Clock Time and Modernist Paralysis

In his Virginia Woolf (2009), Michael Whitworth has traced the critical approaches to the contentious issue of whether Bergson did or did not influence Woolf. Whitworth’s view is that, if Bergson did influence Woolf, ‘then Mrs Dalloway is the most relevant text because at the heart of Bergson’s philosophy was a claim about time’. ¹ Susan Dick’s seminal reading is invaluable in setting the stage for a discussion on how time functions in the novel, which, as Dick indicates, has a looser version of the ‘tight chronological structure’ Woolf had originally intended, but is still paced by the passage of clock time. ² One of the effects of these regular demarcations of clock time is to throw into relief the contracted or distended nature of psychological time, ‘when time seems suspended as the focus shifts from external to internal events’. ³ The impersonal narrative periodically monitors clock time so that actions, events, and even thoughts are given clock time co-ordinates: in the ‘extraordinary silence and peace’, as the crowd is united in watching the aeroplane pass overhead, ‘bells’ strike ‘eleven times’ (22); the Bradshaws’ dinner guests ‘when the clock struck ten, breathed in the air of Harley Street’ (111); and Hugh Whitbread ‘paused for a moment (as the sound of the half-hour died away)’ (113). The ‘timing’ of the characters’ movements, through the streets of London for instance, creates ‘the impression of disparate events occurring simultaneously’, ⁴ and works as a structural device that enables Woolf to connect internal scenes, which reveal individual perspectives, and present them as concurrent. The shifts in focus, from the external world to the minds of the perceiving characters, characterises Mrs Dalloway. ⁵ The transition from omniscient to subjective perspective often takes the novel from ‘actual time’ into non-commensurable ‘mind time’. ⁶ This significant development in her art is illuminated by a diary entry of 30 August 1923: ‘I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; […] The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment’. ⁷ She is referring to what she later called her ‘tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it’. ⁸ As Susan Dick maintains, Woolf ‘had found a method of creating character that imitated the selective process of memory and perception by which we know and recollect ourselves, one another, and our world’. ⁹ This technique consists of a constant juxtaposition of past and present and of duration and clock time.