“An Indescribable Pause”: Reading Pandemic Time Through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
摘要
In her anticipation of Big Ben striking the hour at the onset of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway reflects upon “an indescribable pause” that engages with both time and her lingering symptoms of influenza. This temporal moment is marked by objective clock time but a disruption to subjective time that is both psychological and historical. This moment is one to which contemporary readers during the COVID-19 pandemic could relate. The draw to Woolf’s novel during the early days of the pandemic—by academics and bloggers alike—suggests an affinity with the work, a means of trying to make sense of both living in a pandemic and what can come after. This chapter considers the appeal of Woolf’s novel during the COVID-19 pandemic as a model for how pandemic time collapses time distinctions for both individuals inflicted by disease, the loved ones around them, and society at large. Using the concepts of viral temporalities and nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson’s concepts of durée and clock time, this chapter exposes the ways in which pandemic time resists spatial conceptualization because of the difficulty of conceptualizing the disease itself and the inability to identify clear stages of the pandemic and of time.