A Tale of Two Snails

 

Both Kew Gardens and the Mark on the Wall are told around a snail or at least have a snail as one important anchor of their storytelling. I wonder if Woolf did that on purpose; and whether it is possible for us to consider the change of the snail as the change of Woolf herself or the style of her writing.

 

The role of the two snails might be similar, but they fulfill this role in different ways. In Kew Gardens, the snail has an external, worldly, and real existence. From its first appearance on stage, the reader knows the snail as the snail. Its external, worldly, and real existence is its identity—identity to itself, to the narrator, and to the readers. What is more, this snail has an actual movement. This movement is not only spatial but also chronological. One might even say that it is the chronological movement of the snail that gives the rest of the story—both the other characters and events—a chronological order, a sense of time. The snail carries with it the entirety of Kew Gardens.

 

I guess this is a pretty unique way to write a story. The traditional way of telling a story would perhaps be to focus on one or several major characters and their storylines. The entire story progresses as they progress because the story is essentially made up of their storylines; it is their story. The Euclidean representation of it would perhaps be straight lines joining and intersecting each other, with one straight line that is thicker than others. 

 

However, in Kew Gardens, it is hard to tell if there is a “storyline”. The only storyline that looks traditional might be the one of the snail: it has both spatial and chronological elements and a “goal”. The snail is also the only character (if I am remembering correctly) that is consistent, that is brought up and described at different points of the story. But I would also argue that it is very difficult for the reader to read the snail as the true major character. Its story is perhaps too pale, too boring, too plain, and too insignificant to be that, even when compared to the other human characters in Kew Gardens. It is easy for a human reader to ignore the story of the snail, simply treat it as a part of the description of the surrounding environment, and focus on the human characters, while the snail is the one that is carrying the story forward. What is more, there’s also no direct physical relationship between the parts of the human characters and the snail. They merely run past or touch each other without intersecting and joining each other.

When it gets to the Mark on the Wall, the snail changes again. It turns into a mark on the wall. Its external, worldly, and real existence (identity) as a snail now disappears. It is an abstract geometric shape that is now, though still empirically received by the narrator, internalized by the narrator’s consciousness. It is like the Euclidean point: it has no part, but can nevertheless be appointed, imagined, and utilized by mathematicians. It is in between the real world and the internal world of the narrator’s consciousness. It’s real in another sense and is known in another sense. This is what I meant by the question I asked at the beginning of last class (after the opening question): does the narrator want to know and is knowing what the mark REALLY is, or is she only interested in contemplating and conceiving what it could or might be in her own consciousness? To me, these are two different types of knowing: the former is about the snail while the latter is about the narrator, though both have the snail as their anchor.

Thus, due to the removal of its external real existence, the spatial and chronological movement that is present in the first snail is also gone. The anchor of the Mark on the Wall is not even a dim straight line, but a point. Though the article is still written in a certain order, chronological development, if not time itself, is absent. It is only present at the beginning and the end of the story when external real existence is introduced back into the story. But in the narrator’s consciousness—her internal world—time is absent, movement is absent, the storyline is absent. Its geometrical shape would perhaps be a point with all kinds of lines and circles being emitted from it.

What I want to argue at the end of all these is that in these two short articles, Woolf is deliberately using the snail as the anchor of the two stories (if they can still be considered as a story). She is experimenting what the anchor of a literary work may be. Does it have to be the storyline of a major character? Does it even have to be a storyline at all? No, it could be the movement of an “insignificant” snail or a mark on the wall that does not have a chronological and spatial development to it and has its real identity removed from it. By playing with the snail, Virginia Woolf is perhaps trying to find for herself an answer to what literature may be and what literature should be.