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

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

Sackville-West and her writings were one of the variegated sources of inspiration in Woolf's articulation of the orient and, as I have suggested, there is a natural affinity between camp and orientalism in Sackville-West's life and work. Mark Booth briefly notes the tradition of the "cod-Oriental" which came to fruition in Regency England, achieving its extravagant apotheosis then in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton (141). As Booth explains,

Camp accepts alien styles in a playful way, so they can express a gleeful sense of alienation from the establishment. The Orient interpreted as a place of reckless splendour, of effeminate luxury and strange sexual indulgences, had been a major subject for camp exploitation, its exotic styles seeming to offer a delightful alternative to the stodgy lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. (141)

This is a useful observation in terms of Woolf's deliberate class positioning of Orlando in the Constantinople chapter. While Woolf elevates her character from the poverty envisioned in "The Jessamy Brides," she still enables Orlando to have the same panoptic power, however "fantastic." The first action of chapter 3 is Orlando's ritualized morning levee and his panoramic gaze over the city where he has arrived as Charles II's ambassador extraordinary. From his lofty perspective, Constantinople emerges gradually from the mist:

About seven, he would rise, wrap himself in a long Turkish cloak, light a cheroot, and lean his elbows on the parapet. Thus he would stand, gazing at the city beneath him, apparently entranced. At this hour the mist would lie so thick that the domes of Santa Sofia and the rest would seem to be afloat; gradually the mist would uncover them; the bubbles would seem to be firmly fixed; there would be the river; there the Galata Bridge... (120)

Woolf capitalizes on stock notions of the orient's compelling, glamorous, and inscrutable mystery with this "long shot" (in cinematic terms) and then deflates it with close-up descriptions of the orient as a place of equally compelling disorder and abjection:

there the green turbanned pilgrims without eyes or noses, begging alms; there the pariah dogs picking up offal; there the shawled women; there the innumerable donkeys; there men on horses carrying long poles. Soon the whole town would be astir with the cracking of whips, the beating of gongs, cryings to prayer, lashing of mules, and rattle of brass-bound wheels, while sour odours, made from bread fermenting and incense, and spice, rose even to the heights of Pera itself and seemed the very breath of the strident and multi-coloured and barbaric population. (120)

What is remarkable about Woolf's initial scene setting is how Constantinople emerges from Orlando's point of view but is actually articulated by the third-person narrator, the "biographer" whose constant undercutting of "his" own ability to narrate enables Woolf to disestablish any reliable claim to truth or authority, especially in this chapter, a "lamentably incomplete" and fragmentary account of Orlando's experience in the East (119). With this in mind, the political implications of the content of the observed scene defy exact fixity.. On the one hand, the tone of this vestigial travel narrative seems unable to express the "gleeful sense of alienation" in camp visions of the orient (there is both racist terror and fascination here, as in Sackville-West's sublime orient). Certainly, there are political implications here that challenge Susan Sontag's declaration: "It goes without saying that the camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized - or at least apolitical" (107). The touristic/ethnographic gaze, we more readily acknowledge now than we did when Sontag's "Notes on Camp" first made its sensational appearance, is bound up with the politics of imperialism and racism? Still, both in its hyperbolism ("even to the heights of Pera"), and its predictable iconography, at the core of this writing there is a knowing and ludic understanding of the overwhelming alienation presented by a confrontation with the Other. This is all the more effective in the narrator's careful appeal to all of the reader's senses, which simultaneously enables us to "be there" (in the touristic sense) and yet to consider ourselves unimplicated in the scene as detached observers from a privileged parapet of our own. In this way, the reader replicates Orlando's panoptic power, whose distance from the observed scene enables points of vicarious identification from a position of power, whether in terms of class, race, nationality, or all three.