Apart from the great poet Ovid’s famous book Metamorphoses, which is considered the earliest example of employing stream of consciousness, the 18th and 19th Century had generally paid little attention to the notion regarding mind and thought. In fact, our contemporary term ‘stream of consciousness’ would not surface until decades later. Whilst the Modernist movement was becoming full-fledged, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, among other contemporaries, started to theorize about the human mind. Freud asserted that humans have unconscious minds teeming with desires and counterbalancing restrictions, while Jung combined the former’s theory and coined the term ‘collective unconscious’, referring to the part of a person's unconscious which is common to all human beings. In 1892, William James in his book Psychology introduced a pivotal concept called ‘stream of consciousness’, in which he postulated that it is impossible to for our minds to come across the same idea without changing our perceptions. This landmark in Psychology forever altered the way people view their own ‘consciousness’. The most essential aspect, however, is that the Modernist movement provided a radical break with traditional modes of western thought. An inevitable consequence of this movement was experimentation with the ‘stream of consciousness’, wherein many writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf began to narrate their stories using this style.
The following paper will explore the psychological and literary aspects of the ‘stream of consciousness’. It will gradually become clear that the stream of consciousness does not only establish itself as a practical technique in literature, but it also disproves the notion that it generates random and irrational thinking. In Part I we will analyze ‘stream of consciousness’ from a psychological perspective while key pieces of literature from different era will be scrutinized in Part II. In the last part of the paper we will explore how some sections of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World contain elements of the ‘stream’.
PART 1: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
History has provided a comprehensive view about the idea of consciousness. In particular, the time period in which Modernism was at its pinnacle saw a boom in the study of consciousness. The 18th and 19th Century witnessed an extraordinary flowering of research and studies done towards exploring the concept of consciousness. In 1892, William James, a professor of Psychology from Harvard, took the idea of consciousness further and illustrated what contemporaries now identify as his masterpiece — The Principles of Psychology. The book was significant in a way that it paved the way for studying how a human interacts with his stream of consciousness. It should be noted that the studying of the stream of consciousness now constitutes a major portion in Philosophy and Psychology.
To date, stream of consciousness is defined as a trait of the mind usually considered to encompass key features such as subjectivity, self-awareness, and the ability to perceive the relationship between a person and his environment. According to James, there is no definite starting point of consciousness at any given moment. Somewhere in our higher states of consciousness are compounds of units that act as the medium of arousing the need for attention. As a matter of fact, a person’s thought process begins with “a set of supposed ‘simple ideas’ with which he has no immediate acquaintance at all.” Within an individuals mind consciousness of some degree goes on, with the multifarious states of thought succeeding in him, creating a flow of ideas and keen perceptions. But the essence of consciousness is ‘subconsciously’ derived from a man’s desire for attention and security. To most people, it would be seemingly common sense to respond that no two states of consciousness are alike concurrently. The notion of such reasoning is true, yet there is a major factor present in the world which makes the logic above totally invalid. If there is only a human on the earth at present, then the statement above will be unequivocally true. However, the fact is that more than six billion of us currently inhabit this world, and as humans interact and communicate, the states of mind will be disrupted. The constant flow of ideas and exchanging of knowledge only drive us closer and closer in achieving a unison state of mind, making the idea of a definitive thought spurious. No person’s state of mind once gone can ‘reappear’ and be identical with the former. For an identical sensation to recur “it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain.” Even though we may be exposed to the same people and objects on a daily basis, our consciousness and the ways we interpret them will be holistically different. The epitome of personal consciousness plays a major role into deciding how we interpret objects.
Extrapolating the idea of personal consciousness, our seemingly pallid minds are not as punctilious as people might think. In fact they exhibit a plethora of reactions to different stimulation's; when combined with the human abilities of perception, sensation and association, the stream of consciousness is the result. Most people will be stupefied by the translucence of their individual streams of thought, which are so tacit that even a person with remarkable sagacity finds this subject matter abstruse. Although many people claim that they have the ability to read another person’s mind, the multitude of capturing one’s thought process is tantamount to recreating the conditions of which thought is created from one’s surroundings. To add to the difficulty, many inner-workings of the mind fluctuate periodically, and it is almost impossible to simultaneously translate one’s thought from his consciousness and retain the same state of mind. The fact that we are inured to our system of thinking seems trivial. However, to most psychologists, the concept that we are able to decode our thoughts is merely legerdemain. There will always be a perpetual rearrangement in our consciousness, which makes it ineffable to describe one’s stream of thought. The closest mock-up of a person’s ‘stream’ can only be understood by focusing on fragments of thoughts. It would be appropriate to conclude that various thoughts join to become a stream, yet it is also inappropriate at the same time since the thoughts are not being held together by a force, rather, it is the natural tendency of one’s mind to connect thoughts within a stream in a subtle way.
To that end, rather than describing a ‘chain’ or ‘train’ of thoughts, it would be more appropriate to conclude that a person’s consciousness flows. Metaphorically, thought belongs to the solid state. When our ‘stream’ is closely packed together, it creates a definitive image and in our subconscious mind, creating what humans call feeling and sensation. The ‘entropy’ of our thoughts increases as the interactivity between our consciousness and perceptions increases, which is why our thoughts are constantly effusive and effervescent. Any hiatus or disruptions will divert the flow of one’s stream, and in the process, contaminates the stream of consciousness. It is worthy to remark that transposing our streams of thought through mediums like words and paintings defile and even expunge the underpinnings of a person’s consciousness.
PART 2: THE LITERARY PERSPECTIVE
After an analysis from the psychological perspective, it is now apt for us to view stream of consciousness from a literary perspective. Although the ‘stream’ essentially retains its meaning, the literary technique for writers to transpose a character’s thought is not called stream of consciousness. It only refers to the fact that each character from various passages attempts to render the flow of their thoughts into words. Most writers prefer to utilize interior monologues or soliloquies, since it enables a reader to directly comprehend a character’s thoughts. Also attributed to the modernist movement, this method of narration instantly found its way to appeal most authors, most notably, prominent writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner etc. developed a penchant for the technique. Various stream of consciousness writings are commonly deemed as a distinct branch of interior monologue that are characterized by leaps in sentence structure and punctuation; this combination makes the reading of a character’s thoughts difficult to follow since the monologues are not wholly developed. Throughout the pinnacle of the Modernist movement, stream of consciousness writing symbolized a key philosophical burden. Since many Modernist authors were concerned with the unreliable nature of objectivity, numerous novelists shunned omniscient narrative and regarded it as an ‘impure’ literary technique. Thus they increasingly relied on interior monologue as the closest approximation to truth even though it limited a character’s expression. The use of interior monologues was also motivated by the prevailing interest in Freudian Psychology. In a psychological sense, stream of consciousness is employed to explain convoluted mental patterns, the repetition of intricate ideas, subconscious motivation as well as association, and repressed memory.
Several years before William James came up with the idea of ‘stream of consciousness’, Édouard Dujardin had penned his novel Les Lauriers sont coupes in 1888. Dujardin’s novel attempted to trace the mind of the protagonist without providing an omniscient narration. Intense scrutiny from literary critics revealed that some elements of the book were written using stream of consciousness. Dujardin’s work is generally considered as the first example of a stream of consciousness writing in the modern era. The publications of the Freudian, Jungian and William James’ concepts on consciousness, coupled with May Sinclair’s pioneering the use of the psychological term, numerous works of literature began to surface. In the midst of copious number of novels published using the stream of consciousness technique, several of the most prominent ones are: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. But perhaps the most celebrated of them all is the soliloquies of Molly Bloom, a character who resembles Penelope from the epic poem Odysseus, in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The following is an excerpt from her famous soliloquy.
“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with
my eyes to ask again yes…”
One of the most extinguished features of the soliloquy is its length, which occupies forty pages in most reproduced versions of Ulysses. The soliloquy has no punctuations and other literary techniques such as narrative mediation and third-person narration. From the context, a person can effectively recognize that the thoughts resemble ‘puzzle pieces’, connecting the ideas in a ‘stream’ of associations and perceptions. The fragments of Molly Bloom’s ‘trail’ of thought flow along with the mind’s progression. The effect rendered from the absences of such literary techniques demonstrates the continuous flowing of Molly Bloom’s thoughts. However, most readers would not be able to grasp the meaning of the soliloquy without having first read the rest of the novel.
PART 3: CONNECTIONS TO THE BRAVE NEW WORLD
When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, the Modernist movement was then gradually slowing down. However, only in a period of three decades, stream of consciousness had risen from a mere concept to an extensively utilized literary technique; this literary style had undoubtedly played a major role in literature in the early twentieth century. In fact, many elements of Modernism had found its way into Huxley’s novel; namely Eugenics, Hypnopaedia, and reproductive technology. But frequently, one important element had always been overlooked – the usage of free indirect discourse in the story.
It would be useful to distinguish stream of consciousness narration and free indirect discourse before we investigate how Huxley had incorporated the latter into his story. Strictly speaking, stream of consciousness narration presents a character’s thoughts and perceptions in a disjointed fashion. On the other hand, free indirect discourse holds that the narrator conveys a character’s inner-thoughts while remaining in a third person perspective. Although it is not apparent that Huxley utilized the stream of consciousness narration in this story, there are some aspects which resemble the process of thinking as presented by free indirect discourse. John, the Savage from Huxley’s story, was once described that
“Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous…the words repeated and repeated themselves in his head…When he is drunken asleep, or in his rage or in the
incestuous pleasure of his bed…”
It should be obvious to most readers that the above excerpt does not represent an example of stream of consciousness narration. Rather, Huxley had skillfully substituted his third person point-of-view into narrating this story through utilizing free indirect discourse. In this excerpt, a reader is able to understand John’s emotions without difficulty since Huxley is ‘translating’ John’s thoughts into his story. Had it not been for the free indirect discourse, this excerpt would have taken in the form of an interior monologue, wherein John, in this case, would be speaking or thinking to himself without the aid of third-person narration. But the most notable section of this excerpt is that the latter part of his thoughts is directly borrowed from Shakespeare, a result of reading and memorizing most of the bard’s plays. John’s thought is largely supplanted by the emotions he perceived from the lines of Shakespeare’s play, yet he is able to continue that thought as his own ‘stream of consciousness’.
Another example from the story also relates to John’s thoughts. When he tried to search for Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne in their rest-house, Huxley used free indirect discourse to portray John’s feelings, as revealed by an excerpt from below.
“They were gone! Gone! It was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to him… Joy flared up like fire within him…lay Lenina, fast asleep and so beautiful in the midst of her curls, so touchingly childish with her pink toes… so trustful…”
In the excerpt above, Huxley has recreated John’s emotions as if the reader is the person that is thinking about Lenina. Instead of quoting Shakespeare, Huxley had reflected John’s emotions from a series of exclamation marks and essential word choices. What is different about this excerpt when compared to a true interior monologue is that the rendition of John’s emotion is augmented by the presence of punctuation. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, for example, had no punctuation and syntax. Although Bloom’s soliloquy had captured the essence of her stream of thought, the emotion is not as well reflected as compared to John’s free indirect discourse.
In the society of the Brave New World, conditioning processes have severely hampered the inhabitants’ abilities stream of thought. Before a person was born, he is already subjected to numerous conditioning during the Bokanovsky processes. Not to mention that erotic play, Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, hypnopedia and soma etc. have limited the range of comprehension of most inhabitants. The use of technology to control society as well as censorship undermined the value of being an individual, given that most people have undergone the same conditioning process and exposed to the same human conditions. From a psychological point of view, the possibility of reaching a unison state of mind may not be far away for inhabitants of Brave New World.
CONCLUSION
The concept of stream of consciousness, among other psychological theories, has always fascinated authors and researchers alike. Since its inception in the late 1800s as a part of the Modernist movement, the study of the human mind was revolutionized by the term ‘stream of consciousness’ that Freud, Carl Jung and William James postulated. However, despite intense scrutiny from researchers, ‘stream of consciousness’ still remains an abstract human quality. After an initial analysis of our ‘streams’, here is a question for thought: If psychologists stressed that thoughts are fragments from ‘streams of consciousness’, then what instigated the ‘precipitation’ of these particular ‘fragments’ from the ‘stream’ (thus providing us with thoughts and ideas) and re-dissolve again whenever we continue our thoughts?
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