Virginia Woolf in the Pay of Booksellers: commerce, privacy, professionalism, Orlando

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Patrick Collier

Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) stages one of the central conflicts of modernism. It puts into play the opposing impulses of the longing for cultural centrality--"as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible" (Eliot, Prose 94) (1)--and the desire to write a radical language that stretches or subverts the boundaries of signification and whose inaccessibility to most readers can be claimed as a mark of its authenticity. Orlando raises the tension between the urge to decry the institutions of the literary marketplace and the need to master and manipulate those institutions, for prestige and cultural capital if not for popularity per se--between the writer's wish to be heard and her desire to remain true to her artistic ambition, expressed in Orlando as the wish to refine language into an instrument so efficient, capable of conveying such a dense load of meaning, that it can be understood only by the writer herself and a few select others. This tension is complicated by the contours of the literary marketplace, in which the press and the publishing industry mediate between reader and writer, threatening both the writer's freedom to hew to her own aims and her ability to reach her audience (should she decide that doing so is worthwhile).

In her fiction and journalism of the mid to late twenties, Woolf repeatedly dramatized this conflict with reference to three distinct but related sets of oppositions: art vs. commerce, private vs. public writing, and amateurism vs. professionalism. (2) Woolf in this period reconfigured these categories against a modernist grain--articulated by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the late 1910s and early 1920s--that attempted to validate literature by associating it with professionalism, thereby freeing it from the taints of commercialism and an amateurism that they consistently gendered feminine (McDonald 78-79). Orlando stages an inquiry into these categories by having its time-traveling main character, a perpetually aspiring writer, attempt to navigate the institutions of a series of historical literary marketplaces as a sort of Gulliver who repeatedly has to learn anew each culture's valuation of art, commerce, professionalism, and amateurism, all the while wavering personally between the desire for privacy and the desire for publicity. As Orlando traipses through time, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, he or she vacillates from the extremes of wishing to write only for a lover, using the radically refined patois Woolf would describe in The Waves as "some little language such as lovers use" (238) to powerfully desiring to be read, to be sold, to be popular. (3) Orlando's travels involve each era's literary world, from the Renaissance patronage system to the eighteenth-century salon-Spectator scene to the late nineteenth-century development of mass publishing. Each of these settings calls attention to its particular configuration of the author-reader relationship and its relative mediacy or immediacy. In every case, though, Orlando's constructions of the relationship between writer and audience is marked by anxieties we can recognize in Virginia Woolf.

All novelists of early twentieth-century England had to contend with a saturated book market and an industry of literary middlemen (and women) who stood between them and their desired audience. (4) Many writers were concerned, as well, with the professionalization issue--with literature's establishment as an academic subject, the emergence of a professional class of critics, and the aura of seriousness and relevance that literature might attain through these processes. Woolf's unique intervention in these discussions, in Orlando and in her journalism of the mid-twenties, was to collapse the two issues, positing professionalism as itself a market force that threatened to raise obstructions between writers and readers--a claim that undermined the professional's purportedly special status as outside or above the economy of commodities. That is to say, Woolf reconfigures the standard binaries, aligning professionalism with publicity and commercialism--all of which raise obstacles or exact compromises threatening to a fruitful writer-audience relationship. Woolf was willing to engage with the multiply mediated literary public sphere of the mid to late twenties. (Indeed, the period marks her emergence as a successful author.) But she also used her fiction and nonfiction of the period to probe its difficulties and costs. One way she critiqued the literary public sphere was by constructing imagined exchanges between readers and writers that were more private, more intimate, thus holding out an ideal that, while unattainable under market conditions, and perhaps incompatible with publishing, represented a better balance of power between readers and writers than anything she saw as currently possible. Woolf's writing of the late twenties suggests that professionalism and patronage--two characteristic modernist ways of holding (or seeming to hold) the marketplace at bay--neither guaranteed the writer's integrity nor came without costs to the reader-writer relationship.