The stream-of-consciousness technique in modern literature: origins and impact Premium

Modernism spurred on the rise of stream of consciousness as a narrative technique in literature. Its use had a lasting impact on the form of the novel and is traceable in works of writers like Proust, Joyce and Woolf.

Modernism, as a philosophical and aesthetic movement as well as a mode of thought, was on the rise during the late 19th and early 20th century, spurred on by what may be described as a move away from passé traditions, keeping pace with the advent of modernity and the industrial world.

Modernist influences rippled across all forms of art. In literature, this transition can be marked by the growing usage of stream of consciousness as a narrative technique. Its use had a lasting impact on the form of the novel itself and its influence remains traceable. But before we move ahead: what does stream of consciousness mean?

Popularised by William James, who is often considered to be the “father of American psychology,” the term describes how thoughts are experienced by the conscious mind — perceived in a continuous non-linear flow where one mental event leads to another through association. In literary criticism, it is the narrative technique that attempts to simulate this very experience, as closely as possible, in writing. Early modernism was heavily influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the role of the unconscious, as well as Friedrich Nietzsche and his ideas regarding psychological drives as that which affect human behaviour.

The growth of psychology as a discipline coincided with the move of literary modernists and novelists away from the style of emulating a distinct, detached narrator describing external events, and towards exploring the internal processes of the mind. Thus, many writers were drawn to writing a psychological novel that could represent this interplay between the internal mind and external facts to whatever possible extent. By writing philosophical novels while interrogating psychological character motivations and desires in depth, Fyodor Dostoevsky (with his The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground, among others) and Leo Tolstoy (most noted for Anna Karenina and War and Peace) became important literary precursors to modernism.

Thus, hints of writing that resembled the stream-of-consciousness technique had begun appearing throughout the 19th century. However, it is only around the early 20th century that the technique began acquiring its distinction, when works from prominent modernist writers like Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf began hitting the scene. While the term was first used to describe novelist Dorothy Richardson’s writing, with her 1915 Pointed Roofs often being considered the first stream-of-consciousness novel published in English, the style is most closely associated with Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses.

The quintessential modernist novel, Ulysses, follows the protagonist Leopold Bloom across a single day in 1904 in Dublin but is structured such that it parallels Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. It is celebrated not just for its usage of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, but also for the richness of the literary puns and allusions employed, inscribing it as a highly referential work. How does stream of consciousness appear in his work? Let us begin with an extreme example, such as the initial lines of Leopold’s wife Molly’s 45-page long, unpunctuated monologue:

“Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old [...] Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing…”