Between Acts by Virginia Woolf is the author’s latest novel. It is often described as a difficult read. And indeed, difficult it is, not because it is filled with shocking scenes, harsh language, or improbable plotting, but because it tries to present what people think, as they think, confused, processed only by passing experience, often random and unconnected. .
The style could be called ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘internal narrative’, but no common phrase can adequately sum up or describe the abrupt shifts in point of view, the disjointed timing, the juxtaposition of sometimes unrelated material, the real with the made up. , all imagined and bathed in the feared. One thing that becomes clear as the book progresses is that this process is much more akin to poetry than narrative. His images often flash in opposite directions, seemingly unrelated but thought of by the same person, often in contradiction to what we’ve come to assume to be the character’s stated intent.
This is apparently just a group of people getting together to watch a play. They gather in the open air, in the bucolic countryside of the English counties, on a long, bright summer afternoon to witness a performance of a drama conceived by one of their number and performed by his acquaintances. We learn that proceeds from ticket sales and donations will go towards installing electric light in the parish church, likely to replace the now defunct Luz del Mundo which has now proven defunct. So, at least on the surface, Between the Acts appears to be a middle-class English country comedy, where socialites gossip about each other while watching while remaining baffled by the amateur drama. After all, what can you expect from artists?
But that surface is mere illusion. Written between 1939 and 1941, Between The Acts feels that war is close at hand. There is potential for destruction, for restlessness, for foreboding. In addition, the characters that populate the book in an almost anonymous way, tell their own stories, fears, hopes, prejudices and bewilderments, any of which can change at the moment. All of them are complex in ordinary and perhaps predictable ways, and like all of us, they often think and act tangentially, with one person’s statement eliciting perhaps unrelated responses from others.
Between Acts is not a long book. Nor, on the surface, is their language difficult. But its myriad of associations, random changes, and passing associations make it impossible to follow for any reader hoping to find a one-dimensional narrative. Obviously, it was never Virginia Woolf’s intention to facilitate such an experience.
But any conventional route is not an adequate way to approach this book. It is a work to be absorbed word by word, sentence by sentence, and then again, with the reader’s own imagination stimulated by the images provided. On these pages we are presented with the play itself, with all its inconsistencies and all its deliberate imitations of well-known dramas. But for the most part, we’re among people who are just as confused about their own identity as anyone, and we seem to experience that confusion as themselves.
A rewarding activity for anyone interested is reading the book and then working through the free course on the book available through The Open University’s Open Learn website. What the course achieves admirably is a promotion of reflection on the text, and the insistence that writing as dense as this requires the reflection of the reader and the participation of the imagination.
However, it should also be noted that the author herself was not in the best of mental health when the book was written. This is surely reflected in the text, and as such, Between the Acts probably offers at least some insight into what it must be like to suffer from mental illness. The line between coping with the experience and being overwhelmed by it is a fine one, it seems, so narrow that any of these characters, and indeed any reader, can cross that line without really knowing it.