Sketch of the Past and The Mark on the Wall

In a lot of Sketch of the Past, the emphasis is on the family—and while this might appear as a fairly obvious assertion—how can you talk about the past without heavily including your family? Answer, you can’t—it struck me quite interesting not only in the way Woolf describes her family but the reactions to them. The two deaths in her family, most heavily described, that is, are of her mother and Stella. The scene with her mother is stark and exceedingly well written—but throughout the whole thing there’s this sense of detachment, as if Woolf herself is not personally involving herself in the memory. For example, on page 19 she stoops to kiss her mother’s face, “she [had] died a moment before. Then we went upstairs into the day nursery.” There’s no emotional involvement in the scene; it reads rather like an eloquent list of event. She kisses her dead mother, and then, no contemplation involved, continues on describing the events of the day; she even says a sentence before, “I said to myself as I have often done at moment of crisis since, ‘I feel nothing whatever.’” But however detached she may feel, it lends itself to equally vivid prose, such as when she describes touching her mother’s skin later, and thinking it felt like cold iron. It’s interesting to note, because a certain amount of detachment is required to be a good writer—too much emotional involvement usually ends up in “preaching” and bogs down the work, as anyone who’s had to slog through Atlas Shrugged can attest.

            Stella’s death, too, holds this attachment. Notice how, as Woolf herself says, “sums it up”: she relates a story immediately after pertaining to Stella’s fiancé and how he feels about the whole thing, and how badly it’s torturing him—when she does speak to her own feelings in both these instances, they are in the form of representations. The first, upon her mother’s death, is the apparition of the man sitting on her bed; the second, she relates, is the dead, leafless tree outside the window during the talk with Jack Hills, which she takes as symbolic of the suffering they all felt—notice here the all, meaning including her: she relates her suffering through the lens of a metaphor in the latter case, and her pain and horror through the lens of a manifestation in the former. It makes you wonder, then, where else Virginia sheds her pain by focusing it into physical (or, at the least, visible) representations throughout her life: a lighthouse maybe? Or a garden? Or a mark on the wall?

            And speaking of A Mark on the Wall, I got some serious Seinfeld vibes. I’m not joking, I thought the story would be perfect as an episode of Seinfeld. And it’s really no surprise: the show attempted to show the hilarity in the most mundane bits of nothingness in our lives, and accordingly, this is similar to Woolf’s impression of what literature should be in her essay “Modern Fiction,” with or without the humor. “The mind,” she says on 287, “receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.” And, later, on 288, “Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display…?” This is, to a letter, what is happening in The Mark on the Wall. It appears Woolf is trying to capture the essence of the vacillations of the mind itself, a sort of controlled chaos where everything is up for grabs but, yet, has a definable through-line. So, then, the narrator sees The Mark on the Wall in all its mystery, but through just the silent and unseeable process of thought jumps from the mark on the wall to contemplations of  life, thought, and society all in a tumbling but careful planned trickle up a hill to a river and then a sea. And this is the same thing we do, don’t we? Absentmindedly or not, many times we see one thing, this sparks a thought, that thought sparks another thought, and on, and on, and on, until we end up considering possibilities that have nothing to do with what we were originally musing on—but at the same time—can trace a trace a pattern through these thought processes to see how we got there.

            So why doesn’t the narrator just get up and see what, exactly, the mark is? Why does she just sit there? If I may be so bold for a moment, I believe Woolf is discussing the need of mystery to encourage high thought and conception—she actually addresses the question in the very story, p. 152-153: “I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened!” Before tumbling into a spiel about life and death. But this is a rather odd statement—if she examines the mark on the wall, she wouldn’t be able to know what it was, because she wouldn’t know how it happened?.... This is simply conjecture on my part, but it looks like the narrator—and remember, since these are her thoughts, it makes sense they’re almost nonsensical—it looks like the narrator is juxtaposing what we perceive to be knowledge, and what we perceive to be ignorance; that simply because we think we understand something, doesn’t mean we do. She could examine the mark on the wall, declare it to be this, and that would finish the issue, but in doing so she limits herself to other possibilities to what it could be. By limiting herself, she cuts off the flow of consideration, of thought. The narrator declares that denotation of facts actually leads to more confusion than the connotation. Once something has happened, once we think we’ve learned something and that is that, all we do is make ourselves more confused, with the side-effect of being completely unsure of what happened in the first place!

            No that may sound a little iffy, but don’t worry, it does to me too it’s completely understandable. But in case we you need a little more proof, check out the ending again. When does the story end? The exact second that the mystery is solved. Ah! The mark on the wall was a snail END. And ends, too, every bit of thought that the character put into determining what was the mark on the wall, and all that pontificating and consideration and pensiveness, all that high thought, turned out to be all for naught—for once the mystery is settle, there is nothing left but facts. And facts are inherently confining—which is probably the greatest irony in the history of civilization.

Conferences

       Let's sing an ode to redemption, shall we?
      I really was serious about the modernism thing, whether or not I covered it up in so much fatuous fluff. Many of the essays throughout all three of the conferences deal with Woolf and her contributions to Modernism, as well as modernism’s effect on the process and perception of writing over the past half-century or more.

            Although, I will have to say, that my favorite conference is undoubtedly the one from 2010: Woolf and the Natural World. You only have to look at the very first essay presented to understand: Woolf and the Politics of Grass. Folks, you just can’t get any better than that. What amazes me, simply from the title alone, is the dedication this woman commands from her readers, and, simultaneously, how said readers are influenced by her works in the most…well, the most unique of ways. It truly shows, then, that there is no end to the levels of interpretation of a great work; I’m not going to say there’s an infinite amount, but it’d have to be pretty close. Even once you get past the quote-unquote “regular” modes of criticism: the characters, the themes, plot, pragmatism; even after all of this, there are myriad parts of a novel that can be examined and elucidated upon, even going so far as to create a new type of criticism: I’ve certainly never seen such a focus on the horticultural aspect of any author’s works before. And take this essay, for example: “Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf.” Eco-feminism. You have to wonder how long that has been around--but it’s through novels of Woolf’s caliber that such examinations can be made; and since Woolf is one of the more famous feminists in Western history--heck, history proper--I’m sure she would be rather pleased that her books have helped, in part, to approbate and entirely new type of feminist thought.

            But I mean, let’s go back to the dedication thing for a minute. Dr. Sparks was talking the other day about her book, wherein she said something along the lines of “I went through her books and diaries and letters looking for references to gardens.” Now, it seems innocuous at first and so we kind of brush past it. But let’s look at this statement for a second: “I went through her books, diaries, and letters”……….so basically Dr. Sparks re-read, for Christ-knows how many times, all of Virginia Woolf’s novels--12 of them--as well as 4 short story collections, 2 biographies, thirteen books of essays, five volumes of diaries and six volumes of letters, all the while keeping meticulous notes and charting when and where and in what context the garden imagery came up. This signifies two things: one, that I can never be a literary critic, because my patience is the antithesis of inexhaustibility. Two, that Virginia Woolf must inspire, for some reason, a quasi-fanaticism that keeps these conferences and findings and new ways of thinking alive and well and thriving literally all over the world. I don’t say this just to stand in awe, but to suggest that, since a lot of us have at least passing fantasies of being writers, we could do worse to not only examine Woolf in a literary manner but in an authorial manner: figure out some of the things she is doing that have such far-reaching implications. Not that there’s a formula, by any means, but there must be something there that can help would-be writers spur themselves along.