Listing to the right: authority and inheritance in 'Orlando' and 'Ulysses.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Caroline Webb

Virginia Woolf's earliest ideas for what was to become the novel Orlando: A Biography interestingly recall a moment of Ulysses. In her diary for Monday, 14 March, 1927, she writes,

Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called "The Jessamy Brides"--why, I wonder? I have rayed round it several scenes. Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house. One can see anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes.... The Ladies are to have Constantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes. (3:131).

The resonance with Stephen Dedalus's parable "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine" is unmistakable (Joyce 149; 122:1057-58):(1) Stephen's poor old women climb the pillar to see "Rathmines' blue dome" (148; 121:1011). Although Woolf, perhaps recognizing her source in Ulysses,(2) was to recast the humble Jessamy Brides as the aristocratic Orlando to produce a very different fantasia, the two novels can yet be compared to illuminating effect. Orlando can indeed be seen as a kind of "Oxen of the Sun," as the events of the novel and the style of the biographer move unobtrusively through literary history and culminate in the birth of a child and of a poem.(3) Orlando, like Ulysses, enacts a series of stylistic impersonations that here correspond to the protagonist's passage through history, as Wolf pays a mischievously inappropriate respect to a number of literary genres. Like Ulysses, too, Orlando is full of borrowings, generally either not acknowledged or acknowledged only obliquely; one of the poems Orlando writes is in fact taken from Vita Sackville-West's most successful poem, The Land.(4) As Woolf noted in the same diary entry, "Satire is to be the main note--satire & wildness.... My own lyric vein is to be satirised. Everything mocked. And it is to end with three dots ... So" (3:131). In this essay I examine how the self-consciousness generated by this specifically linguistic satire operates in the Preface to Orlando and in a passage from the "Cyclops" chapter of Ulysses: these passages, each involving a list of names, generate subtly different kinds of humor and in so doing establish contrasting perspectives on notions of linguistic and literary authority.

The opening pages of Orlando strikingly engage such notions. By the opening pages I mean not the beginning of the narrative itself, with its sly introduction, "He--for there could be no doubt of his sex" (1), but the italicized preface in which Woolf lists, as a good scholar-biographer should, her many debts to others. The catalogue is a joke in itself, and its compilation of names appears at first glance astonishingly similar to the parodic catalogues of "Cyclops," in particular the lengthy enumeration of allegedly "Irish heroes" (Joyce 296-97; 244:176-99). Although Woolf's passage is a preparation, an education the reader of Ulysses has mastered by the time he or she reaches "Cyclops," their similar syntactic operation invites comparison. Both passages consist of naming names, and each claims a place in relation to authority: where Woolf acknowledges debts, insisting on her own credentials as a scholar, Joyce locates contemporary Irish claims to greatness by recalling historical Irish heroes. And both, of course, are parodic, for Woolf's research is as fictive as her biography--which is to say its relation to the real is indirect, even allegorical--and Joyce's list extends from the mythic to the absurd, ludicrously incorporating renowned figures from all over the world.

Let us first consider Woolf's preface. Where Joyce's catalogue invites the reader to contemplate its absurdity through its very excess, Woolf's appears at first glance both self-consistent and appropriate to its purpose, in effect unremarkable, until juxtaposed with the comic fantasy of the novel itself.(5) Linda Hutcheon has remarked that parody, like metaphor, "require[s] that the decoder construct a second meaning through inferences about surface statements and supplement the foreground with acknowledgement and knowledge of a backgrounded context" (33-34); this in effect means that the decoder must be aware of the difference between surface and context, be prepared to supplement foreground with background. Woolf's preface oddly disables its decoder, in Hutcheon's terms "[repeating] with a difference" visible only when the novel, not just the preface, has been read (32).

Standing outside the text, as Orlando will stand outside time, and speaking apparently as herself, Woolf moves from representation of that self as passive--"Many friends have helped me in writing this book"--to insisting on its humility: "Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them" (vii). This flourish of modesty, mimicking the habitual voice of Victorian biographers so precisely as to be unexceptionable, nevertheless, like those biographers, at once suggests a modest deference to the influence of the past and elevates the speaker who can, despite her lack of daring, claim the illustrious dead as "friends." Again traditionally, the biographer moves immediately to disarm the pretense to greatness by a return to the community suggested by those helping friends: "No one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,--to name the first that come to mind" (vii). The juxtaposition of these names is surprising only on second glance, for all are recognized, in one way or another, as masters of English prose, whether fiction or history; thus far humor is invisible.