So, with that comforting thought in mind, let’s launch ourselves into the chaos of consciousness, beginning with Time, and one of the most dreaded narrative techniques, the “stream of consciousness”. In Pete McCarthy’s excellent travelogue ‘McCarthy’s Bar’, the author makes the following observation; It’s no coincidence that the style of writing known as ‘stream of consciousness’ was pioneered by Irish authors. Critics have missed the point, however in regarding it as a radical experimental reaction against literary convention. For many Irish people, the avant-garde monologue is the most commonplace form of everyday speech . . . Like the best kind of journey, it’s always liable to veer off in entirely unexpected directions and lead you to destinations you might never otherwise have considered. This remark is prompted by a conversation McCarthy has with an elderly Irish lady whose remarks could almost be recorded verbatim and placed within a Modernist novel (or anything by Alan Bennett). I’ve found this with my Grandmother too; she’s a wonderful storyteller, but has a scant regard for chronology. What drives her monologue is ASSOCIATION. And that’s all that there is to most stream of consciousness writing, which, on the surface, resembles nothing less than a pile of random thoughts and observations vomited out onto the page, but which usually manages to establish a kind of alternative logic. More of which in a moment. The term “stream of consciousness” was coined by William James in his ‘Principles of Psychology’, published in 1890, in which he made three important observations concerning the way us humans perceive the world; 1) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. 2) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous. 3) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects - chooses from among them, in a word - all the while. So - we think a lot; we think continuously without gaps, and we don’t always see the complete picture. But somehow it’s all joined up, whether those joins are immediately apparent or not. Our consciousness thus weaves its seemingly drunken way through reality. And if you take a few moments to analyse your own most recent thoughts, I’ll bet they didn’t proceed in an uninterrupted straight line either. It’s like when you lose your way in an argument or get distracted in mid-sentence, you try and retrace your steps to see how you got to the place you’ve reached (“How did we get talking about that?” is a question that’s often asked in the Kent household). And it’s not always easy to answer straight off, because there’ve been some fairly random associations going on without your necessarily having registered them as you were speaking or thinking. And the literary stream of consciousness is simply intended to be a record of this process in action. So far from complicating meaning, it can, paradoxically, be a more accurate way of representing the way we structure our thoughts than conventional writing. And if there’s one thing above all others writers tend to make a fetish out of, it’s accuracy, otherwise their meaning means nothing. So you might start feeling well-disposed towards the Modernists and their attempts to accurately transcribe what’s going on in all our heads - and subsequently emerging from our mouths. Literary historians tell us the technique was first employed by Édouard DuJardin in his novel ‘Les Lauriers Sont Coupés’ (1888), but I reckon, as in many other cases, ‘Tristram Shandy’ got there first: --Curse on her! and so I send her to Tartary, and from Tartary to Terra del Fuogo, and so on to the devil: in short, there is not an infernal nitch where I do not take her divinityship and stick it. But as the heart is tender, and the passions in these tides ebb and flow ten times in a minute, I instantly bring her back again; and as I do all things in extremes, I place her in the very center of the milky-way-- Brightest of stars! thou wilt shed thy influence upon some one The duce take her and her influence too--for at that word I lose all patience--much good may it do him!--By all that is hirsute and gashly! I cry, taking off my furr'd cap, and twisting it round my finger--I would not give sixpence for a dozen such! But 'tis an excellent cap too (putting it upon my head, and pressing it close to my ears)--and warm--and soft; especially if you stroke it the right way--but alas! that will never be my luck--(so here my philosophy is shipwreck'd again.) --No; I shall never have a finger in the pye (so here I break my metaphor)- - Crust and Crumb Inside and out Top and bottom I detest it, I hate it, I repudiate it--I'm sick at the sight of it-- 'Tis all pepper, garlick, staragen, salt, and devil's dung--by the great arch-cooks of cooks, who does nothing, I think, from morning to night, but sit down by the fire-side and invent inflammatory dishes for us, I would not touch it for the world-- This is nowhere near as extreme as some later Modernist streams of consciousness, but the principles it embraces are the same, and can be said to have anticipated Modernism by over 100 years. Let’s try and see what’s going on amid this torrent of words. (To make life a bit easier, I’ve divided the soliloquy into five separate paragraphs to denote the subject’s seismic mood swings which range from approval to violent denunciation - and in fact, Tristram gets so worked up, his “dear, dear Jenny” has to bring him back to earth to stop the monologue spiralling into apoplexy). As far as I can make out, these are Tristram’s thoughts on the nature of love, which may be his, or, which, as the novel’s narrator, he’s considering putting into the mouth of his Uncle Toby as the latter wrestles with his attraction to the widow Wadman - which is so deep in his subconscious he doesn’t realize it’s there at all. But despite their erratic progress, it’s not that difficult to carve a passage through these thoughts, a passage which is mainly powered by metaphor. Paragraph 1:The passage opens and closes with the Devil; Tartary is another name for Hell; or it’s the Central Asian province which gave us Ghenghis Khan; or, more interestingly, a tartar is a synonym for a scolding wife. So we tie together images of hell, and women, and barbarians (who, as we’ll see in a moment, tend to wear furry hats). This is one aspect of love as conceived by Tristram, expressed in a cluster of related imagery. Paragraph 2: Then there’s the opposite. If you’re saying love’s Hell, then the opposite of that is Heaven. And in the heavens are stars, which, it’s still believed by the numerous followers of Russell Grant and Mystic Meg, have power over earthly mortals as the moon has over the tides. This throws forward to . . . Paragraph 3: . . . the word “influence” to denote that power. Then it’s back to Hell again. In the first paragraph, Tristram mentions the word “nitch”, or hole, where he’s going to “stick” his inamorata’s “divinityship”. And here we start getting bawdy, or maybe Freudian. Throwing back to “nitch”, we get “hirsute and gashly”, which I doubt I have to explain further (and Sterne a clergyman as well). Hell is often likened to a hole or pit into which miscreants fall. Falling into holes is likened to falling in love. They’re both traps. The hell-hole is therefore the vagina. The Tristram takes off his furry cap, which resembles the fur covering the female pudenda. It also resembles the Tartar’s head gear (from Paragraph 1). Paragraph 4: Another mood swing, this time in the direction of Regret. But love can be warm, like a cap, particularly if you stroke it the right way (more Shandean filth). And then it gets worse. An old slang term for the vagina is “pie”, and Tristram reckons he won’t get to insert his finger (penis) to sample the delightful flavours within. In short, he’s destined never to fall in love . . . Paragraph 5: Back to hate again, and the Devil. Food (the pie), like love, is “inflammatory” to the appetite. So, if you’re not enamoured of love, the pie is a vile pie, full of loathsome ingredients which will poison its consumer. Talking of inflaming, we’re back to the Devil again who sits by the flames at the “fire-side” that is Hell concocting dishes (love) that will do us harm. And I’ve omitted the point that at certain stages, Tristram occasionally steps out of the rant, pausing to tell us about the progress of his metaphors and the condition of his philosophy. And this really is all in the text - although to establish every metaphorical connections within so rich a confection takes rather more than one read. We’re basically reading prose that aspires to the condition of poetry. Which is not a bad way to characterize the stream of consciousness. I’m not going to draw any conclusions from the above (I’ll leave that to the critics), save to say that this is a brilliant evocation of the way individual images and words throw our minds forward and backwards, anticipating what we’re going to say next. The succeeding images or words may be like or unlike their predecessor (synonymic or antonymic as the critics say), and they can be picked up, put down, forgotten and then as suddenly remembered - they don’t necessarily arrive in temporal sequence. But while the language in which we express these thoughts relentlessly moves forward in a sequential, chronological line out of our mouths or through our pens, our minds are flying around all over the shop like magpies stealing things from every corner of our cerebral cortexes to stoke the fires that give onward momentum to our thoughts and their subsequent expression. It’s the image of the swan again, paddling like hell under the surface of the water while seeming to glide across it. And that’s why explaining a dense cluster of images like this takes longer than the text it’s trying to deconstruct! So the stream of consciousness is all about CONNECTIONS, connections that are established irrespective of the forward flow of time through both our thoughts and senses; our current perceptions and our past experiences; connections that look, sound, smell, taste or feel similar; words with related definitions; ideas with similar origins or outcomes. You can see much simpler streams of consciousness going on in Shakespearean soliloquies, as the speaker explores a theme by using a succession of linked images or ideas or verbal triggers that give rise to further related images and ideas and verbal triggers. Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” is a good example, and nowhere near as involved as Tristram’s. But you can look that up for yourself. And practised orators use the same technique (only in a more structured way) as they tease the meaning from a set of related metaphors in what a musician would call “variations on a theme.” (try Jaques’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech in ‘As You Like It’). And really, that’s all that’s going on in a stream of consciousness. It’s actually no big deal - but you may have to experience a disorientating rollercoaster ride to get to its meaning, if you get it at all. Some connections are just too personal to track down. And if that’s the case, the writer’s not doing his job properly. Or he’s being mischievous, as we’ll see in Principle 5. A bridge between Sterne’s stream of consciousness and those to be found in Modernist literature occurs in the poetry of Walt Whitman, most notably in his collection, ‘Leaves of Grass’ (first published in 1855, but revised until Whitman’s death in 1892), which contains a particularly odd poem entitled ‘The Sleepers’, from which the folowing is a short extract; The wretched features of ennuyes, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists, The gash'd bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their strong-door'd rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging from gates, and the dying emerging from gates, The night pervades them and infolds them. "The Sleepers" perplexed critics right from the start - and you can see why. Although the language is straightforward enough, the torrent of images and the connections between them are anything but. Richard Maurice Bucke, a friend and disciple of Whitman, in 1883 pronounced "The Sleepers" as "among the very great poems," describing it as "a representation of the mind during sleep-of connected, half-connected, and disconnected thoughts and feelings as they occur in dreams, some commonplace, some weird, some voluptuous, and all given with the true and strange emotional accompaniments that belong to them." Dr. Bucke, who happened to be one of the earliest American psychiatrists, liked the fact that “vague emotions, without thought, that occasionally arise in sleep, are given as they actually occur, apart from any idea - the words having in the intellectual sense no meaning, but arousing, as music does, the state of feeling intended." The quality of music in poetry is something we’ll be looking at in greater detail when we hit the Symbolists; but Whitman’s fearless exploration of the subconscious struck mighty chords in many subsequent American writers, including the entire Beat movement, and anticipated the clinical work of Freud and Jung by several years.