Virginia Woolf "The Mark on the Wall"

Stream of Consciousness (both psychological and literary term)—psychological realism (stories more inside characters’ heads than exterior actions) meets modernism

William James—invents term to express the flux of thought—the mind is a dynamic force/entity not a static “mirror”/slate/mechanical image—mind is not a clock, mechanism, but organic unit constantly reconstituting new “wholes”—accurately observe and describe mental process

Henri Bergson—duree (duration)—experience of time—like a man walking on a road at night with a lantern lighting up the road a little before and behind him—allows us to experience unity (or unified series of impressions) (link to Impressionism

Psychological realism is still rooted in an objective ground of reality (outside view of real) – modernist tend to focus on subjective realities

“The Mark on the Wall”—conflict between subjective and objective realities—the work itself embodies the theme—technique mirrors the conflict 

Circular vs linear thought processes (representations of time)—all things have potentially equal weight in the narrator’s mind (imaginations, impressions, etc.)

CHAOS!!!!

Cubist effect—marshalling image after image that floats past

Art ought to have ideas in it—traditional view of art/aesthetics

Modernism—does art “ought have ideas in it”?  No, not if by ideas you mean static, ossified forms of thought—rather art ought to demonstrate or reveal the mind in action---art becomes about the process of creating art (the mental act replacing the physical)

Woman with Mandolin (the “realist” painting on the right is no less based upon an assumption than the “cubist” painting on the left—it supposes the viewer is a static position able to view the 2-dimensional canvas in perspective)—loss of delineation of foreground and background in cubist work

Modernists—we don’t have the luxury of observing the world/reality from a static, immobile point of view—the process of perceiving art is art—instead of illusion of three-dimensional “realism” Picasso shows/reveals the process of turning fragmentary perceptions into a unified whole

We’re all riding the train of time/duration—no fixed point of view—Einstein’s theory of relativity (space and time are continuum) 

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—the process of observation changes the thing observed (the wave becomes a particle and vice versa)

“Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube 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....”

Images of duration/time and chaos—no fixed reference point—no fixed hierarchical social order (like Whitaker’s Table of Precedency—or masculine point of view)

The mark on the wall is a snail, but wasn’t a snail.  Ambiguity of mind. 

We don’t live in three-dimensional box of Newtonian physics.