Education vs Indoctrination
Colonialism in English Literature
In his
research work The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James
coined a phrase Stream of consciousness to describe the flow of thoughts
of the waking mind. According to him, the intervention of time cannot break the
continuity of consciousness. It flows like a stream of river.
The writers
adopting this technique relate all mental experience of their characters be
they pleasant or unpleasant, trivial or significance without any restrain. In
order to depict the fleeting thoughts of the mind the novelists commonly uses
the narrative techniques of ‘interior monologue’, where the individual thought
processes of a character associated to his/her actions are portrayed in the
form of a monologue that addresses the character itself. As such, it is
different from the ‘dramatic monologue’ where the speaker addresses the
audience. Other devices used by the novelist are epiphanies, dreams, free
association of ideas, symbolism, slips of tongue etc.
According to
this theory time itself is visualised as a continuous stream. The mind does not
follow the artificial division of past, present and future because the present
is at once the prolongation of the past and seed of the future. There is the
element of succession in time. This conception of time has been portrayed in
the novels of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. They move
freely backward and forward in time.
The most
famous example of this technique is James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).
The novel is a complex evocation of the inner states of characters Leopold,
Molly Bloom and Stephen. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931)
presents the fleeting emotions and thoughts of six characters recounting their
lives from childhood to old age. The stream of consciousness style of writing
is marked by the sudden rise of thoughts, lack of punctuation (ungrammatical
construction) and free association of ideas, images and words. The kind of
style is generally associated with the modern novelist and short-story writers
of the twentieth century.
Jungian
psychology has emphasised the significance of myth and archetypal symbols which
represent the spiritual crises through which humanity has passed in its
progress from primitive to the civilized state. The stream of consciousness technique
novels respond to the theory of Jung and have adopted the mythical method which
combines with the adherence of the complex musical forms to shape the circular
structure of many works of fiction.
The novelists
adopting this technique also respond to Adler’s idea of inferiority and
physical compensation. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopald’s
hallucinations and day-dreams point towards his inferiority complex. His
fantasy runs right and he thinks himself to be a ‘King’ and a ‘Messiah’ in his
day dreams.
Comments
Post a Comment