Author: Cameron Aitken.

On 2^nd February 1922, at a quaintly English bookshop in the heart of Paris, Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses which is now considered to be the masterpiece of Modernist literature. There was no doubt that she was aware of the anticipated revulsion with which the book would be received. Both the United States and Britain banned the book; Virginia Woolf herself would not publish it for another reason: she believed it to be the work of a bumptious autodidact, onanistic and nauseating in its delivery. Clearly, she felt it to be unrefined and far too salacious to be considered high literature. This is surprising considering her own employment of some of the same techniques in her own Mrs Dalloway published only three years later.

         Stream of Consciousness is rather an umbrella term used to describe a sort of interior monologue that occurs as opposed to a third-person narrator who monitors the external world of the characters, or a first-person narrative that almost acts as a diary entry of the protagonist, such as Pip in Great Expectations. The move towards this kind of writing is, in simple terms, a move from sociology to psychology. The novel starts to adopt an inward look into the human consciousness. It is possible to see this move from Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky. While Tolstoy mirrored inharmonious family relations, Dostoyevsky examined the complexities of the human mind and its response to trauma sustained during infancy. This almost indicates a move from the 19th-century State of a Nation novel to a much more focussed inspection of character in its isolated state.

         This has often been achieved in impressionistic circumstances – a subjective outlook instead of the omniscience that is replete in 19th-century texts such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch. A notable example of such subjectivity is prominent in Joseph Conrad’s colonial novella Heart of Darkness, during which we hear the eerie journey of Marlow’s ride down a river in the Belgian Congo. Typically, form and content in Modernist texts tend to blend into a unifying whole, rendering the prose quite poetic in this sense. The increasingly rambling musings of Marlow, along with his unrestrainedly vivid descriptions of the horrors he claims to witness, intensify the subjectivity as well as the psychological turn that disturbs what would have been quite a peaceful drift along an idyllic setting. As a result of such confused feelings towards his surroundings, Marlow inadvertently stresses many binary opposites in his narrative which amplifies the ambivalence of his mind. It is as though we are discovering the torment he faces over the colonial project while submissively playing a part in engaging with it. Stream of consciousness allows us to enter the world of our characters in a far more detailed way than before because it is an attempt to reveal the unconscious mind of a character.

         The technique of this stream of consciousness is no better executed than in Joyce’s Ulysses. There are of course quibbles over an accurate name for this technique; Nabokov even refers to it as the stepping stones of consciousness, which seems more apposite in relation to Joyce’s epic novel because it is displayed here in a much more jagged and jarring way. Many who attempt to read Ulysses are often able to breeze through the first two chapters but are then confounded by the third chapter. In this wild chapter, we are confronted by the first conscious use of this technique, for we encounter a chapter with awkward punctuation, only one line of dialogue, and a complete mixture of narrative voices. Stephen Dedalus beguiles us with his interior monologue that touches upon a wide range of topics. He introduces a lot of the different themes of the book and even briefly contemplates solipsism. By this point, many readers will have either put the tome back on the shelf or will have thrown it in the bin. Joyce tends to contort the reader in Ulysses; and because each chapter is written in a different style, it is only surprising that he returns to a more novelistic approach in the fourth chapter. Possibly the most difficult chapter to follow is the ‘Sirens’ chapter which I affectionately call the music chapter. Stream of consciousness enables Joyce to employ many references without being apologetic as to why they are included. This is indeed the beneficial beauty of this particular narrative form. Not only does it enable the writer to be remarkably intertextual, drawing many arcane references from other texts, but it also exhibits the arrant spontaneity of the human mind. Music is a good stimulator of memory — the latter being a common theme across modernist texts. Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu provides a heightened example of this when Odette refers to the short melody that triggers Proust’s own coined term: involuntary memory. A similar thing occurs in Joyce, for the chapter is replete with musical references.

         The stream of consciousness varies as the text goes on. For instance, there is the rather carnal chapter featuring Gerty MacDowell in which Leopold Bloom lusts over her on the beach. This is certainly one of the more readable chapters of Ulysses yet the stream-of-consciousness technique is still prevalent but in a more mature way. Bloom has in a sense bloomed by this point after his various visits throughout the day and has spiked tumescently in both his linguistic (interior monologue) and sexual prowess. It is interesting to notice how a stream of consciousness distinguishes between characters; while Stephen Dedalus’ is fairly erratic and untamed, Leopold Bloom manages to establish an air of control in his thoughts. This is Joyce’s clever way of blending the third-person narrative with a character’s interior monologue, leaving the reader guessing as to who is speaking at that particular time. He develops this over the course of his work and manages to finish his masterpiece with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy — the definitive example of stream of consciousness.

         There are only eight sentences in Molly Bloom’s twenty-thousand-word soliloquy. During this chapter, we read all about her sordid affairs and comments on sexual activity. She mesmerises us with the musical prose of her own interior monologue and reveals more than she would ever dare to reveal in person. Once again memory plays a huge part in this chapter as she unconsciously contemplates her past with Leopold Bloom and the sensations she felt with her new lover. Stream of consciousness gives us an insight into the depths of her character, examining her true nature without worrying about the chance of any unreliability from a narrator.

         The allure of this stream-of-consciousness idea seems to have waned over time. A more plain narrative is preferred by many writers of realism in fiction. Ulysses incorporates many allusions, themes and ideas which would otherwise have been lost if this technique were not employed.

Cameron is a First Class English Literature Graduate and Jazz Musician. He loves poetry and philosophy, and has a background in literary theory. He is also interested in psychoanalysis, and thinks about films through this lens. He is an Early Modernist at heart.