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Name: Mehta Kavita Dineshbhai
Course: M.A English
Semester: 3
Batch: 2016 – 2018
Roll No: 11
Enrollment No: 2069108420170020
Submitted to: S M T S.B Gardi
Department Of English
MK Bhav University.
Email id: kavitamehta164@gmail.com
Paper No: 09 : The Modernist
Literature
Topic: Stream of Consciousness
Technique in To the Lighthouse
My Assignment’s
Introduction about the author:
VIRGINIA WOOLF was born on January
25, 1882,a descendant of one of Victorian England’s most prestigious literary families. Her father, sir Leslie
Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and was married
to the daughter of the writer William Thackeray. Woolf grew up among the most
important and influential British intellectual of her time, and receive free
rein to explore her father’s library. Her personal connections and abundant
talent soon opened doors for her. Woolf wrote that she found herself in a “a
position where it was easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure.” Almost
from the beginning, her life was a precarious balance of extraordinary success
and mental instability. She believes in nonconformity (Bloomsbury group). On
march 28, 1941 she wrote her husband a note stating that she did not wish to
spoil his life by going mad. She then drowned herself in the river ouse.
What is Stream of consciousness?
In Literary criticism, stream of consciousness is
a narrative mode or method that attempts to depict the
multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. It was a
phrase used by William James in his principle of psychology (1890) to describe
the unbroken flow of perception, thought, and feeling in the waking mind.
· It is a literary technique which was
pioneered by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia wolf, and James Joyce.
· It has since been adopted to describe
a narrative method in modern fiction.
· Stream of consciousness is the name
applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce,
without a narrator’s intervention, the full spectrum and conscious and half-
conscious.
When we mention Virginia Woolf, To
the Lighthouse, it’s very natural to talk about her stream of consciousness
technique .In this novel, the structure of external objective events is
diminished in scope and scale, or almost completely dissolved. It is composed
of the continual activity of character’s consciousness and shower of
impressions. External event occupy little space in the novel compared to the
rich development of the response to these events. We can also find in this
novel the writer as an omniscient of the dramatic characters. And the novel
does not progress on “what happens text” basis, but rather moves forward
through a series of scenes arranged according to a sequence of selected moments
of consciousness. And the techniques to which Mrs. .Woolf mainly employed are
interior monologue and free association.
Interior Monologue:
Interior monologue is s
term that is most often confused with stream of consciousness. It is used more
accurately than the latter, since it is a rhetorical term and properly refers
to a literary technique. But even this term is in need of more precise
definition, and it is greatly in need of more limited application, if it is to
be a useful critical term.
Edouard Dujardin, who
claims to have used interior monologue first in his novel Les Lauriers Sont
Coupes (1887), once gave us his definition of the technique. But his definition
is not standard and accurate enough to be relied on, because he defined
interior monologue as: “the speech of a character in a scene, having for its
object to introduce us directly into the the interior life of that character,
without author intervention through explanations or commentaries;… it differs
from the traditional monologue in that: in its matter, it is an expression of
the most intimate thought that lies nearest the unconscious; in its form it is
produced in direct phrases reduced to the minimum of syntax.”
Interior monologue in its radical
form ,is sometimes described as the exact presentation of the process of
consciousness but because sense
perception s, mental images, feeling , and some aspect of thought itself are
nonverbal, it is clear that the author can present these element only by
converting them into some kind of verbal equivalent.
Two type of interior monologue:
1) Direct interior
monologue
2) Indirect interior monologue
· Direct interior monologue is that
type of interior monologue which is represented with neglible author interference
and with no auditor assumed. An examination of its special methods reveals that
it presents consciousness directly to the reader with negligible author
interference that is there is either a complete or near complete disappearance
of the author from the page, together with his guiding such as “he said” and
“he thought” and with his explanatory comments. It should be emphasized that
there is no auditor assumed that is, the character is not speaking to anyone
within the fictional scene nor is the character specking, in effect, to the
reader.
· Indirect interior monologue is, then
that type of interior monologue in which an omniscient author presents unspoken
material as if it were directly from the consciousness of a character and, with
commentary and description, guides the reader through it. It differs from
direct interior monologue basically in that the author intervenes between the
character’s psyche and the reader. The author is an the screen guide for the
reader. It retains the fundamental quality of interior monologue In that it
what it present of consciousness is direct that is it is in the idiom and with
the peculiarities of the character’s psychic processes.
Indirect interior monologue in To the Lighthouse:
Virginia Woolf,
among the stream of consciousness writers, relies most on the indirect interior
monologue and she uses it with great skill. In To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
succeeds in producing a much subtle effect through the use of this technique.
This novel contain a great deal of straight, conventional narration and
description but the interior monologue is used often enough to give the novel
its special character of seeming to be always within the consciousness of the
chief characters .Virginia Woolf says in her essay, modern fiction “Let us
record the atom as they fall upon let us trace the pattern however disconnected
and incoherent in appearances in her method.
Let us examine the following passage
in the first chapter of part one.
…For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and
possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? She
would ask; and to have no letters and newspapers, and to see nobody; if you
were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were, if they
were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the
same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming ,
and the windows covered with spray, and
birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and the
windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp and the whole
place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being
swept in to the sea? How would you like that? She asked….
The passage above is repressed in the
manner of straight narration by the author, but it is clearly what the
character feels and thinks, and it reflects the character’s consciousness and
inner thought. In this passage, Woolf facilities the indirect interior
monologue with her unique skills. Firstly, she uses the conjunction “for” as an
indication of the beginning of this monologue and produces an easy and natural
shift from objective desprition to the character’s interior monologue .secondly
she presents Mrs. Ramsay’s consciousness by the guiding phrases “she would ask”
and “she asked” to make the reader wonder about unhurriedly in Mrs.Ramsay’s
consciousness. Thirdly, here she employs semicolons to indicate the
continuation of the consciousness. The use of semicolons characterized Woolf’s
skill in dealing with indirect interior monologue
In the case of indirect interior
monologue the omniscient author’s continuous intervention is essential to guide
the reader in reading and the character’s mind. The use of frequent parenthesis
can be signals of digression and of simultaneity as this one:
“Teaching and preaching human power, Lily suspected.(She was
putting is beyond away things.)”Parenthesis
can also be little aside, explanations, pointers to what is going on. Lily in
this passage is thinking about Mr.Bankes:
“I
respect you (she addressed him silently). In every atom; you are not vain: you
are entirely impersonal; you are finer than Mrs.Ramsay’s. You are the finest
human being that I know; you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual
feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness) you live for science
(involuntarily section of potatoes and rose before her eyes); praise would an
insult to you; generous, pure hearted heroic man!”
Here the
parenthesis signal sudden and momentary switches in perspective, the narrative
is thrown backward and forward.
With her unique devices, such as guiding phrases, semicolons, and parenthesis
embroidered to her interior monologue, Virginia Woolf successfully overcomes
the short comings of stream of consciousness novel of being incoherent and
chaotic, and achieves great explicitness, coherence, vividness and surface
unity in presenting the character’s inner world. However, it should be noted that
her presentation of the character’s interior monologue is not only coherent in
meaning, but also conventional in appearance.
Free Association:
The chief technique in controlling the
movement of stream of consciousness in fiction has been an application of the
principle of psychological free association. Among all the writing technique in
To the Lighthouse, the most confusing and difficult to follow may be the free
association, for the consciousness of
the character in the fiction has no order and no regular patter. However, the
application of the free association in the stream of consciousness novel has
much aesthetic significance.
First, the
free association in the scope and the levels the writing expresses and makes it
possible for the writers to deal as much possible the characters subjective
experience within fairly narrow objective time space scope.
Second, the
free association technique breaks out the traditional narrative structure. By
the help of this technique, the characters may think about the others upon
seeing related things, recall old memories at familiar sights and think another
thing or person upon seeing one the consciousness may shift freely among
present, past and future, or from one place to another. During the process of
the association, the objective time and the objective time and the psychic time
intermingle the past memories, the future expectation and the present
consciousness exits alternately the result of which is a structure of confusion
in space time and disorder in space time and disorder sequence.
Third, the
free association technique may have the effect of contrast and satire through
the writers bringing together the instances happening at different time and
different places. Therefore this technique is essential for the writers to
depict the real world of the consciousness.
Three factors that control the Association:
1.
The
memory, which is its basis;
2.
The
senses, which guide it;
3.
The
imagination, which determines its elasticity.
Free Association In To the Lighthouse:
In To the Lighthouse,
Woolf usually encloses free association into the indirect interior monologue to
present the psychic processes of her characters. We may take the 7 – 10
chapters of the first part of To the lighthouse as an example: The continuity
of the section is established through an exterior occurrence involving Mrs.
Ramsay tells James the story of the Fisherman’s Wife. Another example in the
twelfth chapter, Lily Briscoe, the artist, while watching the sea, fells her
mind ebb and flow with it.
Conclusion:
Virginia
Woolf in this Novel she analyzing stream of conscious technique we can find
that indirect interior monologue makes Woolf express the character’s inner world in such a great coherence and
surface unity. And also she was individualized and experimental art of fiction
has offered significant not only in studying the stream of consciousness
fiction but also in literary creation.
Work cited:
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