Matriz de criterios de aprendizaje de las competencias genéricas y sus atributos

What makes the reading of Between the Acts presented thus far troubling is the way in which it seems to preclude an ethical dimension. While the novel does provide a detailed and chilling diagnosis of the pervasiveness of patri- archal discourse, it does not seem to offer its readers a way to fight against patriarchy or the connected threat of fascism. Because Woolf presents the world outside the pageant as a mirror to the patriarchal and imperialist ide- ology within it, and because both of these texts reflect the primitive behavior of the hunters and gatherers in the prehistoric London of the Outline of His- tory, there is a sense that there is nothing but repetition in history and that this repetition is caused by the internalization of patriarchal discourse.15

An ethical movement that denies the extreme ramifications of this reading emerges, however, when, at several moments, there are irruptions of chaos and dispersal that challenge the unity and coherence of the patriarchal his- torical plot.

The first such irruption occurs when Isa reads of the rape of a girl by barracks officers at Whitehall.16 _{The soldiers, unavoidably symbols of British}

patriarchy, tell the girl of a horse with a green tail, making Isa imagine a fairy-tale story of romantic knights and fantastic adventure. What follows, however, is a gang rape that is anything but romantic and fantastic. Instead, “That was real; so real that on the mahogany door panels she saw the Arch

50 | Chapter 1

in Whitehall; through the Arch the barrack room; in the barrack room the bed, and on the bed the girl was screaming” (20). The reality of the rape gives Isa a vision of the horrific encounter, which, although mediated by the newspaper story, also exceeds it.17 _{Like Giles, the soldiers are symbols of}

heroism not in spite of, but because of, their link to violence and conquest. The “horse with a green tail” likewise invokes fairy-tale images of a rescued “damsel in distress,” a traditionally patriarchal plot. In this case, however, the fact of the rape cannot be reconciled with such a narrative. Instead, the event “alerts Woolf’s readers to the side of war that is rarely historicized” (Wiley 13). Importantly, the reason it is not historicized is because of the difficulty in fitting it into the patriarchal metanarratives that constitute “his- tory.” Within the disjunction between the singular event and the ideological cultural narrative is what Isa identifies as “real.”

The curious beginning of Three Guineas, lauding both the newspaper and the photograph, makes a similar point.18 _{Although both of these media}

are prone to heavy mediation, deformation, and manipulation, Woolf pres- ents them here as symbolic of the access to the real that is possible. The daily paper is called “history in the raw” (7), and photographs are described as “pictures of actual facts . . . statements of fact addressed to the eye” (10). While she notes the ways in which soldiers not yet at war valorize violence, the photographs of the Spanish Civil War present a very different picture: “photographs of dead bodies” so “mutilated” they could be mistaken for the “body of a pig” (11).

Later in the essay, Woolf voices extreme skepticism towards newspaper “objectivity”19 _{and her play with photographs in the mock-biography Orlando}

indicates a similar awareness of their manipulability. Nevertheless, it is clear that she distinguishes between the stories told about war and the facts of war, or the real as defined by the photographs. It is, indeed, this reality that becomes the basis for Woolf’s ethical stand for pacifism in Three Guineas.20

Isa’s encounter with the rape functions similarly, as an access to the reality of oppression that cannot be reconciled with the stories of the glories of war and patriarchal history. There is little doubt in Between the Acts that actual events can be adapted to and transformed into narrative, discourse, and ide- ology. It is also true, however, that the novel points us toward the possibility that these events, and their photographs, may exceed and resist the narra- tives in which they are embedded.

A second irruption of the real occurs towards the end of the pageant, when Miss La Trobe attempts to release her hold on its unity and coher- ence and to present the real of present time itself. Like John Cage’s musical experiments,21 _{she presents nothing on the stage and instead attempts to}

The Pageantry of the Past and the Reflection of the Present | 51

wrong with the experiment. ‘Reality too strong,’ she muttered. ‘Curse ’em!’” (179–80). La Trobe, like Clarissa Dalloway, again correlates reality with “death . . . when illusion fails” (180). Several critics suggest that the pageant’s failure to achieve formal unity functions as a critique of fascist and patri- archal politics, but few note that the disruption of this concord is achieved by reality itself. Patricia Joplin, for instance, asserts that La Trobe “bears a striking resemblance to a petty dictator in her will to re-impose unity on her fragile, dispersed, uncontrollable work of art” (88). However, Joplin reads the novel as one which “celebrates rather than mourns the impossibility of final meaning” (89), configuring it as antifascist due to its postmodern asser- tion of the impossibility of metanarratives. Then, in a somewhat common- place critical maneuver, Joplin analogizes a faith in linguistic reference with political authoritarianism: “Woolf’s last work becomes a meditation on the proximity of artist to dictator . . . when language is used as if there were no gap between . . . sign and referent” (89). While it is certainly true that Woolf is critical of authoritarianism, reference to the real, as in the case of the rape, is presented as crucial to resisting it, not as its metaphorical reitera- tion. While Pamela Caughie claims that the novel treats “truth and reality as negotiable concepts” (Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism 54), the novel actually insists upon our capacity to access the real precisely for political and ethical reasons.

While it is clear that Between the Acts juxtaposes chaos with order and dispersal with unity, it does so by analogizing the chaotic and the dispersed with the real itself. La Trobe encourages the intrusion of the real in the final act of the pageant despite her anxiety, and Isa gets a glimpse of the real when reading the newspaper. That there is often a gap between “sign and referent” is emphasized repeatedly in the novel, but there is also a tendency to insist on the possibility of factual accuracy and that some truths are not nego- tiable, as in the cases of the bomb victims and the rape. This tendency is the building block of Woolf’s feminist ethics in the novel, an ethics that also relies on the rejection of narrative and the turn to nonnarrative forms.