2023-07-02 03:30:00
Every literary classic is always a little bomb. Something that blows up preconceived ideas and opens a new path in some other direction not imagined until then. When Virginia Woolf, then already a respected author, published Orlando in 1928, she was taking a huge step forward towards a still unknown place that, however, as with the classics, she could not not know…
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Every literary classic is always a little bomb. Something that blows up preconceived ideas and opens a new path in some other direction not imagined until then. When Virginia Woolf, then already a respected author, published Orlando in 1928, she was taking a huge step forward towards a still unknown place that, however, as with the classics, could not not be known. The protagonist of the mutant Orlando is a tremendously attractive young aristocrat who, over time, no less than five centuries —biographed in this novel/game—, will be indistinctly, at times, male and female, and nothing will change for him, unless he counts what society thinks of him. “A different sex. The same person,” Orlando says to himself as he looks in the mirror for the first time after transitioning. That is, he was like that before, and he always will be. The work has gained relevance for a reason that goes beyond literature: a theatrical version has recently been rejected by Vox in the Valdemorillo City Hall (Madrid), where the ultra formation runs the Department of Culture.
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Conceived as an experiment, conceived, in fact, as what Woolf herself considered “a vacation” from her life as a writer—it gave her a hitherto elusive popularity, and established her as a stylist capable of ironically and brilliantly inveighing against the canon of the serious and masculine biographical genre-, Orlando was considered by Nigel Nicolson, one of the sons of Vita Sackville-West -the true protagonist of the story, then Woolf’s lover, and always friend-, “the longest and most charming letter of love” that no one had ever written. And she was not wrong. Although like any magnum opus, Orlando —whose subtitle reads: A biography—, is such an infinity of things that you should not forget to remind yourself that “it is not just that.” It’s a kaleidoscope of Woolf’s experience thus far, with an emphasis on her conception of her world and her immediate present: yes, her love affair with Sackville-West.
That is why, although it invokes, from the title, Orlando in love with the Italian Renaissance Matteo Maria Boiardo, an epic poem from 1486 —in which the figure of the hero is no longer that of the classical hero, but that of one whose deeds have to do with what he loves, and not with anything that involves a battle, or death, or the lust for power of any kind—, is shot through with anecdotes from Sackville-West’s biography. Some so specific that they should have made the also writer blush, so opposite in everything to Woolf —Sackville-West was extroverted, attractive, a very rich aristocrat— that there is a corner in Orlando also for desire, a transforming desire, the desire to be another being yourself. And there she returns to the theme of transformation without it having to do with gender, but with the idea of who we really are, and how the other is, or can be, an engine for creation.
The fact that it is a bogus biography that laughs at the very idea of biography—he’s talking about someone who lives five centuries!—and at absurdly brainy biographers, and their inordinate conceit, allows him to play at admiring the another for all that it has, and is, for what it has been and will be, and at the same time to notice the condemnation that anything entails. Orlando reflects the multiple identity of every human being, and he immerses himself in it, determined to consider himself an infinity of possibilities, and to see how they diminish because of what others think. If it is considered a masterpiece of feminism, it is because Orlando’s life does not change when she becomes a woman because she changes gender, he does it because of the way the world treats him from then on because he is a woman. The loss of her rights is instantaneous, despite the fact that he, now she, continues to be the same, then already the same.
The fact that the novel spans five centuries also allows Woolf to look at everyday life for more than 400 years, and at the change that occurs in what is not presented as anything other than the scenery. In other words, the world out there is nothing more than what changes on stage during a theatrical performance, because the actors who play the drama or comedy, that is, life, remain the same. That is, human beings who want things and try to get them. The context, that is, History, with capital letters, is treated by Woolf as one more element, completely circumstantial, something that will only make the life of the protagonist more difficult or easier, immersed as he is in his own universe. endless, since he is, and we all are, our own show on the go. And that is why Orlando will never grow old, because he will always speak of what the human being will always be.
circa 1933: English critic, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941). (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)Central Press (Getty Images)
There have been numerous Orlando adaptations. In 1992, Sally Potter turned Tilda Swinton into such a mutant character that, remember, she starts out as nothing less than a transcript of William Shakespeare, a prolific writer in the middle of the Elizabethan era. In her theater, she has been returned to often since Robert Wilson and Darryl Pinckney dared to premiere her first production in 1989. In Spain, Vanessa Martínez, and the Teatro Defondo company, produced Orlando in 2019, which will not be performed these days in Valdemorillo (Madrid) due to Vox’s veto of the play. Martínez especially vindicated Woolf’s sense of humor, her very fine and corrosive irony, when approaching the genre that her father, Leslie Stephen, had practiced. Yes, a biographer. Because here is something else that Orlando boasts of, as an anti-authoritarian artifact, the very figure of the father, sacred and cult, and with him, the place we come from.
Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction and fantasy writer responsible for The Left Hand of Darkness, a work undoubtedly influenced by Orlando, in which the idea of gender has been completely superseded, and in which human beings change of sex when they feel like it, she read Woolf’s classic at the age of 17 and it was for her “something both revealing and confusing”. “He made it clear to me that he could envision a society very different from ours,” she wrote. Her literary footprint is capital, and she is also in gender studies, and transgender. The philosopher Paul B. Preciado will premiere his own adaptation of the novel in October, a hybrid between documentary and fiction with the appearance of a choral story about trans and non-binary identities called Orlando, my political biography, awarded multiple times at the Berlinale. It would be said that, like his protagonist, Orlando can take different forms because, like him, he is a universe in himself, refusing to enter it, and staying on the surface, is not only not having understood anything, but fearing to do so. .
Writer Virginia Woolf with her father, critic Sir Leslie Stephen, in an image dated around 1900. Hulton Deutsch (Corbis via Getty Images)
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