Stream of consciousness in novel

 

                    The term Stream of Consciousness, comes from psychology.  It was coined by William James in 1890 and popularised in his Principles of Psychology in 1890.

According to William James,

Every definite image in the mind is stopped and dyed in the free water that flows round it... Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bites... It's nothing joined, or flows... Let us call it stream of thing, stream of consciousness, or of subjective life.

 

  The concept of Stream of consciousness has added new and significant dimension to the art of prose fiction. Actually this new genre of novel took birth between 1913 and 1915. 

                   Stream of consciousness is the name for a special mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator's intervention, the full spectrum and the continuous flow of a character's mental process in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings and random association. 

               The stream of consciousness in its radical form is sometimes described as the exact presentation of the process of consciousness. Because sense perceptions, mental images, feelings and some aspects of thought itself are non- verbal. But an author can present these non-verbal elements only by converting them into some kind of verbal equivalent. James Joyce developed variety of devices for the stream of consciousness narrative in "Ulysses". 

   

                In stream of consciousness novel everything is presented through an apparently unorganised succession of images and ideas connected by association rather than by logical argument or narrative sequence. The action takes place and the plot develops through the mind of the principle character and his stream of consciousness reflects all the forces of which he is aware as they are playing upon him at anyone moment both inside and outside, more or less simultaneously. 

◾ Stream of consciousness novel is a reaction against the well made novel of them 19th century. It's tendency is towards Demoralisation. There are some significant features of this new literary genre:

1. In this kind of novel, plot and characters have decayed

2. Set descriptions of the character of the older novel are subtitled by depiction of the inner selves. 

3. In place of plot construction, in the sense of a logical arrangement of incidents, we notice a backward and forward movement in time. There is no plot, no character, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest in new novel.

4. Instead of concentrating arround a limited issue, the stream of consciousness novelists fly off in an eccentric manner in different direction.

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Most famous novelist:-

• The first modern novelist who consciously employed the stream of consciousness was Dorothy Richardson. She came in the lime light by her novel Pointed Roof(1950) and Pilgrimage (1915-1935). 

• James Joyce was a major novelist, who used the stream of consciousness in A portrait of the artist as a young man, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake .

• Virginia Woolf began as a traditional novelist and then showed remarkable courage to break free from the tradition and wrote a few remarkable stream of consciousness novels. Her Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the light House, The Waves and Between the Act depict the psychological time and incoherent state of consciousness. 

      

               D. H. Lawrence thought not a stream of consciousness novelists was very well conversant with psycho-analytical theories of Freud and Jung and depicted the unconsciousness of his mind through impressionistic and symbolic techniques. As the stream of consciousness technique is a bold experiment in modern fiction, its potency and possibility are well demonstrated by great authorities like- James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The experiment is, however, going on and the complete success is yet to be achieved to harmonize the inner stream of consciousness and the natural fictional structure.