@meinkafka | Would "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones" be a possible contender for an early example of a stream of consciousness novel? Discuss. And do be kind. | lit.salon
Just writing whatever crap comes to mind is not Stream of Consciousness. Stream of Consciousness is an often abused term which is supposed to only refer to texts which faithfully replicate the the flow of sensory information hitting the mind. ISoLT/Pointed Roofs are the first published works to do it, with Ulysses popularizing it soon after.
In fact, Woolf's dreck is not properly stream of consciousness either, and also belongs in the category of writing whatever crap comes to mind.
Been a while but I don’t recall Proust being SoC. He’s certainly concerned with consciousness and memory but he’s not trying to as you say “replicate the flow”. I’d say Woolf is much closer to Joycean SoC than Proust is.
You could argue it's more like a precursor. Proust was at the same time probably trying to achieve a narrative form of Bergson's "duration" as time-mixing in consciousness (he and Bergson were best friends). And Joyce, it's theorized, got hold of an early copy of Merleau-Ponty's PoP when he was developing Ulysses. So the sub-genre or whatever you want to call it didn't come about in a vacuum and serves different purposes for each author. Then again, Modernism is even less of a real genre than SoC is.
Just writing whatever crap comes to mind is not Stream of Consciousness. Stream of Consciousness is an often abused term which is supposed to only refer to texts which faithfully replicate the the flow of sensory information hitting the mind. ISoLT/Pointed Roofs are the first published works to do it, with Ulysses popularizing it soon after. In fact, Woolf's dreck is not properly stream of consciousness either, and also belongs in the category of writing whatever crap comes to mind.
Lieutenant Gustl's the first example of stream of consciousness proper AFAIK, but the rest of your comment still stands (save calling Woolf dreck).
Been a while but I don’t recall Proust being SoC. He’s certainly concerned with consciousness and memory but he’s not trying to as you say “replicate the flow”. I’d say Woolf is much closer to Joycean SoC than Proust is.
You could argue it's more like a precursor. Proust was at the same time probably trying to achieve a narrative form of Bergson's "duration" as time-mixing in consciousness (he and Bergson were best friends). And Joyce, it's theorized, got hold of an early copy of Merleau-Ponty's PoP when he was developing Ulysses. So the sub-genre or whatever you want to call it didn't come about in a vacuum and serves different purposes for each author. Then again, Modernism is even less of a real genre than SoC is.