Third Monday Musing

Interior journeys: Reading stream of consciousness

By Eric Meub

[This is the first of Eric Meub's new monthly column.]

Why is Great Modern Literature at times so difficult to read? The challenges can range from elevated diction and obscure references to, occasionally, the total absence of a plot. My hardest struggle with the modern masterpieces, though, involved a narrative tool that’s known as interior monologue or stream of consciousness. This literary device locks the reader inside a character’s head: truly inside, with less of the “he thought…” or “it occurred to him…” of more conventional writing. In interior monologue, the reader listens to thoughts that play out in a fictional character’s consciousness in the order they occur. It’s sloppier than mind-reading and far more invasive. But the power of such a literary experience transcends our concepts of “a good read.”

One of the masters of the form is Virginia Woolf, whose novel To the Lighthouse uses stream of consciousness extensively:

Of course, she said to herself, coming into the room, she had to come here to get something she wanted. First she wanted to sit down in a particular chair under a particular lamp. But she wanted something more, though she did not know, could not think what it was that she wanted. She looked at her husband (taking up her stocking and beginning to knit), and saw that he did not want to be interrupted—that was clear. He was reading something that moved him very much. He was half smiling and then she knew he was controlling his emotion. He was tossing the pages over. He was acting it—perhaps he was thinking himself the person in the book. She wondered what book it was. Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter’s, she saw, adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the light fell on her kitting. For Charles Tansley had been saying (she looked up as if she expected to hear the crash of books on the floor above)—had been saying that people don’t read Scott any more. Then her husband thought: “That’s what they’ll say of me”; so he went and got one of those books.

    This is Mrs. Ramsey stumbling through her typical thought process. Through stream of consciousness we participate in her indecision, her indirection, her grasping for a motive for her choices. The activities she is engaged in—walking into the room, taking her seat, and picking up her knitting—are barely mentioned, as they are seldom dominant in our own minds as we walk down the sidewalk or drive the interstate. Most moving of all, we witness her concern for her husband’s feelings after something that was said at the dinner table. We see this in a way that is both more brutally honest, and yet more touching and knowing, than Mrs. Ramsey could ever express in words. The portrait that emerges—educated, brilliant, beautiful, and magnetic even, yet just crossing that melancholy threshold into old age—is one of the masterpieces of modern fiction. Our impression of her is so strong that it hovers over any portion of the book where she is absent.
    All in all this seeing into people’s heads makes for a very entertaining pastime. But in many cases, including much of Virginia Woolf’s writing, it is indeed difficult. One reason for the difficulty is that the human mind does not always progress in an orderly fashion: it skips from one association to another. Anyone who has stopped to think—Now what on Earth put that into my mind?—and has then retraced the thoughts that led there, must often marvel at the associations through which our minds are propelled. To us this mental linking may seem wondrous, but then we know our own associations, our histories, in short, our minds. To a third party, however, these linkages may seem chaos. As readers we have no idea where we are being led or why, and we cannot possibly be as familiar with the links as is the character on whom we are eavesdropping. This sense of chaos is exacerbated when the character is a person whose temperament or mental process differs greatly from the reader’s:

Quentin hit T.P. again. Then he began to thump T.P. against the wall. T.P. was laughing. Every time Quentin thumped him against the wall he tried to say Whooey, but he couldn’t say it for laughing. I quit crying, but I couldn’t stop. T.P. fell on me and the barn door went away. It went down the hill and T.P. was fighting by himself and he fell down again. He was still laughing, and I couldn’t stop, and I tried to get up and I fell down, and I couldn’t stop.

    This excerpt from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is in the voice of Benjamin “Benjy” Compson, a character with severe mental handicaps. This passage and many others are challenging for several reasons. Relying on the point of view of such a narrator, it is often difficult to know the basics about an event: when it happened, who was there, what were the motives of the actions. It is unclear, even when there is a description, what the description refers to. In this case, we’re not really sure if T.P. is laughing, or whether that’s just how Benjy interprets his sounds and facial expressions. Throughout the passage, indeed throughout this entire first quarter of the novel, the reader is constantly shifting between the words on the page and his or her own more rational reinterpretation of events, sometimes wildly incorrect. No one can read this section without bewilderment and disorientation.
    And yet, just as we entered the head of Mrs. Ramsey, we have entered the head of Benjy, which is a much more exotic destination. After several pages of Benjy’s voice, we begin to comprehend a logic to his ways of seeing and describing the world, very different from our own, of course, but consistent and even dependable. The curiosity about the narrative details helps drive the reader’s impetus in subsequent sections of the book, where Benjy’s siblings have their own turn to speak. The variety of perspectives and emotional engagements not only contrast with Benjy’s innocent record, but fill in details about which the reader’s curiosity was pricked by Benjy’s overly tangential references.

Some writers of the modern period, of course, were not content with stream of consciousness alone, but felt the need to expand the narrative with larger allusions. James Joyce, for instance, famously layered the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey upon his story of a single June day in Dublin, Ulysses. Each chapter implicitly engages a different adventure, referring not so much to the actions, as to the nature of the Homeric parallel. In the section that he originally titled Sirens, for instance, almost every thought and every action is organized around the particulars of sound. Here, for instance, is Leopold Bloom just leaving a bar where he has lunched alone, hearing not only the voices in the bar (belonging to people who were not even aware of his presence), but also noises in the street, and the noises being generated by his own digestive system in consequence of his lunch:

Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. When my country takes her place among.
    Prrprr.
    Must be the bur.
    Fff. Oo. Rrpr.
    Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram. Kran, kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgundy. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa. Written. I have.
    Pprrpffrrppfff.
    Done.

    At first glance, of course, the passage seems utter nonsense. Once we get our bearings, however, often with the help of a good guidebook, the effect is of several musical themes interwoven in a symphony. The barman is quoting the Irish patriot Robert Emmet’s last words: “When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then let my epitaph be written. I have done.” But we don’t hear it all at once, since other sounds are bursting to the surface, Bloom’s flatulence for one. It causes him to analyze its source—the burgundy he has drunk with lunch—then look about to see if anyone has noticed, and then finally remark on the tram whose clatter may disguise his eruptions. As Hugh Kenner puts it in Ulysses, one of his several efficient guides to the novel, “why not tram against Emmet and posterior trumpet, song against song…why not orchestrate these schemes, fill them out with arpeggios and trills, and in this hour of unheroic evasion let clarity go hang?” In terms of style, this is Virginia Woolf on steroids, and fiendishly difficult to not only understand, but tolerate for long stretches. And yet, much as we did with Mrs. Ramsey and Benjy Compson, we find ourselves entering into another person’s head and discovering not only substantial dissimilarities to our own personalities, but some surprising and perhaps mortifying likenesses. What reader cannot commiserate with Bloom’s embarrassment, recognizing in him the same reactions and evasions? To read such passages is to be amused, and perhaps confused, but ultimately reminded of our kinship with our fellow man.

What can we say, then, of the character whose mind frightens us, whose thoughts are filled with panic and with the madness induced by a terrible crime? Is there kinship there as well?

Suddenly he remembered that the purse and the things he had taken out of the old woman’s box were still in his pockets! He had not thought till then of taking them out and hiding them! He had not even thought of them while he was examining his clothes! What next? Instantly he rushed to take them out and fling them on the table. When he had pulled out everything, and turned the pocket inside out to be sure there was nothing left, he carried the whole heap to the corner. The paper had come off the bottom of the wall and hung there in tatters. He began stuffing all the things into the hole under the paper. “They’re in! All out of sight, and the purse too!” he thought gleefully, getting up and gazing blankly at the hole which bulged out more than ever. Suddenly he shuddered all over with horror. “My God!” he whispered in despair; “what’s the matter with me! Is that hidden? Is that the way to hide things?”

    We are trapped in the head of Rodion Raskolnikov, the horrifying creation of Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel Crime and Punishment (translated here by Constance Garnett). We are not just witnesses to a crime; we are sharing the thoughts of the perpetrator. We experience with him every terrifying feeling: we suffer panic; we think illogically; we follow his every step on the stumble downwards to criminal derangement.
    Philosophically this is more than just an individual aberration. Herman Hesse in The Downfall of Europe interpreted Dostoevsky as a prophet, and his work as a harbinger of the age to come: “the sick man of this sort interprets the movement of his own soul in terms of the universal and mankind.” Inside the head of Raskolnikov, the reader too is drawn down a path “primeval, Asiatic, and occult…to the mother…to the source,” which “will necessarily lead, like every death on earth, to a new birth.” This is no longer just a journey trapped within a man’s pathology; this is participation in a generational descent.

Having read such novels, I find I am Mrs. Ramsey, I am Benjy Compson, I am Leopold Bloom, I am Rodion Raskolnikov. I have lived their lives for hundreds of pages. I have shared their victories and their mistakes. Most of all, because of stream of consciousness, I have thought like them, whether melancholic or murderous, at least in empathy. For all of us readers, this intimate sharing of thought fertilizes our own experiences, and deepens our sense of uniqueness and similarity. This is more than entertainment: such writing changes us.
_______________
Copyright © 2013 by Eric Meub

Comment box is located below