Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Sentencing Orlando
- 1 ‘The Queen had come’: Orgasm and Arrival
- 2 ‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
- 3 Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’
- 4 Rhythms of Revision and Revisiting: Unpicking the Past in Orlando
- 5 ‘Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life
- 6 ‘. . . and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form
- 7 Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape
- 8 Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando
- 9 Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame
- 10 The Day of Orlando
- 11 Satzdenken, Indeterminacy and the Polyvalent Audience
- 12 In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse
- 13 A Spirit in Flux: Aestheticism, Evolution and Religion
- 14 Sir Thomas Browne and the Reading of Remains in Orlando
- 15 The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge
- 16 Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness
- Aftersentence
- Index
12 - In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Sentencing Orlando
- 1 ‘The Queen had come’: Orgasm and Arrival
- 2 ‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
- 3 Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’
- 4 Rhythms of Revision and Revisiting: Unpicking the Past in Orlando
- 5 ‘Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life
- 6 ‘. . . and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form
- 7 Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape
- 8 Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando
- 9 Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame
- 10 The Day of Orlando
- 11 Satzdenken, Indeterminacy and the Polyvalent Audience
- 12 In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse
- 13 A Spirit in Flux: Aestheticism, Evolution and Religion
- 14 Sir Thomas Browne and the Reading of Remains in Orlando
- 15 The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge
- 16 Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness
- Aftersentence
- Index
Summary
But now and again a single phrase would come to him over the ice which was as if torn from the depths of his heart.
In this sentence, Orlando experiences a physical, heart-wrenching identification with floating fragments of discourse. Like musical phrases, travelling through the air, ‘over the ice’, he feels the words as echoes of sounds which originate in his own being, and which are reflected back to him via the actor/character on stage. The words of the play are recognisable to him because the scenes of love and jealousy replicate a structure of feeling and of speaking – in phrases constructing a discourse, with its own grammar and vocabulary – in which Orlando (and Orlando) participates: they are fragments of a lover's discourse. Roland Barthes, in his creative-theoretical text A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977), demonstrates a theoretical ‘Image-repertoire’, or dictionary of terms for the figures by which lovers speak or think. The performative figures of this discourse are created through ‘sentence-arias’ in the lover's mind, and function like allegories or extended metaphors in that they come to stand for a concept such as ‘waiting’. Inspired by the sentence from Orlando, this chapter takes Barthes's Lover's Discourse as a reference point in order to show how Orlando's lover's discourse works via the creation of figures, and how its figurative language creates the lover as subject. This is of particular interest in Orlando, since the text not only creates lovers within the narrative, but is itself also a fraught gift and love letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West. Its creation of the lover as subject is an inscription of Woolf as the lover of Sackville- West, and of Vita as Orlando. Orlando is a demonstration of a lover's discourse on multiple levels at once.
For Barthes, the lover's act of ‘phrasing’ repeatedly and almost nonsensically creates ‘figures’. It creates ‘figures’ rather than ‘concepts’ because, as Barthes emphasises, they are embodied:
The figure is to be understood, not in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation; in short, in the Greek meaning: σχημα is not the ‘schema’, but, in a much livelier way, the body's gesture caught in action and not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the straining body can be immobilized.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sentencing OrlandoVirginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence, pp. 151 - 161Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018