by Natalie Vakulin
Life-writing is, in a broad sense, any exploration of past life as viewed from the present. This exploration asks existential life questions that possess no answers. The exploratory journey that writers go on in search for these answers provides the reason for not only this form of writing but all writing. Once we understand that this exploration is a goose chase–a search that is either fruitless or pointless–not in the sense that it is useless, but in that it contains no destination, we can better analyse all texts that deal with lived life. Virginia Woolf’s pseudo-biography Orlando is an example of this exploratory goose chase. Spanning a fantastical 300 years and including a transformation from man to woman, Orlando’s life has one constant: their writerly pursuit. The reason Woolf presents for which writers write is the exploration of existential life questions. However, in a mimicry of this exploratory process, Woolf entertains an alternative reason that writers could have for writing: fame. Woolf explores fame through ideas of immortality and obscurity, all the while negating through her exploration that these are the true reasons for writing. Her exploration of fame is deeply founded in historical understanding, and here lies her true argument: Virginia Woolf in her novel Orlando, argues that literary exploration of past life experience, understood through the historical lens of individual past, is a questioning of the meaning of life that has no answers but remains the singular reason for which all writers write. It is necessary to take together the scholarly conversation surrounding life writing in Woolf in order to grasp how it is rooted in temporal experience. Building on the work of a number of writers who have explored Woolf’s engagement with time and temporality, I re-read her image of writings as a “wild goose chase” to emphasize the open-endedness of this aspect of her work.
Orlando is a purposefully explorative text in which Woolf often takes literary meanders to investigate themes in a way that seems to contradict her central arguments. However these explorations are significant, and when viewed as literary experiments from which we can draw meaning, they provide ways through which we can better understand Woolf’s project. One of these apparent red herrings is the overarching theme of fame. Woolf explores fame in terms of immortality, positioning this as the reason for writing. In her subsequent negations that fame is the reason for writing, propounded chiefly through the satirical positioning of obscurity, Woolf presents a significant alternative theme to explore: the importance of history.
Fame in Orlando is initially understood as the immortalizing of a poet through the work that they leave behind when they die. This is presented as an outcome that is dependent on the poet’s individuality. In the family crypt that he visits with morbid obsession, Orlando, reflecting on his ancestor’s lives and deaths, “cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but that this man [the writer Sir Thomas Browne] and his words were immortal” (Woolf 50). This sentence highlights two key components to the immortality argument: that good writers are made immortal through their writing, and that those who are not eternalised return without consequence to the dust from which they came. This latter metaphor of what defines a meaningful life worth remembering is repeated when Orlando, newly transformed into a woman, spends time with the Romani people. The group collectively possesses a sense of historical eternity, “a lineage of such antiquity” that “their ancestors had built the Pyramids centuries before Christ was born” (Woolf 88), which conflicts with Orlando’s individualistic fame-seeking. In order to be immortalized for his work, Orlando as an individual must also be remembered. When Orlando is present, the Romani people feel “whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their hands” (Woolf 87). This response is a recognition that Orlando is pursuing immortal glory through her writing in a very individualistic way. Because of her individualism, Orlando is unable to coexist with the Romani people who only exist eternally as a group and individually have no fame. This distinction of the individual is also significant because of the emphasis on individual life in life writing. Therefore though Woolf will continue on to refute that fame is the reason for writing, her exploration of the individual already points to her grander themes.
Angeliki Spiropoulou in her book chapter “Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando” connects these principles and explains the significance of historical understanding to fame in Orlando. Spiropoulou understands Woolf’s image of fame’s immortalizing function as the glory sought by heroes of antiquity. Her analysis of the character Nick Greene reveals that Woolf continues her exploration of fame by connecting fame-seeking with an idealization of the past and that Woolf begins her refutation by satirising this figure. Spiropoulou writes that in Homeric times, “the hero was ensured ‘immortal fame’ through the song of the poet whose fame, in turn, increased in direct analogy to that of his subject” (Spiropoulou 105). This makes explicit that seeking immortality through fame has been an ancient historic goal for humans. In antiquity, heroes cared less about their lives than they did about the glory their name would receive if they were written into verse. Greene admires this form of fame. A poet and critic, Greene is a comical figure who appears in two different ages, embodying this tension between immortality and glory through his idealisation of the past. Greene “praises the ancients in Elizabethan times and the Elizabethans in Victorian times,” maintaining that “it is always the dead poets who are worthy of admiration” (Spiropoulou 106). Whatever age he is in, the current “art of poetry was dead” (Woolf 53). This reveals that for Greene, the quest for immortality is inspired by a veneration of the past. Greene values the “divine ambition” he calls “La Gloire” (Woolf 54), an obviously classical concept that he believes only the past ages of writers to have possessed . Therefore he represents a longing for a time past along with a quest for immortality. For this, Greene is ridiculed. “He pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first catch his meaning” (Woolf 54). This makes Greene out to be uneducated, or simply incorrect in more than just his French. Woolf also ridicules Green’s hypocrisy; he criticises writers who “are in the pay of booksellers” and write for monetary gain (Woolf 162) while asking for a pension from Orlando. “The materialist motives underlying Greene’s conditional proposition seem to serve Woolf’s satiric demystification of poetic genius” (Spiropoulou 109), writes Spiropoulou. Greene is positioned to represent the desire for immortality through fame, which Orlando at times possesses, but because of the satirical nature of his character, an argument that fame is the reason writers write is undermined.
Woolf continues her critique of fame by positioning it as completely undesirable in the creative process. Early in his his journey, Orlando pauses, and “[in] leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of [Orlando’s] heart their dancing ground… he vowed that he would be the first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name” (Woolf 49). Spiropoulou understands this passage with its heavily feminine coded criticism as a result of Orlando being rejected by the Russian princess Sasha, which Spriropoulou describes as a “transposition of love into ambition” (Spiropoulou 107). This passage, though it describes how Orlando is motivated by fame, simultaneously criticises fame as a strumpet, making a connection between fame seeking and the unfaithful Sasha. “Glory is linked with ill emotions, such as egotism and envy, which are not supposed to belong with art and artists. Here, as in her late works, Woolf seems to place a higher value on obscurity than ambition” (Spiropoulou 110). This is seen when, reeling from Greene’s humiliation of him, Orlando “tore up” his ambition of “conferring of eternal immortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave among laurels and the intangible banners of a people’s reverence perpetually” (Woolf 62). This time, rejection causes Orlando to turn to obscurity. “While fame impedes and constricts […] obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded” (Woolf 62). He resolves to write not for fame, but in obscurity “to please [him]self” (Woolf 61). Having disproved fame as a viable reason for writing, Woolf continues her exploration by pointing her satire at obscurity, ridiculing this as a viable reason for writing as well.
Woolf rejects the deliberate pursuit of obscurity through her representation of Shakespeare, and through how Orlando is unable to stick to his new resolution of working in obscurity. Thinking of writing without fame or glory, Orlando thinks,“Shakespeare must have written like that” (Woolf 62). Spiropoulou explains this passage as follows: “Obscurity emerges as the precondition of great art and an attribute of all great poets” (Spiropoulou 110). And though her argument is astute, she fails to investigate how obscurity too is satirised by Woolf. Woolf uses Shakespeare as a self-contradicting example of how Orlando paradoxically romanticizes the obscure lives of writers he glorifies. Shakespeare was well-known during his lifetime, which overlapped with Orlando’s. Shakespeare is one of Orlando’s “favourite heroes” in the age during which the playwright is “writing or having just written” (Woolf 53). Shakespeare is therefore presented as both obscure and as a household name whose plays are acted out in public (Woolf 35-36). In these examples, while Orlando idolises Shakespeare’s obscurity, Woolf shows that he wasn’t in fact obscure. This is further mocked in the description of the “rather fat, rather shabby man” (Woolf 15) that Orlando glimpses writing in his kitchen. The man is again unnamed but is understood to be Shakespeare. Woolf chooses to describe the man in a neglected light highlighting his obscurity while simultaneously leading readers to know him for Shakespeare. This is another example of the paradox of fame and obscurity that Woolf uses to mock both. Later, having just finished her book, Orlando feels her manuscript “wanted to be read. It must be read.” (Woolf 159) This shows that Orlando was unable to live a life of obscurity and that her idealisation of obscurity was opposed by Woolf.
As seen through Greene’s idealisation of the past and passages in which Orlando explores their idealisation of the past, fame and obscurity are linked to historical understandings of literature. Spiropoulou writes, “Similarly being at odds with his/her time by embodying different temporalities at any one time and opting for obscurity, immortal Orlando offers a historical understanding of every present, connecting it to the past while gesturing to futurity” (Spiropoulou 113). As in the rest of her exploration of fame, Woolf seems to contradict herself here. Spiropoulou quotes a passage in which Orlando thinks, “there is no such thing as [eternal] fame and glory” (Woolf 157). But right before Orlando had been thinking: “future ages will think of us with curiosity and envy me with fury” (Woolf 120). These two opposing views cancel each other out, leaving the theme of Orlando’s temporality as the significant take away. It is not instantly obvious from this scene how Orlando’s positioning in her temporal life is significant to her writing. Yet already, from Woolf’s exploration of fame, we have two aspects with which to approach the issue of temporality in Orlando, the individual and the historical understanding of the past.
Tais De Lacerda reads Orlando through the lens of Jean-Paul Sartre in “Life-writing and the Poetics of Temporal Experience in Woolf and Sartre,” exploring how life writing is done through recollection of past experience. Though the article delves largely into the aesthetic constraints of this type of writing, De Lacerda astutely points out that “Writing about life involves taking lived experience as an object” (Lacerda 218). Life writing explores past experiences from the perspective of the present. “Woolf manages to introduce temporality as something experienced, thus providing a valuable contribution to the development of perspectives on human reality” (Lacerda 216). Read through the lens De Lacerda proposes, passages such as “and she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends…she need neither fight her age, or submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself” (Woolf 154) can be understood as a representation of an author’s temporality in terms of the subject they write about, life experience. The last words of this passage also connect to ideas of individuality, a concept carried over from Woolf’s exploration of immortalising the self.
With this consideration of past experience in the writing process, we can understand why Woolf brought us on an exploration of fame as a reason for writing. Fame is not, in Woolf’s understanding, the reason for writing. However, understanding the significance of the individual self and past experience in life-writing is necessary to a complete comprehension of Woolf’s argument that writing is for exploring existential life questions. In the entirety of her novel, Woolf mimics the life writing that she explores by writing a biography, intrinsically an individualistic pursuit, from the perspective of a single day. “And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight.” (Woolf 191) The rest of Orlando’s story has been their past, and for a single moment, the publication of the book on the same day on which it ends, we view the entirety of Orlando’s life from that temporal spot. Orlando is the experienced past that De Lacerda identifies and is like all life writing, a questioning of the meaning of life.
Having come to the conclusion that all life writing is done retrospectively through exploring the past from the present, Woolf explores the meaning of life that writers try to find through their writing by emulating life in literature. Sanja Bahun in her chapter “Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life” investigates the line “Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee” (Woolf 158). Analysing this passage, Bahun draws out how it is through an explorative process of representing life in writing that writers ask and attempt to answer existential questions. In this very line is an emphasis on exploring. Through writing, authors are able to go on a journey asking these questions, but this process has no destination and their questions have no answer. The merit, like Woolf, demonstrates in the entirety of her explorative, experimental text Orlando, lies in the very journey itself.
Orlando’s grappling with how to represent life in writing is a significant part of their character arc and is represented mainly through how they write about nature. The first time that Orlando writes in the text, as a young boy of sixteen, he makes the mistake of looking out the window at the nature he is trying to describe. “After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another” (Woolf 13). Later, he cannot decide if “the sky is blue […] the grass is green” or if “the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas gave let fall from their hair; the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.” Concluding that “both are utterly false,” Orlando “despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is” (Woolf 61). Bahun writes how “when the same trope is revisited in Chapter IV” Orlando “has started writing nature” and the narrator “has not found the answer to the question of what life is” (Bahun 73). There is a difference between the objective truth of nature and the truth that is represented in writing. Orlando up until this latter moment does not know what this truth is and so is unable to articulate nature in their writing. In the moment before she “dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, ‘Done!’” (Woolf 158) she realises the truth she seeks is the answer to the question, what is life?
Orlando has been searching for a deeper truth in her portrayal of nature and as she finishes her book, she discovers that what she has been searching for is the meaning of life. “Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness […] Let us go, then, exploring” (Woolf 158). Orlando realises that the truth she seeks in her writing is the answer to existential life questions which can only be explored through life writing. “Woolf’s narrator goes out to explore the question ‘What is life?’ by interviewing birds” (Bahun 74). “Life, life, life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they don’t know what to say next” (Woolf 158). This passage makes explicit the ideas Bahun drew out in the earlier passage, that writers undertake a journey in search of an answer. Bahun writes Woolf has “The belief that the answer can only be found – and figured in writing – through an exploration, as direct as possible, of the pre-figured, ‘life’ itself”(Bahun 74). Writers explore life in their writing through ideas of past and present because they know that if there is an answer, it is only to be found through exploration.
Woolf plainly states that there is no answer to the question of what is life, instead, she maintains that the exploration in search of this answer is where the merit lies, and that authors will continue this exploration because it is the reason that writers write. “Alas, no answer to the ‘overwhelming question’ has been provided. All this effort seems to have been in vain. Or, has it?”(Bahun 74) asks Bahun. After the writer has gone on their exploration, represented by Woolf as asking the birds and the insects, they return “to the reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is- alas, we don’t know.” (Woolf 158) This reaching for an answer throughout Orlando is represented by the wild goose. “Haunted! … There flies the wild goose … stretched after it. But the goose flies too fast. … always I fling after it words like nets” (Woolf 181) In this paragraph, Woolf creates a vivid image of something that is always just slipping out of your fingers. Orlando’s last words, “It is the goose! […] The wild goose….” followed by the date of Orlando’s publication indicate the impossibility of ever answering the question of the meaning of life, yet this also shows that writers will continue this vocation despite knowing rationally that there can be no answer. Orlando does not stop reaching for the goose, crying out for it even as the book comes to a close.
The wild goose chase that Virginia Woolf takes us on in her novel Orlando is a twisting, often contradictory journey that demonstrates many of the themes she sees writers explore in their writing. Life-writing is taken as a case study on how writers explore the individual through lived experience. Fame is explored as a reason for writing but is then dismissed. The whole exploration mimics the way that writers question life, searching for its meaning. Woolf does not believe that answers to these questions exist, yet, in her novel, she asks them herself showing the necessity of such questions to writing and vice versa. Anyone who explores these themes, whether in life writing or alternative literary exploration, can take from Woolf a deep appreciation of the process. Woolf argues that literary exploration, though externally appearing like a wild goose chase, remains a critical pursuit.
Works Cited
Bahun, Sanja. “‘Let Us Go, Then, Exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life.” Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence. Ed. Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 68–79. Print.
De Lacerda, Tais. “Life-writing and the Poetics of Temporal Experience in Woolf and Sartre.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 44, no. 4 SI, winter 2022, pp. 213+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A735759772/LitRC?u=ubcolumbia&sid=summon&xid=12df914f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.
Spiropoulou, Angeliki. “Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando.” Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence. Ed. Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 104–115. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Edited by Michael H. Whitworth, Oxford University Press, 2015.