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

evening conversation between William Bankes, Andrew and Prue Ramsay, and Lily
Briscoe. All the lights except that of the poet Augustus Carmichael are turned off.
The mode of the novel has not obviously changed: the section is dominated by
dialogue between already-familiar characters, and the lyrical mode 15 as well as the
rapid passage of time which dominates much of “Time Passes” is absent. This
continuity in both subject and mode of narration binds “Time Passes” to “The
Window.” Although “Time Passes” later establishes its radical narrative differences
from the rest of the novel, in the beginning its difference lies purely in the natural
conditions of the narrated world: nightfall. This suggests that, rather than night
serving as a metaphor for the passage of time, war, and the absence of the conscious
bourgeois human mind, instead the meditations and subjects of “Time Passes,”
including the passage of time itself, are suggested—if not determined—by the
narrative problems of narrating the night. Daylight, by contrast, brings with it
conscious thought and the possibility of scenic narration in a stream-of-consciousness
mode. It is the absence of light and consciousness that enables the narration of
historic and major life events, which proceed, unlit, in summary. The interlude
suggested by “Time Passes,” then, is not the purely formal interlude of a contrasting
piece of music between two fully-developed movements. Instead, its formal elements
15 Ralph Freedman describes the lyrical nature of “Time Passes” as follows: “Anticipating The
Waves, it depicts the moment through images, transforming it finally into a larger image of time
itself. Freed from dependence on human beings, it renders, in a more abstract form, the interrelation
between the inner and outer worlds of protagonists on the one hand and a symbolic world on the
other” (234). Susan Stanford Friedman, by contrast, does not consider “Time Passes” to be lyrical,
though she considers To the Lighthouse to be lyric in its overall structure (173). She defines
narrative and lyric as follows: “Narrative is understood to be a mode that foregrounds a sequence of
events that move dynamically in space and time. Lyric is understood to be a mode that foregrounds
a simultaneity, a cluster of feelings or ideas that project a gestalt in stasis” (164).
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