orienting spectacle: the politics of 'Orlando's' sapphic camp - Dis

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1998 by D.A. Boxwell

I should like to write a novel certainly: a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal.

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (67)

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.

- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1659)

Roshan-i-chasm-i-man

- Persian love greeting to Virginia Woolf from Vita Sackville-West,

4 August 1927 (DeSalvo 241)

Musha-i-djabah-dal-imam

- Mock-Persian response to Vita Sackville-West, 7 August 1927 (DeSalvo 241)

Why would Virginia Woolf fabricate the signifiers of an Asian language? At a personal level, she is encoding and decoding an intimate, private language to her lover and muse, Vita Sackville-West, just returned from a second journey to Teheran and expressing doubts about the stability of their relationship. Since Woolf's attempt to match her correspondent's Farsi is a wholly imaginative one, she offers a translation to reassure Sackville-West of her devotion, coupled with a mild rebuke: "Which being interpreted means, Darling-West-what-a-donkey-you-are - all my letters in future are going to be addressed to Pippin, since it is clear you cant read them" (241). Yet the carefully cultivated self-consciousness of the correspondents' appropriation of an "exotic" and "oriental" form of communication speaks volumes about a particular mode of self-presentation and self-authentication, a mode that expressed itself through highly inauthentic means. I refer here to a kind of performative style and sensibility that distinctively marked 1920s Anglo-American lesbian and gay culture: namely, camp.

It is a sensibility that Woolf allowed to run riot - to a degree hitherto unprecedented in her oeuvre - in her 1928 novel Orlando. The work plainly and simply purports to be a biography in its subtitle, yet it soon becomes apparent that Orlando fulfills the author's intention, as she expressed it in her diary, to write "half in a mock style very clear and plain" (3: 162). Unashamedly thieving from a multitude of genres, Orlando functions subversively and comically as mock biography, burlesque literary history, spoof bildungsroman, parodic Kunstlerroman, fantastic picaresque, and chic roman a clef. Woolf originally disavowed any claims to seriousness in "the pure delight of this farce" (162), to inscribe the "life" of a woman, Vita Sackville-West, who was celebrated in 1920s English culture as a preeminent figure of fashion and style (and literary popularity). If camp, as Mark Booth has put it, is "a matter of parody [and] as such borrows much of its form from the object of its parody" (42), the style of Woolf's novel, in some basic sense, mimetically represents the author's first impression of the "florid, moustached, parakeet-coloured" Sackville-West's "aristocratic manner... something like the actresses..." (Diary 2: 216 - 17). A year or so before she began writing Orlando, Woolf recorded her feelings about Sackville-West in terms of the excess that marks camp style. Trying to account for "the secret of her glamour," Woolf describes the object of her desire as having a palpable air of "voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organized as I am. But then she is aware of this..." (Diary 3: 51). It is with good reason, therefore, that Sackville-West has gained an entry in Philip Core's "encyclopedia" of camp (105) while Woolf's novel is fruitfully considered within a dominant strain in 1920s Anglo-American cultural expression that stressed the self-consciously flamboyant and performative.(1)

So when Woolf referred to her novel as a "joke" (Diary 3: 185), she called attention to the way in which Orlando's exaggerated artificiality, stylization, and glamour all seem - successfully and self-mockingly - to disavow any pretensions to asserting cultural power, a disavowal that Mark Booth establishes as one of the hallmarks of camp (30). Booth asserts that camp is a commitment to "the marginal with a commitment greater than the marginal merits" (18). Yet if camp is blithely offhand about its cultural impotence, it is also equally motivated by a desire to function in some kind of culturally transformative way, one with utopian impulses, impulses rooted in camp's carnivalesque origins and antecedents like the masquerade. Officially sanctioned cross-dressing, as Terry Castle has argued, manifestly envisions changes in the social order. The promise of the transfigured relations of men and women (via masquerade) is "merely one emblem of the universal escape from ordinary experience" (51).

If camp, therefore, sets up a tension between avowal and disavowal, so too did Woolf establish a contradictory agenda in the writing of Orlando. She confessed in her diary (20 September 1927): "It might be a most amusing book. The question is how to do it. Vita should be Orlando, a young nobleman . . . it should be truthful; but fantastic" (3: 157). But after she had completed Orlando, she made her own rather campily dismissive and self-effacing witticism at the expense of a work that she referred to in quotation marks, signaling ironic distanciation: "The truth is I expect I began it as a joke and went on with it seriously. Hence it lacks some unity... Anyhow I'm glad to be quit this time of writing 'a novel'; and hope never to be accused of it again" (Diary 3: 185). Certainly this expresses Woolf's ambivalence about writing a "down-market" text as a member of the cultural elite, yet it also signals the irresolvable tensions at the heart of camp as, in Jean Cocteau's definition for a 1922 issue of Vanity Fair, "the lie that tells the truth" (qtd. in Core 9).