Call me Philistine. Call me Ishmael. Call me Thingamajig. Just, please do not call upon me to read your stream of consciousness. I am sorry, but I cannot do it. Much as I appreciate literature, including the early works of Joyce, I cannot read Ullysses, though I think the words are wonderful in the mouths of passionate actors. Nor could I get interested in reading Finnegan’s Wake. Recently I attempted Infinite Jest, Molloy, and The Tunnel by William H. Gass, but I’m afraid I haven’t the patience to read about anyone, even a genius, contemplating his navel.
I thought, perhaps, first person narration was what I could not stand to read, but I did enjoy reading Moby Dick. “I,” in that book though, has something to say, about inns on Nantucket and whaling ships, religion, and nature’s indifference to us. I don’t care; however, what “I” has to say about everything going on in his head. There is something about stream of consciousness, perhaps the lack of a persistent thread, the lack of order made out of chaos that disrupts my concentration, causing attacks of A.D.D.
As William Gass notes in his essay, Representation and The War for Reality, ”If consciousness itself seems strangely vaporous and evanescent–as near to nothing as we care to come, like the crumbling edge of a steep cliff–it is neverthless clearly referential;” Nausea, of which he writes, and Ullysses were noble experiments, perhaps even necessary, given all that was going on at the time in the realms of science and world affairs. Seemingly intended to depict the chaos, they came at a time when the New was needed. The Victorian novel had reached its apex with Henry James and was put to rest by Ford Maddox Ford at the end of the gilded age.
It seems to me that the job of the writer is to make order out of chaos, that the world might be better understood; to give us a vision of a better world, not to depict the chaos as chaos that it might be appreciated as such. We live in a new gilded age, with a media and political culture agog at the power and wealth of our Gogs and Magogs. We do not lack for material, only the courage of our convictions, and the will to extend ourselves yonder, beyond the bounds of memory and the confines of conceit.
So, I return to that image of William Gass, and the writer standing at the edge of the abyss, and I’m wondering why he would choose to dive in. Just because it is there? Did Hillary choose to jump from the North Face just because it was there? The abyss is something one normally seeks to climb out of because one is in it. Thus, it would seem like hubris, or narcissism, for a writer to divulge his every instance of conscious thought, as if it would prove to be of general interest. It’s become the sort of thing one reads on twitter. Perhaps it was Freud and his pseudoscience, and the psychological novel, too, that gave rise to the culture of narcissism, and to literature as therapy.
If you give a gorilla a typewriter and all the time in the world, it’s unlikely he might produce Othello because it takes some orderly thinking to do so, but you might get a stream of consciousness, or a stream of pee.
