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

Mr. Carmichael’s midnight candle-blowing, neither Mr. Ramsay’s confused moment
nor Mrs. Ramsay’s death can be specifically placed in time. The indeterminability of
time in “Time Passes” overwhelms its remaining traditional elements of narrative,
leaving them cast as islands in a sea of unstable time.
The fourth section continues to follow the “certain airs” through stillness and
storm and into the middle of the night, where the housekeeper Mrs. McNab is
introduced: “Then again peace descended; and the shadow wavered; light bent to its
own image in adoration on the bedroom wall; and Mrs. McNab, tearing the veil of
silence with hands that had stood in the wash-tub, grinding it with boots that had
crunched the shingle, came as directed to open all windows, and dust the bedrooms”
(130). When a human presence enters the stage (the stable house-and-environs topos
of the unstable chronotope), narrative immediately attaches itself to that human
presence: it bends to its own (human) image as the light on the bedroom wall. “Time
Passes” thus attempts and deliberately quashes the idea of a nonhuman narrative (a
project which Woolf would attempt on very different terms in Flush). The title of this
middle part promises intransitive action (passing) by a nonhuman agent (time), but it
cannot represent this action directly. Instead, it grasps at light and movement—of air,
of doors—and ascribes to nonhuman objects agency and human-like narrative
moments. When a human enters the stage, she immediately becomes the focus of the
narrative. The narrator of “Time Passes,” then, operates as something of a narrative
detector, with narrative defined roughly in Bremond’s terms: change from one state to
another through time by a human agent. To the extent that “Time Passes” attempts to
understand or fill in the nonhuman elements left out by “The Window,” “The
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