Time as protagonist in To the Lighthouse

Modernism’s lasting influence – as an object of scholarly analysis and as a conspicuous cultural phenomenon – belies the fact that it established itself as an art of failure. This was not a measure of its weaknesses, however, but of its ambition: The urge to overreach, to give voice to the unspeakable, to convey intuitions and processes that seem to lie beyond language. Whether tracking the movement of consciousness in all its waywardness and caprice or peering beneath the veneer of civilization to see what primal unrest lurks there, modernist objectives often are defined by their unattainability. But perhaps the most quixotic of these strivings for the elusive or impossible was the attempt to recalibrate time, to find new forms of periodicity and new narrative rhythms within traditional storytelling practices. In pursuit of this audacious agenda, an enduring strand of modernist fiction concerned itself with the development of alternate temporalities – first recognizing the fractured, discontinuous, and spontaneous nature of experience and then devising suitable techniques for mapping the lineaments of thought itself rather than follow the dictates of rectilinear logic.