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1939-40: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michele Pridmore-Brown
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Abstract

Virginia Woolf in her last novel, Between the Acts, explores fascism from the vantage of the new physics and of information technology. Her knowledge of the new physics is attested to by myriad diary entries; her knowledge of information technology was largely intuitive. In Between the Acts, she uses a gramophone to brew patriotic emotion and thus to transform a group of British pageant goers into a herd. Ultimately, however, she short-circuits the herd impulse by privileging the audience members' interpretative acts. In the novel, patriotic messages of authority are deliberately adulterated by the gramophone's static or noise. The audience members must therefore make meaning out of noise; these interpretative acts break their visceral connection to the sound waves, the rhythm and rhyme, of patriotism. Woolf's intuitive grasp of the concept of noise inherent in information technology allows her to articulate an antiauthoritarian pluralist politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 3 , May 1998 , pp. 408 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

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