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

Golden Bowl reduces key narrative events to zero, leaving what Genette calls an
“ellipsis,” or “infinite speed” (Genette, Narrative Discourse 93). “Time Passes” does
not go quite so far, but occupies the more traditional category of summary. According
to Genette, before the twentieth century, summary was “the most usual transition
between two scenes, the ‘background’ against which scenes stand out, and thus the
connective tissue par excellence of novelistic narrative, whose fundamental rhythm is
defined by the alternation of summary and scene” (Genette, Narrative Discourse 97).
When we consider that Aristotle wrote about beginnings, middles, and ends in the
context of dramatic productions that were quite literally nothing but scenes, we can
begin to see the disruption “Time Passes” poses to the fundamental rhythm of the
nineteenth-century novel. Ten years of events are compressed into a brief summary at
the novel’s middle, the most seemingly crucial of those events confined within
brackets—exiled from the narrative proper and the dominant narrative voice. In To
the Lighthouse, events are not the scenic meat of the narrative, but the connective
tissues that hold the scenes—even the scenes within “Time Passes”—to the bones of
the novel’s form.
What may be considered the basic plot suggested by the novel’s title also
reflects this three-part narrative movement. In the first section, “The Window,” half a
day or so passes in a professor of philosophy’s summer house in Scotland. The book
begins with Mrs. Ramsay, the professor’s wife, promising her favorite son, James,
that, if the weather is good, they will go to the lighthouse the following day. Mr.
Ramsay objects—the weather will not be good enough to go to the lighthouse. By the
end of “The Window,” Mrs. Ramsay has conceded the point to Mr. Ramsay, but she
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