Carnivalesque Comedy in Between the Acts

Abstract

Writing of her composition of Between the Acts, Woolf noted simply in her diary, I'm playing with words (5: 290). If we read Between the Acts attentive to such play, we discover work full of humor, laughter, and comedy. As in so much of Woolf's fiction, the tone of lyric seriousness (here associated primarily with Isa's poetic musings) risks obscuring the rich comedy; surely Woolf's humor has escaped many readers. Yet the spirit of linguistic play and the importance of humor to the work are signaled on the opening page where the narrator identifies the apparent sound of nightingale - bird of myth, poetry, and pathos - as actually only a daylight bird, chuckling. . . in sleep (3). That reference initiates what amounts to an anatomy of laughter in the novel, and it also initiates the bird imagery that is so clearly connected, in its many-tongued syllabling, with the novel's comic and polyphonic mingling of many voices. Between the Acts represents the culmination of Woolf's career-long exploration of contemporary festivity - the party consciousness (Diary 3: 12). It also represents the culmination of her experiments with narrative voice. The festive subject matter and the concern with narrative multiplicity come together in the humor and comedy of Woolf's most explicitly carnivalesque novel. That comedy arises from parody, incongruity, and linguistic play - all forms characteristic of what Bakhtin calls the public square (Dostoevsky 128). Bakhtin's concept of the novel as carnivalesque genre and his understanding of the relationship of laughter and festivity to novel form are illuminating in reading Woolf. Indeed, in discussing the function of parody in carnival, Bakhtin uses simile particularly appropriate to Between the Acts: images. . . parodied one another variously and from various points of view; it was like an entire system of crooked mirrors, elongating, diminishing, [and] distorting (Dostoevsky 127). The fullest treatment of Between the Acts as comic novel appears in an article by Melba Cuddy-Keane, who relates Woolf's use of chorus in the pageant to the use of the chorus in ancient Greek comedy. She argues that this comic mode is central to the questioning of authority in the novel as whole. My focus here is more explicitly on the parodic playlets of the pageant and the verbal play of the narrator and how these comic forms participate in the festive word of the carnivalesque novel. Greek comedy is, of course, an important source of Bakhtin's discussion of carnival and the village square. One of Bakhtin's important theoretical advances is to connect the ritualistic and folk sources of drama (noted by critics such as C. L. Barber and Northrop Frye, and classicists and anthropologists such as Jane Harrison and James Frazer) to the genre of the novel. Between the Acts tests the boundary of genre with its incorporation of lyric poetry and drama (both dramatized action and chorus). This mixing of genres is essential to the novel's festive character. Virginia Woolf may seem an odd candidate for Bakhtinian reading, especially in terms that emphasize carnival and laughter. After all, Woolf is hardly Rabelaisian writer. Yet I believe that Between the Acts is crucial work in the modern revivification of festive forms. Woolf's mingling of genres, aspiration toward plural narrator, and detailed attention to forms of laughter occur, significantly, in novel about village pageant, survival of folk carnival form. Woolf's search for plural and anonymous narrators, in this novel and the uncompleted Anon, represents departure from the modernist emphasis on individual consciousness, which is characteristic of the genre's move away from folk carnival sources. Similarly, her use of parody throughout this novel, as opposed to satire or irony, is consistent with comic vision of life in which all things are perceived as possessing comic, laughing aspect. The humor of Woolf's village pageant itself grows initially out of the double focus of the stage, which in turn points outside the pageant to the audience and the Pointz Hall residents. …