A month ago, we had a book club meeting about Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando”. I had taken lots of notes and I really liked the book. My intention was to write something about it here too, but then traineeship and Midsummer and Norway came and it simply slipped my mind. But I was reminded again when I went through the pile of library books that is constantly growing on my desk at home. It was time to return “Orlando”, and why not then do the writing now, even though it is rather late.
Orlando is a character who moves through the ages like a chameleon. He starts his life in the 16th century as the favorite squire of Queen Elizabeth I, and the book ends in 1928, when she’s finally gotten her poem The Oak Tree published. She moves between sexes, gender roles, class and adapts to the spirit of the times that she moves through, while at the same time keeping her integrity, the core of her personality, intact. The poet, the nature-lover, intelligent and passionate. It is a commentary on sex, gender, fashion, history, ideas, identity and time, and everything is captured in Woolf’s very intimate, familial voice. It’s like being told a story by a dear friend. It is really an entertaining book, smart and funny at the same time.
I was going through my notes and the excerpts that I had marked out, and this page towards the end of the book caught my eye. And it feels like this so perfectly fits here, now, considering what I wrote about the bus trip from Å to Kabelvåg a week or so ago, and it’s connection to the bus trip from Sarajevo to Belgrade last summer. It is about time, memory and identity, and how we are all layered.
That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will, perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her motor-car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronise the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption or completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute. For it is a difficult business – this time-keeping; nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts; and it may have been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose her shopping list and start home without the sardines, the bath salts, or the boots. Now as she stood with her hand on the door of her motor-car, the present again struck her on the head. Eleven times she was violently assaulted.
And a couple of pages later, the question about identity comes up again:
… Orlando heaved a sigh of relief, lit a cigarette, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Then she called hesitantly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, ‘Orlando?’ For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said (being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine – and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him – and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all. So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called ‘Orlando?’ with a note of interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.
You see, the precision of Woolf’s use of language, the way she connects to her own story all through the book, keeping the reader awake and attentive. And her use of historical events, the history of intellectual thoughts, it is so masterfully intertwined in the story so that it is hardly noticeable, unless you’re specifically looking for it.
And that I recognize myself in it. Even though I haven’t lived for 500 years, I feel these different times in me, the different identities that come and go more or less as they please. The difficulty of staying in the present, keeping experiences apart, that life is a circle, not a line. She’s written a book about life, and not only a declaration of love to her mistress Vita Sackville-West.
So, I think I can safely say: I recommend “Orlando”. Virginia Woolf fully deserves her reputation as one of the great authors. And this was definitely not the last book by Woolf that I’ll read.
Katja Malmborg 