Stories About "Nothing"

To really get into this week's Woolf, I feel that a meditative, Zen-like, haiku-appreciating state of mind is helpful to navigate the short stories' startling images and labyrinthine sentences. For example, in the first sentence:

"From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom..."

I found it at first difficult to navigate between subjects and their adjectival descriptors, a difficulty increased by the passive-voice construction in the first line. This phenomenon, however, I find to be far-from-accidental on Woolf's part, particularly given her pun on "rose" in the first verb. This word choice creates a dualistic parallel in the audience's mind, of both the rose flowers that may be blooming in "Kew Garden" and the plants' action of life and growth. Sandra Kemp states of Woolf's short stories that "time, space, and the habitual association of things are erased by this potential of the imagination"; likewise, I find that the dichotomy between "thing" and "action," or "subject" and "being," to be playfully blurred here.

Perhaps this strategy lends the sense of timelessness many sections of both "Kew Gardens" and "Mark on the Wall" contain. There is no traditional narrative with its linear progression of time in either story, but the narrative instead switches back and forth between past, present, and perhaps even future. "Kew Gardens" shifts between the present and a memory of "fifteen years ago," in which what is ostensibly marginal, unrelated background detail reigns over the bulk of the actual occurrence (40). Simon mainly recalls a "dragonfly" circling and the impatient motion of a shoe rather than, say, his lover's words or facial expression as per conventional expectations. Woolf here captures the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind, particularly, as Kemp notes, in regards to recollections (68) -- we often remember the past as a snapshot, and indeed remember minute details while faces and words grow hazy and diluted. There seems to be a tension between the thoughts that relate to the social sphere, socially acceptable thoughts about the weather or events in the "Times" ("Unwritten Novel", 19) and those eccentric flashes of perception that constitute a large part of our waking lives and often lend them meaning. (People ask what I am thinking often, and my answer is always, always censored somehow.)

To return to "Kew Gardens," I am unsure how to "interpret" Simon's "perception" (Kemp, 76), if even that is what Woolf intends, that the "whole" of his beloved "seemed to be in her shoe" (40). There is a hint of Prufrock here, of the fragmentation of the human Self, and particularly men's fragmentation of female syntactic/literary "objects," or bodies. However, given Woolf's love affair with detail and imagery in her short stories, perhaps remembering another by their shoe is not an insult, but merely a method by which Woolf imaginatively penetrates an"other"'s mind. Perhaps transferring preferred body parts from hands to shoes is Woolf's way of playing with and subverting Eliot's device. Furthermore, Kemp seems to view the old woman's "kiss" as mocking R/romantic conventions, yet I thought of a matriarchal transference and blessing upon artistic endeavor (to oppose Harold Bloom!), given that it was received in the company of six painting girls.

Speaking of connections with visual art, the finale of "Kew Gardens," in which "wordless voices" were "breaking the silence," only to be countered by the assertion that, in modern life, there are "omnibuses" and no true silence, paralleled the use of vibrant color at the expense of "shadow" in domestic painting. In fact, the flowers' "colours" (45) is our final remaining image. Woolf, in perhaps her only similarity to the Futurists, seems here to be embracing the dynamism and vitality of modern life rather than bemoaning its lack of silence; I recall a scene from The Hours in which Virginia feels an incurable draw back to her frantic-but-invigorating London lifestyle.

In "A Mark on the Wall," Woolf characterizes the act of interpretation (and indeed, the sense I get interpreting her short stories) as a "swarm" of "thoughts," a multitude like a group of ants or insects, each perception individuated and yet part of the whole (47) . She explores this mode of thought thematically throughout the piece, before her thoughts must be defined, pinned, and fixed by the "mark's" literal definition. I'm wondering if she is presciently hinting at our current analysis of language, in that agreeing upon a central "definition" of a word or even a work of literature necessarily prohibits that word/work's "play" and infinitude of possibilities. Woolf subtly takes issue with the masculine modernists' obsession with "hard, dry things" and specificities, exclaiming that "I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts" (49). Retaining the hard and the dry as sole literary obsessions, she implies, leads to a certain shallow vacuousness. Later, she returns to the problem of "standards," whether of "things" or of perhaps linguistic definitions, stating that "Man" has taken their place -- for now. What will follow, she hopes, is a sort of freedom, of expression and of thought, the feverish freedom to which she strives in her stories. However, the "Mark's" definition as a "snail" throws this reverie into question, perhaps displaying that for all our experimentations, the minute and the concrete, the small, slimy things, still matter in a narrative.