VIRGINIA WOOLF SEEMS TO HAVE UNDERSTOOD history as a stable temporal continuum marked by sudden disjunctive moments, and this view informed her practice of literature. In one renowned declaration, she identified the emergence of a new modern aesthetic, what we might label “modernism” today, with a particular moment in history: “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” This year marks for Woolf a significant shift, for 1910 is when an art exhibition opened in the Grafton Galleries in London entitled “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” This exhibition, with works by painters such as Cézanne, Gaugin, and Matisse, has been described by Julia Briggs as “a point where continuity of past and present broke down” for Woolf. Woolf expressed a similar sentiment about the eruption of the First World War: “That a break must be made in every life when August 1914 is reached seems inevitable.” It was the war, “the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion.” Whether a groundbreaking exhibition of new art or the sudden outbreak of war, Woolf believed that certain historical moments could dislocate the linear trajectory of human existence. This notion that history is marked by sudden disjunctive moments is deeply embedded in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. 1910 and 1914 even fall within the historical span of the novel, whose action begins in 1909 and ends in 1919. Indeed, the events of 1910 and 1914 are even discernable in the plot, despite its general silence with regard to history. The 1910 shift in art is surreptitiously thematized by a contrast between the fictional painter Paunceforte and the character Lily Briscoe. Paunceforte's impressionistic style serves as an aesthetic counterpoint for Lily's postimpressionist painting: “That was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that.” And the First World War clearly plays a role in the death of the character Andrew Ramsay: “A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsey, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous” (133).

Yet To the Lighthouse does not merely depict sudden disjunctive moments of history but rather enacts these interruptions in its very form. It thus epitomizes how high modernism seeks to problematize and transcend aestheticism. Indeed, the dynamic force of Woolf's novel demonstrates the action of the “performative.”