Between the Acts: A Modernist Meditation on Language, Origin Narratives, and Art's Efficacy on the Cusp of the Apocalypse

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Virginia Woolf 's final novel, Between the Acts ([1941] 2008. New York: Harcourt.), is precariously situated in both literary and temporal terms. Written during modernism's eclipse and at the outset of World War II, the first conflict that threatened to annihilate humanity through the deployment of atomic weaponry,Woolf 's text seems to anticipate what would later be recognized in terms of postmodern preoccupation with metanarrative. The contingent nature of life is encapsulated in the novel's fragmentary language, and through addressing multiple genres simultaneously, the text probes the past in an attempt to comprehend a terrifying present, and to prognosticate about humanity's capacity to endure in an uncertain future. Scientific developments from Charles Darwin onwards invite particular scrutiny in Woolf 's text, which suggests that art may imbue humans with values that foster compassion for others, supplanting organized religions that seem to have failed in this respect. The fact that it is a female playwright who directs the subversive pageant of English history interpolated in the novel is significant, with Woolf anticipating that the matrilineal aesthetics, which would subsequently be conceptualized by feminist theorists including Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, might effectively mitigate violent tendencies underlying patriarchal aesthetics that had thus far induced conflict among humans. Readers of the novel, and spectators of the play around which the novel is structured, are similarly enjoined to move from observational to creative roles by recognizing their stake in engendering a counter-narrative to the one that, in Woolf 's time, seemed unambiguously apocalyptic.