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Orlando - Spine 2015
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Discussion - Week Two - Orlando - Chapter IV - VI
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Reading Orlando while keeping in mind that it is at some level a portrait of Vita Sackville-West makes one wonder how deeply Vita and Woolf knew each other.So far, the book fixates on how attractive Orlando is as a woman or a man, and how sensitive. But Orlando's personality is nowhere apparent, and the activities attributed to Orlando (his governing, his "bold male activity" such as drinking and gambling) all happen off-screen.
What we're given, physical appeal aside, is s character that is emotionally frail and therefore (almost necessarily) of an independent mind, adept at social pursuits but a bungling writer.
I kind of wonder how Vita felt when she read it.
Mod
So far, the book fixates on how attract..."
I think this is a case where you might say that Orlando is "based on" Vita, rather than a true portrait or biography.
Regarding Orlando's personality, the meta-fiction here is that 300+-year-old Orlando is writing about him/herself, and so the activities are memoirs/memories rather than depictions of activity in real time. And also, also, an autobiographer isn't going to give a blow-by-blow of every glass tilted and every tart squired, but rather will keep the less savory actions off-screen, as you say, for the sake of public decencies, both real and imagined...
Mkfs wrote: "But Orlando's personality is nowhere apparent, and the activities attributed to Orlando (his governing, his "bold male activity" such as drinking and gambling) all happen off-screen...."I find Woolf's style of writing most interesting. With her stream-of-consciousness novels (To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway) she seems to remove the reader, and sometimes the character, by allowing the reader directly inside the character's head. I'm not sure how the rest of you felt about this style, but I felt I was connected to the character, but not so much to what was happening around them. Once again, in Orlando, even with a different style of writing, Woolf seems to remove both character and, therefore, the reader, from the action and sets them floating in a world of ......... well, I don't know what. Beautiful prose, that's for sure, but as yet I'm uncertain as to what else I'm getting out of it. I wonder if this book was more of an effort to connect with Vita, instead of a larger reading public. It almost seems as if it's a private joke/experience between them ...... ????
Cleo wrote: " I wonder if this book was more of an effort to connect with Vita, instead of a larger reading public. It almost seems as if it's a private joke/experience between them ...... ????"That is very likely to be the case, judging by what Woolf herself has said about the book.
Orlando feels very much removed from the reader and the action, a strange situation for a protagonist to find hirself (a nod to R A Wilson there) in.
Reading To The Lighthouse manymanymany years ago turned me off to Virgina Woolf for a long time.
I'm enjoying Orlando immensely, and my tastes have changed enough that it's probably time to give Lighthouse another chance. I might find it more agreeable now that I know what the author is trying to do with time.
On the Orlando as Vita thing, I've been thinking, actually, that it seems in some ways like Woolf is as least as interested in lampooning (or at least describing) historical periods and values as in describing an individual person. She's sort of pasted all of English history onto Vita's legs, if you will, and I think it's partly for this reason that it doesn't seem like a portrait of an actual person. I'm still reading though (slower than usual as these last couple of weeks have been somewhat tiring), so maybe that will change. It was the passages early on in the second part that speak of Orlando growing up, Orlando transforming her entire way of thinking that made me think that a description was being made of an age, rather than a person.
in other news, I laughed out loud at the attempts to woo Orlando on the part of the cross-dressing duke.
Nicole wrote: "in other news, I laughed out loud at the attempts to woo Orlando on the part of the cross-dressing duke. "For me, it was the name Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.
Not to mention the sentences that come just before:Towering dark against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him, she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped.
'Madam,' the man cried, leaping to the ground, 'you're hurt!'
'I'm dead, sir!' she replied.
A few minutes later, they became engaged.
The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name.
Is it any surprise he's called Mamaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine?
I laughed like an archduke with a toad down his front.
Nicole wrote: "...it seems in some ways like Woolf is as least as interested in lampooning (or at least describing) historical periods and values as in describing an individual person...."As I recall, some rivalry with her father's work (writing biographies, sort of official ones?) appears in Orlando as well?
The movie reminded me of the fascination with what Woolf did with this book that I felt at the time I read it. If I find a day stretcher or get stringent about other interests, I may be compelled to read the book again. I liked then, and still do, the stretching of a single life out over centuries. Virginia did pretty much sustain the privileged status (class) of her character across his/her life.
I agree that it has the feel of a book perhaps written for a particular audience, but still with a recognition that it would be read by a broader one.
Cleo wrote: "Mkfs wrote: "But Orlando's personality is nowhere apparent, and the activities attributed to Orlando (his governing, his "bold male activity" such as drinking and gambling) all happen off-screen......"I remember reading in an introduction of the book that there were some critics that felt the book was not written for a broader audience as much as it was written for Woolf and "her friends." I believe they called it a coterie. I can only imagine the inside jokes and winks this novel has in it.
Lily wrote: "As I recall, some rivalry with her father's work (writing biographies, sort of official ones?) appears in Orlando as well?...."..."
That makes sense. Her father was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and in Orlando she wrote: "The true length of a person's life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter for dispute. That sounds slightly competitive to me. As if she's asserting her individuality perhaps by challenging something her father was involved in ......???
Felicia wrote: "I remember reading in an introduction of the book that there were some critics that felt the book was not written for a broader audience as much as it was written for Woolf and "her friends." I believe they called it a coterie. I can only imagine the inside jokes and winks this novel has in it. ..."
Thanks for this, Felicia! That's exactly what I was feeling. I wonder if at this point in her life she was able to write from either personal pleasure or personal motivation without too much care for audience. I still can't shake the feeling that there are a number of pointed personal references, to Vita I assume, that the average reader would not be able to distinguish.
The edition I'm reading has extensive notes that identify specific incidents from the lives of Vita and her family and ancestors. In addition, it reproduces marginalia by Nigel Nicolson, Vita's son, in his copy. So it's definitely filled with in-jokes. But I don't think that these are the primary interest or point of the book; I think they're like little extras for her friends, but the substance of the novel is, for me anyway, elsewhere.I think the march through history is the principal point, and it is entwined with a do-the-clothes-make-the-man (or woman) type of question (literally for Orlando, as she cross-dresses back and forth), that interrogates where an individual identity stops and where cultural context begins. Is Orlando the same person in the Victorian era, desperate to populate the ring finger of her left hand, as she was before when she wanted life and a lover? Can you change something so huge and be the same person? For that matter, does she or does she not stay the same when she changes sex? These are the big questions, I think, and they are accessible with or without the in-jokes, which read to me a little like an easter egg in a video game: it's fun for those in the know, but it's hardly the point.
Such is the indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters down anyone who tries to make stand against it far more effectually than those who bend its own way. Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.
I think a question like that one is available to everyone, even if they don't know that the dogs had the same names as Vita's actual dogs.
Nicole wrote: "But I don't think that these are the primary interest or point of the book; I think they're like little extras for her friends, but the substance of the novel is, for me anyway, elsewhere...."Don't worry ...... I don't think anyone was saying that they should be the primary interest of the books. As you said, they perhaps are interesting bits to explore, but they are also really parts of a book that do make a whole. They can also be distracting and I find myself wondering sometimes if the "egg" is something is should try to pick up, or it that "egg" not for me and it's fine to pass over.
Nicole wrote: "...Can you change something so huge and be the same person?..."Well, what aspects of identity is Woolf asking her readers to explore? I find the continuity she posits, with all its discontinuities in place and gender, more satisfying than Dante's about the progress of souls in eternity.
Lily wrote: "Well, what aspects of identity is Woolf asking her readers to explore? "The bit where Orlando muses about how the change in gender (and in clothes) has altered her personality is a bit underplayed. I expected there to be more in that vein, but the novel quickly moved on.
What I found interesting was the selection of characters who remained immortal: Mr Green, for example, and the Archduke (though that is implied more than depicted), but none of the housekeeping staff, nor historical figures like Alexander Pope and the royalty.
There was that bit at the end, also, where she says that everyone has thousands of selves, but then there's like a self-in-charge that sorts or manages the others, the one that decides to call up the memory of another one, that has access to them all. So continuity but then also, like, not.
Jim wrote: "Regarding Orlando's personality, the meta-fiction here is that 300+-year-old Orlando is writing about him/herself, and so the activities are memoirs/memories rather than depictions of activity in real time. And also, also, an autobiographer isn't going to give a blow-by-blow of every glass tilted and every tart squired, but rather will keep the less savory actions off-screen, as you say, for the sake of public decencies, both real and imagined... "I'm sorry I am so late in joining in. I just finished it yesterday. I don't agree with the concept of an autobiography. It seems to me the narrator should be regarded as almost a non-entity, only made relevant in the asides he/she addresses to the reader about the impossibility of writing the biography with such a limited amount of background information. It sounded to me as though Woolf herself was the implied narrator, but that may have been an overstretch on my part.
It does seem to be a kind of roman à clef, more accessible to Woolf's coterie than to a wider audience. However, the points made above on the relevance to the wider audience of the questions it raises are well developed. I don't have much more to add to it.
What really caught my attention was the change in the whole climate of the country, quite literally, with the arrival of the 19th century and the Victorian age. Though it is rather background, it does strike a point that Orlando's personality really suffered with the change in the spirit of the age. I was surprised at the confusion she suffered when arriving in post-industrial London, as if transported into a Dickensian world.
Every inch of the pavement was crowded. Streams of people, threading in and out between their own bodies and the lurching and lumbering traffic with incredible agility, poured incessantly east and west. Along the edge of the pavement stood men, holding out trays of toys, and bawled. At corners, women sat beside great baskets of spring flowers and bawled. Boys running in and out of the horses' noses, holding printed sheets to their bodies, bawled too, Disaster! Disaster! At first Orlando supposed that she had arrived at some moment of national crisis; but whether it was happy or tragic, she could not tell.
I thought it extremely telling and predictable, really, that Woolf, who had directly suffered the influence of the Victorian age and the customs and morals established in it, would react so negatively to the change in times. The other eras are more removed, and may be subject to a historical myopia, to a romanticising and fantasising about past times. The era immediately before her own would elicit a more gut reaction, because it meant the time of her parents, of oppression, of outdated views of the world. Her return to the countryside and the beauty of the organic society depicted in Orlando's estate would be very attractive.
Despite this one negative reaction to that period of time, I thought the book did a great service in making it possible to empathise with different times and different conventions, thus highlighting what is common throughout, our humanity. So, despite the change in environment, and even such a substantial change as one in gender, the basic forces that guide our lives remain ultimately the same. We can relate to people all through the ages and see that deep down we're not so different, after all.
Really great thoughts, Simone. I found excepts from Woolf's diary that indicate that she did not really view this book as serious writing but as fun ..... a sort of break from serious writing. Her writing is luscious as usual and the story entertaining but it had kind of left me flat ..... it was nice to know I was looking for something that probably wasnt' there. I can never tell with Woolf. ;-)As for her reaction to the change in eras, it does make sense to me. People usually think the time they lived in earlier in their lives superior to what comes later. I don't think the people who lived in the Victoria age would necessarily feel the same way about it as we do.
I so agree with your last paragraph and very well said!
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aPriL does feral sometimes
(last edited Jan 24, 2015 02:43AM)
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rated it 4 stars
The book is incredibly full of wonderful images and amazing descriptions. But while the front half is structured and has a plot, characters, forward momentum, satiric digs at everything, the last half is more like an attack of PTSD (which I have personal knowledge of). I know all of the historical criticism says this is about her lover Vita, a disguised biography and literary experiment for the amusement of her milieu, but it instead feels to me like an interior mapping of the workings of a traumatized mentally-ill brain. PTSD feels occasionally like your personality has dissolved, lost its borders and shape, and time certainly is mixed up with flashbacks - memory is as unreliable as Modern or Post-Modern Literature genres. Reality feels unreal, social situations feel inane, and ordinary life interests don't matter much anymore. Small details are magnified as if on HD television, and sounds are overly bright.
I am conflicted about revealing this because I'm over it and I'm elderly, but people get weird. However, the last half definitely struck me as the writing of someone exploring the dimensions of processing reality through PTSD. Just saying.
aPriL eVoLvEs (ex-Groot) wrote: "while the front half is structured and has a plot, characters, forward momentum, satiric digs at everything, the last half is more like an attack of PTSD"That is a very interesting insight, aPriL eVoLvEs. I agree that the second half is much more loosely structured. It did get a bit hard to follow in some parts, especially with the ever-changing images flashing in the character's mind. The parts connected to her husband, Marmaduke, are especially like this, as if the relationship and marriage were a whirlwind she couldn't make heads or tails of. The whole image of the boat in the waves was a sort of intrusive thought that made her mind digress, and it seemed to pull her further apart from the world around her.
Simone wrote: "...but it instead feels to me like an interior mapping of the workings of a traumatized mentally-ill brain. ..."Fascinating observation. Let's see, Orlando was published 1928, Woolf died by walking into the river in 1941. I haven't read Lee's biography ( Virginia Woolf ). It might be interesting sometime to peruse the pages related to the period when Woolf wrote Orlando.
Wiki comment on Orlando: "...It was meant to console Vita for the loss of her ancestral home, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando, the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked."I feel as if I don't know enough of Vita's bio to fully appreciate the book. Nor of the work of Virginia's father. So, I just enjoy it on the surface for this long, Methuselah life with many phases and changes.
Oh, and I neglected to mention 'triggering'. If there was a bad thing twenty years ago, and something new, say, like breaking up with Vita, occurs, it can bring up symptoms as severe as in the previous episode. What people will see is a reaction that seems overwhelmingly inappropriate to the situation. I think I read only one thing by Woolf before. I am very interested in reading a biography of her at this point.
Mod
Let's try and steer this back to the text, rather than analyzing a dead woman...
Nicole wrote: "The edition I'm reading has extensive notes that identify specific incidents from the lives of Vita and her family and ancestors. In addition, it reproduces marginalia by Nigel Nicolson, Vita's son..."Nicole -- is it the Oxford University Press edition that has the notes to which you refer? (My best guess, based on your bookshelf.)
(Neither of the editions, my own and a library copy, I have at the moment has such notes. Maybe not now, but sometime I'll try to find one like the one you describe. This book seems to disappear and then reappear in my reading processes.)
Yes, I think I matched the edition on my shelves while I was reading, and Oxford sounds right. It was just chance: this is the edition that the library had on its shelves (it's back there now so I can't double check).
Reading this lede put me in mind of the acceleration of time over the course of Orlando
For more than two centuries, time has been felt to be passing more and more quickly. Scholars tell us that since the twin revolutions of the 18th century — industrial and political — a general sense of time speeding up has been recorded with regularity in documents of all kinds. Political and technical progress somehow meant that people were always losing ground, unable to keep up, out of breath. Rousseau spoke in Émile of the encroaching tourbillon social irresistibly overtaking everything, and the enduring popularity of Walden no doubt owes something to its condemnation of the way we squander rather than savor our time. Marx’s bourgeoisie, of course, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production,” and toward the end of the century, Nietzsche diagnosed the malady of the modern age in “the madly thoughtless shattering and dismantling of all foundations, their dissolution into a continual evolving that flows ceaselessly away, the tireless unspinning and historicizing of all there has ever been by modern man, the great cross-spider at the node of the cosmic web” — lines that come from the aptly titled Untimely Meditations.
-- from Too Fast, Too Furious in the latest n+1.
It almost seems as if it's a private joke/experience between them ...... ????I found the second half of the book interminable, for just this reason. I still have not gone back to the last chapter, which may still yet redeem the book, but I feel so reluctant to finish this I doubt I'll ever go back. I was surprised--I thought To The Lighthouse had such a remarkable depth to it, and yet I see none of that in Orlando. I realize I'm in the minority with this opinion, but I'm afraid it just didn't resonate with me.
Bryan wrote: "It almost seems as if it's a private joke/experience between them ...... ????I found the second half of the book interminable, for just this reason. I still have not gone back to the last chapte..."
I felt the same way as you, Bryan, with both Orlando and To the Lighthouse. I dug around and here are a few quotes from Woolf that may illuminate the book a little more and our experience of it:
" "I have written this book quicker than any; and it is all a joke; and yet gay and quick reading, I think; a writer's holiday."
"......... begun ..... as a joke: and now rather too long for my liking. It may fall between stools; being too long for a joke, and too frivolous for a serious book."
"Orlando taught me how to write a direct sentence; taught me continuity and narrative and how to keep the realities at bay. But I purposely avoided, of course, any other difficulty. I never got down to my depths and made shapes square up, as I did in the Lighthouse ...... I want fun. I want fantasy."
And about writing serious vs. light fiction:
"My notion is that there are offices to be discharged by talent for the relief of genius: meaning that one has the play side; the gift when it is mere gift, unapplied gift; and the gift when it is serious, going to business. And one relieves the other."
I think if I'd been aware that it was going to be just a light, frivilous read, I could have enjoyed it more and not expected to be "informed and amused". And, like you, I felt there were numerous private references and jokes that I just wasn't getting for obvious reasons. I'd like to read it again one day and I hope to gain a little more appreciation for it but from this read I'd give it a solid 3.5 stars (but since Goodreads doesn't have ½ stars I gave it 4. Woolf's wonderful prose certainly doesn't deserve 3.)
I think if I'd been aware that it was going to be just a light, frivolous read, I could have enjoyed it more and not expected to be "informed and amused".That's well put. I also appreciated the quotes you included--especially "My notion is that there are offices to be discharged by talent for the relief of genius, meaning, to me, that she felt she needed a sort of relief valve in order to maintain the seriousness of her other fiction. On the other hand, although I agree with her terming herself a genius, it seems a bit bold.
Cleo wrote: "Bryan wrote: "It almost seems as if it's a private joke/experience between them ...... ????I found the second half of the book interminable, for just this reason. I still have not gone back to t..."
I'm glad I found someone that feels the same way as I do about the book. The prose was beautiful but I feel like I spent the majority of the time looking for something that simply was not there. Maybe I will go back and just read to enjoy the sentences but I've spent too much time looking for something that was never there.
Bryan wrote: "It almost seems as if it's a private joke/experience between them ...... ????I found the second half of the book interminable, for just this reason. I still have not gone back to the last chapte..."
I can't bring myself to finish it. I just can't. There is so much that went over my head with this one. Being that I have no interest in Vita whatsoever I didn't find it that interesting aside from trying to find a change in his/her personality.
Felicia wrote: "Bryan wrote: "It almost seems as if it's a private joke/experience between them ...... ????"I can't bring myself to finish it. I just can't...."
When you all were reading this last January, I did pull out my copy, but it was really watching the movie that I did. Now, after two books on Virginia and her sister, I realize I could probably enjoy the book again -- originally read back in 2010. In a year when the US Supreme Court has made its momentous verdict about marriage, recalling Orlando has felt a prescient romp about identity.
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Conclusions/Book as a whole
It is a strange fact, but a true one, that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought. Perhaps the Turkish trousers which she had hitherto worn had done something to distract her thoughts; and the gipsy women, except in one or two important particulars, differ very little from gipsy men. At any rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck, that she realized with a start the penalties and the privileges of her position.