Let's take a dive into the wide wonderful world of literary technique, shall we? I read Sally Minogue's article "Was it a Vision? Structuring Emptiness in To the Lighthouse." What Minogue deals with most prominently is the sense of juxapostion...although she uses much more fancy and thereby obfuscating terms; basically, she's concerned with Woolf's ability to enact bathos, which is a ludicrous descent from the exalted to the commonplace, or an anticlimax, according to dictionary.com anyway. What Minogue is examining her is the effect this has on "To the Lighthouse," especially the "Time Passes" portion. She focuses on the nature of the passage itself--its fleeting view of the characters at the start--two of which are going to be dead by the end of the section--and its feel of a single act despite being divided into chapters.
As such, I'm going to through another term at you: zeugma, which is defined in-article as "a figure of speech in which words or phrases with widely differing meanings are 'yoked together' with comic effect by being syntactically dependent on the same word, often a verb." This is where I started with juxtaposition: the comic effect comes from this two widely differing ideas being spliced next to each other. For example:
"On September 11th, 2001, hijack planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, causing widespread destruction, panic, chaos, and the deaths of thousands of people; and worst of all, the entire day I could not get that seed out of my teeth."
Two completely unrelated things yoked together to comic effect. But Cameron, you say, this sentence is funny--we don't know why, but it is--but it's also horrifying! And I would say, yes, the horror is what exactly makes the thing funny; see, the juxtaposition is so jarring that we have an involuntary reaction to it--in this case, laughter. Minogue argues the exact same thing occurs in time passes, including the horrific nature. It functions because "Woolf [created] a fictional world of such power that the read is, and is surely intended to be, taken in by it." (289) The entire first part of the novel is a buildup, following the pattern of bathos, culminating in the truimphant dinner and Mrs. Ramsey exuberant happiness. Then we get to time passes, whichis full of some of the most beautiful wordage in the english language, and a profound emptiness. The buildup of the novel is entirely crushed; the reader is instead compelled to focus on an empty and dying house, rotting away due to neglect, in varying stages of decomposition--and intermittent between all this are the glimpses of our characters live, all horrifying, and all hilarious in their juxtaposition and tone of flippancy. As Minogue says "Here [the brackets] carry of the force of the novelist's own apparent indifferance, her 'Oh, by the way." (290). As in "Oh, by the way, Mrs. Ramsey died. Oh, by the way. Prue died. Oh, by the way, Andrew was killed." A veritable massacre takes place in "Time Passes," with the entire emotional weight of a metronome attached to it. Minogue explains the power of the brackets in this case: "The clear implication of the square bracket in all its uses in 'Time Passes' is that what passes within them is less important than what happens outside them." (290) How beautiful the house is described, wasting away. How flippantly, the deaths of three characters that have been carefully constructed in the first 150 pages. This is bathos and zeugma at its finest.
And the result, as mentioned before, is a jarring effect, the equivalent of a slap to the face; my God, these deaths mean nothing! "Furthermore," Minogue elaborates, "the incongruity between the stumbling Mr. Ramsey--who has in any event been largely a figure of fun in "The Window"--and the tragic figure that he should cut, seems to be endorsed by the author, who leaves absolutely no room for emotion in the sentence." (291) She goes on to talk about how Mr. Ramsey gets no chance to be a tragic figure that he deserves to be (on a side note, this is ironic, considering how much he has wanted attention in the first part), and the reader, desiring to feel sympathy, is left unable and impotent. The reader loses the power to connect--the zuegma has jarred them so sufficiently that all they can do is gape and stumble around and hope to gain some footing again; and remember, Woolf does this three times!
The reader is effectively traumatized, his world blown apart whether he realizes it or not; or, as Minogue more eloquently imparts: "In this analysis, then, To the Lighthouse can never recover from the laconic shock of 'Time Passes," its undercutting of the human, its depersonalization of what had been so fully, if fictionally, lived." (293, emphasis mine) And, further on: "Woolf has found and perfected techniques which allow a creative balance of those contradictions, making it fully representational of the uncloseable chasm between life in all is felt beauty and death, which renders it meaningless." (294) The beauty of life is found in the perfect diction making up most of "Time Passes." The death is found in the brackets--but it is the brackets that make us remember. The beauty is lost, all that's left is the death.
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