Time, Self and Style in Virginia Woolfs “Orlando. A Biography”
DOINA CMECIU
Abstract
The paper is an attempt to show Virginia Woolfs ‘struggle’ to make ordinary (life, be- ing and language) become extraordinary. Orlando. A Biography, a text begun sometime in early October (8th) 1927 “as a joke” and finished on the 17th of March, “as the clock struck one” (A WD: 160-161), 1928, may be considered as the prematurely bom child of a mmt/endowed with ‘one rare gift’: that of seeking. It is the seeking of the Word which constitutes the backbone of this ‘joke’. And yet, behind laughter and light-heartedness, there is a serious desire to discover “the most necessary thing to me [Woolf]” (A WD: 169): the ‘reality’ of the creative self through time.Thus, the Orlando-biography invites the reader to decode it as an autobiography, which, finally, proves to be a recording of a spiritua! joumey to attain freedom, stylistical- ly achieved through a gamę of positings and modes of reading and writing. In order to show the process of shaping the creative self in Orlando, we have used some strategies offered by approaches such as:a. phenomenological (offering insights into moods, States of consciousness and the methods used “to investigate” “second selves” (AWD, 1925)- “... opened and intensified as it (the mind) is by the heat of creation” and “to expose” one’s mind, body and self “to the blasts of the outer world” (pp.cit., 1935);b. pragmatic (helping the reader to see how “... the words” can be madę “to glue toget- her, fuse and glow” (AWD, 1924) and how “sentences form and curve under my fingers” (pp.cit., 1935) in order to “convey the true reality” (pp.cit., 1923) to somebody;c. and semiotic (unfolding Woolfs gamę of minimalising or expanding some me- anings, in and through time, which makes out of the word in Woolfs text a dynamie sign).The three approaches will help the reader to see the Woolfian text as a sign-wi- thin-a-sign-within-a-sign. The ‘Orlando-joke’ finally proves to be a complex gamę of po- siting the (creative) self in a temporal abyme, hauteur and surface (Cmeciu 1999), which is unfolded through a metaphoric and metonymic modę (Lodge 1989).
Keywords:
(discourse oj) change, transaction, time, temporality, self, style, autobiography, process of metaphorization, metonymy, misę en abyme/en hauteur/en surface, text as self, “Orlando”References
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