orlando takes a pocket-knife and slices open notions of gender, of great art, of what it means to be making something of yourself or of someone else, and out with their innards fall normative temporalities and spatiality and most of the rest of reality. there is an age defying genius in its mysticism and sarcastic, truly often proudly lowbrow temperament, its meddling with and wanton yielding of literary conventions. to call orlando a seminal queer text is an understatement. and yet.

how do we contend with artists who have been painted so broadly as ‘ahead of their time’ (an often redundant phrase to begin with) or groundbreaking or revolutionary, but whose work in actuality reflects a backwardness; a malicious, tumourous, time-eating nastiness? for it is true: orlando does its best to be time-full and timeless — oxymoronic as far as it is making fun of and melting that which it is, but still; for all that it unravels and pokes fun at, it is still a centuries-and-gender-spanning epic — but it fails insofar as it is a profoundly racist text. slip and fumble as orlando might through genders and eras and classes and lovers, its fluidity falters the moment (and there is many a moment) woolf feels the need to comment on race, or colour (colour meant literally, because virginia woolf cannot write the words white or black or any tint or shade in any context whatsoever without making it some gruelling comment on race). it is impossible to read the tongue-in-cheek as tongue-in-cheek, when it feels like, at all times, there is a larger god, a biographer to the biographer, laughing at and pointing out the hypocrisy and shallowness of the narrator, which makes all ideas of being ‘ahead’ of anything fall swiftly to the floor. because how can witty virginia woolf write a book that intends — or at least appears — to make fun of, in such a knowing way, the frivolities and pitfalls of the literary sphere, and how these stories and tropes age and wear and tear, while remaining so ignorant to her own failings, much more egregious than people in parlours and their intellectual chatter.

oxymoron indeed. how can we call this text seminal on queerness and gender — though it is — when it so boldly hates its own ideas? how do you write a story about fluidity and change and exposing and expelling roles and traditions while its text so firmly reflects an unwillingness to grow or be shifted? when, exactly, virginia, are the rules of society flappable?

were our literary heroes radical? or were they just queer?