Books like Between the Acts

\ Fragments of life’s rich pageant\ Sharp, witty, vital, brilliant. With Between the acts, Woolf sings an eudaimonic valediction to her readers, and finally, to life, as Woolf was still working on the final revisions when she walked into the Ouse and the novel was published by Leonard Woolf four months after her death. Although sometimes perceived as unfinished and jokingly referred to as her ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman’, she gave birth to a full-term child. A full-blown, proficient novel, meant to pay homage to literature and to England’s charm. While writing the novel, she says in her diary on the 24th of December 1940 she feels in the Sussex countryside ‘how England consoles & warms one’.At the core there is a dramatic piece, the annual pageant played by the villagers upon the grounds of a fictitious English country house, Pointz Hall, attended by the local villagers and the Oliver family members living in the house, representing scenes touching on the literature and history of England, set in the Interbellum period, ‘between the acts’.Does this sound like tedious, obsolete bluestockingish stuff to you? Well, it isn’t. The deceptively idyllic, overly traditional setting and the play are a pretext to some exquisite, vivid and playful distillation and exploration of ambivalent human moods and experiences, bristling with Woolf’s sly, derisive and subtle humor and social criticism. The eye is barely directed to the spectacle as such, but focuses on what happens before, between and after the acts, on what commonly passes by unnoticed, the thoughts, observations and emotions that come to us when we are alone and where we do not speak about. The substance of the novel is not to be found on the pageant’s stage, satirizing England’s heroic past, but in the polyphony of the fragmented inner voices dispersed in the audience attending the play. Juxtaposing and confronting apparently trivial, everyday concerns like talks about the weather and the food with most significant moments, present and past, rationality and spirituality, art and nature, author and audience, Woolf evokes life’s rich pageant through refined psychological and suggestive depictions of her characters, handling them with great empathy and care.The musicality of her mercurial prose and the ingenious composition reminded me of Toccata, a choreography on the music of Bach danced by Rosas , the dance company of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a Belgian choreographer which I admire: dancers moving like counterpoint melody lines, sometimes interfering, touching each other, then drifting apart, like the scraps of conversation between Woolfs’s characters and their transient trains of thought. I imagine Woolf as the omnipresent simultaneous resonating voices of Bach, the pianist and the choreographer, conducting and directing the ephemeral movements, minds and bodies of the dancing characters: "For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen. See the flowers, how they ray their redness, whiteness, silverness and blue. And the trees with their many-tongued much syllabling, their green and yellow leaves hustle us and shuffle us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, crowd together, to chatter and make merry while the red cow moves forward and the black cow stands still."Evidently, academic research thoroughly scrutinized the abundant themes, motives and techniques Woolf packed in this concise novel, inviting to a second and third reading. Aware it is impossible to grasp it fully at this first reading, here is what stays with me now: the wonderful evocation of the archetypical rural English landscape; the people living on the brink of war again, metaphorized by the loveliness of birds, shifting into grim bombers; the people living on the verge of transition, their world crumbling and collapsing by modernity, a world that will wither like the profuse flowers adorning the park of Pointz Hall, recalling Vita’s dazzling Sissinghurst gardens. The magnificent, radiant language:"Beyond the lily pool the ground sank again, and in that dip of the ground, bushes and brambles had mobbed themselves together. It was always shady; sun-flecked in the summer, dark and damp in winter. In the summer there were always butterflies; fritillaries darting through; Red Admirals feasting and floating; cabbage whites, unambitiously fluttering round a bush, like muslin milkmaids, content to spend a life there."And the characters of course, of which the women are the most appealing and intriguing, (according to a feminist study, the men in the novel belong to ‘exhausted patriarchy’) showing resembling traits to real women we ostensibly all know: the blatant, in-your-face voluptuousness of the buoyant Mrs. Manresa, turning on the old and the young men with her frivolous airs and graces; beautifully contrasted with the lyrical, melancholic sensuality of Isa Oliver, the daughter-in-law, jealous, “a captive balloon, pegged down on a chair arm by a myriad of hair-thin ties into domesticity”; Isa’s cynical, restless, frustrated, grumpy husband, Giles Oliver, the only person aware of the impending war; his rationalist father Bartholomew Oliver and his widowed sibling Lucy Swithin, a moving ageing woman, intensely spiritual, sensitive to natural mystic; William Dodge, the nervous companion of Mrs. Manresa, with “artistic leanings”; Miss la Trobe, the outcast artist and director of the play.I was enthralled by the recurrent image of a thread connecting the characters, a masterful leitmotiv, visualizing the pas de deux between the characters that will take place in the greenhouse during the interludes to the play: ”The wild child, afloat once more on the tide of the old man's benignity, looked over her coffee cup at Giles, with whom she felt in conspiracy. A thread united them--visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rises. She had met him once only, at a cricket match. And then had been spun between them an early morning thread before the twigs and leaves of real friendship emerge.”Was she referring to her pending death, when she entered the legend of the drowned lady into the book? Her untimely death could easily rouse the usual hineininterpretierung. However, the joyous and playful tone seems to gainsay that morbid interpretation. Adumbrating definitely the gloom of imminent war and suffering, the novel is a hymn of praise to life, being full of pleasure, passion and imagination. Just read this, let her take you eight miles high with her in the flight to the higher realms of celestial beauty and imagination. Listen to her symphony. A swan song and farewell performance indicating that not only Bowie could leave the stage as a genius. Warning: you might end up a Woolfie. \ [image error]