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

154
Virginia Woolf
Such ambiguities will be quite confusing for readers expecting proper
guidance and unequivocal judgment from a Victorian biographer.
Orlando invites us to journey in search of the balance Woolf cherished
in her work: Created “between truth & fantasy,” the biography
embraces both factual and fantastic aspects in the depiction of the self
(Diary, III: 162).
SPACE-TIME WARPS, DOESN’T IT?
In Orlando, Woolf tackles the concepts of time and space, two key
concepts in fi ction. Woolf ’s unquestionable interest in the depiction
of time’s fl ow and the way it infl uences her characters is an inherent
feature of her novels and short stories. Th e infl uential French philosopher
Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Woolf ’s, distinguishes between
the concepts of temps (clock time) and durée (psychological time) and
argues that clock time produces a false idea of time, an idea pinned to
clocks and calendars and their pseudo-precision in measuring human
time. Psychological time, on the other hand, accounts for the individual
consciousness and the way time becomes dissolved into “moments of
being,” coexistent and coextensive as Woolf liked to imagine them.
Th us, as Orlando’s biographer contemplates,
And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful
practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way,
somehow contrive to synchronise the sixty or seventy diff erent
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. [ . . . ] (210–211)
It becomes clear that Woolf ’s serious preoccupation with the idea
of time and its representation in literature has found a way into this
most straightforward of genres, the biography, where the writer simply
cannot aff ord to deal with two kinds of time, least of all sixty or seventy.
However parodic in its conception, Orlando still speaks about the diffi -
culties in narrating human consciousness and the complex perceptions
that inhabit it and form the self ’s relation to time and environment. In
Woolf ’s hands, even the most categorical and undeniable matter for