Realist Critiques of Visual Culture by Edward Barnaby

Author:Edward Barnaby
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Lucy’s dialectic with Bartholomew holds their competing perspectives in productive tension without vindicating one over the other or synthesizing them in Hegelian fashion. Lucy’s participation in this non-Hegelian dialectic delivers her from the ideological solipsism that Debord associates with the spectacle and exemplifies realist fiction’s capability to model authentic consciousness.

The novel closes with Bartholomew, Lucy, Giles and Isa reading silently in the drawing room of Pointz Hall at dusk. The room’s colors intensify in the setting sun, creating a surreal visual effect that I have noted in other moments of acute consciousness of the spectacle in realist fiction—as when Jude Fawley becomes transfixed by the glimmering spires of Christminster, Sue Bridehead eyes the blazing white pagan idols in relief against the Gothic towers, and Lucy Honeychurch grows faint before the throbbing tower in the Florentine piazza. As Lucy Swithin reads a passage from the Outline of History describing how “prehistoric man […] roused himself from his semi-crouching position and raised great stones,” the lengthening shadows of Bartholomew, Giles and Isa take on the “monumental” proportions of Easter Island moai. The view through the windows fades into darkness, and the narrator compares it to a “night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks” (Woolf [1941] 1970, 218). The scene restates another passage from “The Sun and the Fish,” in which Woolf describes the re-emergence of the “primeval world” within the present moment on the occasion of a solar eclipse. Like the figures in the drawing room at Pointz Hall, the party watching the eclipse is stripped of its “little badges and signs of individuality” and “strung out against the sky in outline” like “statues standing prominent on the ridge of the world” (Woolf [1928] 1967, 180).

This primordial setting affords Giles and Isa their first authentic encounter of the day. Once Bartholomew and Lucy go up to bed, the darkness strips Giles and Isa of their own “little badges,” including the domestic and public roles that separate them and the various representations of Englishness foisted upon them by the pageant. “Alone,” the narrator explains, “enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born” (Woolf [1941] 1970, 219). Giles and Isa are the present-day iteration of the marriage plots featured in La Trobe’s pageant. With the final words—“Then the curtain rose. They spoke.”—the entire novel becomes a distended prologue that makes visible the spectacular distance Giles and Isa must traverse and the pseudo-cyclical consciousness that they must shed in order to achieve a single moment of authentic encounter. In this respect, Between the Acts parallels Joyce’s consolidation of the geographic and temporal separation of Odysseus and Penelope into a single day’s experience of the psychological distance that separates Leopold and Molly Bloom. Like Joyce , Woolf takes up Pater’s challenge to contemporary artists to leave behind the externalized dilemmas of ancient drama and epic and address the internalized separations that afflict the modern subject.

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