The Play in the Sky of the Mind: Dialogue, ‘the Tchekov method’, and Between the Acts
Résumé
‘The Play in the Sky of the Mind: Dialogue, ‘the Tchekov method’, and Between the Acts’ explores the way Woolf’s last novel develops and deepens a Chekhovian poetics of dialogue that first emerges in Jacob’s Room (1922). Woolf theorizes this poetics in a 1927 essay that poses Hemingway’s short stories in light of the French and Russian masters: Chekhov, Merimee, Maupassant. There she describes ‘the Tchekov method’ in stories that ‘move slowly out of sight like clouds in the summer air, leaving a wake of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away’. Between the Acts uses this same metaphor for La Trobe’s experimental pageant on the eve of World War II as it weaves a greater music from the spectators’ voiced and unvoiced dialogue before, during, and between the acts and that of the actors onstage. This paper analyzes Woolf’s use of ‘the Tchekov method’ to capture a music beyond the reach of sound and considers its resonances for the future of a world at war.
Texte intégral
- 1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1 (...)
Thinking is my fighting.
15 May 1940
Virginia Woolf1
- 2 The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols., eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcour (...)
Dear John, I’d decided, before your letter came, that I cant publish that novel as it stands. Its too silly & trivial.
27 March 1941
Virginia Woolf2
- 3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Tra (...)
- 4 Virginia Woolf, ‘An Essay in Criticism’, review of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories Men without Wom (...)
- 5 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969) 199.
1In Between the Acts the inhabitants of an English village stage their annual pageant on a June day in 1939, just weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The narrative poses La Trobe’s daringly experimental play against the coming war to explore relations between the characters’ everyday lives and their festival roles as director, actors, audience, and hosts; between ‘real’ life and art; history and spectatorship; insular nationalism and Europe’s fate and future; embodied community and (in Auerbach’s phrase) the political ‘orders over which men fight and despair’.3 My paper today explores Woolf’s free elaboration of what she called ‘the Tchekov method’ in the virtuosic interplay of utterance, conversation, silent reflection and communication, reported speech, citation, the written word in books and newspapers, talking objects and rooms, script, and performance—the animate web of spoken and unspoken words from all across the bandwidths that is Between the Acts.4 Embodying the ‘very latest notion’ that ‘nothing’s solid’, as a departing spectator says, Woolf’s last novel dissolves plot, story, event, and character into these myriad voices, seemingly random yet orchestrated, as if ordinary language were throwing off mundane functionality and aspiring to the condition of music.5 Capturing ephemeral thought, speech, and performance on the wing, Between the Acts is a tour de force of listening to the words for the sake of a music that plays through and between them, beyond the reach of sound.
- 6 Woolf’s 1925 short story ‘Together and Apart’ also associates dialogue and conversation with the sk (...)
2The affinity of Between the Acts with Chekhov that I wish to highlight comes into view in Woolf’s remarks on voice and dialogue in her 1927 ‘Essay in Criticism’, on Hemingway’s stories.6 Contrasting the French and Russian masters of the short story, Woolf writes that ‘The great French masters, Mérimée and Maupassant’, made the story ‘self-conscious and compact’, with a final sentence that ‘flares up’ to illumine the ‘whole circumference and significance’ (‘Essay in Criticism’ 90). ‘The Tchekov method’ creates ‘the very opposite’ effect: ‘Everything is cloudy and vague, loosely trailing rather than tightly furled. The stories move slowly out of sight like clouds in the summer air, leaving a wake of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away’. Of these two methods, ‘Who shall say which is the better?’; any choice is mere personal preference, not an aesthetic judgment (90). Hemingway follows the French masters ‘with considerable success,’ and where he falters, it is not because of his method but because ‘he is modern in manner but not in vision’ (90, 92). Whereas ‘the moderns make us aware of what we feel subconsciously’ and ‘even anticipate’ our experience, ‘giv[ing] us a particular excitement’, Hemingway’s characters ‘are people one may have seen showing off at some café’ who are ‘terribly afraid of being themselves, or they would say things simply in their natural voices’ (86, 89). Beside Maupassant’s ‘they are crude as a photograph’; beside Chekhov’s, ‘flat as cardboard’, ‘bare, abrupt, outspoken’, their dialogue ‘excessive’ (89, 87, 91). For, Woolf writes, ‘when fictitious people are allowed to speak it must be because they have something [. . .] important to say’; they must not say ‘what the author could say much more economically for them’ (91). Whereas the ‘true writer stands close up to the bull and lets the [. . .] truth [. . .] pass him close each time’, the ‘brilliantly and enormously skilful’ Hemingway ‘lets his dexterity, like the bullfighter’s cloak, get between him and the fact’ (91–92). Instead of revealing unconscious feeling, he ‘fake[s],’ until ‘At last we are inclined to cry out with the little girl in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’: Would you please please please please please please stop talking?’ (91).
- 7 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cherry Orchard’, review, in Chekhov: The Critical Heritage, ed. Emeljanow (Lon (...)
3Woolf begins and ends the ‘Essay in Criticism’ by insisting on the critic’s ‘prejudices’, ‘instincts’, and ‘fallacies’, and her own alliance with a peculiarly Chekhovian modernity is felt from Jacob’s Room forward (92). Reviewing the 1920 Arts Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard, she had described Chekhov’s power to give voice to ‘the human soul set free from all trappings and crossed incessantly by thoughts and emotions which wing their way from here, from there, from the furthest horizons’: There is ‘no conflict of individual wills’; the characters speak suddenly and vaguely, ‘as if thinking aloud’, so that ‘one thought scarcely grazed, let alone struck sparks from, another’, yet ‘though the leap from one thought to another was so wide as to produce a sense of dangerous dislocation, all the separate speeches and characters combined to create a single impression of an overwhelming kind’.7 Chekhov ‘shed[s] over us a luminous vapour in which life appears as it is, without veils, transparent and visible to the depths. [. . .] [W]e seemed to have sunk below the surface of things and to be feeling our way among submerged but recognisable emotions [. . .] How the words go sounding on in one’s mind—how the whole play resonates with such sentences, which reverberate, melt into each other, and pass far away out beyond everything’ (‘The Cherry Orchard’ 199).
- 8 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950).
- 9 Diary 2:186, 26 July 1922. ‘[L]ooking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted,’ Sandra Wentworth Willia (...)
4‘There is nothing in English literature the least like The Cherry Orchard’, Woolf observed, and before long had herself created something a bit like it in Jacob’s Room (‘The Cherry Orchard’ 197). Her review cites Charlotte’s ‘strange speech in the beginning of the second act. ‘I have no proper passport. I don’t know how old I am; I always feel I am still young. [. . .] When I grew up I became a governess. But where I come from and who I am, I haven’t a notion. Who my parents were—very likely they weren’t married—I don’t know’’ (198–99, emphasis in original). In Jacob’s Room8 Chekhov’s Charlotte resonates in the prostitute Florinda, with her uncertain parentage, and in Charlotte Wilding, a dinner guest at the Durrants’ country house who in her whimsical wit and rootlessness might almost have sauntered out of The Cherry Orchard and into Woolf’s first novel (tellingly) ‘in my own voice’.9 The shotgun and magic tricks of Chekhov’s Charlotte metamorphose into Charlotte Wilding’s little bets on eating flowers with fish and on how many sounds can be heard on a summer’s night. Both Charlottes distill the human voice in its immitigable solitude, its solitary flutesong of being behind the words not more tragic than comic, as Chekhov insisted to Stanislawski. The Charlottes’ nonchalant loneliness is the matrix of Chekhovian dialogue, wherein the characters’ speeches glance across and ricochet off one another, and the feeling in their words, missing its human mark, hangs in the air. What the characters do utter is almost as unheard by them as what they cannot speak, and what they cannot speak sounds almost more distinctly to the spectator than what they do say. To let characters talk too much, Woolf suggests, is to muffle this real drama, the unuttered speech beneath the words that play and narrative exist to make heard.
- 10 See Woolf’s 1940 essay ‘The Leaning Tower’: ‘Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is c (...)
5In Between the Acts the narrator’s figure of the ‘play [. . .] in the sky of the mind—moving, diminishing, but still there’ affiliates the village pageant with ‘the Tchekov method’ where all is ‘cloudy and vague, loosely trailing’, drifting like clouds and leaving ‘a wake of meaning’ that ‘gradually fades away’ (212, 213). La Trobe herself, with her exotic name, is not ‘presumably pure English’; her ‘eyes and something about her’ remind one matron of ‘the Tartars’ (57–58). Her possible ‘Russian blood’ aside, her Russian soul is suggested when she transfigures the Pointz Hall terrace into an ‘open-air cathedral’, its trees ‘columns [. . .] in a church without a roof [. . .] where swallows [. . .] danc[e], like the Russians, [. . .] to the unheard rhythm of their own wild hearts’ (58, 64–65). This quasi-Russian Englishwoman sets the stage for a modern English pageant re-formed in the image of the outsider’s patriotism described in Three Guineas: a love of England that serves her ‘to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world’ (109). ‘The play [. . .] in the sky of the mind’ locates pageant and narrative at once in an English village and in the ‘whole world’—that deterritorialized country of the mind, the unbounded regions of thought and feeling that are the outsider’s dwellingplace—and gestures with Chekhovian tenderness and inconclusion toward the possible consequence of this art of seeming inconsequence for a world at war.10
- 11 Virginia Woolf, Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts, ed. Mitchell A. (...)
- 12 Diary 5: 210, 22 March 1939. Woolf had missed Eliot’s religious pageant play The Rock at Sadler’s W (...)
6In 1939, Woolf was negotiating between her philosophical and practical Outsiderhood on the one hand, and on the other her fierce ambition, which surfaced in rivalries with such longtime friends as T. S. Eliot. With Pointz Hall underway,11 she felt ‘selfishly relieved’ when Eliot’s Family Reunion failed and wondered ‘why? Had it been a success would it have somehow sealed—my ideas? does this failure confirm a new idea of mine—that I’m evolving in P[ointz] H[all] about the drama?’ She thought his characters ‘stiff as pokers [. . .]. And the chief poker is Tom: but cant speak out. A cold upright poker. And the Fates behind the drawing room curtain. A clever beginning, & some ideas; but they spin out: & nothing grips: all mist—a failure: a proof hes not a dramatist. A monologist. This is stated very politely by the papers this morning’.12 Having thus raised the question of dialogue in formally specific terms, Woolf covertly replies to Eliot’s blank-verse drama with her own ‘play-poem’ (a generic hybrid as apt for Between the Acts as for The Waves): against the monologist who ‘wont speak out’, the dialogist La Trobe, who (no less paradoxically) hides in the bushes to harangue her audience through a megaphone, along with a dialogist narrator, who writes this poetics large on the plane of the narrative (Diary 3: 139, 18 June 1927).
- 13 As Woolf puts it in ‘The Leaning Tower,’ ‘We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. (...)
- 14 Between the Acts 157, 179. Pointz Hall reads: ‘Mrs Mayhew had sketched her own version of what was (...)
7Bodying forth ‘the death of the author’, La Trobe’s avant-garde theatrical practice casts the spectators as the play’s co-creators.13 As Bart informs his guests, ‘Our part [. . .] is to be the audience. And a very important part too’ (Between the Acts 58). La Trobe does not invent this dialogic drama out of nothing. ‘One year we wrote the play ourselves’, Lucy Swithin recalls at the family luncheon on which Mrs Manresa and William Dodge have intruded with their picnic hamper. The blacksmith’s son ‘had the loveliest voice’ and ‘Elsie at the Crossways’, a born mimic, ‘[t]ook us all off’, she remembers. ‘People are gifted—very. The question is—how to bring it out? That’s where she’s so clever—Miss La Trobe’ (59). In line with this job description, La Trobe (a. k. a. ‘Miss Whatshername’) strives to bring out the community’s voices, both hidden and potential (197). And the villagers need her, for we glimpse the sort of thing they come up with when they write the play themselves when Colonel Mayhew wonders, ‘Why leave out the British Army? What’s history without the Army, eh?’ and his wife soothes him by looking forward to what La Trobe has probably planned for a finale: ‘a Grand Ensemble. Army; Navy; Union Jack; and behind them perhaps—Mrs Mayhew sketched what she would have done had it been her pageant—the Church. In cardboard. One window looking east, brilliantly illuminated to symbolize—she could work that out when the time came’.14 La Trobe’s part is not to execute their conventional visions—which arguably resemble them far less closely than her mirror play at the end—but (like the ‘moderns’ in the ‘Essay in Criticism’) to ‘anticipate’ their mute thoughts and feelings. Her part is to be their ‘Bossy’ leader (‘Someone must lead. Then too they could put the blame on her’) and equally their ‘slave’ (‘O to write a play without an audience—the play’) in the effort to call out voice, speech, and feeling they do not yet know they have (63, 94, 180).
8The narrator of Between the Acts both depicts La Trobe’s dialogism and practices it herself. As La Trobe opens the pageant’s borders to chance, letting nature shimmer through art’s illusion, the narrator records every event and voice with stenographic fidelity so that the pageant becomes but one voice among many, its first scene nearly lost amid other sounds and voices:
[1] ‘What luck!’ [2] Mrs Carter was saying. [1] ‘Last year. . .’ [2] Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play? [3] Chuff, chuff, chuff [2] sounded from the bushes. It was the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong. Some sat down hastily; others stopped talking guiltily. All looked at the bushes. For the stage was empty. [. . .] While they looked apprehensively and some finished their sentences, a small girl, like a rosebud in pink, advanced; took her stand [. . .] and piped:
[4] Gentles and simples, I address you all. . .
[2] So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?
[4] Come hither for our festival [2] (she continued)
[4] This is a pageant, all may see
Drawn from our island history.
England am I. . ..
[5+] ‘She’s England,’ [2] they whispered. [5+] ‘It’s begun.’ ‘The prologue,’ [2] they added, looking down at the programme.
[4] ‘England am I,’ [2] she piped again; and stopped.
[2] She had forgotten her lines.
[6] ‘Hear! Hear!’ [2] said an old man in a white waistcoat briskly. [6] ‘Bravo! Bravo!’
[7a] ‘Blast ‘em!’ [2] cursed Miss La Trobe, hidden behind the tree. [. . .]
[7b] ‘Music!’ [2] she signalled. ‘Music!’ But the machine continued: [3] Chuff, chuff, chuff.
[7c] ‘A child new born. . .’ [2] she prompted. (76–77)
9Before the play has progressed six lines we hear at least seven voices: Mrs Carter, the narrator, the gramophone (‘chuff’—the voice of the thing itself, mediating nothing), little Phyllis, whispering spectators, the kind old man, and the director—first sotto voce (‘Blast ‘em!’), then calling for music, then prompting from the script, a sort of eighth voice. Like Mr Erskine, who tells Charlotte Wilding that he can count ‘twenty different sounds on a night like this’ in Jacob’s Room (60), the narrative records each one moment by moment, as if it were a rolling camera pointed at the scene: ‘“Sorry I’m so late,” said Mrs Swithin [. . .] “What’s it all about? I’ve missed the prologue. England? That little girl? Now she’s gone. [. . .] And who’s this?” [. . .] It was Hilda, the carpenter’s daughter. [. . .] “A cushion? Thank you so much”’; ‘“O”, Miss La Trobe growled behind her tree, “the torture of these interruptions!”’ (Between the Acts 79–80).
- 15 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956).
10Who speaks? Together the spectators’ unscripted comments, the faltering little actor, the exasperated director, the gramophone’s scraping needle, the script, and the observant narrator create the rustling, glancing voice of the play in performance—and something more: a voice beyond all these voices, a meta-voice that belongs to no one, not even the narrator, whose gaze and reportage more nearly resemble a documentary cinematographic apparatus than an omniscient, moralizing storyteller. Yet there is nothing mechanical about the quality of the narrator’s attention, which suffuses this Chekhovian human comedy with aesthetic feeling. It is as if she at once attends to every moment for its own sake and listens, watches, for designs and refrains to appear; for that ephemeral ‘something’ that Orlando calls ‘beauty’15 to transform the documentary field of human speech—marked out by the novel’s first sentence, ‘they were talking,’ and its last, ‘They spoke’—into the play-poem (Orlando 322, Between the Acts 3, 219). Or, it is as if, behind the narrative’s quasi-documentary mode, a meta-voice (the artist? the author? We’ll come back to this question) were weaving everything, from the not so privileged script to the most trivial interruption, into an encompassing intention or design, a whole that requires each element as a tapestry requires each thread or an orchestral composition every note, motif, and instrumental voice. Recalling Woolf’s caution that fictitious people must not say what the narrator can say more economically for them, we begin to see that it is the very triviality of the characters’ utterances that makes them transparent to this meta-voice behind the voices. Triviality is indispensable to the aesthetic effect that lifts what they say ‘simply in their natural voices’ out of the mundane and exceeds, yet does not violate, the director’s plan (‘Essay in Criticism’ 89). This poetics parallels on the narrative plane La Trobe’s effects—at once fortuitous and astonishing—with cows, rain, ‘real swallows’, mirrors in her daring experiment ‘try ten mins. of present time’ (Between the Acts 164, 179). The pageant provides an occasion and a temporal frame to hang the human voices on, a canvas for the narrator’s pointillist art. Its mere existence is drama enough: anticipation, preparations, acts, intervals, performance, and aftermath on this festival day engender the subtly eventful social panoply by which the solid pageant sublimes into a play-poem in the sky of the mind.
11The question, then, is less Who speaks than How, although thinking about How they speak leads to a different understanding of Who. Between the Acts dissolves any notion of a divide between functional and poetic language. Like a stone chip in a mosaic, the most ordinary utterance brushes against, calls out, becomes suffused with poetry through context and contiguity, as when, at tea in the Barn, a voice says, ‘“A bit too strong? Let me add water,” and Isa thinks, “That’s what I wished [. . .] when I dropped my pin. Water, water”’ (104). On this afternoon when words ‘cease [] to lie flat in the sentence’, rise, shake menacing ‘fists at you’, speech is never naked (59). As Lucy Swithin ‘increas[es] the bounds of the moment by flights into past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alleys’, the narrator’s kaleidoscopic juxtapositions leave every utterance richly laden, nuanced, made strange by spatial and temporal harmonics, reverberating with and against others like the strings of a piano (9).
12As in Jacob’s Room, the narrator notes epistemological limits only to exceed them in practice. No one knows ‘what it meant to Mrs Sands’ to have to wait by the oven keeping meat hot for people who miss trains, though Isa’s, Giles’s, William’s, Bart’s, thoughts are rendered without anxiety (Between the Acts 39). The narrator is not a conventional moralizing imagination. Rather, she’s after the moment-by-moment ‘truth’ not just of the characters’ actual and inward voices but of rooms and things: ‘Paint my dog’, says the ancestor in the portrait; ‘Empty, empty, empty’, sings the dining-room (49, 36). No wavelength eludes her antennae. So punctiliously does she document what people say—Mrs Haines on the cesspool: ‘What a subject to talk about on a night like this!’ and, a few moments later, ‘What a subject to talk about on a night like this!’—that we trust her on what they don’t, as when, in reply to Bart’s complaint that little George is ‘a coward’, Isa ‘frowned. He was not a coward, her boy wasn’t. And she loathed the domestic, the possessive; the maternal. And he knew it and did it on purpose to tease her, the old brute, her father-in-law. She looked away’ (3–4, 19).
- 16 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948) 216.
13Between the Acts is, of course, a novel about ‘the things people don’t say’ such as Terence Hewet imagines in The Voyage Out.16 Virtuosic transcriptions of unspoken talk turn Chekhovian dialogue inside out: if Chekhov’s characters talk past each other, Woolf’s talk silently, in subliminal or somatic speech. Not only does the narrator hear their unspoken thoughts; they overhear each other’s and soundlessly converse in a hyperreal form of free indirect discourse. Isa, for example, overhears Giles launching stealth missiles at William Dodge:
A toady; a lickspittle; [. . .] a teaser and twitcher, a fingerer of sensations; picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have straightforward love for a woman [. . .] but simply a—At this word, which he could not speak in public [though Giles isn’t in fact speaking], he pursed his lips; and the signet-ring on his little finger looked redder, for the flesh next it whitened as he gripped the arm of his chair. (60)
14Isa ‘guesse[s] the word’ Giles suppresses and voicelessly counters, ‘Well, was it wrong if he was that word?’ (61). Deducing that Mrs Manresa ‘preferred men obviously’, Isa (her silence making its ‘unmistakable contribution to talk’) mocks, ‘Or what are your rings for, and your nails, and that really adorable little straw hat?’ (39). Mrs Manresa defies this unspoken though not unheard appraisal; she too is fluent in speech without words: ‘She gave [Bart] an arch roguish twinkle, as if to say—but the end of that sentence was cut short,’ as if this moment needs a gloss (202). Giles hears Isa intimate ‘as plainly as words could say it’, ‘No, [. . .] I don’t admire you. [. . .] Silly little boy with blood on his boots’ (in quotation marks, as if her feeling is so palpable that she seems to have spoken) (111). He silently wonders: ‘Whom then did she admire? [. . .] Some man, he was sure, in the Barn. Which man? He looked round him’ (111). The air throbs with silent, wireless talk: ‘Well, if the thought gave [Lucy] comfort, William and Isa smiled across her, let her think it’ (175). William asks half-aloud, ‘Isn’t that enough?’ Beauty—isn’t that enough? But here Isa fidgeted. [. . .] ‘No, not for us, who’ve the future,’ she seemed to say. ‘The future disturbing our present’ (82). Yet, for all this voiced and soundless speech, Woolf’s fictitious people do not say ‘what the narrator can say more economically for them’. As (Lucy notes) the Chinese ‘put a dagger on the table and that’s a battle’, Isa and William, with the ‘doom of sudden death’ hanging over them, talk in the greenhouse ‘as if they had known each other all their lives’—and we hear not a word (142, 114). Undistracted by a ‘superfluity of dialogue’, we can hear Giles say clearly ‘(without words), I’m damnably unhappy’, and Dodge echo ‘So am I’, and Isa ‘And I too’ (‘Essay in Criticism’ 91, Between the Acts 176).
15Recorded with the sharpness and clarity of actual talk, these ethereal conversations anticipate the pageant’s most breathtaking sound effect at the moment the actors (‘Children? Imps—elves—demons’) skip and leap out of the bushes, flashing mirrors, tins, candlesticks, ‘Anything that’s bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves’, so that the spectators glimpse their own faces onstage by the broken wall (183). ‘What’s more,’ as the narrator says, they hear themselves—and even see their thoughts embodied—as each actor ‘declaim[s] some phrase or fragment from their parts’—not least, that very important part, the audience (185). Earlier in the day, Giles mutters, ‘I fear I am not in my perfect mind’ watching Great Eliza come apart onstage (85); during the Victorian scene Mrs Lynn Jones reflects on ‘something—not impure, that wasn’t the word—but perhaps ‘unhygienic’ about the home’ (174); Isa broods on the Whitehall rape, picks Old Man’s Beard, and improvises a melodramatic apostrophe to a dagger (‘Plunge blade!’) for William in the greenhouse (113). Now, in the play’s last scene, the actors echo, mime, and embody these unscripted moments in a sound-collage as mysterious as Chekhov’s breaking string: ‘I am not (said one) in my perfect mind. [. . .] Home? Where the miner sweats, and the maiden faith is rudely strumpeted. [. . .] Is that a dagger that I see before me?’ they chant, echoing the echoes of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Sonnet 66, and Macbeth that have flitted through various characters’ minds this afternoon, while ‘the girl in the Mall’ and ‘the old man with a beard’ dance out from the bushes with the rest (185).
16How is this done? Has La Trobe, busy in the bushes during the Intervals, transcribed those ‘stray voices, voices without bodies, symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing, seeing nothing, but still, over the bushes, feeling invisible threads connect the bodiless voices’ (151)? Does she direct her actors to catch the spectators’ utterances and freely repeat them in this scene—to make their secret voices sound in this final chorus of aural mirrors? Or—since ‘She felt everything they felt’—does she somehow divine and give speech to her audience’s inward voices, just as she hears ‘the first words’ of next year’s play the moment that Isa and Giles speak them (180, 212)?
- 17 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New (...)
- 18 Clive Bell, Proust (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929) 85.
17Whatever her method, it is writ large by the narrator, for whom it is a small step from silent conversation to a collective voice; from the characters’ inner voices to the audience’s and even the pageant’s. After the mirrors splinter the audience’s longing for heroic spectacle (‘a Grand Ensemble. Army; Navy; Union Jack; [. . .] the Church’) while the braying megaphone urges them to rebuild civilization’s broken wall, La Trobe’s cacophony of voices culminates in music (179). As ‘Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart or [. . .] merely a traditional tune?’ rises from the gramophone in the outdoor theater, they wonder, ‘Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts, and fragments, are we, also, that?’ (188–89). And when the gramophone asserts, ‘Dispersed are we; who have come together. But [. . .] let us retain whatever made that harmony,’ ‘O let us, the audience echoe[s] [. . .], keep together. For there is joy, sweet joy, in company’ (195–96). As ‘ourselves,’ the music bodies forth Woolf’s ‘philosophy’ in her 1939–40 memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’ that ‘Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself’.17 Who speaks?—no ‘thick little ego’ (in Clive Bell’s phrase), no solitary, bounded mind, but the ‘we’ who are the words, the music, the thing itself.18 The gramophone gestures toward a greater music of the human voice and of the world, a music not merely heard but imagined as that great unfathomable pattern or design to which the narrative attunes us.
- 19 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. with an interpretive essay by Ronald Be (...)
- 20 Speech to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940, following the massive evacuation of Allied troops from (...)
18In this voice too harmony and discord contend. As, instead of the hoped-for Grand Ensemble of Army, Navy, flag, and Church, the music bodies forth ‘[t]he whole population of the mind’s immeasurable profundity’, the community, with the doom of sudden death hanging over them, affirms itself not in its univocality but in the inexhaustible differences without which no pattern, music, or ‘we’ can exist (189). The music’s inner voices now ‘strain [] asunder,’ now are ‘solved; united’, made ‘whole’; now sound ‘[O]n different levels ourselves [going] forward; flower gathering some on the surface; [or] descending to wrestle with the meaning; but all comprehending; all enlisted’ (189). Against the enforced univocality of totalitarianism, parodied and deconstructed by the megaphone, the music gathers up in its aural mirror a dialogic community, to which real differences, as Hannah Arendt says, are so much less dangerous than indifference; a community of spectators who enact a public ‘form of being together’ where ‘no one rules and no one obeys’, where people seek to ‘persuade each other’.19 It is almost as if the pageant gives voice to the ‘we’ Churchill vowed would ‘fight in the fields’ against the Nazis’ scapegoating perversion of community, at the same time that it bodies forth the outsider’s wish to ‘give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world’.20 Ephemeral as a cloud or play, perpetually moving between unity and dispersal, pageant and novel together listen for the meta-voice of that ‘rambling capricious but somehow unified whole’, that ‘we’ whose ‘hidden [. . .] pattern’ embraces ‘all life, all art, all waifs & strays’ (Diary 5:135, 26 April 1938, Moments of Being 72).
19‘What’s more’ (to borrow the narrator’s phrase), even as the narrative voices silent speech beneath the sounds, it also, like Reverend Streatfield, ‘speak[s] [. . .] in another capacity’, to which the ‘distant music’ of twelve warplanes in formation that cuts his word in two draws attention (193). The ‘opp . . . portunity’ (broken but mended with three ps) to ‘illuminat[e] [. . .] our dear old church’ recalls the opp portunity to rebuild civilization’s broken wall, staged in the last scene and urged by the megaphonic voice (193). As the warplanes cut through a word that a merely human voice (‘I speak only as one of the audience, one of ourselves’) completes around them, the question voiced at the end of the pageant reverberates: How rebuild the wall, a world laid ruin by war (192)? That question lingers and floats with the play in the sky of the mind, as when Lucy wonders whether civilization’s fragile ‘blue thread’, if broken here, might flourish elsewhere (205). Meanwhile, Isa, the privileged spectator of this year’s pageant, becomes the unwitting protagonist of next year’s. As La Trobe listens in the pub (looking at a picture of a cow, but in fact standing close to the bull to let the truth pass her close once again), Isa and Giles speak the first words. And now we are the audience, that very important part; collaborators in the play. Will their speech, which is to say ours, be, as some readers think, mere repetition (‘What a subject to talk about on a night like this!’)? Or might it be new speech, to whose infinite possibilities the myriad speech acts—voiced and unvoiced, actual and potential—captured in the narrative attest? Woolf’s last ending beckons her readers over the edge of the page toward an opp portunity that the violence of modern history continually interrupts, yet never completely silences.
Notes
1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977–84).
2 The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols., eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975–80).
3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953) 552–53.
4 Virginia Woolf, ‘An Essay in Criticism’, review of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories Men without Women, Granite and Rainbow: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958) 90. Reprinted from the New York Herald Tribune, Sunday book section, 9 October 1927.
5 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969) 199.
6 Woolf’s 1925 short story ‘Together and Apart’ also associates dialogue and conversation with the sky/meaning/mind metaphor: ‘The conversation began some minutes before anything was said, for both Mr Serle and Miss Anning looked at the sky and in both of their minds the sky went on pouring its meaning[,] though very differently[,] until the presence of Mr Serle by her side became so distinct to Miss Anning that she could not see the sky, simply, itself, any more, but the sky shored up by . . . Roderick Serle, and, knowing how foolish it was, she yet felt impelled to say: ‘What a beautiful night!’ Foolish! Idiotically foolish’ (Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989] 189).
7 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cherry Orchard’, review, in Chekhov: The Critical Heritage, ed. Emeljanow (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 198. Reprinted from the New Statesman, 14 July 1920: 446. When citing Woolf on Chekhov I keep her then-standard transliteration (‘Tchekov’). See also Leonard Woolf’s 1917 review of the short stories in Constance Garnett’s translation (Emeljanow 162–64).
8 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950).
9 Diary 2:186, 26 July 1922. ‘[L]ooking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted,’ Sandra Wentworth Williams holds ‘a little book convenient for traveling—stories by Tchekov’ (Jacob’s Room 141). Much later, Woolf noted in her diary that John Maynard Keynes (married to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova) judged The Years her ‘best book,’ ‘very moving[;] more tender than any of my books,’ and thought that ‘one scene, E[leanor]. & Crosby, beats Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard’ (5:77–78, 4 April 1937). The Woolfs had seen recent productions of Uncle Vanya and The Three Sisters and would dine with the director, Michel Saint-Denis, at Vanessa’s the following year (Diary 5:57 &n7, 128, 129n1; 18 February 1937, 10 March 1938).
10 See Woolf’s 1940 essay ‘The Leaning Tower’: ‘Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. It is thus that literature will survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and to write, how to preserve and how to create’, The Moment and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948) 154.
11 Virginia Woolf, Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: University Publications, 1983).
12 Diary 5: 210, 22 March 1939. Woolf had missed Eliot’s religious pageant play The Rock at Sadler’s Wells (28 May-9 June 1934) because of flu, but she read it and—noting her ‘anti-religious bias’—was ‘disappointed’ by its ‘cheap farce and Cockney dialogue and dogmatism’ (Letters 5: 315, 10 July 1934).
13 As Woolf puts it in ‘The Leaning Tower,’ ‘We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us. Wealth will no longer decide who shall be taught [. . .]. [W]e must become critics because in future we are not going to leave writing to be done for us by a small class of well-to-do young men [. . .]. We are going to add our own experience, to make our own contribution. That is even more difficult. For that too we need to be critics’ (The Moment 152).
14 Between the Acts 157, 179. Pointz Hall reads: ‘Mrs Mayhew had sketched her own version of what was to be the conclusion. If she had written the words, she would have a splendid finale. The Army; the Navy; the King and Queen. Very likely that was what Miss La Trobe had planned’ (Later Typescript, 401)—as if parodying the spirit promulgated by the modern English pageant master Anthony Parker: ‘on to the Finale. The Arena is a blaze of light as the Choir sings the Triumph Song in praise of the Pageant town and all its people. Group by group, the entire casts of all the Episodes enter, forming a great semi-circle of colour right across the Arena, with all their horsemen and all their flags and banners. Then there appear one or more symbolic figures, perhaps representing the Spirit of the Pageant Town, or perhaps the central figures of the Pageant itself. They speak some short verses in praise of the Past and looking with hope towards the Future, and leading up to the National Anthem, which is sung by all the players and the audience. Then, to the stirring music of the March Past, the whole of the performers pass in review before the stands, and our Pageant is over’ Anthony Parker, The Pageant (London: Bodley Head, 1954) 44–45.
15 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956).
16 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948) 216.
17 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) 72.
18 Clive Bell, Proust (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929) 85.
19 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. with an interpretive essay by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 113, 141.
20 Speech to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940, following the massive evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk (Winston Churchill, ‘We Shall Never Surrender (Speech to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940)’, Churchill Speaks 1897–1963: Collected Speeches in Peace and War, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1998) 708–13; Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966) 109. J. H. Plumb cites British historian G. M. Trevelyan: ‘Winston Churchill in his great war speeches made us all conscious of our past, as never before’, G. M. Trevelyan (London: Longman’s, Green, 1951).
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Christine Froula, « The Play in the Sky of the Mind: Dialogue, ‘the Tchekov method’, and Between the Acts », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 26 juillet 2024, consulté le 14 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15132 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwu
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