Stream Of Consciousness Is A Literary Technique

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

In this paper, I will focus on two of the most iconic modernistic texts which employ the stream of consciousness technique in the hope of discovering if the writers really are able to sufficiently represent a character’s consciousness. The texts I refer to are those of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and that of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. But, just what is stream of consciousness?

Stream of consciousness is a literary technique which channels a, usually fictional, characters thoughts and presents them to the reader in a disarray of fragmented phrases which are both confusing and thought-provoking. Pioneering this inspirational technique of mind-diving was James Joyce who later influenced Virginia Woolf to implement the stream of consciousness technique into her literature.

Psychologist William James first "coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe the complex mental flux of thoughts that characterize human consciousness," and workings of the human mind which only later were adopted to describe the type of narration that seeks to replicate this process in the mimetic fashion.

And, according to the Online British Library: "the term was first used in a literary sense by May Sinclair in her 1918 review of a novel by Dorothy Richardson." The technique was closely associated with twentieth-century fiction writers of psychological realism and was also used by authors well known for this style such as Katherine Mansfield and William Faulkner." (British Library, Woolf Online)

But unlike James Joyce who forced "his readers to live in the minds of [his] characters", Virginia Woolf offered her readers the perspective of a character and allowing the readers to find that intelligence through deducing what the external plot of the narrative could be from that characters thoughts.

Although both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf employ the stream of consciousness technique, their styles and mannerisms for using it differ to the point that it’s as if the rules of the technique change with each characters mind we enter. James Joyce only explores the intricacies of a singular individual like Ulysses’ protagonist Leopold Bloom who’s spotlight blurs any other characters from being internally examined. Virginia Woolf, though, keeps a rapid pace of hopping from character to character in a medley of internal mindscapes.

Other variations of the technique also exist, such as the interior monologue which was "used in fiction for representing the psychic content and processes of character, partly or entirely unuttered, just as these processes exist at various levels of conscious control before they are formulated for deliberate speech"(Humphrey 24).

James Joyce utilized the interior monologue in the final part of Ulysses to peek at his character, Molly Bloom’s, thoughts while she lay awake next to her husband which led to one long stream of fragmented ideas while there were no explanations provided by our silent narrator. Virginia Woolf also made use of this method in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway although her version was a lot more comprehensible due to the indirect nature of the stream where the narrator would fill-in the gaps of the characters mimes where necessary.

Yes, stream of consciousness is a powerful tool for the writer. It allows for a vast expansion of writing resource materials by being able to expose the mindscape of any of the characters inside a story and striving to evoke the intelligence in the readers, more so than emotion. One could argue that stream of consciousness was modernist due to it difficulty, being ranked as a form of ‘high modernism’, but the technique is "underdeveloped [and] requires considerable attention towards organizing a syntactic balance between the confusion and jumble of ideas [it] generates (Doherty, Conscience 12).

As Virginia Woolf hints in her essay "Modern Fiction", if "life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged, [but rather] a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end," (page 88) then we as the reader’s need to be within that psyche, surrounded by that envelope, that halo so we can look outwards at what life, that characters life, actually is.

In analyzing Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, the content of the novel at first seems quite small and unintelligent. Within the span of only one day, there was an active description of the lives of our two main characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, whose fate was entwined to be the romantic form from the premise.

It is no surprise we refer to the author as ‘the modernist’ Virginia Woolf as he entire novel is a "stream of consciousness" of the two main characters Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith who share with us their feelings, ideas and memories. These glimpses into the characters psyche don’t always follow that same structure or whether they are complete for that matter as they are fragmented by the bongs of Big Ben. This singular recurring event in the novel is like an alarm that pulls the reader back to reality from their stream of consciousness day-dream and places us, the readers, along with the characters to a jarring realization that we are occupying a space in the novel setting at that precise time. This sort of detachment is very effective in that it reveals that what the readers actually were partaking in is the actual stream of consciousness of the novel, without the realization.

The bells of Big Ben, beating off every hour, are heard by everyone and set the pace for the novel without and meaning of time to it. Insight into the different personas of the other characters and their thoughts at this precise moment was essential for this section to be even considered modernism. At this moment, all stream of consciousness affected characters would be allowed for narrate even for a short while and then carry on with their day. The significance of Big Ben was so important that Woolf was even pondering on "Hours" as title for the novel.

Big Ben is a wonderful example of subjective perception, splitting tedious stretches of un-measured story time into the precision-cleaved moments of existence. This is another note that while in the state of stream of consciousness, both the reader and the character are deep in thought, completely oblivious to the passing of time. All seemingly insignificant tiny experiences the characters have are but a carefully plotted tool for Woolf to promote her characters’ "moments of being" (Woolf, Moments of Being) for an intricate, subtle design of character development through the use of subliminal messages.

The novel boasts two completely opposite viewpoints for their two main characters. While Septimus Smith is fixated on the outside world, this leads to him alienating himself. His character is developed as an extroverted persona while Woolf focuses on Clarissa Dalloway who, we see, is fixated on her own inner mindscape for the soul-searching which Woolf is guiding us through using nothing more than the whispers of Clarissa’s own thoughts.

However, these are not the only opposing forces the two main characters share. Woolf also "uses the novel as a vehicle for criticism of the society of her day. The main characters, both aspects of Woolf herself, raise issues of deep personal concern: in Clarissa, the repressed social and economic position of women, and in Septimus, the treatment of those driven by depression to the borderlands of sanity." (Woolf, British Library) This instance is quite personal for the characters, but Woolf takes it one step further by jumping to lower characters for further random insanity until we have satisfied the hunger for those moments.

The utilization of stream of consciousness creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind.

Stream of Consciousness is characterized by associative, and sometimes dissociative, leaps in syntax and punctuation. This is evident in the all throughout Woolf’s novel because of the depiction of a character’s uninterrupted, uneven, endless flow of thoughts, feelings and perceptions.

Interior monologue is the direct quotation of characters’ silent speech, though not necessarily marked with speech marks. "Interior monologue" is sometimes mistakenly used as a synonym for stream of consciousness writing as such. "Though interior monologue and stream of consciousness have often been considered interchangeable, they have also frequently been contrasted: the former would present a character's thoughts rather than impressions or perceptions, while the latter would present both impressions and thoughts; or else, the former would respect morphology and syntax, whereas the latter would not...and would thus capture throught in its nascent stage, prior to any logical connection" (Gerald Prince, 94).

Interior monologue is a particular kind of stream of consciousness writing also called quoted stream of consciousness, presents characters’ thought streams exclusively in the form of silent inner speech, as a stream of verbalized thoughts. Represents characters speaking silently to themselves and quotes their inner speech, often without speech marks Is presented in the first person and in the present tense and employs deictic words also attempts to mimic the unstructured free flow of thought can be found in the context of third-person narration and dialogue.

Since stream of consciousness is a type of third-person narration that replicates the thought processes of a character without much or any intervention by a narrator, it may come in "a variety of stylistic forms. The narrated stream of consciousness often composed of different sentence types including psycho-narration and free indirect style Stream of consciousness has always been primarily associated with the modernist movement."

Among these forms is the narrated stream of consciousness and quoted stream of consciousness, both of which were present in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dolloway. However, the main streams of consciousness were mainly of Clarissa’s thoughts of Peter, the musings on whether she would have had a fuller happiness with him or with her husband Richard.

But, Woolf also uses the stream of consciousness to, over the course of the novel, incrementally express Clarissa’s own identity searching, considering Clarissa was always questioning her purpose in life if she would ever be able to find it. Septimus too had a stream of consciousness when he hit upon the thoughts of death and the war. Woolf tries to disguise the obvious plot to use the stream of consciousness to portray what is one of the most basic and yet fundamental principles of modernist literature, pessimism. With the two main characters unable to look optimistically on life, Woolf transforms their characters by showing their pessimistic looks on life.

Thus, Mrs. Dalloway is filled with all the necessary ingredients to earn the title of a modernist piece of literature. There exists a multiple narrative point of view, a stream of consciousness and the fundamental pessimism required to the deliver the modernity of the real-world setting in modernism. However, it’s the pessimism in the novel which sets Mrs. Dalloway apart from traditionalistic and realistic movement novels.