Icon of modern literature: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Quelle: picture alliance /
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The English writer Virginia Woolf is difficult for many readers. But with the bittersweet satire “Orlando” about a man who becomes a woman, she managed a real stroke of genius.
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WITHVirginia Woolf sometimes plays with the form of the biography in her work: in the dog novel “Flush”, the autobiography of her cocker spaniel, and in “Orlando”, the most cheerful, light-hearted and therefore most readable Roman Woolf.
Orlando is the name of a dazzling-looking English lord, a member of an ancient aristocratic family who became the youthful lover of Elizabeth I and an envoy to the court of the Turkish sultan in Constantinople under King Jacob II. At the end of Ramadan, Orlando celebrates a lavish festival on the occasion of the rise to the ducal state, which ends with him falling into deep, day-long sleep.
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Truth! Truth! Truth!
After describing the appearance of three allegorical figures, chastity, purity and modesty, the narrator speaks up: “We are therefore left alone in the room with the sleeping Orlando and the trumpeters. The trumpeters line up next to each other and let a huge fanfare strike: ‘THE TRUTH!’ whereupon Orlando woke up. He stretched out. He got up. He stood upright in front of us in complete nudity, and while the trumpets truth! Truth! Truth! slam, we have no choice but to confess – he was a woman. ***** “
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Tilda Swinton in the film version of “Orlando” (1992)
What a stroke of genius! The literary gap that Woolf creates with five asterisks at the end of this paragraph has filled each epoch differently since the novel was first published in 1928. In this goblin-like hilarious book, Virginia Woolf has had great fun putting a literary monument to her lover Vita Sackville-West.
Taking the family history of the Sackville-West as an example, she describes the fantastically long life of a British lord who, in around 430 years, only ages 20 years and turns from man to woman, which, the narrator emphasizes, but only his gender, is not Essence or character changes: “Orlando had become a woman – that is undeniable.
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But Orlando stayed the same as he had been in every other way. ”The obsession with which we think about the big, small difference today makes“ Orlando ”ideal school reading. But Woolf makes far less fuss about the effects of gender change than you should expect.
The class difference between rich and poor is more important than gender for Orlando. The book is also designed as a satire. “Orlando” makes fun of the literary form of biography, which the novel perfectly imitates up to eight full-page illustrations with various portraits of Orlando from different centuries. “Orlando” is a triumph of fantasy over biography.
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Film diva Nicole Kidman embodies the writer Virginia Woolf in “The Hours” (2002)
Quelle: picture-alliance / dpa
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It is a book full of miracles, but the most wonderful thing is the encounter of Orlando, drunk by the literature of his time, i.e. the Elizabethan age, with a certain Mister Greene, who sheds light on the real situation in the literary world: “Orlando now had everyone Given up hope of being able to discuss his own work with the poet; but this became less and less important as the conversation turned to the life and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and the others, all of whom Greene had known closely and about whom he knew thousands of anecdotes of the most amusing kind. Orlando hadn’t laughed that much in his life. So those were his gods!
Battle in taverns
Half of them were drunk and everyone was mad. Most of them quarreled with their wives; not one of them was above a lie or intrigue of the shabbiest kind. Their seals were scribbled on the backs of laundry bills, the heads of print shop boys as pads, in the front door. This is how Hamlet went to press; this way Lear; this way Othello. … The rest of the time was spent brawling and feasting in taverns and beer gardens, where things were said that left the belief behind by a joke word, and things were done against which the courtiers’ greatest antics seemed comparatively bland nothing has changed to this day.
The classic column “Checks Canon” appears every Saturday in the “Literary World”. Denis Scheck explains her background here. “Checks Canon” is as Podcast bei WDR 5 to hear and as Video at the SWR to see.
