Self-Reflexivity in Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov and Orlando by Sally Potter
By Agnes Araujo
The novels, Orlando by Virginia Woolf and Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov, as well as the film, Orlando, written and directed by Sally Potter, are all self-reflexive, or metafictional, i.e., they draw our attention to the processes and techniques of writing and the production of cinema. All three share similarities and differences in setting, narrative technique, characterization and theme.
The settings of the above three works all differ but are similar in their reflexivity. Laughter in the Dark occurs in Berlin, Germany at an unspecified time, as is characteristic of fairy tales. This announcement that the novel is a fairy tale identifies the attitude of the narrator, his intention, and cues the reader on what stance s/he should take in order to understand the tale; that is, the reader must not be a gullible and credulous child, but must view the novel as a work of fiction with a point to make, with a lesson to be taught and to be learned. The novel Orlando opens in an attic room in a "gigantic house" where "He for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters." It is uncertain who had struck it from the shoulders of a "vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa."(13) This setting for an English audience is indeterminate, set in a world far away from the present. The reader cannot quite tell what century from the opening lines, except that the fashion would give us a clue as to the gender of the person whose biography this is about, a biography which is fictional and a commentary of biographical writing itself.
Laughter in the Dark is also fictional biography, that of Albert Albinus in the form of fairy-tale and perhaps even an essay, a suggestion conveying caution to the reader not to be smug about the conventions of this novel. The mise-en sc�ne of the opening scene of the film Orlando is an English landscape in a late summer afternoon. The script reads "Orlando paces back and forth beneath an oak tree, holding a book. He is murmuring, looking at the book occasionally learning some verse. He wears the clothes of a young Elizabethan: doublet and hose, a ruff at this neck." (3) The voice over duplicates a person reading, just as Orlando is reading and when the voice says, "he--" Orlando turns and looks into the camera, a gesture which both makes him real as a character and identifies the viewer as the camera, thus inverting reality, a technique which also pervades Laughter in the Dark. The film frame just before Orlando falls asleep is pointedly a magnificent piece of parchment, with Orlando's plume elegantly poised above the blank page suggesting that he is about to write a poem, "The Oak," a tree under which he is seated, a poem which takes four hundred years to write, as we learn from the novel on which the film is based. Thus all three works have indeterminate, ambiguous settings and all indicate that they are not conventional art forms. All are innovative works of art, all self-conscious of their nature as works of art.
Whereas Orlando is a film, it imitates the narrative technique of a novel; Laughter in the Dark is a novel in the style of film; and Orlando, the novel, is a spoof on biography. All create juxtapositions, which constantly remind the reader of the nature of the work of art as fiction, as a created universe, which has relevance and meaning, nevertheless, to the real life of the reader or audience.
The primary interrelationship and similarity of all three works is the frame. In Chapter 1, Woolf describes Orlando's body to be framed by a window-sill, and lit by the tint of heraldic glass. "When he put his hand on the windowsill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly's wing." (14) Laughter in the Dark has numerous frames painting frames, mirror frames, window frames, doorframes, and stage frame. The film Orlando emphasizes frames for varying purposes. They announce changes in time and scene by means of bold captions, such as "Death," "Love," "Birth," which act like titles of chapters in a book. There are frames within frames, another reflexive technique. At the beginning of the scene captioned "Love," Orlando and Euphrosyne stare at the ancestral portrait of his father and mother and then turn to face the camera conveying a sense of present time, of reality. Another arresting frame occurs under the caption "1650" followed by "Poetry" where Orlando sits on a high ladder and in the foreground is a bookshelf replete with books, top to bottom, fleetingly suggesting that the film is an animated book.
The still frame and the animated frame are frequently juxtaposed in both Laughter in the Dark and the film Orlando. Albinus's family gathered in the living room is compared to an early Italian painting. The art critic considers the Dutch school of painting for animation. The deep colours of the film Orlando are quite evocative of the Dutch school. Outside the cinema in which Albinus first sees Margot, a poster portrays "a man looking up at a window framing a child in a nightshirt" (19-20). The poster foreshadows Irma's illness and her death. The child longs for her father and getting up from her sickbed, she opens the window to the winter night and sees a man "standing, gazing up at the house." (159) He is not her father. In Orlando, a window is the first frame but there are rooms as well, such as the Countess's room, which conveys the idea of stuffy, mannered conventionality. The stiffness, pomposity and ridiculousness of conventions are beautifully parodied in the film. Laughter in the Dark is filled with rooms, as well: the cinema, the rented rooms where Margot and Miller have their dalliance, the rooms in Albinus's house, and the rooms in the villa. These evoke perception and indicate what a person includes on his mind's screen and/or leaves out.
A striking similarity in all three works is the use of colour. Albinus's talk is of paintings and the novel is splattered with coloured objects, particularly red, black, and white but other colours are there as well such as gold "a gold cigarette holder" a "red and gold fire engine;" silver "silver ghost of romance;" purple–stage curtain, pyjamas, Albinus's socks, a plush elephant held by a school girl; brown "brown circular stains;" a yellow bus, a yellow camel overcoat, a hairy man in orange-red pants, gay parasols, striped tents; blue–Paul's eyes, the telephone book, blue sky; pink Paul's blistered shoulders. Red objects are numerous: Margot's frock, a motorcycle, Albinus's face when he hung up the telephone, the silk cushion mistaken for Margot's frock which Albinus had used earlier to crouch on as he consulted a book on the History of Art, Margot's red silk wrapper, Margot's nails, fingers and toes, red stains sticky red kisses. The black objects include an elderly man with a black bandage over his right eye, a black felt hat and a new shiny black trunk. The colour which predominates is white: the door of a child's bedroom, the central heating apparatus, Margot's teeth, Elizabeth's shoulders, the telephone receiver, Margot's face in the blaze of the street lamp, a girl in white tights, Irma's body, Albinus' ivory paper knife, the white parapet, the villa "white as sugar between the black cypresses"–a white silk fan, and the white table cloth where Rex and Margot are left by Albinus. These colours act as a painter's palette and as a list of props for the mise-en-sc�ne of the novel as film.
Although the novel Orlando is also splashed with colour, and descriptions of night and day, light and darkness, night and day are particularly graphic in the film and Laughter in the Dark. In Orlando, light and dark convey not only day turning into night, constant circular motion, but also century after century. This pattern is established from the first scene where Orlando is seen in an English landscape in a late summer afternoon. He falls asleep and is awakened by a distant trumpet call. There follows a scene with very rich dark colours illuminated by torches "On the riverbank servants dash about with flaming torches," "the points of light reflected glittering in the water." Dusk is followed by night. At the start of scene 4, the script reads: "The dark paneled banquet hall in the huge fireplace; a long polished table is covered entirely with orange and yellow sugared flowers." Every scene occurs either during the day or night, the awareness of which is conveyed by the lighting. Light and dark have a different function in Laughter in the Dark. Black and white convey the colours of the film itself but they also convey a neat ordering of objects in a picture as well as states of perception. Light represents the real world and dark, the dark room where the photo, the picture of something real and tangible out there is being developed, is being transformed into what has been perceived by the camera and is metamorphosing into another form which conveys the meaning from one mind to that of another through an art form. The main character's name is Albinus which connotes whiteness. Rex has dark hair and white sunken cheeks. Margot has black hair and often wears black and white. Here is a description from the novel: "With nothing but deep blue above, Margot lay spread-eagled on the platinum sand, her limbs rich honey-brown, and a think white rubber belt relieving the black of her bathing suit: the perfect seaside poster." (112) Yet another frame.
In their respective works, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and Sally Potter satirize art, artists or art critics. The characters Albinus, Rex and Margot are stock figures each representing a hackneyed view of the art critic, the artist or film producer, and beauty. All three are antipathetic characters, in my view. Albinus, the reader is told almost immediately is "giving his learned mind a holiday and writing a little essay �upon the art of the cinema." (8) The book is the essay and it is Nabokov who is giving his learned mind a holiday. Rex is a devious, deceitful person, a gifted artist who is wasting his time creating cartoons–also suggestive of how Nabokov feels about his own writing and how he must write in order to convey his perceptions and worldview. Both Margot and Rex are conveyed as parasites of Albinus, a perception which is reversed when the reader finishes the novel. Albinus has made his fortune, by inference, writing mediocre articles about art to a credulous, gullible audience, not particularly bright, like Albinus. Margot is depicted as a vulgar, uneducated, young whore with a pretty face whose beauty is skin deep and who is avaricious, spiteful, and poisonous as a rattlesnake. She is as old as the theatre Argus, that is, eighteen years old. In Greek mythology, Argus is a giant with a thousand eyes, but it is also the name of a pheasant, "A large bird (Argusianus argus) of southern Asia and the East Indies, having long tail feathers marked with brilliantly colored, eyelike spots." Argus is also evocative of "Argo," the name of the ship of the Argonauts who went in search of the Golden Fleece. The only Golden Fleece in this novel is Albinus' yellow camel overcoat, and he is literally fleeced by Rex and Margot. The art critic Albert Albinus, and the artist, Axel Rex, are conveyed as the crudest mediocrities, without imagination, refinement or breeding whose notion of beauty is an opportunity for lechery and vice. Margot's counterpart, Dorianna Karenina hints at the narrator's attitude regarding contemporary Russian literature. Dorianna, who had never heard of Anna Karenina, is a pathetic image of that tragic heroine. By inference, the arts in Russia, according to this essay-cinematic-novel, are contemptible mediocrities.
In Sally Potter's Orlando there are two delightful scenes, which are commentaries on artists and writing. Nick Green, the poet, is proverbially poor, unkempt and dirty. His manners in Orlando's great house are appallingly coarse. He is self-absorbed, a hypochondriac, and pompous. He is utterly shocked that his collection of poetry has sold so few copies, but how can he write great poetry without a pension of three hundred pounds, paid quarterly? Orlando, who has high regard for this poet's work, regardless of his coarse manners and unkempt appearance, is eager to have his opinion on a poem he has written. Nick Green does not deign to read Orlando's poem for lack of time, ignoring the fact that he has just been fed at Orlando's table. After he has read Orlando's composition, he insults Orlando who aristocratically has Green's reply to his poem burned in the filthiest pile of dung his servant can find. Nevertheless, he will pay the three hundred pounds quarterly. Orlando looks directly into the camera and the viewer gets the message that poets are insensitive, cruel and unfair. Nick Green, who shares Orlando's longevity, mourns the passing of famous writers, unconcerned that the contemporaries he castigated in the sixteenth century are the same men he reveres in the nineteenth, an observation one makes from the novel but is not in the film. The second scene occurs around 1750 in the Countess's drawing room full of "mannered individuals who speak and move in a fast, staccato, casually cruel way. Pope, Swift and Addison are amongst the Countess's guests, and are engaged in animated conversation, which they clearly think is extremely witty." (43) Pope calls the Archduke a fool.
Sir–I admit your general rule
That every poet is a fool;
But you yourself may serve to show it
That every fool is not a poet. (45)
There follows a discussion about women, which is quite unflattering to the fair sex.
(Orlando listens, remains quiet and still, but looks increasingly
flushed.)
Pope: Oh! The lady is aflame. And silent. Perfect!
(Orlando slowly puts down her teacup.)
Orlando: Gentlemen. I find it strange�. You are poets, each one
of you, and speak of your muse in the feminine, and yet you appear to
feel neither tenderness nor respect towards your wives nor towards females
in general. (46)
This scene, added to many sex changes in the novel and the film, underlines
one of the major themes of both works, namely, that individuals may be
either female or male, but their person remains the same. Hence the sexes
ought to respect each other equally and transcend the prejudices or conventions
of society, no matter how their identities and roles are defined in the
time continuum, or century after century.
Orlando, the novel, evokes as Rachel Bowlby indicates in the introduction
to this work, a number of literary figures. Orlando him/herself recalls
a line of literary heroes from the medieval Chanson de Roland (the
French version of the name) through Ariosto's epic, Orlando Furioso,
to Shakespeare's As you Like It in which Orlando cross-dresses
as a woman. She also observes that Orlando undermines the belief
in a developmental historical or personal narrative in which everything
leads up to the present. The novel indicates that histories are fictions
created by narrative techniques, which declare themselves as such. Sex
changes are merely physical appearances but the person is the same. In
relating a story where is the biographer? In the same century or a different
one? As readers of the work, from what vantage point are we perceiving
the work: in the century where events are taking place or from present
time?
An important observation which this novel fleetingly conveys, with its
tromp through 400 years of a person's life, is that consciousness and
materiality may well be embraced by a third phenomena which transcends
time and space and yet is always the same. (Perhaps this is the phenomena,
which both Plato and Aristotle omitted to factor into their philosophies
because their purview was not self-reflexive. They omitted the self, I,
the awareness of being aware.)
In Laughter in the Dark, the theme of the novel is not so cheerfully
conveyed as in Orlando. When Albinus is ushered into the darkened
theatre by Margot, the usherette who guides him to his eat with her spot
of light, she had already been possessed by Miller, the artist who wasted
his time drawing cartoons. The reader understands the significance of
this event after reading the entire novel. Margot, who is as old as the
theatre, represents Art itself. "He looked at her face almost in
dread. It was a pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face." (21) Albinus,
the art critic, the connoisseur of beauty, wishes to possess her. When
Rex and she meet again, they contrive to deceive Albinus by creating a
situation where they have ample opportunities for illicit sex. When all
three were at the villa in Rouginard, Albinus perceives both Margot and
Rex completely happy in each other's company. Earlier Albinus had reflected
that he did not feel jealous of Margot as he had before. The reason for
that was that Margot already had the man she wanted but Albinus did not
know that. He did not know that the artist had his beauty, that he and
Margot were soul mates. The critic had no place there. Albinus's misfortune
was that he wanted to have the soul of the artist but did not possess
it; the implication in the novel is that he should have stayed at home
with his wife and child where he belonged. Outside the theatre his future
is already before him in the images of the night, the poster with the
picture of the child. Inside, he sees the moving picture of the end of
his days, but does not know it. "He had come in at the end of a film:
a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a
gun." (20) Art will blind him and murder him for daring to touch
it because he does not have the soul of an artist and therefore cannot
understand it. If he did, he would be painting pictures and writing novels
rather than talking about them in the darkness, blindly, without the least
comprehension, soul, or appreciation. Art turned viperous and ugly and
bit him. The laughter in the dark is that of Art (Margot and Rex) who
have duped and undone him. This novel, then, is not the biography of Albinus,
but a moral tale and a cinematic literary novel essay on the author's
view of art critics. It is a novelist's revenge on the blindness of his
public. Viewed or interpreted this way, Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark
is a scathing criticism of criticism itself. No art critic or literary
critic who is not himself/herself an artist could produce so thorough
an aesthetic condemnation.
The self-reflexivity of the above works is an advancement in literary
technique not unlike that of the growth of a person when s/he first becomes
aware of being aware. Just as one thousand years ago, people did not expect
the future to be better than the past, except, perhaps, in heaven, nor
did they have the anticipation that new inventions or discoveries might
transform the world, so too, we thought, not so long ago, that artistic
writing might have reached its pinnacle with no more changes in the horizon.
Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov and Sally Potter are revolutionary in
their self-conscious artistry. Such self-consciousness results in much
finer critical thinking and awareness about life and art for the appreciative
reader or viewer. The artist lifts his/her audience to a new level or
perception and understanding.
Copyright Agnes Araujo, 2003
WORKS CITED
Nabokov, Vladimir. Laughter in the Dark. New York: First Vintage International Edition, l989.
Potter, Sally. Orlando. London: Faber and Faber Limited, l994.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth
Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. www.dictionary.com
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992,
VHS VIDEO
Orlando. Directed by Sally Potter, l994.
WORKS CONSULTED
Appel, Alfred Jr. & Charles Newman, editors. Nabokov : criticism, reminiscences, translations, and tributes. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, l970.
Branden, Nathaniel. The Art of Living Consciously. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Clancy, Laurie. The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin's Press, c1984.
Hampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, c1984.
Ross, Charles Stanley. Vladimir Nabokov: Life, Work, and Criticism. Fredericton, N.B. Canada: York Press, cl985.
Roth, Phyllis A. Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov. Boston: G. K. Hall, c1984.
Tschofen, Monique. English 373: Film and Literature Study Guide. Athabasca University, 2000.
