The Symbolism of Walls
Walls are boundaries, but not all walls forbid
Walls keep us safe and they keep us apart. Should we be thankful for them or fear them?
Walls are boundaries, but not all walls forbid. The walls of a cathedral, synagogue or mosque are meaningfully permeable. We are invited to pass through them. The antique churches that populate the villages and countryside where I live always leave their doors unlocked, allowing the great stone walls to mutate from fortress to shelter by the push of a door.
They are walls nevertheless, there to form a curtain and a barrier behind which a different creed of people can be found. A wall always has two sides and two distinct concepts for the people on either side of it. Even the walls that constitute our homes lend our family and friends a sanctified aspect. Who we allow to cross into this space is a question of deep importance to us all.
City Walls
The city of Berlin was divided into two halves with the erection of the wall between east and west, a physical barrier accompanied by a width of no-mans-land known as the “death-strip”, over which lookout towers and armed military kept guard. If ever a wall had symbolic value as well as physical mettle, then it was the Berlin Wall. It stood between 1961 and 1990, and was the ideological symbol of the ‘iron curtain’ that made life at either ends of the continent look so opposed.
Stories of ‘escapes’ from east to west are numerous. Some scaled the wall in specially made boots. A family once made it over the wall in a hot-air balloon. Others still went to the very edges of the territory to find passage: in 1971 a doctor swam 28 miles across the Baltic Sea before he was picked up by a West German yacht.
Walls of Absurdity
Where walls find their way into our everyday speech, the connotation is almost always negative. If someone is not listening to us, we’re talking to a “brick wall”. Maybe they haven’t been listening for while now, in which case they have “put up a wall between us”; perhaps they are even “driving us up the wall”. If we get tired, we “hit a wall”. Walls have to be climbed over, or sometimes just gone through. “Men build too many walls and not enough bridges,” said Joseph Fort Newton. We might have backs to the wall. Otherwise, we might be climbing the walls with frustration.
Walls are definite things, immovable and strong. They may provide us with safety, but just as often they are symbols of entrapment. Walls we stare at, an office wall or a prison wall, or just a sheer blank wall, seem to sum up a certain interior feeling of loneliness.
Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, a lawyer’s clerk on Wall Street, spends hours staring at a “dead” brick wall through his office window. As his workload increases, he opts to undertake fewer and fewer tasks. “I would prefer not to,” comes his retort when given new work, as he withdraws from the world and eventually dies of hunger.
Walls of Art
If a blank wall is a sign of the absurdity of life, then to decorate our walls may help us survive. The teenager who longs to be free from the confines of their parents’ house fills their bedroom walls with posters and photographs. The wall is made to dissolve into a collage of enticements, and freedom is achieved by the excitements of fantasy. The wall is no longer there.
Tricks to make walls vanish are as old as the hills. The Romans decorated the interiors of their villas with illusions of outdoor spaces, verdant garden views or classical cityscapes. Later, in Renaissance Italy, artists such as Masaccio and Raphael completed exquisite paintings using a single-point perspective to give the illusion of extended space.
Raphael’s fresco at the Vatican, The School of Athens, is a figment of a perfect vista upon which the most idealistic might hang their dreams.
Trompe-l’œil (“trick of the eye”) paintings such as these are not confined to Italian frescoes. When the graffiti artist Banksy stencilled a figure pulling back a section of the Israeli West Bank wall, as if the concrete were as easy to draw back as a curtain, it was his way of slicing through an immovable barrier: the aperture showed the glimpse of a blue sea as if paradise lay on the other side. The joke, if one can call it that, is that we know we’re looking at a deception.
Walls might get covered or smothered as another way of making them disappear. In 1974, a 820-foot long section of the Aurelian Walls in Rome was wrapped in polypropylene and rope by the artists Christo and Jeanne Claude. In Seattle, the so-called Chewing Gum Wall, performs its function by hosting a million blobs of chewed gum stuck there by passersby…
Great Walls of Fear
It is really quite surprising how famous a wall can become. Walls of renown and notoriety have existed through the ages, from Jericho to Troy. Yet they are often some of the least understood of all of humanity’s creations.
The most famous of all, China’s Great Wall, occupies a particular romance in our imaginations thanks to the formidable stretches that contour mountains like the spine of some great sleeping dragon.
It is easy to forget the fragmentary nature of the actual wall: one quarter of its length is not in fact made of stone but the natural barriers of rivers and mountain ridges. The earliest portions of wall have been dated to over 2,000 years old, and consist of little more than mounds of packed earth. Conversely, the most visited parts — and most photogenic — stands at Badaling some 50 miles northwest of Beijing, and are just 500 years old. In other words, the Great Wall is really a collection of numerous walls built under numerous dynasties.
Franz Kakfa’s story “The Great Wall of China,” written in 1917, tells of the piecemeal construction of the northwest section of the Great Wall through the eyes of a fictional elderly mason.
As the mason sees it, the building of the wall brings a country together. Not unlike America, perhaps, the hugeness of the territory makes a single narrative for the country insufficient. The narrator says:
Our land is so huge, that no fairy tale can adequately deal with its size.
Yet it doesn’t seem to matter, since the building of the wall occupies the attention of the population. And with the construction, Emperor’s reputation is enhanced, for such a huge undertaking cannot be anything but impressive:
The enthusiasm for labouring once again at the people’s work became irresistible. […] Every countryman was a brother for whom they were building a protective wall and who would thank him with everything he had and was for all his life.
The gaps in the wall remain: it was fear of invasion, Kafka suggests, that inspired belief in the wisdom of the Emperor. The wall is but smoke and mirrors, “something merely makeshift and impractical”, as a way to prompt a psychological need.
Now I think of the modern world and the walls being built today, and I wonder: is not fear a more powerful means of control than bricks and mortar?
Christopher P Jones is the author of What Great Artworks Say, an examination of some of art’s most enthralling images.
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