linear episodic structure of the cosmological time of the plot. This layering device involves a complex shelving of different representations of time. For example the Past becomes multifarious within in narrative it no longer locate the historical past of the material novel but may also delves into the past experience of the characters being. Concrete historical representations become dislocated by the locus of being. For example Clarissa past experience of Bourton corresponds to her individual lived experience. There are distinct and separate degrees of temporal organization evident in this ideology.

CONCLUSION

" "It is time," said Reiza. The word "time" split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; and immortal ode to time" (Woolf, 78)

"Precisely the task of the writer to go "beyond the formal railway line of sentence" and to show how people "feel or think or dream…all over the place" (qtd Lee, 93)