The Stream of Consciousness Novel

IN order to enjoy the modern psychological novel, one need not be a student of modern psychology, but decidedly one must be of a certain type of mind. Between the acts, at an early performance of Werfel’s Goat Song in New York, a male voice in the audience was heard to say plaintively, ‘You can’t have fun at a show like this.’ One cannot have fun floating down the stream of consciousness if one feels that analysis and introspection verge on the morbid; that life, to be a fit subject for fiction, must ‘compose’ properly, with a decent regard for values; that no one is living vividly who is not living dramatically; that such matters as the cessation of a toothache, or a sudden darkening of the atmosphere, or the surprise of a perfectly new expression on a face well known, have nothing to do with the soul on its pilgrimage. Readers of this type can have little patience with those who believe that the stream of consciousness method doubles and quadruples the possibility of drawing the life of the spirit; still less with those of the left wing, who believe that the psychological fiction of an earlier day did hardly more than draw the door of human consciousness ajar and peep tentatively within.

Among the English who have adopted this Continentally born, Continentally nurtured method, half analytical, half lyrical, three brilliant women writers — Dorothy Richardson, English pioneer in stream of consciousness fiction, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf — are interesting for their individuality in likeness. They share the slightly grim spirit characteristic of the school, shot through with the keen pity, also characteristic, only to be found in the nature wholly pure of sentimentalism; they share, too, the passion for beauty, and the sense of the enormous part played by sunshine — not in the Pollyanna but in the literal sense — in any impressionable human consciousness. But each draws in her separate star.

Surely no reader whose acquaintance with the stream of consciousness in English fiction was made through Dorothy Richardson will forget ‘the cool silver shock of the plunge.’ The wonderfully limpid quality in her work, as of clear water, clear sunshine, is felt as instantaneously as its newness. This is particularly true of the earlier novels in the long series called Pilgrimage, for in the later volumes, with their supersubtlety and their tight-packed thought, there often is some loss of this cool, limpid clearness. In its enormous mass of detail, Pilgrimage is like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu; in its single focus, unlike. For throughout the seven volumes, of which the latest brings Miriam Henderson not quite to her thirtieth year, every episode, whether she is actor or onlooker, is presented through her consciousness, and every abstract reflection, whether on the incidents narrated or on life itself, is made through the medium of her thought. The conception of Miriam’s character, no less than the rendering of her experience, is typical of stream of consciousness fiction. She is no idealized heroine, but a humorous, independent girl, impressionable and analytical in the highest degree; ‘socially incompatible,’ incapable of light give-and-take, half envious and half contemptuous of it in others; with a somewhat masculine mentality and a very feminine outfit of delights and repulsions. Her only claim to remarkableness lies in her imperishable sense of the wonder of life and her imperishable delight in living. This vitality and resiliency of spirit is shown, with fine art, as altering in quality with the passing of years; but it is not more strongly felt in the young Miriam’s rapture at the ball, in Backwater, than in the matured Miriam’s power to suck savor from life, in The Trap. ‘Life flowed in a new way. Many of the old shadows were gone; apprehensions about the future had disappeared. Side by side with the weariness, with nothing to explain the confidence, was the apprehension of joy.’ ‘ I am a greedy butterfly flitting in sunlight,’ Miriam reflects, ‘Enviable, despicable. But approval of my way of being speaks in me, a secret voice that knows no tribunals.’

Whether the reader’s prepossessions cause him to see the fifteen hundred or more pages of Pilgrimage as a wealth or as a welter of psychological chronicle, it is probable that he will not dispute the wit and the beauty in it, and certain that he will not dispute the reality. The young ecstasy of Miriam and her sisters in their preparations for the ball, in Backwater; Miriam’s anguished vigilance over her mother’s insomnia, and blackness of horror and despair at her mother’s death, in Honeycomb; the complexity of Miriam’s feelings in the masterly restaurant scene in Deadlock, when her dawning passion for the young Russian, Michael Shatov, fights with her recoil at his strange and terrible way of absorbing his tea; her discomfort, in Revolving Lights, as the guest of Alma, whose notion of the proper way to heal a hurt mind is to minister to it with infinite chirpings and gay little rushes — the art with which these states of consciousness and innumerable others are rendered makes them strike with a ringing note on the sense of recognition.

The conversations in the several volumes faithfully echo the psychology. Just as the current of thought and feeling is shown, in the manner grown increasingly familiar in English fiction of the past decade, as a drifting, easily deflected thing that makes the mental processes of Maggie Tulliver or Eustacia Vye in their moments of overmastering emotion seem as orderly as a French thesis, so the talk has the inconsecutive, ejaculatory quality less often encountered in novels of an earlier day than in real life. The gabble of Miriam’s pupils, the gay nonsense of her sister Harriett, the maddening preciosity of Miss Holland, the halfaffectionate, half-elusive banter of ‘Hypo,’ the difficult, careful English of Michael Shatov, the bewildering sequences of Mrs. Corrie, are only a few of countless conversational styles, each extraordinarily consistent and natural.

In Pilgrimage the stream of consciousness is made a clear medium for memorably telling phrases, for wise bits of philosophy, and for flashes of beauty. Any volume read singly has much the same inconclusiveness that would be felt if a chance segment of one’s own life were considered separately; the composite effect is of significance and unity, and leaves that rare impression of ’a soul entirely known.’

What the late Katherine Mansfield might have done with the stream of consciousness method in the novel one can only guess from the effectiveness with which she used it in the short story. The short story form naturally limits the scope of this method, but it proves its power to drive in emotion with one swift stroke, or — to change the metaphor — to reveal the recesses of a spirit by a flash. This is excellently shown in L. Borgese’s La Talpa, in which a smug and stupid man is roused uncomfortably to his first abstract speculation by the long, shrill, despairing squeal of a mole that the clumsiness of his investigating boot is killing — a squeal obviously addressed to some inattentive deity; or in Fox-Trot, that light laughing tragedy by the same author, in which the head of a family, prancing elated to the strains of Si! non abbiamo banani! raucously shouted by his new phonograph, sees suddenly in the eyes of his children and his servants that he is making a fool of himself — that middle age has treacherously crept up and taken him. So in Katherine Mansfield’s work. It is hard to imagine the beautiful vitality and the bitterness of the story called ‘Bliss’ achieved in any other way; or the light tenderness of ‘ Her First Ball’; or the pathos of ‘Miss Brill,’ the sketch of the lonely little old spinster who pretends to herself that her life is not pinched and empty, but rich in entertainment, almost indeed a game that she and a friendly world are playing together — a gallant pretense, smashed beyond mending one day by a comment and a laugh overheard. Least of all does it seem as if any other method could have produced ‘The Garden Party,’ that masterpiece of heady sunshine and sudden dark shadow.

In conveying the sense of beauty, and the sense of the pitifulness in human life, both so characteristic of stream of consciousness fiction, Katherine Mansfield excelled. It is customary to compare her with Chekhov, and certainly she had much of his power to take possession of the reader’s sympathy without asking for it. No one ever barred the door more firmly against sentimentality; and the result is her mastery of pathos. The reader’s tears do not drizzle voluptuously upon her pages, but his heart contracts with true pity. But there was also ' a deal of Ariel’ in Katherine Mansfield. There was something spiritlike in her power to conjure up beauty — its exquisiteness and fugitiveness. The flash of a blue dragon fly in the sunshine is like her touch upon beauty. The most characteristic quality, however, of her use of the stream of consciousness method is the feeling she conveys through it of the essential isolation of every highly organized spirit.

The evolution — or, more accurately, the gradual intensification — of this method may best be traced in the three novels of Virginia Woolf — The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway. The Voyage Out is episodic, and done from a dozen points of view. Like those two beautiful tissues of Katherine Mansfield’s, ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude,’ it presents not a plot but a pattern. It is true that there is a central figure, Rachel Vinrace; but the reader watches with equal interest the weaving in of the thread of Rachel’s experience, of the dash of bright color that is the transit of the Dalloways, or of the sombre involutions that are the tormented introspections and indecisions of Hirst. Rachel goes on a voyage; wakens, under the influence of one man, from childish unawareness to the sense of a new heaven and a new earth, astounding and perturbing; falls in love, slowly, painfully, and entirely, with another man; and embarks on that other voyage out, beyond the horizon of life. This is the story. As for the characters, the dozen or more varied types, they are drawn with subtlety and truth; they leave, however, after the book has been read, no clear objective impression — rather they take on, for all their traits of reality, a certain dreamlike quality. This is because the reader has looked, in the main, not at them but through them. The incidents of the voyage and of the stay at Santa Marina he has been made to feel with the response now of this character, now of that. This method gives a fragmentary but not a scattered effect, and conveys sensation and emotion with sharpness and immediacy. For example, the suffocated, aching restlessness of passion undeclared and not quite certain of itself, and the suspense, the monotony, the exasperation, the numbness, and the anguish of watching the slow illness and the death of someone loved, close with a pressure almost physical on the reader’s heart.

Jacob’s Room has still less continuity. This novel is not strictly a narrative. Pictures flash and are gone, varying moods flash and are gone, and out of it all emerges the personality of the young Englishman, Jacob Flanders — whole-hearted, faulty, lovable, above all so splendidly young and arrogant that at the end it is not easy to believe him dead. Jacob’s psychological history begins with his entrance into the novel as a strong little boy playing by himself on the Cornish shore, suddenly breaking into sobs as a panic sense of loneliness sweeps over him, suddenly absorbed and comforted by his rich discovery of a sheep’s skull among the seaweed. His last appearance is thoroughly characteristic of Mrs. Woolf’s method: the reader sees him walking through London streets before his enlistment, recognized in Piccadilly, but too late for speech, by a man who had taught him and been fond of him when he was a child; recognized, from the motor that whirls her past to the opera house, by a girl who loves him and will not see him again. Equally characteristic, in its swift effectiveness and in its carrying out of the pattern conception of life, is the way in which the great impersonal fact of the war is made to cut across the small fact of Jacob’s individual existence.

‘Jacob,’ wrote Mrs. Flanders . . . ’is hard at work after his delightful journey.’

‘The Kaiser,’ the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, ‘received me in audience.’

The pattern idea of life is again emphasized in the scene at the opera, where the first measures of the overture set each listener afloat on his own current of memories or anticipations; in the constantly shifting scene of Mrs. Durrant’s party, with its perfect rendering of the interruptedness, thwartedness, and gigantic futility of social contacts in a crush; in the fireside scene, after tea, which shows Jacob’s mother writing him the tiny news of her quiet life, while her heart is crying out, in the manner of the hearts of ‘mothers down at Scarborough,’ to write instead the things that are never written to sons in London: ‘Don’t go with bad women, do be a good boy; wear your thick shirts; and come back, come back, come back to me.’ But what most distinguishes this novel is the richer flowering of beauty. For the style, in spite of flagrantly faulty sentence structure here and there, has very rare beauty; and the imagery seems not to reproduce beauty in skillful words but rather to call it actually into the presence of the reader. Surely sea and sun and wind have never flashed and breathed more livingly from the prose page than in the marvelous passage that shows Jacob and his friend Timothy Durrant rounding Land’s End in their sailboat.

Mrs. Dalloway, the history of one day in the life of a woman, is stream of consciousness undiluted, and pure pattern. Through it run a primary and a secondary figure, sometimes drawing near, never intersecting, sometimes swerving far apart, always held in relation, as by a woven strip of gold, by the striking of Big Ben through the hours of the day. The primary figure is the heart of Clarissa Dalloway, who loves life with passion, whose only creed is that ‘one must pay back from the secret deposit of exquisite moments’; the secondary figure is the heart of poor young Septimus Smith, victim of deferred effects of shell shock, to whom life has become an intolerable horror. The pattern that results is a curiously living thing. As in Jacob’s Room, sunlight seems poured across the pages; and, more than in Jacob’s Room, the reader is made aware of a background of innumerable lives. More subtly than either of the other novels, this shows the play of one personality upon another. The method is like the flick of a wing in flight ; the revelation is complete. Clarissa’s loathing of her own hatred for the fanatical Miss Kilman, who would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she; the panic and despair of poor Septimus under the robust authoritativeness of the great neurologist; the comfort felt by old Mrs. Hilbery, at Clarissa’s party, in the jolly laughter of Sir Harry, ‘which, as she heard it across the room, seemed to reassure her on a point which sometimes bothered her if she woke early in the morning and did not like to call her maid for a cup of tea; how it is certain we must die’ — countless sharp impressions such as these strike up from the smooth flow of the stream Smooth, for—though in this novel, too, the point of view constantly shifts — the transitions are made with suavity. The impersonal voice of Big Ben, falling upon different cars, is not the only device used. Clarissa in her exultant morning mood and Septimus in his agony of apprehensiveness are stopped by the same traffic block; the golden sunlight that lifts up the heart of young Elizabeth Dalloway as she rides on the top of a London bus makes patterns on the wall of Septimus’s sitting-room, and gives his tormented mind one last moment of vague pleasure; and the bell of the ambulance that is carrying his shattered, unconscious body to the hospital clangs pleasantly to Peter Walsh, speaking to him of the efficiency of London. This novel throws light, as by a prism, not upon a score of lives, but upon life as felt by a score of people; its pursuit of Clarissa Dalloway through one day in London leaves an impression of a real woman, but a stronger impression of a woven fabric of life, gay and tragic and dipped in mystery.

To one reader the highly developed manner of such a novel as Mrs. Dalloway seems intolerably artificial; to another it seems an excellent vehicle for wit, for acute sympathy, for the sense of beauty, above all for the sense of life as a thing ‘absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness.’ Probably the most vehement apostle of stream of consciousness fiction no more wishes that all novels now and hereafter should be cast in that form than he deplores that Tom Jones is not written in the manner of Fräulein Else. But he must wonder passionately — and surely it is no fanaticism to wonder — how long so potent a movement in the art of literature will continue to be regarded by a large part of the reading public as an eccentric fad.