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Unit 25: Twentieth Century (Modern Novel-Lawrence, Stream of Consciousness)

and moves at once right inside the characters’ minds. In this kind of a novel a character’s change in Notes
mood, marked externally by a sigh or a flicker of an eyelid, or perhaps not perceived at all, may
mean more than his outward acts, like his decision to marry or the loss of a fortune. Moreover, in
such a novel the main characters are not brought through a series of testing circumstances in order
to reveal their potentialities. Everything about the character is always there, at some level of his
consciousness, and it can be revealed by the author by probing depth wise rather than proceeding
lengthwise.
Since the ‘stream of consciousness’ novelists, like Virginia Woolf, believe that the individual’s
reaction to any given situation is determined by the sum of his past experience, it follows that
everyone is in some sense a prisoner of his own individuality. It therefore means that ‘reality’
itself is a matter of personal impression rather than public systematisation, and thus real
communication between individuals is impossible. In such a world of loneliness, there is no scope
for love, because each personality, being determined by past history, is unique. This idea is further
strengthened on account of disintegration of modern society in which there is no common basis of
values. That is why the modern novelist regards love as a form of selfishness or at least as
something much more complicated and problematical than simple affection between two persons.
D. H. Lawrence believes that true love begins with the lover’s recognition of each others’ true
separateness.

Notes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway rejected Peter Welsh, the man she really loved,
because of the fear that his possessive love would destroy her own personality.
It is in the technique of characterisation that the ‘stream of consciousness’ novelist is responsible
for an important development. Previously two different methods were adopted by the novelists
in the delineation of character. Either the personalities of characters in fiction emerge from a
chronological account of a group of events and the character’s reaction to it; or we are given a
descriptive portrait of the character first, so that we know what to expect, and the resulting actions
and reactions of characters fill in and elaborate that picture. The first method we see in Hardy’s The
Mayor of Casterbridge, where in the beginning there is no hint of Michael’s real nature or
personality. That emerges from the story itself. The second method is seen in Trollope’s Barchester
Towers, where in the early chapter we get general sketches of the characters of Dr. Proudie and
Mrs. Proudie, and in the later chapter we see the application to particular events of the general
principle already enunciated. Some time both these methods are adopted as in the case of Emma
Woodhouse by Jane Austen. Though the methods adopted in all these cases are different, we find
that consistent character-portrait emerges. The ‘stream of consciousness’ novelist, on the other
hand, is dissatisfied with these traditional methods. He has realised that it is impossible to give a
psychologically accurate account of what a man is at any given moment, either by static description
of his character, or by describing a group of chronologically arranged reactions to a series of
circumstances. He is interested in those aspects of consciousness which are essentially dynamic
rather than static in nature and are independent of the given moment. For him the present moment
is sufficiently specious, because it denotes the ever fluid passing of the ‘already’ into the ‘not yet’.
It not merely gives him the reaction of the person to a particular experience at the moment, but
also his previous as well as future reactions. His technique, therefore, is a means of escape from the
tyranny of the time dimension. By it the author is able to kill two birds with one stone; he can
indicate the precise nature of the present experience of his character, and give, incidentally, facts
about the character’s life previous to this moment, and thus in a limited time, one day for example,
he gives us a complete picture of the character both historically and psychologically.

This ‘stream of consciousness’ technique not only helps to reveal the character completely,
historically as well as psychologically, it also presents development in character, which is in itself
very difficult. Thus James Joyce in Ulysses is not only able, while confining his chronological
framework to the events of a single day, to relate so much more than merely the events of that
single day, and to make his hero a complete and rounded character, but by the time the book
closes, he had made the reader see the germ of the future in the present without looking beyond
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