Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
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...
...Writing. To say that Virginia Woolf writes well will hardly be news to anyone who reads contemporary literature. But it is sometimes hard to tell whether she is writing prose or poetry. Such a book as The Waves (TIME, Oct. 19, 1931), for instance, is not only in the mood but in the manner of poetry, flagrantly trespassing on poetry's ground. The Years has fewer of these ambiguously-styled passages than To the Lighthouse or The Waves, but they appear now & then. Sometimes they are onomatopoetic: "And the walloping Oxford bells, turning over and over like slow porpoises...
...lives of human beings are even less observable indications of the same pattern but serve to mark the wavelike motion of life's force. Nearest that common readers can get to Virginia Woolf's prose meaning: human nature does not change, it only seems to, like the particles of water moved by a wave. Thus her characters are not so much individual people as aspects of human nature: human particles in the moving wave of time...
What Time means, what Space is, what the Sea mirrors is more than Virginia Woolf can say: but that they are, that they mean and mirror some Reality measureless to man is the whole import of her writing...