The Concept of Time in The Concept of Time in the Modern Agethe Modern Age

From literature to painting

Laurano Federica5 AA.S. 2012/2013

1

Aim of the path Aim of the path To examine the role of time in

the modern literature and painting

To train in view of the final examination

2

Reason of the pathReason of the pathTo analyze the concept of time:

interior and chronological time.

Why the human being, particularly the writers and the painters, needs to last to posterity ?

3

Time in Time in LiteratureLiteratureInterior time: Mrs Dalloway, Virginia

Woolf Ulysses, James Joyce

4

The stream of

consciousness

Chronological time: Mrs Dalloway, Virginia

Woolf Ulysses, James Joyce

Accurate time references

The human thoughts are organized in a dis-order ,they have no logical links.

Mrs DallowayMrs Dalloway, V. Woolf, V. Woolf

Flew of thoughts “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges;

Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning--fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?"--was that it?--"I prefer men to cauliflowers"--was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace--Peter Walsh. “

Mrs Dalloway’s thoughts are not linked by logical roules: Mrs. Dalloway thinks about flowers, her youth and the strage sentence of Peter.

The writer doesn’t intervenes to make order in the text.

5

Time of consciousness

Chronological Chronological timetime

“For having lived in Westminster--how many years now? over twenty,--one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

6

She is disturb by the strikes of Big Bang: it interrupts her thoughts.

UlyssesUlysses, J. Joyce, J. Joyce“what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for theday well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can dose off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer”

7

Time of consciousness

The absence of punctuation and paragraphs conveys to the reader in a sense of confusion: the minds works without commas, brackets, colon, etc.Past, present and future are mixed !

“ I suppose theyre just getting up in China now”

8

Chronological Chronological timetime

Molly Bloom is thinking, for a moment, about the chronological time, but she shifts suddenly to another thoughts.

Time in the Aesthetic Time in the Aesthetic MovementMovementThe eternal beauty of art

9

Art eternalizes the subjects and the painters/writers

They were recalled from everyone

Only art can prevent the dead of soul

“The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.” O.

Wilde

To last in timeTo last in time

10

The men needs to be recalled because he/she thinks to be important for who recalls him/her.

To last for posterity gives to men the illusion to be eternal, undying, nearly like a God.

The fear of dead deceives the men to be able to find something to be immortal: magic potions in the fable, portraits, myth.

The Portrait of Dorian Gray, O. Wilde

Time in philosophyTime in philosophyBergson

11

• “Il tempo della coscienza è un arrotolarsi continuo, come quello di un filo su un gomitolo, perchè il nostro passato ci segue e si ingrossa senza sosta del presente che raccoglie nel suo cammino. ”

The quotation means, particularly in literature, that the reader reads with his “glasses”: according to the age the same reader can read the same book and understand more hide meanings.

• “L'io vive il presente con la memoria del passato e l'anticipazione del futuro. Fuori dalla coscienza il passato non è più e il futuro ancora non è. Passato e futuro possono vivere soltanto in una coscienza che li salda nel presente”.

Our actions are influenced by all our life: the memory of past, the present decisions and the expectation of the future.

Time in paintingTime in painting

12

La persistenza della memoria, S. Dalì

The clock seems to alive with their shape, representing the flux of thoughts.