Books: How Time Passes

(2 of 6)

The story jumps ahead, like the bumping minute hand of a clock, to 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918, the present. Familiar figures are suddenly there no more; new ones appear; the passage of time is as apparent as in the cinema of a growing plant. In the last scene the whole family have come together in a big informal party. Eleanor, noted now for her rambling tongue and inability to finish a sentence, is over so. Rose, the baby, is stout and deaf. Milly is as fat as her jovial husband, who "swayed from side to side as if his benevolence rolled about in him. He was like an old elephant who may be going to kneel." The once-lovely Kitty is now "one of those well-set-up rather masculine old ladies," and the widow of a Governor-General. Edward is a distinguished old-bachelor scholar. The young people look at the old; the old, who such a short time ago were young, try to remember but find it easier to look at their successors. Before they know it the dawn is in the sky. the party has kept them up all night.

Long before a reader has finished the book he realizes that The Years is well named. It is not so much the story of a particular family as it is the story of how time passes—or seems to pass; recurs—or seems to recur. In Virginia Woolf's plotless pattern there seems to be an inkling, a suggestion, a flash, of what time may mean. The effectiveness of her method, which she has been evolving for 15 years, is that it gives the reader this feeling of being abroad in space and time. The sense of time elapsing which the discontinuous "action" of the story gives is further deepened whenever the clock strikes and the years move on, in scenes that show the seasons changing, day fading into night, night becoming day. These scenes, unlike John Dos Passos' Camera Eye, are described not from the vantage point of an individual but from a point in space somewhere above the world: "The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers. the ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable copies of the same pot. those who bore red hot minds through contorted letters, and also Mrs. Jones in the alley, share my bounty."

Into the mind of aged Eleanor, who thinks deeper thoughts than her old, busy, muddled brain can speak, Virginia Woolf puts her final suggestion: "Is there a pattern?'' she asks. "A theme, recurring, like music; half remembered, half foreseen? ... a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible?" Nobody answers the question; but the sun. which presumably knows its part in the gigantic pattern, rises.