LITERATURE
The Mystery of the Mark
Woolf’s Meaning of Being and the Inaccuracy of Thought
Perhaps you have already experienced that stupefied moment — a moment where time seemed to be frozen for a while that your thoughts swarmed seamlessly and vigorously, floating through a vast ocean of wonder, waiting for a chance to grasp clarity behind the chaos that your mind gave birth to. This is where the author Virginia Woolf is interested in, among other modernists who experimented with a peculiar style of literary writing in the modern period which her piece the Mark on the Wall resonated. It was written during the occurrence of the drastic and traumatic World War I where the literary movement Modernism has also taken place. Modernists like Woolf written different works that depicted the modern living and took advantage of psychoanalysis in literature.
Virginia together with her husband Leonard, was interested in the works of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud that they translated and published some of his works by the time they have established a printing press in the comfort of their home. Woolf, as a modernist, plays with the “consciousness”. Often times on her works the character seems to be huddled up against the present moment and/or in a deep trance of contemplation. Here in this piece the person that is narrating is physically at rest yet actively thinking. Stream of consciousness is a tool which was heavily used in this stylized writing during the modernity. This can also be observed in James Joyce’s Ulysses and in Ezra Pound’s Make It New. What triggered the introspection was imposed on the title of the story — a peculiar mark on the wall. A “small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches which seem to be, as Woolf describes it at first, “too big and too round” to be from a scarring of a nail. This curiosity seemed to fuel the cognitive drive of the character’s wonder. Right then, different thoughts were encountered. From the people who as it could be asserted, left that mark; to Queen Anne, jewelries and stones; to a tree and Giants; to Lord Chancellor and Canterbury; to Whitaker’s Almanack; to field of asphodel. Though heavily diverse, Woolf laid out the ideas with coherence. Exemplified in how she mentioned four figures: Whitaker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord High Chancellor and the Archbishop of York, all in the context of conformity:
“…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; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom…”
This commentary against the philosophy of following someone’s work is rather odd for the philosophy of the movement Woolf belongs in. Modernism may be known for questioning reality but not on the extent that it destroys a pre-structured form. This ideology belongs to the movement which was at the time of Woolf was yet to come — the postmodernism. This literary philosophy mainly involved in deconstruction and pure skepticism. Since she is an atheist, Woolf refers to rational thinking and science to explain things which was expected from a modernist. Modernist’s belief can be summed up into the phrase “I will only believe what I see, what I can prove”. They disregard faith for they believe that everything can be rationally addressed with precision, and somehow Woolf loses (or at least lacks) this tone when she mentioned life:
“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”
Woolf struggled and suffered from a confusion upon the reality of the mark on the wall, as much as how she seemed to fail to distinguish the meaning of life — the mark on the wall used as a metaphor for it. Life here is the consciousness — a constant flowing stream. Woolf seem to assert that the meaning of life lies on the latter part of it or perhaps on the end:
“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.”
Perhaps the meaning is supposed to remain unsaid — hidden under the most obscure circumstances. Another line from the story asserts that life is supposed to preserve its mystery:
“Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy,”
Virginia Woolf understands not as a modernist, but perhaps as human, the complexity of time and being. It is as complex as our thought-process and the universe, yet one doesn’t tantamount to the vastness of the other. Our mind can only understand a little of the accessible knowledge that nature has permitted us to at least glance at it. Woolf recognizes this and insists that among the questions that our civilizations have proposed, all we can offer are not valid distinct truths but rather estimations and assumptions of our perception of reality. Finding the meaning of life would perhaps be seeking death for the meaning lies upon it as Woolf seems to suggest. Perhaps if this is a nihilistic view of life, as the only procreating germ who’s able to drastically evolve in this plane of existence, one should remember that these are not the truths and nothing is ever sure.
