Reading of the modernists involved such a process of disturbance Essay

Modernist authors disturbed their readers by adopting interlacing and difficult y go forthhful organises and hyphens. To w palpebra intent has your reading of the sophisticatedists involved such a process of trouble?Modernist belles-lettres flaunts difficult, often aggressive or disruptive, forms and styles it frequently challenges traditional realistic style and is instanceised by a rejection of 19th century traditions. Literary modernism focuses on hoo-haing away from rules and conventions, searching for new perspectives and gratuitys of view, experimenting in form and style. It breaks up and disturbs the situatetled state of literature and tensenesses a re-structuring of literature and the experience of homophile macrocosm race it moves. Although art always contracts to imitate or represent ingenuousness, w don changed was the under bideing of what constitutes populacely concern, and how that veracity could best be represented.Modernist literature is prono unced by a break with the concomitant, developmental, cause-and-effect presentation of the reality of realist fiction, towards a presentation of experience as layered, allusive, and dis nonstop using, to these ends, fragmentation and juxtaposition, motif, emblem, allusion.From magazine to time there occurs some revolution, or fulminant mutation of form and content in literature. Then, some way of composing which has been practiced for a generation or more than, is found by a few spate to be vest of pick up, and no longer to react to contemporary modes of thought, feeling and speechtradition has been flouted, and chaos has come.1This process of disturbance burn down be passn in the experimentation in form in beau monde to present differently the grammatical construction, the connections, and the experience of carriage. The alter of form puts an emphasis on cohesion, interrelatedness and depth in the structure of the young. This is accomplished in part by and throug h the use of various devices such as imageism, biography perspectives, shifts and everywherelays in time and place and perspective.Woolf uses these methods to explore what lies outside the specification of the real. Woolf draws on an national and symbolic landscape the world is moved inside, coordinate symbolically and metaphorically, as opposed to the realist representations of the outside(prenominal) world as a physical and historical, site of experience.The painter Jacques Raverat wrote in a correspondence to WoolfThe chore with writing is that it is essentially analogue it is almost impossible, in a sequential biography, to express the way wizs mind responds to an idea, a script or an experience, where, analogous a pebble universe thrown in to a pond, splashes in the outer air argon accompanied under the open air by waves that follow one a nonher into dark and forgotten corners2Woolf entangle it was tinyly the task of the writer to go beyond a additive represent ation of reality in order to show how people regain and dream. Rather than reckon her characters from acid A to point B, Woolf gives the impression of cooccurring connections a form patterned like waves in a pond. She reveals what is regular(a)tful to the highest degree her characters by exploring their minds and the thoughts of those surrounding them. Such explorations lead to complex connections among people, in the midst of ago and present, and betwixt inside and exterior experience. Woolf establishes these connections through metaphors and imagery, and structures the new using alternating images of beauty and despair, exhilaration and melancholy. These juxtapositions suggest some(prenominal)(prenominal) the longing towards flavour and the impulse towards death, which makes the process of reading disconcerting and recondite.Woolf dispensed with constituted take carenings and endings, and the traditional structure of rasets in time, for example, Mrs Dalloway te lls about one days experiences for two characters whose snuff its ar not connected with each otherwise, except by the s airyest coincidence at the end. Woolf uses perceived time interwoven with measure time to give rise a simultaneous experience of past and present. The scene is capital of the United Kingdom after the war, moreover as well Bourton thirty old age ago. In this commingling of time, the past exists on its own and in its relations to the present. cartridge holder is moved into the interior as well it becomes psychological time, time as an innerly experienced or symbolic time, or time as it accommodates a symbolic quite an than a chronological reality.Examining the inter section of time and timelessness, Woolf creates a new and affect novelistic structure in Mrs. Dalloway wherein her prose has blurred the distinction between dream and reality, between the past and present. An authentic serviceman being functions in this manner, simultaneously flow rate from t he conscious to the unconscious, from the fantastic to the real, and from store to the moment.Throughout Mrs Dalloway the focus continually shifts from the outside world to the characters consciousness and how they perceive it. This has the disquieting effect of back foundation observable reality so the details emerge more easily than when they are presented by an omniscient narrator. However, the capital of the United Kingdom setting is established immediately, the streets and landmarks are real, this verisimilitude of setting seems to give the characters a solidity which is juxtaposed with the fluidity of the scene of the characters thought processes. Mrs Dalloway supposes that somehow in the streets of capital of the United Kingdom, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived3The fact that the communicative takes place on a specific date is disclosed more gradually than the setting is, for example, Clarissa cerebrates For it was the middle of June. The war was over4 and then the narrator tells us it is Wednesday on page fifteen. posterior still Peter Walshs thoughts reveal that it is 19235. There are too references to Gold cup day at Ascot so by appellative a specific year Woolf turns what could nourish been a fictional fact in to a real one.Woolf implies a ideal of time as a series of life conjunctures rather than impersonal. These are established by the presence of sensory phenomena in different contexts such as the level-headed of Big Ben, the common perceptions among unrelated observers, for instance, the prime ministers car. Also, by convergences at cause of group activities as in Clarissas party.Time seems relativistic in the sense it depends on systems of measurement.The pin grass divide the day into quarter hours. The brassy voice of Big Ben is associated with the masculine. It is castd as a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were lilting dumb-bells this way and that6. It marks the movements of the two docto rs, Peter Walsh and Sir Richard as they move through their day, making pronouncements.St Margarets on the other hand is the feminine. It follows Big Bens booming leaden circles with ring after ring of fathom that glides into the softheartedness like a hostess, like Clarissa herself7 thinks Peter Walsh as he hears St Margarets peeling sound.Furthermore, The clocks divide time into a pattern,Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion8The ringing of the clock bells radiates from the centre of the city. The sound creates a design in the texture of the history, slicing through the characters inwrought experience of time and differentiate this with objective, exterior time.In To The beacon fire many of the characters are preoccupied with time. Mr. Ramsay worries about how his philosophic work will stand the tes t of time, just as Lily expects her painting to be rolled up and forgotten. The very style of the novel brings time into head teacher as Woolf infuses even a brief moment in an workaday event, such as reading a story to a child, with an infinitude of thought and memory 9 Mean spell years, tides, and seasons keep up their rhythms regardless of human events, while historical time brings cataclysmic change in the form of war. In addition, time brings tone ending as well as renewal. Mrs. Ramsay dies, while the children she has left over(p) behind continue to grow.In To the beacon fire Woolf depicts two contrasting kinds of time, the linear and regular plodding of clock or objective time, and the reiterative, non-linear time of human experience. Her depiction of subjective time, layered and complex was, critics have observed, not contrary that of the philosopher Henri Bergson, though there is no evidence of any direct influence.It is in the Time Passes section of the novel that Wo olfs inte await in the contrasting forms of temporality is most evident. The narrative style of this part is very extraordinary and is unlike that of Parts I and III. Its effort to narrate from what Woolf called an eyeless point of view is strange, it is as if she is thinking of the philosophical line of work, the problem with which Mr Ramsay grapples in the novel, of how to think of the world when there is no one there. This is translated into an artistic problem, of how to narrate the going of time when there is no one there to witness it.The surpass of events in Time Passes is much grander than the scale in The Window, thus passim this section Woolf employs a different method and uses parenthetical asides to impart crucial news. Instead of focusing on the thoughts of her characters, she keeps a tight focus on the house itself. Dramatic events such as Mrs. Ramsays death could not have been confronted in the style of The Window. as the subtle, everyday quality of the interact ions between events and thoughts would have been disturbed by the introduction of the tumultuous news imparted here.The air out in this section of the novel are like times fingers. The constant, regular beam of the Lighthouse is closely allied with time, too, like an all-seeing and imperishable eye. Puffs of air detached from the body of the enfold10 pull at the loose wallpaper and the things in the house, the light from the Lighthouse guiding them through the house.Natural time is seen as objective and inhuman, it is destructive and violent in the sense that it has no concern for human purposes. Woolfs solution to this problem is to invent a poetic style that, ironically, relies heavily upon the devices of personification and animism. The follows of the trees make obeisance on the wall, loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, light bent to its own image in idolization on the bedroom wall and in the heat of the summer the wind sent its spies about the house again 11. It can be questioned whether these devices are successful. It is as if Woolf wishes to fill the emptiness of inhuman nature with primitive animistic entities and malign agencies. The solution can seem oddly childlike, personification and animism being, as Freud pointed out, typical of infantile thought12. The problem illustrates, perhaps, the difficulty of avoiding images of human agency even when they are least necessary.In Mrs Dalloway during sections of mind-time, Woolf sets various time streams loose at once, either in the mind of one character, who retreats into internal soliloquy, collapsing past, present and future, or in the simultaneous perspectives given by several characters recording a virtuoso moment. The result of either technique is that plot time stands still.13 Time is not entirely subjective and elastic in this text, however. The novel does take place within a prescribed temporal context marked ominously by the booming of Big Ben First a warning, musical com edy then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Throughout the novel this chronology is inescapable, bleak through the characters thoughts of the past to bring them back to the present momentAuerbach points out that To the Lighthouse marks the end of the westbound tradition of realism. He argues that the novel employs a new fashion of temporality. It is the gap between the brief bitstock of time occupied by exterior events, about two days in The Window, and the rich, dreamlike realm of consciousness. The exterior events actually confused the hegemony over subjectivity14. The novel proves the in implication of exterior events by holding to minor, unimpressive things like stockings, while keeping in minimum the expositions of such great events as death and marriage. To the Lighthouse is thus a disturb round point in literature because it discarded any claim to the organic completeness of exterior events and the chronological order.To The lighthouse empl oys a non-linearity and thus counteracts narratives regular form of depicting events in a continuous succession. Synchronicity, evident in the coexistence of multiple perspectives at the analogous temporal moment, disturbs the narratives attempt to render the story world as events in succession. And elision, evident in the stories within the story whose endings are invariably left dangling and incomplete, dissolves the narratives attempt to achieve completion. Together, these discordant methods undermine the conventional inflorescence of narrative. Woolfs novel employs these techniques of disruption in order to portray narrative continuity as an inescapable yet unattainable illusion.Plot is generated by the inner lives of the characters. Psychological effects are achieved through the use of imagery, symbol, and metaphor. causa unfolds by means of the ebb and flow of personal impressions, feelings, and thoughts. Thus, the inner lives of human beings and the ordinary events in the ir lives are do to seem extraordinary. These complex and new methods that attempt to depict the chaotic interior life appear more jumbled and perplexing than the classical realist novel and so seem disturbing. However, Woolf is attempting to create a realistic account of the inner processes of the individuals mind and an expression of the continuous flow of sense perceptions, thoughts and feelings.Woolf also employs the symbolic apprehension and comprehension of reality as a structural approach to experience. It marked a turning away from writing by observation to transforming fact into a symbol of inner experience. In her diary Woolf wroteWhat disports me in the last stage was the emancipation and boldness with which my imagination picked up, used and tossed aside all the images, symbols which I had prepared. I am sure this is the right way of using them-not in set piecesbut simply as images, never making them work out only suggest 15To The Lighthouse assumes a structure quasi( prenominal) to that found in the fictional scene of the painting. In a garner Woolf acknowledges the structure and its unifying symbol as enacted at the end. I meant goose egg by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line big bucks the middle of the book to hold the design together.16In To The Lighthouse the Lighthouse has a prominent but fluid symbolic place in the novel. It does not seem to be the key to some unnoticeable allegory since it does not stand for just one thing, each character that contemplates the Lighthouse gives it a special meaning, its significance in the novel evolves as the sum of different parts.For the teenaged mob, the Lighthouse is a stark symbol of masculinity, a phallic symbol. For Mrs. Ramsay, the Lighthouse is a watching eye move through her thoughts with a regular rhythm. To Woolf, the Lighthouse seems to serve as an anchor, a unifying image that ties together the layers of time and thought she explores. Like the clock striking the hours in Mr s. Dalloway, images of the Lighthouse act as the bolts of iron17 holding the different strands of the novel together.The focus of the planned excursion is not public figured until page eight and from then onwards the Lighthouse always appears with a capital letter. It is conventional to capitalize words referring to glomions, particularly in philosophical writing. This feature has the effect of elevating the significance of the place, as if Lighthouse were an abstract concept like Truth or Death.The Lighthouse makes its first appearance in the text in very lyrical footing. The domestic metaphors used to describe the scene, which are perhaps Mrs. Ramsays associations the island is in a plateful of dismal water, and the dunes are arranged in pleats18. The first influence of the lighthouse is the description of jams excitement The wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years19 The lighthouse already seems to have gained a greater significance than its mere physical e xistence. It is an object of desire to throng. However, his reaction to Mrs Ramseys squall shows that there is a separation between his dream of happiness (going to the lighthouse) and his dull, everyday experience of life. Prosaically, the lighthouse is a real thing, yet James has made it into an unattainable dream, which he does not expect to come true.James seems to be in a crisis because there is a prospect that his ideal world and real world will become the same and he will go to the lighthouse. Therefore, the wondrous aura of the lighthouse is disposed to mundane things. James endows a picture of a refrigerator with a heavenly bliss. It was fill with joy20 this implies that fantasies bring relief from the dullness of everyday life, as long as there is the prospect that they will come true. However, James is one of that great clan21 who live for the future but if future ideals cloud the view of reality then there is an unverbalized suggestion that achieving ones desire pre sents a danger in that there would be nothing left to live for. Conversely, people essential have some hope of achieving their ideal, or life would become futile.Woolfs symbol of the lighthouse expresses this paradoxical idea in that it represents both an view fantasy while also being a real lighthouse. It becomes a trigger, provoking the reader to think about the human tendency to live for a future fantasy, together with all the paradoxical emotions Woolf conveys as associated with that tendency.James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks the tower, stark and straight he could see that it was barred with black and white he could see windows in it he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too22James compares the real and the ideal and decides that the Lighthouse can be both. He provides a useful key for deciph ering the symbol of the Lighthouse, for nothing was simply one thing23. The Lighthouse is the object of striving, some mystical, distant entity with an all-seeing eye. At the same time it is the embodiment of isolation and sadness, linked with Jamess unadulterated image of himself and his father as lonely and apart from other peopleThe fact that the Lighthouse is a frequent subject for artists adds to its symbolic import. The tightening of form puts an emphasis on cohesion, interrelatedness and depth in the structure, Woolf engages both the subject of art, Lily Briscoes painting, for example and the aim of philosophy, in Mr. Ramsays work.The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty- feel tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and gently in the evening.24 Mrs. Ramsay incorporates the Lighthouses regularly appearing light into the pattern of her thoughts. She recognizes that she is doing this, that she is making the things she sees part of herself, as if the Lighthouse was an eye looking at her. The light strokes also serve to highlight certain cadences in her thought, heightening their meaning by repetitionThe parallels developing in this section between Lilys actions and reflections and the impending trip to the Lighthouse suggest that Lilys revelation, her moment of clarity and stability, is her own version of the Lighthouse, the thing toward which she has been striving 25.Woolf builds upon the same metaphors and imagery through repetition and association to give them symbolic foster of their own. There are repetitions of key images water, waves, and sea webs, ties, and threads and trees through the novels.In Mrs Dalloway words are used in very certain terms in relation to life. They are used repeatedly throughout the rest of the novel, and built upon as metaphors until they stand alone to symbolize life. The sense of being absorbed in the process of action is inseparable from the fear of being excluded from it and from the dread that the process is goi ng to be interrupted. The metaphor of the interrupter and the solemn pause, indicating a fear of being interrupted, are developed throughout the novel.Clarissas secure is depicted in a rhythmic wave of building, creating, and making. These images recur throughout the novel as they gain symbolic significance. Sewing is a metaphor often used to denote womens creative capacity and symbolizes both artistry and the establishment of life. The wave provides both a sense of comfort and fulfillment, yet maintains a suspenseful pause before a flop or interruptionMrs. Dalloway has an unpleasant feeling she cannot place. After taking a moment to think, she realizes this feeling is attached to something Peter had said, combined with her own first gear26. She realizes it is her parties. Her unpleasant feeling is attached to the criticism she receives from both Richard and Peter about her parties.Clarissa privately defends her parties. She sees them as an religious offering, a term she is ab le to recognize as vague and goes on to define. She is offering a connection. She gives meaning to life by feeling the existence of others and offering a way to bring them together, offering them a chance of connection.While sitting on the couch, Septimus notices a shadow on the wall. Fear no more the heat o the sun. This phrase, which acts as a calming device, enters his head. Suddenly, he is not afraid. He sits up and takes an interest in what Lucrezia is doing. She is making a hat. More significantly, she is creating and buildingRezias creation of the hat, like Clarissas sewing, symbolizes not only the creation of life, but also more specifically, the female ability to create life But this hat now. And then (it was getting late) Sir William Bradshaw27Woolf uses this one symbolic line as a metaphor for the transition from life, represented in the making of the hat and death, suggested by Bradshaw, the symbol of the souls containment and the character who ultimately provides Septim us with the nervous impulse to kill himself.Woolf uses a great deal of imagery her similes often begin as a straightforward comparison, which is then elaborated. This moves the ideas away from the physical reality of the narrative and towards mental events, emotions and ideas providing a bridge between the plot and the interior consciousness of the characters. The reader is shown the dilemma of how to create a meaningful grade and the impossibility of essentially finding an explicit formal system of how to represent objects and concepts, that are assumed to exist, and the relationships between them.The cumulative effect of such repeated notions and images is to establish a systematic network of social elements, such as, human time, space, shared symbols, personal relationships, so as to arrive at a vision of modern life on a national scale. This bodied existence is apprehended internally, as its participants experience it.It is both the content and the form used to portray that c ontent which makes reading a disturbing process. The question of the reality of experience itself the critique of the traditional values of the culture the redness of meaning and hope in the modern world and the exploration of how this loss may be faced are all themes within Woolfs novels.Subject matter and writing style are the two features that characterise Modernism and this applies to Mrs Dalloway. The themes of Woolfs novels express the angst of Modernism in a precise way and Mrs Dalloway exemplifies the difference of opinion felt in the modern society that produces this angst. The conflict is played out between two forces, one that fragments and disperses social order and causes chaos, and a more stable impulse that looks for unity.Multiple voices, fragmented narrative and stream of consciousness are the stylistic devices of Woolf that convey the themes of conflict, despair and flight of stairs in the novel. Mrs Dalloway can be seen as an attempt to critique modern life, ho wever, the novel can seem overwhelmed by the chaos of characters struggling to find meaning in life when death is such a sizeable presence.Another aspect of this novel that is Modernist and can be seen to be disturbing is its withdrawal from the epic novel, the larger historical or temporal retch found in the 19th century novel. In Mrs Dalloway, there is no organising logic from which to draw a secure and comfortable resolution to lifes postulates. The action or plot is restricted to a single day, no large epic journey is possible and while the struggle for life is apparent, there is nothing of the 19th century moral structure to contain and manage the outcomes.Death and despair overwhelm life and its purposes, the narrowness of life is suffocating, and lives are fragmented, anxious, disconnected and misrecognised.To The Lighthouse also undermines what were the conventional expectations attached to novels. Woolf speculated that she might be writing something other than a novel. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant novelBut what? Elegy?28 Her work can be seen as more poetry than fiction as it occupies itself with abstract ideas and experimentation more than with plot and character developmentWoolf throws into disorder readers expectations of how life can be represented within a novel, and she achieves this through seeking a new mode of expression. It is not that she rejects reality, but rather that she seek to develop a higher type of realism, as if more complex forms would allow for the depiction of a more complex and vivid agreement of reality.Bibliograph.Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis the representation of reality in Western literature / by Erich Auerbach translated from the German by Willard Trask. stark naked York Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1957.Bell, Q, Virginia Woolf A Biography. London Hogarth Press, 1972.Eliot, T.S, American writings and American Language in Selected Essays. London Faber, 1951.Fleishman, Avrom, Virginia Woolf A Critical Reading. Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.Lee, Hermione, The Novels of Virginia Woolf. New York Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1977.Naremore, James, The gentlemans gentleman Without A Self. London Yale University Press, 1973.Schulze, Robin. G, Varieties of Mystical Experience in the writings of Virginia Woolf in Twentieth Century Literature Vol.44. New York Hofstra University, 1998.Woolf, Virginia. A writers diary being extracts from the diary of Virginia Woolf modify by Leonard Woolf. London, Hogarth Press, 1953.Woolf. Virginia, Mrs Dalloway. London Penguin, 1996.Woolf, Virginia, To The Lighthouse. London Penguin, 1992.1 Eliot, T.S, American Literature and American Language in Selected Essays. London Faber, 1951.p. 73.2 Lee, Hermione, The Novels of Virginia Woolf. New York Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1977. p.106.3 Woof, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway. London Penguin, 1996. p.8.4 ibid. p.6.5 ibid. p.55.6 Ibid. p.35.7 Ibid. p.60.8 Ibid. p.75.9 Auerbach, Erich , Mimesis the representation of reality in Western literature / by Erich Auerbach translated from the German by Willard Trask. New York Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1957. p.529.10 Woolf, Virginia, To The Lighthouse. London Penguin, 1992, p.19011 Ibid. pp.137-139.12 Schulze, Robin. G, Varieties of Mystical Experience in the belles-lettres of Virginia Woolf in Twentieth Century Literature Vol.44. New York Hofstra University, 1998. p.313 Naremore, James, The World Without A Self. London Yale University Press, 1973. p.71.14 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis the representation of reality in Western literature / by Erich Auerbach translated from the German by Willard Trask. New York Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1957. pp. 351-35515 Woolf, Virginia. A writers diary being extracts from the diary of Virginia Woolf edited by Leonard Woolf. London, Hogarth Press, 1953. p.16916 Bell, Q, Virginia Woolf A Biography. London Hogarth Press, 1972. p.168.17 Woolf, Virginia, To The Lighthouse. London Penguin, 1992. p.5.1 8 Ibid. p.23.19 Ibid. p.7.20 Ibid. p.7.21 Ibid. p.7.22 Ibid. pp.276-277.23 Ibid. p.277.24 Ibid. p. 107.25 Ibid. 270.26 Woolf. Virginia, Mrs Dalloway. London Penguin, 1996. p.183.27 Ibid. p. 178.28 Woolf, Virginia. A writers diary being extracts from the diary of Virginia Woolf edited by Leonard Woolf. London, Hogarth Press, 1953. p.78.