If Aenglish Were a Language (Part Five)

Scraps & Sync

Despite the multiple intricacies with regard to how literary elements operate in Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941), it is probably the narration that is the most captivating one. However, one cannot think of narration in the narrowest sense of the word. It can simply not be perceived as an isolated aspect of the novel. The observation might appear to be addressing a more than obvious fact: any reader with a tiniest interest in getting a grasp of a literary work one encounters could make the same, or, at least, a very similar remark in relation to any piece of writing. And yet, applied to Woolf’s prose, this common wisdom acquires slightly modified meaning. To support such a statement by emphasizing the role of the tone in shaping the narration is nothing new. Perhaps, it is not spectacularly informative either. But, although reading the dialogue between them in Woolf’s storytelling might not be an entirely fresh approach to a novel, it certainly does inform the reader’s perception of the fictitious world presented.

Few are novels that parallel Between the Acts in terms of the elusiveness of a narrator. Fewer dare to allow such a seemingly unreliable polyphony to carry the structure of the narrative. Seldom could a book written at the time Woolf wrote hers be said to have ventured into the adventures Woolf’s did. But, what, one wonders, could it be that which constitutes such a specific conversation between and among the storytelling layers in Woolf’s prose?

Partly, it is for sure the way poetic components spike the prosaic tissue. Partly, it is how those minute connective lyrical ingredients sparkle from the solemn easiness of her fiction. It is quite possible that more than each particular nutrient, the interconnectivity between and among them is what constitutes the cornucopia of the literary diet sustained within and by Woolf’s filigrane, yet bold, signature. Specifically, the most stunning effect the narration can have on a reader comes from the nearly paradoxical, almost sublime strain in the voice overburdened with the quotidian. It is perhaps precisely the aloofness exuding boredom of a dispassionate engagement in daily chores that emanates a profound emotional charge from the layers underneath the tasteless everyday.

Even an event as extraordinary as a pageant provokes reserved responses of the participants. For example, while preparing the stage, Miss La Trobe meditates upon the audience. Due to a touch of a unique remoteness in the tone, her thoughts can scarcely be taken at face value. Way too deeply immersed she seems to be in the shadow of history, maintaining a distance from the audience for whom her consideration borders on carelessness, albeit not exactly verging on either disrespect or neglect. Therefore, neither does a single page of this astonishing novel signal a slightest possibility of leaving the reader with a sense of indifference. Such is the quirky dynamics with which one comprehends and responds to the seeming disinterest the tone in the book at times tends to incline towards. One would be prone to assume that the audience in the novel might mistrust the apparent lukewarm attitude demonstrated in the characters’ organizational maneuvering.

Is it, then, one would ponder, solely the dialogue between the narration and the tone that imbues in Woolf’s singular poetics the streak constitutive of the signature? Quite possibly not. One can hardly think of the tone without rightfully crediting the characterization. This opens up a whole new avenue to muse about the way the flux of history shown in the novel conditions the fluctuating character of the protagonists. How trustworthy is their elusive presence? How praiseworthy is the manner in which they win autonomy and guard themselves from multifarious voices of the audience. How incredibly the tone thereby serves the characterization, all the while strengthening the narration in the most delicate and dignified of manners allowing both the story and the reader to breathe freely.

`           La Trobe might be perceived the way the Rev. G.W. Streatfield observes in a postclimactic tone preaching with a look directed first towards the audience, then towards the sky: “He looked round. La Trobe was invisible” (Between the Acts 191). And yet, absent she is not. It is perhaps how one sees the pageant that can inform hearing Miss La Trobe’s presence. It may also be a perspective from which to contemplate how history is told. It is to ruminate about the quizzical relationship between continuity and syncopation. It is to see the current moment in the looking glass whose acoustics consists of the imagery not so much visual as it is semantic. The closing scene of the pageant is loaded with kaleidoscopic pictures and fragmentary voices. The characters in the pageant leap, jerk, skip, jump, dance. The scenery is flashing, dazzling (184). The audience seems to believe what the play is communicating:

Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen! Then at the wall; and ask how’s this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves? […] All you can see of yourselves is scraps, orts and fragments? Well then listen to the gramophone affirming…. (188 italics in original).

Only Manresa’s conduct radiates the perception in a subversive key. She powders her nose (186), after which a voice asserts itself. The Reverend was to speak shortly. But, before he does, the audiences are confronting the looming, ominous sites: “And the audiences saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still” (185). They seem to be listening to the gramophone affirming (188). For them, it is still like an echo of the brooding scratches the music is being dashed with: “The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we” (95-6 italics in original).

First Manresa (96), then Isabella (96), followed by Mrs. Swithin (103) murmur and hum a consensus about the portrayal of who they thought they were: “The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was now. Ourselves” (186). Anxious indifference, stupefyingly unsettling is the aural aspect of the perception of the play. They ask. From the question, an answer arises: “Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that? The voice died away” (189).

            Having been deprived of the acoustic component, they seem to be increasingly perplexed by the shadow overhanging from a displaced, almost unidentifiable comment on the discussion Oliver and Lucy have about time. Isa distracts the debate from the lofty realm towards the awareness of temporality. An interjection emerges from the crevices in the conversation: “The future disturbing our present” (82). All is fragments. All is abysmal hollowness threatening to sweep daylight from the eyes of the audiences. All is noise, the troubled history-lovers seem to be suggesting: “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” (23). One wonders if the gramophone affirms.

            Instead of a response to the query, the signs of the times were revealed via the emissaries of modernity: “The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed” (193 italics in original). Little room does it create for doubts about the eras bygone. Fewer a suspicious thought can conquer the mind when the music of the planes outvoices the sound coming from the gramophone. The audiences seem to believe the music they listen to. Music as the signs of the times. Music as the signs of the historical narratives about traditions seemingly floating along the flux of Chronos’s tales. As if each attempt to tell the world that once upon a time a world existed that spoke a different language were a walk across the bridge tricking one to suspect the solidity of the ground beneath.

Sometimes, stories coming from the depths of history bear witness to the worlds so irredeemably incommensurable with current cultural vocabulary that one doubts the linguistic unity underpinning the prolific descriptions. How arbitrary is such a verisimilitude, one would like to know. How comprehendible is a story borne out of polyphonic flows? How hostile is the past that resists deciphering? Traditions : either as a succession of disposable linguistic variants—a centuries-long pageant of differences dissolving into a tasteless indistinctiveness, or, as a linguistic rigidity of a privileged vocabulary excluding the validity of playfulness.

The rule of absolutely random morality or robozombism seem to be the choices on offer. We don’t buy such a dichotomy. We don’t buy deceitful binary opposites. We don’t even care about the number of the components in the debate, we don’t care how many oppositional parameters constitute the edginess of a critical / creative narrative. But, there is no way to argumentatively defend such a seemingly controversial attitude. Sometimes we wonder like the characters in Between the Acts do: “’Were they like that?’ […] ‘The Victorians,’ Mrs. Swithin mused. ‘I don’t believe,’ she said with her odd little smile, ‘that there ever were such people. Only you and me and William dressed differently’” (174-5). Sometimes, one wonders what the sound of the versatile attire in question is like. One wonders how the gramophone could affirm a response to such an inquiry. An answer seems to be coming from the characters in the play: “... All passes but we, all changes…but we remain forever the same…” (139 italics in original). The same fragments? The same broken beat voices? The same kaleidoscopic imagery? The same noise? Possibly. But, most probably in the way calling for a different combination of those scraps & syncopations. To say the very least.

The reverend makes a point about the congregation : each individual is part of the whole (192). One could hardly resist taking his observation as a clue for a literary analysis. The metaphorical charge of the remark is suggestive of the idea that just as the members of the congregation make sense only as nodes interconnected within a web, so do literary elements in Woolf’s novel become articulate only when they are put in conversation with other constituent parts of the web in question. Only then are they fully animated. Only then are they reintegrated. Only then do they resonate with the sound coming from the gramophone: “Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken” (120). Such moments might even be capable of disclosing the dissoluble character of bewildering historical flows, of disambiguating deceiving mirror images, re-animating the linguistic anchorage underneath the deafening “easy pluralities”: “But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust— She waited for a rhyme, it failed her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear” (61).

            Rather than isolated particulates, what was believed to be irrevocably alienated pollutants in the communication channel, one would preferably accept the perception based on transformative potentials of music. Translated into the language of theory, it may be illuminated from the angle presented in Sucking on Words: A Documentary about Kenneth Goldsmith directed by Simon Morris (2007). Goldsmith points out the following:

What are you going to do, take a grain of sand and chop it up even further or are you actually going to forget about deconstruction and begin some sort of re-construction acknowledging and re-building this vessel. Acknowledging the cracks in it. We’re not going back but instead we have to, kind of, look at wholes again. I’m not interested in rips. I’m actually interested in wholeness. (Sucking on Words)

            History can be oppressive. Historical narratives can be confusing. The imperial grandeur of western empires might be history : huge chapters in history books long over. And yet, some tales endure. Neither nostalgic nor somnambulist : neither lionizing the idealized past nor projecting into a romanticized future, the poetics of the remix perseveres in DJing in the intersection of the time axes : recuperating the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.