The Gift of Fire: On the Stream of Consciousness and the Reinvention of the Novel From James Joyce to Thomas Pynchon

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

-Ulysses (1922)

James Joyce

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

-Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

Thomas Pynchon

One of the many waterloos in literary study is found whenever an author at hand goes into a fit of internal monologues, incoherent thoughts, interdisciplinary digressions, and downright intentionally discombobulated speech. The situation is so counterintuitive to the objective of reading that one is tempted to think that excellence is judged by the degree of “ivory-tower” mentality that is present in a given work. What one fails to perceive though is the beauty of the novel as something paying vibrant homage to the fount of a holistic human mind. Two writers, for this reader at least, have contributed greatly to the growth of a more enlightened and lively type of literature: James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. Though the former is the more canonical of the two, the latter is already raking in much controversy and debate, so much so that in 1973, the Pulitzer Prize Committee withheld its fiction prize for that year.

These two writers handle the word with much ease using techniques that seem hard to follow for most pen-wielders, namely, the stream of consciousness and the self-consciousness of the novel. Albeit this subject has been more comprehensively dealt with in books such as Brian Stonehill’s The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), the goal of this undertaking is merely to entice the uninitiated to the self-conscious novel by showing some of the fundamental mechanism of works in the said genre.

Stream of consciousness, a term that was first used by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a narrative technique in nondramatic fiction that aims to show the ‘stream’ of various impressions in an individual mind; for 20^th century novelists, the psychological novel now had the liberty to depict the mind at work by incorporating “snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical constructions, and free association of ideas, images, and words at the pre-speech level (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1993).” For the free realm of the novel, this means that the character and the author no longer have to be caught in the monotony of the singular third-person. There is greater individuality to each character as his mind pours attention on unique sets of things, in a manner all his or her own. For the author, this means that the ineluctable subjectivity of the narrator becomes a norm rather than something to be frowned upon.

Stream of consciousness, dedicated as it is to the realistic flow and pouring of thoughts, naturally begets the novel’s consciousness of itself. This simply means that the novel now possesses references to the world outside of the entire story within it, which in literary theory means breaking the fourth wall. Fourth wall is the academic term for the boundary that separates the world of the reader from the world that the literary artifact is asserting in its story or content. Self-consciousness of the novel is most noticeable when the narrative suddenly refers to the reader, or when characters in certain scenes gain objects from some nameless hand as though from a stage crew.

James Joyce easily blurs the line between first-person narrative and stream of consciousness. What of course sets apart the stream of consciousness from the first-person narrator is the pure display of thoughts within the character regardless of grammatical, or sometimes even logical, coherence. And the self-consciousness of his novel Ulysses emerges when the character’s narrative implies conversation with the reader while apparently flaunting Stephen Daedalus’ signature internal monologue:

“Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once… (Ulysses, 1960)”

For Thomas Pynchon, who is already being hailed as an heir to the Joycean legacy, the stream of consciousness is an opportunity to inject more palpable and grounded images and sensations through the narrative. And the role of narrator and character is easily blurred when one realizes that the point-of-view shifts without warning and from one character to another. In fact, the narrator in many cases within the novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), gets counted as another character. This is possible because in the final analysis, all that a novel works with is a specific set of minds set apart by the descriptions that accompany them. But in the stream-of-consciousness novel, instead of descriptions, the novel ‘characterizes’ its characters by showing the way their minds work:

“Sometime during the annual PISCES Christmas Party, Pointsman is led by Maudie Chilkes to a closet full of belladonna, gauze, thistle tubes, and the scent of surgical rubber, where in a flash she’s down on her red knees, unbuttoning his trousers, as he, confused, good God, strokes her hair, clumsily shaking much of it loose from its wine-colored ribbon—here what’s this, an actual, slick and crimson, hot, squeak-stockinged slavegirl “gam” yes right among these winter-pale clinic halls, with the distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses, woodblocks, wearied blown sheets of tropic string cadences audible as everyone dances back there on the uncarpeted floors, and the old Palladian shell, conch of a thousand rooms, gives, resonates, shifting stresses along walls and joists… bold Maud, this is incredible […]—it’s happening so fast that Pointsman only sways, blinks a bit drunkenly you know, wondering if he’s dreaming or has found the perfect mixture, try to remember, amphetamine sulphate, 5 mg q 6 h, last night amobarbital sodium 0.2 Gm. at bedtime, this morning assorted breakfast vitamin capsules, alcohol an ounce, say, per hour, over the past… how many cc.s is that and oh, Jesus I’m coming. Am I? yes … well… and Maud, dear Maudie […] (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973)”

Albeit there are cases that the stream of consciousness technique is used as some sort of excuse for excessive profanity, the ‘purposeful’ portrayal of such things is easily discernible from instances that do not really call for it. Real art, when it shows wrongdoing in seeming glorification of it, does so in a manner that in the end displays the evil as evil and good as good just as shadows in a painting.