Abstract
This essay will examine the way in which media technologies, through object agency, produce intersubjectivity and, thus, challenge the autonomy of the self. For H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), the image produced by the cinema bridges differences created by conventional language, culture, and nationality. Her poems, “Projector” and “Projector II (Chang),” celebrate the importance of the projector that reasserts light as deity. By contrast, Virginia Woolf privileges sound in her search for intersubjectivity. Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, presents a much bleaker view—particularly of machine-generated intersubjectivity—of the loss of autonomy in the rise of Hitler and Fascism.
Both H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Virginia Woolf were intrigued by the potentialities of intersubjectivity—shared meaning, thought, and experience—that media technologies in the first half of the 20th century made possible on a far wider scale than previously imagined or experienced. For H.D., the images produced by the projector bridge differences created by conventional language, culture, and nationality, thus creating intersubjectivity. Her poems, “Projector” and “Projector II (Chang),” celebrate the reassertion of light as deity and speak to the importance of the machine—the projector—that makes this reification possible. By contrast, Virginia Woolf privileges the aural in much of her writings, illustrating in many of her early novels that sound creates the intersubjective moment. Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, is a sustained interrogation of the role of media technology in creating and maintaining intersubjectivity, for there exists within intersubjectivity a challenge to the individual’s ability to know and to act with agency. Both authors understood the dangers associated when the intersubjective moment is generated by and dependent upon a machine. Obeying mechanical directives alienates one from one of the defining characteristics of the human: agency, or the ability to act. When Woolf (1970) writes in Between the Acts, “They were neither one thing nor the other; neither Victorians nor themselves. They were suspended without being, in limbo” (p. 178), she is considering the audience’s sense of themselves. However, she is also illustrating that those whose position as the subject is challenged exist in a sort of limbo—they are neither their own autonomous self nor are they truly merged with the group. Intersubjectivity might unify, it might bridge differences, but it also challenges the autonomy of the self, ultimately destabilizing the privileged position of the subject even as it fails to unify members of the group. The media technologies of the early 20th century seemed uniquely qualified to pose such a challenge.
By the first decade of the 20th century, both sound and image technologies had pervaded mainstream culture. Media technologies such as the gramophone and the film projectors served as reminders that objects have a life of their own. 1 In his essay “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown (2001) notes “the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a nut,” and argues that these moments “are occasions of contingency—the chance interruption—that disclose a physicality of things” (pp. 3-4). Thus, objects are more than simply the results of production and consumption. They exert a presence in their environment, reminding the humans who live with them that their space is shared—sometimes pleasantly and sometimes with the disruption that arises from the perversity of inanimate objects. Thus, media technologies played a role in preparing the modernist writer to consider the potential agency of objects. The gramophone, for example, not only played back the human voices recorded on wax cylinders but also recorded environmental white noise, sounds that the human ear typically disregarded as meaningless. Furthermore, the gramophone was quite capable of generating its own sounds: hissing and scratching when the needle stuck, and “chuffing” when the needle came to the end of the phonograph disc. 2 Such sounds permeated the human body, dissolving ego boundaries. Likewise, the projector produced images that could be read across cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. As both the physical boundary of the body and the social boundaries of class and nation dissolved, new possibilities for intersubjectivity emerged.
H.D. and Woolf are not alone in their interest in media technologies. Such technologies as the phonograph, the printing press, the typewriter, and the player piano appear in other works as varied as Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Voice of Silence,” James Joyce’s “Aeolus” from Ulysses, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. However, while each of these objects exercise some agency in the texts, none challenge the position of the subject in the way that H.D.’s projector and Woolf’s gramophone do. Furthermore, because H.D. privileges the visual in contrast to Woolf’s interrogation of the aural, examining the “Projector” poems in tandem with Between the Acts allows the opportunity to consider the influence of early media technologies on the senses in producing intersubjectivity and, as a result, challenging the autonomy of the self.
Projected Gods and Intersubjectivity in H.D.’s Writing
As an Imagist, H.D. privileged sight as “fresh, accurate access to the exterior world” (Morris, 2003, p. 96). The tenets of Imagism have been attributed to Ezra Pound (1913), who declared that “[a]n ‘image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (p. 200). However, the movement saw its earliest beginnings in the poetry group which had T. E. Hulme at its center. It is from his thinking about poetry that the aesthetics of Imagism developed, and Hulme (1955) privileges vision in his consideration of the role of language in poetry, asserting, “A man cannot write without seeing at the same time a visual signification before his eyes. It is this image which precedes the writing and makes it firm” (p. 79). This assertion suggests that the physical eye, as much as the mind’s eye, plays a vital role in the creation of the image and, ultimately, the poem, placing the instigating image—that image that is the starting point of the poem—squarely in the realm of physical vision rather than mental imagery.
Hulme’s (1955) privileging of vision arises from his contention that language is a “[l]arge clumsy instrument” that “does not naturally come with meaning” (pp. 83-84). While language might not be sufficient to communicate adequately the writer’s ideas, vision and the images perceived by vision might very well be universal. Morris (2003) notes that for the Imagist, “[s]ight is the acid bath that dissolves the sticky sludge of rhetoric . . . [and] connects us directly . . . with the things of this world” (p. 96). By contrast to those who privileged the aural, Morris observes that the Imagists found “in vision a release from a shared system of signs into a spontaneous, intuitive, unmediated apprehension of essences” (p. 97). Yet, a poet works in language rather than in the visual as does a painter or a photographer; thus, Hulme demands, “Each word must be an image seen, not a counter” (p. 79). This tension, then, between sight and language, between the concrete thing and the abstract word(s) used to represent that thing is the foundation of the Imagist aesthetic. Within this aesthetic, too, lies the desire, if unspoken, for the universal experience of the emotion, of the moment, and of the thing that lies at the poem’s center, and that is the poem’s raison d’être.
For H.D., the image rather than sound provided a means to bridge differences created by the flawed and arbitrary mediation of language and to create intersubjectivity. 3 Although H.D. is best known for her poetry and prose, her foray into film reveals her belief that a universal language, the dissolution of differences, and the intersubjectivity that might result were dependent upon the image: not the language-dependent image created in poetry but the moving image created by light projected through film. She declares film “[a] perfect medium [that] has at last been granted us” (H.D., 1998c, p. 112). This perfect medium is “a subtle device for portraying the miraculous” (H.D., 1998c, p. 112)—a nod to H.D.’s (1998b) Imagist beginnings—but it is also the medium by which “there would be no more misunderstandings . . . of nations” (p. 117). As Laura Marcus (1998) observes, “The dream of recapturing a prelapsarian, universal, pictographic language fed directly into early film aesthetics” (p. 103). How better to find commonality in communication than through pictures, for while language might act as a barrier to shared understanding, H.D. believed images would evoke a universal response from viewers. 4
The search for a universal language is centuries old. Umberto Eco dates the desire for what he terms a perfect language to the second century A.D. when syncretism gave rise to the belief in a universal World Soul. Because “[e]ach language organizes the way in which we talk or think about reality in its own particular way” (Eco, 1995, p. 21), a universal language could overcome different cultural and linguistic perceptions of reality, thus making it possible for those of differing nations to converse without the risk of misunderstanding. Such linguistic commonality would promote the sharing not only of ideas but also of consciousness. In 1887, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof created Esperanto, an artificial language that he hoped would become the universal language that had thus far eluded humankind, but despite its relative ease of acquisition, Esperanto did not become the single tongue of humankind. Instead, 19th-century visual technologies such as photography and the cinema promised to bridge cultural and linguistic differences more quickly and effectively than any written or spoken language ever could.
Michael North (2005) observes that, initially, photography was thought to be the new “Rosetta Stone, decoding every written language by reference to a visual language common to all” (p. 5). The same observation can be made about the hopes for and beliefs about early cinema. Just as “photography was strongly associated from its very beginnings with hieroglyphs” (North, 2005, p. 5), so was “the image of (silent) film” seen “as a form of hieroglyphics, a thinking in pictures rather than words” (Marcus, 1998, p. 102). Such thinking in pictures, which were more universal than language, might create a shared experience and common understanding in audiences from varying cultural and language backgrounds. Béla Balázs noted, “[O]n the motion picture screens all over the world we currently witness the development of the first international language: that of facial expression and physical gestures” (as cited in Hansen, 1991, p. 188). 5 Film images then could form the “halo of visual connotations” (Eco, 1995, p. 149) denied to the writer of poetry and prose, whose work would be understood only by those who shared the same language experiences as the writer.
Thus, if images could overcome differences, then consciousness might be shared with others. This was a hope widely expressed during the first decades of the 20th century. H.D. shared this enthusiasm and belief that unity might be created by the projected image, and she wrote ecstatically about this, as well as about both light and film in the early issues of Close Up. In a June 1927 letter to Viola Jordan, H.D. writes, “I feel [film] is the living art, that thing that WILL count but that is in danger now from commnerical [sic] and popular sources” (as cited in Marek, 1995, p. 129). Her belief in film and “its ability to transform the human soul” (Marek, 1995, p. 133) permeates the reviews and commentaries that she wrote for Close Up during its first two years of circulation. Not surprisingly, the film aesthetics she espoused were similar to those that shaped much of her poetry. In a series of interlinking essays called “The Cinema and the Classics,” the poet gave voice to her ideas of film aesthetics and her hopes of the role that cinema might fill. 6 H.D. saw film as an opportunity to create art that could cross national boundaries and believed that her essays could help shape this art and help it resist the commercial pressures of Hollywood.
In addition to establishing her theory of film aesthetics, H.D. also used her contributions to Close Up as a venue for her celebration of light. In the essay “The Cinema and the Classics I: Restraint,” she declared, “[t]he fascinating question of light alone could occupy one forever” (H.D., 1998b, p. 111). Her adoration of light winds through her contributions to Close Up, and light takes on mystical properties in the two “Projector” poems she published in the July and October issues of the magazine. However, while her writing celebrates light and film, the projector is the ultimate source of the light that H.D. deifies in her writing. The idea of projection pervades H.D.’s poetry. Projection is, as Morris (2003) observes,
the thrust that bridges two worlds. It is the movement across a borderline: between the mind and the wall, between the brain and the page . . . between me and you . . . across dimensions of time and space. (p. 96)
Thus, the medium of film provided the poet a way to approach her “broader concerns with language and symbol, psychoanalysis, mysticism and spiritualism, classicism, and the celebration of women’s beauty and power” (Marcus, 1998, p. 98). Within the walls of the cinema, projected light reached across the dark to cast images upon a screen, images that promised in many ways to overcome social and national differences, and to become a universal language that might unite viewers when phonetic language failed. Projected light is made possible by the projector, a fact celebrated in the poems “Projector” and “Projector II.”
Even as the projector’s dynamism and agency made possible light’s reassumption of power in modern culture, it is the light that most enamored H.D, who situated it as a reanimation of Apollo. Laura Marcus (1998) reads the two Projector poems as “invocations to Apollo, upon whom [H.D.] bestows the godhead of cinema” (p. 98). In H.D.’s writing, light is both the tool of the artist and an entity to be deified. In writing of Kenneth Macpherson’s work on the film Borderline, H.D. notes that “those lights have been arranged, re-arranged deliberately focussed [sic]. Those who know anything, even of the technique of mere photography, realise that Macpherson sculpts literally with light” (H.D., 1998a, p. 227). Here, light is something to be managed and to be manipulated; it “is pliant, is malleable. Light is our friend and our god. Let us be worthy of it” (H.D., 1998c, p. 112). The notion that light is both a friend and a god is clearly articulated in “Projector” where the acknowledgment of light’s power in the making of films becomes the language of adoration:
O fair and blest, [light] strides forth young and pitiful and strong, a kind of blazing splendour and of gold, and all the evil and the tyrannous wrong that beauty suffered finds its champion, light who is god and song. (H.D., 1983a, pp. 349-350)
The entity in these lines is a benevolent deity that restores order and beauty even as it asserts its authority. Its authority, however, is not omnipotent. Adalaide Morris (2003) reads “Projector” as H.D.’s evocation of Apollo as “the god of cinema” (p. 104). While such a reading speaks to H.D.’s affinity for Greek classicism, it does not consider H.D.’s own acknowledgment that light is something that can be manipulated. H.D.’s assertion that light is pliant and malleable suggests that its deification is limited, subject to the vision and skills of the film’s director. Ultimately, too, light’s power exists through the “mighty rays” (H.D., 1983a, p. 350) of the projector that creates them. As such, light is a god dependent on media technology for both its existence and its ability to “snare . . . in a net” (H.D., 1983b, p. 356) the film’s audience.
Even so, H.D. continues her analogy of light as a god returned when she suggests that the cinema is a modern temple. In “Projector,” she writes that light “lifts up a fair head/ in a lowly place/shows his splendour/ in a little room” (H.D., 1983a, pp. 351). The poem’s speaker explains, “we had no temple and no temple fire” (H.D., 1983a, p. 351), suggesting that the return of light in the form of film creates a place of worship and meditation within the space of the cinema. This is reiterated in “Projector II” when the speaker declares the light “draws us to his altar;/ we worship who no more/ see star in Grecian water” (H.D., 1983b, pp. 356). The role of cinema as church is most clearly articulated in “The Mask and the Movietone” where H.D. (1998b) writes, “Then we sank into light, into darkness, the cinema palace . . . became a sort of temple . . . The cinema has become to us what the church was to our ancestors” (p. 116). For H.D., the cinema is a place to worship this new god, and the light-god created by the projector is a source of solace and comfort. This god promises relief from suffering by “turn[ing] . . . pain to bliss” (H.D., 1983b, p. 356). The ecstasy experienced by the worshippers in the cinema-temple is expressed by the poem’s speaker, who proclaims:
This is his gift; light, light a wave that sweeps us from old fears and powers and disenchantments; (H.D., 1983b, pp. 354)
The tone of religious ecstasy continues as the light-god speaks in the last three sections of “Projector II” when it declares the audience is one with him: “You are myself being free/ as bird/ or humming-bee” (H.D., 1983b, pp. 357). Although the light-god promises spiritual unification with its people, the reader is reminded of the physical limitations of this deity, for its power is confined to the space of the cinema. The light-god may promise the faithful they can “live lives that might have been,/ live lives that ever are” (H.D., 1983b, pp. 358), but this can be done only with their “souls upon the screen” (H.D., 1983b, p. 358). Without the darkness of the cinema, without the screen as a canvas for images, and, most importantly, without the projector’s “ray[s] of gilded light” (H.D., 1983b, p. 357), H.D.’s light-god has neither power nor existence.
In addition to film providing solace to the worshippers in the cinema-temple, H.D. believed that film had the ability to unify and to overcome differences. She expresses the belief that such unity is possible in “Projector” when light
in a new blaze of splendor calls the host to reassemble and to readjust all severing and differing of thought, all strife and strident bickering and rest; (H.D., 1983a, pp. 349)
Laura Marcus (1998) observes that “[t]he broader context for H.D.’s conceptualizations of film is, undoubtedly, the concept and dream of a ‘universal language’” (p. 102). A universal language would be possible if film images functioned as modern hieroglyphics. Such images would speak to the shared associations long embedded in the human conscious, associations buried but not eroded by differences in regional and national cultures. These images would exist between conscious minds and would transcend the barriers of language so that audience members would experience a shared understanding. Such a picture language would overcome the differences in culture and the lack of understanding resulting from spoken language, thus ensuring a reduction of misunderstandings between people and between nations, as well as a greater tolerance for one another’s differences. Such understanding and tolerance might prevent another Great War. These were the hopes H.D. had for the cinema and for the reawakened light-god in the 20th century.
Despite these hopes, H.D. expresses some ambivalence in her writing about the cinema as temple and light as the new god. Her celebration of light and her belief in the ability of film to overcome differences are tempered by her realization that a certain mindlessness and loss of agency might occur within the cinema-temple. In “The Mask and the Movietone,” she writes, “we depended on light, on some sub-strata of warmth,” likening the audience to “moths in darkness . . . hypnotized by cross currents and interacting shades of light and darkness” (H.D., 1998b, p. 116). If the audience is spellbound or enchanted, then spiritual or intellectual awareness becomes difficult, if not impossible. There is no need to engage with the images on the screen or with the narrative they represent. It is enough to observe the images and to receive light’s gift of bliss. The cinema, then, might very well be modernism’s opiate of the masses, serving to numb the audience to the pressures and challenges of daily life.
Of course, the light that hypnotizes the audiences throughout “Projector II” is possible only through the functioning of the projector. The projector of H.D.’s poems is a dynamic object, capable of exerting influence over and challenging the agency of those in its immediate proximity. It is this machine’s ability to influence, to hypnotize, that gives H.D. pause even as she celebrates film’s potential to create intersubjectivity among the audience members. While light might be the proximate god worshipped by the theater-going supplicants, the projector is the ultimate source of the light and the images. The light-god of the cinema promises solace and comfort, but it is the projector—the machine—to which the audience submits its will and agency. Thus, the silent pictures that H.D. believes will unify the audience are possible only because of the machine projecting those images upon the screen. Thus, the images are mechanized, just as is the light-god that is projected upon the screen. More importantly, the machine that projects both the light and the images sits behind the audience and so goes unnoticed in the dim light of the cinema. The projector then is a god that projects light away from itself. The supplicants, too, face away from the source of the light and become lost in the projector’s hypnotic effect of “interacting shades of light and darkness” (H.D., 1998b, p. 116), forgetting they are worshipping the product of a mechanized society. Ultimately, as the speaker of “Projector II” declares,
your being is my grace (he says) your life, my life; I catch you in my net of light on over-light; you are not any more, being one with snake and bear, with leopard and with panther; you have no life who taste all life with bear and lynx; (H.D., 1983b, pp. 356)
The ambivalence of these lines echoes H.D.’s own uncertainty toward the cinema that seemed to fulfill the dream of a universal language and intersubjectivity even as it obscured the individuality of those it united in its light.
Subjects, Objects, and Gramophones: Woolf and Intersubjectivity
Like H.D., Virginia Woolf was profoundly interested in the possibility of intersubjectivity created by media technologies. Even more than the poet, Woolf eventually grew to distrust mediated intersubjectivity, particularly auditory media, and the loss of human agency that could result. Woolf had a long interest in sound and the intersubjectivity it could produce and had previously considered sound’s ability to create connections between characters and their world in her earlier novels. Such connections were treated in a generally positive light. However, Between the Acts takes a much bleaker view of these connections, particularly in regard to machine-generated intersubjectivity. The gramophone’s agency, expressed by the machine’s sounds during the pageant, challenges the subjectivity of those gathered to watch the pageant. The machine’s chuffing and ticking are cues that direct the audience’s movements, so that the humans, while sharing feelings of patriotism elicited by the pageant and its music, become objects to be manipulated. The gramophone, by contrast, seems to develop a life of its own. By using the sounds made by the gramophone, Woolf is able to illustrate both the intersubjectivity that results when the ego’s boundaries are dissolved and the dangers that arise when the individual merges with a group, thus interrogating her own political views and diminishing hope in the face of the growing power of Nazi Germany. 7
Like many modernist writers who came of age during the late 19th century swell of media technologies, Woolf was preoccupied with the role of the senses in organizing and understanding individual experience, although her attention was drawn in particular to the aural. While she did not analyze sound or its impact upon her daily life, her diary entries are rich with references to sound. Despite her interest in sound, despite even her tendency to privilege the aural, Woolf, as Melba Cuddy-Keane (2000) observes, was “rather negative about the sound of the gramophone which frequently in her writing ‘brays’ or ‘blares’ or gets stuck in a worn groove” (p. 75). Nor was she overly enamored with the wireless or, more particularly, the BBC. Cuddy-Keane also notes that “Woolf . . . was not an extensive commentator on technology; its effect has to be found in its pervasive presence throughout her work” (p. 74). The few comments she makes tend to be found in her letters rather than in pieces written for public consumption. In her letter to Ethel Smyth dated January 6, 1933, Woolf (1975) writes,
I agree with you—the wireless is a humbug—a mere travesty and distortionment [sic]—I get more pain from it than pleasure. What with the Germans cutting in and the voice of your friend God Almighty—growling and grumbling. (p. 146)
Although she had reservations about sound technology, Woolf recognized that such technologies could play an important role in creating the connections between people that she tried to create in her own art.
Such connections were critical to both Woolf’s politics and her aesthetics. She writes in Three Guineas
that the public and private worlds are inseparably connected . . . A common interests unites us; it is one world, one life . . . we are reminded of other connections that lie far deeper than the facts on the surface . . . even now your letter tempts us . . . to listen not to the bark of the guns and the bray of the gramophones but to the voices of the poets, answering each other, assuring us of a unity that rubs out divisions as if they were chalk marks only. (Woolf, 1966, pp. 142-143)
The connections of which Woolf writes suggest the possibility of an intersubjectivity existing between people of different genders, different politics, and different socioeconomic statuses. Angela Frattarola (2009) argues that in many of Woolf’s novels, including in Between the Acts, sound is “used to connect a character to the world” (p. 139). Because, as David Michael Levin (1989) notes, sound does not “stop at the boundaries set by the egocentric body” (p. 32), sound is a means of overcoming the isolation that occurs when the visual is privileged. 8 As the physical body is penetrated by sound and the individual ego is overcome, connections are formed. These connections between character and the world, as well as to the other characters in the novel, become the means to create the intersubjectivity that Woolf believed could be achieved in the real world. Readers might be united by the experience of the novel, even as her characters are united by the sounds in their fictional world.
While Woolf idealized the intersubjectivity that might be possible through art, by the time she wrote her final novel, she had developed reservations about intersubjectivity and the use of media technology to promote the nationalist fervor on which Nazism fed. Between the Acts was written between 1938 and 1941, during a period in which Hitler began his assimilation of Europe. During this time, Woolf (1980) also listened to broadcasts by both Hitler and Churchill and recognized the tendency of any government to use sound to create unity among its citizens: “When the 12 planes went over, out to sea, to fight, last evening, I had I think an individual, not communal BBC dictated feeling. I almost instinctively wished them luck” (p. 306). That Woolf sought to create intersubjectivity within her work yet resisted the imposition of government inspired and controlled unity suggests a compelling ambivalence on her part.
In Between the Acts, the gramophone and its agency illustrate Woolf’s ambivalence toward media technologies and the intersubjectivity they can produce. Miss La Trobe, the director of the pageant, is astute in her selection and use of music to manage the audience, but the gramophone asserts itself so that it becomes the director of the audience even as Miss La Trobe directs the pageant. Audience management begins with the opening moments of the pageant when the “[c]huff, chuff, chuff sounded from the bushes” gets their attention: “Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play? . . . Some sat down hastily; others stopped talking guiltily” (Woolf, 1970, p. 76). The audience is prepared to respond to cues that the show is about to begin. Particularly compelling here is the audience’s willingness to attend to the “noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong” (Woolf, 1970, p. 76). It is not pleasant melodies nor profound dialogue that attracts the audience’s notice, but the chuffing of a machine that fails to work properly.
As the gramophone expresses its agency, its ability to influence is apparent: “All looked at the bushes. For the stage was empty. Chuff, chuff, chuff the machine buzzed in the bushes” (Woolf, 1970, p. 76). With no one on stage to begin the performance, the audience looks to the most obvious source for direction and confirmation of correct behavior: the misbehaving gramophone. In her discussion of how “technology has . . . produced our current understanding of sound,” Cuddy-Keane (2000) observes that “the phonograph enabled people to think of sound as an autonomous entity in itself” (pp. 70-71). Sound was not inextricably linked to a physical object in the way that color and shape had to be. As a result, the gramophone’s chuffing becomes the master of ceremonies, an unseen manager of the audience and the pageant. Through this persona, the gramophone continues its management role throughout the pageant. As with many amateur performances, the play is beset by forgotten lines, miscues, and general confusion among the actors, so that the stage is often empty. Without the guidance of the gramophone, even in its malfunctioning, the audience would have been adrift:
Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Could they talk? Could they move? No, for the play was going on. Yet the stage was empty; only the cows moved in the meadows; only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced. Nothing whatsoever appeared on the stage. (Woolf, 1970, p. 82)
Even when the stage is occupied by performers, the sounds and the music “brayed and blared” (Woolf, 1970, p. 79) by the gramophone are often all that the audience hears, for the “half [the] words” of the actors are “blown away” by the wind (Woolf, 1970, p. 78). It is the chuffing of the machine, not the speaking and singing of the performers, that dissolves ego boundaries; the gramophone’s sounds, however unpleasant they may be, unite the individuals in the audience. The intersubjective moment is created by a machine rather than by the actors. By tacitly agreeing to follow the implied directive of the gramophone, the audience members lose their agency, becoming objects to be manipulated by the machine and, as a result, losing some of what it means to be human.
Not only does the gramophone provide the initial cues to the audience that the performance is to begin, the machine’s agency is instrumental in directing audience behavior during the intervals between the pageant’s acts. At the close of the first act, the gramophone “chants,” “moans,” and “laments” the chorus, “Dispersed are we” (Woolf, 1970, p. 95), cuing the audience to move from their seats to enjoy the tea served during the intermission. The dispersing audience struggles momentarily with their dismissal—Dodge wonders whether to “go or stay” while Giles questions whom to follow (Woolf, 1970, p. 96). Both men, as well as the other audience members, are unsure how to disconnect themselves from the group. However, as the gramophone continues the chorus, the audience complies, dispersing, only to return when “[t]he music summon[s] them” (Woolf, 1970, p. 118) for the next act. They “sink down peacefully into the nursery rhyme . . . fold their hands and compose their faces” (Woolf, 1970, p. 122). Although the music and the nursery rhymes have been selected by Miss La Trobe, it is the gramophone’s blaring of these melodies that catches and holds the audience’s attention permeating their ego boundaries to reestablish intersubjectivity. During a later interval, it is the “tick, tick of the gramophone” (Woolf, 1970, p. 154) that holds the audience together despite their inclination to wander the gardens and see the house. Since the pageant’s opening moments, the audience has followed the machine’s directives—whether they were the clear instructions to disperse or the more obscure chuffing call to attend. The machine’s sounds have now penetrated their individual boundaries to unite them into a group, and it is to the machine’s directives that the audience most consistently responds, abandoning their agency to assume the role of the object, if only temporarily.
The gramophone also shapes the self-perception of the audience. As they attend to the sounds and music produced by the machine, the audience members become aware of the dissolution of their ego boundaries: “The inner voice, the other voice was saying: How can we deny that this brave music, wafted from the bushes is expressive of some inner harmony?” (Woolf, 1970, p. 119).
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This brave music unites the individual both as audience members and as British subjects; their experiences are similar, as is the language that attempts to organize and assign meaning to those experiences. Furthermore, they recognize the pressures of daily life in disrupting such intersubjectivity: “‘When we wake’ (some were thinking) ‘the day breaks us with its hard mallet blows.’ ‘The office . . . compels disparity’” (Woolf, 1970, p. 119). By contrast to their daily lives, the dissolution of their ego boundaries precipitated by the gramophone’s sounds and music allows the audience to enjoy moments of intersubjectivity and a sense of belonging. No one is excluded for they understand that “(m)usic wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken” (Woolf, 1970, p. 120). For a while, they are no longer the “scraps, orts, and fragments” (Woolf, 1970, p. 189) that is their usual state of being but are joined into a unified whole. The unity achieved by the audience is reflective of Lucy’s worldview, which includes all living things:
Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselves—all are one. If discordant, producing harmony—if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head . . . and so . . . we reach the conclusion that all is harmony, could we hear it. And we shall. (Woolf, 1970, p. 175)
The music La Trobe has chosen speaks to the sense of the audience as “British”; however, it is the gramophone that first unifies the pageant’s attendees as an audience, which is a more immediate and physically relevant collective than the national identity provided by La Trobe. As such, the individual audience members are acquiescent in this union with the larger group.
While the audience members embrace their union with the larger group, they also resist complete and lasting immersion. This resistance begins even as they assemble prior to the pageant’s prelude. Initially, the audience is defined as having nothing to do—They have gathered on the lawn only to wait for chairs to be brought. Although the gramophone’s sounds have not yet begun to dissolve ego boundaries, those milling about the lawn have begun the transformation from individual to group. However, they resist this consolidation:
They were silent. They stared at the view as if something might happen in one of those fields to relieve them of the intolerable burden of sitting silent, doing nothing in company. Their minds and bodies were too close, yet not close enough. We aren’t free, each one of them felt separately, to feel or think separately . . . We’re too close; but not close enough. (Woolf, 1970, p. 65)
This tension between the need to separate and the need to belong is lessened by the gramophone’s initial chuffs and ticks, but the individual’s resistance to complete immersion in the group never completely fades as is illustrated during the interval following the “Victorian Age.” The music has stopped, and the gramophone chuffs and ticks in the bushes. Now, however, the sounds that had earlier cued the audience’s behavior and held the individuals together as a group become “maddening” (Woolf, 1970, p. 176). Their earlier intersubjectivity has been challenged by their competing perceptions of the Victorian era—a period within living memory of some of the audience. Mrs. Jones recalls her home and her father reading, believes “it was beautiful” although possibly a bit “unhygienic” (Woolf, 1970, pp. 173-174), while Etty Springett views the act as “[c]heap and nasty” (Woolf, 1970, p. 173). Lucy does not “believe . . . that there ever were such people. Only you and me and William dressed differently” (Woolf, 1970, p. 175). Lucy’s assessment speaks to her general belief in an underlying harmony that unifies all life, that any differences are as superficial as one’s dress. For the others, however, their differing perceptions begin the reassembly of the boundaries that normally separate the individual, so they begin to feel “caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle” (Woolf, 1970, p. 176). The dissolution of the group continues throughout the last act, “Present Time. Ourselves,” culminating in the physical dispersal of the audience to the gramophone’s repetitious “Dispersed Are We” (Woolf, 1970, p. 196).
Karen Schneider (1989) suggests that psychic distress of the war “undermined [Woolf’s] faith in the validity of her vision of an ultimate, unified reality underlying apparent fragmentation” (p. 95). Certainly, the “retreating, withdrawing, and dispersing” (Woolf, 1970, p. 202) of the pageant’s audience following their unification speaks to this loss of vision. However, this loss was also a growing concern on Woolf’s part of the dangers associated with a highly unified group. The rise of Nazism was a contemporary illustration of the power of a collective mind that tolerated no differences or deviations from its worldview. Anyone outside the group of fascism became an object, an item subject to removal from society and, ultimately, disposal. That Hitler used media technology, a technology that earlier had brought Woolf so much pleasure, must have been even more disturbing. Woolf’s use of the gramophone and its dynamism to illustrate the dangers of mediated sound as it penetrates ego boundaries to create, shape, and manage human emotion speaks to her anxiety. Galia Benziman (2006) has argued that, ultimately, Woolf’s last novel suggests that “[t]he self-image is no longer that of ‘me’ and ‘others’ as separate, but of a big, inclusive ‘we,’ which, unlike the nationalistic or totalitarian ‘we,’ is not stable and monolithic but accommodates difference” (p. 69). This seems an overly hopeful reading of the text, for after the play ends, the individuality of the audience members returns.
The most hopeful aspect of the novel’s conclusion lies in the final moments as Giles and Isa prepare to do emotional battle. Isa is well-aware of Giles’s infidelity, while he suspects her desire to be unfaithful. Initially, “they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born” (Woolf, 1970, p. 219). While the gramophone’s sounds effected the most widespread and lasting intersubjectivity during the pageant, even the words that Giles and Isa will speak in anger will have the potential to penetrate the boundaries of their individual selves. There is the potential for intersubjectivity, however briefly, between the two that comes from the embodied voice rather than the mediated directives of a machine. The greater hope is the new life that might arise from this intersubjectivity. It may be that this life is better equipped to accommodate differences, to exist uniquely even among an inclusive “we,” and to resist the dangers of thinking with the herd. That hope springs to life in the inclusive final sentence of the novel: “They spoke” (Woolf, 1970, p. 219). In the end, Woolf believes that intersubjectivity comes from the embodied voice of the human speaking directly to another.
Conclusion
Both H.D. and Woolf believed that art could unify people of disparate social, cultural, and national backgrounds. Both writers also understood that the dynamic and influential nature of media technologies could create an intersubjectivity that challenged individual notions of the self, thus destabilizing the privileged position of the subject. Although both writers valued intersubjectivity, the rise of the National Socialist Party to power in Germany and Hitler’s use of media technologies to encourage uniformity of thought suggest that intersubjectivity might be as dangerous as extreme individualism.
It is unclear how H.D.’s perception of film may have changed with the rise of Nazism. After about 1930, her interest in film—at least as expressed in her writing—seems to have faded. Her last essay for Close Up was published in 1929, and her last essay about film was contained in the pamphlet Borderline, published in 1930. It is likely that the advent of sound in film played a role in her shifting attention. H.D. (1998b) writes at the end of the “Mask and the Movietone” that “[t]here is something inside that the Movietone would eventually . . . destroy, utterly, for many of us” (p. 119). The object of destruction is the cinema as temple: “that half-world of lights and music and blurred perception” (H.D., 1998b, p. 119). The sound film might produce a “‘bottled’ America” (H.D., 1998b, p. 117) that would improve understanding between nations, but it also challenged the film image as a universal language, as well as the shared experience of the audience in the half-light of the cinema. Ultimately, her ambivalence toward both the introduction of sound to film and the loss of agency on the part of the audience created a sense of distrust in machine-mediated intersubjectivity so that her attention turned from the cinema during the early 1930s back to poetry and prose as her primary means of artistic expression.
While H.D. believed that film failed as a means of achieving intersubjectivity, she did not believe that shared consciousness or shared understanding were unachievable goals. During the late 1930s, she became involved with the Mass-Observation project. Georgina Taylor (2001) describes the project as
committed to assembling the facts of everyday existence in this period of crisis, an anthropology of ordinary lives carried out by ordinary people. It sought to move away from a focus on individual production and to remove a distinction between an intellectual or artistic elite and the “masses” by gathering the opinions of people from all classes and backgrounds and documenting very ordinary lives. (p. 149)
Such a project must have appealed to H.D. and her desire to find commonalities and understanding among people. As war became inevitable and the hope of nations coming to understand one another faded, H.D. placed her faith in the people of Great Britain finding a point of intersubjectivity through the Mass-Observation project, which she hoped would “help break down these barriers that make eventually for prejudice and at the last analysis for war” (as cited in Taylor, 2001, p. 150). Germany and Great Britain might not find common ground, but H.D. believed the people of Britain could. Furthermore, she believed they could be united through sharing responses and observations rather than through the nationalist propaganda that had created such patriotic fervor during the First World War. Intersubjectivity was desirable but not at the expense of the individual’s thought, experience, or agency.
Woolf, by contrast, was less hopeful as she witnessed the rise of German Nazism even as she drafted Between the Acts. The exploitation of the aural—the sense Woolf privileged most—to create the intersubjectivity required to grow the National Socialist party to power must have troubled her deeply. The exploitation of media technology informed her last novel, as the intersubjectivity she had hoped to achieve in her art is brought to fruition within the pages of Between the Acts only to be shattered when the pageant’s cast forces the audience to look at themselves in the mirrors. But even more damning is the manipulation of the audience during their moments of intersubjectivity, for they become little more than objects to be directed and managed, by a machine no less. If inanimate objects can exercise such influence, what then separates the human from the object? If intersubjectivity is stretched into Nazism, then what hope is there for a common understanding that can overcome differences while still respecting those differences? These are the questions Woolf poses in Between the Acts, and these are the questions that for her are never resolved.
For both H.D. and Woolf, the promise of media technology as the means of bridging differences and creating intersubjectivity falls far short of their expectations. As H.D. (1998b) writes, “Too much mechanical perfection would serve only I fear, to threaten that world of half light” (p. 120). She is writing of the sound film’s intrusion into her universal language of image, but the mechanical perfection of which she writes may well refer to the visual and aural media technologies themselves and their abilities to influence the masses in numbers and ways that print media never could. The half light of an intersubjectivity that acknowledges and allows differences is threatened by the technologies that fill the air waves and the cinemas with propaganda that tolerates no variation in thought or ideology. The promise of “a perfect medium” is lost to a war machine.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.