What is Stream of Consciousness ?

Students of literature are accustomed to the term “Stream of Consciousness.” It is employed as a technique by writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others. I think the term was used first by William James, the psychologist and brother of the novelist Henry James.

There are many dictionaries of various kinds that have defined this fashionable term. And many writers and critics too have added information. Among them is J Issacs. I found his interpretation much to my satisfaction.

For the benefit of the undergraduates, I extracted a few pints from an essay he wrote. The following I have noted in my scrap book. You may also please consider these notes.

James Joyce	T S Eliot	Virginia Woolf

* “Cyril Connolly suggests novelists can no longer develop situations and characters or places. Flaubert, Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have finished off the novel. Now all will have to be re-invented from the beginning. “ Ulysses “ is a novel to end all novels”

* It is not objective portraiture but the mind from outside, the mind allowed to speak itself, under minute control but without any intrusion by the author without comment and without analysis.

* Speech is quoted without inverted commas and without labels like ‘he said.’ And thought flows incoherently if necessarily and illogically with grammar and the special logic of the unconscious.

* It is the impressionist method. William James in 18884 popularised in his “Principles of Psychology” published in 1990.

* It comes into the discussion of Dorothy Richardson (Pointed Roofs -1925). She was the first to use deliberately and almost exclusively for the portrayal of character.

* Miss Mary Sinclair’s article in the ‘Egoist’ in 1918 was the first to analyse Dorothy’s technique.

* It is Impressionism but it goes much further back than impressions.

* Some of the writers who have used this technique in the past were Sir Walter Scott, Jan Austen, Sterne, Fielding, Samuel, Dorothy Richardson, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens.

More from my Scrap Book

Graham Hough was one of the renowned writers and critics in England. In one of his talks over the BBC he mentioned the following on Literary Criticism:

* The old kind of literature study and criticism was only the loose and oppressive sense of an inherited hierarchy of values.

* The New Criticism of the 1920s and 30s came into being as a weapon aimed more or less consciously at diverting taste, study and the future development of literature.

* Literature is the total dream of man. It is not the record of man’s doings. That is history. It is not his formal speculations. That is philosophy.

* Lieraturet is man’s vision of his condition and his destiny. And of this vision- every fragment of literature - forms a part.

T S Eliot in his ‘The Sacred Wood’ wrote that

* “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

* But of course only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to escape from these things.

* The poet has not a ‘personality’ to express but a particular medium which is only a medium and not a personality in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

* Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry

* And those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

More comments from the authentic writers and the critics will follow sometimes later.

Have a good reading.

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