Related to Bergson's works are the themes of intuitive and learned
and experiential knowledge; about the moments of insight about the future, about
eternity, suddenly flashing and fading into the present. The directions
associated with the movements in the work are due to the theory of W. James.
The straight direction in which the actual time for the novel flows is like
consciousness - a flowing river that does not return (transitivity). The
circular movements implying the characters as butterflies in flight, fluttering
in concentric circles around Mrs. Ramsay, around an empty center, around the
lighthouse, etc. express their desire and impossibility for selectivity, i.e.
they cannot reach any center. They are also an expression of things that
vibrate and circle around the mind. They circulate in the space around the
creator, but they cannot enter into any form, therefore they are inserted,
hinted at, adapted through allusions, metaphors, strokes - other signs in
general. According to F. de Saussure's theory, language is a sign. But he means
speech, which is made up of sounds. V. Woolf reverses this perspective by using
as a reference point the fine art working with light - in diametrical
opposition to sound. And this is not accidental, considering that both sound
and color have tonality. So instead of the sign of an ear trying to take in
some utterance, at the beginning of her novel with the window she suggests an
eye that seeks to penetrate, to explore, to reach... Saussure explains the
relationship between thought and speech through a graph, in which the partition
- connection between thought and sound is depicted as a channel, a furrow[x].
It turns out that the connection between thought, which is a nebula, and the
sounds that convey it through their orderly arrangement in speech, is
invisible, undetectable. Saussure offers another example of a surface of water
on which the wind causes waves[xi]
to explain how a connection between thought and sound is understood to be made,
and hence in orderly speech. This exact moment seems to be recreated, but again
in an inverted perspective through the abyss "Time Passes", inserted
between the "Window" and the "Lighthouse" in the novel[xii].
It was probably painful for V. Woolf to think about, or mention directly, the
words she used to name her mother and other loved ones she had lost. The sunken
house metaphor in Time Passes, when Mrs. MacNab floats like a big heavy boat (154);
a clumsy tropical fish, the beam of the headlight studies the patterns on the
carpet (157); the sun traces the rooms in furrows and squares (157), etc., as
if the floor of the house had ended up at the bottom of the sea (roofless, like
a cocoon, left without a dome when the butterfly flew out of it) depicts a
house sunk in the mind of a person. V. Woolf consciously work out different
metaphors to make it more painless to touch the actual images and objects. But
Saussure connects the movement of the wind with thought, which is inv