Whitaker's Table of Precedency

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How does “it” mean, what is “it” about and what does “it” reveal about the ethics of Virginia Woolf’s poetics of the implicit, and therefore of fiction? Through “A Mark on the Wall”, it is easy to examine the structural and thematic function in Woolf’s fictional prose around “Whitaker’s Table of Precedency”. As a pronoun replacing a noun or referring to a clause, “it” first seems to call for our knowledge of language as a code and designates language as explicit. “Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail”, the narrator of Woolf’s famous short story concludes in an anti-climactic moment deflating the reader’s expectations as to the nature of that “small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece” described in the first paragraph. In what clearly reads as an ironical punch-line, “it” first refers to the mark before providing the reader with a definition — “it was a snail” — which puts an end to the thematic and imagistic meditation that it had triggered off in the first place. The deceived reader is left with the feeling that the ling...

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