『파도』에 나타난 시간과 파도 이미지

Abstract

This paper explores literary portrayals of time and wave-image in The Waves written by Virginia Woolf. Specifically, I apply Henri Bergson's theories of time to the text so as to analyze the meaning of The Waves. Bergson's idea of duration, memory, or of an eternal flux which precedes the categories of time and space, has a close resemblance to Woolf's treatment of the fluid movement of time within the consciousness. Virginia Woolf looked for a new form which could overthrow the technique of conventional fiction. Woolf attempted to describe something existing beyond everyday consciousness, the idea of which is connected with Bergsonian 'duration'. In addition, Woolf begins to use time as a literary element, thereby reducing her development of plot and characterization. In The Waves, Woolf would write a book told only in psychological time within the minds of six individuals. She tends to see external or physical objects in terms of their subjective significance for her characters. But at the same time she uses a large number of images metaphorically in order to represent the consciousness of her characters. For instance, in the Waves Woolf uses color, and the different meanings which particular words have for each of her characters, as symbolic images to evoke the character's consciousness and even to distinguish them from each other. Besides, the soliloquies in The Waves demonstrates a rhythmic, fluid psychic movement that is like the flux of sound waves. Ricoeur argues that literature stands outside time and yet that regaining the original impression means that the work of art has recovered life in the extratemporal moment. For Woolf, mental space is a constantly changing reality, or in other words resembles the character of Bergsonian duration. Woolf's writing suggests the possibility of achieving the extratemporal 'recovery' of lost time in mental space through the inspiration of works of art. Besides, what makes her writing notably modernist in its representations of time is its focus on the unique ways in which each subject constructs or reconstructs an external world, which is thus at least as mental and individual as it is material and universal.