Topic : - Stream of Consciousness Novel to the Lighthouse.
Paper
09
:-
The
Modernist Literature
Name :-
Devender
A Joshi
Class :- M.A.
Sem-1
Submitted
To
:- Smt.
S. B. Gardi
Department
of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University
"Stream of Consciousness Novel to the
Lighthouse"
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Revolutionary Devices, Employed in Novel-Writing
The phrase “Stream of
Consciousness” was coined by William James 1 to describe the flow of
thoughts of the waking mind. Subsequently his phrase began to be used in a
literary context to describe the narrative method by which certain novelists
have described the unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters, without
resorting to objectives description or conventional dialogue. James Joyce was a
pioneer in using this technique in his novels of which the best known are
Ulysses and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And this technique was
also used by Virginia Woolf. The related phrase “interior monologue” is used to
describe the inner movement of Consciousness in a character’s mind. A famous
example of the interior monologue is the opening pages of Mrs. Dalloway. The use of
devices of the stream of Consciousness and the interior monologue marks a
revolution in the form of the novel because through these devices the author
can represent the flux of a character’s thoughts, impressions, and emotions and
reminisce nests, often without any logical Sequence. Closely linked to this new
view of time was the new view to consciousness deriving in a general way from
the of end and Jung, but Concentrating on the fact of the multiplicity of
Consciousness the presence in the given Consciousness of all it had ever
experienced and perhaps also of all these that race had experienced.
Characters, Presented Through their Own and
through other’s Consciousness
According to Virginia
Woolf, the Conventional novel did not express life adequately. She was of the
opinion that life was a shower of ever-failing atoms of experience, and not a
narrative line. Life, she said, was a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of Consciousness to end.
She also expressed the
view that, if we want an adequate portrayal of life, we should turn to James
Joyce’s novel, Ulysses. She tried to experiment with the same technique in her
novel, ’To the Lighthouse’. In which the character reveal them very much in the
same way. However, her method differs from that of Joyce in certain important
respects Virginia Woolf does not put us directly into the minds of her people
all the time. She does depict character through the inner Consciousness of the
Person’s whom we meet in this novel. But she herself remains the controlling
intelligence, speaking in the third person. While she very seldom slips in
Comments of her own, she remains the narrator, telling us what is going on in
the various minds.
Virginia Woolf Shoes us a particular person in this novel not only through the Consciousness of that person himself or herself, but also through the Consciousness of the other persons. We are given the interior monologues of the various characters in this novel, and it is largely through the twin devices of stream of Consciousness and the interior monologue that we come to know the various characters. Thus we see Mrs. Ramsay not only through her own Consciousness but through the Consciousness of Mr. Ramsey, the child James, Lily Briscoe, Mr. Tansley, and Mr. Banks. Similarly we come to know Mr. Ramsay not only through his own Consciousness but also through the Consciousness of Mrs.Ramsay, the young James, Lily Briscoe, and Mr. Banks. In fact, every character in the novel is presented to us through his own Consciousness and also through the Consciousness of the other characters. At the same time, the characters are occasionally presented to us directly by the all-knowing author of the novel, and also sometimes bits of conversation or dialogue between the characters.
Rejection of Traditional Technique
Mrs. Woolf’s Concern in writing novels was not merely to narrate a story as the older novelists did, but to discover and record life as the people feel who live it. Hence it is she rejected the conventional technique of narration and adopted a new technique more suited to her purposes. It is for this reason that in ‘To The Lighthouse’ she not told a story, in the sense of a Series of events, and has Concentrated on a small number of Characters, whose nature and feelings are represented to us largely through their interior monologues. In order to capture the inner reality, the truth about life, she has tried to represent the moving current of life and the individual’s Consciousness of the fleeting movement, and secondly, also to select from this current and organize it so that the novel may penetrate beneath the surface reality and may give to the reader a sense of understanding and completeness. The interior monologues of the different characters are, no doubt, given, but the novelist, the central intelligence, is also constantly busy, organizing the material and illuminating it by frequent Comments.
The
Role of The Central Intelligence
In this respect Mrs.
Woolf’s technique of narration is quite different from that of the “Stream of
Consciousness” novelists. Writers, James Hefley.
“Far from
being a stream of Consciousness novel, ’To the
Lighthouse’ is the objective account of a central intelligence that approaches
and assumes the characters. Consciousness, but does not become completely
identified with any one Consciousness. This central intelligence is thus free
to Comment upon the whole in what seems a completely impersonal manner, as this
short passage shows:
‘It is a triumph’ said Mr. Banks, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country? He asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his reverence, had returned; and she knew it.”
“It is a French recipe of my grandmother’s said Mrs. Ramsay, Speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abominations; it is pulling cabbages in water. It is roasting meat until it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. ’In which’, said Mr. Banks,
“All
the virtue of vegetables is contained”
Here the central
intelligence is reporting a part fog the dinner Conversation.
Suspense and Curiosity
Other aspects of Mrs. Woolf’s technique of narration may now be noted To the Lighthouse begins by taking us into the middle of scene; Mrs.Ramsay’s opening remark is the answer to unstated question, which we have to supply by picking up clues from what follows.
The reader’s natural curiosity thus becomes involved. We wonder who these
people are, what they are talking about and so on. As we read on, prompted by
this desire to know, we begin to recognize a pattern in the narrative at same
time as we assimilate names, facts, ideas.
The
Pattern : Conversation and Reaction
Then, too, the pattern
begins to establish itself; the pattern that is, of Conversation and reaction,
of the actual words in the first person and the present tense, and the
reflections of the characters in the third person and the past tense. This
violence of feeling is seen first in the child, James and seems natural to the
exaggeration of childhood; we are thus prepared in an acceptable way for the
emotions of the adult character, Tempe real by age and experience, but made
more complex too.
Sources
of Unity
(A)Isolation
A number of devices have
been used to impart structural unity to the novel. First, she has introduction
only a limited number of characters, and they have been isolated in a remote
island away from society. Further, out of this isolated group, she has focused
attention only on two or three personalities, and exploited their stream of
Consciousness alone. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and lily Briscoe are the main
figures. Other is only of a Secondary importance.
(B)The Role of the Central Intelligence
Secondly, the readers are
not placed directly within the minds of characters, as in the modern
psychological novel, but the central intelligence of the novelist is constantly
at work as the narrator, controlling and organizing the material, and
illuminating it with its comments, and order emerges out of chaos.
(C)Lily’s Painting
Lily’s painting is
another device by which the novelist has patterned her material. The novel
begins with Lily her easel and her paints and brush on the laws of the Ramsay’s
Summer House, and it ends with her having her vision and completing her
picture.
(D)The Lighthouse
The Lighthouse is another
important source of unity in the novel. It shines throughout at a distance, and
all the lines of the novel Converge towards it. The expedition to the
lighthouse is planned in part I, and it is actually undertaken in part.III.
(E) Emotional
Unity
To the Lighthouse may not have a logical unity, a logical sequence of Cause and effect, it is have a unity of a higher and stronger kind i.e. emotional unity. Jean Gigot has considered the point in detail, and we may be excused for quoting from him at length;
“Lily Briscoe, painting
on the lawn, from time to time costs a glance towards the bay to watch the boat
on which Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam are sailing. But this link is purely
eternal; the real unity of the sections lies in the Coincidence of Project and
thought me the Completion of Lily’s Canvas, the fulfillment of James’ plan. It
is not so very important that Lily sees the sails fall and Flap; what common is
their common immobility: “Life stands still here, and “The boat made
no motion at all.”
And further on, the
mixture of charm and tyranny in Mr. Ramsay occupies the thoughts of Lily, and
so on the end, where Mr. Ramsay’s unexpressed vision is identified with Lily’s-
his defeat and triumph. The brackets enclosing the brief section 7 and 10 irresistibly
recall the events inserted in the same fashion in Time Passes. Like these, they
are hard kernels of a different nature to the flux out of which they emerge.
The mutilated fish interrupting Lily’s tragic cry, the sea having apparently
swallowed up the little boat and obliterated the lives of the passengers while,
all the time, James, Mr. Ramsay and Cam purse their own train of thought. But
heterogeneous as they are, these observations, like the events in time passes,
have a secret relationship with the context that they seem to interrupt. The
mutilation and survival of the fish is, at the same time, the survival of Mrs.
Ramsay and the mutilation of Lily’s universe peace evoked by the scene she is
contemplating emphasize the remoteness of the past which the occupants of the
boat are remembering and the feeling of reconciliation which is doing amongst
them at this movement.
Third
Person Narration
The Third person narration is a very Common novel device Virginia Woolf is, however, very careful to mock her direction of the narrative as little noticed as possible. Her use of direct speech for the interior monologues of her characters makes it easy for her to work into these mental soliloquies a number of statements and ideas which are outside the range of knowledge of character she is dealing with.
When, for example, at the
beginning, she describes the feelings of James about his father, she moves from
what the child is thinking to what Mrs. Ramsay habitually did and said, through
impersonal sentences:
“Had there been an ate
handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s
breast and killed him, there and then James would have seized it. Such were the
extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere
presence : Standing: disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife,
who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but
also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of
judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. He Was incapable of
untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit
the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own
children, who sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is
difficult…….”
The statements in the
midge here clearly develop from James is thinking, but we seem to move away
from the child himself into a general comment, which, in turn, merges into the
description of Mr. Ramsay’s attitude towards life. Yet we hardly notice the
shift because of the uniformity of style; the two currents of thoughts seem to
flow together. Just as this third person narration makes it possible for
Virginia Woolf to move smoothly from one character to another, so in the novel
as a whole it is a unifying Principle.
The Completion of the Circle
If the arrival at the
lighthouse and the completion of Lily Briscoe’s picture complete the circle of
the book, and if Time Passes forms a sort of landing between the upward
movements of The Window and the downward, resolving movements of The
Lighthouse, we find here the same structural design. The Part I, Conforms to
this design. Section II, when the fairy tale is
finished and James has gone, a perfect moment, rich with solitude and
revelation, certainly forms a peak that communicates its exaltation to the
second half of the chapter, which however, never reaches the same intensity at
this may moment.
In other respects the closing pages, while they show the difference between the Ram says being resolved, bring us back to the starting point, the projected journey. In one sense, the circle is completed here too, nevertheless the postponement of the plan, the frustration of James’s hopes introducing the possibility of a letter realization, leave the way open for the third part.
Conclusion
The lighthouse has been employed as a Symbol and it has a number of undertones of meaning, and serves the purpose of a unifying factor in the novel. The action moves on normal Constructional lines from scene to scene and from the mind of one person to that of another. There is very little Complication. These shifts from one consciousness to another and these movements are made further easy by allowing every incident to take place in a close knit homogenous world. ’To The Lighthouse’ is a masterpiece of Construction. It is an organic whole. It is a great work of art which fully deserves the Praises that have been lavished on it.
She (Mrs. Woolf) has
cleverly avoided the drawbacks of the stream of Consciousness novel, and given
form and coherence to her material. She is not haphazard and incoherent like
the other “Stream of Consciousness” novelists. Indeed through her
flexible style she fuses narrative and description of thought, imparts farm and
unity, and conveys a sense of the amazing richness and Complexity of
life.
