Searching For Meaning in Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts Essays

Searching For Meaning in Virginia Woolfs Between the ActsI 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 leger (or articulation itself) breaks up or fails. Woolfs 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 co mplicated 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 places public 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 big 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 grassroots question. In the modern plot of revelation, however, the emphasis is els ewhere, the function of the discourse is not to answer the question or even to pose it...It is not that events are opinionated (happily or tragically) but rather that a state of affairs is revealed. (Seymour Chatman)Works CitedJulia Kristeva, A Question of Subjectivity--An Interview,Womens Review, no. 12 (1986), pp. 19-21Ferdinand de Saussure,From Course in General Linguistics, Modern literary Theory ,Third Ed. (1996),Ed. Rice and Waugh, pp. 8-15Jacques 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