Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

152
Virginia Woolf
the Biographer’s “triCks of the trade”
Nigel Nicolson defines Orlando as “the longest and most charming
love letter in literature” for its dedication to the life and persona of Vita
Sackville-West, an extremely colourful figure in the Bloomsbury circle
(qtd in Gilbert 1993: xv). Yet Woolf not simply dedicates the novel to
her intimate friend Vita but uses the glorious ancestral history of the
Sackville family and their family home, Knole, to produce a stunning
combination of picaresque Bildungsroman and biography. To write a
fictionalized “biography” of Orlando, a hero or a heroine who simultaneously
embodies the “true” character of Vita so familiar to the author
and, at the same time, a character who outgrows the realistic constraints
imposed by the genre of biography, is what motivates Woolf to embark
on a journey of creative enjoyment and exploration. Thus her impetus
to “revolutionize biography in a night” and her desire to “toss this up in
the air and see what happens” are married into the fantastic, parodic and
polemic form of a fictional biography (Diary, III: 428). Then, indeed it
will be reasonable for the lover of biographies to ask, “How can one be
both faithful to facts and unfaithful and tell more of the truth without
exactly telling it the same?”(Burns 1994: 342). In other words, if biography
turns out to be more complicated than the standards of a reader
expecting realism, what kind of “biography” is Orlando after all? Thus
begins Woolf ’s foray into the sphere of authorial tricksterism, where
the lines of expectation are blurred and the reader is forced to reconsider
preconceived definitions of literature and reality.
Woolf had an impressive first-hand knowledge of the genre of
biography through an extensive reading under the influence of her
father, Sir Leslie Stephen. Among other duties, he was the editor
of twenty-six volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography
(1882–1890) and wrote many of the entries himself. The traditional
belief of the Victorian biographer in an essential “self ” that could
be pinpointed and thus faithfully portrayed undoubtedly provoked
Woolf to reconsider both the form and the claim. On the other
hand, Woolf ’s Orlando is probably indebted to Bloomsbury friend
(and one-time suitor) Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918)
and Queen Victoria (1921). While rejecting certain old-fashioned
constraints inherent in the nineteenth-century biographies in favor of
more psychologically based portraits, Strachey nonetheless espoused