I see a possibility to expand Sara Crangle's analysis in "Woolf's Cesspoolage" by thinking of the question of waste as a question of writing, or more exactly, a question of rhetorical invention. Crangle explicitly links, and I think quite appropriately, La Trobe's writing with wastage. Her writing is a kind of irredeemable expenditure, inevitably failing, mired in its own detritus. Most importantly, La Trobe is unable to cope with this inability to reach beyond cesspooling language. There is no cure for her rhetorical aporia, an impotence in rhetorical invention. She cannot redeem wasted language as "progressive" modern society has developed methods to redeem its shit (as Laporte shows us in History of Shit). Crangle admits that this is nothing less than a "a condemnation of writing" (17), but I see this also as a challenge to the idea of rhetorical invention itself. If it is true that Between the Acts prompts us to think that "Language spasms like the bowels, looping back on itself, repeating the same old activities, the same old refrains" (Crangle, 1), then there is a serious complication for rhetorical invention that comes to the fore. Crangle's thesis, that Woolf uses resignation to the waste of language/language of waste as a "catalyst for innovation" (18), suggests an interesting rhetorical tactic as we inevitably come up against our own shit, as it returns to us even while we reject it. Woolf had to have imagined, based on the experience of the Great War at the very least, the tremendous amount of waste generated by war: visceral, cultural, spiritual, ethical... Resignation as a tactic for "dealing" with this waste by not dealing with it seems to agree with her pacifism but also suggests a link with her ambivalence to modernity and technology. Modernity is sometimes exciting, sometimes breathtaking (e.g. her fondness for the cinema), but also repulsive at times in that it brought so much war, so much oppression. If the best response is just this kind of resignation which accepts the ambiguities of the things that attract/repulse us, we are "cured" by no longer needing the cure since we are reconciled to what makes us sick. This is not necessarily a hopeful view (especially if Crangle is right that Beckett is also saying this...), but it is a peaceful view of the world and others which does not incite violence against/from the abject. Perhaps as Woolf's last work it is her strongest rhetorical expression (thought not a statement) of pacifism.
Her adoration of the library along with popular wisdom of Mrs. Giles, condensed into a sort of cliche in "books are the mirrors of the soul" (12), is swiftly overturned as Woolf admits that she was "book-shy" (14) and sought from her books, and we can presume Woolf implies almost all books given the spread of subjects and genre's contained in her library, a kind of cure. "Yet as a person with a raging tooth runs her eye in a chemist shop over green bottles with gilt scrolls on them lest one of them may contain a cure..." (14) so Mrs. Giles glances over the collected books without reading - there is no cure there, apparently. The modern age is not one for books for it bears a "spotted soul" (14) caught in the trammels of literary detritus, resulting in perpetual boredom. Boredom, of course, can be a "waste" of time, or a wasted soul. At any rate, it is a situation of non-innovation, and modernity was sick with it. Mrs. Giles, not finding the cure in books, reverts to the newspaper, her generation's book, to find her remedy in a scandalous rape story which projects itself on the mahogany door. The spectacle alleviates the boredom, but what if the relief just adds to the cesspool?
I think there is much more to say here, but to do so would require more thought and time. Nonetheless, what I think Woolf is indicating in Between the Acts, beginning from Sara Crangle's discussion of literary/rhetorical cesspooling, is that there is an extreme irony for those who think they must be "cured" (i.e. the modern will to cleanse, to sanitize, to drain off their shit). If modernity wishes to be cured it must cast of filth, which creates abjects. The continual alleviation of boredom through "real" stories in the newspaper, most likely a metonymy for greater habits of society (perhaps war?), will only create more abjects which will haunt us unless we find a way to work with them. Boredom places us in an innovation dead-zone where ideas do not flow. One can reactivate the flows in a sewage system, which will certainly open up minds to innovation, but what will be invented is not something that is humane, because ultimately more abjects will be produced which will then have to be disposed of by creating more abjects. Woolf stems the flow, and thus stems invention, but only in a sense. She accepts the cesspools of human life and stems the impulse to purify, and in that we can say she might have been much more "real" than anything her generation could have read in the newspapers. She expresses a pacifist's method of invention.
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