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| A ‘nuclear reactor’ of our mind: Stream of consciousness examined from a Psychological & Literary Perspective |
 PRINTABLE VERSION |
“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.
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Writer Profile
Iman Ng
I was born in Hong Kong on June 13th, 1989. Having lived in this Asian metropolis for 13 years and witnessed its transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the PRC, I developed my critical thinking skills about governance and international relations from these life-changing events.
My educational experience is undoubtedly one of the more interesting aspects of my life. I was brought up in a Cantonese-speaking environment and began my formal English instruction in 1996. After 1997, however, my school ceased using English as the medium of instruction and instituted Mandarin as the former's replacement in situ. I did not learn English formally (though I did study English privately for 4 years) until 2001 when I started my 7th Grade education at a Catholic-Jesuit secondary school.
In April 2002 my family decided to immigrate to the United States, after my father had almost lost his job. It was the only choice my family had, given how woeful the economy had been at that time. With great reluctance we left Hong Kong in July 2002, and settled in Rockville, Maryland, USA, where I have been living ever since.
One of my greatest passions is International Politics. I would like to learn more about the human condition and the state of the world today; we are intrinsically born into this Westphalian state system and there's no way to escape it, given how rampant globalization is and how constantly it is affecting our lives on a daily basis.
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