Writing Help 129 | - ☆ Freelance Writer
Apr 05, 2013 | #1
Terms You Need for Writing about the Novel
All of us are familiar with the common conventions of storytelling, and none of us has any difficulty in telling stories to our friends and families. If I asked you right now to compose a story which involved a tennis ball, three giraffes, and a swarm of locusts, you would encounter little difficulty, despite the fact that these things are not at all related. Now, you might not produce what people would consider a good story, but it would be identified as a story nonetheless. You might begin with "once upon a time," you would likely choose a third person omniscient point of view, and you would tell of some adventure the hero got into involving the necessary things, or you might even make one of these things the main character. There would likely be some dialogue, and what was happening at any given stage would be made clear, as would the setting, and the distinction between what is a real part of the story world, and what was happening in the minds of the characters and in the imagination of the narrator.
Now, abandon most of these conventions, and you are left with what is known as stream of consciousness narration. This is somewhat too simplistic, but it does capture some of the radical differences between this way of telling a story and the traditional ways of doing so. In stream of consciousness narration, we are not presented with tightly ordered prose that moves in clear lines toward predictable goals. Instead, we are presented with the loosely associated series of thoughts which enter and flow through the mind of a character or narrator, which is often highly chaotic and confusing. An exemplary passage from James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the first novels to employ this device extensively, will help to clarify what stream of consciousness narration looks like:
Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl shovelling 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.
First of all, you might get the sense after reading this that it really isn't narration at all, but instead just an assortment of disconnected words shuffled onto the page, with some punctuation sprinkled in for variety's sake. This might be a credible argument if this passage stood in isolation, but since it is nested in an entire novel with like narration, it becomes possible to understand what is being said, and what is happening in the fictional world.
Stream of consciousness narration seems like a radical departure from the "realistic" modes of narration that even today enjoy tremendous popularity, so it might come as a surprise that it was originally conceived as a more realistic manner of narrative expression, reflecting more accurately the complex operations of conscious and unconscious thought. Although we tend to believe that we think in ordered sentences according to the rules of grammar (more or less), in reality our conscious words and thoughts arise from the interplay between many different sensations interacting with the impressions left by previous sensations in conjunction with memory and feeling. What we are left with is not a straightforward expression of clear thoughts but a grammatically confusing pile of words and images. It is impossible to convey this precisely in words of any kind, since language is only one aspect of our conscious (and unconscious) minds, and so stream of consciousness narration is an interesting approximation which gives the right feeling despite being doomed to fail in the details.
Stream of Consciousness
All of us are familiar with the common conventions of storytelling, and none of us has any difficulty in telling stories to our friends and families. If I asked you right now to compose a story which involved a tennis ball, three giraffes, and a swarm of locusts, you would encounter little difficulty, despite the fact that these things are not at all related. Now, you might not produce what people would consider a good story, but it would be identified as a story nonetheless. You might begin with "once upon a time," you would likely choose a third person omniscient point of view, and you would tell of some adventure the hero got into involving the necessary things, or you might even make one of these things the main character. There would likely be some dialogue, and what was happening at any given stage would be made clear, as would the setting, and the distinction between what is a real part of the story world, and what was happening in the minds of the characters and in the imagination of the narrator.
Now, abandon most of these conventions, and you are left with what is known as stream of consciousness narration. This is somewhat too simplistic, but it does capture some of the radical differences between this way of telling a story and the traditional ways of doing so. In stream of consciousness narration, we are not presented with tightly ordered prose that moves in clear lines toward predictable goals. Instead, we are presented with the loosely associated series of thoughts which enter and flow through the mind of a character or narrator, which is often highly chaotic and confusing. An exemplary passage from James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the first novels to employ this device extensively, will help to clarify what stream of consciousness narration looks like:Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl shovelling 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.
First of all, you might get the sense after reading this that it really isn't narration at all, but instead just an assortment of disconnected words shuffled onto the page, with some punctuation sprinkled in for variety's sake. This might be a credible argument if this passage stood in isolation, but since it is nested in an entire novel with like narration, it becomes possible to understand what is being said, and what is happening in the fictional world.
Stream of consciousness narration seems like a radical departure from the "realistic" modes of narration that even today enjoy tremendous popularity, so it might come as a surprise that it was originally conceived as a more realistic manner of narrative expression, reflecting more accurately the complex operations of conscious and unconscious thought. Although we tend to believe that we think in ordered sentences according to the rules of grammar (more or less), in reality our conscious words and thoughts arise from the interplay between many different sensations interacting with the impressions left by previous sensations in conjunction with memory and feeling. What we are left with is not a straightforward expression of clear thoughts but a grammatically confusing pile of words and images. It is impossible to convey this precisely in words of any kind, since language is only one aspect of our conscious (and unconscious) minds, and so stream of consciousness narration is an interesting approximation which gives the right feeling despite being doomed to fail in the details.