Abstract: | The paper investigates "this extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind" in Virginia Woolf s last novel Between the Acts. 'Real', business, cultural time, 'the time of interrogation' or the 'time of becoming into being' are seen as several sides of the all-mighty Time, creating a pattern made up of the time of the text, of discourse and of the reader. Exploiting the richness offered by these temporal categories and the perceiving power of the 'eye' which is able to pierce through the multiple-layered "pond"/word, Virginia Woolf suggests that the (human) mind and its apprehending of one's 'existence-acts' are forms of "move-ment". Through anticipation and interrogation, the "mind" of the past = culture brings the future into the present and creates a condensed time. In its turn, the "condensed" time = 'event' time grows into "rings", gliding along an axis which links the "depth" of life/text/ time to its surface. Using the technique of the mise en abyme, en hauteur and en surface, Virginia Woolf tries to capture time into a "globe" = a metaphor apprehended only by those selves that want " to fly out of simplicity", making up a succession of " acts" (the text is formed of 33 such acts) which finally create the dramatic struggle of the I to find its place on the stage of this world. |
