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flooding and lapping and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke’. 32 And as we have seen, in
To the Lighthouse
the culturally constructed time by which history is usually measured – the chronicler’s time of births, deaths and wars – is so engulfed by a sort of undifferentiated ‘natural’ time that major events are related in parenthetical statements while the passage of ten years appears merely to occupy a single night.
    As a meditation on comparable questions about temporality, however,
Orlando
is a good deal more radical than either of these precursor texts. Obviously, the elasticity of the medium through which the book’s protagonist moves is metaphysically crucial: on the one hand, half of Orlando’s life/time expands to include five centuries of English social and cultural history; on the other hand, five centuries of English history shrink, as it were, to half the span of this magical being’s life/time. But in addition, Woolf intermittently comments not just on the arbitrariness of the ‘ages’ into which historical time has been organized by assorted historians, but also on the arbitrariness of temporal units themselves. At one point, for example, her narrator ridicules the calendar, which, as she dryly observes, has no meaning in and of itself unless a human significance is imported into it:
    It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January, February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back at November again, with a whole year accomplished.
    This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little bare, perhaps… (p. 184)
    At another point, though, Woolf celebrates the centrality that the calendar – and the clock – can assume when their abstract signification coincides with the fullness of human experience. Achieving a sort of Joycean epiphany in the twentieth century, Orlando notices that
    the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became mysteriously tightened… she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten timesshe was struck. In fact it was ten o’clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the present moment.
    No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. (p. 206)
    Hyperbolical though it is, this passage summarizes the radiant intensity of the temporal experience – the ‘moment of being’, to use Woolf’s own phrase – that this writer continually sought to capture in her complex role as revisionary biographer/historian/novelist and that, in
Orlando,
she triumphantly bestowed upon Vita Sackville-West.
    By the time Woolf finished
Orlando,
she had started to have doubts about this novel which had begun with such compelling exuberance as a ‘writer’s holiday’. ‘It may fall between stools, be too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book,’ she worried on 22 March 1928, and a month later she dismissed the work as ‘a freak’. 33 To her surprise, though, her first ‘reviewer’ – Leonard Woolf, to whom she regularly submitted all her manuscripts for comment as soon as she felt they had been properly completed – took the book ‘more seriously than [she] had expected’. He ‘Thinks it in some ways better than The Lighthouse’,