다시 읽는 “존재의 순간들”: ｢순간: 여름 밤｣과 『댈러웨이 부인』을 중심으로

Rereading Virginia Woolf’s “Moments of Being”: “The Moment: Summer’s Night” and Mrs. Dalloway.

This study is a critical response to the longstanding view that has aligned “moments of being” in Virginia Woolf with religious or mystical traditions of epiphany — a sudden revelation of transcendent truth. From this perspective, the moments of being mark instants for transcending the chaotic, rapidly changing, and fragmented life in a modern society, finding their existence in the self-limited and self-sufficing work of art. Thus, the moments of being have been easily connected to order, eternity, stabilization, and stasis, while also implicating their fundamental transcendence from — or independence from — ordinary life.
Reading against the grain, this paper proposes that Woolf’s moments constitute active engagement with actual social life. My contention is that eruptive moments in Woolf are not static, but dynamic; they are resistant, rather than susceptible, to order and stability, as well as to the belief of the linear progress of time and history. Structured by the alternations between the present as a part of an order — which is subservient to maintaining the status quo — and the eruptive present — that exposes and challenges the repressive forces of the former –, an essay entitled “The Moment: Summer’s Night” dramatizes the political potential for the subversive moments of being as a social criticism. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa’s encounter with moments of being against the backdrop of the social space of London ushers us into an alternative utopian chronotope that interacts with the actual life in its radical vision of the interdependence of the self and the universe, a vision that destabilizes the repressive social system.
In sum, Woolf’s critical distance from the dogmatic prescription in various utopian discourses for an ideal society located in a distant, static time and space drives her to seek alternative utopia. Eruptive moments of being in Woolf’s writing enacts utopia that intervenes into the production of a more liberating social space in its blurring of egotistic and repressive boundaries between beings and its fight with imagined closure.

Key words: 존재의 순간들, 모더니즘, 사회적 공간 moments of being, modernism, social space.

Related posts