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

a reconstitution across the middle, rather than a forward movement from beginning to
end.
“Time Passes” represents one of Woolf’s solutions to the problem of making a
coherent long-form narrative out of the stream of consciousness. In preparing to write
what would become The Waves, Virginia Woolf offers a critique of “conventional”
novels that echoes Henry James’ famous charge that the large, history-spanning
narratives exemplified by War and Peace are loose, baggy monsters:
Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice
of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that
dont belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the
realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely
conventional. Why admit any thing to literature that is not poetry—by
which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novel[ist]s—
that they select nothing? (Diary Vol. 3 209-10)
Here, Woolf links a preference for poetry over prose, truth over convention, and the
heightened moment over the passage of time. In this poetic moment, Woolf includes
the internal (thought), the external (the voice of the sea), and the mediation between
the internal and the external (sensation). The external, moreover, is also figural: rather
than include a social and a natural world in the moment, Woolf gives the natural
world a voice. In doing so, she is able to elide the social world that is the primary
concern of realist novels. Furthermore, Woolf rejects temporal rhythms of
conventional novels, what Genette calls “the connective tissue par excellence of
novelistic narrative, whose fundamental rhythm is defined by the alternation of
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