Between the Acts Read online

  Then, throughout the whole period of the novel’s composition, Woolf’s diaries and letters offer a most penetrating and moving record of a civilian’s experience of war. Numerous biographies describe in detail this portion of her life, but a few key details must at least be noted here. Little more than a week before beginning the first typescript, Woolf recorded her expectation that war would soon be announced (Diary 5: 131); by September, she was contemplating the “darkness, strain [and] conceivably death” that war would bring (Diary 5: 166). That September was a month of high tension, but a temporary respite seemed offered in the Munich Pact, in which England, France, and Italy ceded to Germany an area in Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland in return for Hitler’s agreement to respect the rest of Europe’s borders as they stood (see note to page 10). By the end of 1938, Woolf had written almost the first half of the novel. Then, in March 1939, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia; on September 1, Hitler attacked Poland, and Britain and France declared war. Woolf’s progress on the novel went much more slowly in 1939 and the first half of 1940, as she worked on her biography of Roger Fry; yet by August 1940 the novel was close to being finished in its first draft. That fall, Germany launched its most sustained bombing campaign, or blitzkrieg, on England, the famed Battle of Britain, and—as Woolf’s diary indicates over and over again, even up to her entry on February 7, 1941—Hitler’s invasion of England was expected at any time. Bombs destroyed two houses in London where she had lived, and, in Rodmell, bombs were dropping in the adjoining fields.

  Set against such escalating conflict, hostilities, and destruction, writing itself became an act of resistance. On May 15, 1940, Woolf wrote, “This idea struck me: the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting” (Diary 5: 285). In this light, her ideas for her novel constituted the form her “fighting” took: a loose and hybrid mix of genre, the everyday world of a country house, a discussion of literature, a pluralistic communal theme, the freedom to range anywhere and everywhere, repetition with difference and difference with an underlying unity—together all these thoughts articulate a pluralism of style and vision antithetical to the concentrated obsessions of power and aggression at the roots of war. Although Woolf did not specifically relate her objectives in the novel to the war, her diary is filled with relevant remarks. On September 6, 1939, the day of their first air-raid warning, she affirmed writing as her work: “Any idea is more real than any amount of war misery. And what one’s made for. And the only contribution one can make” (Diary 5: 235). Knowing, with Leonard’s Jewishness, their socialist writings, and their membership in the Labour Party, the personal consequences if Hitler should invade, Leonard and Virginia discussed plans for suicide, for which purpose Leonard kept petrol in the garage: “Capitulation will mean all Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage” (Diary 5: 292–93). Yet even so, in the same entry where she wrote that thinking was her fighting, she declared:

  No, I don’t want the garage to see the end of me. I’ve a wish for 10 years more, & to write my book wh. as usual darts into my brain. . . . Why am I optimistic? Or rather not either way? because its all bombast, this war. One old lady pinning on her cap has more reality. So if one dies, it’ll be a common sense, dull end—not comparable to a days walk, & then an evening reading over the fire. (Diary 5: 285)

  Ordinary life, and the life of the mind, were in no way pure or faultless, but they marked the location where meaningful struggle must be based. A village pageant, rather than a battle-field, becomes her human stage: “Finished Pointz Hall, the Pageant: the Play—finally Between the Acts this morning” (Diary 5: 356).

  Narrative

  A “CONCENTRATED SMALL BOOK”: Virginia Woolf did achieve that aim. Between the Acts is a short text with a simple scheme; yet as Lucy Swithin says of the pageant, “The Chinese, you know, put a dagger on the table and that’s a battle” (97). Woolf’s novel enacts, first of all, an extraordinary time compression: Twenty-four hours from one June evening to the next encapsulates hundreds of years in the pageant’s time and thousands of years in Lucy Swithin’s Outline of History. Time compression then creates space density: The village of Liskeard is also the location of a prehistoric swamp, of Roman occupation, and of numerous phases of English culture. Furthermore, although the physical site is England, references and allusions remind us of England’s interconnections with the globe: Europe, of course, but also India, China, Africa, Canada, Persia, Peru. In Orlando (1928), Woolf took the life of one person and extended it over three hundred years. In Between the Acts, she takes the life of a vast historical and geographical community and compresses it into one day.

  The pageant, which mimics the compression of the frame narrative (or, if the audience is framed by the acts, it may be the other way around) must similarly skip, select, hint, suggest, leaving the audience at times so confused that Isa wonders, “Did the plot matter? . . . The plot was only there to beget emotion,” and either Isa’s thinking or an anonymous voice continues, “Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing” (63). The conflicting emotions that Isa identifies both in the pageant and in herself, however, love and hate, imply an obsessively repetitive plot that humanity seems destined to continue: “Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes” (146). Plot here is more rhythmically cyclical than sequential and linear, directing our reading equally, if not more so, to what is surrounding it as opposed to what lies ahead. In this densely layered text, a variety of textual narrative elements call for our attention while we read.

  Voices

  This is a novel of voices. We listen almost as if we are listening to a documentary recording, almost as if a microphone were set up in the house, in the barn, on the grass.7 Voices are multiple and interacting: pageant and audience; male and female; refined and simple; “public” and “inner”; human and animal (birds, sheep, cows, mice); natural and mechanical (telephone, gramophone, and loudspeaker); individual and collective. Voices are “hollow,” “low,” “fluty,” “loud,” “husky,” and “primeval”; they sing and they speak; they are identified, or anonymous, or eerily “bodiless.” Silence is a speaking voice as well. We hear both conflict and agreement, making us wonder if what we are hearing is mellay or medley. The novel presents both what the narratologist Mikhail Bakhtin called “polyphony,” multiple narrative voices, and what he called “heteroglossia,” multiple discourses within a society. Then, beyond all the individual voices, there are two other kinds of voice we hear as well: the voice of the “chorus,” and a haunting, mysterious voice “that was no one’s voice.”

  One of the innumerable meanings of “between the acts” is the chorus, stemming from Greek drama, in which the movement alternates between the chorus’s commentary and the represented acts.8 Throughout the pageant, a group of village players dressed as medieval pilgrims winds in and out of the background trees, chanting a song of the soil; in the Victorian act, another group of players sings “choruses,” like the refrains in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta; and throughout the novel, the audience voices behave like a chorus in a Greek drama, commenting on the action of the play. The traditional heroes and heroines are balanced by the putatively minor figures; observing and doing are given complementary roles. There is yet another voice, however, that escapes registration: “But now that the shower had fallen, it was the other voice speaking, the voice that was no one’s voice” (123). It might be the voice of the gramophone, or of the author, or of music, or “Was that voice ourselves?” (128). More important than identifying this voice, perhaps, is the sense of a voice without fixed location, possessing a fluidity that characterizes the narrator’s voice as well. For the narrator continually shifts positionality: sometimes an objective, external omniscience; sometimes apparently someone present at the scene; sometimes with the indeterminacy of the technique called free indirect discourse (FID), in which thought shifts almost imperceptibly from the narrator’s mind to a character’s mind. We are thus not always sure
if a thought should be assigned to narrator or a character—an effect that makes it difficult to be too specific about what Woolf or her narrator thinks. But the “other” voice might also suggest the presence of some underlying, unifying common spirit, not transcendent and elsewhere, but—if we could only hear it—immediate and here.

  Words and Rhymes

  Between the Acts offers a world of words, words that go forward in linear sentences, but words that also leap sidelong in associative fashion, setting up rhythms and patterns, suggestive of underlying connections that network through our lives. Words, in this novel, have a mobile life: “Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence. They rose, became menacing and shook their fists at you” (41). They mock our attempts to control reality; they gesture to a deeper reality underneath.

  Language becomes a kaleidoscope that resists single relations between signified and signifier. Sometimes the signified holds still, while multiple designators circle around. The person whose name “Lucinda” is never said is Lucy, Cindy, Sindy, Mrs. Swithin, Old Flimsy, Mother Swithin, Batty, and Aunt Lucy. “Isa” is Isabella, Mrs. Giles Oliver, Mrs. Giles, and Mrs. Oliver. Even the cat has a kitchen name (Sunny) and a drawing-room name (Sung-Yen).

  Sometimes the signifier remains still, at least in sound, moving through multiple homonyms: the fishy sole, the intangible soul, the crepe soles on the bottom of shoes; a peg on which to hang things, the peg like a nail that holds things down, the peg-top trousers worn in the play. Words leap to their cognates, like Mrs. Sands and sandwiches, or suggest cockney rhyming words, like dicky-bird for word. There is the cross that Lucy caresses, crossed daggers on the bottom of a cup, uncrossing of legs, crossings of the terrace or the desert, a crisscross pattern, and, as we shall later discuss, a crisscross letter. Playful, and confusing, language speaks to us of multiple identities. Nothing, nobody, is ever simply and only one thing.

  Rhythm and Repetition

  Voices and words create patterns or repetitions; repetitions create rhythms. Woolf’s description of writing The Waves (1931) resonates with the style of Between the Acts as well: “I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot” (Letters 4: 204). The systolic/diastolic alternations of rising and falling sound in the novel’s fluctuating responses to its questions: “It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no, no, it contracted” (146). The play leads Isa to think that “[t]here were only two emotions: love; and hate” (63)—the same two emotions she battles in herself. Two portraits hanging in the dining room set up rhythmic dualities as well: a male-gendered discourse oriented toward talk and possession, vying with a female-gendered discourse leading toward poetry and silence. Gendered dualities motivate the sparring between characters, as, for example, in the conflict between Bart’s analytic separations and Lucy’s imaginative “one-making” (119), but the double discourse is evident within the characters as well. For it is Lucy who yields the hammer in the barn, Bart who empathetically intuits at the end what Miss La Trobe will need.

  In addition to alternating rhythms, there are doubling rhythms of call and response, of sound and echo, and of simultaneous sounds. Bart’s clenched hand (13) is echoed in William Dodge’s clenched hand (76); the literal blood on Giles’s shoes (69) resonates with metaphorical blood on Miss La Trobe’s shoes (122); both Mrs. Swithin and Isa forget Dodge’s name. In the pageant, such echoes bridge gaps and make transitions: In a moment of peace, “The view repeated in its own way what the tune was saying. . . . The cows, making a step forward, then standing still, were saying the same thing to perfection” (92). A little later, such correspondences save a moment of collapse and emptiness on the stage: “Suddenly the cows stopped; lowered their heads, and began browsing. Simultaneously the audience lowered their heads and read their programmes” (96).

  Yet another rhythm is the “triple melody” sounded in the triadic rhyming of the view and the tune and the cows (92). It might be heard in the three notes of the scale, “A.B.C.,” which suddenly resolve into the “dog” of “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark” (80); in Isa’s “three-folded mirror” that reflects “three separate versions of her rather heavy, yet handsome, face” (10); or in the triple-sounded conversation between Bart and Lucy about the weather—wet? fine? which?—that Isa hears repeating like the “chime of bells”: “As the first peals, you hear the second; as the second peals, you hear the third” (15). Or Isa’s two emotions accompanied by a third emotion, an illusive emotion given the coming war, and one that haunts both novel and play: “Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life” (64).

  There are the jazz rhythms that, in their syncopation, imply both irreverence and relief: “And not plain. Very up to date, all the same” (124); and the desire to break away from any rhythmic control at all: “Let’s break the rhythm and forget the rhyme” (127). And then, finally, the multilayered polyphony of the pageant’s culminating music, which brings, for one moment, all rhythms into one, as they “crashed; solved; united” (128). Which of all these—or is it all of them—is the rhythm of the human heart?

  Mixing Genres

  In Between the Acts, the multiplicity of voices, of words, and of rhythms is further extended through hybridity of genres. As noted earlier, Woolf first conceived this novel as “dialogue: & poetry: & prose” and possibly criticism as well (Diary 5: 105). In the course of its writing, she wrote more poems for Isa than she included in the finished text, and at some point she believed that “Pointz Hall [was] to become in the end a play” (Diary 5: 139). In the published version, genres are fully mixed: A play is embedded within a novelistic world; poetry appears as either text or subtext in the language of the pageant, the characters, and the narrator; and the audience’s commentary offers an informal critical review. But Woolf, as a literary critic, did not think of drama, poetry, and fiction just as stylistic categories easily identified by their different appearances on the page. Each genre for her was a distinctive mode of thought.

  Concepts of genre are pervasive in Woolf’s literary essays and reviews, and they are the explicit subject in a talk she published as “Poetry, Fiction, and the Future,” which, after her death, Leonard published as “The Narrow Bridge of Art” in the collection titled Granite & Rainbow (1958). Characteristically, Woolf argues that different genres respond to different needs. Poetry taps our dreams and imagination; it expresses “the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude” (Essays 4: 435). The novel is conversational, psychological, representing “people’s relation to each other and their activities together” (435). Drama offers “explosive” emotional conflict (438), while theater is the site that brings playwright, actors, and audience collaboratively together. The Elizabethan playhouse—perhaps conceived somewhat idealistically—is a hub inclusive of all classes and ways of life. Each genre thus makes its own contribution, but Woolf’s main point is that no single genre is adequate to the modern age. “For it is an age,” she writes, “clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves” (429). Things with no previous connections are now associated together, things that once appeared whole “are now broken up on the threshold” (433). The modern writer thus confronts an extraordinary pressure: to capture innumerable conflicts and yet to encompass them, for forceful impact, with a “shaping power” (430). For this task, Woolf believes, the novel has the greatest potential—not for what it is, but for what it can become. The novel is so flexible, so changeable, and indeed so “cannibalistic” that it can transform into a hybrid genre. And transformation is crucial, for only pluralistic hybridity can express “that queer conglomeration of incongruous things—the modern mind” (436).

  The generic hybridity of Between the Acts thus crosses another threshold, taking a relatively isolated rural community and locating it within modern flows. For the modern sensibility conceives no simple, single place: “Modern” is not an urban mentality but a pervasive sense of life. All ge
nres, all times, all places must thus conspire together, yet even then complexity escapes: “Life is always and inevitably richer than we who try to express it” (Essays 4: 419). Density must then be further thickened through a multitude of intertexts, so that all writing, all speech, can be revealed as implicated in that queer conglomeration: the modern collective mind.