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

from lunch to dinner (or, more properly, from sunrise to sunset and from birth to
death) but the problem of the middle remains. The middle serves to give structure to
the plot and to the novel’s form, which, through the rise and fall of the sun and a
shifting of its characters’ lives from a focus on the future to a focus on the past (and,
simultaneously, from life to death), achieves directionality as well as segmentation.
The Waves, though it does not solve the problem of the artificiality of plot and the
way that plot implicitly defines events in the flow of time as beginnings, middles, and
endings, does, through its pattern of alternating segments, largely separate the
problems of the passage of time from the problem of middles. 13
To the Lighthouse, however, completed months before the above-quoted diary
entry was written, directly links middles with the passage of time. “Time Passes”
links two days, set ten years apart in the same summer house in Scotland. Here, the
appalling narrative business of getting from one moment to another is tackled not
with the Jamesian ellipses of The Waves or even, as Woolf suggests in Orlando, “by
the simple statement that ‘Time passed’ (here the exact amount could be indicated in
brackets) and nothing whatever happened” (69). In refusing to simply skip over the
passage of time, Woolf engages with the conventions both of traditional narrative and
with the modernist conventions she establishes in the beginning section, “The
13 For D.A. Miller, the ending is false. However, beginning, middle, and ending are linked concepts:
if one is arbitrary, all are. That is, the middle is the middle of something. The middle always sits
arbitrarily between arbitrary beginning and arbitrary ending. In praising the digressive middle as a
distinct, truer concept than the arbitrary ending, Miller vacates the concept of the “middle” of any
meaning. In Reading for the Plot, Miller offers a compelling study of digressive and nonteleological
narrative. His use of the term “narrative middles” in this study is at best superfluous
and at worst misleading. What he means to emphasize is a different sort of relation between
middle, beginning, and ending. But the very term “middle” implies the finitude of narrative, and
thus makes the middle as arbitrary as any ending.
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