A Plot Unraveling into Ethics: Woolf, Levinas, and "Time Passes"

I Temporalization as lapse, loss of time, is neither an initiative of an ego, nor a movement toward some telos of action. The loss of is not work of a subject.... passes. --Levinas, Otherwise Than Being (51-52) For a long it was thought that language had mastery over time, that it acted both as future bond of promise and as memory and narrative; it was thought be prophecy and history.... In fact, it is only a formless rumbling, a streaming; its power resides in its dissimulation. That is why it is one with erosion of time; it is depthless forgetting and transparent emptiness of waiting. --Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside (55) In diary entries, Woolf describes Time Passes, short middle chapter of To Lighthouse in which Ramsays' uninhabited summer house ages ten years, as impersonal thing, which I'm dared do by my friends, flight of time and the most difficult abstract piece of writing ... all eyeless and featureless with nothing cling to (D3 36, 76). These suggestive phrases for chapter's dislocations from normal life help us appreciate its strange narrative qualities, its intimation of a not-quite-human voice that seems cling nothing in order cling passing of time. Yet, as many critics have noticed in recent years, this section is not simply an exercise in abstraction or formalism; perspective of Time Passes is distinct from rest of novel--and new modernism--but not because it moves from particularity generality, from contingent events their essential forms. (1) The haunting narrative unlocatability of its language carries a palpable stillness and silence, an almost reverential care not wake sleeping and dead, rather than narrative omniscience or objectivity. In this essay, I discuss fragile stillness and delicate lyricism around absences of Time Passes, not as abstraction, but as narrative poetics of alterity, poetics of subject's intuition of its responsibility towards others, and especially of its involvement in deaths of others. I argue that Woolf anticipates concepts in ethical criticism and philosophy regarding subject's response death of other as origin of time. Time Passes is an especially vivid example of an important strain in Woolf's writing--I also refer briefly Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and A Room of One's Own--in which death of other inaugurates subject's temporality, and in which this temporality exceeds subject's knowledge by virtue of its impossible ethical demand. In other words, I argue that narrator of Time Passes speaks with ethically-inflected voice of selfhood bound other more than its own being, a self for whom fullness of autonomous identity is not a sufficient meaning of human. For these few pages, Woolf leaves familiar horizons of traditional Western subjectivity narrate in voice of its unnarratable, voiceless exteriority, rendering intelligible a void in consciousness that is hard describe or imagine. This can be thought as something like an eclipse, (2) a shadow saturated with light that evades or pains our seeing. Locating exteriority of self, like grasping darkness as a substantial thing, confuses familiar notions of identity and difference, giving what is other and alien a value that is not compatible with internal economy of self. To describe Time Passes in terms of alterity and exteriority instead of abstraction is suggest that its narrative technique animates difference as a meaningful discrepancy in being, rather than subsuming difference in identity or rendering it an object for subject's grasp. Alterity, in this sense, differs from Wilhelm Worringer's emphasis on modernist abstraction in that it does not provide solace a self vulnerable death and decay by creating a new (aesthetic) order; rather, alterity is experience of selfhood that achieves an ethical value in its relation others. …