The Stream of Consciousness Novel :
“The Stream of Consciousness” novel
is the peculiar product of the 20th century. The rise of this art form on the eve of the
World War I marks an epoch in the history of the English novel. This particular kind of novel is also called
the novel of subjectivity or the psychological novel. The phrase,”stream of consciousness” was
first used by William James in his Principles of Psychology, 1890, to denote
the chaotic flow of impressions and sensations through the human
consciousness. Dorothy Richardson in
England, James Joyce in Ireland and Proust in France are the chief architects
of the novel of subjectivity, and Virginia Woolf is the novelist who imparted
form and discipline to it and thus made it a popularly accepted art-form.
The New Psychology : Among the psychologists, Bergson’s
theory of time has been of far-reaching significance in this connection. He divided Time into
‘Inner time’ or Duree’ or
psychological time, and
Clock time or
mechanical time.
Inner Time or
Duree is conceived of as a flow, a continuous moving stream and the division into past, present, and
future as artificial and mechanical. The
past lives on in the present, in memory and its consequences, and in this way
it also shapes the future. Freud, Adler
and Jung, on the other hand, studied the human consciousness and conceived of
it as nothing static or fixed, but something in a state of flux, constantly
changing and becoming different, in response to sensations and emotions
received from out-side. It was conceived
of as chaotic, a welter of sensations and emotions, feelings and desires and
memories. There was deeper and deeper
probing into human consciousness by these psychologists. Their researches revealed that there are
layers within layers in the human consciousness. Beneath the conscious, there is the
subconscious, and then there is the unconscious. The past lives on in the
subconscious and the unconscious and is brought up to the conscious level
through memory and recollection. The
conscious is only a very small part of the human psyche or soul. Human actions are determined more by the
sub-conscious, and the unconscious, than by the conscious. Hence it is that there is so much of the irrational and the emotional in human
conduct. Freud, particularly, tried to
account for neuroses and other abnormalities
by his theory of sexual inhibition and frustration. His concepts like, mother-fixation or father
fixation or ‘Oedipus complex’ have been freely exploited by the modern writers of what has been called
the psycho-analytical novel. The stream
of consciousness novel carries the impress of all these theories.
The Stream of
consciousness novel has been variously defined by various writers. Thus H.J. Mullar is of the view that the new
novel is,” a withdrawal from external phenomena into the flickering half-
shades of the author’s private
world.” This definition emphasizes the
inwardness of the novel of subjectivity.
Robert Humphrey defines it as “a type of
fiction in which the basic emphasis is placed on exploration of the pre-speech
levels of consciousness for the purposes primarily of revealing the psychic
being of the characters.” E.Bowling
subscribes to the same view by
describing it as, “a direct quotation of the mind – not merely of the language
area but of the whole consciousness”
According to this view the Stream of Consciousnes Novel deals with the
pre-speech level of incoherence in human consciousness with a view to analyzing
human nature.
The ‘Psyche’: Its
Nature : The aim of the modern psychological novelist is to render the sould or
psyche truthfully and realistically, and with this endin view he uses the
stream of consciousnss technique. The human psyche is not a simple entity
functioning logically and rationally, in a predictable manner. Modern psychology conceives it as a vast
fluid, or even vaporous mass.
The Technique of Rendering it : The ‘ stream of consciousness’
novelists are as much concerned as the old ones with the psyche, it being the
focus of life experience. Only, with
their modern conception of the psyche, they grow more and more impatient of the
quaint little patterns into which the old psychological novelists had tried to
force this protean creature, and their disposition to ignore all sorts of things that go to make
up human personality. And the new
writers have felt the need to break up these conventional patterns. They have wanted new technical devices, new
procedures, for rendering the psyche.
Decay of Plot and Character : In other words, the psychological
novel represents a reaction against the well-made novel of the 19the century.
A continuous action seems to them too
unlike ordinary experience, with its freakish, accidental interruptions, its
overleapings of time and circumstance.
They feel that the sense of life is often best rendered by an abrupt
passing from one series of events, one
group of characters, one center of consciousness, to another. Moreover, they don’t particularly care about
neatly finishing off a given action, following
it through to the fall of the curtain.
They feel that the imagination is
stimulated and rendered more active, is actually exhilarated, by broken bits of
information, as the nerves are stimulated by the discontinuity of an electric
current. Thus, their technique conforms
more closely to the actual thought process, which is made up of a flux of
sensations and impressions, than does a connected chain of logical reasoning.
Skilful Manipulation of Time : This preoccupation with the psyche,
rather than with the externals of character, also accounts for the
pre-occupation of this kind of novel with time.
The action moves backward and forward
freely in time; there is no chronological, forward movement, but a zig-zag,
sinuous movement from the past to the present, and from the present to the
past.
Mrs. Woolf has shown great skill in
the manipulation of Time in Mrs. Dalloway.
The clock time is merely a single day in the life of the heroine, but in
the consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway we
move freely in Time and Space, and in this way is built up a perfectly
credible and rounded personality.
The Novelists of This Genre : Dorothy Richardson, Mary Sinclair, Virginia
Woolf are all novelists of the ‘Stream
of Consciousness Novel’ though Joyce is perhaps its most famous
exponent. Dorothy Richardson flicks a
delicate glove in the face of the reading public through her novels – pointed
Roofs, 1915, Backwater, 1916, Honey-Comb, 1917, The Tunnel, 1919 Interim, 1919,
Dead-lock, 1921, Revolving Lights 1923, The Trap,1925, Oberland, 1927, Dawn’s
Left Hand, 1931. All the ten novels
constitute one series entitled Pilgrimage, and give us a number of spiritual
adventures of a young Englishwoman, Miriam Henderson, a school-mistress in
Hanover, through the medium of her own mind.
Dorothy Richardson’s method admits no reflection upon experience, no
moulding of it intoi form. She is
concerned not with describing consciousness, but with seeking words to embody
it. There is no consecutive and
connected story, and no selection of incident for the core of climax it may
contain.
May Sinclair is the champion of the
Novel of psycho-analysis. An eclective
novelist, her novels reflect the
changing social attitudes and technical resources of the new century. The Divine Fire, 1904, The Helpmate, 1907, The Judgement of Eve,
1908, The Combined Maze, 1913, The Three
Sister, 1914, The Tree of Heaven, 1917, The Romantic, 1920, Mr. Waddington to
Wyck, 1921, Anne Severn and the Fieldings, 1922, Arnold Waterlow,1924, The
Rector of Wyck 1925, and The Allinghams, 1927, - all present society as
suffering from neuroses similar to those
of its members, and reacting miserably upon the individual.
Her technique is the result of many
influences, the Freudian method of psycho-analysis being the most
important. Approaching the normal through the abnormal, she builds
up her situations on complexes, unfulfilled desires, compensation,
frustrations, wish-fulfillments, and
dream. Mrs. Virginia Woolf, author of The Voyage Out (1915), Night
and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925) To The Lighthouse
(1927), The Waves (1931) The Years (1936), has poetry and subtlety as her characteristics. And both these are the result of
sensibilities which connect the inner life with external manifestations,
especially the manifestations of impersonal nature.
Mrs. Woolf does not believe in
‘Life-like’ novels, nor in the tyrant plot, nor in the conventional comedy,
tragedy and love interest of
fiction. Is life like this? Must novels be like this? She asks in her essay on Modern Fiction.
James Joyce : An Irishman by birth, Joyce knew eighteen foreign languages in all. He published his first novel A Portrait of an
Artist as a young man, largely
autobiographical, in 1916. His second
novel Ulysses, which took him seven years to write, was published in Paris in
1922. It was banned in Great Britaub
and the United States, and became sensationally
popular. It is said that he spent
seventeen years in completing his last
novel Finnegans Wake. This book
is the ne-plus ultra of the Joycean method in fiction. The novel contains Joyce’s vision of life
with all its thrilling spectacle, its
utter sordidness, its restless emotionalism and its somnambulant absurdity.
His last novel is not written in
English, or in any other known language, but in a mixture of languages.
Ulysses attempts to reveal a day’s life of Leopold Bloom, a Dublin advertisement
canvasser. Finnegans Wake is the story
of an Irish contractor who fell and was
stretched out for dead. When his friends
toasted him he rose at the word ‘Whisky’ and drank with them ! But what a tortuous method! Plot, action
coherence, Time and Space – are all annihilated. Thought and technique are
tormented; ideas and words are twisted.
The novel form itself is violently wrenched and stretched into a strange
shape.
Conclusion : The Stream of Consciousness technique enjoyed its heyday from 1915 to 1941, but its
influence did not come to an end with the publication of Between the Act
(1941).
However, if the novel is to fulfil its purpose as the
agent of the moral imagination, structure is a necessary as ever it was. The major novelists of to-day should attempt
to wed the Stream of Consciousness technique to an adequate conception of
structure. Only then novel can hope to
fulfil itself
0 Comments