'How easily our thoughts flow onto a new object, lifting it a little, as ants feverishly carry a blade of straw and then leave it...' Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall suggests a number of ways of looking at the banal in literature. The line isolates the "thought" from the "object" and shows that they are fundamentally connected. She communicates the interaction between physical and mental reality, but, at the same time, Woolf makes clear that their relationship is abstract and subject to the 'swarm' of a thousand different 'thoughts' that surround them. Emily Dalgarno writes of "a kind of power" in Woolf's writings "to see beyond the horizon of ordinary perception." The Mark on the Wall is concerned with this perception, as it explores the distinction between the world of individual thoughts and the mundane reality from which they arise. This symbiosis between objects and signs is central to Joyce's Dubliners. Here, Joyce builds conflict as his characters are unable to perceive a thing, equally, imbuing the mundane with meaning as mundane reality gives way to individual interpretation. To examine the role of the mundane, it is necessary to define and clarify the term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “mundane” denotes “belonging to the earthly world, as opposed to heaven,” a meaning that later came to describe the “ordinary” or “commonplace.” The mundane therefore has to do with physical experience. If one considers Kant's conception of the sublime as "a feeling of superiority of our reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature", worldly experience seems to stand in direct opposition to this. Unlike the expansion of thought connected to the sublime, the mundane concerns tangible experience indicating engagement with the "earthly world" rather than a metaphysical exercise of reason. In the opening paragraph of The Boarding House, Joyce establishes a sense of the mundane that pervades the tale. His language is corporeal and describes physical attributes and actions as opposed to contemplation. Joyce objectively introduces his protagonist, Mrs. Mooney, informing the reader of her relationships with her ex-husband from the removed perspective of third-person narrative; "One night he went to get his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbor's house." The line is imbued with references to physicality; the setting of a butcher's shop, the physical need for sleep, and the inferred image of cutting meat ground the passage into the "earthly world." However, what makes this phrase so curious is the tone of banality created by Joyce's syntax. Here, the verbs 'went for' and 'slept' are premodified by similar pronouns. This constructs a strange situation in which sleep and attempted murder maintain the same syntactic status; a balance concretized by the equal syllables on both sides of Joyce's conjunction. Therefore, the phrase meets both definitions of mundane as a descriptive phrase that combines the physical world with the commonplace. However, Joyce makes clear that reality, as understood by his characters, is not limited to physical experience. His language is descriptive but equally astute; entering the minds of his characters through the use of free indirect discourse. Therefore, a reader can access the internal perceptions revealed by the other characters. Mrs Mooney's conception of herself as a "woman who was quite capable of keeping things to herself" (p71) runs parallel to the doubts that pervade the mind of her lodger, Mr Doran, lending complexity to the narrative as indicates the wayscontrasts in which physical events are experienced. This emphasis on perception is intriguing as it causes a shift from the mundane to the mundanesubjective. In his Essay on the Sublime, John Baillie constructs a broad investigation of the sublime. His language is laudatory, he praises the sublime as the mind's "consciousness of its own vastness". Baillie refers to the sense of "elevation" related to rational thought, but the "vastness" of consciousness is intriguing on several levels. While The Boarding House is rooted in palpable life, it essentially deals with the shifting and entirely immaterial perceptions of its characters. Consciousness then dominates the work. However, rather than depending on lofty contemplations, it draws inspiration from the mundane. This creates a strange situation in which "consciousness" is present both in the mundane and in the sublime. This symbiosis between what you see and what you think brings us back to Woolf's The Mark on the Wall. Woolf's language is expansive, following the stream of consciousness of her narrator's meditation on the nature of human identity. Woolf asks us to "suppose the mirror breaks" and leaves only "the shell of a person to be seen by other people." (p79) 'Shell' is important here; emphasizes the meaning of internal reality and links language to the "snail" which turns out to be the "sign". The very anatomy of a snail denotes an internal meaning as its hidden and vital being is contained within that "shell". Here we may recall Woolf's famous statement in Modern Fiction that "if the writer were a free man and not a slave... he could base his writing on his own feelings and not on conventions." “Feeling” and personal contemplation are at the heart of The Mark on the Wall as the story is driven by awareness rather than narrative. Fletcher and Bradbury point out that Woolf is "...Paterian enough to believe that consciousness is itself aesthetic", comparing her use of stream of consciousness to a "kind of poeticized subjective vision...". This notion is intriguing as it more easily connects Woolf's writing to Baillie's. understanding of the sublime rather than the subject of the worldly "brand"; denoting a concern with thought that is remote from physical experience. However, Woolf does not separate consciousness from the material world but shows that they are fundamentally connected. In The Mark on the Wall, he supports the narrator's reflection with the 'little round sign… over the mantelpiece' (p77). Here, Woolf's narrator imbues the banal with her own meaning. The narrator's belief that "it couldn't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature" (p77) draws the reader's attention to the "powdered curls, the powdered cheeks" of the portrait of a "lady" (p77 ) for which the mark may have been affixed. Thus a single sign acquires its own history and its own personal narrative. By elevating the narrative status of the "brand," Woolf challenges the classical understanding of the sublime as superior to the mundane. In his Course on General Linguistics, Saussure argues that in binary pairs, one party tends to have authority over the other. To make a strong generalization, it may be suggested that the sublime was often favored over the mundane within the canon of pre-20th century literature. Baillie's Essay on the Sublime compounds this preference as it suggests that literature that aspires to "high genius" holds the "truly excellent and great manner." Woolf's character's imagination is motivated by the mundane but provides a platform for human reason. This creates a strange symbiosis in which the typical characteristics of the 'sublime' depend on the banality of physical existence. This is the sameexplored in The Boarding House. Here, the mental activity of Joyce's characters is not polemical with the mundanity of their situations but draws inspiration from the world in which they operate. Joyce compounds this dynamic in the final part of the story in which Mooney's daughter Polly contemplates her relationship with Mr. Doran. In this passage the banal takes over its very meaning as his 'lovely secret memories' (p79) are derived directly from the sight of his 'pillows'. This relationship between object and thought is intriguing as it transforms individual perception into a form of semiotics. Polly's reveries are supported by the "cold iron bed rail," whose pressure and shape take on phallic symbolism for both Polly and the reader. Therefore, Joyce demonstrates the interdependence between the mundane and the world of thought as the mundane is imbued with individual meaning; with its own 'secret' language. The Boarding House describes the symbiosis between worldliness and thought. However, Joyce makes it clear that the same perceptions cannot arise from the same object. In The Dead, Joyce distinguishes the characters of Gabriel and his wife Gretta by their contrasting reactions to the same piece of music. The music itself is unsuccessful; its chanter is "hoarse as a crow" (p229) and ends abruptly. Yet, for both Gabriel and Gretta, the melody is imbued with connotation and reflection. However, a sense of conflict is created as the event causes opposing emotions in the two characters. While for Gabriel, music evokes fond memories of his wife and provokes his desire for her, for Gretta it forms a direct link with her past lover, a "boy" who she believes has "died for [her]" (p238 ). and whose loss he bitterly laments. Gabriel internally responds to this confession with bitterness; “While he was full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness, joy and longing, she compared him in her mind with another.” (p238) Surprisingly, the “tenderness,” “joy,” and “longing” that color Gabriel perceives are immaterial experiences that belong more to the language of the sublime than to banal existence. This correlates with his fantasy of "fleeing away together with wild and radiant hearts" (p233) expressed earlier in the narrative, with Joyce's free indirect discourse indicating that the metaphor is constructed by the character's mind rather than the author alone. The reflection then addresses the fear of the mundane and the desire to escape prosaic "duties" (p233). Gabriel is full of exalted passion and the possibility that he might interfere in a relationship with another suggests a banality of character that is too much to bear. Joyce constructs an intriguing binary between the desire for the sublime and the mundane nature of existence. Gabriel's desire for the immaterial depends on physical interaction; he desires to "... cry out to her with his soul, to crush his body against hers, to dominate her." (p235) Joyce's sentence is characterized by binary opposites; the physical and the metaphysical, power and submission, the masculine and the feminine. However, these characteristics are not distinct but depend on each other to be clarified. Thus, the desire for soul connection is expressed through sexual desire just as the desire to "dominate" Gretta is indicative of Gabriel's inability to take control. The paradox of Gabriel's desire therefore lies in the analogous relationship between the mundane and the desire for transcendence since the very contemplation of the soul is based on the binary of physical existence. This symbiosis between physical perception and metaphysics echoes in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens. History has to do with memory but depends on the material; using objects to communicate the emotions of his characters..