Between the Acts: The ‘Orts, Scraps and Fragments’ of Postmodernism

Abstract

Between the Acts has probably occasioned a more disparate critical response than any other of Woolf’s major novels. From the outset readers have disagreed over whether the mood of the book is bleak and despairing (with the odd light touch) or affirmative and comic (with dark strains running through it).¹ The book is difficult to get a handle on: it is no longer a voyage, whether ‘out’ or ‘to the lighthouse’; it no longer focuses on a particular character, her parties or his room; it no longer invokes the linear flow of waves or years. The title, as L.J. Swingle points out, evolved in the drafts from ‘Pointz Hall’, which suggests a walled-in structure apart from the temporal process, to ‘The Pageant’, which forces acknowledgement of that process even as it attempts to transform mere change into coherent acts, to the final title, ‘Between the Acts’, which places the emphasis on the abyss between any two elements of a given enclosure. Taken most literally, the title privileges the actions that takes place in the intervals between the acts of the country pageant.²