Virginia Woolf & The Stream Of Consciousness Style: Yay, Or Nay?

I'm a fan if it's done well. Woolf did it very well, and her genius with language and knowledge of the human heart makes her very readable to me -- Mrs D and To the Lighthouse more than, say, The Waves, which is even more experimental, employing a handful of characters as SOC narrators. Ulysses is readable; Finnegan's Wake is not. Faulkner is readable but he lacks IMO Woolf's genius with language and I have never re-read one of his novels as I have Woolf's.

Lucy Elliman's "Ducks, Newburyport" is an experimental stream-of-consciousness novel that is set in contemporary America. She engages in a lot of Joycean wordplay and free association and it is very entertaining and worth the work to get through its almost 900 pp. I don't think, however, that is on the level of Woolf's best work.

[quote]Initially (and uninformed), because I live inside my head, I thought the stream of consciousness style would prove to be a favorite.

Oh my god, I completely relate to this! And then I tried to read Ulysses...

^^well; stream-of-consciousness requires us temporarily to abandon our own full consciousness in order to enter the slipstream of another’s, does it not? Perhaps that got in your way, dear OP & R2.

Love how this thread dies at 3 posts, but thanks for your contributions those who did (and/or could).

R4 (and OP?), success of a thread sometimes has more to do with the time you posted it, rather than subject matter.

I once posted a thread that died at 6 replies. Nine months later, I discovered someone had bumped it and it had over 100 responses.

You just need to help it along every couple of hours or days.

The Hours is a hugely popular DL movie and thread topic. This thread should eventually do well.

We had to read "Ulysses" for English Lit, and it was a challenge for me to slog through. I don't even recall what it was about. But then again, I was 17 years old at the time and had the attention span of a gnat.

Many years later, I picked up "Mrs Dalloway" for my reading pleasure and I surprised myself in finishing it in a matter of days.

I felt the way you do OP when i tried to read “to the lighthouse” but I may be ready to give it another go now. I was reading so much at the time perhaps I just didn’t give myself enough time to become acquainted with her style.

There are a lot of very literate DLers and a fair amount of writers and academics here, too. The thread topic is a good one, OP. Give it some time and I hope it will get more traction.

I really hate Stream of Consciousness Style writing, even though it does intrigue me as to how it's done. I've tried writing in that style and it just doesn't work for me. To me, the beauty of the written word is in the subtle beats of the style and the prose.

And I, too hated James Joyce.

Unfortunately, I tend to never have time to read fiction. I guess when I retire, eh? I have to say that I used to read occasional fiction and mainly read the Decadents who also write in a dense style. While I admire this style, I do find it tough going for a pleasure read. It’s kind of like reading Foucault difficult, challenging and dense, but worth the effort if you are able to find the time and patience.

I've always thought that stream-of-consciousness prose tends to be either very good or very bad, and rarely just "okay." As others have wrote above, Virginia Woolf was someone who did it masterfully. "Mrs. Dalloway" is a gorgeous novel—the "quicksand" feeling OP describes is, I think, the ineffability of her language. For me, reading it is almost like wandering through a dream, and you have to accept it as such. It's more about impressions of people, places, and time, which are all woven into a larger tapestry.

I haven't actually read any Woolf since I was an undergrad which was around seven years ago now. I also read "Orlando," though I much prefer "Mrs. Dalloway." I think I may have to revisit it.

I like reading her challenging writing like I like reading Paradise Lost—the language itself is propulsive and wondrous, and I cna get so lost in it that I appreciate it for the aesthetic alone without caring so much about the story being told. It's encantatory and mesmerizing. I recall loving her story "Kew Gardens" even though all I remember about it is that it names a lot of plants and follows a snail crawling through them.

The only Woolf I have read so far is a series of short stories collected that aren't Mrs Dalloway, but ones she wrote at the same time that were either rejected from the book or alternate versions or something.

The one story that really stuck with me and I enjoyed was about a woman wearing a new dress to a party and going to pieces over it because she starts doubting her choice. It was very well done.

R14 Read To the Lighthouse. It's short and magnificent.

I attempted to read Dalloway many years ago and couldn't get past page 30. Then I saw The Hours, which I not only loved, but it inspired me to read the Pulitzer-winning novel it was based on. I was surprised to find I preferred the movie. Maybe because I had seen it first? My favorite written speech in the film is the talk between Meryl Streep and Claire Danes, on her bed in the middle of the day, where she explains her grasping of happiness and how truly fleeting it is. When I d got to that section in the book, it wasn't there. Apparently it had been written expressly for the film....thus my disappointment in the novel.

So then I attempted to read Mrs. Dalloway again, thinking I'd be able to get thru it this time. No such luck. lol

Two other novellas I've attempted but could never get thru are Annie Prouix's Brokeback Mountain and Nathanial West's Day of the Locust.

^^ Oh, but I loved both movies.

So beautiful. I loved Ulysses too. On the other hand I hated The Waves and Finnegan's Wake. Both of them really did go too far into crazy with those. You have to get the balance right with creativity - creativity is that grey area in between madness and sanity.

Yes, R18, but to get to that perfect balance, geniuses generally have to go way too far to become masters or their innovations.

It's really the same thing as young people and other animals spending all their time playing, combining imagination and logical thinking and physical abilities, to understand what they are capable of in many contexts and all their facets so that they can function living mundane adult lives.

My favorite musician is Tori Amos, and a lot of people wrote off her music after her first four or five albums, believing her to have "lost it." But she didn't. She experiments with music and ideas and after a couple of lackluster experimental albums, she reliably puts out another work of brilliance. Joyce, Woolf, Picasso, Van Gogh et al. all had similar cycles.

Despite my troubles with stream of consciousness and Ulysses, I do think this is really well done, but I think my feelings on this have been helped along by Kate Bush:

...the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman's body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn't answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn't know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharon's and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes

Pretentious.

I’m such an amazing writer I’m just going to vomit random ideas into text, and people will declare this bold attempt to convey consciousness a masterwork!

Woolf was a snob but she wasn't pretentious. That was the real Virginia Woolf.

When I was a teenager I bought a collection of second hand books from a flea market, among which was Orlando. Tried to read it but couldn't go after 5 or 6 pages. At college I tried again and was completely taken. Afterwards I read Mrs. D, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out. Then, I read James Joyce and Proust, but Woolf remained my favorit. I think I liked The Stream of Consciousness because somehow it echoes my introverted self and the way thoughts are processed in my mind.

[quote] Intellectually, I'm fully capable. But I scarcely have the patience.

I'm glad to hear you're capable but unsurprised at your impatience.

The attention span of the 21st century Intellectual has shrunk in this Digital age. Literature is best kept for when we're on holiday in places without Apples and Iphones.

I'm afraid of her.

[quote] I prefer the cinematic style of Steinbeck.

You're an American, aren't you?

It's one of the hurdles between you and Virginia. Another hurdle is we're living in a different century.

It's yea or nay, as in yes or no

[quote] Woolf was a snob

She and her husband were members of the 1917 Club (inspired by the Russian Revolution). Her husband worked for the Labour Party.

She was friends with Maynard Keynes who inspired Rooseveldt and his New Deal policies. She devoted her time to teach in the Women's Self-Education group.

R22; I think you're giving a glib reaction to a severely-nuanced writer.

I find a lot of celeb biographies and auto biographies use a modified version of this. Their lives aren't that interesting outside a couple high points, so they pad the book with soul-searching, speculation and breathless what-ifs.

R11 mainly read the Decadents

Who do you mean? Do you mean those with turgid prose like Henry James or Joseph Conrad?

Or do you mean those other decadents who were quasi-homosexual?

Shtream of conshcioushnesh! Try shaying that shix timesh fasht!

[quote] stream-of-consciousness requires us temporarily to abandon our own full consciousness in order to enter the slipstream of another’s

R3 Michael Redgrave says something similar when he said that when on stage he has to enter a waking dream.

(He met Virginia at university and named his daughter after Virginia's sister)

I like her style.

Ernest Hemingway wrote stream of consciousness in Islands in the Stream, I believe. Or at least I remember it that way. Didn't Gertrude Stein originate the style?

[quote] Oakland … there is no there there.

Stein was a rich woman who may have made the occasional interesting aphorism but her 'novels' are as unreadable as Joyce.

It's all part of the general deconstructionism of everything post-WW1, I guess, would that be right in saying? Like, after the horror of that, why do anything the way we've always been told it should be done - how we write, paint, make music, dress, our living arrangements, etc. I find it a very interesting time in history.

Yes, but unfortunately the deconstructionism in so many art form after WW11 was bigger and more dehumanising.

These are the days, my friend, these are the days it could be very fresh and clean it could be fresh and frankly it could be because it is. 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

OP, your description of Mrs. Dalloway matches what I thought of Marcel Proust's "masterpiece" Rembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time). I started reading it last year and it was so meandering and pointless that I couldn't make it past the boy getting tucked into bed and wanting a good night kiss from his mother.

I tried Proust's "Sodom & Gomorrah" in two translations.

But the smell of sex was as barely perceptible as the smell of old cakes.

[quote] I felt the way you do OP when i tried to read “to the lighthouse” but I may be ready to give it another go now. I was reading so much at the time perhaps I just didn’t give myself enough time to become acquainted with her style

R8 I think giving yourself time is the crucial factor in reading Virginia Woolf.

Now that our attention spans have shrink in the Digital Age I say we have to go to a private garden, large park or a quiet space to let Virginia's prose speak to our senses.

Wow, R28, that may all be true, but read a bit of her diary. She was a nasty piece of work, and not even in an enjoyable way.

[quote] a nasty piece of work

Dear R42, I look forward to reading your diary.

I know you tell your husband that they are secret, personal and NOT TO BE PUBLISHED but your widower waits 30 years after your death before he eventually does so for their literary value.

Maybe Marcel Proust is best read as a very young person, because the 'lessons' of his monumental work are beautifully, minutely expressed, but rather basic: high society is made up of well-dressed morons, 'falling in love' is akin to madness, and time changes everything, even things you thought were permanently valuable.

I wouldn't read it now, but I think reading it when I was twenty probably helped me deal with the future, full of exactly the kinds of exquisite disappointment he writes about. I have to try reading Woolf again and see if I can.

That's absolutely true, R43, and I was going to mention that circumstance, but I didn't want to answer my own posts all night. That said, I have kept a diary, and I'm not a twit like she was, so not much comparison.

[quote] I have to try reading Woolf again.

R44 I did an adult evening course on Woolf and we read eight of fictional works. Some of them are transcendent (Lightouse) and some of them are rather laboured (Waves).

But I really do recommend the Diaries (despite R42 hating them). Her diaries contain the transcendent moments as well as lots of history, charm and brilliant character-sketches.

R30. My grad advisor, coauthor, and close friend wrote her dissertation on Symons, under the supervision of Joyce and Wilde biographer Richard Ellmann! Smell me!

In muy experience, NO ONE thinks the way "stream of consciousness" writers claim they think....Utter hooey.

I love The Waves, but the best way to experience it is by reading it aloud—inhabiting the language and minds of those six friends. (I’m told that that’s the only way to get through Finnegans Wake, which I’ve never tried—though I live Ulysses and have read it twice and I’ve read and taught Dubliners and Portrait several times).

R48. All stream of consciousness styles are imperfect attempts at approximating what no one can actually put into words. Deal with it. It’s not hooey-it’s imagining.

Of course, R27. I posted this at 4:00am, after a long day at work. Funny that I should make such a simple mistake in a thread about literary style of any kind. Oy vey!

I really did try with the diaries. My mistake was probably having the whole thing, rather than excerpts.

R48, bueno on your muy experiencia, but people do think like that. Maybe you don't.

[quote] NO ONE thinks the way "stream of consciousness" writers claim they think..

I can't agree that Virginia can be described as 'stream of consciousness' because she chooses her words so meticulously and consciously.

Burroughs who burbled his words on to the page and then threw the pages into the air for someone else to reassemble. He is stream of conscious'.

Burroughs wasn't really stream of consciousness, was he? The early stuff was influenced by detective stories. And the later stuff was a lot of shuffled-up dirty routines. I well remember reading parts of Place of Dead Roads (at the public library!) at an impressionable young age....

R54 We remember the "dirty scenes" but we had to wade through so much meaningless waffle.

If it wasn't for Burroughs' dirty scenes and friendship with sexy Kerouac he'd be as forgotten as James Joyce.

Yeah, Queer and Junky were the best ones. No fat in those.

There is no sex in Virginia Woolf's prose. The streaming of consciousness happiness in the mind not the penis.

Well I must say it is pretty fucking difficult to describe or imagine Woolf having sex. Licking a glacier, maybe.

"Vita shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks…pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung…There is her maturity and full-breastedness.

… Her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood…her in short a real woman"

I didn't realize Vita is Orlando.

"Orlando" is Virginia's 134-page public love letter to Vita.

I'm pretty sure she suffered from severe mental illness leading to her suicide because her half brother sexually abused her.

She is a brilliant writer , I remember reading To The Lighthouse and feeling amazed by it. At the same time, she's pretty much an acquired taste. She fascinates the literature set for good reason. I also remember she wrote an interesting essay called Shakespeare's Sister I believe. She was an early feminist. I hated The Hours as I felt like Nicole Kidman's fake nose was far too distracting. I kept wishing for a scene where someone would knock it off, into a tea cup.

Woolf was lucky to have been self-published, to have the resources to do that and to have been taken seriously by many anyway, and we're lucky for that, as well.

She could have been a DLer, too. Her reviews of Ulysses:

[quote] I . . . have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters–to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War & Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200. (D 2: 188-89)

[quote] I finished Ulysses, & think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board [sic] schoolboy, say like Henry Lamb, full of wits & powers, but so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him, & stern ones merely annoyed; & one hopes he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is 40 this scarcely seems likely. I have not read it carefully; & only once; & it is very obscure; so no doubt I have scamped the virtue of it more than is fair. I feel that myriads of tiny bullets pepper one & spatter one; but one does not get one deadly wound straight in the face–as from Tolstoy, for instance; but it is entirely absurd to compare him with Tolstoy. (D 2: 199-200)

See, I said she was a nasty piece of work!!

R62 She committed suicide for a number of reasons.

1. Her home was directly in line of the bombs and the German invasion of Britain in 1941. Her husband was Jewish and would definitely be sent to the camps WHEN the Germans landed.

2. She was in her 60s (which was old for that time) and was getting frail.

3. She wasn't sure of her literary direction and she was fiercely competitive with TS Eliot and EM Forster. Her first stories in the 1910s were conventional then she went 'stream of conscious' ('The Waves' in 1931) but she seemed to retreat into the conventional ('The Years' and 'Between The Acts') in the late 30s. She wasn't sure if she was going backwards.

Does Michael Cunningham post here?

[quote[ I hated The Hours… Kidman's fake nose

That was repellant. It was a woman's tear-jerker. Cunningham is a parasite.

I also thought it was dreadful. I wanted to push Ed Harris and Meryl Streep both out the window halfway into it.

I kind of always want to push Ed Harris out the window. Especially after his Jackson Pollock movie.

R62, I agree and so do many biographers. She was brilliant but it was difficult for her to recover from the trauma, then WWII crushed her. I don't think she was any angel, but name me an author who was.

Very interesting information R65.

It is factual, R71, instead of the other lurid servant's gossip in this thread.

This thread has the best R1 ever and Vita Sackville-West posting with her pen of brass. My life may be complete.

Allegedly Vanessa Bell had sex with John Maynard Keynes on the dining room table during a party, but you didn’t hear it from me.

I voraciously read everything I could my hands on by Virginia Woolf when I was 15 and 16. By far my favorite was the Waves. It blew my mind, I went around telling friends and random people to read it. (Yes I am the nerdiest nerd who ever nerded) At 17 I read Portrait of the artist as a young man because Woolf published Joyce and I had no desire to ever read him again.

Faulkner I read in my twenties with much respect and very little enjoyment.

Then the two 100 best English language books of the twentieth century lists came out and I decided to read every book on the lists that I had not already. I read Joyce last since I hadn’t liked him. I found Ulysses surprisingly enjoyable, dense, but not impenetrable. After two weeks and 17 pages I gave up entirely on Finnegan’s Wake. Uggh

The thing about stream of consciousness is, imho, that is a technique used to very different ends by the writers. Woolf used it enlighten, to get to the ineffable experience of another person’s life that straightforward prose would never be able to convey. It gives you the tingles of being in another person’s head. Faulkner uses it as layers of a puzzle where you as a reader have to figure out what really happened. It’s work. Joyce uses it as a frame to show off his erudition by putting all his languages and references in the protagonist’s head.

As for puzzles of perspective more enjoyable than Faulkner, I really liked The Alexandria Quartet.

Also as far as trashy beach reading Sackville-West’s the Dark Island is fun.

this is a good thread, bitches

see, OP?

[quote]I really liked The Alexandria Quartet.

I started reading Justine a couple of years ago, and my god, talk about purple prose! Also, stories of tortured men lusting after women are really tired, I just couldn't get into it. I suppose straight men might like this kind of thing more. It was disappointing, because that period of history in Alexandria was really interesting, the cosmopolitanism of it all, and my best friend's family were born there and have lots of great stories about it. Much more interesting than what Durrell wrote about it.

Maybe try again starting with the second book R75? They are all very different. That said maybe it just isn't your cup of tea. I hate Dickens which means I have terrible taste.

[quote]I hate Dickens which means I have terrible taste.

No... no it doesn't ;).

I didn’t find “ Mrs. Dalloway” challenging unless you mean the characters weren’t sympathetic. I read Woolf for her deep understanding of human nature, motive and awareness. I will credit her novel “ The Waves,” considered her masterpiece, as challenging.

At one point I was convinced Septimus Smith was moonlighting as a drag queen went by Clarissa Dalloway.

R73, I was as nerdily in love with The Alexandria Quartet as you were with Woolf. No one I knew had read it and with no internet, making sense of the novels was a puzzle, indeed. I was just thinking about Clea the other day and her work at the hospital. I found the writing so ineffably sophisticated and evocative. And at 16 I didn't even know evocative of what!

Evocative is the perfect word. And it’s just surprising. You read the first book and you think it’s one thing and then you get to the next and it’s entirely another, but yet it’s all the same thing and each story stands on its own as a coherent whole although unreconcilable with the others, but you can’t really pull them apart either. Are you getting closer to or further from the truth as you go along? (I’m probably not expressing that well.)

It’s worlds apart from Faulkner where you spend every other page careening between the inbred lunatic, the damaged narcissist and the idiot.

Reading through those top 100 lists was a wonderful experience in that there were many books I never would have discovered doing a self directed reading plan.

[quote] Woolf was a snob

"In the nineteenth century much valuable work was done for the working class by educated men's daughters in the only way that was then open to them. But now that some of them at least have received an expensive education, it is arguable that they can work much more effectively by remaining in their own class and using the methods of that class to improve a class which stands much in need of improvement.

"If on the other hand the educated (as so often happens) renounce the very qualities which education should have bought--reason, tolerance, knowledge--and play at belonging to the working class and adopting its cause, they merely expose that cause to the ridicule of the educated class, and do nothing to improve their own.

"But the number of books written by the educated about the working class would seem to show that the glamour of the working class and the emotional relief afforded by adopting its cause, are today as irresistible to the middle class as the glamour of the aristocracy was twenty years ago (see 'Proust) .

"Meanwhile it would be interesting to know what the true-born working man or woman thinks of the playboys and playgirls of the educated class who adopt the working-class cause without sacrificing middle-class capital, or sharing working-class experience."

Woolf was 59 when she committed suicide; the post about Shakespeare's Sister is in fact a reference to her nonfiction work A Room of One's Own; her diaries IMO are magnificent--half the fun is in her bitchiness--and she writes about each novel as it progresses. Her first intimation of The Waves was the image of a fin passing far out at sea. She was also a brilliant essayist and letter writer. Some of the greatest reading pleasure I've had in my long life came from the reading and rereading of her novels.

R81, I think you express it well. What was Justine, really? None of the characters seem fathomable--just like real human beings. Labyrinthine might be another word for it.

To The Lighthouse and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer are the two best SoC novels. They absolutely gut you with words and images, even the "story" is lacking.

This line from Tropic of Cancer blows me away every time I read it:

Every bat flying out of the belfry a lost cause, every whoopla a groan over the radio from the private trenches of the damned. Out of that dark, unstitched wound, that sink of abominations, that cradle of black-thronged cities, where the music of ideas is drowned in cold fat, out of strangled Utopias is born a clown, being divided between beauty and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upward sees a buttered angel, a snail with wings.

Loved it.