Stream of Consciousness in Modernist Literature

英语文学课 Literature of Bodies 上最后一篇论文。主要引用了课程里要求阅读的一篇讲述越南战争中士兵内心的半虚构小说《The Things They Carried》 by Tim O'Brien，和一篇以20世纪初美国弗吉利亚州 Eugenics movement（优生运动）为背景的诗集《The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded》 by Molly McCully Brown.

主题关于意识流现代文学写作。花了两天晚上写完后心情舒畅，po上豆瓣做个记录。

In the perspective of historical materialism, the form of modernist literature can be traced to when the capitalist countries have entered a stage of rapid economic development and expansion in the 1880s. However, if in the perspective of aesthetics, the emergence of modernist literature was long ago foretold by Rene Descartes, a French philosopher and mathematician, in his philosophical proposition “I think, therefore I am” (Balakrishnan 402). The emergence of the dimension of subjectivity is an indispensable component in modernist literature. Following that, it came to a transition period of subjective literature approaching modernism literature which includes stream of consciousness. As a narrative style, stream of consciousness helps the writer capture the rough flow of a character’s extended thought process, by engaging sensory imagines, incomplete thoughts, disordered syntax, and unique grammar.

To understand consciousness, one of the most controversial things to describe or to be properly aware of is the feelings inside humans’ mind. The second-by-second flow of imagines, words, and sound inside our heads are what philosophers call consciousness. This consciousness is filled with a tangle of material that flashes by an observing eye. It is extremely fast, multi-layered, and dense array; we can generally only rest and focus on a minuscule part of what is before us. There are waves of sensations, fog-shade of moods, collisions of ideas, and swirls of associations and impressions. However, when we open our mouth and tell others, we have no option but to radically simplify the nature of experience. On one hand, writing in stream of consciousness differs from an interior monologue in which the character’s thoughts are often in traditional syntax and grammar. Stream of consciousness focuses on the object. The author is not eliminating the externality and finally reaching the truth, but eroding and twisting the object’s formation in order to “guide the character from one place to next internally and not make the character’s thoughts go haywire” (“Stream of Consciousness”). On the other hand, unlike freewriting or automatic writing in which no need for editing or worrying about the products, stream of consciousness is always writing for a purpose. Though gives the impression of “random”, it seeks to portray the actual experience of thinking, in all its chaos and distraction. Stream of consciousness is not only an attempt to convey a character’s thoughts, but a synthesis making the audience experience those thoughts in the same way as the character does.

In a stream of consciousness novel, characters are always attributed an utterly implausible, superficially beguiling, yet the clarity of mental functioning. In a literature perspective, stream of consciousness is a narrative form in which the author presents in a way that parallels a character’s internal monologue and also makes use of associative thought. In this style of writing, the writer transition between ideas using “logical-weak” connections which are often based on a character’s personal experiences and memories. The idea is that this technique helps writers present the experience of human thought more accurately than by using a series of ideas connected with clear, logical transitions. Associative thought can be seemed “random” as it leaps from one thing to another, with the help of only ambiguous or “seemingly nonexistent” connections, even as it can also feel similar to the actual random leaps that are a part of people’s everyday thoughts.

For example, characters’ thoughts are often presented to the audience in response to sensory impressions—fragmented observations describing what the character sees, hears, smells, feels, tastes, etc. A novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, shows the struggle of overcoming grief and of dealing with death and destiny. The main character O’Brien plays the role of a protagonist in the story and a narrator outside the story. In the chapter “The Man I Killed”, he goes back and forth between the two main roles. O’Brien describes the man he killed with too many details to be a truly existing story but makes his death meaningful,

he was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole. (124)

O’Brien also makes up a love story about the man he killed. He wrote romantic poems and fell in love with his classmate,

[…] a girl of seventeen, who one day told him that his wrists were like the wrists of a child, so small and delicate, and who admired his narrow waist and the cowlick that rose up like a bird’s tail at the back of his head. She liked his quiet manner; she laughed at his freckles and bony legs. One evening perhaps, they exchanged gold rings. (122)

O’Brien describes the man by giving him a “seem-reasonable background”, and the thoughts of the killing are scattered and guilt within the chapter. With the technique of stream of consciousness, each character in the novel has their story. For instance, Dobbins wears his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck even after they had broken up. He believes there is magic in the pantyhose and that they keep him alive.

Traditional writing is highly linear. One thing or idea follows after another in a more or less logical sequence, as in a line. Stream of consciousness is often non-linear, especially in poetry. “Poetry is not inward and pastward, but outward and forward; it moves not to a passive and subjective valuing of consciousness but to ‘objective’ choice and action” (Mitchell 234). The style is hard to define with the multiplied use of unusual syntax and grammar, associative leaps, repetition, and plot structure. The consciousness in The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown is brisk. There are ubiquitous stream-of-consciousness texts in this collection of poems since the girls in the hospital are mentally and physically ill. No one expects to find in the company of wandering thoughts frequently provoked when in boring surroundings. There is a huge appreciation for each of the things which rise up to charm engage and captivate the mind, both inside the hospital and in the flower-bloom world outside. In the poem “The Blind Room: an Execration”, the speaker thinks,

swallow beetle lightning bug brother

all unraveled all undone

at first you will tell yourself stories remember

that fall meant a bonfire

the ribcage of buck lit up

with whatever limbs the storm brought down

old wood burns sweeter than green

the smoke stays on your skin for days remember

your mother combing it out of your hair on the porch

your father playing banjo the

the way the late october thunderstorm rolled in and

drank away the stars (Brown 22)

Additionally, in the following poem titled “The Blind Room: a Consecration”, the speaker parallelly writes,

sparrow possum sheepmoth brother

all unraveled all undone

at first you will tell yourself stories remember

you could ford a river hold a log level

hit a long high note you closed your eyes to silence

after awhile blessedly you are the only creature

everything is without history

there was never anyone but you in the cold lightless place

but the one you’re humming with now and that high accompanying call

that must thank God be Gabriel

swallowing the final stars (Brown 23)

The girls trapped and suffering in the institution are wishing a way out. These imagines might be judged contextually irrelevant by “accuracy” or “logic” but true to the character’s life by their “consequence”. The characters try to catch the seasons, heat, thunderstone, sky, and any creature in the surroundings as they have a meaning to their life. As an example of punctuation usage, ellipses, dashes, and lines are used to break out in order to indicate pauses and shifts in the character’s train of thought, and they are used in an uncontroversial way. In addition, the use of parallel paragraphs makes the language elaborate, tones convincing and touching, and moving in emotions.

In the collection of the poems, McCully Brown imagines what life was like in the hospital while she is not able to really live there. The poems were described in a New York Times book review as “part history lesson, part seance, part ode to dread—beautiful and devastating” (Garner). Stream of consciousness in poetry writing is often disjointed and lacks traditional sentence structure and punctuation. This is because thoughts are often not fully formed, or they change course in the middle and become run-on sentences, or they are interrupted by another thought. Therefore, grammar and syntax can be used to replicate this process in ways that aren't grammatically or syntactically “correct”, but that nonetheless feels accurate. In the stream of consciousness writing, the objects are suspended in the domination of the pre-consciousness intentionality. At the same time, the proactivity and retention of the original literature impression present an effect similar to the defamiliarization of Russian Formalism (Humphrey 12). In comparison, psychoanalysis writing does not rely on the dimension of objects. The objects that need to be captured in the stream of consciousness writing are drawn in advance in psychoanalysis. In the old saying in psychoanalysis—the reality is always constructed.

Imagine a poet walking in the night. Wherever he passed, everything was “eroded” and lost its meaning in “reality”. A traumatic emotion was produced in the process of losing its symbolization. Where his eyes are, in a different space composed of all the emotions produced by all the eroded and distorted information, the audience are pulled back from the apparent reality into a “pre-reality” driving space. It is also there that under the intention of this poet, we “surpassed” the reality.

The narrative view of modernist literature is developed from the perspective of “hysteria” or “sensationalism”. We can see the relationship between the birth of modernist literature and psychoanalysis at the same time. As refer to documents, the beginning of psychoanalysis was dedicated to hysteria treatment (Singer 190). The application of unconsciousness in writing makes the subjective elements in literary creation go beyond realism and reach a whole new dimension. As for the tradition of “suspending reality” in writing, evidence can be traced from the transformation of the theoretical paradigm from the ancient structuralist literary theory to the structuralist poetic literary theory. Reality is always predetermined in the pre-literacy period. The task of literature is to reproduce and describe it truthfully, or to say poetically and transcendentally. At that time, linguistics considered reality an established subject, and words were just tools for describing reality.

Reference:

Balakrishnan, Vijay S. “The Birth of Consciousness: I Think, therefore I Am?” Lancet Neurology, May 2018, Vol. 17, No. 5, pp 402. http://proxysu.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=129051116&site=ehost-live

“Stream of Consciousness.” Literary Devices, http://www.literarydevices.com/stream-of- consciousness/, Accessed 3 May 2020.

Mitchell, Peter. “Consciousness in Modern Poetry.” ELT Press, 1994, Vol. 37. http://proxy-su.researchport.umd.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=15811865&site=ehost-live

Garner, Dweight. “Beautiful Poems about a House of Horrors.” Nytimes, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/books/review-virginia-state-colony-for-epileptics-and-feebleminded-molly-mccully-brown.html, Accessed 3 May 2020.

Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. University of California Press, 1954. https://books.google.com/books?hl=zh-CN&lr=&id=- hrR9RTGs0wC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=stream+of+consciousness+in+literature&ots=lcO3M9ybFH&sig=_9banPFGTYIAHJ12gQEnAAwWG8I#v=onepage&q=stream%20of%20consciousness%20in%20literature&f=false

Singer, Jerome L. “Researching Imaginative Play and Adult Consciousness: Implications for Daily and Literary Creativity.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1 Nov. 2009, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp190 –199. http://dx.doi.org.proxy-su.researchport.umd.edu/10.1037/a0016507.