Tales of the Snail: Naturalist Perspective and Evolutionary Form in “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall”
3.8: TRANSITIONS—THE SOLIDITY OF TREES: NARRATIVE CONTINUITY AND INTERRUPTION
Woolf, then, has created out of “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens” her first great departures in conventional narrative form. These transformations to narrative not only alter perspective but the relation of that perspective to evolution and evolutionary time. Previous to “Mark” and “Kew,” the characters themselves had to discover their own connections to
evolution and the immensity of time, plotting a course through social convention and
adventurous expeditions. The characters experience the great crises and the ensuing moments of epiphany by experiencing the plotlines of conventional fiction. The Kew Gardens scene of Night
and Day already offers a preview of what was to be the necessary link between the relation of
evolution to time––a temporal awareness that would alter Woolf’s conception of the novel and ultimately the techniques with which she devised the temporal framework of the fiction to come. In questioning the plot of the Victorian novel, even while adhering to it in the conventional
construction of Night and Day, Woolf uses this garden scene as a means to consider how evolutionary contemplation might take the shape of evolution. Julia Briggs notes that “Kew Gardens provides the setting for desire to bring about a reconciliation and a symbolic re-entry into Eden”,202 but this is decidedly an evolutionary garden that marks Woolf’s first dedicated gestures towards a movement from evolutionary plotting to evolutionary form. Night and Day’s mergence of the social and visionary bodies, of the “life of society” (Woolf’s figurative day) and the “life of solitude” (night), still needed to include one more dualistic pairing: the correspondent timeframes of Darwin’s time of living and the deep time of nature. Woolf’s ambition is no less than a synthesis of the two times. Ricoeur refers to the mature example of Mrs. Dalloway, but the two times are first worked out explicitly and early. The Kew Gardens scenes give not just the expanse of vision through the evolutionary botany that Ralph discusses, but the expanse of temporality that evolutionary theory radically lengthens.
Take Ralph’s leonine pose while waiting for Katharine to show at Kew Gardens, where we are given the quick purview of the timekeeping that Woolf will employ in her own break with fictional conventions as she moves from evolutionary discourse to evolutionary form. Ten minutes elapse in two paragraphs as Ralph waits for Katharine. He simultaneously charts the progression of hands on his timepiece even as he experiences this monumental moment whereby all his past frustrations and future aspirations coalesce in this felt life of an eager love:
At a quarter-past three in the afternoon of the following Saturday Ralph Denham sat on the bank of the lake in Kew Gardens, dividing the dial plate of his watch into sections with his forefinger. The just and inexorable nature of time itself was reflected in his face. He might have been composing a hymn to the unhasting and
201TN3, 90. 202Ibid, xxx.
unresting march of divinity. He seemed to greet the lapse of minute after minute with stern acquiescence in the inevitable order. His expression was so severe, so serene, so immobile, that it seemed obvious that for him at least there was a grandeur in the departing hour which no petty irritation on his part was to mar, although the wasting time wasted also high private hopes of his own."203 What Ralph reads into the watch is his own future: “The world, he assured himself, since Katharine Hilbery was half an hour behind her time, offers no happiness, no rest from struggle, no certainty.”204 But there is no outward expression of worry, no spat of nervous fidgeting; instead, Woolf presents Ralph as supremely stoic, passively accepting the judgment of time and the unfolding consequence of events. There is still “grandeur in the departing hour” and the way time lays to account, even lays waste to what counts to Ralph Denham.
Ralph takes the long view, which is also inevitably the tragic view of deep time: “Looking at his watch, he seemed to look deep into the springs of human existence, and by the light of what he saw there altered his course towards the north and the midnight…Yes, one’s voyage must be made absolutely without companions through ice and black water—towards what goal?” Yet, when Katharine appears, Ralph’s obsessive timekeeping ceases, as does his reverie. The time of romance becomes the time of nature. This reification of time through the watch’s dial and reading into it an augury of the character’s own direction in life represents well the dialectic that would come more and more to frame the temporal form Woolf’s fiction was taking. The mechanisms of clock-time would conflict considerably with the mechanisms of nature. A schism opens up radically after Darwin unhinges the comforting vestiges of a divine watchmaker—William Paley’s famous metaphor of the watch found in the middle of the heath,
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meant to be analogous to the mechanisms of nature and pointing toward a supernatural artificier. That metaphor became extinct, defunct.205 “There cannot be design without a designer,” Paley argues, but design post-Darwin comes in the ruthless, remorseless, impersonal mechanism of adaptation by means of natural selection given the vast timeframes of geological time. There is no divine winding in Darwin’s mechanism. Ralph’s watch is not Paley’s time, and Darwin winds the clock back to its natural timesetting. “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” additionally return the the watch’s representative hands on the dial to the natural turns of the sun dividing day from night.
The need for the same development and representation of character in the manner that Woolf constructs a Ralph gives way to a narrative form that would take over the work of plot and character by containing it in the temporal dimensions of narrative representation. In discussing this departure in form, it would be irresponsible to not acknowledge the tremendous relation of Woolf’s narrative form to the corresponding departures in the visual arts, especially considering her close relationships and kinships within Bloomsbury. Many critics have looked to “Mark” and moreso to “Kew” for the influence of Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell, or Cezanne and Post- Impressionism more generally due to the vivid use of color in her description that eyes so carefully the surface of this garden scene. Comparison to the visual arts is indeed fruitful here, and Fry’s formalist example of his revered Cezanne bringing “design” to Impressionist “vision” can be seen in the way that Woolf’s impressions are vividly described but structurally contained by the hard geometry of the oval frame that circumscribes the entire sketch, or the seemingly solid object upon which the narrative draws its images. But Woolf’s design is naturally a
narrative design, and Woolf’s fascination with space does not forestall movement; when Woolf
traces her figures with colors and the variegated light patterns, the intensity emanates from what
moves through this one particular plot of Kew or what moves through the mind bent on the one particular mark on the wall. By remaining intent upon this one spot of story, “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” quite consciously explore what would be the more limiting dimensions of the painter’s canvas: movement and temporality.206 The mark that hangs the narrator’s moving images and frames her objects of thought is not a nail but a living snail.
This is not to say that Woolf devalues the still frames of the artist or the feeling of solidity, the equipoise of the solid and the shifting. She wants the craft of fiction to be the reader’s, the emotion that the form instills and not the structure that is seen. Woolf’s reader is meant to feel, in “The Mark on the Wall” for instance, how the fluidity of thought mimics the rapidity of life. This is what a story about time, conscious of how the narrative itself conveys it, contributes to a phenomenology of reading. Even then, Woolf at this early stage is
experimenting with how she can accomplish through narrative this feeling of the newfound instability of time without eschewing structure altogether. Paradoxically, the consciousness of this unsettling dimension of time—Darwin’s deep time, that lies vastly across the billions of years and creates the millisecond of human significance without the compensatory gathering into either the artifice or the artificier of eternity—is precisely the feeling, working almost
unconsciously, that Woolf wants her form to convey. At the deepest intimations of deep time, the long perspective of natural history gives Woolf’s new form its narrative structure.
What Woolf, at the completion of “Mark” and Kew,” had not worked through was how this temporal dimension to life, whereby these thoughts once embodied in a narrative mode, could additionally arrest time and forge some formal stability. The involuted/internal and
evoluted/external movements of both time structures had not yet “joined hands,” as Woolf put it.
206Many critics have noticed this painterly quality and commented upon the influence of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and perhaps Cezanne and the Post-Impressionist exhibits that Fry brought to England in 1910 and 1912.
Both needed to be present in Woolf’s vision of a fiction that would contain some balance
between the solid and the shifting aspects of life that Woolf equally felt authentic and legitimate sources of experiencing the world. Of one model for her, DeQuincey, she would write that no author after him “could maintain that the whole truth of life can be told without ‘piercing the haze’” which so often envelops one’s own “secret springs of action and reserve.”207 Yet, Woolf continues, “external events also have their importance.” The writer must “devise some means by which the two levels of existence can be recorded—the rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of single and solemn moments of concentrated emotion.”208 Woolf had indeed attempted her own piercing of the haze enveloping consciousness of character by devising “Mark” to mimetically represent the two levels internally and “Kew” to mimetically represent the two levels externally. Read together, they fulfill Woolf’s vision of capturing “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”209 but offer two different visions of it in the public garden and the private space.
There was the other quality she admired in DeQuincey’s written involutes, where the moment miraculously protracts time and expands space, where “one moment may transcend in value fifty years.”210 By detaching narrative from the intimate investments of character and plot, Woolf had created for herself a new version of impersonality in narrative form, a naturalist’s perspective that observes the subjectivity of thought externalized upon a garden or internalized through a mark. “To sit check by jowl with our fellows cramped up together is distasteful, indeed repulsive,” Woolf writes. “But draw a little apart, see people in groups, as outlines, and they become at once memorable and full of beauty. Then it is not the actual sight or sound itself
207CR2, 139. 208Ibid.
209from “Modern Fiction,” The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925) 149. 210“DeQuincey’s Autobiography,” CR2, 138.
that matters, but the reverberations that it makes as it travels through our minds.”211 Great investment had been made in viewing humanity at this remove and to see beauty in movement of time and consciousness, a Darwinian time seen inhumanly, and a human time seen from the viewpoint of evolution. Even so, it had not resolved for Woolf that value of human time humanly felt. An ordinary mind on an ordinary day can also include some extraordinarily significant moments. In weighing the consequences of Darwin’s writing, Gopnick muses, “The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn’t a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.” Even so, “The hardest Darwinian view of all is still roomy enough for ordinary love to breathe in.”212 At this juncture, Woolf was already enamoured of Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy’s use and application of “moments of vision” in their works.213 She had fully digested Walter Pater, but she had not transformed her own personal experiences into DeQuincey’s autobiographical involute, transformed “moments of vision” into “moments of being” or found a form for fiction that would capture how those moments of being arise out of the vastly dominant and consuming “moments of non-being.”
For an essential problem in Darwin, as it became the problem for Woolf, is that time does not stand still, whether it be the long stretch of evolutionary time or the quick moment of
individual living. How can the present moment be but a moving instant in time, when time is accepted as the long perspective of evolution? How can the moment made precious be anything but sentimental—or a Wordsworthian spot of time that found so much romance in nature still resonant with transcendence—after nature was so thoroughly realized as Darwinian? In The
211“Impassioned Prose,” Selected Essays, 61.
212“Rewriting Nature,” New Yorker, (Oct. 23, 2006) 59. 213See, for instance, Woolf’s essay “Moments of Vision” (1918).
Voyage Out, Rachel has many “exultations” of the present moment, none perhaps more
memorable than her own tree of life:
But filled with one of those unreasonable exultations which start generally from an unknown cause, and sweep whole countries and skies into their embrace, she walked without seeing[…]. The constraint of being among strangers in a long silk dress made it unusually exciting to stride thus alone […]. So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way, had it not been for the
interruption of a tree, which, although it did not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if the branches had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree, but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world. Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and there, leaving jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly as if it had but that second risen from the ground. Having seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve that second, the tree once more sank into the
ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able to seat herself in its shade and to pick the red flowers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it.214
In this case, the tree “interrupts” Rachel’s own reverie, her “walking without seeing” in a blissful unawareness of her surroundings. The tree stops Rachel in her tracks “as if the branches had struck her in the face.” It somehow, mysteriously makes the moment whole, “would last for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve that second.” Everything about why the tree does so and accomplishes so much remains vague, mysterious, ethereal. All we know is that the
possibility of the moment happens when Rachel enjoys a rare space of time to herself. In “The Mark on the Wall,” the momentous reverie of the tree is not interrupting but interrupted. The
narrative tries to capture the clash of the interrupted moment: “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.”215
Indeed, from Woolf’s earliest fiction to her final works, the moment of importance is incessantly interrupted. The late critic Lucio Ruotolo’s fine summation of this quality in her work, his titling of it The Interrupted Moment, captures well its consistency and its importance in an assessment of her process.216 As many gestures as Woolf makes towards the flow of thought and the rapid flights of time, that narrative receives its share of ruptured, fragmented, broken moments. Throughout “The Mark on the Wall,” even until the last reverie of the tree, the narrator is interrupted out of some serenity or somnolence associated with the organic, nature- induced springs of consciousness. The present moment includes “Whitaker’s Almanack” of the “tables of precedency” and generals who administer wars: “I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of
shades….How peaceful it is down here…--if it were not for Whitaker’s Almanack.”217 Thoughts interrupt other thoughts, particularly for Woolf’s female narrators whose thoughts are always encroached upon by “the masculine point of view which governs our lives,”218 and the self grows fragmented, disoriented, and incomplete. Again and again, this wish for the solitary reverie unimpeded emerges in Woolf’s experiments with a new form for fiction. The “pleasant world” is one “without professors or specialists” but rather with one’s thought “hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs.”219 In “An Unwritten Novel,” the narrative travels precariously fast as the narrator herself travels by train. The world in “Mark on the Wall” likened to being “blown
214VO, 194-195. 215CSF, 89.
216The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. 217CSF, 87-8.
through the tube at fifty miles an hour” and being “torn asunder” from the strangers outside the train windows is “An Unwritten Novel’s” fictional setting, where the narrator, an aspiring novelist, imagines an entire life out of the stranger sitting across from her. At every stop of the train, every noise, every entrance and exit and gesture of a passenger, there is an interruption. Even the face of the stranger being read and rewritten is
a break—a division—so that when you’ve grasped the stem the butterfly’s off— the moth that hangs in the evening over the yellow flower—move, raise your hand, off, high, away. I won’t raise my hand. Hang still, then, quiver, life, soul, spirit, whatever you are of Minnie Marsh--I, too, on my flower--the hawk over the down—alone—or what were the worth of life? To rise; hang still in the evening, in the midday; hang still over the down.220
Hang Still: Paradoxically, what Woolf was working towards was how the interruption of the
moment could strike her scenes into stability, how a break in the unity of design could nonetheless create its completed vision. The internal flow of time and consciousness so evidently at play in these first experimental works always receives a rude intrusion that is ultimately formative. The ensuing chapter explores how these early narrative departures lead to