FINAL CURTAIN ON THE WAR: FIGURE AND GROUND IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S BETWEEN THE ACTS
"X I make this mark to show the point at which a bomb shook the window so violently that the pen jumped out of my hand. There's an air raid going on--"
(Virginia Woolf, Letter to Hugh Walpole, 29 Sept. 1940, Letters 6:435)
Virginia WooIf wrote Between the Acts during the Blitz. She wrote it during the Dunkirk invasion, during the battle of Britain, and while London was being bombed. During that time her Bloomsbury home was damaged and her sister's home was destroyed. With every bomb that fell on London, with every donning of her gas mask, Woolf dug in deeper, as the manuscript absorbed the shock waves. Rather than retreating from artistic experimentation, Woolf invented literary strategies for registering the experience of war on the homefront, for resistance through art. Reviewing James's response to the outbreak of World War I, Within the Rim, Woolf wrote in 1919:
A moralist might object that terms of beauty and ugliness are not the terms in which to speak of so vast a catastrophe nor should a writer exhibit so keen a curiosity as to the tremors and vibrations of his own spirit in the face of the universal calamity. Yet, of all books describing the sights of war and appealing for our pity, this largely personal account is the one that best shows the dimensions of the whole. (The Death of the Moth 131)
Woolf's commentary on James's essay, in which he takes a steady and elegiac look at an endangered English civilization, is an apt description of her own last work as it constitutes an artistic response to the onset of World War II. Although war was a major motif in her earlier works, such as Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To The Lighthouse, Between the Acts, composed and revised when war was imminent and then actual, is haunted by it. In that novel Woolf addresses directly the question of the place of art in time of war and the responsibility of the writer. "The only contribution one can make," she wrote, "--this little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom. So I tell myself" (Diary 236)[ 2]
For Woolf the sense of inadequacy as an artist in the face of the compelling reality of war was compounded by her being a woman writer. In her nonfictional writings of the same period she explores the particular anguish of women who lie "weaponless" ("Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid") and who, when faced with patriotic emotions, will ask themselves what "our country" means to one outside the patriarchal nation.[ 2] Therefore, she had to contend with a double sense of ineffectuality during war time, that of the artist and that of the female civilian. In most societies women are protected from the battlefield, or, to put it another way, in exile from the experience often upheld as the most authentic measure of reality. If defense of patria takes place on the battlefield, women need not leave home to be expatriated. For women on the homefront in England during the Second World War, Virginia WooIf among them, war consisted of imaginary trenches, of air raids and bombings, of the "slowness, cadaverousness, grief of the long heavy [hospital] train, taking its burden through the fields" (Diary 289). Yet technology brought the battlefield to the skies of the homefront and the voice of the enemy to the parlor, so that unlike Jane Austen, who could ignore the Napoleonic wars in her fiction, Virginia Woolf joined her contemporaries in hearing "Hitler's voice as we sit home of an evening" ("The Leaning Tower" 107). My main concern in this essay is the dialectic between the circumstances of the composition of Between the Acts as recorded in Woolf's nonfictional writings of that time and the formal artistic strategies in that last unfinished work of fiction. What effect did the London Blitz have on the artistic process, particularly in Woolf's experimentation with figure and ground? How did the war call into question the very enterprise of art and particularly creation by women on the homefront?[3] To achieve this, I will take a close look at the discourse of war in Woolf's records--her correspondence, diaries, and essays, and in her successive revisions of the drafts of "Pointz Hall" up to the proofs, which she read but did not approve shortly before her suicide.
WAR RECORDS
As Woolf was composing "Pointz Hall," her working title for Between the Acts, the impressions of the war on her mind and senses is evident in her diaries and letters, and they form a pattern. She describes the war as an assault on everyday life, both of sound and sight. "But it's odd," she writes, "how near the guns have got to our private life again. I can quite distinctly see them and hear a roar, even though I go on, like a doomed mouse, nibbling at my daily page" (Diary 17). Woolf is conscious of writing always against this backdrop of what she called "the bomb terror," and she describes "a great boom rattling my windows," even placing an X on the page of a letter in order to inform her correspondent of the exact second "at which a bomb shook the window so violently that the pen jumped out of my hand." Yet against this backdrop of bombings, her correspondence and journals during wartime testify to an insistence on normalcy while remaining a helpless spectator, "plane shot down before our eyes just before tea" (Diary 318). As she continues to work on her biography of Roger Fry and looks up some papers at the London Library, she is interrupted kindly by "They're telling us to put on our gas masks, Madam" (Letters 276). She describes the effect of the bombs on the quiet Sussex countryside and on London, whose vast destruction rekindled in her the love of that city: "the passion of my Life, that is the City of London--to see London all blasted, that too raked my heart" (Letters 431).[4]
Many of her observations tend to fall into two categories, regression to a primal, barbaric era and the theatricality of war for the civilian? Her notes on the bomb strikes center around their effect, as if each bomb is a jolt propelling humanity back to a prehistoric time. On the first day of the war she records the sensation of time reversing direction, as London appears to have reverted "to the middle ages with all the space and the silence of the country set in this forest of black houses." She notes that there are
[v]ery few buses. Tubes closed. No children. No loitering. Everyone humped with a gas mask. Strain and grimness. At night its so verdurous and gloomy that one expects a badger or a fox to prowl along the pavement People grope their way to each others lairs . . . . Great caterpillars dug up the square. (Diary 243)
The language of beasts continually invades the London cityscape in scenes of progressive degeneration.[6] London appears as a "great dumb ox" (Diary 267) and a raid "like a sheep dog, chasing a fox out of the fold--you see them yapping and biting and then the marauder, dropping a bone, a bomb towards Newhaven, flies" (Diary 1940). At about this time, Woolf was also reading psychology and anthropology, which made her particularly sensitive to the dangers of patriotism as a symptom of a herd impulse: "And as we're all in the dark . . . we are beginning to feel the herd impulse" (Diary 166). She is prone to discuss Hitler as a beast and quotes one of her guests describing him as "bawling" with the "the crowds howling like beasts" (Letters 276). This tendency to envision a primeval and prehistoric origin for the human race is shared by other twentieth-century writers such as Conrad and Eliot as they construct a past in keeping with their understanding of evolution. As Gillian Beer has observed, Virginia Woolf's response to her age's need to discover origins was marked by her awareness of the survival of prehistory in the present, of the simultaneity of the prehistoric in our present moment ("Virginia Woolf and Prehistory" 171).
In seeming contrast to this proliferation of animal analogies, Woolf's correspondence and diary entries also underscore the experience of war aesthetically as a spectator observing an unreal scene through a window or beyond a curtain. She writes "If it [the war] were real, one could make something of it. But as it is it grumbles, in an inarticulate way, behind reality" (Diary 166). While she clearly wants to believe that "any idea is more real than any amount of war misery" (Diary 235), she also tries "to imagine how one's killed by a bomb," aware that death, "the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain: the process of putting out the light," is the experience that "[I] shant, for once, be able to describe" (Diary 327). Things become real to her only as she has the ability to write about them, but in her transforming the experiences into language, they exist at an aesthetic distance as if they were the scenes of a play. As one of the organizing principles of her last novel is the indeterminacy of what is drama and what is "real" life, it is interesting to observe these same terms in her record of the war itself.
This terminology is most noticeable in her description of the fire curtains that were required on English homes during bombing raids. At first she merely records having spent two hours sewing black-out curtains, or that she "papered my windows" after airplanes flew overhead with shafts of light following (Diary 293). The curtains also reinforce the animalistic dimension of warlife: "I've just pulled down the black blinds--rats in caves live as we do" (Letters 364). But after awhile they function not only as a safety precaution, but also as a mental shield against the war, "By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good" (Diary 346); or "I try to let down a fireproof curtain and go on reading, writing, and cooking" (Letters 432). Eventually they take on a metaphorical quality, so that "[ 1]eaving London was rather like drawing the curtains and finding it a fine day" (Letters 366). Finally what began as a useful device to safeguard life becomes an image of shutting out the reality of the war and of a final curtain on life as if it were a play. "Yes, I'm sure the safety curtain--a heavy iron drop over ones own scene--is the only preservative. But I admit it dont always work" (Letters 433). While her early impressions of the war tend to be of a play with scenes to be observed, the later writings cast her own life behind the fire curtains into the acts of a play with the last scene in view. One of her means of self preservation at a time when she perceives that her civilization is threatened is to cherish that which seems vulnerable, in her case, "reading the whole of English literature through . . . . By the time I've reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling. So I've arranged a very nice last scene: reading Shakespeare, having forgotten my gas mask, I shall fade far away, and quite forget . . ." (Letters 466).
The two major strains in her record of the war, therefore, are cognitive disorientation and reverse evolution. Her tendency is to describe the war as a play, at times with herself in the role of audience and at other times in the role of performer. At the same time, the war seems to have the effect of stripping humanity to some primal state so that the end of civilization is a return to its beginning. Her impressions of the war, then, were influenced by Darwinian constructs that shaped so much of the literary and cultural discourse of her time (constructions that were not necessarily true to Darwin's own theories) as well as aesthetic discourse of the "theater of war" that was part of the lexicon about the Great War. It is not surprising to find that immediate impressions are themselves mediated through cultural assumptions and reigning metaphors. But when she turns to the composition of her novel, both of these conventions are questioned at the same time that they are reinforced by their being put to use in fiction. She may be susceptible to the prevailing discourse about war, but she cannot use it without exploding these conventions as well. Between the Acts aims for a literary text that can come as close as possible to incorporating that X, the very second that the bomb fell and was already a mark on a page.
Moreover, a third motif from the war records also has its literary counterpart, that of the disembodied voice that Would bring messages of doom, either through the loudspeakers in London "telling one to go and be fitted for gas masks" or through the radio, whether it be the English leaders announcing policies, Hitler's demagogic speeches, or the anonymous voices of newscasters informing listeners of attacks and casualties. This eerie sense of a disembodied voice invading the quiet domestic scene with words of doom or calls for courage is linked with a general sense of always being on the edge, always waiting: "I can't help wishing the invasion would come. It's this standing about in a dentist's waiting room that I hate" (Letters 483).
Finally, Woolf's fear that this war would mean the end of her civilization, her determination to continue to live a normal life, and her feeling of powerlessness are all evident in one of her earliest diary entries on the war in 1938. "Hitler has his million men now under arms. Is it only summer maneuvers or--? . . . That is the complete ruin not only of civilization, in Europe, but of our last lap. . . . One ceases to think about it--that's all. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do?" (Diary 162). Two years later, with her London houses destroyed by German bombing attacks and her recognition that Leonard's Jewishness would make them particularly vulnerable, she would seal her suicide pact with him should the Germans invade. Moreover, in the midst of writing Between the Acts, she was also conscious that there seemed to be no place left in her world for art, and without an audience for her writing, she already felt herself to be partly dead.
As sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean All Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage Last night aeroplanes (G.) over I . . . . papered my windows. I don't want to go to bed at midday: this refers to the garage . . . . It has struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing "I" has vanished. No audience. No echo. That's part of one's death. (Diary 293)
The war threatened her life both as a vulnerable civilian in London and as an artist effaced by the urgency and primacy of survival. Between the Acts, therefore, which shares features with other of Woolf's novels, takes a turn that translates all of these war impressions into complex literary form.
WAR, FIGURE AND GROUND, FICTIONALITY
Historically, "between the acts" refers to the interval between the two world wars, thus designating the wars themselves as performances for which there are spectators (Fussell 190-230). Written from spring 1938 to 1941, Between the Acts takes place in June of 1939 with war imminent, in what Frank Kermode has called "a still moment of history." On the day of the novel, the Oliver family is hosting the village's annual pageant with the proceeds to provide for the illumination of the church. The performance itself takes place against a backdrop of military training for World War II as RAF planes fly overhead. Miss La Trobe, an unmarried female playwright, has created a pageant for her conservative village audience that offers a survey of English history in the form of pastiches of earlier literary periods and that ends with a scene of "The Present" that violates theatrical conventions by turning the audience into actors and nature into a part of the spectacle. By the time Woolf writes this novel, the theme of the dissolution of self, the presence of a quasi-successful artist, and the built-in self destruction of carefully conceived illusions is well established in her writing (Wirth-Nesher). Between the Acts is a continuation of Woolf's earlier formal experimentation, but the stylistic daring is shaped by her response to war as the cognitive disorientation recorded in her diaries becomes inscribed into the fictional world as well in the form of a figure and ground enigma.
In Illusion and Reality, E. H. Gombrich has demonstrated that perception of figure and ground, as well as illusion and reality in art, is a matter of convention and expectation. Readers tend to form the "gestalt" of a literary text by grouping together its different parts and attributing consistency where it appears to be required. A reader pictures the contours of a text so that it becomes a figure and ground pattern, thematically, structurally, and ontologically? This is all part of the illusion-making process that is inherent in the reading of a text, as readers respond to the gaps and indeterminacy of literary artifacts (Iser 274-92). Woolf's experimentation with figure and ground in Between the Acts is intertwined with her response to the war in her diaries and letters as it is recorded in terms of cognitive disorientation and reverse evolution. Both of these motifs are affected by her self-consciousness as woman and as artist.
Thematically, Between the Acts concerns itself with the status of art in a world of war, the artist wielding a pen, as James put it, that smells of gunpowder and blood. The war impinges on the world of art just as the airplanes flying overhead during Miss La Trobe's pageant serve to provide a backdrop, a ground, a reality that threatens to engulf the figures of La Trobe's illusion. Structurally, Between the Acts is a novel that contains a play, a fiction that contains a fiction, with scenes taking place on and off stage, thereby calling into question the border between art and the real world within the fictional world of the text. The thematic and the structural are intertwined in that the issue of mounting a pageant in wartime by a woman artist evokes the same questions about the relationships of women, war, and art, as do the series of interruptions of the acts, which structure the play within the novel.
As the problem of the formation of illusion in the face of war consumed creativity during the last years of her life her last novel is an artistic response to the war in the sense that it resists the attempt to form consistent illusions with identifiable figures on stable ground. The characters within the text face situations so disorienting that they can no longer discern figure from ground while they themselves become part of a configuration equally disorienting for the reader. In her last novel the dissolution of the boundary between the play and the audience transforms the characters into archetypes, into a matrix for the creation of both individual selves and innovative art. But to what extent are these primal male and female archetypes a form of resistance to the glorification of gender types prevalent during wartime? It is clear from Woolf's revisions that this is a question that disturbed her deeply and that she struggled with throughout her writing of the manuscript.
Ontologically, Woolf's final novel reaches for a momentary recognition that gestalt psychology denies, namely simultaneous perception of a field as both figure and as ground? Between the Acts positions the reader exactly between both experiencing and observing illusion and it maps out this new terrain by cancelling the dichotomy on which "between" depends. Given the circumstances of the book's composition, is this ontologically unattainable place the paralysis of the woman artist in wartime who may seek a position outside of war rhetoric and the cultural typologies generated by war, but who cannot break out of the traditional discourses surrounding it?
The title Between the Acts, which Woolf did not use for her manuscript until the last stages of revision, is itself a figure and ground enigma. According to the novel's plot, the title literally refers to the intermissions between the acts of Miss La Trobe's pageant and to the activity of the characters when they are not simply spectators of the play. It implies that the novel focuses on what is off stage, that its reality is bordered by the illusions of the theatre. As enclosure of any field tends to be its ground, this would make the intermissions of the pageant, the "real life" encounters, the figures on the ground of the pageant, but "between" is itself a "ground" as it is the more loosely organized pattern on which the contours of figures are discernible. Thus, the intervals between acts of the pageant can be perceived as either figure or ground and, similarly, as either more or less "real" than the theatrical acts. The paradoxical position is further reinforced by the fact that "between" is itself a word with two opposing meanings, both to connect and to separate: "between you and me" as opposed to "between fact and fancy." What are the implications of these stylistic devices for the broader cultural question of how a society determines greater or lesser degrees of reality during war and peace time? And what are the ideological implications of choosing one over another? Woolf's novel is not merely a dazzling display of philosophical or aesthetic effects, for the specific cultural content of these figure and ground shifts always concern the relation between women, art, and war.
The interruptions in La Trobe's pageant exemplify the link between Woolf's formal experimentation and her thematic concerns. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf had already demonstrated in both her rhetorical strategies and in her argument that interruption characterizes woman's writing and woman's experience as a creator, so that a series of interruptions in a work of art created by a woman is in keeping with her concept of woman's art. Each of the interruptions in the pageant signal the artist's loss of control over her creation as she finds herself incorporating unanticipated elements into her art: the sudden rainfall; the bellowing of the cows; and the babbling of Albert, the village idiot. As violations of the norms of conventional theater, these interruptions become successively more disorienting: the rainfall is the simplest case of nature's intrusion on culture; the cow bellowing for its calf is an expression of loss and pain shared by humans; Albert's ignorance of social and cultural conventions is the greatest source of audience unease. Yet the pageant is in some sense rescued by nature, not only because the cow's bellowing relieves the tension of an awkward silence, but also because this reminder of the maternal instinct suits the recurring theme of the pageant as depicted in each period of literary history. In each scene there is some attempt to manipulate or to deny natural generation for social or political reasons: in the Elizabethan vignette, a crone rescues a child who is rightful heir to a kingdom from the hands of murderers; in the Restoration episode an old aunt attempts to deny her niece her rightful inheritance; in the Victorian scene all thought of sensuality and generation through love is subordinated to the potential contribution of matrimony to the political expansion of the empire. While the scenes themselves reinforce the centrality of power relations, the interruptions share qualities that are traditionally associated with women, namely identification with nature and its powerlessness in wartime. The rain cannot deter the aircraft; the village idiot, like the women and children, remains on the homefront ignorant of the rules of the game; and, most searingly, the bellowing of the cows, like a parody of a Greek chorus, is nature mourning a break in the chain of generation. Uniting the audience with the spell of that primeval sound, the bellowing calls into question the role of women in wartime: "Women Must Weep" over dead sons and husbands, as WooIf titled an American condensed version of Three Guineas (Marcus 284).
Then suddenly, as the illusion petered out, the cow took up the burden. One had lost her calf. In the very nick of time she lifted her great moon-eyed head and bellowed. All the great moon-eyed heads laid themselves back. From cow to cow the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning. It was the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present moment . . . (140)
Like an overgrown child and, by implication, in this novel like women and artists on the homefront, Albert threatens the conventions of the theatre and the ground rules of society. By not recognizing the boundary between on and off stage, he transforms the audience of theatregoers into onlookers. "There was no need to dress him up. There he came, acting his part to perfection . . . . 'Hope he don't have a fit,' Lucy murmured" (86). If the theatre of war does not remain on the other side of the fire curtain, then where exactly is the homefront? And if the drama of war is all-encompassing, is there any place left in the wings? It would appear that the only functions assigned to women during wartime, whether they be artists or not, are fertility (the rain), maternity (the cows), and disruptive and unselfconscious performance (the village idiot). Shaping her art outdoors and using village actors, Miss La Trobe is vulnerable to the random intrusions of nature in the form of weather, the biological cycle, and unsocialized human behavior, yet these intrusions are apt commentary and chorus on her art.
While work created by the female artist is interrupted by a maternal cry, male commentary on art--the clergyman's address--is interrupted by the instruments of war, associated with males. Although the pageant concludes with the pleas of an anonymous voice on a gramophone, the spectacle is not over for the audience awaits commentary on the female artist's creation from a male, the Reverend Streatfield. Folding their hands in the traditional manner "as if they were in church" (191), the audience is back in a situation in which they can comfortably assume familiar roles. Their deference to Mr. Streatfield's interpretation as he searches Miss La Trobe's text for "what meaning, or message, this pageant was meant to convey" (191) assumes that the ultimate authority for assigning meaning is the Church, represented by the pastor, and that the purpose of art, after all, is to serve religion, in this case to raise funds for the illumination of the church. But just as he reminds them that the church is still suffering from a "deficit," his performance is also interrupted, this time by the war: "Twelve airplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead" (193). By then, the church deficit, which is responsible for its lack of illumination, is linked to the war planes as they interrupt the clergyman's speech in language that further reinforces the danger of the war for all aspects of civilization: when they fly overhead "[t]he word was cut in two" (193).
Much critical attention has been given to La Trobe's final scene of the pageant, the staging of "The Present Time. Ourselves," for in defiance of any conventions of closure, she intentionally breaks out of the frame of traditional drama by turning the audience into actors? Expecting a conventional interval, the audience interprets the minutes of silence, what Miss La Trobe intended as an immersion in the present, as a gap between performances. Squirming uncomfortably, the audience is unwilling to submit to the unstructured present as art nor to shift frames of reference that would place them on stage, an act that would turn their own ground into figure as well.
Miss La Trobe stood there with her eye on her script. "After Vic.," she had written, "try ten rains. of present time. Swallows, cows, etc." She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality. But something was going wrong with the experiment. "Reality too strong," she muttered. "Curse 'em!" (179)
The unnerving sensation experienced by the audience resulting from the blurring of the boundaries between figure and ground adumbrates the dilemma that the reader of Between the Acts will face at the end of the novel. There is no place left on the sidelines for the spectators, as each is enlisted into the all-encompassing drama.
Miss La Trobe's Present Time, that still moment filled with the foreboding of war, radically disrupts sight and sound, body and speech. On the one hand, by literally holding up mirrors to the audience, she assaults them with fragmented images of their own bodies. "Ourselves? But that's cruel. To snap us as we are, before we've had time to assume . . . . And only, too, in parts . . . . That's what's so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair" (184). On the other hand, they are subjected to speech which is not their own, disembodied speech: "before they had come to any common conclusion, a voice asserted itself. It came from the bushes, a megaphonic, anonymous, loud-speaking affirmation" (186). This anonymous voice in the megaphone implores the audience, before they part from one another, to "talk in words of one syllable, without larding, stuffing, or cant. Let's break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. And calmly consider ourselves. Ourselves" (187). Just as the cry of the cow for its calf is a return to some primordial sound, the megaphone's call at the end is for a return to the simple language of an imaginary primal state, of a romanticized infancy of the species. In other words, the abrupt induction of the audience into the play not only challenges the most basic assumptions about the ontological status, significance, and function of art, but also constitutes another form of reverse evolution, with a plea for language's return to an idealized primal state.
As a result, the ontological figure and ground problem resulting in cognitive disorientation is compounded by the disembodied voice reminiscent of the megaphone that would announce air raids and gas mask drills. Hardly voices of affirmation, these alarming disembodied speeches had their counterpart in the ominous voices on the radio, the voices of Hitler that Woolf recorded in her diaries as the sounds of brute ancestors. The formidable circumstances of the composing and revising of Between the Acts casts a retrospective shadow over the text. Despite her attempt to transform these disembodied voices from a horrific echo of man's origins, as she described them in her letters and diaries, to a romantic view of the primitive as redemptive, the former insinuates itself into the latter. Moreover, the split between the body reflected in the mirror, both visible and vulnerable, and the voice outside of the body but speaking for it is further evidence of the infiltration of wartime hindsight into what would otherwise be merely an avant-garde theatrical event. There can be no doubt that Woolf's perception of the war as a spectacle, with herself on either side of the black fire curtain as performer and spectator, is translated into the reversal of figure and ground in the novel. But beyond that, Woolf's experience of the war as disembodied speech, as voices threatening her physical safety, is also translated into the double-edged speech of a woman artist both resistant to and in complicity with the drama of war.
In the last scene of the book, both cognitive disorientation and reverse evolution reach dizzying heights as husband and wife are about to resolve their domestic quarrel, and in doing so they themselves become part of the artist's consciousness, the first scene of the next pageant. Isa and Giles exist both as part of the ground of social-fictional reality, the "real" characters outside La Trobe's play, and as part of the mind of the artist: both the artist within the fiction, La Trobe, and the artist Virginia Woolf herself, the "ground" for this entire fictional universe. At the book's end, Miss La Trobe retreats to the local pub to relax after her trying day and to begin to envision next year's performance and the family retreats to its home, with husband and wife facing each other and about to speak. Both of these final scenes are portrayed as preludes of creation, the first as the consciousness that precedes writing for the artist and the second as the sexuality that leads to procreation of the species for Isa, wife and mother. Even the artist's vision and language itself are described in terms of biological generation, the conception of a literary work identical with the dawn of a new world.
She raised her glass to her lips. And drank. And listened. Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. She drowsed; she nodded. The mud became fertile. Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning--wonderful words.
There was the high ground at midnight; there the rock and two scarcely perceptible figures. Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She sat down her glass. She heard the first words. (212)
In fact, the entire last scene is a journey backward in time, the reverse evolution that Woolf described in her letters during the war, as well as forward to a post-war world. As dusk turns to night, the family appears to evolve into earlier forms of life. Lucy Swithin returns to her Outline of History and picks up where she stopped: mammoths, mastodons, and prehistoric birds. Shadows creep over Bartholomew's high forehead and "as a dog shudders its skin, his skin shuddered" (218). And just as Lucy reaches the stage of prehistoric man, "half-human, half-ape," and tiptoes out of the room, Giles and Isa seem to be transformed into prehistoric man and woman, a vision of the return to some original human form or the dawn of a new age--a vision that is presented simultaneously as history, as fiction, and as prophecy.
Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night. (219)
Is this scene a return to gender archetypes that glorify the primal "reality" of wartime, the authenticity of "natural" man and woman, or is it resistance to this traditional wartime typology? Woolf's revisions of her typescripts are compelling testimony of her preoccupation with these questions.
PROOFS--FROM THE HOMEFRONT TO THE GALLEYS
It was customary for Woolf to revise her manuscripts numerous times before publication, and Pointz Hall was no exception. A look at the last three typescripts, for example, reveals patterns in the revisions that are direct responses to the war. Focusing only on the end of the novel, i.e., scenes 33 to 37 (from Miss La Trobe at the pub to the Oliver family at home with Giles and Isa about to speak), one can observe significant differences between the early (ETS) and late (LTS) typescripts, and between the late and final (FTS) typescripts? The increasing loneliness of the artist at a time when it is almost impossible to engage the interest of an audience in art is evident in her treatment of Miss La Trobe, for in the late transcript she adds an entire section about the artist's panic when illusion fails: "Panic seized her. Blood seemed to pour out of her veins. Is this death? she noted. When illusion fails?" (180).
In the last scene her revisions chart two courses: more primitive images that imply both human vulnerability and a return to a prehistoric era; and self-referential literary markers that undermine clear boundaries between the acts of the pageant and the acts of the characters' lives, that begin to reverse figure and ground. In other words, reverse evolution and cognitive disorientation. The proliferation of animal images in her descriptions of London at the time of the bombings, for example, appears in the descriptions of characters and settings in Between the Acts. Bart Oliver is always accompanied by his Afghan hound, one of the oldest species of canines, and Bart himself is described as a shuddering dog when he dozes in the last scene. Indeed, if the clock is turned back in Woolf's description of wartime London, then in the novel Lucy Swithin spends her time reading Wells's Outline of History, where she is significantly immersed in the age of mastodons: "elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanadon, the mammoth, and the mastodon" (9). In the last scene, the family members assembled in the parlour in the evening are referred to as insects: "There in that hollow of the sun-baked field were congregated the grasshopper, the ant, and the beetle" (216), echoing Woolf's diary entry about her own feeling of impotence and vulnerability during the war, the "gnat on a blade of grass." Watching from the windows, the family regards "the sky and the grass world" uniting in a reversal of Genesis.
Simultaneous with her emphasizing the journey back to primal origins, Woolf also revised passages to insist on self-referentiality and disorientation by means of metafiction. In the late penultimate manuscript Isa contemplates the audience as part of the play, and Lucy, gazing at one of the paintings in the parlour, saunters back "from her voyage into the picture" (214). Isa's thoughts in the later version--"It was time someone invented a new plot: time the author came out from the bushes" (215)--ambiguously refer both to the pageant and to the spectacle of her own life. In the later draft the play, slowly losing shape, "was shoved out by the other play that was about to begin," referring to the two figures who exist both in La Trobe's mind and as part of the narrative outside the boundaries of her scripts. In a further revision, Woolf changed "shoved out" to "covered," a movement away from displacement to a figure on top of a still-existing ground. WooIf deleted like from "It was like the first night before roads were made," simile giving way to metaphor, so that more than one plane of reality can coexist rather than one plane serving to describe another. The early typescript ends with the two figures about to fight as animals and with the stars coming out, although there are several deleted paragraphs following this last one that explicitly and awkwardly raise the questions that further revisions of the narrative integrate in a more subtle manner: "Why must we take our parts in the play? And who has written it? . . . and how were they to act?"
In the final typescript the move toward more archetypal characters, more primal settings, and more ambiguity of figure and ground is continued, as is the ominous wartime atmosphere. Isa's recurring thoughts about sexual assault, her own image for the war drawn from a newspaper account, become more violent, and La Trobe's despair about the loss of her illusion-making powers becomes more pronounced. When Lucy turns away from contemplating the painting, she "looked like a tragic figure from another play," the word another reinforcing the shifting ground of art and life. The personal gives way to the universal as their is removed from the sequence of "enmity" and "love," making the characters generic rather than personal. "Prehistoric man," in Lucy's outline of history, "half-human, half-ape, roused himself from his semi-crouching position and raised great stones" (218; my emphasis) differs from the earlier versions, where he first "looked at the stars" and in a later draft "fashioned a weapon" (Leaska 439). Rejecting both the triumphant air of her first choice, as man is able to experience wonder at the sight of beauty, and the gloom of the second version, his first act as upright creature being war, she chooses an ambiguous phrase, the raising of stones, which can be either an act of aggression or an act of construction. In her final typescript Woolf added the phrase "in the heart of darkness," which, in its reference to Conrad's work, underscores the journey back to a more primitive time both within the society and within their own psyches and places the novel within that tradition in modernism that conrates biological, psychic, and cultural evolution.
The last paragraph of the final transcript turns the two figures into the actors of a play and returns them to a prehistoric setting, as the fire curtain of her diaries, that foreboding symbol of the possible annihilation of civilization, rises on a postwar landscape and the dawn of a new age.
Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (219)
In her revision from late to final transcripts Woolf made three important changes in this last paragraph: 1) She deleted the definite article the before night (similar to her deletion of the possessive their), signifying a move from the particular to the general, to more universal statements about life; 2) She added both the existence of the great hooded chairs and the fact of Giles and Isa increasing in size along with them. The distortion of space, therefore, reinforces the distortion in time as the two contemporary characters are transformed into their own primal ancestors. Moreover, the hooded chairs contribute both the notion of covering up individual identity and reverse evolution, the return to the origin of the species, since hooded is also a zoological term for an expanded part near the head of an animal. Before the reader's eyes, the figures loom larger and larger until the house can no longer offer shelter and they are alone in the natural landscape; 3) Finally, in the last line, Woolf changed At last to then, a shift from closure and finiteness to progress and infinity. In short, the revisions point to an increased emphasis on both a movement toward collective origins and a denial of origin.
The significance of this last paragraph as it affects the reader's understanding of the entire work is that the two characters, Isa and Giles, have not only moved backward in time as they have been transformed into their own primal ancestors, a fact that can be understood psychologically as well as anthropologically, but in the process they have also been transformed into characters in the mind of another character (Miss La Trobe, as her next play originates in her consciousness). By now it is clear that Woolf has drawn the reader into the same disorientation of figure and ground as was experienced by the audience of Miss La Trobe's pageant. If the story of the Oliver family is the ground for the depiction of Miss La Trobe's work of art, then Miss La Trobe's art becomes the ground for the drama of Isa and Giles. In short, the reader is being asked to do the impossible, to sustain two opposing concepts of figure and ground simultaneously.[11] What makes Woolf's last novel a particularly intriguing example of metafiction is that the last scene, in which the characters in the ground narrative become a figure on the ground of the art within the art, is that this shift does not take the reader back to where he or she began, namely the work of art, but even further back to the origins of the work of art in the mind of the artist. Here the collective origin of the species merges with the collective consciousness that is the ground for imagination and human creativity.[12] Furthermore, the image of primal man and woman under a rock and subject to their instincts as the origins of humankind is itself a product of human imagination, Darwin's theory and Wells's Outline of History, that so enrapture Lucy Swithin, serving as testimony to the human propensity for storytelling. The novel is replete with images of the interchangeability of history and art including portraits of family ancestors and portraits purchased for artistic merit that are indistinguishable from each other.
In Between the Acts the woman artist, Miss La Trobe, is in a double exile: once as an artist in time of war, questioning the ethics and efficacy of art on the homefront, removed from men in battle; and once as single woman dedicated to art and exiled from procreation of the species, emphasized as woman's role even more acutely during wartime when the primal roles of male prowess and female procreativity are upheld. At the end of the novel, the woman artist envisions such a scene of primal man and woman about to mate and thereby guarantee survival of the species. The fiction within the fiction merges with the outer fiction, the embedded narrative merges with the frame, Miss La Trobe is transformed into Virginia Woolf. La Trobe, as woman artist, is exiled from that last scene of a return to these archetypes, but she is also creator of that scene. The archetypes themselves are visible only as they exist in the individual work of art, just as a ground is perceptible only when it serves to frame a figure. In the last scene, evolution in reverse is represented by cognitive disorientation, for Isa and Giles are both their own archetypal ancestors and their future reincarnation as La Trobe's invented protagonists. The work of art fades into the collective unconscious on the one hand and, on the other, into a new primitive age, the product of the barbarism of war. Primal man and woman on the last page of Between the Acts are both the ground of all human endeavor and the figure on the ground of the artist's fertile imagination. The artist on the homefront, then, is in exile from reality and also at the very heart of reality, in touch with human imagination.
In Between the Acts war sets in motion a return to archetypal man and woman, seemingly stripped of civilization; but Woolf also questions this very view of history by depicting it as an imaginative recreation, as a work of art. In Beer's terms, Woolf "refuses that metaphor which assumes that prehistory is deeper, grander, more sonorous, than the present moment" (180). She also refuses to accept "the nature of manhood and the nature of womanhood" as they are "frequently defined by both Italian and German dictators," that it is "the nature of manhood to fight" (Three Guineas 326). While her own record of the war in her letters and diaries partakes of a traditional discourse of war--of its "reality," its return to primal instincts, its reversion to gender archetypes--her manuscript revisions reveal this language to be suspect as an authoritative discourse. Through formal experimentation with figure and ground, Woolf was able to question the very terms of her own language for the war as she strove to find the words that would be the equivalent of the X on the page that marked the moment that the blast from the bomb thrust the pencil out of her hand. In this last novel, she was able to write about the end of the world as if it were the beginning, to question the place of art and women in a world of war, and to construct planes of reality that suggest infinity.
What distinguishes Woolf's last work of art from the rest of her canon and from other metafiction of her own time is the way in which the war and its threat to destroy both her own life and the civilization which she cherished moved her to write a work that strains to embody the very limits of the imagination. Between the Acts is a look at the mind's attempt to look at itself, to be both performer and spectator of that performance, to describe what Gombrich terms impossible: "To watch ourselves having an illusion." As she gradually began to lose her own grounding, committing suicide as she checked the last galleys of the book, she put the final touches on a work that came close to embodying her admission that she would never be able to describe the experience of the loss of consciousness in death, "the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain." Step by step as the bombings intensified, Woolf responded by writing the war into her art. At the end of the book, primal man and woman are about to speak. We the readers are left to decide whether the book comes full circle with the characters uttering the words at the beginning, merely recapitulating the past, or whether a woman artist can endow them with new words in 1941, in Woolf's cataclysmic "Present Time." The silence of her characters at the end constitutes a space somewhere between Woolf's evasion and her resistance, between despair and affirmation.
Notes
1 James's reaction anticipates her own: "I dip my nose, or try to, into the inkpot as often as I can; but it's as if there were no ink there, and I take it out smelling of gunpowder, smelling blood." Yet he wanted to believe that one could still "make a little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss" (402).
2 When he says, as history proves that he has said, and may say again, "I am fighting to protect our country" and thus seeks to arouse her patriotic emotion, she will ask herself, "What does our country mean to me an outsider?" To decide this she will analyze the meaning of patriotism in her own case. She will inform herself of the position of her sex and her class in the past.
(Three Guineas 107)
3 From among the critics who have examined the link between the war and Woolf's work, I have benefitted the most from the following: Brenda Silver for her documenting Woolf's extensive research and preparations for her late writings and Jane Marcus for making the case for Woolf's political commitment in these texts; Sallie Sears for pointing out direct references to the war in the pageant; Alexander Zwerdling for demonstrating how the book is a negation of liberal-progressive ideas and the power of art as an integrating force: Judith Johnston for placing Woolf's negation of humanism in the context of her rejection of a patriarchal cultural inheritance, thereby rendering the pageant an indictment of a narrow cultural history; Karen Schneider for tracing Woolf's vacillations between possessive fondness for England under siege and harsh critique of a patriarchal tradition that keeps repeating itself.
See also Hussey.
- 4 WooIf loved London so much that she eventually wrote that "It's my only patriotism" (Letters 6:460).
- 5 For a discussion of the discourse of theatricality during World War I, see chapter 6, "Theater of War," in Paul Fussell.
- 6 Alexander Zwerdling has noted the pessimism of her Bloomsbury friends in light of the war, pointing out that Leonard Woolf published a book in 1939 entitled Barbarians at the Gate (306). For a discussion of how Darwinian theories affected literature (including work by Woolf), see Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots.
- 7 My use of figure and ground is drawn from Gestalt psychology, in that ground refers to the framework in which a figure is suspended; a ground is perceived to underlie the figure, even though it is not visually apparent (Koffka 177-210). Discerning figure from ground is determined by such factors as main directions in space, relative size, enclosure, and density. For example, an enclosed area will tend to be perceived as figure, and an enclosing area as ground. Ambiguous figure and ground patterns disorient the perceiver and force the question of how orientation is relative with regard to frameworks.
- 8 This is exemplified in the familiar picture of the goblet and two faces in profile. Between the Acts aims for what, in Gombrich's terms, is unattainable: "though we may be intellectually aware of the fact that any given experience must be an illusion, we cannot, strictly speaking, watch ourselves having an illusion" (5). In narratological terms, Woolf's novel is a classic example of what Menakhem Perry has termed "alternate patterning": that is, a text that systematically contains multiple frames that compete for inclusion of details.
- 9 For an analysis of the collision between the artist's intentions and the audience's response, see Sallie Sears.
- 10 All citations from typescripts are taken from Woolf's Pointz Hall.
- 11 Like the paradox of Epimenides, the Cretan who claimed that all Cretans were liars, or like the drawings of Escher in which hands are seen to be drawing the hands that are drawing them, Woolf's novel Between the Acts constitutes what Daniel Hofstadter has termed a Strange Loop, which "occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves fight back where we started" (10). In discussing Escher, Hofstadter goes on to make a point that can apply to Woolf's novel as well:
the mere presence of these two levels invites the looker to look upon himself as part of yet another level; and by taking that step, the viewer cannot help getting caught up in Escher's implied chain of levels, in which, for any one level, there is always another level above it of greater "reality," and likewise, there is always a level below, "more imaginary" than it is . . . . However, what happens if the chain of levels is not linear, but forms a loop? What is real, then, and what is fantasy? (15)
In these Strange Loops, Hofstadter demonstrates that there is a conflict between the finite and the infinite and hence a strong sense of paradox.
12 J. Hillis Miller has pointed out that the novel "constantly interrogates its own order, in a self-reflective reversal of which it contains many examples on a small and large scale" (204). Referring specifically to this scene and its metafictional dimension, Miller writes,
The real "acts" are not given in the novel: the primeval drama which presumably began it all and the love battle of Giles and Isa from which another life might be born. These interchangeable events, an early and a late, that which has always already occurred and that which has always not quite yet occurred, take place in the margins of the novel . . . (217)
Works Cited
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Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
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By Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel Aviv University
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