In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. The term was coined by William James in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology, and in 1918 the novelist May Sinclair (1863-1946) first applied the term stream of consciousness, in a literary context, when discussing Dorothy Richardson's (1873-1957) novels. Pointed Roofs (1915), the first work in Richardson's series of 13 semi-autobiographical novels titled Pilgrimage, is the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. However, in 1934, Richardson comments that "Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & D.R. ... were all using 'the new method', though very differently, simultaneously". There were, however, many earlier precursors and the technique is still used by contemporary writers.
Video Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)
Definition
Stream of consciousness is a narrative device that attempts to give the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue (see below), or in connection to his or her actions. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in thought and lack of some or all punctuation. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue and soliloquy, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, which are chiefly used in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself); it is primarily a fictional device. The term "stream of consciousness" was coined by philosopher and psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890):
consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.
In the following example of stream of consciousness from James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly seeks sleep:
a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmlock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early
Maps Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)
Interior monologue
While many sources use the terms stream of consciousness and interior monologue as synonyms, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms suggests, that "they can also be distinguished psychologically and literarily. In a psychological sense, stream of consciousness is the subject-matter, while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it". And for literature, "while an interior monologue always presents a character's thoughts 'directly', without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, or logic- but the stream-of-consciousness technique also does one or both of these things." Similarly the Encyclopædia Britannica Online, while agreeing that these terms are "often used interchangeably", suggests, that "while an interior monologue may mirror all the half thoughts, impressions, and associations that impinge upon the character's consciousness, it may also be restricted to an organized presentation of that character's rational thoughts".
Development
Beginnings to 1900
While the use of the narrative technique of stream of consciousness is usually associated with modernist novelists in the first part of the twentieth-century, a number of precursors have been suggested, including Laurence Sterne's psychological novel Tristram Shandy (1757). It has been suggested that Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) foreshadows this literary technique in the nineteenth-century. Poe's story is a first person narrative, told by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of his sanity, while describing a murder he committed. and it is often read as a dramatic monologue. George R. Clay notes that Leo Tolstoy "when the occasion requires it ... applies Modernist stream of consciousness technique" in both War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878). The short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890) by another American author, Ambrose Bierce, also abandons strict linear time to record the internal consciousness of the protagonist. Because of his renunciation of chronology in favor of free association, Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) is also an important precursor. Indeed, James Joyce "picked up a copy of Dujardin's novel ... in Paris in 1903" and "acknowledged a certain borrowing from it".
There are also those who point to Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays (1881-1904) and Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890), and Mysteries (1892) as offering glimpses of the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative technique at the end of the nineteenth-century. While Hunger is widely seen as a classic of world literature and a groundbreaking modernist novel, Mysteries is also considered a pioneer work. It has been claimed that Hamsun was way ahead of his time with the use of stream of consciousness in two chapters in particular of this novel. British author Robert Ferguson said: "There's a lot of dreamlike aspects of Mysteries. In that book ... it is ... two chapters, where he actually invents stream of consciousness writing, in the early 1890s. This was long before Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce." Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor, in a work as early as Portrait of a Lady (1881). It has been suggested that he influenced later stream of consciousness writers, including Virginia Woolf, who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them.
However, it has also been argued that Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), in his short story '"Leutnant Gustl" ("None but the Brave", 1900), was in fact the first to make full use of the stream of consciousness technique.
Early Twentieth century
But it is only in the twentieth-century that this technique is fully developed by modernists. Marcel Proust is often presented as an early example of a writer using the stream of consciousness technique in his novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) (In Search of Lost Time), but Robert Humphrey comments, that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and, that he "was deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not write a stream-of consciousness novel". Novelist John Cowper Powys also argues that Proust did not use stream of consciousness: "while we are told what the hero thinks or what Swann thinks we are told this rather by the author than either by the 'I' of the story or by Charles Swann."
The term was first applied in a literary context in The Egoist, April 1918, by May Sinclair, in relation to the early volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage. Richardson, however, describes the term as an 'lamentably ill-chosen metaphor".
James Joyce was a major pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness. Some hints of this technique, are already present in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), along with interior monologue, and references to a character's psychic reality rather than to his external surroundings. Joyce began writing A Portrait in 1907 and it was first serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915. Earlier in 1906 Joyce, when working on Dubliners, considered adding another story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses. Although he did not pursue the idea further at the time, he eventually commenced work on a novel using both the title and basic premise in 1914. The writing was completed in October 1921. Serial publication of Ulysses in the magazine The Little Review began in March 1918. Ulysses was finally published in 1922. While Ulysses represents a major example of the use of stream of consciousness Joyce also uses "authorial description" and Free Indirect Style to register Bloom's inner thoughts. Furthermore the novel does not focus solely on interior experiences: "Bloom is constantly shown from all round; from inside as well as out; from a variety of points of view which range from the objective to the subjective". In his final work Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit in, which abandoned all conventions of plot and character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure English, based mainly on complex multi-level puns.
Another early example is the use of interior monologue by T. S. Eliot in his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), a dramatic monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action," a work probably influenced by the narrative poetry of Robert Browning, including "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister".
1923 to 2000
Prominent uses in the years that followed the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, include Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno (1923), Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Though Randell Stevenson suggests, that "interior monologue, rather than stream of consciousness, is the appropriate term for the style in which [subjective experience] is recorded, both in The Waves and in Woolf's writing generally. Throughout Mrs Dalloway Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech, freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy. Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano (1947) resembles Ulysses, "both in its concentration almost entirely within a single day of [Its protagonist] Firmin's life ... and in the range of interior monologues and stream of consciousness employed to represent the minds of [the] characters". Samuel Beckett, a friend of James Joyce, uses interior monologue in novels like Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies) and L'innommable (1953: The Unnamable). and the short story "From an Abandoned Work" (1957).
The technique continued to be used into the 1970s in a novel such as Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea collaborative Illuminatus! (1975), with regard to which The Fortean Times warns readers, to "[b]e prepared for streams of consciousness in which not only identity but time and space no longer confine the narrative".
Scottish writer James Kelman's novels are known for mixing stream of consciousness narrative with Glaswegian vernacular. Examples include The Busconductor Hines, A Disaffection and How Late It Was, How Late. With regard to Salman Rushdie one critic comments, that "[a]ll Rushdie's novels follow an Indian/Islamic storytelling style, a stream-of-consciousness narrative told by a loquacious young Indian man". Other writers who use this narrative device include Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar (1963) and Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting (1993).
Stream of consciousness continues to appear in contemporary literature. Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), according to one reviewer, "talks much as he writes - a forceful stream of consciousness, thoughts sprouting in all directions". Novelist John Banville describes Roberto Bolaño's novel Amulet (1999), as written in "a fevered stream of consciousness".
Twenty-first century
The twenty-first century brought further exploration, including Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002) and many of the short stories of American author Brendan Connell.
See also
- Free indirect speech
- Free writing
- Internal monologue
- Modernist literature
- Soliloquy
- Stream of consciousness (psychology)
References
Bibliography
- Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, 1978.
- Friedman, Melvin. Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method, 1955.
- Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, 1954.
- Randell, Stevenson. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1992.
- Sachs, Oliver. "In the River of Consciousness." New York Review of Books, 15 January 2004.
- Shaffer, E.S. (1984). Comparative Criticism, Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 119. Retrieved 12 Jan 2011.
- Tumanov, Vladimir. Mind Reading: Unframed Direct Interior Monologue in European Fiction. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997. Googlebooks.
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