translate this to persian:
Drowning in the Stream of Consciousness
ONCE UPON A TIME, narrative was simple. You said what characters did, you quoted their dialogue, and,
if need be, you told what they thought: “This is easy, Joe thought, as he ambled down the quay.” The only
tricky thing here is knowing what a quay is. But then, as Virginia Woolf points out, “On or about December
1910, human nature changed.” Certainly the novelist’s relationship to consciousness did. As a result of huge
changes in the scientific and philosophical understanding of the mind—the by-products of work by Freud
and Jung and William James and Henri Bergson (who won a Nobel Prize in literature)—the depiction of
consciousness became much more fluid. And messy. As a movement, stream of consciousness had a short
tenure, only three decades or so. Yet it helped to define the modern novel, change how later writers
approached character, and bewilder generations of English classes. But we’ll be bewildered no more.
Or maybe just a little.
So what is this beast, stream of consciousness? Oh, that’s easy: it doesn’t
exist. Lot of help, right? Nevertheless, it’s true: there is no single thing to which
we can point and say, “Stream of consciousness.” There are a lot of works that
seem to fit the notion, but they’re hardly all doing the same thing. It’s a lot like
obscenity: no one can define it, but everyone thinks he knows it when he sees it.
Okay, we have something that may not exist, that no one has satisfactorily
defined, that existed only briefly, and that tends to confuse readers. Where do I
go to sign up? And can it possibly matter?
Oh, yes, it matters greatly. On one level it matters because of all those
bigwigs of modernism who attempted new things. They came, they went. But
something stayed behind, and that something matters. Prior to the start of all this
—let’s take Woolf’s 1910, plus or minus a few—readers and writers could
automatically expect a certain level of authority in the telling of a tale. There was
a narrative center that existed outside the characters in the tale. That center is
easiest to see in the omniscient narrators of the great Victorian novels, whether
Bleak House or Vanity Fair or Middlemarch. There is clearly an intelligence that
exists external to the story, one that shapes the story and says, in effect, “We
exist outside this story, but through my agency, we can go not only into the story
but into the thoughts of the characters at will. That is, at my will.” That outside
center, however, also exists in the first-person narratives. Outside? Of course,
outside. The Pip who narrates Great Expectations is clearly separate from the
child Pip who stumbles into the clutches of Magwitch at the novel’s opening.
Most of his life to date has taken place in the intervening years. But he’s also
separate from the Pip who talks to Joe Gargery about being a gentleman late in
the novel and who has his final, memorable meeting with Estella. The narrating
Pip exists both outside and after those character Pips. How can we be sure? Verb
tense. The past tense of the narrative—not simple present or some progressive
form—argues for distance from the events and the self within the narrative.
So? How does that make a difference? It means everything we know about
the character, and especially everything we know from the character is mediated.
There’s a conscious presence imposed between us and young Pip or Esther
Summerson filtering their thoughts—selecting, arranging, rewording—so that
we know them only in this shaped, rather distant form. For all their variety, the
one thing common to stream-of-consciousness novels is their desire to do away
with that mediation, to get not merely close to but inside the characters’ heads.
Swell idea, but where’s the road map? As it turns out, the woods in 1900
were just full of cartographers.
As I said before, there is no single technique known as “stream of
consciousness.” Rather, we use the term, very loosely, to describe the effects
produced by a number of techniques, and more generally to describe a certain
type of fiction that seeks to reproduce consciousness in all its complexity and
with a minimum of narrative mediation. And while they differ considerably from
one another, they have this in common: the loss of a narrative center outside
character. Instead, narration began to find a home within characters’ minds, and
not always the minds of which they were aware. Because, as it turns out, “mind”
gives way to “consciousness,” and consciousness is composed of multiple levels.