Deconstructed Narrative
The first decades of the 20th Century were difficult to endure. World War. Global pandemic. Crippling economic collapse. Class unrest. As always, the arts reflected the times. To this day, many viewers struggle with so-called Modern Art. Readers similarly struggle with the era’s most innovative fiction.
We have learned that, in Narrative, Narration projects a Story that we understand to be playing out in some Story World. Most readers get caught up in the Foregrounded story: What happens next? Narration orchestrates our reaction, but we frequently pay little attention to it.
In the early 20th Century, however, some Avant garde fiction writers began to dismantle the story just as Matisse, Picasso, and Kandinsky were dismantling the visual subject:
Stream of Consciousness
As viewers of abstract painting become frustrated by the erasure of a represented subject, so readers of stream of consciousness Narrative may be frustrated by the evaporating Story. To “get” such a story, one must turn one’s focus away from the usual plot-centered questions—who are they? What is the conflict? How will it resolve itself? Will they get married?—and become absorbed in the narrating consciousness expressing itself.
Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall”
Virginia Woolf was a member of the London literary scene between the World Wars. As a social critic, she helped to define feminist thought of the time. Her novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse pioneered a major shift in narrative emphasis. Long passages in these novels occur within characters’ minds, achieving a subjective emphasis on apparently trivial events.
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| Virginia Woolf (N.D.) [Photograph]. |
Like James Joyce, Woolf is known as an innovator of Stream of Consciousness technique. Whereas the verbal play in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is so radical as to be almost unreadable in a conventional sense, Woolf’s prose and Narration are clear enough. But the Story? What is happening? Anything?
Virginia Woolf. (1921). “The Mark on the Wall”.
PERHAPS it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
This is the first paragraph of Woolf’s groundbreaking story. The Narration is easy enough to read. But the Story has all but vanished. Or, rather, the whole idea of a story has been re-imagined. In this first paragraph, we find a woman smoking a cigarette and looking at a mark on the wall. She wonders what it is. The story becomes a mystery tale, but one unlike any we have seen before. What is that mark on the wall?
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it…. If that mark was made by a nail, it can’t have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
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 after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube[1] 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! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard….
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct color—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—I don’t know what….
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy[2] three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.
[1] The Tube: Londoners affectionately refer to their subway system as The Tube.
[2] Buried Troy: this phrase refers to the 1870s discovery by Heinrich Schliemann of the ruins of Troy which had long been thought to be a fictional city-state only imagined in the ancient Greek legends attributed to Homer—the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! A woman sits idly in a chair peering up at a mark on a wall. She considers getting up to look … and then subsides into a reflection on the nature and limitations of consciousness. If this seems outlandish, think of the ways that each of us invests significance in banal aspects of life. The nature of thought indeed! Let’s continue with the story.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane…. I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes…. Shakespeare…. Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so— A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door,—for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer’s evening—But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-colored people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:
“And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First.[3] What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?” I asked—(but, I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers—a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits—like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency,[4] which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon—one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists….
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs[5] which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf…. There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name…. What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged laborers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighboring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites[6] a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan[7] nails, a great many Tudor[8] clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson[9] drank out of—proving I really don’t know what.
[3] English King Charles I, “this man of blood,” fomented a series of civil wars and was executed on the order of Parliament.
[4] Whitaker’s Table of Precedency: The Table of Precedency in Whitaker’s Almanac laid out the castes of English society in hierarchical relationship to each other. The reference here suggests the profound disruption of traditional English society by World War I and the suggestion that new social orders could be possible.
[5] South Downs: the chalk hills and cliffs of Sussex in South-Eastern England are referred to as the South Downs.
[6] Indites: i.e., writes or composes
[7] Elizabethan: the age of English Queen Elizabeth I.
[8] Tudor: an English royal house established by Henry VII and ending when Elizabeth I died childless.
[9] Nelson: that is, Admiral Horatio Nelson, heroic naval leader during England’s wars with Napoleon’s France, killed at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
…. I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes.
This is both a description and an illustration of stream of consciousness. Notice here how character, story, and writer’s persona compress into one. A novelist narrates a literary agenda attributed to a reflecting character. And here of course the reader faces the challenge. Will one sit still for this? Will one embrace a narrative of a mind in idle reflection? Or, conditioned to reading “proper stories” will one fret and cast about for an exit? If we have a bit of patience, we’re in for some pretty fascinating reflections. OK, let’s finish the story.
No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say?—-the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?— Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honor them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases…. Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs…. How peaceful it is drown here, rooted in the center of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections—if it were not for Whitaker’s Almanac—if it were not for the Table of Precedency!
I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is—a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor[10]; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York.[11] Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of…. 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. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raiding domes of mud upon the bed of the river. 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 song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes…. One by one the fibers snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately—but something is getting in the way…. Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember a thing. Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing…. There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying—
“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”
“Yes?”
“Though it’s no good buying newspapers…. Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!… All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.”
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail. Is this the greatest anticlimax you’ve ever read? In conventional story terms, nothing has happened apart from the resolution of a mystery of colossal insignificance. But then, the mark on the merely provides a structural framework for the “real story,” the reflections of a woman troubled by life in a society wounded by one of the most destructive wars in human history. A woman chafing under “the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard.” A woman desperately attempting to shore up her failing faith in reason and life by compulsively citing the “Table of Precedency” governing the social order. This is perhaps not a well woman, although her struggles are all too humanly understandable. In fact, twenty years after writing this story, unable to face the horror of another World War, Woolf walked into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets and drowned.
It is always dangerous to equate an artist’s life with her work. We can however recognize the themes of life and death, truth and delusion which this story about nothing probes. Mark Rothko, who also committed suicide, painted bands of pure color and then insisted that he was “expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.” The artists and writers of the Modern era challenge our assumptions that only classical themes and compositions can have nobility, that banal aspects of life can never be as momentous as the decisions of kings. Confronted by artists playing strange games, we can turn impatiently away or we can pause, open ourselves to new experiences, and find richness in forms that seem at first to make no sense.
References
Virginia Woolf [Photograph]. (n.d.). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Manuscript Collection 349: Volume 166, Item 2030. ARTstor https://library-artstor-org.ezproxy.bethel.edu/asset/SS37713_37713_41250760.
Woolf, V. (1921). “The Mark on the Wall.” In Monday or Tuesday. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. https://www.bartleby.com/85/8.html.
a “telling” of a series of events through a medium: e.g. an author’s voice, a series of action images in a comic book, a movie camera, etc. A composition with two dimensions: Story (the events in a story world) and Discourse (the narration or telling of the story). Often contrasted with Drama
(or discourse) the "telling" of story events in a narrative through a medium, a dictating voice (narrator), a cinematic camera, a dramatic painting, etc. An audience’s perceptions of and reactions to story events are shaped by narrating discourse.
in narrative, the content presented by the narration: events and actions performed by characters that unfold within a world
in narrative, the imaginary context of time, place, and character in which story events play out
an emphasis on a particular aspect of a work of art that arises from choices made by the artist regarding medium, technique, composition, or subject
a general term referring to innovative, experimental, potentially subversive artistic movements that challenge the conventions of the day.
a narrative that abandons the linear logic of story to follow the erratic flow of a human consciousness, sensations, thoughts, memories, feelings. Stream of consciousness can refer to 1) the flow of a character’s mind as the story and/or to 2) a free-flowing technique that narrates story events without observing syntax, grammar, or punctuation
