Carnivalesque comedy in 'Between the Acts.' - novel by woman author Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Christopher Ames

Writing of her composition of Between the Acts, Woolf noted simply in her diary, "I'm playing with words (5: 290). If we read Between the Acts attentive to such play, we discover a work full of humor, laughter, and comedy. As in so much of Woolf's fiction, the tone of lyric seriousness (here associated primarily with Isa's poetic musings) risks obscuring the rich comedy; surely Woolf's humor has escaped many readers. Yet the spirit of linguistic play and the importance of humor to the work are signaled on the opening page where the narrator identifies the apparent sound of a nightingale - bird of myth, poetry, and pathos - as actually only "a daylight bird, chuckling. . . in sleep" (3). That reference initiates what amounts to an anatomy of laughter in the novel, and it also initiates the bird imagery that is so clearly connected, in its "many-tongued syllabling," with the novel's comic and polyphonic mingling of many voices. Between the Acts represents the culmination of Woolf's career-long exploration of contemporary festivity - the "party consciousness" (Diary 3: 12). It also represents the culmination of her experiments with narrative voice. The festive subject matter and the concern with narrative multiplicity come together in the humor and comedy of Woolf's most explicitly carnivalesque novel. That comedy arises from parody, incongruity, and linguistic play - all forms characteristic of what Bakhtin calls the "public square" (Dostoevsky 128). Bakhtin's concept of the novel as a carnivalesque genre and his understanding of the relationship of laughter and festivity to novel form are illuminating in reading Woolf. Indeed, in discussing the function of parody in carnival, Bakhtin uses a simile particularly appropriate to Between the Acts: "various images. . . parodied one another variously and from various points of view; it was like an entire system of crooked mirrors, elongating, diminishing, [and] distorting" (Dostoevsky 127).

The fullest treatment of Between the Acts as a comic novel appears in an article by Melba Cuddy-Keane, who relates Woolf's use of a chorus in the pageant to the use of the chorus in ancient Greek comedy. She argues that this comic mode is central to the questioning of authority in the novel as a whole. My focus here is more explicitly on the parodic playlets of the pageant and the verbal play of the narrator and how these comic forms participate in the festive word of the carnivalesque novel. Greek comedy is, of course, an important source of Bakhtin's discussion of carnival and the village square. One of Bakhtin's important theoretical advances is to connect the ritualistic and folk sources of drama (noted by critics such as C. L. Barber and Northrop Frye, and classicists and anthropologists such as Jane Harrison and James Frazer) to the genre of the novel. Between the Acts tests the boundary of genre with its incorporation of lyric poetry and drama (both dramatized action and chorus). This mixing of genres is essential to the novel's festive character.

Virginia Woolf may seem an odd candidate for a Bakhtinian reading, especially in terms that emphasize carnival and laughter. After all, Woolf is hardly a Rabelaisian writer. Yet I believe that Between the Acts is a crucial work in the modern revivification of festive forms. Woolf's mingling of genres, aspiration toward a plural narrator, and detailed attention to forms of laughter occur, significantly, in a novel about a village pageant, a survival of a folk carnival form. Woolf's search for plural and anonymous narrators, in this novel and the uncompleted "Anon," represents a departure from the modernist emphasis on individual consciousness, which is characteristic of the genre's move away from folk carnival sources. Similarly, her use of parody throughout this novel, as opposed to satire or irony, is consistent with a comic vision of life in which all things are perceived as possessing a comic, laughing aspect.

The humor of Woolf's village pageant itself grows initially out of the double focus of the stage, which in turn points outside the pageant to the audience and the Pointz Hall residents. The portrayal of Queen Elizabeth by Eliza Clark of the tobacco shop illustrates one sort of comic double vision. The audience sees the stage figure as both Queen Elizabeth ("She looked the age in person" [83]) and as the humble Eliza Clark. The comic breaking of the mimetic illusion of the stage is intensified by the folk character of the pageant: the flaws of the amateur production, the interruptions of the audience, the audience's familiarity with the local actors, even the sounds of birds and cows and weather. In traditional carnival, the monde invers allowed a laughing double focus where the common folk impersonated royalty, clergy, and gentry. Woolf exploits the comic potential of a similar mingling of high and low. The "child new born" who represents England forgets her lines - to Miss La Trobe's curses and the audience's cheers (77). Eliza Clark is "splendidly made up" with "sixpenny brooches" and a royal cape made of "swabs used to scour saucepans" (83). The audience is amused to note that "Mrs. Otter of The End House" plays the aged crone in the Elizabethan playlet. Albert, the so-called "village idiot," plays many roles, "energetically representing . . . the sound of horse's hooves . . . with a wooden spoon" (142) and later undertaking the more demanding cooperative role of the hindquarters of a donkey. Woolf's use of the troubling anachronism, "village idiot," suggests both the harshness of stereotyped social roles and the festive inclusiveness that allows, albeit temporarily, for the transformation of such roles. When Mrs. Parker deplores Albert's presence, William Dodge (acutely aware of social marginality himself) responds, "The idiot . . . He's in the tradition" (111). The play of carnival pageantry, as Bakhtin explains it, creates a comic double focus that temporarily exalts the lowly and lowers the exalted. But the inversion is not a one-sided attack on authority or power; the carnival spirit is richly inclusive. Rather than undermining tradition, it seeks to include all within it: from the resistant and moody Giles, to the pompous Reverend Streatfield, to Albert the idiot, firmly ensconced in "the tradition."(1)