In memoriam twixt the huxtable on all our allegorical allaying of the spiritual woes hmm i’d fancy a dish of kippers oh where does the time go wrote edgar allan poe should I use that for the column no no into the trash bin that one would’ve should’ve used the word parsimonious parsnips are a root vegetable synonymous to the condition of a deacon lain up with heads in his belfry all wobbly and fluoride assayers tweaking into the dark and stormy night yabba dubai doo…
Lost? Confused? Angry? Then you’re in luck: that was the point. And before you ask, this wasn’t an exercise to vent the pressures of being an English major, but to show what would happen if you ever waded into a stream of consciousness book.
Well not exactly, but close. I was going off the last chapter of “Ulysses” by James Joyce, which is an interior monologue completely devoid of punctuation save for two measly periods awash in a sea of green-gray ranting and rambling. This, in part, is what separates stream of consciousness from more traditional modes of writing.
Documenting a character’s thoughts is nothing new to literature. The interior monologue is old hack, so what makes stream of consciousness so special? Besides the general evisceration of syntax, stream of consciousness is supposed to delve into a character’s given thought processes and impressions, rather than report on them from afar.
The term “stream of consciousness” is generally accredited to William James, psychologist and philosopher. The idea was simple: Thought couldn’t reasonably be segmented into something as orderly or coherent as a chain or a train. Those were generalizations and abstractions not fit for the surging school of psychology.
There was an aspect of convenience to the emergence, articulation and adoption of stream of consciousness thinking. Modernist literature was stretching its limbs at the turn of the century. The Great War loomed, fantastic specter it was, but those budding authors were still looking for ways to break away from 19th century realist literature. They found more fertile ground in the fulcrum and dregs of hell; they effloresced.
Stream of consciousness, as a technique, had been around beforehand (Proust being the most obvious example), but it really crystallized in the postwar period. There was “Ulysses.” There was “Mrs. Dalloway.” Over in the United States there was “The Sound and the Fury.” And so on and so forth, extending towards time immemorial.
It’s unlikely authors will ever lose their fascination with this style of writing. The mode is too enticing, since it’s supposed to cut through the inflexibility of realism.
There was no loss of cutting psychological insight in 19th century literature—Henry James comes to mind, though he really straddles two centuries; straddling seemed to be his modus operandi—but it was of a more traditional sort. The word we’re looking for is objectivity.
The mind has always been a hub of literature. How can it not be? Literature as a whole is fascinated with personality types: the aberrants of Gogol’s Ukraine/St. Petersburg, the righteous and obsessive mindedness of Javert, the plaintive suffering of Dickensian orphans and roustabouts, the focus and diligence of Odysseus.
There will always be some kind of veil to this method, however.: the wall of objectivity. This is an appeal to solipsism, a terrible but necessary thing, since our own minds are supposed to be the one thing we can ever fully, truly understand.
This is where the levee breaks. Stream of consciousness is meant to wash away these things, or to deal such pneumatic pressure as to bore into the mind of a character and ride out whatever rises up in its wake. When we get into how damnably myriad and disparate our stream of thoughts really is—the accumulation of eons of development—we’d be apt to follow Heraclitus in his teeth gnashing.
I believe there is great merit to the form. But it is a very interior form of writing, quite different from the largely exterior driven writing of the past—appearance, actions, caste and other contingencies, divorced from personal insight and the intimacies of thought—and it can lead to pretentious, frankly silly examples like the first paragraph of this piece.
That’s when a stream of consciousness is wending bereft of any recognized input. A stream is nothing without a source, or scenery to color it: Interior meshed with exterior, reciprocating into the night.
sean email beard should in life sreichard@dailycardinal.com.
