Time Clock time Big Ben Internal time Interior

Time Clock time (Big Ben) Internal time (Interior monologue) Past – present – future (Deep past and deep future suggested in portrayal of the present moment)

Structural organisation Text is chronologically structured Adheres 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.

Ricoeur As 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

Time Present 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.

Big 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. 80

Big Ben and the late clock Contrast 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?

Past Present and Future All 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 Cymbeline

Deep time Anticipation 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.

…and deep past Through 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.

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

Past, present, future Co-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. . .

Consciousness Interior monologue – Woolf presents unfiltered thoughts of characters Also, passes on the dominant consciousness to different characters, often very minor, without signalling the change Example – beginning of 3 rd paragraph

Co-incidence Consciousness is passed on via the co-incidence of characters in time and space They 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. ”

Time’s elasticity Rezia 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)

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.

Modernist view of time Woolf: 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