Reading readers in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography

Style, Summer, 1994 by Kathryn N. Benzel

Reading Orlando: A Biography or, for that matter, any of Virginia Woolf's novels becomes a venture into uncertain terrain where the reader must sign on with the writer to discover the text's construction and thus a path, not necessarily an easy one, to its meaning. Recent Woolf critics employ this notion of readership to describe the reader's participation in creating an aesthetic experience from engagement with the text. For example, Pamela L. Caughie analyzes Woolf's reader as one who, directed by the writer, performs the text. Woolf's "narrative does not just represent a world; it represents as well a mode of producing and a way of valuing that world," which engages the reader in a "rhetoric of reality" (84, 31). Additionally, Susan Stanford Friedman discusses this significant reader in "Virginia Woolf's Pedagogical Scenes of Reading: The Voyage Out, The Common Reader, and her 'Common Readers."' Friedman suggests the importance of recognizing the reader's creative activity: "Each text sets the ground for its own experiments, which teaches its reader to interpret. The appeal each text makes, therefore, is to a thoroughly active reader who becomes its second author through the act of reading" (105). The cooperative process between reader and writer in Orlando is analogous to the characterization of Orlando: like the biographer struggling to characterize the subject, we as readers struggle to create our place in this text. The writer, the narrator-biographer, and reader must work to overcome the constraints of narrative conventions in order to construct a "real self," a self that creates a reality in and of the text. From this relationship between writer and reader, a Woolfian aesthetic emerges, an aesthetic that is collaborative, contextual, and compelling. In short, like Orlando's own manuscript "The Oak Tree," Orlando "wanted to be read. It must be read" (O 272).(1)

The significance of this aesthetic is found in the dual nature of Woolf's innovation: that is, as Woolf purposefully deconstructs biography and narrative in Orlando, she not only creates a new narrative form but also redefines the relationship of reader and writer.(2) Her last critical work, variously titled Reading at Random and Turning the Page (a work that remained unfinished at her death in 1941), sets out to describe the relationship between writers and readers, a relationship that she has established in her fiction. As Woolf suggests in the introduction to that work entitled "Anon," by mutually caring for and nurturing the communication process, the writer and reader create a kind of ultimate communal communication where "[e]verybody shared in the emotions of Anons [sic] song, and supplied the story" ("Anon" 382). This type of reading posits relational and alternative ways of learning about the world in the text; readers are asked to "refresh and exercise [their] own creative powers" in order "to make use of all that the novelist--the great artist--gives [them]" ("How" 3-5).(3)

The shared aesthetic experience, I believe, motivates Woolf in Orlando as she attempts to define and redefine the reader's role as participant creating the biographical characterization of Orlando. As readers, we enter this fiction, waiting and wanting to confirm the reality of the story, a biography about a character of some presumed significance. And in spite of the novel's fantastic elements (climactic phenomena, conflation of time, physical incongruities), certain novelistic conventions (particularly characterization and plot) seemingly maintain a natural flow of narrative events for the reader. Similarly, on a thematic level Orlando develops as a rather typical protagonist, one who confronts obstacles to his/her growth, overcomes them, and gains self-knowledge in spite of the sex change from male to female. The audience reads this progression as essential to the delineation of Orlando's character as the stated subject of this biography. However, our expectations for the characterization and its manner of presentation are disrupted by a self-conscious "biographer," who parodies the biographical form and continually interrupts to question the propriety and credibility of this hybrid fiction-biography in representing (truthfully) this character. The self-reflexivity that results on the part of the audience creates a narrative space that allows the audience to experiment with reading Orlando, both with the mimetic illusion of Orlando's character and with the narrator-biographer's telling of the story. In order to discover a reading identity appropriate for this text, the reader becomes a "second author" sharing the creative activity with the writer.

Peter J. Rabinowitz in Before Reading and James Phelan in Reading People, Reading Plots suggest that this kind of dual perspective enhances our reading experience by making it plural. Rabinowitz's discussion of a "double-leveled aesthetic experience" claims two kinds of reading audiences--narrative and authorial readers--who are bound together in their acceptance of mimetic illusion of a text but who diverge as the reader becomes conscious of the craft of the text: "the authorial audience knows it is reading a work of art, while the narrative audience believes what it is reading is real" (99-100).(4) Phelan's refinement of the distinctions between these audiences locates the levels of reading in relation to the story's instabilities and narrative tension particularly with regard to characterization. As a narrative dramatizes characterization ("created by situations, and complicated and resolved through actions" [15]), the text often acts out discursive tensions as well ("between authors and/or narrators, on the one hand, and the authorial audience on the other" [15]). Thus, as the story progresses toward fulfilling characterization and revealing technique, it works to engage the reader in a search for a reading identity that will accommodate this plurality.