TIME AND CONSCIOUSNESS REPRESENTATION IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Abstract

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel, is often regarded as one of her more complex and ambitious narratives. Erich Auerbach (2005) made one of the first attempts to shed some light on the narrative techniques employed in the novel in his essay “The Brown Stocking”, the last chapter of his seminal work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. However, some recent criticism on this essay, notably from Michael Levenson (2015), has emphasized the limited scope of Auerbach’s terms of approach regarding the narrative of To the Lighthouse. Therefore, this article aims to update Auerbach’s ideas with the terminology provided by structuralist narratology, especially the categories regarding time and consciousness representation, according to the theoretical propositions of Bart Vervaeck and Luc Herman (2005). In this respect, Woolf’s use of multipersonal consciousness representation, differently from her contemporaries James Joyce and Marcel Proust, for instance, enables her to portray time in very peculiar ways in each of the sections of the novel. Consequently, by rendering the perception of the events not only from a single perspective, but from as many as possible, Virginia Woolf creates a mosaic of points of view that aims at a synthesis of reality.