Comparing Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse and...

Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse and Kawabatas Snow Country Virginia Woolfs claim that plot is banished in modern fiction is a misleading tenet of Modernism. The plot is not eliminated so much as mapped out onto a more local level, most obviously with the epic structural comparison in Ulysses. In To the Lighthouse, Woolfs strategy of indirect discourse borrows much from Impressionism in its exploration of the ways painting can freeze a moment and make it timeless. In Kawabatas Snow Country, the story of Yoko and her family and its relationship to the rest of the novel corresponds with an even more modern medium, film, and its superimposition of contradictory image. Lily Briscoes metaphor stabilize the†¦show more content†¦Ramsay) and the image, fashioned by Lily, that lasts. In Snow Country, cinema is the subtextual art form of choice for Kawabata. When Shimamura looks up at the domed sky, Kawabata uses filmic imagery to describe his visual journey: Shimamura fancied that his own small shadow was being cast up against it from the earth. Each individual star stood apart from the rest, and even the particles of silver dust in the luminous clouds could be picked out, so clear was the night (165). Shimamura literally projects himself into the void, through the particles of silver dust that resemble the dust a projector illuminates. The characters in Snow Country are trapped in themselves, with a reduced ability to articulate their desires, but they expand through cinematic images into the infinite landscape of nature and the Milky Way, just as the traditional plot, though displaced, is illuminated by the moments of consciousness throughout the novel. The novel opens with Shimamura gazing at Yoko in the reflection of his train window. Early filmmakers took advantage of trains to showcase their medium, as the rapidly shifting landscape, and multitude of framing windows, was already an instance of moving pictures. We are made aware in Snow Country, as in To the Lighthouse, that windows serve three purposes, just as the ocean is utilized in three visual ways in Moby Dick; we can look at them, through them, or at their