Write an essay on the rise and development of the ‘Stream of Consciousness’ novel in English with special reference to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Q)-Write an essay on the rise and development of the ‘Stream of Consciousness’ novel in English with special reference to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

ANS:-

Stream of consciousness:

INTRODUCTION

The term stream of consciousness, also known as Interior monologue characterizes the unbroken flow of thoughts and awareness in the waking mind. It is a mode of narration that attempts to give the written equivalent of the character’s thought process either in a loose interior monologues or in connection to his/her actions. Stream of consciousness as a narrative technique successfully captures without the author’s intervention ,the complete mental process of the character in which sense perception mingles with consciousness and half conscious thoughts,memories,feelings and random associations. In literature, the phrase refers to the flow of these thoughts, with reference to a particular character’s thinking process. This literary device is usually used in order to provide a narrative in the form of the character’s thoughts instead of using dialogue or description. The thought process in the mind of the characters is never coherent and jumps from one thought to the another. The world wars had changed how people saw the world and as a result literature too changed as it is fundamentally the human experience. There was this post traumatic stress disorder after world war I. Men came from the war disillusioned with what they saw, did and experienced. The technique of stream of consciousness best captures these experiences of people. Perhaps the earliest stream of consciousness writer was the minor French novelist and a short story writer Eduard Dujardin who attempted the technique in a rather crude manner in his short novel “The laurels have been cut” In English the technique has been used by Dorothy Richardson in pilgrimage (1915-1938) Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) To the light house (1927) William Faulkner in first part of The sound and fury(1929) arguably because of the long passages found in them by George meridith,Henry James and James Joyce in Ulysses (1922).

Characteristics of Stream of Consciousness:

Records multifarious thoughts and feelings: stream of consciousness writing is known to record the multiple thoughts that keep occurring in the minds of the individual. It attempts to give the written equivalent of the characters thought process either in a loose interior monologue or in connection to his or her action. In This technique the speakers thoughts are more often depicted as overheard in the mind.the authors of this technique follow visual,auditory, factile,associative impressions and express them using interior monologue of characters.this narrative mode mingles thoughts and impressions in an illogical order and violates grammatical norms.It is a style of writing developed by a group of writers at the beginning of the 20th century. It aimed at expressing in words the flow of a character’s thoughts and feelings in their minds. The technique aspires to give readers the impression of being inside the mind of the character. Therefore, the internal view of the minds of the characters sheds light on plot and motivation in the novel. When used as a term in literature, stream of consciousness is a narrative form in which the author writes in a way that mimics or parallels a character’s internal thoughts. Sometimes this device is also called “internal monologue,” and often the style incorporates the natural chaos of thoughts and feelings that occur in any of our minds at any given time. Just as happens in real life, stream-of-consciousness narratives often lack associative leaps and are characterized by an absence of regular punctuation.

Stream of consciousness writings and prominent writers:

Though this study is confined to the two prominent writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, there are other notable writers who deserve to be mentioned. The other writers who have successfully used this technique are Allen Ginsberg, Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson, welsh Irvine, William Faulkner and Wilson Robert Anton.

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf:

The writers for this study: The novels for this study: this study aims to study the stream of consciousness style of writing in literature with respect to the two of Joyce’ novels : ‘Ulysses’ and the ‘portrait of artist as a young man’ and two of Woolf’s novels namely’ Mrs. Dalloway ‘and’ To the light house’ James Joyce (1882-1941), and stream of consciousness: A writer from Ireland wrote his masterpiece “Ulysses” which serves as a landmark in the modernist literature. He is the earliest and the best known practitioners of stream of consciousness. This study would focus on two of Joyce’s novels which epitomize his signature stream of consciousness prose style, Portrait of artist as a young man’ which is also an autobiographical novel and ‘Ulysses’. For Joyce, his fiction is marked by moments of intense realization when his characters suddenly discover truths about themselves and are given moments of intense insight. For example, in "Araby," the teenage protagonist, having developed and nurtured his love for the shapless Mangan's sister, is suddenly forced to realise the shallowness of his love and how stupid he has been. long and hazardous period of probation seems to face a writer when, ceasing to be a contemporary, he becomes a classic. But in the case of James Joyce, perhaps because he was so rigorously tested during his lifetime, this further trial has been cut short. Already his work has weathered rejection by publishers, objection by printers, suppression by censors, confiscation by custom officials, bowdlerization by pirates, oversight by proofreaders, attack by critics, and defense by coteries--not to mention misunderstanding by readers. Meanwhile he has won the most significant kind of recognition: imitation by writers. His influence has been so pervasive that, to a large extent, it remains unacknowledged. How many of those who read John Hersey's Hiroshima recognize its literary obligation to Ulysses. There have been other demonstrations, but none so pertinent, of how an original mode of expression can help us to grasp a new phase of experience. Is it any wonder, when we live in such an explosive epoch, that even the arts have made themselves felt through a series of shocks. Hence Joyce's books, which a few years ago we had to smuggle into this country, are today required reading in college courses. As we study them closely, we are less intimidated by their idiosyncrasies, and more impressed not only by the qualities they share with the great books of other ages, but by their vital concern for the problems of our own age. In the light of the political exile that has activated so many writers in recent years, Joyce's artistic expatriation no longer seems a willful gesture. His escape from his native island to the continent of Europe, as it turned out, was to merge his private career with what he called the nightmare of history. It was easier for Flaubert, a sedentary bachelor with a comfortable estate and a regular income, to assume the stigmata of aesthetic martyrdom. It was excruciating for Joyce, a nomadic foreigner struggling to support a family by other means than his writing, to be bound--as he put it--"to the cross of his own cruel fiction." The temptations and distractions that sidetrack the artist have multiplied, and examples of intransigence are rarer now than they were in Flaubert's day. What he represented to his younger contemporaries, nonetheless, Joyce has become for us: the Writers' Writer. The characteristics that enabled him to sustain his purpose are apparent in his very death-mask. Delicately but firmly molded, the head is long and narrow, the forehead high, the chin strong, and the eyes closed. It is the face of his Stephen Dedalus, of the perennial student, of a man who carries to the verge of his sixtieth year the agility, the curiosity, the sensibility of his youth. And, just as many of Joyce's fellow citizens are forever transfixed in the poses he caught--the priests saying Mass, the barmaids pouring ale, the sandwich-men filing by, the midwives and undertakers plying their respective trades--so he has crystallized himself in our minds as the hero of Stephen Hero, the model for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Setting down his memories of his brother in a current Italian journal, Professor Stanislaus Joyce would caution us against a too complete identification. James Joyce was a rather more filial son than Stephen Dedalus, it appears, and his actual adolescence was less dispiriting than his later depiction of it. This we might have gathered by comparing the account of his university days in Stephen Hero with the final chapter of the Portrait. The earlier version is more immediate, fully rounded and factually detailed; the definitive treatment is carefully shaded and dramatically sharpened. It is not enough for the novelist to possess, like a number of Joyce's characters, "an odd autobiographical habit." He must be able to trace a meaningful pattern through the welter of circumstances. Joyce has managed, by invoking an ancient myth, to conjure up a modern one. Deliberately he has struck the attitude of Icarus--the classical posture of flight, the artist's revulsion from his middle-class environment, the youthful effort to try one's father's wings. The works of Joyce's maturity are less personal and more human: in his own terms, they are farther removed from his lyric self and closer to his godlike ideal of sympathetic detachment. Their emphasis shifts from flight to creation, accordingly, and from the son's role to the fatherimage: Dedalus, the fabulous artificer; Ulysses, the paternal wanderer; Finnegan, the builder of cities. The technical and psychological paradox is that Joyce, as his comprehension of ordinary humanity increased, became less comprehensible to the common reader. He is commonly remembered not as the mature creator--forging, in mingled arrogance and piety, "the uncreated conscience of his race"--but as a winged figure poised for a break with the dominating forces in his background. Language, religion, and nationality were envisaged by Stephen as a series of nets to restrain that initial impetus. When his trial flight succeeded, and the creative process began, the metaphor was calculated to change. For the irreducible substances out of which Joyce created his monumental achievement were nationality, religion, and language. The first consideration, with an Irishman, is nationality. Joyce, like Stephen, was "all too Irish"-- all the more Irish because he was a "wild goose," because he resided mainly in foreign countries after his twentieth year, seldom as long as a year in the same domicile. From first to last, his underlying impulses were those of his racial endowment: humor, imagination, eloquence, belligerence. If other endemic traits are less in evidence, notably gregariousness and bibulousness, it is because they were so brilliantly exemplified in Joyce's father. A genial ne'erdo-well, a political job-holder, a man about Dublin--but there can be no substitute for the characterization of Simon Dedalus by his eldest son. The Portrait begins with the child's earliest reminiscence, a story told by his parent; it ends with the fledgling's departure from his parental roof. Its most dramatic episode occurs at the family's Christmas dinner. Here, in a vividly remembered argument, lies Joyce's basic premise: the long-delayed hope of independence that was frustrated again with the downfall of Ireland's leading politician, Charles Stewart Parnell. JAMES JOYCE'S Ulysses was first published by a young American bookseller in Paris nearly fifty years ago--the rest is literary history. No novel written in this century has laid such a large claim on the literature and criticism of our time. Ulysses stands as one of the seminal works of our culture, and to say this is not in any sense to make personal claims for it. The enormous amount of critical material that has been written on Ulysses is legend and not the subject for discussion here, except to note the fact that all the previous book- length studies of Ulysses have been written by individual authors, each pursuing a special line of inquiry, each developing his own approach through a sustained reading of the book. The quality of these contributions to Ulysses criticism, of course, varies, and the time of composition affects the perspective of each author. In the 1930s, for example, Stuart Gilbert and Frank Budgen books on Ulysses were written with firsthand information from Joyce himself. The nearly dozen book- length studies which have followed represent a wide range in both quality and approach. This volume is the first book-length study to pre,

Virginia Woolf :( 1882- 1941)

Virginia Woolf was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory and conceived the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions. that traditionally made up a story were no longer important for her; what mattered was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. In her novels the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, momentarily impressions presented as a continuous flux. To the lighthouse : a key example of stream of consciousness technique. This novel includes very little diaologue and almost no action ,written as thoughts and observations to the lighthouse, recalls childhood memories and emotions and highlights adult relations . among book’s many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity and the problem of perception. The world of reading woolf is a world of psyche and abstractions the bringing to the forefront of our unconsciousness thoughts and emotions the ones we all have that affect us heavily ,that we are woefully aware of time gets slowed down and the magic of the moment is reached .Life is about perception and nobody seems to get this better than Woolf.

In one of her essays Woolf quotes "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." Virginia Woolf’s critical writings are witty, entertaining, deliciously sarcastic, and yet written in the spirit of an artistic mentor and a reader who questions herself as much as she questions others. Her novels are as complex and conflicted as her relationship with the business of reviewing. She dreaded each morning spent reviewing, procrastinated, cursed the whole business, and was at the same time deeply concerned about the reception of her work ,blossomed with praise, and in the end could simply not resist the pull of criticism. Her philosophy could not be summarized on a small exam cheat sheet. Parts seem paradoxical: she demanded verdicts and condemned verdicts. She delighted in unified, consistent, beautiful art and thought at the same time that all these worries over aesthetic and formal aspects must be suspended until the modern novelist dares to travel the perilous psyche of the modern mind .However, in all these paradoxes, she consistently defied the labelling practices she resented .Studying the body of her critical work, which makes up six volumes combined, is a serious challenge after so many voices have stamped upon it half-baked opinions, careful denigrations, and various labels. Only recently has the study of Woolf’s essays become more than a corollary to the study of her novels. the close analysis will focus on the reviews and longer essays. The mostly paragraph-long notices of “lesser books” are too short to offer any opportunity for indepth readings and are not what held her interest in journalism. Virginia woolf is considered one of the prominent writers who is Recognized as the most important feminist writer (and perhaps one of the most important writers in general) of all time, used the stream-of-consciousness technique to great significance in her works. She is a writer who is known for her finest treatment of problems of love and loneliness. Her novels Mrs Dalloway and To the lighthouse will be dealt with in this study. For Woolf, on the other hand, her fiction features "moments of importance," which she defined as follows: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they came, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life. To make it more explicit we have an extract from her novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’: "Such fools we all are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June." .The importance of stream of consciousness technique in modern literature: The role of stream of consciousness in literature is typically as a character study. It is a purposeful innovation in the modern prose style .The modernist writers such as Woolf and her contemporaries wanted their work to reflect life in its complete authenticity mirroring the universal human experience. Hence this study would try to locate how far these novelists have succeeded in achieving it. The character is not speaking to the audience in this literary device, as he or she is in a monologue, but is rather speaking to himself. Though the character may be analyzing events that happened in the story, and moving the plot along in that way, typically the character is examining his or her response to the events. Usually, this is a literary technique that the author will dip into and out of throughout the story, though some writers will produce an entire novel in this stream of consciousness format, with the character acting as the narrator.