“How easily our thoughts rush to a new object, lifting it a little, as ants so feverishly carry a blade of straw, then leave it…” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall suggests a number of ways of considering the mundane in literature. The line both isolates the “thought” from the “object” and shows that they are fundamentally linked. It communicates the interaction between physical and mental reality, but at the same time, Woolf makes it clear that their relationship is abstract and subject to the “swarm” of the thousand different “thoughts” that surround them. Emily Dalgarno speaks of “a kind of power” in Woolf’s writings “to see beyond the horizon of ordinary perception.” The Mark on the Wall is interested in 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 sign is at the heart of Joyce's Dubliners. Here, Joyce constructs conflict as his characters are unable to perceive one thing, in the same way, imbuing the mundane with meaning as mundane reality gives way to individual interpretation. In order to examine the role of the mundane, it is necessary to define and clarify the term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "mundane" denotes "belonging to the earthly world, as opposed to heaven," a meaning that later came to describe "the ordinary" or "commonplace." The banal is then linked to physical experience. If we consider Kant's understanding of the sublime as "a feeling of superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature", ordinary experience seems to stand in direct opposition to this. Unlike the expansion of thought related to the sublime, the mundane concerns a tangible experience indicating involvement in the “earthly world” rather than a metaphysical exercise of reason. In the first paragraph of The Boarding House, Joyce establishes a sense of the mundane that permeates the short story. His language is corporeal, describing physical attributes and action as opposed to contemplation. Joyce objectively presents her protagonist, Mrs. Mooney, informing her reader of her relationship with her ex-husband from the distant perspective of the third-person narrative; “One night he went to pick up his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep at a neighbor’s house.” The line is imbued with references to the physical; the setting of a butcher's shop, the bodily need to sleep and the inferred image of cutting flesh are all elements which anchor 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 “fetch” and “sleep” are pre-modified with similar pronouns. This constructs a strange situation in which sleep and attempted murder have the same syntactic status; a balance made concrete by the equal syllables on either side of Joyce's conjunction. Thus, the phrase meets both definitions of mundane as a descriptive phrase that combines the physical world with the commonplace. However, Joyce makes it clear that reality, as understood by her 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 speech. Thus, 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" (p. 71) parallels the doubts thatpermeate the mind of its tenant, Mr. Doran, lending complexity to the narrative as it indicates the contrasting ways in which physical events are experienced. This emphasis on perception is intriguing because it provokes a shift from the mundane to the subjective. In his Essay on the Sublime, John Baillie constructs an in-depth investigation into the sublime. His language is laudatory, praising the sublime as the mind's "consciousness of its own immensity." Baillie refers to the feeling of “elevation” attached to rational thought, but the “vastness” of consciousness is intriguing on several levels. If The Boarding House is rooted in palpable life, it is essentially about the changing and completely immaterial perceptions of its characters. Consciousness then dominates the work. However, rather than depending on noble contemplations, it draws inspiration from everyday life. Thus a strange situation is created in which “consciousness” is as present in the banal as in the sublime. This symbiosis between what is seen and what is thought takes 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: “Suppose the mirror breaks” and leaves only “the shell of a person who is seen by other people.” (p79) “Shell” is important here; it underlines the importance of internal reality and links language to the “snail” which we discover to be the “brand”. The very anatomy of a snail denotes an internal significance since its hidden and vital being is contained within such a “shell”. Here we can recall Woolf's famous assertion 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 conscience rather than narrative. Fletcher and Bradbury note 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 because it more easily connects the Woolf's writing to that of Baillie. understanding of the sublime than its subject of the banal “brand”; denoting a preoccupation with thought removed from physical experience. However, Woolf does not separate consciousness from the material world but shows that they are fundamentally linked. In The Mark on the Wall, she supports the narrator's reflection with the “little round mark… above the fireplace” (p. 77). Here, Woolf's narrator imbues the mundane with his own meaning. Its narrator's conviction that "it can't be for a painting, it must be for a miniature" (p. 77) draws the reader's attention to the "powdered curls, the powdered cheeks" of the portrait of a “lady” (p77) for whom the mark may have been made. Thus, a single brand acquires its own history and its own personal narrative. By elevating the narrative status of the “mark,” Woolf challenges the classical understanding of the sublime as superior to the mundane. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure argues that in binary pairs, one side tends to hold authority over the other. To make a strong generalization, we can suggest that the sublime has often been privileged over the banal in the canon of literature before the 20th century. Baillie's Essay on the Sublime aggravates this preference by suggesting that literature which aspires to "high" "genius" is the possessor of "the truly excellent and great manner." Woolf's character's imagination is driven by the mundane but it provides a platform for human reason. Thatcreates a strange symbiosis in which the typical characteristics of the “sublime” depend on the banality of physical existence. This is also explored in The Boarding House. Here, the mental activity of Joyce's characters does not argue about the banality of their situations but is drawn from the world in which they operate. Joyce compounds this dynamic in the latter part of the story in which Mooney's daughter Polly contemplates her relationship with Mr. Doran. In this passage, the mundane takes on its own meaning since his “kind and secret memories” (p. 79) are taken directly from the sight of his “pillows”. This relationship between object and thought is intriguing to the extent that it transforms individual perception into a form of semiotics. Polly's reverie is supported by the "cool iron bed rail", its pressure and shape taking on phallic symbolism for both Polly and the reader. Thus, Joyce demonstrates the interdependence between the ordinary world and the world of thought, the mundane being imbued with individual meaning; with its own “secret” language. The Boarding House describes the symbiosis between banality and thought. However, Joyce clarifies 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 a failure; its singer is “hoarse as a crow” (p. 229) and it ends abruptly. However, for Gabriel as for Gretta, the melody is imbued with connotation and reflection. However, a sense of conflict is created as the event causes opposite emotions in the two characters. While for Gabriel, music evokes tender memories of his wife and provokes his desire for her, for Gretta it forms a direct link with her former lover, a “boy” who she believes to be “dead to [her]” ( p238). and whose loss she bitterly deplores. Gabriel responds internally to this admission with bitterness; “While he was full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness, joy and desire, she compared him in her mind to another. » (p238) Strikingly, the "tenderness", "joy" and "desire" that Gabriel's perception of colors are immaterial experiences that belong more to the language of the sublime than to mundane existence. This correlates with his fantasy of "running away with wild and radiant hearts" (p. 233) expressed earlier in the story, with Joyce's free indirect speech indicating that the metaphor is constructed by the character's mind rather only by the author alone. The reflection then focuses on a fear of the mundane and the desire to escape prosaic “duties” (p233). Gabriel is filled with an exalted passion and the possibility that he might be interfering with another suggests a banality of character that is too much. a lot to bear. Joyce constructs an intriguing binary system between a thirst for the sublime and the mundane nature of existence. Gabriel's desire for the immaterial depends on physical interaction; he wants to “…cry out to her from his soul, to crush his body against hers, to master 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 a soul connection is expressed through sexual desire, just as the wish to "master" Gretta is indicative of Gabriel's inability to take control. The paradox of Gabriel's desire therefore lies in the analogous relationship between the banal and the desire for transcendence, because the very contemplation of the "soul" is based on the binary of existence.