1. She of the long-face, the dolorous countenance. Poster-daughter for creative depression. Prototype of future celebrity suicides of the female literary persuasion, i.e. Sexton, Plath. Dour downer, star-subject of Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours and celebrated film of the same moniker in which Nicole Kidman embodied everyone's idea of Woolf if not already then from this day forward, the archetype of the tortured, over-sensitive, tragic artistic genius. Woolf as grim, saturnine, always a day or two from filling her pockets full of rocks and wandering off into the nearest river. Goodbye cruel world, glub-glub.
It's hard to picture Virginia Woolf any other way. It's certainly unimaginable to think of her as the life of any party, as a cut-up, as a barrel of laughs. In fact, it's hard to imagine her laughing at all, shaking her belly like a bowl full jelly.
Who would guess based on the common (mis)perception of Virginia Woolf as a spinstersh sourpuss, a repressed lesbian in a closet still scented with Victorian mothballs, an Emily Dickinson with a husband, that she could write a novel as hysterically funny as Orlando?
2. But she did. Orlando is a madcap picaresque novel that playfully masquerades as a biography; its written on the fast and loose model first drawn up by another anachronistic rebel-scribe, Laurence Sterne, (Woolf herself credited Sterne as an influence)whose Tristam Shandy pioneered the practice of practically every trick in the postmodern playbook, leap-frogging several ages and literary movements not yet invented to do it.
3. Orlando, the subject of this faux biography, never existed, never could have existed, but by the end of the novel, you wish could have existed. You wish it so thoroughly you're almost convinced she did.
When we first meet Orlando, he is a young noble born in Elizabethan England. He lives three centuries, becomes a court favorite of Elizabeth I, spots Shakespeare in a scullery, changes pronouns in the middle of the story from he to she, gets married, has a baby, becomes a famous poet, and is still alive and barely thirty-six years old when you reach finis in the year 1928.
How the hell did that happen, you ask yourself.
3. It was, I believe, her effort to see things as they were apparent to other people that wore her down. The bus, the lamp-post, the teacup—how formidable she found them, everyday things! said Elizabeth Bowen.
But within the realm of the novel, Woolf was at home and at peace. Within the novel, she was happy, even playful; she could do anything. If writing is a magic spell, and it is, she wove a reality out of sheer enchantment. She was the life of the parties she threw between the covers of her books. Here, if nowhere else, she was alive, more fully alive than most. And she was, when she wanted to be, a laugh-riot.
4. Orlando, Woolf writes, pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, "Done!" She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued. "And if I were dead, it would be just the same!" she exclaimed.
The problems start when the novel ends. The problem is life as it's lived by the consensus. Life can be so much more…well, lively. That one can imagine a life so much richer, exciting, and varied than the single, well-proscribed one we're allowed in reality puts one at risk for madness; at the very least, it leads almost inevitably to chronic frustration and thence towards depression.
5. In the course of this fantastical narrative Woolf compresses history and time, twists, if not altogether defies logic, injects philosophical asides and literary criticism, and breaks fictional convention by talking directly to the reader. She employs many of the techniques of the meta-novel that are often (mistakenly) believed to have been created in the last thirty years or so. Orlando was written fourteen years shy of a century ago.
6. For all the antic fun, Woolf exhibits her usual verbal virtuosity, so Orlando isn't exactly an easy read. No more than Beckett is, though the mordant wit is much the same. In between the yucks, Woolf has important things to say about life and literature, gender and sex, mortality and immortality. She's the sort of writer who can make you laugh and think at the same time. It's startling to realize that a novel like Orlando would have a hard time finding the ready and appreciative audience that was waiting for it back in 1928. What would readers today make of a novel where the main character changes sex and lives three hundred years without aging and without being a vampire and without stepping into a time-machine; in fact, without any authorial explanation or concession to rationality at all all? If they didn't object to the transsexuality one suspects they'd object to the irrationality. Have we as a culture really become so dull, so intolerant, so earthbound, so unimaginative, so orthodox, so blinkered to alternative, so much the slaves of consensus reality, so indoctrinated into worshipping that supreme fiction dubbed by the Priesthood of Accountability as The Truth, so, dare we even say it…un-fictional?
7. Of Orlando, Woolf writes: She had, it seems, no difficulty in sustaining the different parts, for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied. From the probity of breeches she turned to the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, sang the Kinks.
Lou Reed: Holly came from Miami, F.L.A., hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A., plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs and then he was a she.
Woolf said it all before. She writes, He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth!we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman.
And that's that. As simple as that, Orlando goes from man to woman. He to she. Husband to Wife. It's all so mind-bogglingly simple one wonders why people still don't get it. Men and women are a lot more interchangeable than society allows itself to admit.
Like the other leaps of imagination in Orlando, Woolf doesn't explain but rather announces this rather extraordinary turn of affairs. She says, The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact: Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.
Too bad that even today we can't allow people a similar ease of fluidity to express the various sides of themselves, nevertheless leave it to an individual to decide for themselves what suits them best.
8. For Woolf, identity is multiple. One can be one person in the morning, another in the afternoon, another at tea, another while taking a stroll through the garden, another while in the market, something entirely different by dinner time, change again in the parlor by the fire, and the exact opposite of all that when slipping between the sheets at bedtime.
And still, through all those metamorphoses, not be "one-self."
9. Orlando falls in love with a Russian princess who breaks his heart, runs away from another woman to become ambassador in Constantinople, escapes a massacre during a Turkish uprising, meets literary luminaries such as Swift, Addison, and Pope, lives as a woman among the gypsies, returns on board ship to England and falls in love with a sea captain. The episodes follow so rapidly upon one another, the years pass, the centuries changes and it all happens so smoothly, in the blink of an eye, from one paragraph to another before you even realize it's happened. This is the magic of Virginia Woolf. It all seems perfectly plausible, this gender-bending-time-bending act. This is Virginia Woolf playing your imagination like the virtuoso she is.
10. Reality, so-called, is intolerable to such as Woolf for precisely the reason that its not allowed to operate with the freedom of the imagination.
For Woolf, the novel is nothing less than a model of the human mind and, as such, a model for the way we truly perceive and experience "reality." In the life of the imagination a man can become a woman, a life can last three hundred plus years, one can travel to any exotic place on the planet past, present, or future, meet any personage alive or dead or not yet born and still be at one's place at table in time for dinner. Woolf's novels work the way the mind works: compressing, extending, slowing down time, reconstituting memories, inventing and altering character according to one's own desires, not according to the clock or convention, and certainly not according to the demands and expectations of other people.
Other people seem content—or is it misguided, brainwashed, repressed?—to live one life with one name with one identity. For Woolf such a life is not only not enough, it is an intolerable hell. She argues that we each have a thousand lives imprisoned inside, a thousand voices, each of them clamoring for release and expression. We'd need at least three centuries to exhaust all the possibilities. A life fully lived so that each of those identities is allowed it's head would last—or at least would seem to last—three centuries. It would be a far richer life than those most people have ever dared to live.
11. And so Woolf's unstinting belief in literature. Not as an escape from reality, but as an escape into reality itself, into the concretization of the actual workings of the mind and the experience of consciousness. Apropos, she has Orlando turn her back on the "manly" worldly actions of her forbears and devote her life to the pursuit of letters.
To Orlando, Woolf writes, there was a glory about a man who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all the glories of blood and state. To his imagination it seemed as if even the bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured. They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow between their lips.
He soon perceived that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom were not half so arduous as this which he now undertook, to win immortality against the English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigors of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good, read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple…and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
12. Of course, this kind of a life poses a problem for the biographer and Woolf has great fun playing the aggrieved author of Orlando, watching in frustration for a now literary Orlando to actually do something.
Thought and life are poles asunder…she writs in mock exasperation, Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind…Or suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we could out with our pens and write. For there would be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. And if killing a wasp is the merest trifle compared with killing a man, still it is a fitter subject for novelist or biographer than this mere wool-gathering; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and an ink pot.
Thought and imagination—are of no importance whatsoever. If the subject of one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.
The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There were sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or two rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One's mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly, about this same life. Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a hob, Life, life, what art thou?
13. Yes, it's always that in the end: what is life? That is the most important question of all and it is the question that most people have no time or inclination to ponder, and most novelists and poets, pandering to them, have no incentive to try to answer unless they care to be doomed to obscurity.
14. And what of obscurity? Woolf who always had mixed feelings for fame and success asks this question throughout her work, and never more directly than in Orlando. Her heroine spends three centuries laboring over her poem "The Oak Tree" only to question whether the recognition she at last received was worth the seeking.
What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Woolf asks through Orlando. What has seven editions to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself—a voice answering a voice. What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years?
15. The world outside us, then, is of far less importance than the world inside us. It might not even be an exaggeration to say that the outside world is of almost no significance at all except as it provides us with the raw material with which to weave our own and the identity of the person we were meant to be within it. Its a world of words that Woolf weaves, a magic spell, and, if she left this world we can only presume that she did so because this world hadn't enough magic in it and I find that to be as good a reason for leaving a world as any.
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