Some Big Time Thoughts with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography explores many concepts such as gender, culture, and literature, but the narrative is especially unique as Orlando lives as an ever-changing character with a lifespan of nearly four centuries. Devoid of any supernatural force, Orlando’s experience of time is incredibly unique as they shift from time period to time period. In O’Sullivan’s essay, he discusses how Orlando and Virgina Woolf’s writing highlight what psychologists study about the relationship between the mind and its experience of time.

While time can be experienced objectively via counting hours, minutes, and seconds, time is also experienced subjectively by the person themselves.

Through Orlando’s and the narrator’s musings about the nature and relationship of time and the self, O’Sullivan argues the time is ultimately a subjective experience. O’Sullivan’s essay, “Time and Technology in Orlando” constructs a well-supported and reasonable argument about the subjective nature of time while exploring both Orlando the film and Orlando the novel. 

O’Sullivan’s discussion of how one experiences time is as psychological and philosophical as it is literary. Nearly half of O’Sullivan’s sources are from psychological or sociological journals and much of his weightier points about where the self ends and the external worlds begins go beyond just exploring Orlando.

O’Sullivan’s argument resides in both proving the importance of time in Orlando as well as applying Woolf’s musings about experiencing time to the larger human experience. This argument appeals to literary, philosophical, and psychological audiences alike.

Whether a reader is coming from an interest in Orlando, Virgina Woolf, time as a dimension, or how the brain perceives time, O’Sullivan’s journal has something to say to that individual.

Due to the broader audience his argument entices, he utilizes a broad support base to reflect his own findings in Orlando as well as his thoughts about the perception of time. Orlando remains the foundation of his discussion, however, as without Orlando, his discussion would be little more than a psychological musing. Orlando is a key element of his discussion as in Orlando one finds an exploration as to the relativity of time from before the field of psychology was truly developed.

Here O’Sullivan can use the character and narrative of Orlando, someone whose life spans around four centuries and several time periods, to show how the experience of time is truly relative.

Key to O’Sullivan’s argument is his discussion of how Woolf slowly continues to unravel the objective powers of time throughout the novel. The powers of time that O’Sullivan explores most intensely are those of progression, memory, societal standards, and periodization. O’Sullivan references the clock as the embodiment of objective time.

Objective time as in the math and science of calculable time that society follows to determine days, weeks, and hours. Objective time is how society often measures progression and decay, big events, routines, and periods of history.

While O’Sullivan references how Woolf uses technological advancements or large events to set Orlando in certain time periods, most of the other roles of objective time are thwarted by Woolf. As O’Sullivan notes, “The narration does not progress in a fashion consistent with objective measures of time: the events of a single day can occupy pages, while decades are traversed in a line” (41).

He supports his analysis of Woolf’s disregard for objective time by noting several specific events in Orlando. Instead of by time, the story of Sasha changes by seasons, instead of Orlando aging by year, they age at random, and instead of Orlando always following a certain schedule, they often live within their own sense of time. O’Sullivan’s use of specific events helps his argument sound more reasonable and seem more fitting with the novel as a whole. 

Another strong element of O’Sullivan’s argument is his anticipation of counter-arguments. Orlando touches on a myriad of topics and themes, and while others may come to different conclusions about the significance of specific sections, O’Sullivan is quick to redirect these analyses by pointing to other elements of the text.

For example, O’Sullivan discusses the analysis by Minow-Pinkney that believes Orlando’s lateness is an issue of gender, but O’Sullivan refutes by noting how Orlando is uncomfortable with time regardless of their gender (45).

According to his argument, Orlando’s view on time is such that “happy he would have been to have remained under his tree, unhindered by the demands of time and the manner in which it regulates human relationships and dictates social interaction” (O’Sullivan 45).

O’Sullivan’s ability to pull from the breadth of the narrative to support his argument lends credibility to his findings.

O’Sullivan uses sources in a myriad of ways and ties them in effectively. He is quick to blend the findings of both the literary and the psychological to support his argument, placing an Orlando quote right before the writing of a social behaviorist, George Mead. O’Sullivan uses the majority of his psychological sources towards the beginning of his essay, introducing the mental concepts he wishes to discuss.

These sources serve as methods to educate the reader on more scientific terms for what may seem simply philosophical. Much of the literary sources serve to deepen O’Sullivan’s discussion and support his viewpoint, besides the one he uses as an example of a counter-argument.

Another interesting note is his use of Virginia Woolf’s own writing through the narrator in Orlando and Orlando himself to further his argument about the relativity of time. O’Sullivan also discusses some of Woolf’s other works to show her interest in discussing one’s experience of time.

Key to the discussion are specific moments or elements of the film Orlando that O’Sullivan utilizes to show how the ideas of Orlando were translated to a different medium and reimagined by the director, Sally Potter. 

“Time and Technology in Orlando” by James O’Sullivan serves as an intriguing and reliable scholarly source as it explores a dense topic from a variety of angles. Orlando by Virginia Woolf touches on several topics and themes, but there is a strong argument for O’Sullivan’s reading of Orlando and how it relates to the human experience of time. 

Works Cited

O’Sullivan, James. “Time and Technology in Orlando” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 27, no.1, 2014. pp 40-45.