Sustaining relative experience : Virginia Woolf's and Marcel Proust's struggle to narrate inner lives

Abstract

There is a fine line between sanity and madness; antithetical standpoints which need to be re-evaluated to determine whether the latter is a term referring to exceptionally rare individuals who manage to experience life consciously. A basic need of human beings is to live life to the full but this desire struggles against the concept of tempus fugit. No writer despised absolute time more than Virginia Woolf. Her novels present the inner self in its raw state as she endowed the English novel with a touch of the avant-garde by amplifying her tales with a 'multi-voicedness' characteristic stemming from the multiple selves of the relative lives of her protagonists. Similarly, Marcel Proust's 'simultaneism' in his novel, In Search of Lost Time also focuses on narrating the inner life of his protagonist; one that is stimulated by involuntary memories. The mechanics of relative time will be the main focus of this thesis as it will analyse how these Modernist writers have plunged their narratives into a relative world to attempt to transcribe the inner life of their characters. Accordingly, the chapters will include the notion of perception, of memory and of immediate experience to understand whether Woolf and Proust managed to create novels that authentically portray how human nature works internally. The primary texts to discuss the relative world will be Woolf's two novels Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, together with Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time. Moreover, philosophical narratives such as St. Augustine's The Confessions, as well as Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will will provide the basis for this thesis to better delineate the concept of time since it is a subject that has been thoroughly analysed yet it still lacks an exact definition.