the mark on the wall - VW - take two
My experience with Woolf is that she is always exploring the vital oppositions that make up life. “The Mark on the Wall” is exactly that - looking at the inner vs. the outer, subjective thought vs. objective reality and the general vs. the specific.
For me the main tennet of the story is Woolf’s desire to decipher what reality is.
“But as for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. 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. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is [...]”
Woolf starts the story by focusing on our external world, the mark on the wall, this tangible physical thing. And then, as Woolf does, she digresses into her subjective mind which arguably we can possess, unlike the physical world.
When she says it’s a wonder “that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment.” She is working to dispel the belief that the physical world is our one reality. She continues, writing: “Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!” Here she rejects the outer world – you’re going to be naked at the end of life anyways, who needs the physical world.
Instead “The Mark on the Wall” is an argument for fruitful inner life, or at least that you must continually mediate your outer life through the subjective mind to garner meaning. This is how you slow things down, how in one moment of trying to decipher what the mark on the wall is you can have enough fruitful thought to fill ten pages of a short story. I really enjoyed this story because while Woolf is discussing some heavy theories about the constitution of reality, she doesn’t stray from humor. That the mark on the wall ends up being a snail is the biggest jab at the external world and our ability to possess it. The mark is not at all permanent, but alive and moving (though arguably slowly) and there is no certainty in this.
My favourite part of the story is probably Woolf’s discussion of the tree:
“Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers—all things one likes to think about.”
Woolf speaks of wood because it is something solid, something certain like the mark of the wall. However she also describes the extent of this purely external connection between herself and the tree – that she can never fully know the tree or the wood.
You can only imagine the tree to be close to it and Woolf does just that:
“I like to think of the tree itself:—first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long.”
The external world can only be real to you in thought and through your own self expression, and for Woolf that’s through putting pen to page. She takes the tree and makes it part of her mental life, takes the objective and makes it subjective. It’s writing like this that draws me to Woolf. I continually admire her ability to make things real that are not at all.
- xoxo Abigail