ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

narrative form. Though they disrupt narrative point of view, genre, and the direction
of the plot, these middles are themselves hidden: Conrad’s by the absence of formal
markings, James’s by the absence of the middle itself.
To the Lighthouse, on the other hand, identifies its middle through a clear
three-part narrative structure, so that the reader is able to identify the middle even
before she begins to read. Woolf described the novel’s form as “Two blocks joined by
a corridor,” accompanied by a drawing resembling an outlined letter “H” with a
single stroke below (Holograph, Appendix A 48). Woolf’s phrase and diagram are
highly suggestive of Todorov’s description of the two types of narrative episodes,
“those which describe a state (of equilibrium or of disequilibrium) and those which
describe the passage from one state to the other” (Todorov 111). These are,
respectively, the adjectival and the verbal, Given Woolf’s choice of the word “block”
to describe the stative beginning and ending, we might also associate the adjectival
with the nominal phrase in a narrative predicate. If narrative, as in Woolf’s diagram,
consists of two dimensions (or, in Todorov’s theory, two parts of speech) the
beginning and ending primarily provide one of these two dimensions, while the
middle provides the other. Woolf’s underline emphasizes that these parts combine to
create a narrative whole. Without “Time Passes,” then, To the Lighthouse would not
be a narrative—but instead two unconnected descriptive episodes. Put more modestly,
“Time Passes” does the work of turning modernist adjectival episodes into a single
novelistic narrative. “Time Passes” makes the narrative both unified and twodimensional.
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