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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Christopher Ames

The tune began; the first note meant a second; the second a third. Then down beneath a force was born in opposition; then another. . . . from chaos and cacophony measure; but not the melody of surface sound alone controlled it; but also the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder: To part? No. Compelled from the ends of the horizon; recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses; they crashed; solved; united. (189)

This description of the effect of music on the pageant audience is richly ambivalent in its tension between harmony and disorder, but the musical metaphor for community is unmistakable.

Laughter is notoriously hard to show rather than tell in fiction, and while real laughter is often contagious, descriptions of laughter are rarely funny. Nevertheless, Woolf makes a concerted point of outlining the places of laughter both within the pageant and between the acts. Laughter is described or mentioned more than fifteen separate times in the text. We encounter Albert's senseless "chuckling over the placard under the shade of some hedge" and the workers laughing good naturedly at "Old Flimsy" (27). Bart laughs less charitably at what he considers his sister's superstitions (2426). Laughter from the bushes that provide the actors' dressing room signals that the pageant is about to begin (56, 62). That beginning is described as the laughter of the gods creating a gende breeze, in a passage that recalls the breeze that puffs the curtains as Mrs. Dalloway's party gets underway: "And then a breeze blew and all the muslin blinds fluttered out, as if some majestic goddess, rising from her throne among her peers, had tossed her amber-coloured raiment, and the other gods, seeing her rise and go, laughed, and their laughter floated her on" (72). Specific moments of the pageant, of course, inspire the audience's laughter: "Everyone was clapping and laughing" (83). The "Loud laughter, low laughter" of Queen Elizabeth's monologue (84) infects the audience as Giles repeats the phrase, Mrs. Manresa shouts "Bravo! Bravo!" and "the audience laughed so loud that [Eliza's forgetting her lines] did not matter" (85). "The great lady in the bath chair . . . so indigenous . . . that even her body, crippled by arthritis, resembled an uncouth, nocturnal animal, now nearly extinct - clapped and laughed loud - the sudden laughter of a startled jay" (94). Her liberating, "Ha, ha, ha!" appears twice more (94, 133) as does Bartholomew's vigorous laughter "like a horse whinnying" (149).

Woolf puts such emphasis on laughter in the context of the pageant of English literary history because she perceives its central comic importance to that tradition and to the present moment of her novel. In discussing the history of laughter, Bakhtin locates it at carnival performances: "This universal character of laughter was most clearly and consistently brought out in carnival rituals and spectacles and in the parodies they presented" (Rabelais 88). Woolf's life-long attention to the festive forms of the modern world - what she called the "party consciousness" - is most clearly allied with comedy and laughter in Between the Act.(6)) As in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, in Woolf the festival has been replaced by the party - evidence of the shift away from the folk carnival experience to bourgeois individualism that Bakhtin analyzes and deplores. But in Between the Acts, Woolf uses a folk celebration to assert the vital connection between contemporary festivity and its communal roots. Bahktin's history of laughter argues that folk laughter gives way to the impurities and negativity of satire and irony after the Renaissance. Bakhtin negatively characterizes the modern attitude toward comedy as believing that "the essential truth about the world and about man cannot be told in the language of laughter" (Rabelais 67 [Between the Acts 157]). Yet Woolf seems intent in doing just that in a comic, laughter-filled novel that reprises English history ("without the Army" as Colonel Mayhew complains) under the threat of catastrophic war. Between the Acts seems to be one of those rare works in which "seriousness and laughter coexist" - a phrase of Bakhtin's (Rabelais 122) that is strikingly similar to Forster's praise of Woolf: "Though most of us like to write sometimes seriously and sometimes in fun, few of us can manage the two impulses so that they speed each other up, as hers did" (12). In Between the Acts laughter almost seems to serve the utopian functions Bakhtin describes: