![]() ![]() ![]() This ‘conflict’ not only refers to the war but the conflict between the present and the past. Published in 1931, The Waves was written in the interwar period, in an ‘atmosphere of doubt and conflict’, in which, Woolf asserted, ‘writers now have to create’ (2009:75). Through reading The Waves in conjunction with Henri Bergson’s metaphysical theories of time and duration, we might better understand Woolf’s conception of temporality and relation to modernity. To ‘stand’ on a period of time problematises the conception of time as a linearity, understood through scientific quantification into measurable units. However, Woolf’s description spatialises time: a ‘moment’ is understood as a (brief) period of time, often marked by a particular experience or event. In her diary, on 4th January 1929, Virginia Woolf described ‘this moment I stand on’ as ‘transitory, flying, diaphanous.’(1981:138) This triptych of adjectives echoes Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.’(2010:16) This echo links the experience of temporality with modernity: both are essentially fleeting. Time, Memory and Duration in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ ![]()
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