Chapter 11 stream of consciousness

Mrs. Dalloway said she would go and buy flowers herself.Because Lucy has her own work.All the doors are to be removed; the Lappermers are coming soon.Then Clarissa Dalloway's thoughts wandered, What a morning—cool and pleasant, it felt like a group of children playing on the beach. How interesting!Suddenly being outdoors!For she always seemed to feel that way when, with a creak of the door hinges--she could still hear the slight click of the hinges--she flung open the French windows of the Bolton house and was suddenly outside. when.How crisp and still the early morning air was, stiller of course than it is now, like the lapping of waves, like the kiss of waves, cool and sharp, and solemn (to her then eighteen); At the window, she felt that something terrible was about to happen; she gazed at the flowers and trees, saw the smoke winding away from the trees, saw the rooks flying and setting; she stood and watched until Pete Waugh Ershi said: "Thinking about things in the vegetable garden?"-Is that what you said? — "I'd rather be with people than with cauliflower." "Did you say that? He must have said that at breakfast that day—Pete Walsh, when she went out on the balcony He was coming back from India in a few days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were always dull; his words were remembered, and his His eyes, his knife, his smile, his bad temper, all countless things disappeared--how strange!--just a few words about cabbage.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) The term "stream of consciousness" was coined by psychologist William James, brother of novelist Henry James, to refer to the continuous flow of a person's thoughts or feelings.Later, literary critics borrowed the word to describe the creative genre that imitates this process in modern novels. Representative writers of this genre include: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. Of course, fiction has always been distinguished by its visceral representation of human experience. Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") may serve as its motto, but the novelist's "cogito" includes not only reasoning, but also emotions, feelings, memories, and wild ideas.As a literary genre, Defoe's autobiographical novel and Richardson's epistolary novel did not get rid of introspective elements in the early stage of novel development.Classical nineteenth-century novels, from Jane Austen to George Eliot, combined the depiction of social characters with a delicate and sensitive analysis of their inner moral and emotional aspects.Yet at the turn of the century (you can see this in the novels of Henry James), reality was increasingly housed in private subjective consciousness, and one's experience could not be fully reproduced to others.It is said that stream-of-consciousness novels are the literary embodiment of solipsism, and its philosophical creed is that nothing but self-existence is imaginary.But we can also say that this creed provides us with an imaginary avenue by which we can enter the inner world of other people (even fictional characters) and thus escape from the guilty assumptions of the past. .

Needless to say, such novels tend to evoke sympathy for characters whose hearts are exposed, no matter how selfish, egotistical, or mean they sometimes appear to be.In other words, to try to reveal the inner workings of an unsympathetic character is intolerable to both the writer and the reader. The case of "Mrs. Dalloway" is particularly interesting because the heroine appears as a minor character in Virginia Woolf's first novel, "Sailing" (1915).In that novel, the author used the traditional authoritative narrative method to portray Clarissa and her husband as snobbish and reactionary figures of the British upper class, with a lot of irony and prejudice in the tone.For example, the following passage describes Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares to meet a scholar named Ambrus and his wife:

Mrs. Dalloway tilted her head in thought, trying to imagine Ambrus' situation—is it a first name or a last name? — but I can't imagine it.She had heard of some cases before and it made her a little uneasy.She knew that academics took a casual mate—whether it was the girl you met on the farm, at the book party, or the little country woman who would just say annoyingly, "Of course I know you're going to meet my husband, It's not me," none of them cared.Just then, Helen came in.Mrs. Dalloway was relieved to see that, in spite of her slightly eccentric appearance, she was neatly dressed, elegantly dressed, and had a low voice, which she regarded as the hallmark of a lady.

Mrs. Dalloway thinks and thinks, but the style of the narrative ironically places a distance between her thoughts and herself, producing a kind of silent judgment on her thoughts.It is clear that Virginia Woolf's motives for writing this character again were still ironic, but by this time she had turned to the stream-of-consciousness approach, which made her portrayal of Clarissa Dalloway impossible. Sympathy was avoided. There are two main techniques for depicting the consciousness of characters in novels: one is the inner monologue, in which the grammatical subject of the discourse is "I", and we seem to have overheard the inner thoughts of the characters casually.This method will be discussed in detail in the next section.The other technique, also called free indirection, dates back at least to Jane Austen, but it is more and more widely used by modern writers, such as Woolf and others, and its artistry has become more and more exquisite.It speaks the character's thoughts in a paraphrased tone (third person, past tense), but the words fit the character's identity, and omits some epilogues necessary for the formal style, such as "she thought", "she thought to herself", etc. ’, ‘she asked herself’, and so on.This technique gives people an illusion, as if they are very close to the psychology of the characters, but without completely abandoning the author's participation.

"Mrs. Dalloway said she wanted to buy flowers herself," this is the first sentence at the beginning of the novel. It is a statement made by the writer as the narrator, but the person of this statement is not clear, and the semantics are also vague. It does not explain Mrs. Dalloway. identity and why she went to buy flowers.This method of directly putting the reader into the lives of the characters is a typical creative method that uses consciousness as the end of the expression (we can only put together the experience of the female native hero bit by bit through reasoning).The other sentence "Because Lucy has her own work" turns the point of view of the narrative into the thinking activities of the characters. This conversion is accomplished in two ways——using free indirection, omitting the author's interjection "Mrs. Dalloway talking to herself"; the second is by calling the maid directly by name without mentioning her identity, as Mrs. Dalloway used to do, and the words also reflect Mrs. Dalloway's unique speaking style: " Has her own job," the original text is a heavily colloquial phrase.The form of the third sentence is the same.The fourth sentence leans slightly towards the author's narrative angle, telling us the heroine's full name and her happy mood on a sunny summer morning: "Then, Clarissa Dalloway's thoughts wandered", "What a wonderful Morning - nice and cool, like a bunch of children playing on the beach."

What follows, as if to blurt out, "How interesting! To be out in the open!" on the surface may appear to be a character's internal monologue, but this is not how the heroine felt when she went out to buy flowers that morning at Westminster Abbey.She remembered the scene when she was eighteen years old, and the scene when she was a child.In other words, the sight of Westminster mornings being "cool and pleasant, like a group of children playing on the beach" reminded her of a similar metaphor she had at Bolton (a country house, we presume)" When she was suddenly exposed to the "clear and quiet air of a summer morning", she remembered the scene of children playing in the sea, "like the lapping of the waves, like the kiss of the waves", she waited in Bolton - a man named Pete Ward Ershi people (this is the first hint of storytelling).The real and the metaphorical, the past and the present interweave and interact to form a long and winding sentence, each thought and memory evokes another.Realistically, Clarissa Dalloway doesn't quite trust her memory: "'Thinking about the vegetable garden?'—is that what it says?—'I'd rather be with people than with Cauliflower stays together'—is that what it says?"

Despite their twists and turns, these sentences, in addition to their free and indirect style, are rigorously structured and well articulated.Virginia Woolf unknowingly brought her own fluid lyric style into Mrs. Dalloway's stream of consciousness.Rewriting these sentences into the first person would seem too literary and measured to be an account of someone's free thinking at all.The rephrased sentence would appear too literal and more autobiographical: How interesting!Suddenly being outdoors!For I always seemed to feel that way when, with the squeak of the door hinges - I can still hear the slight click of the hinges - I flung open the French windows of the Bolton house and was suddenly outside. when.How crisp and still the early morning air was, certainly stiller than it is now; At the window, I feel something terrible is about to happen...

The internal monologue in Virginia Woolf's later novel, The Waves, bears the same polish, so far as I know.The most accomplished representative writer in using the stream of consciousness technique is James Joyce.