| The Years is often criticized as a retrogressively realistic novel, or, if it is an experimental piece, as a failure. But these criticisms are mostly due to assumptions of Virginia Woolf`s so-called visionary novels such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Now, it is time to evaluate The Years itself as an independent and experimental work. Woolf as a writer is deeply concerned with aesthetic theories of the novel. She thought that the traditional Victorian novel was too much immersed in what is called life and forgets its own aesthetic functions. Thus, she tries to upgrade the novel to its proper aesthetic territory. The Years is her effort to transform the linear narrative of the novel into a spatial one which is a more inclusive artistic form. By using the methods of scene making and double perspective, her novel builds up many different shapes of space out of time. But this spatial narrative may be rather static. Woolf uses the old literary method of repetition in a rather exaggerated way. She almost forces repetition in every possible level of the novel, such as scenes, ideas, words and phrases both of the characters and the narrator, This is the most difficult part to come to terms with in the novel. But this persistent usage of repetition does give it a needed "sense of movement and change" (MB 79). She, however, does not change the novel only on the formal level. It also incorporates elements of the essay-form within the novel and discusses general and metaphysical ideas instead of specific and individual issues. Her novel is not obsessed with human beings or their materialistic ways of life anymore. Its horizons become wider, enough to contain not only the human perspective, but also the inhuman as well. Still, The Years can be so dramatic and involves the reader into its own narrative. Even if there is no clear resolution at the end of the novel, it makes one ask the same urgent question with the characters, how human beings can improve their quality of life coming out of Plato`s caves. |
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