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October 21, 1928
Mrs. Woolf Explores the "Time" Element in Human Relationships
Orlando.
By Virginia WoolfReviewed by Cleveland B. Chase
hose who open "Orlando" expecting another novel in the vein of "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" will discover, to their joy or sorrow, that once more Mrs. Woolf has broken with tradition and convention and has set out to explore still another fourth dimension of writing. Not that she has abandoned the "stream of consciousness" method which she used with such conspicuous success in her previous novels, but with it she has combined what, for lack of a better term, we might describe as an application to writing of the Einstein theory of relativity. In this new work she is largely preoccupied with the "time" element in character and human relationships, and with a statement of the exact complexion of that intangible moment, a combination of past and future, of objective reality and subjective consciousness, which we refer to as the present.
An hour [she explained], once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or one hundred times its clock length: on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. * * *The most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize 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 nor 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; others are hundreds of years old, though they call themselves 36.
Mrs. Woolf’s hero-heroine is hundreds of years old. At the beginning of the book Orlando is a boy of 16, melancholy, indolent, loving solitude and given to writing poetry; the age is the Elizabethan; the book ends on the 11th of October, 1928, and Orlando is a thoroughly modern matron of 36, who has published a successful book of poems and has evolved a hard-earned philosophy of life. Thus, to express her very modern fourth-dimensional concepts, Mrs. Woolf has fallen back upon one of the most ancient of literary forms, the allegory. In doing so she has left the book perhaps more confused than was strictly necessary.
At the first reading it is somewhat difficult to grasp the structure of the novel. During the Elizabethan period Orlando is a young nobleman, a favorite of Queen Bess, discovering for himself the world he lives in; first gloomy and in love with death; then amorous and florid, roistering in taverns; then a sprightly and dashing young courtier, engaged three times and finally jilted by a beautiful Muscovite Princess. Disillusioned, he returns to his estate in the country and devotes his energies entirely to writing.
By this time the Elizabethan background has gently faded away and it is the eighteenth century. Before he was 25 he had written some forty-seven plays, histories, romances and poems. By the age of 80 he had become disillusioned with literature: "not only had he had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain." Consequently he gave himself over to the enjoyment of nature and to deep reflection about the ultimate realities of life, finally deciding to carry on the noble tradition of the members of his family who had generation after generation added to and improved the castle which he had inherited. His philosophic calm was eventually shattered by an importunate Archduchess, who pursued him so insistently that, to escape her, he was driven to serve King and country and to accept the Ambassadorship to Turkey, a position which he filled with distinction.
At this point Orlando unexpectedly changes sex, and throughout the rest of the novel is a woman. There is a revolution in Turkey; she escapes and for some time wanders about Central Europe with a band of gypsies; eventually her British love of nature asserts itself and she hastens back to the hills and hedges she is so fond of. Later she comes to London in search of "Love and Life," she experiments with the various diversions the city has to offer, but finds them empty. Fashionable society is exciting for the moment, yet "nothing remained the next day;" she becomes intimate with Pope, Addison and Swift, but finds them dull fellows compared with their books. Then the eighteenth century fades from the screen and Orlando finds herself in the age of Victoria.
The rest of the novel may be divided into two parts; the first deals somewhat whimsically with Orlando’s attempts to adjust herself to the conventions of nineteenth century England. The second, and by far the most stimulating section of the book, describes Orlando at the present moment, and traces with breath-taking delicacy the influence of her past upon her present. It is in these last thirty-odd pages that the book springs startlingly to life. Up to this point it had seemed a pleasant narrative made notable by a number of passages of great beauty and by occasional bits of vivid description, but marred by a rather self-conscious facetiousness on the part of the author, an addiction to parenthetical whimsicalities that are not particularly effective.
In the closing pages of the novel Mrs. Woolf welds into a compact whole what had seemed to be a series of loosely connected episodes. In them she seems to reach down through the whole superstructure of life and to lay bare a new, or at least a hitherto unperceived, arrangement of those ephemeral flashes of memory of perception that go to make up consciousness. Throughout the ages people have remarked that time, under certain circumstances, seems much longer than under certain other circumstances. Mrs. Woolf presents concrete proof that this is not merely an impression, but a fact, by showing of what time, not as a mechanical, but as a human element, consists. She has carried the "stream of consciousness" technique a step further; she has not been satisfied to present a succession of thoughts and sensations passing through the mind; she shows what is behind those thoughts and sensations, whence they spring, and how great their relative value.
In attempting to describe such subtle and illusive qualities--or should they be called quantities?-- Mrs. Woolf has faced squarely one of the most puzzling technical and esthetic problems that confront contemporary novelists. The mere fact that she has stated the problem as succinctly as she does in the course of this book is immensely stimulating, whether or not one feels that she has achieved a final solution of it. It is something of a question whether the tendency of contemporary novelists to become more and more introspective can profitably be carried much further. If it is to continue, however, Mrs. Woolf has pointed out the direction in which it must develop.
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