Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

something permanent(as in other sphere Lily tried to make of the moment something 
permanent) – this was of the nature of a revelation. (183) 
I believe that in this extract, the writer celebrates the power of memories and their influence on the 
present moments. Indeed, as seen from the words in bold, Lily manages to bring the mythical Mrs. 
Ramsay’ s picture back by her creative effort to fill space and time with the meaning. Before she 
does it, all the things she sees around her seem “like curves and arabesques flourishing round a 

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center of complete emptiness” (205). Lily feels that the language of memories and its emotional 
intensity can bring people back to the presence, back to life, even if they are far away or are dead. 
Indeed, according to Stevenson (1998:103), Woolf “uses the memory as a seamstress to cut and 
reshape sections taken out of the ordinary, sequential passage of time”. Thus, in the critic’s 
opinion, the writer emphasizes the importance of represented time in the depiction of her 
characters’ lives, which can be clearly seen in the following passage from To the Lighthouse (1927): 
(24) The space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape, if they 
shouted loud enough Mrs Ramsay would return. ‘Mrs Ramsay!’ she said aloud. ‘Mrs 
Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face. (205) 
Here, the represented time in the novel covers the past, present, and future periods. Lily goes 
back to the times when Mrs Ramsay was present and now she expects to make these moments 
present by the power of wish and intensity of her emotions. In my opinion, here Woolf foregrounds 
the importance of sustaining intimate relationships between Lily’s yarning for Mrs Ramsay and the 
immortal picture of Mrs Ramsay that will always remain in Lily’s mind. 
With no doubt, it would be difficult to understand the mission of temporality of Woolf’s 
novels without wider knowledge of the literary context of the books. According to Surette 
(1993:23), in Woolf’s fiction, the tragedy of modern human lost in modern world is convincingly 
depicted in the context of the war, urbanization and industrialization of the world, and dramatic 
changes in the traditional values. Without general understanding of these important factors, a reader 
will not be able to comprehend fully the semantic core of Woolf’s fiction. Thus, as Onega and 
Landa conclude, having all these facts taken into account, there is no single answer to the question 
‘Which kind of time, represented or representational, has more significance?’ 
It is possible to compare the represented and representational time to two more types of time 
indicated by Onega and Landa. They carry an elaborate analysis of the time of narrating and 
narrated time. How do the two kinds of time differ? As the linguists say (1996:130), “on the one 
hand, what is narrated and is not narrative is not itself given in flesh and blood in the narrative but 
is simply ‘rendered or restored’. On the other hand, what is narrated is essential the temporality of 
life.” Thus, the nature of the time of narrating is a great deal similar to that of the representational 
time. It is a real period of time sacrificed for producing a piece of fiction. By comparison, narrated 
time is a fictional time, or the temporal setting that embeds the elements of a particular story or 
novel. 
Stevenson complements Onega and Landa’s insights and compares the two aforementioned 
notions, namely, represented and representational time, in a greater detail. In his opinion (1998:91), 
“modernist fiction rarely abandons story altogether, or smashes up the clock entirely, but it often 

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abandons the arrangement of events in their time sequence – the kind of mechanical succession of 
day following day”. Besides, he points out the differences between natural, or astronomical 
physical, and historical, or social time in literature. On the one hand, time is understood as a real 
natural phenomenon, an ontological concept that has been explored by philosophers since the times 
of deep antiquity. Then time was defined as the movement that is measured by certain periods that 
nature invents, namely: days and nights, months, seasons. The man divided the passing time 
according to his needs into hours, days, weeks, or months. On the other hand, the historical time is a 
much more complex and wider concept, which includes long decades and centuries in history. This 
time includes all human history and the social changes occurring in society such as relations 
between peoples and cultures, intercultural and intergenerational conflicts and other interactions of 
human realities. The historical time is difficult to limit, to break, and to describe; it goes by itself, as 
a matter of changing human nature. Thus, al in all, as Stevenson concludes, time is a wide 
multidimensional issue and should be understood “by means of intuition, able to apprehend the 
permeation of conscious states; the seamless flow of creative evolution and becoming”. (1998: 107)