Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)

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' of a narrator. The term was coined by Alexander Bain in 1855 in the first edition of The Senses and the Intellect, when he wrote, 'The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness (on the same cerebral highway) enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense' (p. 359). But it is commonly credited to William James who used it in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology. 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.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.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 Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.T. S. Eliot, 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock'1915 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' of a narrator. The term was coined by Alexander Bain in 1855 in the first edition of The Senses and the Intellect, when he wrote, 'The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness (on the same cerebral highway) enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense' (p. 359). But it is commonly credited to William James who used it in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology. 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. 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): In the following example of stream of consciousness from James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly seeks sleep: 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'. 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. 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'.