La Trobe’s depiction of the present does not end with the ten minutes of silence. As Christopher Ames points out, the final act is, in fact, divided into three stages: “ten minutes of silence, the actors approaching the audience with fragments of mirrors, and the actors chanting bits and pieces of their earlier lines” (“Modernist Canon Narrative” 400). Ames does not include in his list the brief interlude in which a ruined wall is rebuilt by “woman handing bricks . . . black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban” taken by a reporter to be symbolic of the rebuilding of civilization by the League of Nations (181–82). The audience responds to what they see as a “flattering tribute to ourselves” (182), but in light of what has gone before and what is to follow, it is clear that this episode calls for a dissolution of what is currently “civilization” and a rebuilding under more egalitarian terms, such that the League of Nations may have symbolically promoted but did not achieve.39 The unity of the rebuilt wall is, indeed, soon met by dis-
cordance and discontinuity, indicating how its “wholeness” is another plot of achievement, civilization, linear progress, and imperialism that must be interrupted, in this case when the music “changed; snapped; broke; jagged,” creating a “cackle, a cacophony” in which “nothing ended” (183). Nothing could be more opposed to the unifying vision of plot and of the wall of civi- lization than this music, its aural discontinuity matched by the return of the cast members using pieces of glass and mirrors to reflect fragments of the audience.
The Lacanian notion of mirror images being constitutive of a false uni- fied subjectivity is, in this scene, reversed (Lacan 1–7). Instead, these mirrors, or fragments of mirrors, refute any notion of a unified self. With the frag- mented mirrors, La Trobe encourages her audience to abandon the coherent narratives of their own lives and to acknowledge instead the fundamentally fragmentary and multiple nature of their identities (183–84). From the point of view of various unidentified audience members, the reflections are “dis- torting,” but the audience expresses discomfort not only because of this dis- tortion but also because the mirrors reflect them “as they are” before they have a chance to “assume” poses, plots, or identities.
For Lacan, the wholeness of the self as seen in the mirror during the formative “mirror stage” is defined as “Imaginary,” a delusion of wholeness and self-presence that is revealed as such over the course of the rest of the subject’s existence. Once the self is revealed to be fragmented, it must enter the domain of language, the Symbolic, in order to attempt a reunification through the construction of a life narrative. Because, for Lacan, identity is, by
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its nature, never unified, it sparks the need for narratives, which, constructed retrospectively, attempt to approximate a wholeness that never existed (and never will).40 The conclusion of the life “story” invests the self with meaning,
as in much theorization of narrative that attributes particular interpretive importance to a story’s end. For this reason, it is significant that “nothing ended” (183) in the discordant music near the pageant’s close. The lack of an ending necessarily leaves the history told in the pageant unintelligible. The introduction of discontinuity and the lack of closure are a concerted effort to remove or counter the (ironic) meaning of the pageant’s plot, that of the achievements of patriarchy and imperialism. If we, as readers and audience, cannot know where this “plot” ends, we cannot attribute it a clear meaning, whether positive or negative. Likewise, while the mirror fragments subvert the imaginary wholeness of the self, wholeness is not then reconstituted through language, as it is in Lacanian theory. Instead, the words of the pag- eant are re-presented in random and incoherent order, freed of their original context and the signals and markers of progressive narration (184–85).
The fragments of speech spoken by the actors are not limited to those previously performed in the pageant, however, but expand to include addi- tional texts, colloquialisms, rhymes, and phrases. Again, Woolf emphasizes how the pageant is both a repetition and representation of the “general text” of the world outside of it, with the words, phrases, and commonplaces of one bleeding into and out of the other. Plots are not merely repeated, however, but are reordered into incoherent fragments that refuse narratable tempo- rality. If human identity and history itself are understood as only explicable through narration, Woolf’s novel suggests that this understanding of them is both factually inaccurate and unethical. La Trobe’s final speech to the audi- ence both draws together the parallel between human identity and history and emphasizes its continuing ramifications. “Look at ourselves, ladies and gentleman! Then at the wall; and ask how’s this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by . . . orts, scraps, and fragments like ourselves?” (188). While the audience sees the complete and unified wall of civilization as representative of the unity, coherence, and power of their culture, La Trobe explicitly puts this notion into question, indicating how it is all but impossible that such a unity could be built by individuals who are as fragmented, discontinuous, and divided as the audience members. It is, in fact, the distance between the communally assumed unity of identity and history and their actual fragmentation that renders any faith in unified civilization problematic, if not delusional. Such delusions, predicated on the expunging of those people and ideas that do not fit the preconceived unity, make any actual attempt at social and political universality ungraspable. La Trobe’s attempt to reveal the distance between (unified) perceptions and
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(fragmented) actuality mark an effort to escape patriarchal and hegemonic “plots” into an as-yet-unarticulated nonnarrative reality.
Despite the utility of Lacan’s “mirror stage” in understanding the final stages of La Trobe’s pageant, it is important to identify some crucial dif- ferences between Woolfian notions of temporality and history and Laca- nian ones. It is clear, for instance, that the novel articulates the Bergsonian “present” as a moment of being and not as a moment of “lack” or emptiness as is more common to Lacanian thought.41 While Lacan discusses the impor-
tance of narrative in constructing subjectivity within the Symbolic, he also insists that any accurate account of subjectivity must acknowledge the Sym- bolic’s limits, and the need to move beyond it into the register of the Real, wherein the impossibility of a unified self is revealed. As such, narrative is ultimately rejected, as it is in the final scenes of Between the Acts. However, for Lacan, the rejection of narrative is not linked to an acknowledgment of materiality. Instead, “the authentic realization of temporality . . . would rec- ognize . . . the inescapable emptiness, béance, gap, or gulf around which the human subject builds a false identity” (J. Lee 81). Because “identity,” in Laca- nian psychoanalysis, is constructed as a narrative that must have a beginning, middle, and end, we have no choice in analysis but to arbitrarily choose an end point from which to construct our life story retrospectively. This arbi- trariness, however, reveals Symbolic identity to be merely a comforting story, neither rooted in the “presence” of an arrested, graspable, and ontological “present,” nor true, since the ending that confers its meaning is not really an end, but is chosen, almost at random, from a never-ending stream. The rejection of the Symbolic (and narrative) and the turn to the Real is not, for Lacan, a turn to material “reality” or “authentic” identity, but is merely an acknowledgment of the impossibility of such a turn, since stopping time at a “present” moment (or a moment of conclusion) is impossible.
This assessment of temporality has relevance beyond a philosophical understanding of subjectivity, however. In his extended treatment of Hei- degger’s Being and Time, Derrida notes that time carries with it many depen- dents, including “Dasein,” “finitude,” and “historicity,” all of which have significant impact on political and ethical concerns (“Ousia” 64). In “Ousia and Grammé,” Derrida deconstructs the notion of material “presence” (in history, in being) because of the term’s link to the temporal “present.” For Derrida, like Lacan, the present is never categorically “here” and is never therefore a guarantor of material existence or fundamental essence. Derrida argues that, “Being, the present, the now, substance, essence, are all linked in their meaning to the form of the present participle” (40), and this tying of materiality to something as fleeting as the present moment serves to unmoor substance itself (Being/history) from the solidity it implicitly claims. It is for
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this reason, says Derrida, that thinkers like Hegel have tried to remove the idea of “presence” from the idea of the temporal “now” and to place it in an “Eternal” realm outside of time. This, however, presents the problem that “Being is nontime, time is nonbeing insofar as being already, secretly, has been determined as present, and beingness (ousia) as presence” (“Ousia” 51). Derrida here reveals how Hegel refuses “presence” in the temporal present, moving it to a realm outside time, and in doing so, implicitly refuses concepts (like history) that depend upon substance and materiality in the real world, which is unavoidably temporal. Derrida’s deconstruction of “presence” relies, however, on the conception of the “present” as nonpresent, always fleeting and evanescent and never “there.”
While Woolf’s novel has much in common with deconstruction as “double reading” and with Lacan’s treatment of subjectivity, it is in the under- standing of temporality that such parallels fail. The Lacanian and Derridean approaches to time seize strongly upon one half of Bergson’s dialectic, config- uring time as continually moving and the present as an impossible moment that is always already passed, making presence, substance, and materiality impossible. Bergson, however, also insists upon the concept of the present as the intersection of time/consciousness and space/matter. In doing so, he does not reject time as pure continuity but insists that both pure continuity and material presence exist simultaneously. In these terms, the oppressive Sym- bolic, plot, and general text can be dissolved without presence itself being reduced to “lack.” If narrative is defined as temporality tied together by action, with both a beginning and an end, its subversion can be achieved not only by a never-ending pure continuity without beginning or end, but also and simultaneously by the arresting of time, the conceiving of an ideal present “moment.” In this case, ontological presence may accompany the fragmen- tation of plot. It is for this reason that La Trobe’s insertion of ten minutes of “unplotted time” is not purely characterized by absence or lack. Rather, it also carries with it the materiality of a “reality too strong” to be plotted into a familiar Symbolic. We may call these “moments of being” or antinar- rativity, wherein material presence is felt most strongly. These moments, like Bergson’s present, embody the convergence of matter and memory, rooting resistance to hegemonic discourse in materiality as opposed to “emptiness, beancé, gap” or “lack.”42