An understanding of Stream of Consciousness Technique with reference of To The Lighthouse.
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Assignment - 9
Name : Vipul C Dabhi
Semester : 3
Roll no : 35
Enrollment no : 2069108420180009
Email ID : dabhivc04@gmail.com
Paper : 9 The Modernist Literature
Topic : An understanding of stream of consciousness technique with the reference of To The Lighthouse.
Batch : 2017-2019
Submitted to : Department of English, MKBU.
Introduction :
Whenever we hear about the term Stream of consciousness that time so many thoughts starts running in our mind. The first question arises in our mind is that, What is the Stream of consciousness technique ?
What is Stream of Consciousness Technique :
Initially this phrase was used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890). Where he describes the unbroken flow of perceptions, memories, thoughts and feelings of person's running mind. After that it has been used as a narrative methodology in modern fiction. Through this technique reader comes to know about an ongoing thought of character's mind, But other characters remains unaware about that thoughts. James Joyce was a pioneer in using this technique in his novels of which the best known are Ulysses and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And this technique was also used by Virginia Woolf.
The another interesting thing we found about this technique is long passages of introspection, where narrator records the ongoing flow of character's mind. There are so many modernist writer who uses this term in their works. For more details we can see the work of James. Like Portrait of a lady is entirely given over to the narrator's description of the sustained process of Isabel's memories, thoughts, and varying feelings. For more examples we can take example of a short novel The Laurels Have Been Cut , Which represents the scenes and events of story solely as they run into the consciousness of the character. Another definition also we can give to this technique is the name applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character's mental process.
When we understand further that time we can see the similarities between interior monologue and stream of consciousness technique. An important thing we found in interior monologue is that, author does not mediate. An interior monologue sometimes described as the exact presentation of the process of consciousness. But some aspects of thought itself are non verbal, so we can say that author can present these elements only by converting them into some sort of verbal equivalent.
James Joyce developed a variety of devices for stream of consciousness narrative in Ulysses. Here is a passage of interior monologue from the " Lestrygonians " episode, in which Leopold Bloom saunters through Dublin, observing and musing :
Pineapple rock, lemon Platt, butter scotch. A sugar - sticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a Christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the king. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne, sucking red jujubes white. There are other examples too where we finds mode of narrative focused on the mind and perception of her heroine, throughout the novel Pilgrimage.
Stream of Consciousness technique in To The Lighthouse :
What Virginia Woolf said about the technique is the Conventional novel did not express life adequately. She was of the opinion that life was a shower of ever-failing atoms of experience, and not a narrative line. Life, she said, was a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of Consciousness to end.
She also expressed the view that, if we want an adequate portrayal of life, we should turn to James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses. She tried to experiment with the same technique in her novel, ’To the Lighthouse’. In which the character reveal them very much in the same way. However, her method differs from that of Joyce in certain important respects Virginia Woolf does not put us directly into the minds of her people all the time. She does depict character through the inner Consciousness of the Person’s whom we meet in this novel. But she herself remains the controlling intelligence, speaking in the third person. While she very seldom slips in Comments of her own, she remains the narrator, telling us what is going on in the various minds.
Virginia Woolf shows us a particular person in this novel not only through the Consciousness of that person himself or herself, but also through the Consciousness of the other persons. We are given the interior monologues of the various characters in this novel, and it is largely through the twin devices of stream of Consciousness and the interior monologue that we come to know the various characters. Thus we see Mrs. Ramsay not only through her own Consciousness but through the Consciousness of Mr. Ramsey, the child James, Lily Briscoe, Mr. Tansley, and Mr. Bankes. Similarly we come to know Mr. Ramsay not only through his own Consciousness but also through the Consciousness of Mrs.Ramsay, the young James, Lily Briscoe, and Mr. Bankes. In fact, every character in the novel is presented to us through his own Consciousness and also through the Consciousness of the other characters. At the same time, the characters are occasionally presented to us directly by the all-knowing author of the novel, and also sometimes bits of conversation or dialogue between the characters.
To survive in the Modern Time :
Mrs. Woolf’s Concern in writing novels was not merely to narrate a story as the older novelists did, but to discover and record life as the people feel who live it. Hence it is she rejected the conventional technique of narration and adopted a new technique more suited to her purposes. It is for this reason that in ‘To The Lighthouse’ she not told a story, in the sense of a Series of events, and has Concentrated on a small number of Characters, whose nature and feelings are represented to us largely through their interior monologues. In order to capture the inner reality, the truth about life, she has tried to represent the moving current of life and the individual’s Consciousness of the fleeting movement, and secondly, also to select from this current and organize it so that the novel may penetrate beneath the surface reality and may give to the reader a sense of understanding and completeness. The interior monologues of the different characters are, no doubt, given, but the novelist, the central intelligence, is also constantly busy, organizing the material and illuminating it by frequent Comments.
Expectancy and Novelty :
To The Lighthouse begins by taking us into the middle of scene; Mrs.Ramsay’s opening remark is the answer to unstated question, which we have to supply by picking up clues from what follows. The reader’s natural curiosity thus becomes involved. We wonder who these people are, what they are talking about and so on. As we read on, prompted by this desire to know, we begin to recognize a pattern in the narrative at same time as we assimilate names, facts, ideas.
Some of the Illustrations :
Chapter XVII of The Window begins with Mrs. Ramsay wondering what she has done with her life, as she directs guests to their seats and ladles out soup. She sees her husband at the far end of the table, frowning. “What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him” (83). As she thinks about her displeasure and disconnectedness with Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay notes that she would not speak out loud her inner feelings. There is a strict difference between her actions and her thoughts:
Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy—that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing—ladling out soup—she felt, more and more strongly, outside that eddy.
The point of view shifts abruptly to Lily Briscoe, who is watching Mrs. Ramsay intently and imagining her thoughts. Lily is able to read Mrs. Ramsay pretty clearly: “How old she looks, how worn she looks, and how remote”. She wonders why Mrs. Ramsay pities William Bankes, and she realizes that “the life in her, her resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity”. Lily does not find Bankes pitiable, but she recognizes that Mrs. Ramsay is fulfilling some need of her own. Lily thinks about how Bankes has his work, then her thoughts switch to her own work, and she starts imagining her painting and the adjustments she will make. As if to remind the readers of the setting, Woolf has Lily take up “the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower in pattern in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree” . After all of Lily Briscoe’s thoughts, Mr. Bankes finally responds to Mrs. Ramsay’s inquiry as to whether he has found his letters.
By shifting the point of view from character to character, Woolf shares each character’s thoughts and feelings, opinions and reactions to one another. The dynamics between the characters are expressed more fully by their thoughts than by their words. The light dialogue serves to break up the transitions in perspective. By blending people’s inward feelings and keeping dialogue to a minimum, Woolf develops her many-dimensioned characters in a unique way.
Conclusion :
Thus we can see that how Virginia Woolf became more successful than others by breaking the traditional methodology of writing. In a way it gives an awesome experience to the reader too.
For a writer or person like Virginia Woolf one can use this kind of things in their works. Like how she had to suffer for the rights and freedom. And for that or we can say to describe the her own experience she uses this technique. And that thing we finds in daughters of Ramsay Family.
Ultimately the outcome might not be good but for the experiencing the new things in the works and in this process how it creates an amazing effects that is shows her talents.
Work cited :
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Stream-of-Consciousness-in-Virginia-Woolfs-To-the-Lighthouse
http://dharabhatt061011.blogspot.com/2011/11/stream-of-consciousness-novel-to.html?m=1
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