Temporal succession in itself is a loose link. Defining time as the relations of chronology between story and text, Gerard Genette considers the experience of time represented in narrative text as constitutive both of the means of representation and of the object being represented, which might be viewed in three respects: order, duration, and frequency. Correspondingly, Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall represents, among other things, a disturbing discrepancy between the story-time and the text-time through the tedium of several digressions that seemingly subscribe to a snap-shot description of the narrator's experience, a snail-like deceleration of narrative action, and above all a meta-narrative self-reflection within the story.
The narrator's detailed discovery of the mark is incessantly punctuated by a series of digressions on history, art, society and reality; giving rise to some snap-shot descriptions where the minimum speed of narration is manifested as a descriptive pause. The flux of images, ideas, and reminiscences between which the narrator is constantly shifting back and forth provide fairly a large quantity of narrative information that relatively effaces the narrator from the scenes being described, marking a multilinearity of the story-time and distorting the temporal succession of events.
Regarding the discrepancy further in terms of duration, there seems an infinity of possible paces on the theoretical level as the story, already fraught with a descriptive pause, produces multiple degrees of deceleration within the text. Similar to what Genette argues, the segment of the text in The Mark almost corresponds to the zero story duration building upon introspective monologues rather than articulating actions. The snail-like deceleration of narrative drive that is correspondingly connected with the unchanged, fixed mark on the wall gives way for a series of multi-linear digression to be prescribed on the possible linear figuration of events in the story. Nonetheless, the inherent paradox is hardly resolved in the story as the level of narrative digressions, brought forth by the degrees of deceleration; further substantiate the mark as a point of departure than as indication of centrality and importance in the story.
Apart from the noted discrepancies, The Mark aptly relates the narrative digression, on a meta-narrative level, with the self-reflexive subjectivism practiced in the story. The pause and deceleration of narrative information, whether descriptive or not, allows for a subjective reflection on how the narrator can pursue and connect the pattern of introspective train of thoughts with the observation of the mark on the wall. The method pursued in the story is almost similar to what the narrator states: "To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes…" It seems the narrator is dissatisfied with the impediment of that "train of thoughts" and "shower of ideas", and their tyranny of demands that upon several points of digression prescribe a multi-directional figuration on the mode of narration.
On the whole, the abiding narrative digression seems to bound up the story in several respects, whereby the narrator's attempts to liberate the narrative from this constraint appear to destroy the subjectivism and intelligibility of the narrative. The digression seems to stop, however, as the identification of the snail closes the narrative, yet paradoxically leaving the end of the story open for another digression.
Sources:
McQuillan, Martin. Ed. The Narrative Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.
Rebeca, Matei. "Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall." Nov. 14th 2009. http://www.scribd.com/doc/22146701/Virginia-Wolf-The-Mark-on-the-Wall
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
