By analyzing the modernity of Woolf's experimental narrative in To The Lighthouse (1927), as well as her depiction of different temporalities operating within a single perceptual experience, Erich Auerbach famously referred to a kind of “omnitemporality” that permeates the writer's style and poetics (Vogler 39–52). Similar to this, and very close to the constant ambivalence between time of the clock and time of the consciousness, one could also refer to a sort of “omnispatiality” enacted in Woolf's writing, and to the constant ambivalence and mutual influence of two main concepts of space. Firstly, a space which is portrayed as a measurable and scientific entity, a Cartesian frame of reference that pre-exists the movements, actions, and thoughts of the subjects; secondly, a kind of space that is traversed, interpreted or even recreated and metamorphosed by the consciousness of the characters and by their mutable perceptions, so as to mime the artist's arbitrary recreation of it. Within this main distinction, which in Woolf must not be seen as a dichotomy but rather as an ambivalence of two spatial configurations always overlapping, one can note a number of different implications, representations and stylistic treatments that directly connect to the multifaceted and multilayered nature of Woolf's experimental narratives and to her belief in the multifariousness of human nature and of human consciousness. Hence, the choice in my title of the term prismatic, which is meant to comprehend all of its meanings: “formed by a transparent prism,” “spectral and yet vivid and brilliant in colour,” “highly varied or faceted” (OED “ prismatic”).

Virginia Woolf mentions a “lustre,” an ornamental device similar to a prism, in the short story “Blue and Green” (1921) where “all day long the ten fingers of a lustre drop green upon the marble” (The Mark 33, my emphasis). The short piece continues by describing the nuances of the color green created by the beams of light reflected from the lustre onto the marble, until, in the end, as time passes, darkness descends upon it and makes it disappear, in a passage endowed with a highly metaphorical language: “Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the mantelpiece; the ruffled surface of the ocean.