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Are Machines the Devil? Progress and History in Virginia Woolf’s “Between the Acts”

After the play is concluded and the auteur Miss La Trobe has turned the mirror has been turned on the audience, the cast of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts disperse and talk in fragments amongst themselves about the meaning of what they have just seen. Notions of animating ‘world spirits’ and the place of an evolving Christianity are bandied about. Near the end of the fragmented meditation, one finds this line: “Are machines the devil, or do they introduce a discord . . . Ding dong, ding . . . by means of which we reach the final . . . Ding dong” (BTA 124). A lot of Woolf critics like to cite her husband, Leonard’s assertion that Virginia was the “”the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented the definition” (Carroll 99) as evidence to support their reading of her works as, if not apolitical, then uninterested in politics enough to support the status quo of the empire. Opponents to categorizing Woolf as a writer of the individual mind unconcerned with the politics of the day cite the prominent theme of anti-patriarchy than runs throughout her corpus, particularly in her later works. Anti-patriarchy in England is closely tied to anti-colonialism and anti-fascism.

Ergo, if one applies the feminist and possibly pseudo-Marxist politics of A Room of One’s Own, the anti-war politics of Three Guineas and the anti-authoritarian and possible feminist revisionism of history in Between the Acts to Woolf’s earlier works, then one may read some of “the pro-English culture” and or elitism toward India as if not complicated, then ironical. Such readings are possible, but smack of wishful thinking on the part of those who voice them. Woolf’s opinions were not static, and it seems specious to assume that she would maintain ideological and ethical consistency throughout her writing career. Regardless, can Woolf’s later work still be read as progressive, if not just for its time, but for today as well?

Like Woolf’s work, the answer is complicated. The political landscape in which Woolf wrote Between the Acts was vastly different than that of Mrs. Dalloway. World War II was well under way, and fascism had taken hold of much of Europe. And this will eventually bring us back to the matter of machines being the devil quoted above.

In Between the Acts a small village views a play by a Miss La Trobe, a local eccentric. People from the village are cast in various historic roles. The play occurs in three acts. In the prologue, a child playing England is “born” and forgets her lines, much to the dismay of Miss Latrobe. The first act is faux-Shakespearean. The second act is a parody of a restoration play. The third depicts the Victorian age. The play concludes with a mirror being turned on the audience, suggesting, perhaps, that all of this English history has led to the present moment. The implication is that history is a construction. The differing style of each era suggests these constructions. Style features heavily in the imagination of an era. Moreover, the play as of means of conveying history calls attention the means by which communal history is disseminated. More often than not, public history is negotiated and performed.

The novel complicates the matter by having La Trobe consider the message of the play to be a failure, by having the audience voice uncertain and differing opinions on its meaning, by having the present impinge on the recreation of the past (the play is interrupted by cows, birds, planes, the songs of villagers, etc.), and by having the hidden machine (a record player) that guides the whole affair seeming to malfunction throughout. It is here that Between the Acts begins to become potentially anti-fascist in its view of history. Fascist history assumes a uniform history being, more or less, uniformly understood. It is created by the state for the purposes of nationalism. It excludes peoples that do not fit its narrative. It harkens to a mythic past as a means ordering its present. It also asserts the superiority of its culture. Miss La Trobe’s play is not uniformly and understood, and its possible attempts at nationalism are thwarted by human subjectivity as well as natural and human error. Still, what is directed is directed imperfectly by the machine in the bushes. Audience opinion seems to be synchronized by the music (or even the “chuff chuff chuffing” or “tic tic ticking” of the machine) when it is synchronized at all, “Only the tick tick of the gramophone held them together” (BTA 96). A possible commentary rendered by all this suggest that while history is in large part an artistic invention interpreted, negotiated, and acted out by the present players of each age, and thus in flux, technological advancement, which is to say machines, is the means by which empire unifies and progresses. Notions of progress are questioned, if not flatly criticized. Near the end of the play, seemingly by chance, the natural world is replaced with the militaristic, “Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music” (BTA 119). English society’s grand march to progress ends in fascism, an idea similar to that voiced by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. “How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry” inquire Adorno and Horkheimer “promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction?” (Zuidervaart par 6).

At its core, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment seeks to demonstrate the “tendencies which turn cultural progress into its opposite (Preface to the Italian Edition). Although the precise beginning of the Enlightenment is subject to debate, for our purposes we shall begin in 1784, five years before the French Revolution, and examine Immanuel Kant’s definition of enlightenment. “Enlightenment” writes Kant, “is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another” (Then & Now 4:05-4:40). To Adorno and Horkheimer, the goal of the Enlightenment — the liberation of man from into a state of individualism through rationality — can, in spite of itself, lead to its inverse: domination. Here domination can be thought of as “in effect whenever the individual’s goals and purposes and the means of striving for and attaining them are prescribed to him and performed by him. (Then & Now 3:00-3:13). For Kant, and later for Hegel, “men had the faculties to be reasonable to think logically. But reason was larger than any single man, it was the unity of all logic, all nature in a systematization, a single governing principle, schema, a blueprint” (Then & Now 5:43-6:01). A universal schema, despite being the product of reason, is also prescriptive and therefore dominating. Moreover, Adorno and Horkheimer saw at least two different kinds of reason simultaneously at work: individual reason and a purportedly collective reason. The authors write that the

“difficulties within this concept of reason, arising from the fact that its subjects, the bearers of one and the same reason, are in real opposition to each other, are concealed in the Western Enlightenment behind the apparent clarity of its judgments. In the Critique of Pure Reason, however, those difficulties make themselves apparent in the unclear relationship of the transcendental to the empirical ego and in the other irreconcilable contradictions. Kant’s concepts are ambiguous. Reason as the transcendental, supraindividual self contains the idea of a free coexistence in which human beings organize themselves to form the universal subject and resolve the conflict between pure and empirical reason in the conscious solidarity of the whole. The whole represents the idea of true universality, utopia. At the same time, however, reason is the agency of calculating thought, which arranges the world for the purposes of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than that of working on the object as mere sense material in order to make it the material of subjugation.” (Dialect of Enlightenment 65).[1]

Woolf’s vision of fascism in Between the Acts is, in to Woolfian fashion, not so clean cut. Even within the play, ideas pertaining to the reasoning power of man are questioned (see the village idiot playing himself). If the play is meant to be taken as a sort of “Outline of History” (also the title of a book Lucy reads throughout Between the Acts)¸ its constant disruption by both internal forces and external forces suggest that the streamlining of history into the subjective minds of each individual is impossible. The view of history remains similar to that expressed in “A Mark on the Wall.” The past is unchanging, yet largely unknowable. Our perception of it is a present construction, constantly in flux, not much different from a work of fiction. Yet in Between the Acts, fascism has arrived all the same. Planes still fly overhead, hidden machines still guide the masses. The invention of machines suggests a material progress operating partially outside of human comprehension. The machine in the bushes (a gramophone) is linked to the quantifying of linear time “Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Time was passing. How long would time hold them together?” (94), “Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing” (96). History can change from era to era, but unless they are physically destroyed, machines will continue to be used and modified. With all this in mind, the “ding dong” interrupting the thoughts on machines being “the devil” suggest a sort of doomsday clock, a counting down as it were, “by means of which we reach the final . . . Ding dong” (BTA 124).

 

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodore W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edmund Jephcott

Trans. California: Stanford UP, 2002. https://monoskop.org/images/2/27/Horkheimer_Max_Adorno_Theodor_W_Dialectic_of_Enlightenment_Philosophical_Fragments.pdf . Accessed 12 May 2021.

Carroll, Berenice A. “‘To Crush Him in Our Own Country’: The Political Thought of Virginia

Woolf.” Feminist Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1978, pp. 99–132. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177627. Accessed 12 May 2021

Then & Now. “Adorno and Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment – Part I.” Youtube.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMiF9Bv-72s . Accessed 12 May 2021.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Global Grey, 2019. https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/between-the-acts-ebook.html, Accessed 12 May 2021.

Zuidervaart, Lambert, “Theodor W. Adorno”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter

2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/adorno/>. Accessed 12 May 2021.

 

[1] Beginning at the Zuidervaat quotation and ending at this one, this research has been lifted from a previous essay I wrote in 2020, “The Domination of the Whale: An Exploration of Ahab and Totalitarianism through the Framework of Adorno and Horkheimer”