Searching For Meaning in Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts Essays

Searching For Meaning in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts I wanted to examine the states at the limits of language; The moments where language breaks up...I wanted to examine the language which manifests these states of instability because in ordinary communication--which is organized, civilized--we repress these states of incandescence. Creativity as well as suffering comprises these moments of instability, where language, or the signs of language, or subjectivity itself are put into "process". (Julia Kristeva) Any attempt to study the complex layers of the human endeavor of "meaning-making" should include an examination of those places where the spoken word (or articulation itself) "breaks up" or fails. Woolf's Between the Acts is itself a study of the struggle of relying on language to act as the sole currency of significance in a world which refuses to be contained. The novel does in fact put language, the signs of language, and subjectivity into "process". Consequently, "meaning" becomes complicated as it often falls outside, (but not entirely), of ordinary discourse and speech. "Meaning" wedges itself in between words; it is found in the silences between two characters, in the interruption of a speech by wind, in the social taboos which make the unsayable so much louder than the said. " kind of meta-discourse emerges in Between the Acts, one which pushes the conventional foreground (i.e. the characters themselves and their conversations) of a novel into the background. This inversion p laces humans in a broad dialogue that the characters themselves, (and even we the readers), may fail to recognize as a dialogue because it does fall outside of normative, controlled language. It is in this larger context of silences an... ...ess process. In the traditional narrative of resolution, there is a sense of problem solving...a kind of ratiocinative or emotional teleology... "What will happen" is the basic question. In the modern plot of revelation, however, the emphasis is elsewhere, the function of the discourse is not to answer the question or even to pose it...It is not that events are resolved (happily or tragically) but rather that a state of affairs is revealed. (Seymour Chatman) Works Cited Julia Kristeva, 'A Question of Subjectivity--An Interview',Women's Review, no. 12 (1986), pp. 19-21 Ferdinand de Saussure,From Course in General Linguistics, Modern Literary Theory ,Third Ed. (1996),Ed. Rice and Waugh, pp. 8-15 Jacques Derrida, 'Structure, Sign and PLay in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', Modern Literary Theory ,Third Ed. (1996),Ed. Rice and Waugh, pp.176-190