The novel, the play, and the book: 'Between the Acts' and the tragicomedy of history. (Virginia Woolf's work)

In a playful review of a volume of Dostoevsky's stories published in 1919, Virginia Woolf asks us to imagine that the great Russian novelist has been magically "transplanted" to an English village straight out of Jane Austen. "How," she wonders, "would Dostoevsky have behaved on the vicarage lawn?" The answer, of course, is that his "patience" is quickly "exhausted" by provincial ladies who "spend their time drinking tea" and gossiping: "there can be no doubt that he suddenly stamps his foot, exclaims something unintelligible, and rushes off in despair." In Woolf's view, Dostoevsky's impatience reflects above all his inability to maintain "the restraint and aloofness of the great comic writers. . . . Because of his sympathy his laughter passes beyond merriment into a strange violent amusement which is not merry at all. He is incapable . . . of passing by anything so important and loveable as a man or a woman without stopping to consider their case and explain it. . . . the more you examine it, the more cloudy and confused it becomes." While Woolf's own fiction is deeply rooted in the traditions of English comedy, she recognizes that it is only "because we know so little about the family history of the ladies [on the vicarage lawn] that we can put the book down with a smile. Still," she concludes, we need not underrate the value of comedy because Dostoevsky makes the perfection of the English product appear to be the result of leaving out all the most important things. It is the old, unnecessary quarrel between the inch of smooth ivory and the six feet of canvas with its coarse grains."(1)

Woolf's literary criticism, like her fiction, is consistently marked by her desire to fuse comedy's "aloof," impersonal vision--her reference is to Austen's celebrated description of her art as "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush"--with Dostoevsky's plunge into the tragic depths of the individual's history and psyche.(2) When she praises Dostoevsky for his "power of reconstructing those most swift and complicated states of mind, of rethinking the whole train of thought in all its speed, now as it flashes into light, now as it lapses into darkness," Woolf is clearly echoing the terms of her celebrated quarrel with "Mr. Bennett." The Russian novelist's ability "to read the most inscrutable writing at the depths of the darkest souls," she argues, is "the exact opposite of the method adopted, perforce, by most of our novelists. They reproduce all the external appearances . . . but very rarely, and only for an instant, penetrate to the tumult of thought which rages within [the character's] own mind" (EVW, 2:85-86). Yet Woolf also sees that the modern "psychological novelist" pays a penalty for his empathetic immersion in the "subtle labyrinths" of consciousness and the complexities of history. "The minutely realized characters of contemporary fiction," she observes, lack "a dramatic power" which has been "sacrifice[d] in the interests of psychology": "We long for some more impersonal relationship."(3) The Russian novelists "penetrate further and further into the human soul" with a "terrible power of sustained insight" and an "undeviating reverence for truth" (EVW, 2:274), but there is something suffocating, even paralyzing about the truth they reveal. Their scrupulous fidelity to the "inconclusiveness" of human experience leaves us with "the sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation"--a sense "that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair. . . . Perhaps we see something that escapes them? . . ." (EVW, 3:36).

Woolf believed, with Dostoevsky, that the "chief task" of the modern novelist is to convey the "incessantly varying" movements of the mind "with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display" (EVW, 3:33), to represent the self in mental and historical process. But her status as an exemplary modernist is also confirmed by her fascination with literary modes and figures--Elizabethan and Restoration drama, comic opera, Austen, Pope, and Congreve--that reflect an alternative impulse towards comic distance and formal perfection. Woolf thus quotes with approval Congreve's remark that "the distance of the stage requires the figures represented to be something larger than life" (CE, 1:76); she praises Goldsmith's "detached attitude and width of view" (CE, 1:108), and valorizes "the finely shaped mould of The Rape of the Lock," the repose, the distinction, the reserve," which characterize "the sense of form which seems to have prevailed in the eighteenth century." What Woolf admires in the neo-classical writers is "the completedness with which they triumphed, imposing shape upon the tumult of their material." But this "completedness," by itself, is as unsatisfying as the "inconclusiveness" of modern fiction. Woolf echoes her reservations about Austen when she observes that the "grace and perfection," the "flawless simplicity" of this art, is not only "enviable" but "almost incredible" to the modern sensibility: "did they not perhaps leave out too much, and sacrifice so devoutly at the shrine of form that some very important qualities were excluded? . . ." (EVW, 2:324-25).

Woolf recognizes, moreover, that the comic writers she admires "leave out too much" in part because they are so sure of what to put in. Just as Goldsmith "know[s] exactly what to laugh at" because he has "a settled code of morals" (CE, 1:110), so Austen's formal perfection stems from her "natural conviction that life is of a certain quality." The modern writer, Woolf acknowledges with a mixture of regret and relief, no longer shares Austen's belief that her impressions "hold good for others"--a belief that "released" her from "the cramp and confinement of personality," but which also prevents her from gratifying the modern "sense of the human being, his depth and the variety of his perceptions, his complexity, his confusion, his self, in short."(4) The great comic writers achieve their sense of "tranquility," "security" and certainty" by excluding difference, complexity, and history,: "They know the relations of human beings towards each other and towards the universe"--hence their ability to create "that complete statement which is literature" (CE, 2:158-59).(5) Thus while Woolf values classical comedy's detachment, she also shares Bahktin's suspicion of its monological "completedness," its vision of reality as an ahistorical, "absolute distanced image, beyond the sphere of possible contact with the developing, incomplete, and therefore re-thinking and re-evaluating present."(6) When Woolf argues in A Room of One's Own that the older, "hardened and set" literary genres--"the form of the epic or of the poetic play"--are not "rightly shaped" for the woman writer she articulates her reservations about comedy as well.(7)

Woolf distrusted the conventions not only of comedy, but of all the established genres, for she recognized that literary conventions are inextricably tied to social conventions of which "men are the arbiters": "As [men] have established an order of values in life," she argues, "so too, since fiction is largely based on life, these values prevail there also to a very great extent" (CE, 2:145-46).(8) In an early version of her famous essay on "Modern Fiction" (1919), Woolf speculated that a writer liberated from the dominant conventions might well produce a text marked by "a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical [would be] dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition" (EVW, 3:33). This interest in the possibility of "dissolving" conventional generic distinctions--especially the distinction between "the tragic" and "the comic"--resurfaces in "The Narrow Bridge of Art," an essay which embodies Woolf's most concentrated effort to define the requirements of a twentieth-century tragicomic mode. Written in 1927, some thirteen years before Between the Acts, "The Narrow Bridge of Art" prophesies the future development of modern fiction along lines which, as several critics have remarked, anticipate the hybrid, contrapuntal form of Woolf's last novel.(9) Woolf sees the literature of her time as engaged in a struggle to unite two opposed impulses: the novelist's immersion in historical and social detail and in "that queer conglomeration of incongruous things--the modern mind"--and the poet's "lyric cry of ecstasy or despair." Divorced from "the common purpose of life," "aloof in the possession of her priests," lyric poetry is too "limited" to encompass the "atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create." But Woolf also wonders whether the novel, "adequate though it is to deal with the common and the complex," can "say the simple things which are so tremendous." The "psychological novelist," she insists, is as limited as the lyric poet, for his "incessant, . . . remorseless analysis" makes us "long for ideas, for dreams, for imaginations, for poetry."

Citing the example of The Waste Land, where the unified emotion of Keats's ode gives way to the "incongruous" music of "the nightingale who sings |jug jug to dirty ears,'" Woolf argues that modern fiction must move towards a similar fusion of affects. And like Eliot, Woolf finds the closest approximation to the form she seeks in a genre that she admits "seems dead beyond all possibility of resurrection today": not the form of lyric poetry," but "the form of the drama, of the poetic drama of the Elizabethan age." Woolf praises the Elizabethans' radically inclusive "attitude towards life," a "view which, though made up of all sorts of different things," allows them "to express themselves freely and fully," to turn "without a hitch . . . from philosophy to a drunken brawl; from love songs to an argument; from simple merriment to profound speculation." Like the comic writers, the Elizabethans are free from "the cramp and confinement of personality": "They never make us feel that they are afraid or self-conscious, or that there is anything hindering . . . the full current of their mind." Yet their possession of "some general shaping power, some conception which lends the whole harmony and force," does not preclude historical complexity and "psychological subtlety," or prevent them from conveying "an attitude which is full of contrast and collision" (CE, 2:218-29). For Eliot, the Elizabethans' comprehensiveness--their "mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience"--reflects an underlying, unified vision rooted in the eternal truths of divine and natural law.(10) Woolf, in contrast, sees a unity that is anything but monological, something more akin to Bakhtin's conceptualization of the novel's polyphonic wholeness, where everything is grasped "as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process."(11)

The qualities Woolf discerns in the Elizabethan play--its mixed form, perspectival inclusiveness, and refusal to privilege any one voice or viewpoint--are in fact very similar to those Bakhtin attributes to the novelistic, "seriocomic" genres. Like Bakhtin, Woolf wants a form ...