Understanding Novels by Thomas C. Foster

Author:Thomas C. Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A & C Black Publishers Ltd
Published: 2009-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

13

Drowning in the Stream of Consciousness

ONCE UPON A TIME, narrative was simple. You said what characters did, you quoted their dialogue, and, if need be, you told what they thought: “This is easy, Joe thought, as he ambled down the quay.” The only tricky thing here is knowing what a quay is. But then, as Virginia Woolf points out, “On or about December 1910, human nature changed.” Certainly the novelist’s relationship to consciousness did. As a result of huge changes in the scientific and philosophical understanding of the mind—the by-products of work by Freud and Jung and William James and Henri Bergson (who won a Nobel Prize in literature)—the depiction of consciousness became much more fluid. And messy. As a movement, stream of consciousness had a short tenure, only three decades or so. Yet it helped to define the modern novel, change how later writers approached character, and bewilder generations of English classes. But we’ll be bewildered no more.

Or maybe just a little.

So what is this beast, stream of consciousness? Oh, that’s easy: it doesn’t exist. Lot of help, right? Nevertheless, it’s true: there is no single thing to which we can point and say, “Stream of consciousness.” There are a lot of works that seem to fit the notion, but they’re hardly all doing the same thing. It’s a lot like obscenity: no one can define it, but everyone thinks he knows it when he sees it. Okay, we have something that may not exist, that no one has satisfactorily defined, that existed only briefly, and that tends to confuse readers. Where do I go to sign up? And can it possibly matter?

Oh, yes, it matters greatly. On one level it matters because of all those bigwigs of modernism who attempted new things. They came, they went. But something stayed behind, and that something matters. Prior to the start of all this—let’s take Woolf’s 1910, plus or minus a few—readers and writers could automatically expect a certain level of authority in the telling of a tale. There was a narrative center that existed outside the characters in the tale. That center is easiest to see in the omniscient narrators of the great Victorian novels, whether Bleak House or Vanity Fair or Middlemarch. There is clearly an intelligence that exists external to the story, one that shapes the story and says, in effect, “We exist outside this story, but through my agency, we can go not only into the story but into the thoughts of the characters at will. That is, at my will.” That outside center, however, also exists in the first-person narratives. Outside? Of course, outside. The Pip who narrates Great Expectations is clearly separate from the child Pip who stumbles into the clutches of Magwitch at the novel’s opening. Most of his life to date has taken place in the intervening years. But he’s also separate from the Pip who talks to Joe Gargery about being a gentleman late in the novel and who has his final, memorable meeting with Estella.

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