The Unrecorded Sequences : Virginia Woolfs The Years

抄録

This essay discusses how the description of daily life in Virginia Woolf's The Years (1937) creates a new type of fictional family chronicle. In this novel, Woolf attempts to present the everyday life which is the undercurrent of historical discourse. Conversations between people, the noise in the bustling street, the disorderly party, etc., which would normally have remained as a background to the story, constitute the mainstream of the discourse in this novel. James Naremore says : "In writing The Years, Woolf tried to give a concrete demonstration of the split between private and public worlds, the conflict between a timeless, transpersonal human nature and a divisive, changing social structure. She also provided intimation of that unity which haunts the mind, and envisioned history moving toward a potential resolution of people's inner conflicts" (246). The history on the surface of public memory and a personal history in the background - a history of everyday life - are focused on at the same time, as Narremore also comments : "Although history is one of the book's manifest subjects, The Years subordinates public events to a series of domestic scenes or dinner parties" (246). By analyzing the language of everyday life which emerges from the undercurrent of history in The Years, the following three points are treated : first, how the historicity of public events is transformed by the narrator's description of the unrecorded flow of language used in domestic scenes and dinner parties ; secondly, what the reason for deferring the end of this family chronicle is ; thirdly, how the new sequence, as well as the new kind of language, could be read as a device to offer something beyond patriarchal temporality.