Resumen de The modern work of art and the spatialisation of time: painting in the novel
This paper discusses how the modern work of art, and particularly the novel, reflects the process of spatialisation of time diagnosed as distinctive of modernity by Walter Benjamin in "The Origin of German Tragic Drama". It focuses on a special instance of this process with reference to the thematisation of painting in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" (1927). While most modernist fiction, and especially Woolfs, exhibits a marked concern with space, this novel in particular: by taking up the painting of a picture (a spatial art) as one of its structural and thematic axes, it raises crucial questions about the work of art in modern times. What is at stake here is more than an examination of Woolf's well-established 'visual' mode of fiction writing, or her equally acknowledged close relation with the world of art and artists, mediated especially by her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and her close friend, Roger Fry, a renowned artist and critic who introduced post- lmpresionism to the English art scene. Rather, in this particular instance of a 'painting in a novel', the pictorial process becomes a metaphor of Woolfs fictional writing and of her quests as a modernist artist, framing the novel's text in a kind of "mise en abyme". Moreover, this modernist, abstract painting embeds history, including art history, by displaying a marked concern with the material and means of art in its predilection for the abstract and the fragmentary, common to both visual and literary modernism. Simultaneously , it raises questions about its own historicity, in the context of the demise of transcendence in secular modernity, thus refuting the commonplace perception of modernism as ahisrorical.
