When you read the novels of J M Coetzee, Charles Mungoshi and others, you find them using a narrative mode or device that depicts the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the minds of their characters. These are streams of consciousness and interior monologues.
This technique of writing allows authors to provide a more intimate portrayal of their subjects. It prevents them from being confined to physical descriptions or accounts of spoken dialogue, which was a standard literary technique prior to the rise of the stream of consciousness approach.
In literature, stream of consciousness and the interior monologue are products of a movement called Modernism which started in Europe around the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century.
The terms were coined by William James. The interior monologue has varieties like reflection, flashbacks, flash forwards and poetic detours. Modernism, the mother of interior monologue was championed by writers and theorists such as Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach.
In this period, that also included the first and second world wars, there developed a tendency to desire to break away from the past in the way art is conceived and produced.
The horrifying two wars and new technology made people question the future of humanity. Writers started to move from the notions of the Romantic era which had focused on nature and being. There was a departure from rationality and orderly presentation in telling stories. There was a clear movement towards psychological realism which promoted the inner being. To achieve that, modern literature was cast in the first person and it employed the stream of consciousness.
One of the key proponents of Modernism, the American poet and critic, Ezra Pound, was not only important for his own creative writing but for his ideas that influenced other writers and artists.
Ezra Pound did more than any other single figure to advance a modernist movement in English and American literature by promoting and also occasionally helping to shape the works of such writers and poets as W B Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, DH Lawrence and TS Eliot.
For example, his Make it New maxim emphasized a new kind of poetry that centered on easy choice of words and simple syntax, while focusing on very strong imagery.
Sigmund Freud’s ideas also had major influence on the arts during Modernism. He invented the concept of the subconscious dimension of the mind, explaining how the subconscious influences the way we think about thinking and reality. He emphasised on the idea of the life of the mind. He thought that thought has privilege over action.
He wrote about the primacy of the mind and that truth existed beneath the surface and that truth reveals itself through complex abstract symbols and perverted actions.
For Freud, the individual is more important than society. Confessions, meditations and dreams are repositories of deep and privileged truth and therefore art should do the following things: A) art should focus on individuals and show how the individual is in conflict with society. B) art should focus on the inner lives of individuals as they struggle to find their real selves. C) art should use symbols that are abstract and as complex as dreams. And D) art should privilege characters who achieve a deeper understanding of the self.
The above tend to be the inherent characteristics of the interior monologue.
The term was actually coined in 1890 by William James, a philosopher and psychologist and has been adopted in literature. James was the first person to spell out the idea that consciousness is a “stream” or precisely “a continuous succession of experience.” He saw the role and function of consciousness as to select what to pay attention to. His actual words are:
“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.” (p.526)
One could say James considered the critical role of this stream of consciousness to be the selector of what should be paid attention to by the mind at any given time. In addition, thought has two other characteristics. Thought tends to be personal because several different minds simultaneously entertain several different thoughts. Secondly, thought tends to be in constant change because although belonging to one person, thoughts are utterly isolated from one another.
In 2017, K. Weerasekera suggested that the stream of consciousness is also referred to even in the early writings of Buddhism where it is actually called Mind Stream or the Practice of Mindfulness. It is considered to be the state of being aware of one’s individual and subjective experience. Buddhist teachings refer to “stream of mental and material events” that include sensory experience like seeing, hearing, touching smelling and tasting. These are based on one’s previous and current experiences in the universe.
Writing in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 2007, JE Luebering indicates that the Interior monologue, in dramatic and nondramatic fiction, is a narrative technique that exhibits the thoughts passing through the minds of the protagonists. These ideas may be either loosely related impressions approaching free association or more rationally structured sequences of thought and emotion. This is in line with the idea that thought has various characteristics.
Thought tends to be personal because several different minds simultaneously entertain several different thoughts. Secondly, thought tends to be in constant change because although belonging to one person, thoughts are utterly isolated from one another.
Interior monologue may include several forms, including dramatised inner conflicts, self-analysis, and imagined dialogue with the self as in T S Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is a 1917 poem by TS Eliot in which the persona is constantly very self conscious with his thoughts flowing forward, backwards and sideways, sparking various psychological associations.
Prufrock is an aged man who is very concerned with the way people may think about what he thinks is his not so appealing appearance. Meanwhile he is thinking about making a love proposal to a woman. He constantly addresses himself while he is in one spot. He imagines himself straying into various rooms where there are many women who could easily pass negative comments about him. Finally he undertakes no physical journey at all, having already travelled mentally.
He finally goes out to the beach and takes a restless walk, still holding mental debates within himself. It is apparent that the use of the interior monologue in this instance is to ably capture the mind of the individual who fails to come to terms with a practical reality and ends up living in his mind. In literature this tends to dramatise the neurosis of the individual in modern society.
Interior monologue may also come in the form of a direct first-person expression apparently devoid of the author’s selection and control, as in Molly Bloom’s monologue concluding James Joyce’s Ulysses of 1922, or a third-person treatment that begins with a phrase such as “he thought” or “his thoughts turned to.”
Molly Bloom is a character in Ulysses by James Joyce. She is the wife of Leopold Bloom. Molly is having an affair with Hugh Boylan. Her key interior monologue is in the final chapter of Ulysses. It is a long narrative that is free of punctuation. It carries Molly’s thoughts as she lies in bed next to her husband.
Joyce experiments with the narrative form in Ulysses, using techniques such as multiple points of view and stream of consciousness. As a result, reading this novel demands active participation on the part of the reader. The reader should be a knowledgeable person in order to read this text. It is what Bulson describes as an activity that takes the reader from the beginning to the end and back again.
Umberto Eco the Italian semiotic theorist argued that many modernist works are open and invite the reader’s collaboration in the production of meaning. These open texts are steeped in ambiguity, discontinuity, indeterminacy, plurivocal, ongoing process, movement, possibility and free interplay.
Hashemi and Hesabi in 2016, took us into the subject of narratology. They take us to one such scholar, Gerad Genett who identifies three forms of narrative. The first narrative is called zero focalisation. Here the narrator knows more than the characters. The second type of narrative is called internal focalisation. Here the view is restricted to that of the single character. The story becomes based on what only the character knows.
This is common in modern novels such as those by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who use the technique of stream of consciousness and interior monologue to reveal a character’s thoughts.
Internal focalisation is itself divided into three. The first form is called fixed internal focalisation which allows everything to pass through one character. The second is called variable focalisation in which characters take turns to being central as in Madame Bovary. The third form is called multiple focalisation. It happens in epistolary novels where the same event maybe evoked several times according to the point of view of several letter writing characters.
R. Fowler claims that when it emerged in Doroth Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the stream of consciousness was a fresh weapon in the struggle against intrusive narration. By recording the actual flow of thought with its paradoxes and irrelevances, the authors set to avoid the over-insistent authorial rhetoric of Edwardian novels.
They felt that the traditional techniques could not meet the social pressures of the new age. They rejected the socio descriptive novel in favour of a novel centring on the character itself.
In a 1962 dissertation, E. Stephens argues that the stream of consciousness came into literature around 1914 after the First World War and created “a new standard of value” in that the writer became interested in exploring the private world and its values as an area of expression. Writers found out that in dealing with the psyche, no static patterns of description nor chronological reactions sufficed. It was discovered that a dynamic pattern was necessary to record the fluidity of consciousness.
Beyond William James, writers found Sigmund Freud’s study in psychoanalysis very useful. It is said that James Joyce was interested in the work of Freud. In his book The interpretation of Dreams Freud says, “The unconscious is the larger circle which includes the smaller of the conscious; everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage… The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature, it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world.”
Harry Levin’s defines interior monologue as “The internal monologue, in its nature on the order of poetry, is that unheard and unspoken speech by which a character expresses his inmost thoughts (those lying nearest to the unconscious) without regard to logical organisation.”
However in 2007, S. Blackmore challenged the usefulness of the stream of consciousness because he thinks it does not exist. She refers to it as an illusion. Her actual words are: “We must be clear what is meant by the word ‘illusion’. An illusion is not something that does not exist, like a phantom or phlogiston. Rather, it is something that it is not what it appears to be, like a visual illusion or a mirage. When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.”
Stream of consciousness is a narrative style that tries to capture a character’s thought process in a realistic way. It’s an interior monologue, but it’s also more than that. Because it’s mimicking the non-linear way our brains work, stream-of-consciousness narration includes a lot of free association, looping repetitions, sensory observations, and strange (or even non-existent) punctuation and syntax—all of which helps us to better understand a character’s psychological state and worldview.
It is meant to feel like you have dipped into the stream of the character’s consciousness—or like you’re a fly on the wall of their mind.
Authors who use this technique are aiming for emotional and psychological truth: they want to show a snapshot of how the brain actually moves from one place to the next. Thought isn’t linear, these authors point out; we don’t really think in logical, well-organised, or even complete sentences.
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