Scan barcode
A review by joannaautumn
Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf
4.0
”Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that when she cut this knot in the centre?
Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.”
Woolf, a true modernist, tries to portray every aspect of life, experimenting with the writing and narration, writing about the things that aren’t given page time in fiction; say the effect of music on people, rich imagery of nature and food, sudden outburst of strong emotions.
Surely, one can draw a parallel between Miss La Trobe and Woolf, capturing the struggle of a writer to give birth to the concept in their head but “the words escaped her”, words are at the same time wonderful and awfully difficult because they are open to different interpretation. A wise man, in one of my favourite books, one whom I admire a lot, once said:
“It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”
-Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
That being said, this novel doesn’t have a traditional protagonist nor plot. One might say that nothing meaningful happens in the novel.
The time span of the novel is one day in June 1939, a few weeks before WWII, exploring the tie between the past and how it influences the present.
It follows one English family and their friends and acquaintances attending a yearly pageant; the pageant itself is a portrayal of the whole spectre of English history and literature from Canterbury tales of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, Restoration comedies to the present day. Another instrument that ties the past and the present together, considering the time when the pageant is played out the question arises – how long will things go unchanged?
” Dear, how my mind wanders, she checked herself. What she meant was, change had to come, unless things were perfect; in which case she supposed they resisted Time. Heaven was changeless.”
Between the acts is, on one hand, a story about creation – the creation of artistic work, creation of the inner dynamics of human relationships, creation of life itself – much of life is in the things unsaid, unwritten, the things hidden Between the acts, between our actions, between our words.
“But we have other lives, I think, I hope,’ she murmured.'We live in others… We live in things.”
In conclusion: I liked this novel very much! The ideas underneath it weren’t stronger than the novel itself – which I often find problematic with modernist prose fiction
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
My faith in Virginia Woolf is restored. Review to come.