A conflict of closure in Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Marc D. Cyr

midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the fight and lies

quiescent, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some

existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of. . .

The ellipses are Woolf's and lead immediately and abruptly into the story's final "digression," about wood and trees; that is, they lead immediately back to the "reality" that matters, her own thoughts and feelings. However, as the narrator says, we and she want the comfort of "something definite, something real," and the snail at the end of the story is just such "a plank in the sea," offering closure at least, though individual readers, as I've noted, may find it more a sliver than a plank.

One problem with this closure is that not only did Woolf say that "inconclusive stories are legitimate" ("Russian" 84) but it is just the kind of pat ending Woolf dismisses in "Phases of Fiction," where one of the tyrannies of the novel form she objects to is that

the story must be finished: the intrigue discovered, the guilty punished,

the lovers married in the end. . . . Better would it be, we feel, to leave a

blank or even to outrage our sense of probability than to stuff the

crevices with this makeshift substance . . . . (63-64)

(One could argue that the mark turning out to be a snail--"the intrigue discovered"--does "outrage our sense of probability," but I would think that if any sense is outraged, it is our sense of proportion, not probability.) Throughout this story, Woolf has violated--perhaps "attacked" is the right word--standard fictional techniques of coherence and logic, the most obvious violation being the lack of plot structure. That is, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis might put it, in "The Mark on the Wall" Woolf attempts to "distance the reader from codes of expected narrative and from patterns of response that had seemed to command universal or natural status" (20). Another point to remark on is that none of the mini-stories the narrator starts ever reaches conclusion or closure: She was "torn asunder" (77) from the house's previous tenants before they could complete a conversation; her vision of the afterlife is unable to "become more definite, become--I don't know what . . ." (78, Woolf's ellipses); her vision of Shakespeare at work is abandoned mid-sentence (79); her story of the antiquarian colonel trails off with a list of artifacts "proving I really don't know what" (81); and her reveries on wood--ultimately disrupted by her companion--include the comment that, even when the tree falls, "life isn't done with" (83). The sense of completion and closure the identification of the mark as a snail brings is what writers are ordained to produce and readers conditioned to expect, and so it seems a departure from the radical technique exhibited everywhere else in the story.

This lack of consistency could be deliberate, of course. As DuPlessis remarks, "there is often a disjunction between narrative discourses and resolutions, which may be felt as the `partness' of a resolution, or as the ironic comment of an author at closure" (7), and the neat, pat irony of so petty an object having ignited the various disquisitions in this story could be just such a comment by Woolf But DuPlessis also notes that