Final curtain on the war: figure and ground in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts - World War II

Style, Summer, 1994 by Hana Wirth-Nesher

Miss La Trobe stood there with her eye on her script. "After Vic.," she had written, "try ten mins. 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.