In this sentence, Orlando experiences a physical, heart-wrenching identification with floating fragments of discourse. Like musical phrases, travelling through the air, ‘over the ice’, he feels the words as echoes of sounds which originate in his own being, and which are reflected back to him via the actor/character on stage. The words of the play are recognisable to him because the scenes of love and jealousy replicate a structure of feeling and of speaking – in phrases constructing a discourse, with its own grammar and vocabulary – in which Orlando (and Orlando) participates: they are fragments of a lover's discourse. Roland Barthes, in his creative-theoretical text A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977), demonstrates a theoretical ‘Image-repertoire’, or dictionary of terms for the figures by which lovers speak or think. The performative figures of this discourse are created through ‘sentence-arias’ in the lover's mind, and function like allegories or extended metaphors in that they come to stand for a concept such as ‘waiting’. Inspired by the sentence from Orlando, this chapter takes Barthes's Lover's Discourse as a reference point in order to show how Orlando's lover's discourse works via the creation of figures, and how its figurative language creates the lover as subject. This is of particular interest in Orlando, since the text not only creates lovers within the narrative, but is itself also a fraught gift and love letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West. Its creation of the lover as subject is an inscription of Woolf as the lover of Sackville- West, and of Vita as Orlando. Orlando is a demonstration of a lover's discourse on multiple levels at once.

For Barthes, the lover's act of ‘phrasing’ repeatedly and almost nonsensically creates ‘figures’. It creates ‘figures’ rather than ‘concepts’ because, as Barthes emphasises, they are embodied: