James Joyce's contribution to stream of consciousness novel

What is Stream of Consciousness Novel

 It is in the early part of the nineteenth century that the stream of consciousness novel, a new literary genre, began to appear in the realm of English literature. It was William James who first used the phrase, 'stream-of-consciousness' in his Principles of Psychology In 1980 to denote flow of impressions and sensations through the human consciousness. Then Freud's writings began to appear in English translations shortly after 1910. The ideas of Bergson and William James also began to have their impact in England. According to William James, "Consciousness, is an amalgam of all that we have experienced and continue to experience. Every thought is a part of the personal consciousness; every thought is also unique and ever-changing". 

 

The rise of this literary genre of 'the stream-of-consciousness' novel in the early twenties is but a reaction of the increasing exterior focus of 19th century novels.The Georgians realised that if they were to explore the new territories, they required new tools. The new perspective needed a new technique. Mrs. Dorothy M. Richardson was no doubt, the pioneer in this field in England. But Virginia Woolf was the most important protagonist of this new literary genre. Of course this was not just confined to England. On the eve of the First World War, three novelists unknown to each other, began their epoch-making works destined to have enormous influence on the fiction of the century. In France, Marcel Proust published the first two volumes of his Remembrance of This Past. And then in 1914 James Joyce, an Irishman, began publishing in serial form A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. And the third novelist was Miss Dorothy Richardson. So between 1913 and 1915 was born the new novel, the psychological novel or the novel of the stream-of-consciousness'. And the great thing is that the three novelists turned fiction from the external to internal reality. All the three wrote from an acute need to pose inner problems and project their inner life before the world. The novelists of this era were greatly influenced by Henri- Louis Bergson, the French philosopher who held the view that the continuation of an infinite past in the living present is always there. 

 

In fact the past lives in the present, in memory and its consequences, and hence it also shapes the future. Hence in the psychological novels there is a preoccupation with time. So in this type of novel we find the action moving backward and forward freely in time. There is no chronological forward movement which is a common feature of the traditional novel. In the new psychological novel, the movement is zig-zag, a sinuous movement from the past to the present, and from the present to the past. Thus we often find the novelists of this school making an hour seem like a week or a week like an hour. In this connection David Daiches' comments are worth quoting: "The stream-of-consciousness technique is a means of escape from tyranny of the temporal dimension. 

 The modern novelists are more interested in the inner than in the outer life of a character. And the aim of these writers is to render the soul or 'psyche' truthfully and realistically and hence they use the stream-of-consciousness technique. They know and so they want to show that the human psyche is not a simple entity functioning logically and rationally, in a predictable manner. Hence, in their novels, in place of external action and violent deeds, there is the interior monologue and there are the fluid mental states. The novelist creates a world of his own with its own laws. Hardly any climax or a turning point is to be found in the story. It is the penumbra of the mind which becomes important. Hence the modern novelists of this new school are spiritual, as opposed to the Edwardian novelists. Hence these type of novels have mainly as their essential subject-matter the consciousness of one or more characters. There is very little of external action. But in its place we get the interior monologue and the fluid mental states-existing simultaneously at a number of points in a person's total experience.

 

The interior monologue is in fact, an integral part of the novels of this new literary genre. This internal or interior monologue is the silent speech of a given character, designed to introduce us directly into the internal life of the character without the author's intervention to explain or to comment. like other monologues, it has theoretically no organisation in these respects; in the matter of content, it is an expression of the most intimate thoughts, those which lie nearest the unconscious. 

 

In the psychological novel there is hardly any plot or story. Both plot and character in the conventional sense have decayed in the novels of this new genre. There is no set description of characters as in the older novel; there is a shift from the externals to the inner self of various personages. And then there is no plot-construction in the sense of a logical arrangement of incidents and events, leading chronologically to a catastrophe or denouement. And according to Virginia Woolf herself, in the novel of subjectivity there is no plot, no character, no tragedy, no comedy, and no love-interest as in the traditional novel. That is why she abandoned all the conventional aspects of a novel.

 

Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man heralds the technique of the 'stream of consciousness' novel. It is a sort of lyrical biography focusing on the developing sensibility of the artist, stephen dedalus from boyhood to manhood. It is in fact an autobiographical novel originally published in serial form in The Egoist, February 1914 September 1915. Stephen Dedalus (representing Joyce), an intelligent but frail child, struggles towards maturity in Ireland at the turn of the century. The novel traces his intellectual, moral, and artistic development from babyhood to the completion of his education at University College, Dublin. Though the writing is completely in third person, there is an attempt, in each example to reproduce the character's mentality.