Stream of consciousness is a literary and psychological technique that represents the unstructured thought process, incorporating sensory stimuli and speculations. Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, and James Joyce used this technique to portray characters’ inner lives. The technique often takes the form of long passages without punctuation or standard writing conventions. Other writers like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Alan Moore have given it their own interpretation.
Stream of consciousness is a term used in both psychology and literature to represent the thought process. Unlike speech or writing, human thought is freed from the rules of grammar or the limitations of language, incorporating sensory stimuli, speculations and sometimes even illusions. In the 20th century, many writers tried to depict this process through a literary technique, also called stream of consciousness. Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot and James Joyce were particularly noted for their use of this technique. Later writers who employed stream-of-consciousness included Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Alan Moore.
Pioneering psychologist William James is usually credited with coining the phrase “stream of consciousness” in an 1890 treatise. James, like many early psychologists, was concerned with analyzing human consciousness. He realized the impossibility of gaining an unbiased view of the processes of the mind. The stream of human consciousness is an overlapping melange of incoming visual and sensory data, internal responses to this data, and often sheer flights of fancy. At the same time that James was exploring this process, some writers were attempting to portray it in their books.
This generation of writers, known as the Modernists, has renounced the literary techniques of the past, seeking new ways of representing a rapidly changing world. Even before James’s use of the term, French writer Edouard Dujardin experimented with the stream-of-consciousness technique in his 1888 novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés. English novelists and poets quickly followed suit. Virginia Woolf, a pioneering writer in many ways, loved this technique, as did the poet TS Eliot.
In literature, stream-of-consciousness often takes the form of long passages that lack punctuation or other standard writing conventions, such as capitalization or paragraph breaks. Writers borrowed from the psychological technique called free association, presenting ideas in rapid succession with little or no obvious link between one and the other. The intended effect was to provide greater insight into the characters’ inner lives, by narrating not only their experiences, but their own thought processes, as realistically as possible. This was challenging for the readers and daring for the writers, who risked confusing or alienating readers who couldn’t decipher the sometimes difficult-to-follow passages.
One of the most famous uses of stream of consciousness is in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, in which a 40-page passage without punctuation presents the thoughts of the character Molly Bloom. Once stream of consciousness was an established technique, other writers have given it their own interpretation. In Kerouac’s autobiographical novels, it has become a kind of beautiful poem. Another Beat writer, William Burroughs, used it to describe the dark and fantastical terrain of the fictional city Interzone in his controversial book Naked Lunch. In his novel Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore presents the thoughts and experiences of a preliterate Stone Age character who lacks the concepts of time, artifice, or deception.
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