Virginia Woolf’s short story “The Mark on the Wall,” published in 1917, was one of the first two stories printed and published by Virginia and her husband Leonard when they started the Hogarth Press. A new experimental short film, now available online, brings her first published story to life.
Anderson Wright’s evocative and experimental short film is described as capturing the essence of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative, in which a seemingly insignificant mark on the wall triggers the exploration of memory, identity, and the passage of time.
I watched it and found it hauntingly beautiful, with the final words of the film echoing Woolf’s own, minus her words about war.
If you have three minutes and forty-four seconds at your disposal, you can watch it, too.
Among other intriguing rare finds, Jon S. Richardson Rare Books is offering a previously unknown version of Virginia Woolf’s short story “The Mark on the Wall” in French.
“The piece is accompanied by a short essay on Woolf’s breakthrough style and a review of her novels through her short story collection Monday or Tuesday by one P.C. [presumably Paul Colin, one of the editors).”
The catalogue explains that “this translation is not noted in Kirkpatrick, it is three years earlier than the earliest known appearance of Woolf in the French language” and there is “no mention in Leonard’s autobiography of this translation or Mende.”
More about the volume
As for the volume’s condition, the “book is bright, solid and VG for age with minor wear from age and soil, unusual to be in this condition because paper has acidified slightly.” The price is $275.
Jon and Margaret Richardson are not newcomers to the world of Woolf. They have made hunting down the works of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group their mission since opening York Harbor Books in Maine more than 25 years ago.
The Richardson duo put out a list of “Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group” offerings quarterly. They issued their previous list in the summer.
More French connections to Woolf’s “Mark on the Wall”
For more on the French connections to Woolf’s “Mark on the Wall,” read Blogging Woolf’s post from Oct. 20, 2010, “The French connection to ‘The Mark on the Wall.'” It explores similarities, parallels, and differences between Woolf’s short story and novels by Marguerite Dumas and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
She shared her impression of Ane’s exhibit with Blogging Woolf. We are happy to include it as follows:
Nell’s first-hand impression of Ane’s exhibit
First there was some of her ‘Woolf-work’ in the Oslo National Academy of the Arts reflecting process, research, previous work and documentation). That same evening there was the official opening of the major installation of “The Mark on the Wall” in Kunstnernes Hus, an art institution in the centre of Oslo.
It was a surprise, this major installation, the result of Ane’s enormous work of typesetting and printing during last autumn as one could see on her website. It was really impressive: entering the room and wherever you looked words, words, punctuation marks and words.
Woolf’s first publication in Hogarth Press, the complete short story “The Mark on the Wall” handprinted on I don’t know how many papers, white and off-white, neatly arranged so as to fill all the walls. If you would walk the room in eleven rounds you would be able to read the whole story. Reading it this way is an absolutely different experience than reading the story in a book.
It was worth the journey.
Nell’s photos
Below are the photos Nell sent Blogging Woolf to help readers get a better idea of the installation’s impact.
In 2017, Ane Thon Knutsen combined her love of Virginia Woolf and her love of typesetting with her project A Printing Press of One’s Own. The two came together in her hand-set volume by the same name, which she debuted at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at the University of Reading that June.
Now she’s at it again, this time with a massive installation titled “The Mark on the Wall,” which runs Jan. 22 – Jan. 27 at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo.
In this practice based PhD. Ane Thon Knutsen reflects on how the material process of typesetting colours the way one thinks about words and the physical materials of literature, from within the practice of typesetting itself.
The results of this research will be presented as a massive installation, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on The Wall” (1917). “The Mark on the Wall” is the first story Woolf wrote whilst teaching her self to typeset. The prints will all appear in one installation, filling a huge room.
Knutsen’s adaptions of this short story represents a new way of reading Woolf as a typesetting author. Knutsen reflects on and lives out how thoughts materialize in the world, in a pendular process between the mind and the body. In this installation Knutsen is translating the story from the pages of the book to a room of one´s own.
Knutsen will also be showing previous adaptions of “The Mark on The Wall” simultaneously at Oslo National Academy of The Arts.
See a time-lapse video of the printing process
As Ane says, “This (time-lapse video) documents every minute of the three months it took me to reprint and translate “The Mark on the Wall” to 1828 A3 posters, setting it word by word with moveable type. The whole short story can be read on the door in the centre during two hours and 18 minutes.”
About Ane
Ane Thon Knutsen (b.1984) is a designer & artist living and working in Oslo, Norway. She specialized in letterpress printing and her artistic practice can be placed in-between graphic design, conceptual letterpress printing and performative presentations.
Ane is currently a PhD- candidate in Graphic Design at Oslo National Academy of The Arts. In the project A Printing Press of One´s Own, she is researching Virginia Woolf’s practice as a self taught typesetter and publisher through experimental graphic interpretations of the short story “The Mark on the Wall” (1917).
“The Mark on the Wall” installation in photos
Below are photos of her work on the exhibit that Ane shared with Blogging Woolf.
“900 massive meters of prints are up!” is the comment Ane included with this photo on her Facebook page on Jan. 18.
Editor’s Note: This essay, written in March of this year, was contributed by Mine Özyurt Kılıç, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and co-organizer of Harvard’s May 10 event, A Press of One’s Own: Celebrating 100 Years of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. At Harvard, she currently investigates the connection between the ethical and aesthetic components of short fiction. Her research mostly focuses on contemporary British fiction with special interest in women’s writing. She is the author of the first book-length study on Maggie Gee’s fiction — Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel (Bloomsbury 2013). This academic celebration brings her back to her master’s thesis on the theme of failure in love in T. S. Eliot’s poetry as well as to her lectures on British Modernism.
The snail is a seal of the Hogarth Press, a signature of its focus on nature and the natural against the industrialized literary marketplace! Like this snail with its home on its back, The Hogarth married private and public life with a letterpress machine on a dining table. And that has made all the difference!
The snail that makes its appearance on the first publication of the Hogarth Press, “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), is the very emblem of the Woolfs’ mission. Like Schumacher’s claim for the economy “Small is Beautiful”, the Woolfs suggest that in “express[ing] the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair”: Slow is beautiful!
This first Woolf story they publish can also be read as a fictional manifestation of Woolf’s ars poetica. The narrator first situates herself in the world understanding one truth about it– “what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in” — then discerns her calling in it:
I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.
This quiet, calm, spacious, and uninterrupted mode of deep thinking is the very engine behind Woolf’s Modernist texts that require a different mode of reading, a deliberately slow and effortful one that is like the movements of a crawling snail. The central motif in the story, also visually reproduced in Dora Carrington’s woodcut print to accompany the text, the snail is one of the many lives that the narrator feels committed to describe in detail.
[…] there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately.
In a later Woolf story “Kew Gardens” (1919), the snail now becomes one of the central consciousnesses. A single figure among those visitors coming from different walks of life, it makes its way around the flowerbed, thinking whether it is better to move or not, drawing the reader’s attention to the minutiae of everyday life, to a moment of being, from a major to a minor key. As such, it becomes a sign of a special state of consciousness slow enough to attend to details, to the cotton wool of daily life, to moments of being, to epiphanies, to fragments shored against ruins, to marks on walls, flowers, images and smells that memory brings from distant times and places.
In the idiom of Woolf’s snail, the early Hogarth draws its readers’ attention to an eccentric, marginal and extraordinary vision that necessitates a reading slow enough to digest and savor millions of surrounding lives.
