Starting with a perhaps quintessential Scottish discussion of whether to visit the lighthouse depending on the weather, the narrative is also coated with cinematic qualities akin to film noir, which denote a disembodied and dislocated experience of voyeurism. The noir-like experience is not unexpected given Woolf’s interest in cinema, then still an emerging art. 10 In her brief essay ‘The Cinema’ from 1926, Woolf focuses on the qualities the moving picture eventually adds to still photographs mainly through the manipulation of time. 11 Written synchronously with To the Lighthouse , it seems plausible that the experiences Woolf describes in ‘The Cinema’ may have affected her writing more widely. 12 In the essay, Woolf seems to load the marginal with endless possibility with the description of her experience at a screening of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligar i, when she suddenly glimpses ‘a shadow shaped like a tadpole [that] appeared at one corner of the screen.’ The experience, she adds, triggered ‘some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic’s brain.’ 13
Woolf’s glimpses of the house, seemingly tangential to the novel’s narrative, are unexpected appearances that materialise and immediately vanish. They resemble the accidental interferences flickering in old cinema screens, which are marginal to the projected movie, but strong in triggering a way of thinking that is alien to the chronological order of the projection. Instead, they dislocate the audience’s attention and briefly detach them from the cinematic immersion. They augment the thick and porous threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. Light in ‘Time Passes’ does not only scrutinise the surfaces it dusts; it examines the dusted dust itself. It connects the making and undoing of materiality across deep temporal scales, not necessarily always in a chronological order but also sometimes noticing how marginalia are dragged laterally or obliquely into the described scene. It may even allow the following of a dust speckle in its queer movement before it deposits. The interferences unsettle the immersive experience and glitch the brain into a world of different dimensions. The flashing light not only accentuates paranoia, giving the scene an uneasy feeling of being controlled or surveyed by military searchlights, but it also complicates time. The story unfolds with the expectation of that visit, which never actually happens. Unlike dust, which is literally tangible, the lighthouse is a future that is there as expectation; a destination illuminated in brief rhythmic flashes, but never fully realized. 14 *
10 Laura Marcus argues that ‘Time Passes’ ‘can be read as a form of experimental cineplay,’ through which Woolf’s writing as ‘ghostly realism’ is indicative of film as a media that is ‘complete without us.’ Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p120, quoted in Caleb Sivyer, The Politics of Gender and the Visual in Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter (PhD Thesis, School of English, Communication & Philosophy, Cardiff University, 2015), p22 The ghostly presence of Mrs Ramsay at the end of the chapter is described as a film projection on to the interior of the decaying house: ‘… and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table, across the wash-stand …’ (Woolf, To the Lighthouse , p149) 11 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, in The Nation and Anthenaeum Vol. 39, No. 13 (1926), pp381–383, available online: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the- cinema-by-virginia-woolf-from-the-nation-and-athenaeum. 12 The ten years between the first and third chapters of the novel also have an important resemblance in the gap of ten years that Woolf alludes to in ‘The Cinema’. In the essay, these ten years pass between ‘the present in which the early films are being viewed and the past of the realities they record’ (Laura Marcus, ‘Cinema and Modernism,’ in Discovering Literature: 20th Century (2016), available online: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/cinema-and- modernism ) 13 Before Woolf, and at a screening of a Lumière film, Maxim Gorki comes remarkably close to this undoing of the orders in representational systems with his attention to the marginal and the eccentric, when he glimpses a strange flicker passing through the screen, which stirs the picture to life.
14 The literary formulation rehearses a previous journey in Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out . Deceivingly conventional in her plot, Woolf’s proposed voyage is less external – when Rachel embarks on ship to South America – than it is internal – when the main character journeys from a sheltered education to emancipation. When Rachel dies, the journey remains unclear; an anticipation that never happens and whose end approaches when she ‘kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should move.’ See Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915, New York: The Modern Library, 2021).
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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