Throughout this chapter, I have highlighted Woolf’s resistance to patriarchal discourse and her construction of theories of time and history that allow that
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resistance to be based not merely on alternate discourses but also on refer- entiality and truth. There are, of course, always multiple discourses oper- ating at a particular time, and feminist ones certainly existed in 1941, some influenced significantly by Woolf’s own work.43 It would be possible, then,
to merely argue that Woolf participates in an alternate discourse to the one dominant in her society without necessarily referring to the “truth” itself. To do so, however, would be to support the popular critical position that truth is merely a byproduct of discursive formations and not productive of them. This critical environment derives principally from the pervasive influ- ence of middle-period Michel Foucault, who, despite his acknowledgment of multiple discursive frameworks, denies truth-value to any of them. Instead, Foucault, when at his most relativistic, asserts that all statements claiming truth are results of various loci of power that define the “true.” To explain the presence of multiple discourses, but the impossibility of acting outside of them, Foucault introduces the notion of an episteme, which he describes as “the total set of relationships that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly for- malized systems . . . the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period” (Archaeology of Knowledge 191).
As Reed Dasenbrock discusses in Truth and Consequences, Foucault needs the notion of an episteme in order to retain his claim that there is no such thing as truth, but only “regimes of truth,” which “each society . . . accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanc- tioned” (115). If society is to have a shared sense of what counts as “true,” then there must be an episteme under which various competitive discourses function. Under this logic, under one episteme, the rape of the girl at White- hall would be a romantic and loving gesture, under another an act of violence and domination, and under a third no rape could be said to have occurred at all. The truth of each of these statements cannot be measured against the world, as such, but only judged within particular epistemes. In Power/Knowl- edge, Foucault argues for an almost purely social conception of truth and a nearly complete lack of agency for the subject: “we are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands” (93).
As Dasenbrock points out, the Foucault on display here is similar to the Stanley Fish who asserts that we are all merely products of interpretive com- munities, or the Thomas Kuhn who argues that each scientific paradigm is properly considered “true” for the time period in which it operates, but none can be considered objectively valid.44 What none of these theories (often
identified as “postmodern”) can explain adequately, however, is how epis- temes change, paradigms shift, or new interpretive communities develop. To
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explain this, Dasenbrock invokes Donald Davidson, who refuses the notion that scientific paradigms (or epistemes) are hermetically sealed ways of pro- ducing different epistemic worlds. Rather, he argues, they are competing means of explaining a single world. Therefore, when we encounter data, lan- guage, or communication that we cannot comprehend, we develop a “passing theory” to help cope (Dasenrock 73). A new theory is then created, which may become influential, depending on its utility for coping with new data and situations.
In the notion of the “passing-theory,” Davidson introduces two concepts anathema to Foucault and Fish at their most relativistic. First, there is the notion of the individual as more than the subject of discursive discipline or interpellation. As discussed above, in The Order of Things, Foucault defines “man” as an articulation of discourse who is “in the process of disappearing” (Order 385). Similarly, Fish denies the existence of both subjects and objects in Is There a Text in This Class? (332). On the contrary, Davidson insists that new ideas can arise out of encounters between individuals holding differing beliefs. People are not merely products of discourses; rather they are also capable of producing them. Second, Davidson’s idea that “data,” “language,” or even “truth” can confound a particular episteme and its participants implies that not all data, language, or truth is integrated to that episteme. For epistemes to shift there must be something to shift them, something out- side the oppressive system, demanding a reorganization of discourses. That is, inherent to the intensely constructivist notions of multiple interpretive communities, multiple paradigms, and multiple epistemes is the necessity of something outside of them, which we might tentatively call the real.
Davidson further notes that there must be some statements that are true, since there is a world that we all share (and not merely competing interpreta- tions). Crucially, however, although “we may discover the truth, we can never be certain we have discovered it” (Dasenbrock 168). That is, truth must be separated from certainty, since one is possible and one is not. Notions of truth allow for the “disconfirmation” of things once held to be true, but which do not stand up to the present data, but they do not necessarily allow for complete confirmation of new theories that match data. From the perspective of a world on the brink of World War II, wherein the quarrel over colonialist acquisition led to the Great War, the Victorian belief in the moral and ethical imperative of imperialism displayed in La Trobe’s pageant might be said to be potentially disconfirmed. Likewise, the real evidence of the rape can be seen as evidence for the disconfirmation of the general wisdom and superiority of patriarchal structures. None of this gives complete certainty to Woolf’s models of time and history, but the possibility of truth allows for a critique of dominant paradigms from a perspective that exceeds mere disagreement.
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The “shocks” of being that jettison La Trobe and Isa from the dominant social symbolic indicate the capacity for new data, new information, and new language to introduce discontinuity into a dominant episteme. That such “shocks” are associated with the materiality of the present and not merely with an alternate discourse is crucial not to an insistence that we can know the “truth” in all cases, but that we can know things that are not true, like the “history” presented in the pageant. The possibility of an encounter with “present” truths that become the basis for ethical resistance is seen most clearly in the moment following the radical fragmentation and reordering of the pageant in the voices of its actors. At this precise moment, “The hands of the clock had stopped. . . . It was now. Ourselves” (186).
Certainly in any naturalistic reading of the novel, it would be impossible to say that time actually stops for the actors and the audience. However, it is clear that both Woolf and La Trobe wish to give the audience, and the reader, the sensation, and the knowledge, of the ideal present, wherein ontological existence can be felt with all of its force. That nearly everyone in the audience cannot confront his or her own reality illustrates the difficulty in jettisoning ourselves from the plots we have adopted. “All shifted, preened, minced; hands were raised; legs shifted. . . . All evaded or shaded themselves” (186). Mrs. Manresa uses the mirrors to “make up” a new identity, powdering her nose rather than facing herself as reality.
Woolf’s incisive and deep probing of the pervasive influence of dis- course and social plotting are then balanced, if not undercut, by the tripartite attempt to theorize the present as something that can subvert plot and that exists in material fashion, even as it continually passes us by. In this sense, while we may experience life as a plot as David Carr and similar thinkers argue, and while discourse and social text may pervade every corner of our lives, it is possible to seize the present moment as present to us and to remove ourselves from the plot of our life and our culture, even if doing so feels like a kind of death. The novel, then, is more than a “crazy quilt of discursive and aesthetic forms” (McWhirter 803); it is also an examination of how to remove oneself from that quilt.
Likewise, Woolf sees the immense power of society to transform and recuperate symbolically suicidal acts into its own repetitive plots. It is for this reason that Judy Little can see the novel both as celebratory of the pos- sibility of regeneration and mournful of the ways that “such regeneration is thwarted” (36). Following the transformative effects of La Trobe’s perfor- mance, Reverend Streatfield attempts to unify the fragments once again. It is not only Streatfield, however, who returns the world of Pointz Hall to its usual plots. La Trobe herself reunites her fragmented players and audience by returning to a simple tune, linear and orderly, like an “ideal” Aristote-
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lian narrative, “The tune began; the first note meant a second; the second a third. . . . but not the melody . . . alone controlled it; but also the warring battle-plumed warriors. . . . To part? No. . . . they crashed; solved; united” (189).
La Trobe, after metaphorically halting time itself, departing from the symbolic, and exploding narrative, winds up the clock and re-forms plot, both in her pageant and in the general text outside of it. It is significant that it is not purely the linear, orderly melody that reunites the pageant and its audience but the “battle-plumed warriors,” the symbols of patriarchal vio- lence. It is clear here that Woolf is aware of the limited sociopolitical force a single work of art is capable of generating, and that it takes very little for discursive power to be reasserted. It is for this reason that La Trobe can “say to the world. You have taken my gift,” and also begin to believe that it “meant nothing,” lasting only “for one moment” (209). La Trobe’s subversion of plot, after all, seems possible only within a controlled environment like an artistic creation.
It is important to recall, however, that Woolf has already illustrated the parallels between the world outside the pageant and that within it. Through this layering of frames, Woolf encourages her readers not only to read the world as a text and to do so ironically and skeptically but also to imagine a different type of text, a different language that may result in peace. Many have read Between the Acts as a final pessimistic resignation to the inexorable progress towards World War II or as a final statement of the possibility of artistic unity that may protect us from the real world.45 In fact, it is the unity
and progress of a particular type of plot that makes World War II seem inevi- table. That Woolf can see the possibility, if not the likelihood, of a break in that plot is a reserved but insistent affirmation of hope.
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n Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf builds a case against plot and advo- cates the possibility of an access to the materiality of the past achieved through a theorization of the present. In this critique of narrative form and its crippling effect upon the ideology and accuracy of historical rep- resentation, Woolf foresees contemporary debates about narrativist his- toriography and the ethics of postmodernism despite preceding them by several decades. As such, any discussion of Woolf’s connection to post- modernism happens retrospectively, through a critical lens provided by our present. Written some forty years later, Graham Swift’s best-known novel, Waterland, not only tackles the same issues but also seems clearly conscious of the academic debate over relativist historiography. In fact, Waterland has been almost inevitably discussed within this context, with references to Hayden White dominating the critical conversation.1 LikeWhite, Swift’s novel illustrates the failures of narrative in representing the historical truth, while recommending nonnarrative forms that offer