Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

From All This Diversity…
raphy, and a major aspect of this satire is the critique of incomplete and distorted representations
of the self. Orlando exposes the narrator-biographer’s inability to keep hold of
the subject, and the inability of traditional biography to represent subjectivity in all its
various and diverse forms. “Tantalising fragments” (O 122) that remain from Orlando’s
time as an ambassador in Turkey produce a subject riddled with holes. As a Victorian
woman writer, Orlando keeps “slipping out” of the narrator-biographer’s “grasp” (255).
She does not fi t the model of a genre dominated by the lives of men, and her diff erence is
marked by a lack of external action, her “pretence of writing and thinking” (256). Orlando
ridicules this one-sided dependence upon evidence and activities external to the subject,
exposing the elision of personality and subjective interiority.
However, as the damp mists of the nineteenth century rise and disperse, the narrative
of Orlando undergoes a signifi cant change, entering what James Naremore has called the
“extreme of modernity” (210). Th e narrator-biographer’s parodic metanarratives become
less prominent and a new form of biographical discourse emerges, a form that approximates
more closely to the “lyric vein” (D3 131) characteristic of Woolf’s other experimental
novels. Th is shift in Orlando’s register is the product of a new narrative drive to represent
subjectivity through a “new” biography. Connections between Orlando and Woolf’s
1927 essay of this name are widely recognised, with the former often identifi ed as the
novelistic playing out of the essay’s theoretical argument. 1 In “Th e New Biography,” Woolf
argues that the new biographer, no longer a passive chronicler, is a creative artist, and she
celebrates the generic indeterminacy that would characterise her writing in Orlando: the
combined truths of fact and fi ction, the “queer amalgamation of dream and reality” (CE4
235). Woolf argues that this creative biographical discourse would express “the pith and
essence of…character” and the “light of personality” in all its diversity (CE4 232, 229).
“Th e New Biography” is rarely read as a demonstration of Woolf’s theoretical ambivalence
and her ambiguous equivocation, yet this essay is at the root of Orlando’s dilemma of
representation and is the source of the untwined subject being twisted again. Woolf’s essay
retains a demand for biographical “integrity,” warning that its loss would result in disaster:
an “incautious movement” in the combining of fact and fi ction would blow the book “sky
high” (CE4 229, 233). Th e new biographer must combine the incompatible, yet must do so
with consistency and balance, with the stability implicit in Woolf’s metaphor of “perpetual
marriage” (CE4 235). Th e use of fi ction should not be taken “too far,” or introduced with
“incongruity” (CE4 234). Such warnings lie behind and cast their shadow over Woolf’s argument,
qualifying her utopian vision of playful genres and ceaseless diversity.
Th e textual practice and subjectivity produced by Orlando’s modernity is in breach of
this demand for sustained integrity. As the “new” biography and its subject dis-integrate,
Orlando/Orlando comes to a point of narrative and representational crisis. Th erefore, the
narrator-biographer must re-impose order and restore integrity; the narrator-biographer
must prevent the book being blown sky high.
“ENTIRELY DISASSEMBLED”: ORLANDO AND THE “NEW” BIOGRAPHY IN CRISIS
Narrative and subject reach this point of crisis as Orlando/Orlando arrives at “the
present moment” (O 284). Th e narrator-biographer is faced with a subject that is still
alive; a subject that does not derive from a fi xed and completed past and who remains outside
fi xed limits of identity. Travelling out of London in her motorcar, Orlando undergoes
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