Between the Acts Read online

  Allusions

  WHEN THE day’s festivities are over and the family is gathered quietly in the sitting room before retiring for the night, Mrs. Swithin reads a letter that has arrived for her in the mail. Described as a “criss-cross” (146), the letter employs an old technique for saving on paper or postage: writing the first page in the normal way and then turning the paper at right angles to write the second page on top of the first. What Lucy receives is thus a layered or palimpsestic text—a term deriving from ancient manuscripts on which an earlier and partially effaced writing is still legible under more recent written script. The land around Pointz Hall is a geographic palimpsest, revealing traces of Roman civilization beneath the marks of the present day; the acts of the pageant offer a palimpsestic account of history, with each era superimposed on a previous era, yet with the outlines of the old never fully effaced; and in the novel itself, words of earlier texts are constantly sounding between and underneath the words that we read. Between the Acts may well be Woolf’s most allusive work, with the simplicity, indeed almost slightness of its plot strikingly thickened and deepened with multiple layers of other texts. The notes in this annotated edition focus specifically on such intertexts, to reveal, as it were, a vast cultural root system descending fibrously into the past. But these numerous and lengthy annotations—and they are selective rather than comprehensive—also raise several crucial questions for our critical approach. Many allusions are explicit: when characters, for example, knowingly quote poetry, songs, and nursery rhymes; refer to writers, mythological figures, or historical personages; or question the origin of a common expression or traditional custom. Other allusions are detectable through brief quotations or distinctive images, like “manacled to a rock” (41), the “stricken deer” (59), or “heart of darkness” (148). Still others reverberate in the mind like ghostly echoes, as when, for example, the description of Isa’s neck, “broad as a pillar, against an arum lily” (73) stirs associations with the poetry of Edmund Spenser, the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, or Stephen Dedalus’s pondering ambiguities of spiritual-erotic imagery in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; or when the image of the great pear tree (106) taps into a long tradition that links pear trees and the fecundity of the womb. Once we begin allusive reading, however, is there any limit to when we should stop? As a second problem, once we acknowledge the nature of this text as profoundly allusive, does it demand then an educated, sophisticated, and perhaps even British reader to be understood?

  The answer to the first question depends on the importance we assign to authorial control and conscious intent. Must we assume that everything we consider an allusion was deliberately and consciously intended by Woolf? If not, how do we distinguish between allusions she intended and allusions that spring from personal associations in the minds of individual readers? In Practical Criticism (1929), the modernist critic I. A. Richards deplored the confusion of the poem with the idiosyncratic responses of its readers, and warned in particular of the deleterious effect of “mnemonic irrelevances” that occur when readers project associations from their own pasts onto their interpretations of literary works. Yet the modernist narratologist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the novel is inherently dialogized by an ever-present heteroglossia, or plurality of social voices (“Discourse in the Novel” [written 1934–1935, translated 1981]); and Roland Barthes, a theorist writing just after the modernist period, came to see the text as a woven network of citations, echoes, and inescapable allusions, engaging the reader in stereophonic play (Image—Music—Text). Most approaches today will likely come closer to Bakhtin and Barthes than to Richards, according both voices outside the text and the voices of its readers a collaborative role. Not to abandon Richards entirely, however, we are still likely to see each literary work as creating its own discursive and rhetorical schema, inviting certain kinds of readings and soliciting particular patterns of response. The way allusions work in Between the Acts may not be the way they work in all texts. Woolf’s novel, however, both explicidy invites allusive thinking and penetrates further to engage the fundamentally allusive nature of words themselves.

  Allusion is, of course, the primary mode of Miss La Trobe’s pageant, which mixes and merges numerous works of English drama in its plots, and boldly steals from a wide and eclectic range of reading in its script. The pageant also mirrors its own technique in a scene of self-allusion, when the characters combine at the end, “each declaim[ing] some phrase or fragment from their parts” (125). Language that echoes previous texts comes also to echo its own previous utterances of the echoed words. Pageant language furthermore bleeds into “real” language as characters in the audience world think in allusive forms as well. Isa, trying to write her own poetry, is obsessed with images, phrases, and rhythms from past poems, but she is certainly not the only one. Her father-in-law, Bartholomew, quotes Byron (4) and Swinburne (75); Mrs. Manresa quotes Hamlet (38) and Oliver Goldsmith (119); William Dodge completes Isa’s quotation from Keats (38) and quotes Racine (141); and anonymous audience voices return to Hamlet’s question and recite a Whitman poem (136). Accumulating layers, allusions may refer to texts that are themselves allusive and that frequently involve some question or problem about allusion’s role. The name of Bartholomew’s dog, Sohrab, for example, recalls not only Matthew Arnold’s poem “Sohrab and Rustum,” but the controversy over that poem’s alleged plagiarism from a Persian tale; the song “I Never Loved a Dear Gazelle” in a dizzying cycle echoes James Joyce’s citation of Lewis Carroll’s parody of Thomas Moore’s retelling of another Persian tale; the song furthermore invokes Carroll’s accompanying, though facetious, argument that poetry, like music, should dilute its intensity by offering “settings” or arrangements of works we already know. Further thematizing the allusive presence of the past, characters wonder about the origins of the expressions they use (17, 84), and Lucy Swithin, passing a shelf of books, offers what might well be a metacritical comment on a way to understand the novel as a whole: “Here are the poets from whom we descend by way of the mind” (47–48). It is not only poets, or even aspiring poets, who descend from past words; it is language itself. And it is not only poetry that allusively haunts the language; all literature, history, popular culture, folklore, cultural tradition creates, by implication, a global palimpsest, like some gigantic crisscross letter. The characters are always speaking, and we are always reading, through layers of previously sounded words. By constructing a storyworld of proliferating and pervasive allusions, Between the Acts releases allusion from any tie to the author’s intent; allusion proliferates, and opens itself to proliferation in the reader’s mind because citation is inherent in the nature of words themselves.

  The idea that no word sounds on its own, that language carries a heavy freight of cumulative use, is a common theme among modernist writers, resonating as well, for example, in the highly allusive works of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. The preoccupation reflects, to some extent, a modernist sense of belatedness: the difficulty of writing after a great tradition and the need to devise new and creative ways to engage with, to order, or to alter the inheritance of the past. Certainly Isa struggles with the problem of finding a voice in the wake of other voices, and their putative authority may be the source of “abortiveness” in her own efforts to write: “‘How am I burdened with what they drew from the earth; memories; possessions. . . . That was the burden,’ she mused, ‘laid on me in the cradle . . . what we must remember: what we would forget.’” (106). Miss La Trobe, however, as the other writer in the text, creates in a way that revels in verbal associations, and in a way that Woolf often celebrates in her literary essays and reviews. Reviewing a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 1935, Woolf writes, “For Shakespeare is writing, it seems, not with the whole of his mind mobilized and under control but with feelers left flying that sort and play with words so that the trail of a chance word is caught and followed recklessly. From the echo of one word is born another word, for which reason, perhaps, the play seems as we read it to tremble perpetually on the brink of music” (“Twelfth Night” 45). Allusion in this view transforms the nature of language, from referential meaning to associative meanings, and in an energizing, not coercive, way.

  One of Woolf’s last essays, “Craftsmanship,” addresses so specifically the echoic nature of words that it suggests the way to read Between the Acts. Woolf begins this talk, written for BBC broadcast in 1937, by illustrating her leap from reading instructions in the London Underground to hearing the same words in the poetry of Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, and Keats. Even words used for mundane purposes, she indicates, have the power of triggering associations in our minds. The word incarnadine, she insists, will always subliminally evoke “multitudinous seas,” sounding Macbeth’s cry that the blood on his hands from murdering King Duncan will “The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red” (act 2, scene 2). Yet Woolf also distinguishes between “surface” and “sunken” meanings, the former having to do with the specific and conscious communicative message, the latter, with the chaotic unruliness of the unconscious mind’s “multitudinous seas.” The point is a crucial one, particularly for those of us who seek to be both scholars and readers of Woolf. Annotations, such as this edition provides, isolate and explain individual sources, making them the focus of conscious scrutiny, but as Woolf states, “The moment we single out and emphasize the suggestions as we have done here they become unreal; and we, too, become unreal—specialists, word mongers, phrase finders, not readers” (“Craftsmanship” 202). “In reading,” she continues, “we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river” (202).

  In such reading, allusion is not intrusi
ve but ghostly, not isolated but blended and composite in our minds. As Mitchell Leaska writes, “Readers have repeatedly seen that V. W. often tapped multiple literary sources to insinuate a point” (221), or as Gillian Beer notes, “Woolf skeins together words and phrases recognizable from a wide, and multiple, range of poetic contexts” (140 n94). Perhaps it is the Bloomsbury writer David Garnett, however, who most evocatively captures the way Woolf attunes our ears to the whole, when he writes of “her command of language and of all associations which echo in words and can be called out from them like the murmur of the waves evoked for us by the shell clasped to our ear.” Through an image anticipating the mirror scene in the pageant’s last act, “Craftsmanship” relates such multiplicity to a pluralistic and refracted conception of truth: “The truth [words] try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that” (206). Whereas some modernists (arguably both Eliot and Joyce) use allusion as a way of ordering their texts, Woolf seems more interested in allusion’s disordering potential—or at least in the way simultaneous apprehension of multiple allusions can prevent our settling into any one voice. Her allusions also work to bring past and present meanings collaboratively together, giving precedence neither to the earlier nor to the present text, but rather stimulating the play of interactive meanings in our minds. The deeper community of Between the Acts thus resides in the totality of collective thinking: “all life, all art, all waifs & strays—a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole” (Diary 5: 135). But what then are the implications for reading, for scholarship, for art?

  For today’s reader, such pervasive allusion returns us to the vexed question of modernist difficulty: What competency, on the part of the reader, does this text require to be understood? Like much modernist writing, Between the Acts itself stages the problematic of cultural memory: How can words enact their subliminal, liberating effects for the reader who lacks the memory that allusions tap? The library, with its bookshelves, stands in Pointz Hall with its many riches, but even the aspiring poet Isa is “book-shy” (14) and the narrative voice laments, “For her generation the newspaper was a book” (14). The problem lies not in reading newspapers, but in the loss of other memories if newspapers or “picture papers” become the only thing we read.

  Reading and scholarship thus need to work together. Our scholarly selves can assist in the ongoing task of cultural archaeology, both tracking additional allusions and probing more fully the way that any one annotation works. The goal is not to identify each allusion in order to understand the novel but to acquire a richer feeling for the way citational language works. Then we might look for clusters, patterns, or rhythms in the allusive materials, going beyond identifications of single works. Undercurrents of violence, for example, run throughout this novel, but readers of the annotations here might be struck not only by how overwhelmingly allusions to rape and male violence to women sound in the early section, but also how mixed these are with allusions to pilgrimage and spiritual seeking as well. Allusions seem to become more light and playful in the middle section, returning again to violence at the end. The violence of the later allusions seems more fundamental to human passions and obsessions, yet there are alternations here with allusions to rebirth, resurrections, and seasonal cycles, too. Critical interpretation can thus assist with numerous cross-readings—seeking patterns within the text, within the allusions, and in text and allusions combined.

  If scholarship can thus enhance our reading, Woolf’s imaging of sunken reading can enhance our scholarship as well. Inevitably, scholarly readings will be partial, leading perhaps to brilliant insights yet constitutionally unable to capture the whole. Summing up, like the Reverend Streatfield’s interpretation of the pageant, is necessarily limited and reductive, for the need to express meaning directly must carefully control the indirect and suggestive life of words. There comes a point then, always, when we need to set scholarship aside, when we need to return to unconscious reading, to surrender again to the textual spell. Annotations will achieve their aim only if they return the reader, with greater receptiveness, to the text in between.

  Art

  IT IS TIME to revisit, in larger terms, the question with which this introduction began: What is literature’s significance in a time of war? Or rather, if hostility and conflict are endemic to the human condition, as this novel suggests, what is literature’s relevance in our ordinarily troubled world? Thematically, Between the Acts raises such broadly relevant matters as culture, nation, civilization, ecology, and ethics, but undergirding them all is the novel’s self-reflexive questioning of the validity and value of addressing such issues through art. Staging a pageant simultaneously stages an exploration into the nature of aesthetic creation, production, and reception, and the role these processes play in our lives.

  In both this novel and its embedded pageant, recollection undergoes a process of radical reconstruction. Language, we have seen, is laden with echoes; the characters are burdened with memories of the personal, the communal, and the geological past. Yet, as we have also noted, a narrative impelled by rhyme and rhythm can alter the anticipated structure, shattering old habits of attention and perception, and stimulating readers to think in new ways. The title of this novel itself enacts a radical reorientation, like a syncopated beat that places the stress a little offside. All conventions of literary criticism place the “acts” at the center; “between the acts” disrupts that concentration with the pull of a space offstage. Our focus reorients itself to highlight what has previously been marginalized, neglected, or ignored.

  In this world of shifting perception, however, between becomes an unstable and multivalent term. In a literal sense, the novel alternates between pageant and audience, between what is on- and offstage. Yet repetitions and continuities weave throughout all the voices, making it difficult to maintain the binaries of acts and between. The separation is always tenuous, and then utterly collapsed in the pageant’s Present-Time scenes. Traditional realistic drama, performed behind the proscenium, positions the audience as invisible spectators, sheltered behind the equally invisible wall of the stage’s four-sided room. Modern experimental theater, in contrast, draws on techniques such as actors directly addressing the audience, or speaking their parts from audience seats, to break what Bertolt Brecht termed the “fourth wall”: the illusion of separation between fictional and real worlds. In Between the Acts, Woolf’s La Trobe radically explodes that illusion by placing her audience fully onstage. In the pageant’s scripted ten minutes of silence, all present-time sounds, including any sounds made by the audience, become the aural content of the play. Then, as the stage fills with mirrors, the audience, through their reflections, becomes doubly positioned, located both on and off the stage. The characters at the play are also the characters in the play, inhabiting a site in between. And, by a domino effect, as the pageant’s audience transforms into players, so, too, a responsive reading audience will feel itself shifting position, to become the subject seen as well.

  Caught between two worlds, the liminal space is unstable; it is also uncertain terrain. In a positive way, the pageant breaks down barriers of isolation, creating what we might call a participatory community, united not by shared ideologies but in a collaborative act. But the shift—and the audience feels it—is also threatening, for in breaking down barriers of self-protection, the mirrors compel the audience to examine and judge themselves. The “megaphonic, anonymous voice”—ambiguously the voice of mass technology and individual conscience—confronts them with human greed, jealousy, superiority: the knowledge that what “the gun slayers, bomb droppers” do “openly,” we do “slyly” (127). Yet it holds out as well tiny straws of hope—something as small as an impulse of kindness to the cat, or grief for a loved one, or one brave urchin’s resistance to being exploited and bought. Playful, performative, and provocative, the pageant strikes out with an ethical challenge, too. But will the audience really look at the reflections? And will the mirrors of self-reflection bring about any change?