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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Christopher Ames

The parody serves its function of making one question all pieties and revered aspects of official culture. So when the Reverend Streatfield takes the stage after the pageant to offer a summary interpretation, it seems as if the parodic pageant is still in force. The double-voicing of parody penetrates the boundary between stage and spectators and permeates the priesthood, presenting the time-honored "travesty of the low clergy" (Bakhtin, Rabelais 86). Woolf's narrative language is extreme here:

What an intolerable constriction, contraction, and reduction to simplified absurdity he was to be sure! Of all incongruous sights a clergyman in the livery of his servitude to the summing up was the most grotesque and entire. He opened his mouth. O Lord, protect and preserve us from words the defilers, from words the impure! . . . The whole lot of them, gentles and simples, felt embarrassed, for him, for themselves. There he stood their representative spokesman; their symbol; themselves; a butt; a clod; laughed at by looking-glasses; ignored by the cows, condemned by the clouds which continued their majestic rearrangement of the celestial landscape; an irrelevant forked stake in the flow and majesty of the summer silent world. (190-91)

As in much of Between the Acts, the narrative voice plays with language so incessantly that it virtually parodies itself. It is hard to read the narrative indignation of this passage in the same fashion as the more serious attacks on Doris Kilman or Sir Bradshaw in Mrs. Dalloway. And should we miss the comic wryness of this vituperative narrative assault, the narrator immediately qualifies it. We are told that "one fact mitigated the horror; his forefinger, raised in the customary manner, was stained with tobacco juice." What might undermine his voice elsewhere, here, in the world of festive inversion, redeems it - his affiliation with natural desires. And thus the comic spirit can find room to include him.(5) His words too are subject to the interruptions that plague the pageant but also provide a welcome limit to authority: "His first words (the breeze had risen; the leaves were rustling) were lost. Then he was heard saying: 'What'" (191). Finally his "one-making" interpretation is split apart: "The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation" (193). This interruption is one of many grim reminders of the war, the antifestive background against which Woolf stages the parodic celebration of the tradition and offers what Bakhtin calls the "regenerating power of laughter" (Rabelais 38).

The playlets of the pageant are introduced and interwoven with the activities of a pilgrim-like chorus, groups of villagers who dance between the trees, chant in unison, and make sowing motions. Though their function is not humorous, it is firmly in tune with the comic tradition. While the playlets comically point up the aspects of ages past that appear anachronistic today, the chorus stresses what is timeless and enduring. Cuddy-Keane, in discussing the chorus as the central communal and ritual presence of the novel, notes that "Because Woolfs choric voice signifies the integration of society, Between the Acts lies primarily within the comic genre" (275). Cuddy-Keane argues that the concept of chorus - a group that speaks without a leader or individualized voice - serves as the most successful way in which Woolf questions and undermines traditional authority and concepts of social leadership in the novel. But I cannot go as far as Cuddy-Keane does in asserting that "Woolfs comedy . . . celebrates an irreversible dismantling of order and actually advocates permanent instability" (280). Between the Acts seems to me to place in sympathetic (and irresolvable) tension the impulse to order and the impulse to chaos or anarchy. Nevertheless, the multivoiced chorus, along with the parodic pageant and the consciousness of acting and role-playing, all contribute to the technical breakthrough Woolf conceived of as plural narration: "All [literature] discussed in connection with real little incongruous living humour . . . but 'I' rejected: 'We' substituted . . . we all life, all art, all waifs & strays - a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole" (Diary 5:135).