Stream of Consciousness in Modernism
Freud's theories about the unconscious definitely changed the way people thought about the mind. But William James' theories about the nature of consciousness that had a much greater influence on the way Modernist literature was written than most people realize.
Wait. William who now?
Willy James' had a little theory called Radical Empiricism (which kind of sounds like a metal band), which sheds doubt on the existence of a unified self. In normal-people speak, this means that the "I" you were five years ago or even five minutes ago is not the same "I" you are now. We are all a series of selves and that the self cannot be disentangled from the world. In other words, we are what we see.
Mind. Blown.
He shared with his brother, the novelist Henry James (how much do you want to go to the Jamesfamily Thanksgiving?!), a preoccupation with consciousness. He described the flow of thought, in a phrase that would launch a thousand works of fiction, as "a stream." The rest is history… Modernist literary history.
Who employed stream of consciousness writing techniques? Um, everyone who was anyone in Modernism. Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce… and that's just the tip of the stream of consciousness iceberg.
Not surprisingly, Henry James was the earliest novelist whose work reflects his bro William James' theories. The books Henry James published after the appearance of his brother's Principles of Psychology (1890) seem to turn upon the issues related to consciousness. In novels like What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Golden Bowl (1904), readers have to ask themselves how the narrators' perspectives account for what they see.
Gertrude Stein also was tight with William James. He was her mentor at Radcliffe, where she studied from 1893-97. In fact, the story goes that Stein wrote nothing at all in her examination booklet in the final exam for James' class (didn't feel like taking an exam that day, it seems), but he gave her an A in the class anyhow. Official Shmoop Disclaimer: We do not suggest taking this same approach to acing your exams.
As Judith Ryan argues in her book The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism, even though critics often call Stein's work Cubist, it is William James' theories that account for Stein's Avant-garde techniques.
Stream of consciousness reminds us of a technique in film that, not coincidentally, was also introduced about this time. That's "montage," developed by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. When a camera cuts from the door to a shot of a person looking frightened, we get the idea that something or someone dangerous is about to come through that door. Eisenstein was the first filmmaker to cut from one shot to another seemingly discontinuous one so that the viewer had to draw an inference about their connection.
This method seems super-obvious today (and we also think of montages more about scrappy underdog athletes training for the Big Day in feel-good 80s movies than anything else), but back then, it seemed revolutionary… and definitely the cinematic equivalent of stream of consciousness writing.
Chew On This
James Joyce's novel Ulysses not only gives us access to the thoughts of its characters, but also presents each chapter in the style of a different writer and work. This novel is a whole delta of streams of consciousness.
In the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf plays up stream of consciousness while emphasizing the uniqueness of the characters, creating a web of connection between them.