If you’re starting to feel that your brain has devolved into so much icy mush in the bleak new year, fear not! Stephen McEwen is back with his ‘The Book I Read’ series, waxing lyrical about literature in the hopes of getting you all back on the reading wagon. In the first installment of 2011, it’s Virginia Woolf’s novella ‘Between The Acts’:
“Here came the sun, an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human suffering.”
Suicide, depression, Nicole Kidman with a huge prosthetic nose – is that all Virginia Woolf means to us today? Even the most literary-minded of us may not have ventured further than a dinner party with ‘Mrs Dalloway’, a brief trip ‘To the Lighthouse’, or maybe, if we are feeling experimental, a slight dip into ‘The Waves.’ Written a year before her suicide in 1941, and posthumously published, the short novel ‘Between the Acts’ is Woolf’s literary swan song, and is probably one of her most accessible works, whilst still retaining her conceptual and stylistic ethos.
Any good English student will fear Barthes too much to make a link between a writer’s life and times, and a writer’s work; however, with the contemporaneous escalation of the threat of Fascism on the continent, and Woolf’s increasing bouts of mental instability, one cannot help but view the text in the light of a way of life, and a life itself, under threat. The novel takes place in the course of one day in pre-War England, in which a small community are planning the performance of a pageant in a rural country house. It is the Oliver family who occupy the house, and with whom we become most familiar, as family members and family friends appear for the pageant, which is intended as traditional celebration of the English past, but which ends up – unsurprisingly – coming under scrutiny by Woolf.
The characters are not as fleshed out as in her other works, but this is not important, as in this work (as was the case in Woolf’s life itself), time is of the essence – we are presented with a mere sliver of time, and the people who exist therein, just as is the case with the pageant the community are about to witness. Yet Woolf is never all doom and gloom, as we are often led to think. If time ends and existence corrodes, it is also reborn and rejuvenated. For Woolf, time exists within a prism, it is shadowed by a beforehand that has already ended, and looks towards a future yet to occur. Almost Chekovian in its approach to humanity, and the process of time to which it is forced to endure, in this work, we see Woolf’s ever-intriguing characters as humans, of a particular time, in constant flux, but also never-changing in their humanity, and all that that humanity entails.
