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Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade . . . ; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and again how futile life writing becomes.
-Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"
In a conversation with Bruno Latour, historian and philosopher of science Michel Serres provides a metaphor that captures modernist life writing's temporality. Our experience of time, says Serres, re- sembles a crumpled handkerchief rather than a flat plane, where the past folds in on the present, pressing on it at difference places, and the present folds in on the past, pressing on it from behind in that the present redacts our understanding of what the past has become (60).1 Virginia Woolf shares this understanding of the proximity of the present and the past in her classic life writing narrative, Orlando, as in her memoir, "A Sketch of the Past," begun in 1939, where she dates each reminiscence to include the present moment in which she writes as "a platform to stand upon" (75). In writing a life, and in reading life writing, one unavoidably encounters the past from some present vantage point, some immediate stimulus that revisions that past, and thus the present as the past's future, gathering up mo- ments in time that resonate with the present moment. In this sense, Orlando's composition of "The Oak Tree" over three centuries is not fantastic, a temporal aberration, but emblematic of how writing and reading work. "The present when backed by the past," writes Woolf, "is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close you can feel nothing else" ("Sketch" 98). Likewise, the past when backed by the present is far deeper, more yielding than when visited as a discrete period, as if only a moment in time.
In this essay, I read Woolf's 1928 mock biography, Orlando, whose eponymous protagonist changes from a man into a woman midway through her life, in relation to the discourse of transsexual- ism in the modernist era. In particular, I compare Orlando with the contemporaneous Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, the biography-memoir of...