ONCE UPON A TIME, narrative was simple. You said what characters did, you quoted their dialogue, and, if need be, you told what they thought: “This is easy, Joe thought, as he ambled down the quay.” The only tricky thing here is knowing what a quay is. But then, as Virginia Woolf points out, “On or about December 1910, human nature changed.” Certainly the novelist’s relationship to consciousness did. As a result of huge changes in the scientific and philosophical understanding of the mind—the by-products of work by Freud and Jung and William James and Henri Bergson (who won a Nobel Prize in literature)—the depiction of consciousness became much more fluid. And messy. As a movement, stream of consciousness had a short tenure, only three decades or so. Yet it helped to define the modern novel, change how later writers approached character, and bewilder generations of English classes. But we’ll be bewildered no more.
Or maybe just a little.
So what is this beast, stream of consciousness? Oh, that’s easy: it doesn’t exist. Lot of help, right? Nevertheless, it’s true: there is no single thing to which we can point and say, “Stream of consciousness.” There are a lot of works that seem to fit the notion, but they’re hardly all doing the same thing. It’s a lot like obscenity: no one can define it, but everyone thinks he knows it when he sees it. Okay, we have something that may not exist, that no one has satisfactorily defined, that existed only briefly, and that tends to confuse readers. Where do I go to sign up? And can it possibly matter?
Oh, yes, it matters greatly. On one level it matters because of all those bigwigs of modernism who attempted new things. They came, they went. But something stayed behind, and that something matters. Prior to the start of all this—let’s take Woolf’s 1910, plus or minus a few—readers and writers could automatically expect a certain level of authority in the telling of a tale. There was a narrative center that existed outside the characters in the tale. That center is easiest to see in the omniscient narrators of the great Victorian novels, whether Bleak House or Vanity Fair or Middlemarch. There is clearly an intelligence that exists external to the story, one that shapes the story and says, in effect, “We exist outside this story, but through my agency, we can go not only into the story but into the thoughts of the characters at will. That is, at my will.” That outside center, however, also exists in the first-person narratives. Outside? Of course, outside. The Pip who narrates Great Expectations is clearly separate from the child Pip who stumbles into the clutches of Magwitch at the novel’s opening. Most of his life to date has taken place in the intervening years. But he’s also separate from the Pip who talks to Joe Gargery about being a gentleman late in the novel and who has his final, memorable meeting with Estella. The narrating Pip exists both outside and after those character Pips. How can we be sure? Verb tense. The past tense of the narrative—not simple present or some progressive form—argues for distance from the events and the self within the narrative.
So? How does that make a difference? It means everything we know about the character, and especially everything we know from the character is mediated. There’s a conscious presence imposed between us and young Pip or Esther Summerson filtering their thoughts—selecting, arranging, rewording—so that we know them only in this shaped, rather distant form. For all their variety, the one thing common to stream-of-consciousness novels is their desire to do away with that mediation, to get not merely close to but inside the characters’ heads.
Swell idea, but where’s the road map? As it turns out, the woods in 1900 were just full of cartographers.
As I said before, there is no single technique known as “stream of consciousness.” Rather, we use the term, very loosely, to describe the effects produced by a number of techniques, and more generally to describe a certain type of fiction that seeks to reproduce consciousness in all its complexity and with a minimum of narrative mediation. And while they differ considerably from one another, they have this in common: the loss of a narrative center outside character. Instead, narration began to find a home within characters’ minds, and not always the minds of which they were aware. Because, as it turns out, “mind” gives way to “consciousness,” and consciousness is composed of multiple levels.
Pretty much everybody seems to have had this idea of depth at the same time. The term first arises in William James’s work The Principles of Psychology (1890), where he prefers it to “train” or “chain” of consciousness. The fluidity and continuum of depths suggested by “stream” make it more nearly ideal as a descriptor of James’s notion of consciousness. Some of his brother Henry’s late works begin to explore consciousness as operating simultaneously on a variety of levels, although none of them could be properly described as stream-of-consciousness novels. So far so good, right?
But here’s the thing: it had already begun to exist in practice. Two years earlier, Édouard Dujardin did something remarkable in his short novel, Les lauriers sont coupé (the first English translation: We’ll to the Woods No More, the second, The Bays Are Sere—clearly imprecise renderings). He employed, for the first time I believe, a technique that is recognizable as interior monologue. It’s a lot like a regular monologue except that it is unspoken, inside the head, and largely unshaped. What Dujardin recognizes at once is that thoughts go where they will, leap in ways that defy logic, and take on a life of their own.
A drop of wine. Empty, the seats opposite; between the seat and the mirror, leather upholstery. I must see what happens with a note—anyway. My card-case; my address card, that’s more suitable; my pocket-pencil; very well. What shall I put? A rendezvous for tomorrow. I must indicate several. If that solid solicitor knew what I was up to! I write: ‘Tomorrow, at two, in the reading room of the Magasin du Louvre…’ The Magasin du Louvre, not very chic, but still the most convenient; and then, or somewhere else? The Louvre? go on with you! At two o’clock. Need to allow enough time; at least from two till three; that’s it; I change ‘at’ to ‘ from’ and I’m going to add ‘until three’. Next ‘I…I will wait for you…’ No, ‘I will wait’; that’s it; let’s see.
Perhaps not surprisingly for an experimental work, Dujardin’s novel lapsed into neglect and was largely forgotten in 1902 when Joyce stumbled across a copy in a bookseller’s shop in Tours, France. The impact is undeniable, for despite a twenty-year gap, Joyce copies Dujardin’s style exactly for many of Leopold Bloom’s monologues in Ulysses.
Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze. The quick touch. Soft mark. I’d like my job. Valise I have a particular fancy for. Leather. Capped corners, riveted edges, double action lever lock. Bob Cowley lent him his for the Wicklow regatta concert last year and never heard tidings of it from that good day to this.
Mr Bloom, strolling towards Brunswick street, smiled. My missus has just got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don’t you know? In the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can’t he hear the difference? Think he’s that way inclined a bit. Against my grain somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope that smallpox up there doesn’t get worse. Suppose she wouldn’t let herself be vaccinated again. Your wife and my wife.
Part of being a genius is knowing when you’ve found a winner. What the interior monologue does for Joyce is allow him—and us—to follow the meanderings of his characters, especially Leopold Bloom, who is a world-class meanderer. Of his wife Molly, more anon.
The intellectual sanction for this new fiction is largely derived from the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson. In works such as Matter and Memory, Laughter, and Time and Free Will, Bergson lays out a theory of mind, memory, and the subjective experience of time that gives free reign to the novelistic explorers of consciousness.
At the center of experience in the “new” fiction is memory. Bergson distinguishes between mémoire volontaire, which is a product of reason and will, the portion of memory we can control, and mémoire involontaire, which is the part writers can make use of. This latter is capricious, flowing uncertainly, never quite graspable. We see when we look at writing by Joyce or Woolf, for instance, just how much of memory is involuntary, how little control we have over the images that float to the surface, often to haunt or mock us.
Another key notion is la durée, or durational time. As opposed to clock time or metronomic time, humans experience time subjectively, so that moments are almost infinitely elastic, as in the instant before the car crash when one “sees” one’s life flash before one’s eyes. The notion of durational time, curiously enough, is picked up by the imagist poets for their tiny creations and by novelists with ambitions as large as the author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In the practice of fiction, durational time allows for almost limitless exploration of a single moment, as the mind can be functioning on a host of levels and covering a wide array of subjects all at once as time seems, at least sometimes, to stand still.
The change in the narrative presence is most notable in the stream-of-consciousness novel. This is not to suggest, however, that narrators disappear entirely; rather, the narrator ceases to act as mediator or filter for the characters’ thoughts and acts more as presenter or conduit for direct transcription, with little or no authorial commentary. Where Dickens would tell us what someone was thinking and what it might mean or portend, Faulkner or Joyce give us not only the thoughts (the word suggesting an awareness and even a control by the character), but the whole jumble of thought, instinct, pre-thought, reflex, and response to stimulus to which the character is subject. In stream-of-consciousness fiction a character’s thoughts are presented directly, without mediation by an intrusive narrator; he speaks, as it were, to himself. Hence the use of contractions and of the second person. The effect of the latter is to give what is said a more general significance, the speaker assuming that his reactions and thoughts do not hold for him alone but for any human being.
If the entire history of stream of consciousness had been a failure, it would have been redeemed by a single section of a single novel. In fact, this section may be why the entire field developed. In the trade the episode, which begins and ends with the word “yes,” is called Penelope, but Penelope has nothing to do with its brilliance. It’s all about Molly:
they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seed-cake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop
For forty-five tightly packed pages. Molly’s soliloquy is the most amazing literary achievement I know of. Her whole life is in there—past, present, and future; attitudes, considerations of career, and love life; her menstrual cycle; everything. What’s more amazing is that people often think at first glance they can’t read it: it’s too dense, too allusive, to scary, too something. In reality, though, it’s really pretty simple. These are the nocturnal, sleepy-but-not-asleep musings of a passionate, not terribly well educated, proud, loving, talented woman. She’s at the end of a very long, taxing day. We’ve been following her husband through funeral and newspaper office and music room and pub and brothel, but she’s been busy in her own right. Her current lover, Blazes Boylan, has made love with her in the afternoon. She’s been preparing for a series of singing engagements. She has begun her period. And she’s had her sleep interrupted when Bloom arrives home with a very drunken Stephen Dedalus in tow. Given these conditions, her monologue makes perfect sense and is actually not difficult to follow. On some levels, it may be the simplest thing in the book, since it’s pure interior monologue, so we don’t move between narration or description, dialogue, and thought. Instead, we’re in there and we’re staying.
Virginia Woolf practices her own form of consciousness narration, and in each book it differs somewhat from what she’s done elsewhere. James Naremore in The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (1973) points out that “stream of consciousness” is not entirely adequate to describe what Woolf attempts in Mrs. Dalloway, preferring instead “indirect interior monologue,” a variant of “free indirect discourse.” This jawbreaker of a term refers to a special mode of third-person viewpoint in which the narration takes its cues from the consciousness of the character so it’s quite close to but not quite first person. You can think of it as the language the character might use if she could get outside her own consciousness to articulate it. Needless to say, the ironic possibilites are legion. This distinction would be equally true for To the Lighthouse or indeed most of her mature work. There’s really nothing in the way of direct interior monologue as it appears in Joyce or Dujardin. Rather, it is filtered through a narrative presence whose chief job is to change the first-person “I” to a third-person “he” or “she.” Hence the “indirect” part of Naremore’s characterization.
One of Woolf’s abiding concerns is the degree to which characters are connected psychologically and linguistically. This is in part an outgrowth of the philosophy of G. E. Moore, under whom the Bloomsbury males studied at Cambridge. Woolf was excluded from that experience because of her gender, of course, but she absorbed much of what she learned from her brother Thoby; her husband, Leonard; and her other friends. The part of Moore’s thought she’s particularly interested in here are his ideas on friendship, so much so that by the time she writes The Waves in the 1930s, characters’ monologues are impossible to separate entirely one from another. A professor of mine once said that he thought any monologue belonged only about 80 percent to the character who voiced it and the remaining 20 percent to the other friends. She’s only beginning to explore that possibility in Mrs. Dalloway, although we see some of it in Clarissa’s time together with Peter Walsh, for instance.
Consider this passage from To the Lighthouse.
While he walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all, in love with this world) he weighed Ramsay’s case, commiserated him, envied him, as if he had seen him divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking domesticities. They gave him something—William Bankes acknowledged that; it would have been pleasant if Cam had stuck a flower in his coat or clambered over his shoulder, as over her father’s, to look at a picture of Vesuvius in eruption; but they had also, his old friends could not but feel, destroyed something. What would a stranger think now? What did this Lily Briscoe think? Could one help noticing that habits grew on him? eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps? It was astonishing that a man of his intellect could stoop so low as he did—but that was too harsh a phrase—could depend so much as he did upon people’s praise.
This passage has numerous telling features of the Woolf style: a wide range of topics that barely hang together, parenthetical insertions, sometimes using dashes instead of parentheses, question marks in mid-sentence positions, a sliding narrative center (is a specific thought coming from William Bankes or Lily Briscoe?), and as a source of that sliding quality an indirect way of revealing thought. The thought flows from character, but we’re never sure how directly or what degree of mediation has been practiced in conveying that thought.
It’s a mystery, always, and a good one. So here’s the Law of Streaming Narrative: All representations of consciousness are arbitrary and artificial. It’s impossible to see into another mind, so writers therefore employ devices that create the illusion of consciousness. It’s the same as any other sort of narration. Omniscience doesn’t exist among humans, yet we accept the illusion of it in fiction. The “limited” or “sympathetic” viewpoint is an imaginative construct, not a journalistic reality. With all these approaches, we suspend what we know, namely, that they are untrue to our experience of the world, in favor of the possibility that they will help us arrive at something we desire, whether that is insight into the human condition or pleasurable reading. We’re neither dupes nor dopes. Rather, we want something the writer has to offer, and we agree to play along with her game in order to acquire that something. It’s not about what’s “easy” or “hard” but about what achieves the mutual ends of both participants in this transaction. We’re even willing to meet new and challenging demands, sometimes, if the rewards are great enough. The demands of stream-of-consciousness fiction were steep, so not all that many readers were willing, at least initially, to meet the challenge. Time, however, has shown that those writers were onto something. Responding to the new psychology and the new philosophy, they created in their turn new fiction that gave insights into the workings of the mind that no earlier techniques had ever provided. Not a bad day’s work.
Woolf and Joyce, Faulkner and Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes and maybe John Dos Passos. There are a few others, but the club that could be stream-of-consciousness writers was never large. So why all the fuss? Not because of how many imitators they inspired, but because of how their techniques influenced other writers. Novelists found new ways of presenting consciousness because of the daring experiments of a few pioneers. If no one after them writes stream of consciousness, it’s because everyone after them does. Writers as various as Lawrence Durrell, Margaret Atwood, Graham Swift, Anthony Burgess, Henry Green, Edna O’Brien, and John Updike can pick and choose among the techniques developed by Woolf and Co., employing the devices within otherwise comparatively stable and even conventional narrative frameworks. We don’t have to be Einstein, thank heaven, to have access to relativity; he did the heavy lifting for us.
Oh, right, a quay? Just a dock that knows somebody. Which leads me to…