on the ontology of transition *from a passage in Orlando (1928)

at the quasi midpoint of Virginia Woolf’s queer fantasy novel Orlando, its main character, seemingly out of nowhere, changes their sex. this is not something that she goes through — it is a ‘happening’. waking out of a seven-day sleep and in the midst of a Turkish rebellion, we are told, Orlando just is a woman now. or, how the narrator puts it, “Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since”. but Woolf is clear in pointing out how Orlando’s “change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity”. at first glance, this might seem contradictory. one might argue that, there was no reason to point out, in the text, a difference there; that the alteration of Orlando’s future consists of, or is one with, the alteration of their identity. that it is not inconsistent with the logic of being to, well, become. but Woolf is clear: she’s not interested in the why’s and how’s of ontology or biology — and nor is Orlando herself: “let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; — she (the narrator) says — we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can”. because transition, in the Woolfian sense, is not a state of being — and especially not a state of becoming —, but something more akin to an event, a diversion in time, which redirects one towards an alternative future; makes an actuality out of possibilities.

any hitherto ontology has only been able to produce a concept of transition as a ‘becoming’. and this is because, in the end, ontology always points towards death, or, better yet, can only think through it. its object of study — being — is conceived of on its way to dying, and its methods are autopsic. and so its conception of becoming, or temporality, is rooted in this understanding of the future as nonbeing; that is, something which is not yet. inside this framework, there is no futurability. no salvation. and so, we’re always, ultimately confronted with the idea of ontological fate, namely that “every transition is done too late”. but what if the truth was, in fact, the opposite? that every transition is always on time — what if we built our understanding of transition on a different concept of the present? one “in which time stands still” — to say it alongside Benjamin —, rather than just marching onwards its own annihilation, mercilessly. in a deeply allegorical passage that prefaces the very moment of Orlando’s transition: the figures of Purity, Chastity and Modesty try and prevent the occurance of this revelation, but are cast out by Truth, whose trumpets blare them away, “the Truth and nothing but the Truth!” — and, in coherence with the biblical undertones of the scene, there is Truth. Orlando is a woman now: she reveales herself as the thing which she always was to become.