We’ll look at two more distinctive examples of the stream of consciousness before we move on: the first is from ‘The Waves’, published in 1931 by our woman of the hour, Virginia Woolf. Bernard is in a restaurant. I feel at once, as I sit down at a table, the delicious jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation. Images breed instantly. I am embarrassed by my own fertility. I could describe every chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and thither with its veil of words for everything. To speak, about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an explosion. Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination. The entirely unexpected nature of this explosion - that is the joy of intercourse. I, mixed with an unknown Italian waiter - what am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. This is a rather useful example of a stream (or perhaps ‘tide’, ha ha) of consciousness; it’s written mostly in sentences, so it’s easy to understand, and it perfectly encapsulates a rampant, lyrical artistic imagination just this side of being out of control. It’s ironic that Bernard should remark on the “joy of intercourse” (and yes, it does have ruder implications), because the six characters in ‘The Waves’ never actually talk to one other throughout the entire course of the novel. They’re like disembodied sensibilities poised just above the book’s ‘action’, sensing, feeling but not actively engaging with it. It’s like an eternal present, an ongoing diary of one person’s perceptions - no editing, no selection - striving to preserve a moment in time, of experienced time as completely and accurately as possible. It’s irrelevant whether it has meaning or not - and it’s certainly not being ‘lent’ meaning by being placed in any kind of order either by the perceiver or by Woolf herself. So yes, it looks disordered and anarchic, almost like a lone eyeball attached to a video camera jerkily panning a room, but these seemingly random thoughts and perceptions are given unity by being the product of a single consciousness. Not that of an omnipotent external narrator, but a narrator who’s witnessing in the present the scene we’re reading in the novel. Woolf contrasts this way of seeing/ writing with what’s referred to as “the biographic style”; “About this time Bernard married and bought a house. His friends observed in him a growing tendency to domesticity. The birth of children made it highly desirable that he should augment his income.” That is the biographic style, and it does to tack together torn bits of stuff, stuff with raw edges. After all, one cannot find fault with the biographic style if one begins letters “Dear Sir,” and ends them “yours faithfully”; though one may be humming any nonsense at the same time - “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark.” “Come away, come away, death" In ‘The Waves’ however, “the stuff with raw edges” is given unity by the individual perceiver, who you can guarantee is fully engaged; his mind isn’t “humming any nonsense at the same time” because as he’s writing, he’s telling you what he’s seeing at that moment - an activity which precludes all others. It’s an instantaneous video diary. To do otherwise would resemble a football commentator at a live match refusing to report what he can see happening on the pitch and telling you what he had for breakfast instead. Bernard too, is a live action commentator - but one who thinks his own aesthetic life is as rivetting as England vs Argentina. (You may, of course, wish to dispute his assessment). So Woolf’s version of the stream of consciousness has two central ambitions in this book: psychological authenticity and continuity (no “torn bits” here); and to arrest time so the reader can examine it as it’s perceived in its fullness by an individual sensibility. Again, she’s restricted in both endeavours by the linear structure of language, but her characters are actually converting their perceptions into language as they’re going along, so the perceptions themselves appear linear as well (. . . and then . . . and then . . . and then . . .) So while ‘The Waves’ represented a daring formal experiment in 1931 , it looks fairly conventional in comparison with later pioneers of interior monologue who, as we’ll see, went in for much more extreme sensory dislocations. William Faulkner was another Modernist who used the stream of consciousness to monkey about with time. In ‘The Sound and the Fury’, Benjy speaks in an uninterrupted flow of images not because he’s unusually perceptive, but because he’s a retard who can’t differentiate between past and present or give any kind of order to what he sees. As with Woolf’s young aesthetes, we get a real-time narrative set in the present, but one that jerks backwards and forwards as Benjy randomly associates present occurrences with past memories. And Benjy’s perceptions exist at an additional remove from our own because practically everything he experiences is drained of its meaning, and exists only as a timeless form of significance. So by not having his perceptions “edited” by conscious thought, Faulkner can use Benjy to explore reality more thoroughly. His is truly an innocent eye. So Benjy refers to a game of golf as “hitting” - which, when you think about it, is golf minus meaning. He also confuses the golfers’ cries of “caddy!” with the name of his sister Caddie who has run away from the family home - so every time he hears these shouts he bellows in expectation that she has returned. He makes too many connections, because all he can recognize is presence and absence - he knows none of the background to why Caddie is no longer there, how long she’s been gone, or how a single sound can have two entirely separate meanings - all pieces of knowledge which would restrict his capacity to free associate. So Benjy’s consciousness, like Tristram’s, is indeed associative, but on a level drained of received notions of meaning. When he sees a horse, it reminds him of other occasions on which he’s seen a horse, and the past horse is just as significant in his consciousness as the past horse was/ is. So the narrative in Benjy’s section of ‘The Sound and the Fury’ is presented as a continuous flood of half-perceptions; his visions rise out of the mist of the story only to disappear back again. But that doesn’t mean the book’s all that difficult to understand, as fellow novelist Richard Hughes (author of ‘A High Wind In Jamaica’) noted soon after its publication while most critics were scratching their heads and condemning the novel as unreadable. Rather it’s the brilliant use of a damaged stream of consciousness to deliberately withhold meaning pending its ultimate resolution later in the book. There’s three other narrators in the novel; Quentin and Jason (Benjy’s brothers) and Dilsey (the family servant), each of whom has a section to him/ herself, and who provide more conventional expansions of Benjy’s narration as the book progresses. I’ll let Hughes take up the story and lift the lid on Faulkner’s technique; [By the fourth section] this curious method is finally justified: for one finds, in a flash, that one knows all about [the characters], that one has understood more of Benjy’s sound and fury than one had realized: the whole story becomes actual to one in a single moment . . . it is then one begins to realize with what consummate contrapuntal skill these drivellings have been composed, with what exquisite care their pattern fits together. And he’s right. Everything does become clear. What the reader gets is four different perspectives on the same set of circumstances from four separate characters - rather like Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse. Except the four narrators of ‘The Sound and the Fury’ each add their pieces to the jigsaw until not just a symbol, but the entire story is complete. It’s a skill Hughes recognizes from poetry; it’s as if you’re watching a complex and beautiful crystal emerging from a chemical solution, seeing shapes come together within that complexity rather than being presented with the crystal already fully-formed, or having the crystal described to you. So the next time you’re reading a problematic piece of prose, simply bear in mind that if it’s a half decent book there’ll be a structure to its meaning in there somewhere, no matter how deeply hidden it is. And then remember two words: ‘association’, and ‘counterpoint’. The former links textual elements (themes, words, characters, images) together through repetition and similarity, the latter reinforces meaning through variation or opposition. And there’s the essential keys to your structure that no meaning worth its salt can exist without. All you’ve got to do is identify those points in the text where there’s a shift of perspective - and those points obligingly tend to identify themselves as they instantly disrupt the narrative sequence.