Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Sentencing Orlando
- 1 ‘The Queen had come’: Orgasm and Arrival
- 2 ‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
- 3 Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’
- 4 Rhythms of Revision and Revisiting: Unpicking the Past in Orlando
- 5 ‘Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life
- 6 ‘. . . and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form
- 7 Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape
- 8 Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando
- 9 Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame
- 10 The Day of Orlando
- 11 Satzdenken, Indeterminacy and the Polyvalent Audience
- 12 In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse
- 13 A Spirit in Flux: Aestheticism, Evolution and Religion
- 14 Sir Thomas Browne and the Reading of Remains in Orlando
- 15 The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge
- 16 Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness
- Aftersentence
- Index
8 - Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Sentencing Orlando
- 1 ‘The Queen had come’: Orgasm and Arrival
- 2 ‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
- 3 Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’
- 4 Rhythms of Revision and Revisiting: Unpicking the Past in Orlando
- 5 ‘Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life
- 6 ‘. . . and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form
- 7 Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape
- 8 Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando
- 9 Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame
- 10 The Day of Orlando
- 11 Satzdenken, Indeterminacy and the Polyvalent Audience
- 12 In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse
- 13 A Spirit in Flux: Aestheticism, Evolution and Religion
- 14 Sir Thomas Browne and the Reading of Remains in Orlando
- 15 The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge
- 16 Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness
- Aftersentence
- Index
Summary
The pith of his phrases was that while fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded.
The above sentence from Orlando serves as the starting point for some reflections on the dialectics of obscurity, fame and history in one of Virginia Woolf's most famous novels. While a concern with these concepts is recurrent in Woolf's oeuvre, the issue of fame lies at the heart of Orlando's pseudo-bio/historiographical narrative, intertwined with questions of gender and time, aesthetics and ethics. Typical of Woolf's poetics, the sentence is rich with tropes of antithesis, rhetorical repetition, personification of abstract notions, and analogies. It also epitomises much of her thinking about the historical conditions and goals of writing in their relation to subjectivity. In many ways, then, this sentence points to the possibility of reading Orlando as a comment on a genetics of writing, in its constitutional imbrication with a politics of the self in time.
As a mock-biography in the form of a novel, Orlando ironically points to biography's generic function of immortalising its subject. It foregrounds the fact that biographies give their subject a name and singular identity, and are thus inextricably bound with fame in at least two seemingly antithetical ways. On the one hand, biographies are consequent on fame, precisely because it is for already famous people that the writing of bios is typically reserved; and, on the other, a biography arguably confers fame on its subject by singling out a person's life as worthy of recording for posterity. It has become a commonplace to point out Woolf's understanding of the political significance of biography, and her subversion of the standard biographical bias for ‘great men’, great deeds and teleological narratives. In a 1927 letter, she described the conception of Orlando in terms of her desire to ‘revolutionise biography in one night’ (L3 429).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sentencing OrlandoVirginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence, pp. 104 - 115Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018