Temporality and Intuitive Perception in Woolf's Fiction: A Bergsonian Reading

Time and perception are two major concerns of Woolf in many of her novels and short stories. Woolf as a modernist writer often tries in her fiction to find an epistemological solution to the problems of mortality and immortality, appearance and reality and diversity and unity and she succeeds, I think, by taking on a kind of perception that is intuitive and temporal. For her, true perception is time-bound, but like Bergson she divides time into mechanical and organic one. In her writing, she often associates symbolically the former with death and aridity and the latter with life and fertility, presenting them in the images, to name but a few of keyboard of a piano or alphabetical letters and tree or green shawl and dress, respectively. Evidently, in her views and the solution, she finds to the problems of time and perception Woolf is influenced by Bergson whose theory of time has also influenced so many other modernists. This paper elaborates on the relationship between time and perception in the works of Woolf, especially in her two major novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs Dalloway (1924) and her short story “An Unwritten Novel” (1921).