'If one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?' queries a character in Virginia Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts. Both Alex Zwerdling in Virginia Woolf and the Real World and Lucio Ruotolo in The Interrupted Moment engage with the implications of this question - though neither has much to say about aeroplanes. Zwerdling concentrates on Woolf's 'intense interest in the life of society and its effect on the individual'; Ruotolo emphasises 'the rhythm of broken sequence'. Zwerdling and Ruotolo recognise the urgency with which Woolf responds to the current moment in her final work. Ruotolo discovers a hoped-for continuity: what is interrupted is resumed, though changed in form by interruption. Zwerdling emphasises the diaspora of the self and of English society that is chillingly written into the book's gossip: 'Negation regularly has the last word.' Ruotolo, in his book's only surprising move, proceeds from his analysis of Between the Acts to claim Woolf for anarchism, though the anarchism for which he claims her proves to be generalised ('All great art is anarchy'--Gertrude Stein) and muted, a matter of 'the liberating space of unguarded moments'.

LRB 23 April 1987 | PDF Download