The King of Fools and the Bishop of Unreason: Virginia Wolf's Carnivalesque Vision in Between the Acts.

Abstract

Impelled by the urgency of a society threatened by the imminence of an international conflict, along with the oppressive impositions of growing fascism, Virginia Woolf proposes a radically unconventional insight into this world through the determined subversion of the established values and patterns. Accordingly, it is by setting up a carnivalesque pageant of the world, ruled over by a catalogue of grotesques directly inherited from the carnival tradition, such as the King of Fools or the Abbot of Unreason – its ecclesiastical embodiment - that the narrator is enabled to promote the erosion and debunking of any form of centralized authority. Furthermore, as pertains to a carnival paradigm and its politics of praise and abuse, only through the debasement of the self-enclosing, monadic forms of power operating either in the name of royalty, Empire, religion, or patriarchy, will the process of regeneration of those prevailing structures and conceptions be thus fostered.