William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf: the movement of the moment, a dialectic

Abstract

The moments of illumination created in the novels Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves by Virginia Woolf render realities in which illusions of separateness dissolve, and unity of being is achieved; and further, it is the focus and assertion of this study that these epiphanies are disclosed by both writers dialectically. While such moments resemble a still point, they are, nevertheless, a place where characters may hook into the flow of a larger reality, into the movement of life, into the process of creative becoming. At once they are moments arrested and moments that move, and that itself constitutes a dialectic. These illuminations in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf are like thresholds to widening possibilities, to worlds in which contradictions, incongruities, paradoxes are the source of a dialectical truth, which is itself epiphanic. These moments, according to this study, comprise a movement, a creative movement that is essentially a synthesis in which meaning is made from the relation of positions or even oppositions that come together in a whole; a world of unity, not one of fragmentation is then ultimately what is posited by both writers. The dialectical philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel offer relevant commentary and are included in this consideration as well as Henri Bergson's philosophy, possessing its own dialectic. Synthesis in time, in consciousness, in language, in style, and in perspectives are all examined with a final consideration of the implications for dialectical criticism.