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The stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction received much critical attention. The method has since been widely used and is subject to much criticism. A part of this continuing debate on the value of such writing concerns the question of just what a stream-of consciousness novel really is.
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Some Exponents of Stream of Consciousness- Dorothy O. Golden
The stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction received much critical attention. The method has since been widely used and is subject to much criticism. A part of this continuing debate on the value of such writing concerns the question of just what a stream-of consciousness novel really is.
The stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction received much critical attention. The method has since been widely used and is subject to much criticism. A part of this continuing debate on the value of such writing concerns the question of just what a stream-of consciousness novel really is.
TECHNIQUE IN MODERN AMERICAN FICTION by DOROTHY O. GOLDEN, B.A. A THESIS IN ENGLISH Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Technological College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Approved August, 196S 13 ^^ No. I'? C c r p . 2 ' 173( ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to Dr. Everett A. Gillis for his direction of this thesis. His helpful criticism, his patience, and his generosity with time have provided the encour- agement necessary for completion of this work, ii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii INTRODUCTION 1 I. ANOTHER LOOK AT FAULKNER 18 II. ECHOES OF FAULKNER 59 III. THE SEARCH OF THE ANTI-HERO 86 IV. ACCEPTANCE OF THE QUOTIDIAN 114 CONCLUSION 144 LIST OF WORKS CITED 147 ill INTRODUCTION THE STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS NOVEL: SOME DEFINITIONS The stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction received much critical attention during the second and third decades of this century. Although the origin of this type of fi-ction is not clearly known, it is generally agreed that James Joyce was chief promulgator of the new technique. The method has since been widely usedand in some cases, abusedand is the subject of much criticism, both laudatory and derogatory. A part of this continuing debate on the value of such writing concerns the problem of just what a stream-of-consciousness novel really is. Numerous labels have been offered in efforts to define this unique approach: the "thought-stream novel" or 2 3 simply the "stream novel;" the "time novel;" the Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Conscious- ness Novel (New York, 1963), p. 2. Paul West, The Modern Novel (London, 1965), I, p. 46. 3 Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel (New York, 1955), p. 143. 2 4 "psychological novel;" and, more broadly, "experimental 5 novel." A few critics have attempted to find similarities betv/een fiction using the technique and the impressionistic school of painting and have consequently designated it "post-impressionistic."^ Other critics of a considerably 7 greater number have used the term "syitibolistic novel," Q and still others, the "novel of subjectivity." Perhaps the term which lias been most widely accepted, though it is a rather unwieldy phrase, is the "stream-of-consciousness 9 novel," referring to the description of mental activity as set forth by the psychologists Sigmund Freud and William James. A related problem of definition has been whether to classify the use of stream of consciousness as a technique or a genre. But however the method is labeled 4 Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel (New York, 1964), p. 11. 5 Robie Macauley and George Lanning, Technique in Fiction (Evanston, 1964), p. 88. Herbert Muller as quoted in Kumar, Bergson, p. 4. 7 Edmund Wilson quoted in Kumar, Bergson, p. 5. 8 Edel, Psychological, p. 202. 9 Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness i_n the Modern Novel (Berkeley, 1962), p. 1. Subsequent page references to Humphrey's work are to this edition. ^ Ibid., pp. 1-2; Melvin Friedman also considers this question in Stream of Consciousness; A Study in Literary Method (New Haven, 1955), p. 3. or categorized, the consensus is that such v/riting is an important part of our literary heritage and that variations of this method in fiction will continue to be used in the future. Despite difficulties of classification, several essential characteristics of the stream-of-consciousness point of viev7 are clear. For example, in Robert Humphrey's opinion, the stream-of-consciousness writers "have created a fiction centered on the core of human experience," adding "mental functioning and psychic existence to the already established domain of motive and action in the novel" (p. 22); and creating a new "approach to the presen- tation of psychological aspects of characters in fiction" (p. 1) . Such novels, he concludes, are identified more by subject matter than by "techniques, purposes, or themes" (p. 2) . Melvin Friedman expresses essential agreement with Humphrey when he says: "The stream of consciousness novel should be regarded as the one which has as its essential concern the exploitation of a wide area of consciousness, generally the entire area, of one 11 ^ ,_ . or more characters." Further agreement may be seen in statements by Robie Macauley and Robert Penn Warren, vzhich, separately, offer similar opinions. Macauley declares Friedman, Stream, p. 3. that the reader has "a sense of direct participation in a character's mental processesespecially in those processes 12 of which the character himself /is/ unav/are. To this Warren adds that one methodused by Faulkner in at least two of his booksis to let each character unfold in his 13 own language or flow of being before us. Kumar may be included in this same group of critics on the basis of his comment that behind "the new mode of portraying character as a ceaseless stream of becoming" (p. vii) is Bergson's concept of durational flux. On this same point, once more Kumar quotes Edward Bowling's judgment that the stream-of- consciousness novel is "a direct quotation of the mind not merely of the language area but of the whole consciousness" (p. 3) . There is general agreement also among the major portion of present-day critics that, the users of various streams of consciousness "attempt to give the reader an effect of living thought." Leon Edel is possibly a bit more exact in his terminology In what he calls the "inward 12 Macauley and Lanning, Technique, p. 88. ^"^Robert Penn Warren, "William Faulkner, " in Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis, 1948), p. 130. ^^Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), p. 324. Subsequent page references to Booth's work are to this edition. turning to convey the flow of mental experience, /trying/ 15 to capture for the reader the atmosphere of the mind." Humphrey's statement of this point of viev; is that the stream of consciousness is concerned with "levels more inchoate than rational verbalization of communicable 16 awareness." Both Humphrey and Friedman maintain that the stream-of-consciousness novel attempts to convey primarily the prespeech or preconscious level, though Preidman also asserts that "consciousness is actually the 17 entire area of mental activity, " which may at the same time include various gradations from unconsciousness to complete awareness. That the reader of the novel is directly involved in the experience is generally now accepted. Booth says that "every reader is his own producer" (p. 324), and Leon Edel declares that the experience of the reader may be "as complex and subjective" (p. 145) as that of the writer. However, all critics are not agreed as to the value of the reader's experience. Joseph Warren Beach maintains that William Faulkner's use of the stream of consciousness 15 Edel, Psychological, p. 7 of Foreword. 1"Humphrey, Stream, pp. 2-3. 17 Friedman, Stream, p. 3, results in great bewilderment for the reader."'"^ Robert Liddell is of the opinion that James Joyce's attempt, in Ulysses, "to make homo fictus coextensive with homo sapiens" 19 is a failure, and Orville Prescott's evaluations in his book Ijn My Opinion suggest the unnecessary and over- whelming obscurity of such writers as Joyce and Faulkner, among others. Both Muller and Weidle define "the new novel . . . as a withdrav/al from external phenomena into 21 the flickering half-shades of the authDr's private world." Some critics insist that the reader's subconscious must be in the same state as the author's in order to realize the experience of the novel, and others see the "thought- stream" novel as similar to the process of psychoanalysis. The stream-of-consciousness novel does present difficulties both for the reader and the v/riter. The problem of the v/riter is "to represent consciousness realistically by maintaining its character of privacy (the incoherence, discontinuity, and private implications) and still to communicate something to the reader through 18 Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction 1920-1940 (New York, 1942), p. 169. 19 Robert Liddell, A Treatise on the Novel (London, 1955), p. 91. 20 (Indianapolis, 1952), passim. 21 As quoted in Kumar, Bergson, p. 2. 22 this consciousness." Such writing often captures thought units as they seem to originate within the character's consciousness rather than as they would be deliberately expressed by him in a conventional novel.^^ Such presen- tation, in turn, often imitates thought by disregarding both formal syntax and logical thought progression. Such liberties, plus an absence of punctuation and of inhibition, such as in Molly Bloom's interior monologue, tend to give the reader the sense of mental flow. Wyndham Lewis objects, on the other hand, that such a "romantic abdominal method" represented by the stream-of- consciousness viewpoint "results in a jellyfish structure, without articulation of any sort." In addition to the lack of normal syntax and punctuation, stream-of-consciousness ^writers frequently find it necessary to violate chronological sequence"Perhaps in imitation of the human consciousness 27 itself" in order to present to the reader "what is 22 Humphrey, Stream, p. 62. 23 Humphrey, Stream, p. 23. 24 Macauley, Technique, p. 88. 25 Edel, Psychological, p. 134. 26 Ibid., p. 187. ^'^Ibid., p. 151. 8 28 happening at the very moment." Perhaps the most force- ful answer to the critics of the stream-of-consciousness method is C. P. Snow's statement that the stream-of- consciousness novel is "a singular mixture of invented colloquialism.and inflated 'poetic' mandarin, delivered 29 in a tone as near as possible to an alcoholic's mumble." Yet for proponents of stream-of-consciousness writing, "the psychic viVidness of prolonged and deep inside views" can produce an intense sympathy for characters who do not 30 have any strong virtues to recommend them; and the novelists v/ho use the stream-of-consciousness method "are essentially concerned v/ith presenting individual personality 31 in terms of artistic sensibility," a "deliberate effort to render in a literary medium a new realization of .32 experience as a process of dynamic renewal." In order to present' such an aesthetic experience, the major stream-of-consciousness v/riters have variously employed the same basic devices: e.g., free association ^^Ibid., p. 153. ^^Paul West, The Modern Novel (London, 1965), I, p. 46. ^^Booth, Rhetoric, pp. 377-378. 31 Kumar, Bergson, p. 3. ^^Ibid., p. 2. 9 according to psychologic. 1 laws, standard rhetorical figures, 33 and images and symbols. Hov/ever, with regard to the use of symbols, the novelist can record his imaginative ex- O A perience in only "the most approximate way," since they constitute, as it were, substitutes for rationally for- 35 mulated ideas. According to Friedman, the sections of the stream-of-consciousness novel are knit together mainly by such methods of continual cross reference of symbol and image (p. 24), rather than by the process of action. The extreme use of figurative language and of classical rhetori- cal devices, such as personification, hyperbation, anacoluthon, litotes, and of course, simile and metaphor, along with many others, may lead us eventually, according to West, to regard the stream-of-consciousness method as the least disciplined form of romantic poetry." Melvin Friedman lists three- broad methods which are available to the stream-of-consciousness writer, namely, interior monologue, internal analysis, and sensory impression. More useful, to the critic, perhaps, are Humphrey's cate- gories. Humphrey divides Friedman's internal monologue 33 Humphrey, Stream, p. 64. Edel, Psychological, p. 145. 35 Humphrey, Stream, p. 19. ^^West, Modern, p. 37. 10 into' direct interior monologue and indirect interior monologue; The direct form is used for representing psychic content and processes partly or entirely unuttered (p. 23). The indirect method approximates Friedman's internal analysis, in which the author summarizes the impressions of the character in his own words, and is con- sequently closer to directed thinking and rational control. Two other categories used by Humphrey are omniscient description, which gives the consciousness or psychic life of a character, and soliloguy, which communicates emotions and ideas related to plot and action and which has greater coherence than interior monologue because an audience is assumed (p. 30) . He further explains that the use of soliloquy is a combination of the interior stream with exterior action. Other critics, notably Harry Levin, have also included, as typical of the stream-of-consciousness novel, the cinematic device of montage, which is used to express movement and coexistence, or the inner life simultaneously with the outer life. Only Humphrey, of the v/riters noted in this paper, has given any attention to the structural patterns employed in the stream-of-consciousness novel. He lists the most frequently used ones as (1) the unities, which usually have their framework in the external world; (2) leitmotifs; (3) previously established literary patterns, which are 11 often burlesqued; (4) symbolic structures; (5) formal scenic arrangements; (6) natural cyclical schemes, such as in Woolf's The Waves; and (7) theoretical cyclical schemes, such as musical structures and historical cycles (p. 86). Certainly every stream-of-consciousness work has some basic structural pattern; and though it may be hard to discern through the "circuitous, associative demands of the un- 37 conscious, " t>iese works can best be comprehended by such an approach. From the foregoing discussion, it probably can be safely concluded that the representative examples of the stream-of-consciousness novel do have certain characteris- tics in common; They attempt to present the different levels of consciousness, varying in their degrees of inclusiveness, of one or more characters; they look both inward into the mind and outward from that mind at the world. For representing this double vision, certain devices are common: the interior monologue, in some degree or other; an extensive use of sensory impression, expressed in figurative and symbolic language; lack of directive commentary, since to all intents and purposes, the author is virtually effaced, and of the traditional aids of conventional paragraphing, syntax, and punctuation. The 37 Alex Comfort, The Novel and Our Time (London, 1948), p. 93. 12 reader, consequently, must of necessity immerse himself in this strange fictional world of another's consciousness in order to feel and understand the whole of the novel. Despite these difficultiesor maybe because of themthe reader's experience is often much more intense and rewarding than that gained from reading the more conventional forms of fiction. For the purpose of clarity of reference in the present examination of some recent works of fiction, the following definitions are used. (1) Interior monologue: interior monologue is a rather general term which may be used to define those sections in a novel which record the obviously inner activity of a character, regardless of the levels of consciousness used. (2) Direct Interior monologue; the term direct interior monologue is used to indicate those portions of the novel that employ the personal frame of referenceusually the first-person pronoun; shifting sequences of time and place; negligible author interference; fragmentary sentence structure; conscious activity of which the character may or may not be aware; and dis- continuity of thought at the prespeech level. (3) Indirect interior monologue; indirect interior monologue is used to designate such passages in a novel that employ the second- or third-person pronoun; guidance by the author; psychic content in the character's own idiom; which show 13 a level of consciousness nearer the surface, and even one that illustrates a verbalized thought-level present, though actually unuttered. (4) Soliloquy: the term soliloguy is employed to indicate passages in stream-of- consciousness fiction showing psychic activity with an assumed audience, although the content is not spoken verbally by the character; using the first-person pronoun, and a nearly surface level of consciousness, with greater coherence than the interior monologue, and v/ithout the presence of the author. (5) Omniscient description: omniscient description, though a convention of older forms of fiction, is also applicable in a special v/ay to stream- of-consciousness writing as a technique for describing the psychic content of a character in the author's words, v/ritten in the third person. The fundamental difference betv/een omniscient description and interior monologue is that the latter is directly to the reader from the con- sciousness of the character whereas the former comes to the reader through the voice of the author. In association v/ith the basic techniques tenta- tively defined above, there are three devices v/hich v/ill be employed in this study: free association, montage, and variable chronology. The first of these is the psycho- logical process by v/hich a character's consciousness simply drifts from one thing to another because of some 14 random connection between thema similarity, a contrast, an imaginary parallel. As well as movement of the psyche in response to a particular thought, this device may also indicate physical movement of the character, responding to external stimuli. The second device, montage, refers either to external objects or inner thoughts which follow the principles of cinematic presentation of panoramic views, slow-ups, close-ups, and a series of views in rapid succession. This device is both useful in showing physical movement of a character and the quality and rate of psychic activity. The third device consists of a variation of time from its chronological sequence. This variation may involve compression or expansion, depending on the con- sciousness being presented; or one time may be superimposed upon movement into the future, or memory, within memory. Such inner time contrasts sharply with external or temporal time, and the contrast is a valuable means of depicting the flow of conscious activity. Other means employed extensively by stream-of- "" consciousness writers and recognized in the study as specific devices of the method are sensory impression, .most often expressed in imagistic form; symbols, which usually form patterns of cross-references as a structural framework; and mechanical devices. These mechanical aids isness being presented; or one time may be superimpc another; or there may be side digressions, forward 15 are used to help the reader identify a change in time, a different level of consciousness, or a different quality of thought. Some of these aids are italics, dashes, parentheses, lacunae, fragmentary sentence structure, lack of standard capitalization and paragraph indention, and special applications of conventional punctuation. Stream-pf-consciousness writing has made a per- manent contribution to the world of literature and it is still v/idely employed today, though certainly in many variations and degrees. Friedman maintains that stream- of-consciousness fiction was abandoned after 1930, especially in America (p. 254). Edel believes that since the publication of Finnegan's Wakethe supreme and ultimate rendition of the stream-of-consciousness novel"there seems to be only a retracing of steps, a return to earlier forms, a reworking and perhaps intensification of earlier material" (p. 202). But, later in the same work, he admits that "there are signs among the younger writers of further refinement of techniques and a moulding of the stream of consciousness to nev; uses as well as integration of it into the older type of narrative fiction" (p. 214). Paul West, in his very recent book. The Modern Novel, says that the stream-of-consciousness mode is used by the novelists who depict "the anti-hero who now typifies powerless. 16 antisocial man"; and that it "has been renewed in signifi- cance by novelists who have lost faith in society and therefore also in the novel as social portraiture" (p. xii) . Since, however, the thought process we term stream of consciousness-is inadequate as a structural device for an entire novel, he continues, because it is only one part 38 of our mental structure, it may be that the continued use of the method will be found in those novels which demonstrate "something basic in the nature of fiction: the need for surface action and external reality to make 39 VThole reality as man knows it. The use of the stream-of-consciousness technique in American fiction has been, from the start, a departure from that used by James Joyce. American innovations in- clude the use of more than one consciousness in a novel; the addition of external action in a unified plot; and the frequent combination of stream-of-consciousness tech- niques with the traditional forms of the novel. One must look to William Faulkner as the first writer in American fiction to use the stream of consciousness. Although Faulkner wrote many of his works after the supposed decline of stream of consciousness, continued study of his works 38 West, Modern, p. 12. 39 Humphrey, Stream, p. 119. 17 has shovm the presence of this method, combined with some external action, in varying degrees in his fiction: in As I Lay Dying, "Old Man," and "The Bear," as well as in the earlier work. The Sound and the Fury. Other exponents among current American writers of some form of the stream- of-consciousness techniqueand employing "surface action and external reality" as wellare such v/riters as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and William Styron, who, because of the representative nature of their stream-of-consciousness technique, have been chosen, along v/ith Faulkner, to illustrate its use in modern American fiction. Faulkner's pioneer effort in The Sound and the Fury in effect estab- lishes the method as a standard element in modern American experimental fiction. Only a very brief survey will be made of Faulkner's contribution, however, because of the large body of critical effort already expended on the v/orks listed above. CHAPTER I ANOTHER LOOK AT FAULKNER William Faulkner, as recognized by the majority of critics, holds an important place in American fiction. Sometimes accused of being grandiose and rhetorical, or 2 of failing to provide judgment upon his materials, or of making his fictional world more ambiguous and complex 3 than the real one, Faulkner, nevertheless, has been re- 4 garded as an important innovator, one willing to make new 5 explorations of material and method. The Sound and the Fury (1929), now considered an American classic, employs the techniques of the stream of consciousness, but it also contains an important element of plot, which had not been previously used in novels employing the stream-of-consciousness technique. The plot. Maxv/ell Geismar, American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity (New York, 1958), p. 97. 2 Booth, Rhetoric, p. 397. "^Waltern Slatoff, Quest for Fai^lure: A Study of William Faulkner (1960), in The Turn of the Novel by Alan Freidman (New York, 1966), p. 183. William Van O'Connor, William Faulkner (University of Minnesota, 1965), p. 12. Robert Penn Warren as quoted by O'Connor in Faulkner, p. 11. 18 19 briefly, presents the disintegration of an old Southern family as seen in the last generation of the Compsons, represented in the four children; Quentin, the eldest son, sent to Harvard on the proceeds of the sale of the last few acres of Compson land, seeking to reconcile the past and the present into some sort of viable future, can find an answer only in suicide. Caddy, the beautiful daughter, loving and yet hating her family, seeking an answer to life, resorts to promiscuity, bears an illegiti- mate child (also named Quentin), and is finally seenin Jason's eyes at leastas an international tramp. The youngest son is Benjy, who is an idiot, cared for at home until he is thirty-eight years old, at which time he is committed by his brother Jason to the state asylum. Jason-- avaricious, egoistic, and vicious, is the "rational" middle son who assumes a managerial responsibility for the family, but this responsibility is both a cause and an effect of the total disintegration of the family as he, too, becomes a victim of his o\>m depravity. The family, as such, re- mains only in the mind of Dilseythe old Negro woman (family matriarch in her private world) who seems to represent the nimbus of flowing timelessness. The^story of the decline of the Compson family, and, by extension, the decline of the old South, is told in four sections, each focused upon the daughter, Candace 20 (Caddy), who is seen only through the consciousness of the others. Three of the four sections use the interior monologue, while the fourth, or Dilsey section, is told from an omniscient point of view. The first section is devoted to the consciousness of Benjy, a thirty-three- year-old idiot. The section clearly qualifies as a direct interior monologue, representing as it does the psychic content and processes just as they exist before they are formulated for deliberate speech. As a matter of fact, Benjy is unable to speak, being forced to communicate "by howling, moaning, or remaining placid." The monologue ranges in time as far back as Benjy's memory can carry him. These memory scenes, sometimes very long, sometimes only a flash within another memory, are triggered by external stimuli, in the present, v/hich is April 7, 1928. A brief passage may be used to illustrate the numerous time shifts that occur in the Benjy section. Luster is speaking to Benjy: '. , . You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail.' Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. . . . /ellipsis mine/ Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (New York, 1964), p. 87. 21 Or they'll get froze. You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you. *It's too cold out there.' Versh said. ^ 'You dont want to go out doors.' (pp. 24-25). There are three time levels used in this short selection. The first speech is Lester's in the present; the snagging of himself on the nail reminds Benjy of the time he and Caddy had carried a message for Uncle Maury to Mrs. Patterson; which in turn reminds him of a time v/hen Caddy made a remark about his freezing his hands. This memory expands into that time before Christmas when Caddy was still in school. This last time is broadly the same as that in the italics, but the specific scene it evokes is one in which he is waiting for her at the gate. A fev/ examples of the process of association which triggers Benjy's memory of past scenes may indicate the extensive use made of this psychological element at its fundamental level. Luster takes off Benjy's shoes so that he can wade; the water reminds him of the time Caddy and the others v/ere playing in the branch and she got her dress wet (p. 37). The golfer calls his caddie and Benjy begins to moan over the loss of his Caddy (p. 73). Dilsey accuses Luster of allowing Benjy to upset Miss Quentin by 7 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York, 1946). This and all subsequent page references to this book are taken from the Vintage Books edition. 22 simply being near her and then sets Benjy down in front of the fire; the reminder that he is not wanted and the sight of the fire remind him of the time his mother became so disturbed about him and his name change and Caddy took him away to the kitchen and comforted him (pp. 74-75). Many of the memory scenes are told in fragments, being continued later despite the interposition of outer action and even of other memories. Such a method may at first seem unnecessarily obscure and frustrating, but one should remember that it is the chaotic consciousness of an idiot that is being presented. The second section, belonging to Quentin, is also in the form of a continuous interior monologue. It is much nearer the standard form of the stream-of-consciousness method, characterized by discontinuity, privacy, lack of inhibition, free associations (associations of an order more sophisticated than those in the Benjy section), and lack of punctuation and formal syntax. A short quotation, as follows, may illustrate this more complex type of monologue: It's not for kissing I slapped you. Girl's elbows a^t fifteen Father said you swallow like you had a fishbone in your throat what's the matter with you and Caddy across the table not to look at me. It's for letting it be some darn town squirt I. slapped you you will will you nov/ I guess you say calf rope. My red hand coming up out of her face. What do you think of that scouring her head into the. Grass sticks 23 crisscrossed into the flesh tingling scouring her head. Say calf rope say it (p. 152). It may be noted that this passage is in italics, which are used generally in this part to relive past scenes. The present time of this section, dated June 2, 1910, contains monologues of even more discontinuity. Two excerpts, each from a much longer passage, may show this level of consciousness, which is much nearer the center than Benjy's; . . . she stood there her eyes like cornered rats then I was running in the grey darkness it smelled of rain and all flov/er scents the damp warm air released and crickets sawing away in the grass pacing me with a small - travelling island of silence Fancy watched me across the fence blotchy like a quilt on a line I thought damn that nigger he forgot to feed her again . . . (p. 168) Just by imagining the clump it seemed to me that I could hear whispers secret surges smell the beating of hot blood under wild unsecret flesh watching against red eyelids the swine untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the sea and he we must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while its not always and i it doesnt have to be even that long for a man of courage and he do you consider that courage . . . (p. 195). The latter excerpt shows much greater incoherence, but its inchoateness is in keeping with its position in this entire section as the last entry into the inner recesses of Quentin's mind. The Quentin section, like that devoted to Benjy, combines the psychic content with external action. The 24 outer events actually are few in number but are detailed, covering his actions on the day he commits suicide. Such minute accounting for his actions provides a tangible framework for the continuous and erratic flow of consciousness. Another type of monologue is to be found in the third section, which belongs to Jason. In keeping v/ith his character, Jason's narration is much more coherent and "sane," but it is also very self-revealing. There is a great deal of external action involving directly other characters who, until now, have been seen only through the consciousnesses of Benjy and Quentin. A portion, with ellipses inserted, of a passage typical of the revealing nature of this section is given below: Well, Jason likes work. I says no I never had university advantages because at Harvard they teach you how to go for a- swim at night v/ithout knowing how to swim and at Sev/anee they dont even teach you what water is. I says you might send me to the state University; maybe 1*11 learn how to stop my clock with a nose spray and then you can send Ben to the Navy I says or to the cavalry anyway, they use geldings in the cavalry. Then when she sent Quentin home for me to feed too . . . I says . . .It's your grandchild, which is more than any other grandparents it's got can say for certain. Only I says it's only a question of time. If you believe she'll do what she says and not try to see it, you fool yourself because the first time that was that Mother kept on saying thank God you are not a Compson except in name, because you are all I have left now, you and Maury, and I says well I could spare Uncle Maury myself and then they came and said they were ready to start. . . . (pp. 312-214). 25 As one can see, this monologue depicts a level of con- sciousness much nearer the surface than those of either Benjy or Quentin. That he is shallow, selfish, envious, and mean is quickly made clear. This section also is a combination of -psychic content, mixed time elements, and external action. A number of questions are answered, or clues to the answers are given, as Jason gives his sub- jective versions of the past. The last section of the novel focuses on Dilsey, but the account is an exterior one told from an omniscient point of view. Perhaps this point of view is used to emphasize the objectivity with which Dilsey is able to view the Compson family. In addition to the use of interior monologues, free association, and complex time, the wealth of sensory images and the cross-reference of symbols enrich the experience of the novel. The most important symbols include time, v/ater, and honeysuckle, especially notable in the Quentin section, but also appearing in other sections. All of these techniques are used extensively in this novel, the archetype of stream-of-consciousness fiction in America. A later novel. As I. Lay Dying (1930), also makes use of one of the techniques of stream of consciousness. This technique consists of a special form of monologue 26 sometimes designated as soliloquy, and is the only form of narration used throughout the novel. The individual soliloquies are connected by the content of plot action which they also reflect. The plot concerns the actions of the Bundren famj-ly and a few others. The mother Addle is dying and in order to carry out the promise to bury her in Jefferson, a coffin is constructed by Cash, and after her death, the family start out for Jefferson. On the way, many hazards delay the journey, among them fire, flood, and pestilence in the fojrm of buzzards. The account of the trip reveals other problems as well: Dewey Dell, the unmarried but pregnant daughter, tries to buy abortion pills but is seduced by the druggist's clerk instead; Darl seems to go mad; and the husband Anse, after burying Addie, steals Devjey Dell's money, buys himself a set of new teeth, and finds a nev/ wife. Jewel,. Vardaman, and Cash, the other three children, are last seen simply waiting placidly in the v/agon for Anse and his new wife. There are fifteen characters v/ho have soliloquies; seven of them are Bundrens and the other eight are various outsiders. Two of the outsiders are neighbors, Cora and Vernon Tull; one is the doctor, Peabody; and one is the Preacher Whitfield, v/ho is the father of Jevzel. Samson is. a storekeeper, Armstid is a neighbor v/ho helps them. 27 Moseley is the druggist, and MacGowan is the clerk who seduces Dewy Dell; all of these people outside the family have one section each. Of the family members. Jewel and Addie have one short section each, though Addie's is the center of meaning; Anse has three sections; Dewey Dell, four; Cash, five; Vardaman, ten, and Darl, nineteen. According to Humphrey, who counts only thirteen soliloquies, the large number of consciousnesses used is a quite 8 original application of the stream-of-consciousness method. Each monologue of the family members serves as a means of characterizing that person, and the monologues of the out- siders serve either to enforce or counterpoint these revelations, or to show a different perspective of events. According to Volpe, there are three levels of diction used: "a realistic dialect records actual speech; a more formal diction records conscious thought, and a poetic 9 imagistic language indicates uncontrolled thought." The following excerpt, from one of Dewey Dell's monologues, will seorve to illustrate these three levels. Ellipses have been added. 'We'll leave you here, then. Lessen you behave, we will leave you. Go on, now, before that old green-eating tub of guts eats every- thing up from you.' He goes on, disappearing slowly into the hill. The crest, the trees. o Humphrey, Stream, p. 105. 9 Volpe, Faulkner, p. 128. 28 the roof of the house stand agains the sky. The cow nuzzles at me, moaning, . . . He could fix it all right, if he just would. And he dont even knov/ it. He could do every- thing for me if he just knowed it. . . . The sky lies flat down the slope, upon the secret clumps. Beyond the hill sheet-lightning stains upward and fades. The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth. . . . I said You dont know what worry is. I dont know what it is. I dont know whether I am worrying or not. . . (p. 61).10 The first speech shows her habitual idiom and refers to Doctor Peabody. The next two sentences record her sight perceptions v/ithout being put into words. Then following the first ellipsis, idiomatic speech is again used, though thi^s time it is unuttered. This speech is followed by lines showing a poetic quality, reflecting her undirected perceptions, and the last part beginning with "I said" is the more formal diction of conscious thought. Examination of a monologue by Darl shows these same levels, although the segment of actual speech is fairly limiteda factor which, of course, is in keeping with his character. An excerpt follows; Let Jewel take the end of the rope and cross upstream of us and brace it,' I say. Will you do that, Jev/el?' Jewel watches me hard. He looks quick at Cash. . . . /Ellipses are itiine^ 'Let's do that. Cash,* I say. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Vintage Books edition. Subsequent page references are from this edition 29 *I reckon we'll have to,' Cash says. The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached a the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. . . . (p. 139). Just as actual ,speech is limited in Darl's sections, so is uncontrolled thought, since Darl's thoughts usually reflect his intelligence and awareness. However, these portions are frequently poetic in tone, with the images somewhat more elaborate and sophisticated than those of the other characters. The last section, devoted to him gives indications of his continued keenness of observation, but there is also apparent the inability to communicate, as previously noted (pp. 243-44). Many other examples of monologues could be cited, but since this fojrm is used exclusively, the foregoing may show their individuality and the typical levels of language. Although not exemplified in the above quoted passages, Faulkner's methods of fragmenting the story and of moving backward and forward in time are also used in this novel. The plot, involving a number of events, is revealed piecemeal in each section; hov/ever, there is less transposition of chronological events found in this novel 30 than in the complex movement in The Sound and the Fury. This interweaving of external action into the conscious- nesses of fifteen characters and the restriction of narra- tion to one technique only make this novel unique in stream-of-consciousness fiction. Experiments with time and the use of external action in presenting the pscychic processes on various levels of consciousness are, however, evident in many of Faulkner's other works. A brief look at two of his short novels, one v/ritten ten years after the monumental The Sound and the Fury and the other, thirteen years later, give abundant proof of Faulkner's continued application of the stream- of-consciousness techniques in his own original fashion. In the first of these. The Wild Palms (1939), Faulkner has used an unusual form of consciousness in relating the experience of the Tall Convict in the second story of the book entitled "Old Man." The Wild Palms was originally published with the tv/o storiesthe title story and "Old Man"presented in alternating sections from each one, but later publications have separated the two, and now many readers regard "Old Man" as a short novel in itself. It will be so treated in the follov/ing brief discussion. The setting of the story is a prison in Mississippi and the Mississippi Riveri.e., the "Old Man"in flood stage in May of 1927. The protagonist, never given a 31 name, is the tall convict who is seirving a fifteen-year sentence for attempted train robbery, the plans for which he had based on his reading of detective magazines and other such pulp fiction. The second convictwho serves, among other things, as an anchor to the prison as far as narrative technique goesis serving a sentence of a hundred and ninety-nine years for some unknown crime in- volving robbery' and a woman. It is through the latter's reading of the newspapers that the inmates first begin to learn of the growing flood. The convicts are called out in guarded squads to help control the flood by working on levees and aiding in rescues. The tall one and the short convict are sent out in the morning to rescue a woman sitting in a cypress snag and a man on the roof of a cotton house. But their boat is sv/amped and overturned and the two convicts are separated.. The short convict and the man on the roof are brought back to the levee by the deputy v/arden, where the short convict reports that the tall one must have drowned. The main burden of the narrative, then, is focused on the tall convict, who has not drowned but who has managed to retain the paddle and shortly retrieves the skiff. Carried and swirled by the raging current, his boat happens to strike the clump of cypress trees where the woman whom they were sent to rescue is perched. 32 Intending to find his partner, the short convict, and to rescue the man on the roof, the tall one gets the woman, who is obviously near the last stages of pregnancy, and they set outbut under the river's control, not under their own power.. Recognizing a stretch of the river, the convict plans to head for the nearest town, any town, where he can "surrender his charge . . . and turn his back on her forever . . . and return to that monastic 11 existence of shotguns and shackles" (p. 110). They undergo many harrowing experiencesnear-drownings, hunger, birth of the baby, snake-infested islandsand all the time they must struggle with the power of the river. During this time he learns to accept her as his responsi- bility and to keep in mind his goal of returning the skiff and himself to the prison. In order to accomplish these aims, he takes different short-term jobs, among the more bizarre being the killing of alligators. After some seven weeks, he manages to hire a launch to take him and the woman, with the skiff in tow, to a place where he can surrender, once again dresse-d, deliberately, in his peni- tentiary clothing. To the awkward deputy he says, "'Yonder's This page reference is taken from the Vintage Books edition of Three Famous Short Novels by William Faulkner, copyright 1939; subsequent references are to this same edition. 33 your boat, and here's the woman. But I never did find that bastard on the cottonhouse'" (p. 172). He is re- turned to prison where, for political purposes about v/hich he neither knows nor cares, the authorities add ten years to his sentence for "'attempted escape'" (p. 177). The structure of the story is the flashback account of his experiences related to his bunkmates in the prison. The first section of the story is concerned with an omniscient account, compressed in the telling to only a few pages (eight out of the total number of one hundred eight) , of hov/ he and the short convict came to be in prison, and to the necessary information about the flood. Transition now being made to the scene where the two con- victs are sent on their rescue mission, the real story is then related from the consciousness of the tall convict, with fairly frequent reminders of the present through direct statements, such as, "This is hov/ he told about it seven weeks later . . . on his bunk in the barracks" (p. 114); by interruptions from the short convict in the form of questions or comments; or by less noticeable phrases inserted in the midst of narration, such as "he remembered it." These three elements suggest a third-person point of view, and the author's voice speaking, or that of the omniscient narrator. But it is the consciousness of the convict that makes up the real story. The events which 34 he recounts are, in themselves, interesting only to a very limited degree and would hold little meaning without the interpretation v/hich his perceptions give to them. The form used to relate his inner experiences while he is living the external experiences assumes a form of the indirect interior monologue, modified and combined with omniscient description. Any objection that the con- vict is orally recounting the experiences to his cell mates and thus cannot be interior is quickly seen as pointless because what the story reveals is much more than what he tells his listeners, or what he thinks, for that matter, since the reader learns things, despite the con- vict's innate knowledge of them, that even the convict cannot verbalize. The follov/ing passage may be helpful in illustrating how such information is conveyed. The convict returns to the shack, the shelfer for the last few days of hunting alligators of himself and the Cajun, where he sees some men waiting: . . . Turning to the woman again, his mouth already open to repeat as the dreamy buzzing voice of the man came to him and he turning once more, in a terrific and absolutely un- bearable exasperation, crying, 'Flood? What flood? Hell a mile, it's done passed me tv/ice months agol It's gonel What flood?' and then (he did not think this in actual words either but he knew it, suffered that flashing insight into his ov/n character or destiny: hov/ there was a peculiar quality of repetitiveness about his present fate, how not only the almost seminal crises recurred with a certain monotony, but 35 the very physical circumstances followed a stupidly unimaginative pattern) the man in the launch said, 'Take him' . . . (p. 166). Here, one can see how the depths of his consciousness is revealed but, obviously, not in his words. These are the author's; the feelings are the character's, yet the ex- perience never reaches the speech level of his consciousness and cannot be related audibly to his listeners. The passage thus qualifies as indirect interior monologue because it is of such a private nature, but the nature of the convict is such that this privacy must be described in another's words, namely the author's, and in this manner, the passage is, of necessity, modified by omniscient description. A special element of time, apparent in this same passage, demands consideration. As indicated earlier, the major portion of the material, in which the central story is revealed, is told obstensibly as a flashback. Since, however, so much more than the events is also given, it is possible that the material comes from either of two sources: his feeling experienced at the time of narration, or the feeling experienced at the time of occurrence. Probably a more accurate assessment is that much of this material stems from parts of both timesthe response is registered and the analysis is applied later. 36 In contrast to the above, many of the longer passages are much more easily seen to qualify as a form of interior monologue in combination with omniscient descrip- tion. These are nearly always connected to external action, an innovation-in the stream-of-consciousness technique which is attributed to Faulkner.'^ A passage of this nature arising from external action, clearly shown to be so by the inclusion of people other than the v/oman, occurs near the end of the story being related by the convict to the prisoners. In the incident from which the passage comes, the convict and the woman have been taken to an armory serving as a shelter for the flood victims. At the woman's suggestion that he lie to the guard in order get out of the armory and back on his way to return to prison, his reaction is shown in the following passage, with ellipses added. And how ha did not; he could not have expressed this either, it too deep, too ingrained; he had never yet had to think it into v/ords through all the long generations of himselfhis hill- man' s sober and jealous respect not for truth but for the pov/er, the strength, of lying not to be niggard with lying but rather to use it with respect and even care, delicate quick and strong, like a fine and fatal blade. And how they fetched him clothes . . . (a brisk starched young woman saying, 'But the baby must be bathed, cleaned. It will die if you dont,' and the woman saying, *Yessum. He 12 Humphrey, Stream, p. 121. 37 might holler some, he ain't never been bathed before. But he's a good baby.') and now it v/as night . . . and he rising, gripping the woman awake, and then the v/indow. He told that; how there v/ere doors in plenty . . . 'You ought to tore up a sheet and slid down it,' the plump convict said. . . . nor did he tell, any more than about the sixty-foot levee, hov/ he got the skiff back into the water (p. 170) . The above quotation, lengthy as it.is, constitutes only a portion of the entire passage (v/hich runs for more than two pages in one unbroken paragraph), but there are a number of things included that are v/orthy of attention; first, his reasons for not taking advantage are shov/n to be below the level of vrebalization; second, his conscious- ness is presented as fully sentient without verbalization; third, the interior and exterior actions are shown as simultaneously occurring, and fourth, the instrusion of the short convict's speech keeps the reader attached to the convict-narrator in the present. The last part quoted, after the last ellipsis, indicates one of the many things he does not tell his listeners, a reseirve which clearly builds reader-sympathy for the character. An additional notev/orthy item is the material enclosed in parentheses (parentheses, incidentally, are used with great frequency throughout) revealing not only humor, which is such an integrated element in this story, but also pointing out what mast be the narrator's private memories and impressions which are on the verablized level but are not spoken. 38 along with further ramifications of character revelation and background detail. The following passage shows still a different combination of levels. This technique is a form of interior monologue akin .to the direct form; however, it does not show the discontinuity normally exhibited in the direct interior monologue, perhaps because of the brevity. The excerpt is from a longer portion concerning the alligator- hunting episode: He told itof the next eight or nine or ten days . . . He did not tell it that v/ay, just as he apparently did not consider it worth the breath to tell how he had got the . . . skiff single-handed up and do\-m and across the sixty-foot levee. He just said, 'After a while v/e come to a house and we stayed there eight or nine days then they blew up the levee with dynamite so v/e had to leave.' That was all. But he remembered it, but quietly now, with the cigar now, the good one the Warden had given him (though not lighted yet) in his peaceful and steadfast hand, remembering that first morning when he v/aked on the thin pallet beside his host (the woman and baby and the one bed) with the fierce sun already latticed through the warped rough planking of the wall, and stood on the rickety porch looking out upon that flat fecund waste neither earth nor water, where even the senses doubted which was which, which rich and massy air and v/hich mazy and impalpable vegetation, and thought quietly. He must do something here to eat and live. But I. dont knov/ v/hat. And until I_ can go on again, until I. can find where I. am and how to pass that tovm without them seeing me I will have to help him do it .so we can eat and live too, and I. dont know what. (p. 150). One can imiiediately recognize the sparsity of what he tells and the density of what he withholds. The italicized 39 section at the close of the excerpt illustrates the modi- fied interior monologue, clearly in his idiom, using the first person, and although verbalized, not designed to be spoken. There is also a triple-layered time element to be considered: the present in the prison, the immediate past in the Warden's office, and the time of his memory with its double level of consciousness. An interesting complication of the time element, following the distortion of chronology quite often found in stream-of-consciousness writing, can be shown by a very short example. Relating the alligator episode, the con- vic't mentions going "halvers" with the Cajun, and the short convict intervenes with a question: 'How could you make a business agreement v/ith a man you claim you couldn't even talk to?' *I never had to talk to him,* the tall one said. 'Money aint got but one- language' (p. 152). Then somewhat later, he is thinking of the return boat trip after his first kill, v/hen he looked at the bloody skin and thought; And I. cant even ask him how much my half will be. But this not for long either, because as he was to tell the plump convict later, money has but one language. He remembered that too (they were at home now. . . . *I done seem to got to where if that boy v/as to shoot me in the tail v/ith a bean blower my nose would bleed.') remembered that too but he did not try to tell it (p. 156). 40 At first glance, the time mentioned in both parts of the passage seems simple enough, but upon closer examination, its multiple complexity emerges. One other form of the direct monologue used by Faulkner in "The Old Man" may be mentioned; however, there is only one instance of it, and a very short one at that: a brief dream sequence in which he dreams of the prison, of being cold and wet, and of the mule with which he used to plow, that now in his dream gives him a long swipe across his face; he awakes to find himself lying in four inches of v/ater and snakes crawling everywhere, including over his ov/n body (p. 136) . A great deal of the narration is not clearly interior monologue or omniscient description, but consists of frequent phrases, especially those conveying images, which are couched in words that stem from his conscious- ness. A few examples, chosen at random, may show this effective description: "the unfinished paddle of the color and texture of sooty bricks, like something gnav/ed out of an old chimney by beavers and weighing twenty-five pounds" (p. 137); the talk of the Louisiana people as "'gobble-gobble, whang, cav/-caw-to-to'" (p. 139); the steam- boat moving "like a ant crossing a plate" (p. 143); and the alligator hide that "had belonged to something larger than any calf or hog" (p. 153). The numerous images 41 referring to animals and insects are in keeping with the simple, primitive nature of the convict; these images occur in those passages phrased in his language as well as in those using the author's words, which describe the con- vict's psychic processes. Almost the entire short novel may be said to describe the consciousness of the tall convict except for the first section, which, as has been noted (p. 33), is an impersonal "history" of the two convicts and a prepa- ration for the action to follow, and another short sec- tion, about five and a half pages, near the end, when the narration moves away from the consciousness of the central character. This latter passage takes place in the Warden's office and concerns the problem which the convict's return has caused. As soon as he is brought in to hear his sen- tence, the narration again focuses on him. Certainly there is to be found the integration of external action and interior processes, and though he tells his fellow convicts what has happened externally, the author presents to the reader what occurred internally as v/ell. In doing this, Faulkner has employed modified forms of interior monologue and omniscient description. Little use has been made of the device of free association, perhaps because the experience is told from a retrospective point of view. However, this retrospective angle allov/s for a great deal 42 of complexity in the handling of time, with the reader aware of several layers at once. All of these techniques have combined to present a character who first appears somev/hat foolish and unattractive, to say the least, but who gains in stature and dignity as the stoiry unfolds until, at the last, one is fully cognizant of his courage, modesty, integrity, and simplicity. This partial and limited analysis of the narrative techniques employed has, it is to be hoped, shown Faulkner's originality in adapting the stream-of-consciousness methods and applying them in new ways. The second short novel in question, originally published as one of the seven interrelated stories in Go Down, Moses, and now frequently published separately, is "The Bear." In this v/ork, Faulkner has also adapted the techniques of stream-of-consciousness writing, manipu- lating the time element in an involved manner, using monologues in the form of memory sequences piled upon other memories as though lived in the present, amassing sensory experiences perceived through one consciousness, ^and employing the Joycean epiphany as the center of meaning of the whole novel. These techniques are combined to . relate the story of Isaac McCaslin in his efforts to reach maturity, both in the external world and the inner world of the heart. 43 Told in the form of reminiscence, the novel recounts Ike's experiences on his hunting trips into the v/ilderness which culminate in the killing of Old Ben, the bear, and the end of the wilderness. He visits the woods one last time after the lumber rights have been sold; later he gives up his patrimony in his efforts to reach an under- standing of the relationship of the individual, society, and nature. Not allowed to go on the semi-annual hunting trips until he can write his age in two figures, Ike learns to be both a master woodsman and hunter with the help of Sam Fathers, part Indian, part Negro, and part white. On his first trip when he is ten, the most rewarding experience occurs when he senses the presence of Old Ben, the symbol of the ancient wilderness untainted by society. On successive hunts he learns more and more about being a true woodsman, and his hunting skill increases until he is able, at the age of twelve, to kill his first buck, for which Sam Fathers marks his face with blood, symbolic of the puberty ritual, physical and spiritual. His knowledge of the wilderness continues to increase, and when he is sixteen, he is one of the group that v/itnesses the death of Old Ben, killed by the inept Boon, who wants to save the powerful dog Lion, trained by Sam but cared for by Boon. At Old Ben's death, which means the end of the wilderness 44 to Major de Spain as well as to Ike and Sam, Sam Fathers and the dog Lion both die and are buried in a remote spot in the woods. The next year Major de Spain sells the lumber rights except for a small section enclosing the burial plots. Ike makes one more hunt, but he is forced to admit what has long been apparent: that the encroachment of society, represented by the logging train, will temporarily destroy the wilderness, thus preventing man from returning to his essential nature, which is to be found in the funda- mental patterns of nature itself. Recognizing the crime against humanity committed by his grandfather and his own society, he repudiates his heritage at the age of twenty-one in an effort to live by the code of nature; he tries to trace his grandfather's children of Negro blood in order to turn over the legacies which had been set up for them, but he is only partly successful, just as he only partially succeeds in his personal attempts to fuse social man and natural man in his own life. Structurally, the novel is divided into five sections, told from Ike's memory when he is over seventy years old (though for proof of this the next story in the complete book, "Delta Autumn," must be taken into consideration; moreover, there are also several scenes in the "The Bear" which are told in detail in an earlier story, "The Old People," the fourth in the collection Go Down, Moses). 45 The first two sections are devoted to the five hunts, from v/hen Ike is ten to the time he is sixteen, during which he first feels the bear's presence and the power of the wilderness; sees the bear for the first time; kills his first honorable game; tracks Old Ben and is forced to grab the fyce to keep Old Ben from killing it; witnesses the training of Lion, and the attempts of the hunting party to kill Old Ben, especially Boon's futile effort of shooting at Old Ben, and missing all five times. The third section is a detailed account of the last hunt for Old Ben, when Lion brings him to bay and is saved from immediate death by Boon (who kills Old Ben with his knife). The fourth section is out of chronological, though in proper thematic, order in taking up the account of Ike's repudiation of his patrimony when he is twenty-one, and his memory of two years before attempti.ng to trace the Negro heirs of his grandfather, and of a later time and the failure of his marriage because he refuses his wife's demand that he claim "the farm." The fifth section returns in time to when he is eighteen, when he makes one last trip to the wilderness before the lumber company moves in. The novel ends on the note that runs throughout the whole: man's futile attempts, represented in Boon's frenzied commands about the squirrels, to possess the wilderness. 46 Faulkner again has moved time backward and forward in presenting the story, and again the reader is required to assort and relate the episodes into an overall pattern and yet retain the narrative pattern in order to comprehend the total significance of the novel. In general, the novel covers events which occur from the time Ike is ten until after he is twenty-one, but this time is extended on occasion to far' into the past and even into the future to a time when he is over eighty, v/ith implications of events of an even remoter time. As noted earlier, the sections themselves are not chronological, the last tv/o sections being transposed, but there is even greater disruption of the temporal flow of time within each section. For example. Part I begins when he is sixteen, but within a short space the narration returns to the time of his first hunting trip when he is ten. Such a flashback seems normal enough, but a closer look reveals that there is a third layer of time to be taken into accountthat of his memory before he is ten, when the wilderness "ran in his knowledge before 13 he ever saw it" (p. 187) and when he was "still a child, with three years then two years then one year yet before he too could make one of them" (p. 188). Within this 13 William Faulkner, Three Famous Short Novels (New York, 1940); Vintage edition. This and subsequent page references to "The Bear" are taken from this edition. 47 same section he remembers the time when he was eleven and actually saw Old Ben for the first time (p. 198 and p. 202), and then the future is also brought in when he compares their surrey (when he is ten) in the wilderness to a boat on the ocean-"after he /had/ seen the sea" (p. 189). Additional complications of time are found in greater complexity as the novel progresses. Part II be- gins with his memory of Lion, when he himself is thirteen. But because of the processes of psychological association and the discontinuity of memory, events must be realized through a pastiche of a part of an event here, the recall of an earlier event, and bits of others that he remembers when he is eighty, and some of these memories may have occurred at any time in the past. In order to illustrate the technique which Faulkner uses and which forces the reader to be his own composer, the following passage is quoted, with a liberal use of ellipses for the sake of brevity; So he should have hated and feared Lion. He was thirteen then. He had killed his buck and Sam Fathers had marked his face with the hot blood, and in the next November he killed a bear. But before that accolade he had become as competent in the woods as many grown men with the same experience. By now he was a better woodsman than most grown men with more. . . . In the third fall he found a buck's bedding- place by himself. . . . By now he knew the old bear's footprint. . . . Twice while on the stand during the next three years he heard the dogs strike its trail 48 and once even jump it by chance. . . . Once, still-hunting with Walter Ewell's rifle, he saw it . . . /and/ he realized then v/hy it would take a dog not only of abnormal courage but size and speed too. . . . He had a little dog . . . of the sort called fyce. . . . He brought it with him one June. . . . So he should have hated and feared Lion. It was in -the fourth summer, the fourth time he had made one in the celebration of Major de Spain's and General Compson's birthday (pp. 203-206 passim). The first part ,of the above passage concerns a time inter- mediate between the two broad segments of events in Part I, when he is sixteen and when he is ten. The time mentioned next is the time he kills the buck, at the age of twelve (from information revealed at another place). The phrase "the next November" means the time.at twelve or thirteen in the fall before the present summer tripnow at the age of thirteen also. The hunt with the fyce occurred in June of the year he was apparently twelve years old. The major portion of Part II deals with the events of the summer's trip during which he first sees Lion, the fall trip when Lion trails Old Ben, and then the next November, when Ike would be apparently fifteen, v/hen Lion bays Old Ben but Boon is unable to hit him. Such an interpretation depends upon the reader's ability to find the clues and bits of information scattered throughout all five sections. In contrast. Part III is much more unified, centered upon the killing of Old Ben, Lion's death, and 49 Sam's burial. There are only two short digressions of any importanceone concerning Boon's devotion to Ike, and the other concerning an incident in Boon's past and his inept- ness with a gun of any sort. This straightforv/ard method is obviously chosen to convey the importance which the entire episode holds in Ike's memory, having become almost ritualized, and holding the key to the turning point in his life. It is in the fourth section, however, that the greatest amount of complexity is encountered. Covering nearly sixty pages, the narration concerns the evening in October of the year that Ike is twenty-one (1888) as he and McCaslin talk together in the storeroom where the ledgers containing records of all the transactions con- cerning the slaveslater, the freed slavesare kept. The time covered is expanded much beyond the confines of one evening's conversation, ranging as it does from far in the past that is reflected in the record of the ledgers to indeterminate times between his age of twenty-one and the eighty years he has reached at the time of the remi- niscence. Even universal time is considered as Ike tries to explain to McCaslin his concept of history and of God's plan. Memory interferes v/ith memory, bits of their conver- sation enter from time to time, and one moment's flash may set off a train of events covering a year's time. 50 A selection showing a number of these time varia- tions follows below. Liberal use has again been made of ellipses in order to emphasize the time element, but the essential substance of the passage is retained. Ike and McCaslin have been speaking of the Civil War: . . . This was chronicled in a harsher book and McCaslin . . . had seen it . . . and the boy himself had inherited it . . . that dark corrupt and bloody time while three separate peoples had tried to adjust . . . those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight . . . who misused it . . . so that he thought Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffering necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license; that race threefold in one . . . composed of the sons of middle-aged Quartermaster lieutenants and Army sutlers and contractors in military blankets and shoes and transport mules . . . and in another generation would be engaged in a fierce economic competition . . . and in the third generation would be back once more in the little lost county seats . . . first in mufti then later in actual formalized regalia of hooded sheets and passwords and fiery Christian symbols . . . and of all that other nameless horde of speculators in human misery . . . and the Jew . . . a pariah about the face of the Western earth. . . . McCaslin had actually seen it, and the boy even at almost eighty would never be able to distinguish certainly between what he had seen and what had been told him. . . . and this time McCaslin . . . merely lifted one hand . . . toward the desk . . . the ledgers . . . among which the old names . . . were lost Tomey's Terrel . . . Percival Brownlee . . . an old man now and quite fat, as the well-to-do proprietor of a select New Orleans brothel; and Tennie's Jim . . . and Fonsiba in Arkansas with her three dollars each month . . . and only Lucas was left . . . whose name would not even appear for six years yet . . . (pp.277-81). 51 Except for the beginning of the paragraph, not here quoted, there is no interruption in Ike's flow of thought, ranging in time from before his birth to events which have not happened yet at the time of the conversation. Other passages of similar nature could be taken from almost any part of this long fourth section to show the piled up time layers, many of them clues to events that have been recordedin partearlier in the narration. But, again, it may be noted that this tortuous approach in relation to time is in keeping v/ith the characteristics of reminiscence; also, this disjointed unraveling of his thoughts parallels his need to explain to the head of his family his reasons for repudiating his heritage. These reasons lie at the very center of his consciousness, and in trying to trace their sources he must take into account the many ways he has become what he- is. Obviously, the discontinuity and manipulation of time found in this section alone qualify it as a stream-of-consciousness account. The fifth and final section, though told within itself in a fairly straightforward fashion, reenforces the idea of his effort to reveal to McCaslin the reasons for his rejection of his patrimony. Just as one recalls the most critical decision of his life in all its ramifications, a frequent accompaniment is an after-thought as to what set one finally on the road to that decision. In this 52 manner, Ike recalls, in the final section, his last visit to the woods before society takes over, remembering his realization of the irrevocable loss of the wilderness as a way of life. Other-techniques belonging in the stream-of- consciousness category are to be found in the indirect monologues and the Joycean epiphanies used in the novel. Certainly many of the passages in the fourth section can be properly considered as indirect interior monologues. For instance, the extract quoted above (p. 23), concerning the Civil War, is seen to be a third-person account of what he is thinking as he talks with McCaslin. The passage has all the usual attributes; discontinuity, free associa- tion, time distortion, and privacyeven though McCaslin is made aware of some of Ike's most intimate thoughts. This is true, likewise, of the episode concerning the silver cup filled with gold pieces and wrapped in burlap, the legacy from Uncle Hubert Beauchamp. The memory of this aborted legacy is first triggered by thinking of his pre- sent treasured possessions in the boarding-house v/here he has lived for nearly sixty years (p.288), and it ends with the memory of McCaslin's bringing to him the first thirty dollars from the estate (p. 296) . Perhaps the clearest example of the indirect monologue, combined with other techniques, is the long scene with his wife (pp. 297-301). 53 The first part of this particular memory sequence concerns the early days of marriage when "it was the new country, his heritage too as it was the heritage of all, out of the earth, beyond the earth yet of the earth" (p. 298), and the last part of it ends with what he first thinks is her crying but is her bitter laughter (p. 301). There is at least one direct interior monologue, found also in the fourth section. In the debate with McCaslin over the Negroes, in speaking of "the old free fathers" (p. 283), he remembers McCaslin's and his con- versation a week after he and the fyce had encountered Old Ben. Sam Fathers had told McCaslin about Ike's refusing to take a shot, and a few days later McCaslin had asked Ike about it. The passage is set in italic printing, indicating direct transcription of thought, and it includes his direct thoughts at the time of their conversation (pp. 284-85). The fact that the third person point of view is used, as well as the use of inserted phrases as guides ("he said"), does not destroy the contention that it is direct monologue because the directness is his memory of that time quoting, so to speak, his thoughts. The in- direct form resumes v/ithout any separation, as follows: ". . .Do you see now?' and he could still hear them, intact in this twilight as in that one seven years ago . . . " (p. 285). The present time in the storeroom 54 intervenes between his direct consciousness of that moment seven years ago and its memory now. These monologues, of both kinds, are helpful in establishing the sincerity of Ike's actions and of his words to McCaslin. These interior monologues become the true meaning of the external action of his various hunts and an interpretation of the cryptic ledger entries. Along with the monologues, as part of them and apart from them, there is a great deal of sensory impres- sion throughout the novel. Frequently these images are combined with omniscient description, which, it seems, the memory accounts of four of the five sections actually imitate primarily. A typical passage showing this combi- nation is quoted belov/. The events occur on the hunting trip v/hen he is eleven, the first time he actually sees the bear. Again ellipses have been inserted within the passage. By noon he was far beyond the crossing on the little bayou, farther into the new and alien country than he had ever been, travelling now not only by the compass but by the old, heavy, biscuit-thick silver v/atch which had been his father's. . . . He had already relinquished, of his will, because of his need, in humility and peace and without regret, yet apparently that had not been enough, the leaving of the gun v/as not enough. He stood for a momenta child, alien and lost in the green and soaring gloom of the markless wilderness. Then he relinquished completely to it. It was the watch and the compass. He v/as still tainted. . . he did what Sam had coached and drilled him as the next and last, seeing as he sat down on the 55 log the crooked print, the warped indentation in the wet ground which while he looked at it continued to fill with water until it was level . full and the water began to overflow and the sides of the print began to dissolve away. Even as he looked up he saw the next one, and, moving, the one beyond it . . . and the v/ilderness coalesced. It rushed, soundless, and solidified the tree, -the bush, the compass and the watch glinting where a ray of sunlight touched them. Then he saw the bear. . . . Then it moved. It crossed the glade without haste, walking for an instant into the sun's full glare and out of it, and stopped again and looked back at him across one shoulder. Then it was gone. It didn't v/alk into the woods. It faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion as he had watched a fish, a huge old bass, sink back into the dark depths of its pool and vanish without even any movement of its fins (pp. 201-203). Here can be seen the impressionist use of imagery, especially in the last part, as the bear, instead of walking into the trees, fades and sinks into the wilderness, symbolizing its complete oneness with the omnipresent myriad life of the wilderness. The omniscient description has a peculiarly original slant in that the voice describing his actions and his thoughts is that of Ike himself seventy years later. A number of other sensory impressions, taken at random, show how v/ell Ike's consciousness is represented. These are listed without comment since they convey their own message: (1) the deer, the buck, smoke-colored, elongated with speed . . . the gray half-liquid morning (p. 190); (2) standing beside Sam in the thick great gloom of ancient woods and the winter's dying 56 afternoon, he looked quietly down at the rotted log scored and gutted with claw- marks and, in the v/et earth beside it, the print of the enormous v/arped two-toed foot (p. 194); (3) a flavor like brass in the sudden run of saliva in his mouth (p. 194); (4) the gap of iron earth beneath the brilliant and rigid night . . . tasting, tongue palate and to the very bottom of his lungs, the searing dark (p. 219) ; (5) a walnut a little larger than a football and with a machinist's hamTier had shaped features into it and then painted it, mostly red (p. 220); (6) the v/oods . . . and the rain-heavy air were one uproar. It rang and clamored; it echoed and broke . . . and reformed and clamored and rang (p. 231); (7) then the bear surged erect . . . It didn't collapse, crumple. It fell all of a piece, as a tree falls (p. 232); (8) toward the long wailing of the horn and the shots which seemed to linger intact somewhere in the thick streaming air (p. 236); (9) the bear, the yearling . . . sitting up, its forearms against its chest and its wrists limply arrested as if it had been surprised in the act of covering its face to pray (p. 311); (10) he could smell it nov/: the thin sick smell of rotting cucumbers and something else which had no name (p. 315). Taken in sum, the examples show a full range of the sense, allowing the reader to live what Ike perceives. Such vivid representation of consciousness gives depth to a character who might otherv/ise seem overly romantic, verbose, and even sanctimonious. 57 The most profound depth, however, is revealed in those scenes relating the near-epiphanies and the epiphany itself. Building on what "ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it" (p. 187), he recognizes the bear as "too big for the very country which was its constricting scope" (p. 187) and the "epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life" (p. 188). Feeling the power of the bear when he senses that it is looking at him, he thinks later of "the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it" (p. 197). But all of his appreciation of what the wilderness means and of his searching for the essential nature of man is reached in the moment, after relinquishing all symbols of civilization, when the wilderness coalesced. It rushed, soundless, and solidified. . . . Then he saw the bear. It did not emerge, appear; it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him (p. 202). Later, another year, he has a chance to shoot the bear but refuses, without then realizing it, because he has been able to see Old Ben as a phantom of "an old dead time" which God had wanted man to live. Because of this mystic illumination, his attempt to live according to 58 his naturalistic principles is much more believable, and the resultant credibility from the reader is the effect of having experienced with him the flashes of recognition of eternal truths. Thus, -having re-experienced the portions of his life which he chooses to remember, Ike himself has created a stream which the reader must navigate in order to reach the sea of meaning. Faulkner has roiled the flow with currents, cross-currents, and undertov/s of interior monologues, time distortions, and compelling insights. The author has presented Ike as seeing himself as he v/as then, knowing what he does nov/, intermingling the two to produce the material of consciousness. CHAPTER II ECHOES OF FAULKNER In the novel Lie Down in Daxkness (1951), by William Styron, there are several qualities which are very similar to elements found in some of Faulkner's works/ especially in The Sound and the Fury: the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique; the handling of the time dimension; unusually well-developed characters;^ subject matterboth The Sound and the Fury and Styron's work deal with the deterioration of a Southern family; and' a haunting, tragic tone. It is the use of the stream techniques and the accompanying problem of "'the pro- 2 gression of time'" that perhaps offers the best evidence of Faulkner's lasting influence on fiction and of Styron's debt to Faulkner. The three main characters in Lie Down in Darkness reveal themselves in various interior mono- logues, of which one may be considered a soliloquy; but the consciousnesses of several minor characters are also presented. Evident also is some omniscient description. David D. Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin, 1966), pp. 53-54. 2 Matthiessen and Plimpton, "William Styron," Writers art Work, p. 275 as quoted in Galloway, The Absurd Hero, p. 53. 59 60 but this is usually inextricable from the indirect mono- logues. Sensory impression is used extensively, and a definite matrix of symbolism is apparent. These techniques and devices form the internal stream which combines with external action in presenting the Loftis family. There are four members in the Loftis family: Milton, the father; Helen, the mother; Maudie, a crippled and retarded daughter; and Peyton, the other daughter, willful, beautiful, and doomed. In their attempts to find a workable and loving relationship among themselves, they are constantly prohibited by their basic personalities. Milton and Helen love each other, but their life together is totally empty. Weak, alcoholic, and sexually frustrated, Milton has an affair of long duration with Dolly Bonner, but a deeper problem is a hidden incestuous longing for his daughter Peyton, Helen is frigid, precise, and excessively proper and has turned all her love toward the saintly Maudie, with a resulting increase in the amount of natural antipathy which she already holds toward Peyton, unwillingly recognizing in her a rivalry for Milton's love. After Maudie's death, Milton and Helen enjoy a false sense of peace and reconciliation, but at Peyton's wedding, the hatred which Helen has for Peyton results in a violent scene, and Milton resumes his drinking and his affair with Dolly. Peyton herself suffers from her 61 Electra complex and tries to escape in alcoholism and nymphomania. She eventually marries Harry, a New York Jew, but because of her disordered personality, the marriage is a failure. Peyton finally commits suicide, and at her graveside, Helen and Milton find that any sort of life together is impossible. The trip from the train station to the cemetery to bury Peyton forms the structural framework of the novel. The cortage is made up of only three cars: the hearse, v/hich frequently breaks dov/n; the family limousine, driven by the mortician, Mr. Casper, and carrying Milton, his mistress Dolly Bonner, and the faithful Negro servant, Ella iSv/an; and the last car, delayed in joining the pro- cession, carrying Helen and the Reverend Carey Carr. These are the characters whose consciousnesses are used to present the real storythe various- events which have led up to this moment. 3 The trip, in August of 1945, itself covers several hours, v/hich form the present time of the story. The reader is kept aware of this present time by brief scenes within the interiors of the two cars and at the stops caused by the faulty radiator of the hearse. As the party William Styron, Li^e Down in Darkness (New York, 1951), p. 9. Subsequent page references to this work are taken from the Signet edition. 62 is en route to the cemetery, various scenes of the country- side are presented, including the marshland, Negro sections of town, the Negroes on their way to Daddy Faith's revival, garbage dumps, a ramshackle gas station, and the shipyard. Of the seven chapters, five begin in the present and four end in the present, with brief scenes in the present time interspersed, except for the last one, within the chapters. Such a framewor'k proves most helpful because the transition between the times of the memory sequences, which constitute the bulk of the material, is very vaguemuch on the order of some of the cinematic devices, such as fade-ins, close- ups', and flashbacks. Such an indefinite form of transition is used in the following situation: Chapter 3 begins in the present of the limousine in the funeral cortege, narrated from an omniscient point of view in the first paragraph, but the narration centers upon Dolly's thoughts beginning in the second paragraph and continuing, in a varied manner, for eight pages (pp. 64-72) . This poirtion ends as she watches Milton drive away from the country club where they had spent the evening, the same evening that the news of Peyton's death is received, which ^//ould be the night before the trip to the cemetery. Seeing him drive away from her, she thinks; "It v/as just her woman's intuition. Oh, please, God. Again. He's going back to her. 63 Again" (p. 72) . With this faint connection found in the word "her," the narration immediately sv/itches to an earlier time at the clubbut not in Dolly' s mindwith the following sentence. The passage has been shortened by the addition of ellipses. Now here at the country club in August, 1939the time that Dolly remembered, that first timePeyton had had her sixteenth birthday which, to ^call back ancient history, was the day before the war began. There v/as talk about a Corridorand what was that?but in Port Warwick . . . Helen went around and around, dancing with Milton. . . . 'Oh, Milton,' she said, 'I'll sit this one out. I'm hot.' He smiled broadly. 'But, honey,' he said, *we just started.' She slid away from him. Don't be a ' Wet blanket. That's what he'd say. I'm so very hot. And tired. Then he danced v/ith Peyton. . . . He is not deceiving me. He nodded left and right to the young people v/ho danced around him (p. 73) . An examination of this passage reveals a number of things 4 about Styron's "technical virtuosity" ; first, there is a concealed transition in the phrase "the time that Dolly remembered, that first time." In the preceding passage concerned with Dolly, the moaning saxophone (at the club the night before the funeral trip) reminds her "of a dance right here, long ago. Peyton's birthday. The first 4 Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity (Nev/ York, 1958), p. 239. Also, Galloway, The Absurd Hero, p. 54. 64 time, after all the waiting, they had ever made love" (p. 72) . The details of "the first time" are revealed, piecemeal, on pages 84 and 92, after the long section devoted to Helen and an omniscient account of Peyton's actions. Further, the entrance to Helen's thoughts is very gradual; it is not until she silently finishes Milton's line of conversation that the reader knows whose viewpoint is being presented. Another problem raised by this transition is the means by which Helen is connected to the present of the funeral cortege. It is clear that Dolly is, but at this point in the narration, Helen has been present only in the memories of those who are in the limousine. Since the Helen portion (pp. 73-78) shifts to Peyton with an e^qual lack of connection to the present and v/ith no narrator in evidence, and since there are other such changes exhibiting a similar failure in clarity, it seems possible that Styron's "virtuosity" has led him into comiTiitting an error in structural unity. However, this density of time is frequently very effective in relaying the multiple layers of consciousness and the complexities of inner time in comparison to the temporal activity. In Chapter 5, Milton, overwrought, trying to avoid the reality of Peyton's death, feverish and nauseated, falls into a somnolent daze, and "visions white as sunlight . . . came to him briefly, vanished . . . 65 thinking of Helen . . . Charlottesville . . . Peyton. . . . He opened his eyes. . . . The hearse had stalled. . . (p. 143). At this point the narration takes up a time three years previous, the night before he drove to Charlottesville (in November of 1942) to be at Maudie's deathbed. Thinking of the situation of the last few years, before his drive to Charlottesville, he reviews the cold, heartless relationship with Helen, his "screened" affair with Dolly, and his growing alcoholism (pp. 143-46) . He remembers his helplessness where Peyton is concerned, and the memory of Christmas of 1941 is brought about (p. 146). This memory section, lasting for nearly twenty pages, involves his recognition of Helen's desperate attempt to reach him, his unhappiness at Peyton's refusal to spend all of her time at home, and the disastrous Christmas dinner, revealing Helen's deep-seated hate toward Peyton (pp. 146-63). Then, the next NovenuDer (1942), he remembers, Helen takes Maudie to Charlottesville, and he enjoys the next week of freedom, but it ends in a masochistic night of passion with Dolly in Helen's bed, where he is av/akened with a telephone message of Maudie's imminent death (pp. 165-178). He gets rid of Dolly and begins the drive to Charlottesville, thinking of Peyton and the glad possibility of seeing her and of Maudie (By-by, Pappadaddy), drinking from his pint, and arriving inebriated at the It 66 hospital (pp. 178-79). The narrative continues in this same time period (November, 1942), though the last few pages are an omniscient account of Peyton and Dickie Cartwright, the narration having abandoned Milton at the point when he shouts "Helenl" as a protest of her accusa- tion of Peyton as the cause of Maudie's final illness (p. 214). Thus, there are six or seven individual times employed in the narration of events which are remembered in the temporal space of a few minutes on the way to the cemetery. The transition from one time to another is much more smoothly devised, after the memory is once set in motion. The foregoing discussion has by no means fully explored the time progression employed in this novel, but perhaps it will have indicated the complexity with v/hich it is handled. The contrast of ext-ernal time with the internally infinite is a fundamental characteristic of the psychic processes. Psychic content is presented more fully in the numerous interior monologues in Lie Dov/n in Darkness, monologues which are associated not only with the three main characters but also with some of the secondary charactersDolly, Carey Carr, and even Mr. Casper. The monologues of the less important characters primarily perform the function of exterior commentary on the 67 principals and the events, but they also serve at the same time as intimate revelations of the speakers themselves. An indirect interior monologue of Dolly's, quoted below, reveals the activity in the presentthe tension generated by the journey itself, Milton's indifference, and her ov/n weak and selfish nature. Again ellipses have been used to shorten the passage. All at once the limousine gave a startling heave . , . she sank back . . . and clutched Loftis' hand. She felt Loftis draw his hand away: That's another time he's done it, she thoughtand it was then, looking up at him that she had her horrible premonition. He doesn't love me any more. He's going to leave me. The same premonition she had had last night. . . . She began to weep a little. . . .It's true, she thought, . . . Through a blurred film of melancholy she saw a brovrn wart at the base of Ella Sv/an's neck, unkempt strands of nigger hair turned gray. Ugly, Oh, Ugly (p. 65). Perhaps a better illustration of the self-revealing V nature of these monologues, and the insight into the main characters which they provide, is Dolly's direct interior monologue, a result of her withdrawal from Milton's interminable talk of Peyton. This is the last paragraph of the longer passage; His room. We go there how and he pays the nigger a dollar to keep the hall door locked and because of this I can awake on Sunday morning before he spirits me out as he says and feel the sunlight on my face and think well Dolly Loftis you've come a long way for a farm girl and think too as he says in the soft . 68 morning sunlight that there are miles to go before we sleep and miles to go before v/e sleep. . . (p. 71) . This passage has the mechanical aid of italics, a lack of punctuation, discontinuity, and privacy, all of which clearly indicate the direct form of interior monologue. It is also most revealing of her sensual, selfish, and secretive qualities. Being allowed this close to Dolly's inner thoughts at such an early point seems to indicate where her own reality resides; in her ability to receive, and respond to, passion. She is simply a recourse to Milton, and what little action she triggers in the story is brought about because of her physical relationship to him. Though to Helen she serves as an excuse for mis- treating Milton, it is shov/n later that this point of view is only Helen's form of rationalization (p. 283). To Peyton, Dolly is not important at all, for Peyton later tells Dickie: It would have been funny if it hadn't been so av/ful. Apologizing to me for that gruesome woman he's been running around with all these years. To mel Why would he dp that? As if I gave a damn. I wanted to tell him that it was a fine thing, only v\^hy didn't he get some- body with a little sav . . . savoir-faire? Why would he apologize to me? I just guess he's got to apologize to somebody,' (p. 222). Thus, just as Dolly is allowed only on the outer edge of the inner circle of society, she is also peripheral to the interests of the family, which she tries to destroy for her own selfish reasons. 69 Another interior monologue of a minor character is Mr. Casper's brief one (pp. 17-20), as he considers what he expects from grief-stricken relatives and the unnaturalness of the reactions of Helen Loftis earlier. His monologue serves as an entry into the scene between the two major participants, Helen and Milton, which takes place early in the morning of the present, showing their lack of communication, and what Mr. Casper considers to be strange behavior. He is thus shown as a fussy little man, concerned with appearance only, but he also serves as a point of reference for the evaluation of the actions of Helen and Milton in relation to external conventionality. Another minor character, second to Dolly in importance in relation to plot events, and an essential key to the secrets of Helen's character, is the Reverend Carey Carr. By degreesfrom the external account of his drive to the Loftises' on the morning of the funeral to the description of his character from some unknown voice (further evidence of Styron's vulnerability in structural unity?), and, finally, to the private information of his soul-search for a revelation of Goda gradual entrance into his psyche is accomplished. However, despite personal revelations of his own actions, reservations, self-judgments, and the like, most of his monologue is centered upon his past professional relationship with Helen Loftis (pp. 101-136) 70 In her disturbed emotional state of mind, Halen tries to seek refuge in religion, but she succeeds only in reaching a degree of self-understanding in the many talks she has with Carey Carr. His memory records in detail the content of ,their many conversations, at the same time registering his own secret reactions and opinions of what she is saying. Such a double vision is presented in the following excerpt: So, she told Carey, she yieldedto her pride, her hurt, her ov/n abominable selfishness. She got up and put her arm around Maudie and said to Milton, quite without emotion: 'Something has happened, Milton. Didn't I tell you? Peyton let her fall. I'll have to stay here.' And she turned and went upstairs v/ithout a word , more, to Peyton or anyone. After Helen had finished that part of her story, Carey remembered, he had been inclined at first to say: so what? He hadn't wanted to make all these snap judgments, but his initial pity for her had been tempered by a strong irritation: here was a woman who had been the dupe of life; but had been too selfish, too unwilling to make the usual compromise, to be happy. And although he didn't know her well, he would like to venture that she was also a complete prig. No wonder life had seemed a trap. All she had needed to do at certain times was to have a little charity, and at least measure the results. And he had told her so. . . . (pp. 118-19). The above quotation is typical of a great deal of the chapter (Chapter 4) devoted to Carey and Helen, though this selection is disproportionate in the amount of the repre- sentation of Carey's reactions. The major portion of the material actually becomes a dramatic soliloquy from Helen, 71 combined with a recorded audience-reaction from Carey. The dramatic presentation, however, is compounded for the reader in several ways: e.g., the reader hears what Helen is saying but recognizes that she wants and needs to believe her prejudiced version of the past; he reacts in sympathy to Carey's responses but also realizes Carey's own ineffectuality; and he is ultimately aware of an objective judgment imposed by the totality of his knowledge of others' views of the same events detailed by Helen. In the long run, the reader is presented with two subjective versions, both of which he must reconcile with his knov/- ledge of several other accounts, equally unreliable, of events and of people. Presenting as it does Helen's "confessions" and biased reports of her conscious responses, the passage becomes virtually Helen's, though Carey reveals himself in his mental recording of their conferences. This compounded vision, in its intricate suggestiveness, is as subtle and challenging as any other narration in this book, or those in many other books of more renown. Even though such interior monologues described in the preceding paragraphs are ample evidence of the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, the ultimate valida- tion is to be had from the exclusive monologuesnot just second-hand onesof the three main characters, Helen, Milton, and Peyton. Helen's monologuesmostly of the 72 indirect fonii but occasionally of the directare found in a number of passages throughout the book. One of the most effective passages is Helen's scene v/ith Carey at Peyton's wedding. Appealing to him for aid, she becomes embroiled in an emotional explanation, but as she rants, her cold, subterranean emotionshatred of men, and the need to dominate Milton, repressed mother-love, sexual frustration, the dependence upon propriety, and her conflicting need to be a part of Miltonall coalesce in her conscious recognition of the meaning of her recurrent dream: "And as she spoke she knew that it was not Dolly's legs, but Peyton' s which had shown v/ith the rainbow of decay, sprawled out so indecently in the dreaming, pestilential dust" (p. 287) . Although she realizes the meaning of her dream, never can she reconcile the tv/o worlds of inner demand and external compulsion. One of the best monologuesnotable for its richness of detail; its comical overtones, which constitute a travesty of Milton's desperate intensity; its bitter satire on the importance of sex; and its depiction of a compulsive search, v/hose object can offer only a deeper descent into despairis a part of Milton's attempt to locate Peyton in Charlottesville (pp. 186-205) . A fev/ selected passages are given below, with identification appended and a liberal use of ellipses; 73 In the KA house at noon there was an air of intense gaiety. Young people . . . the noise of horns and saxophones . . . calculated darkness. . . . Solitude, tv/o lovers together . . . piano . . . phonograph . . . girls' flushed pink faces . . . (pp. 186-87). The richness of detail shown above exists in many other monologues within this section. E.g.: And oh God: Pookie was saying it. 'How's Dolly, Milt?' 'She's--' he yearned to be three inches high'0,K., I guess.' 'What a swell kid,' Pookie went on. . . . You know what she wrote? She said, "Where'er you v/alk I'll think of you because there are miles more for both of us before we go to sleep.' . . (pp. 192-93). This, it seems, is comical, though there is bitterness and also satire on sexual relationships suggested. The follov/ing is likewise typical: while his conscience, reviving from the brown depths of the day, told him that it was true: sitting here ev.ading all, hiding his very identity among people for whom that fact, at least, was of no importance, he had committed the unpardonable crime. . . . And it seemed that if he didn't rise at this very moment, become sober, strike boldly, act like a man . . . (p. 198). Obviously, Milton's sense of compulsion here, absurd and alone as he is, requires a superhuman effort to forego inevitable dereliction and to continue his frenzied searching for Peyton. He thinks of his father's line; "Ah, for a man to arise in me, that the man I am should cease to be" (p. 199). Leaving the football game at this 74 point he tries to will himself into sobriety, and "murmuring I will be strong, I will be strong," he strikes out for the KA houseonly to fall into a culvert (p. 202) , Another monologue of Milton's, this one showing a deeper level of consciousness, occurs at Peyton's wedding. It is at the wedding that he finally faces up to his Freudian attachment to Peyton and realizes, at the same time, the source of the hatred between Helen and Peyton. Attempting to avoid the reality of the wedding, he allows his most inner thoughts to emerge, but this emergence produces the very thing he has tried to evade. The' passage, below, exhibits a part of this process. The ellipses are mine. /He/ felt unbelievably depressed, and neurotic, and he had to go to the toilet very badly; yet he only faintly knew the cause for these feelings, . . . /He/ gazed up now at /Peyton's/ back, to the place where her legs met her skirt made of some green stuff that looked like satin. . . . Why? Why this unbearable depression? Peyton's dress was drav/n tightly against her hips , . . it v/as too obvious or something. . . . Soon it would be over . . . he'd kiss her, she'd laugh, he'd shake hands v/ith Harry. . . . /He/ was suffering boundless, inexplicable anxiety, and consumed by the same hunger he had felt so gluttonously this very morning. It was different. But this hunger was different, because it was inverse and oppressive and awful. He felt that the room had suddenly shrunk to the dimensions of a small hothouse . . .his anxious hunger groped like antennae, seeking refuge and escape. . . . /He/ sav/ Peyton, those solid curved hips trembling ever so faintly; he 75 thought desperately, hopelessly, of something he could not admit to himself, but did: of now being abovemost animal and horrid, but lovingsomeone young and dear that he had loved ever since he v/as child enough to love the face of v/oman and the flesh, too. Yes, dear God, he thought (and he thought dear God, what am I thinking?) the flesh, too, the wet hot flesh, straining like a beautiful, bloody savage. . . . And his hunger went forth again, sending fingers through the crushed, vegetable air; only this time, helplessly, his thoughts became flaccid and wet and infantile . . . (pp. 257-259). Most of this passage is the indirect form of interior monologue, though there are places v/here it comes very close to the direct form. But it is in the Peyton section, in the last chapter of the book, that the purest form of stream of consciousness is revealed. Beginning by means of direct narration with a view of Potter's Field, a brief account of Harry's recovery of Peyton's body, and his recall of their meeting and courtship (pp. 310-17), the account then dissolves into Peyton's consciousness, covering the last few hours of her life. The number of events which actually happen in this section is rather limited. Stripped bare of the accompanying thoughts, memories, and minor sights and sounds, they occur in the following sequence: As this section begins, she is in her apartment with her current "lover," Tony Cecchino, a milk man. After their love-making, he leaves and she makes herself coffee. 76 dresses, and cleans the apartment. Taking the clock, so important to her disorderd mind, she leaves, encountering the landlady to whom she promises immediate payment, and starts out for Cornelia Street to find Harry. She stops for an espresso in a familiar cafe, continues on her way, then stops for a drink at a bar, where she meets a soldier with whom she converses for some time. Leaving the bar, shs has to ask for 'directions, even though the way is obviously very familiar to her, and pauses in front of a drug store for a bit; continuing tov/ard Cornelia Street, she is almost run over by a truck. When she reaches Lennie's place v/here Harry has been staying, she finds a note saying that he and Lennie have gone to Albert Berger's apartment. She takes a taxicab to Berger's place, where she begs Lennie to tell her where Harry is. She walks to the borrowed apartment, where he is painting; she pleads with him to come back to her and he at last agrees. Despite herself, she begins to accuse him of a perpetual lack of understanding, and he, in turn, throv/s her out, along v/ith her clock, which she has paid for with a hot check. She leaves and catches a subway and rides aimlessly for over one hundred city blocks. When the train stops, she gets off and finds a building with a loft. She climbs many flights to the top, finds the women's room, v/here she undresses completely, and then she jumps out of the window 77 to her death. (All events mentioned are taken from pages 316-368.) This long passage has most of the characteristics to be found in the accepted stream-of-consciousness method. The entire section is one paragraph, with no hiatus in the print except for the first ten lines (in italics) and the last two lines, consisting of a total of five words. In addition to the disregard of normal paragraph divisions, there is a lack of standard syntax, with many fragments and frequent run-on sentences. But much more than mechanics of style points to the stream-of-consciousness technique; There is a great employment of free association, symbols, and sensory impressions. Basically, following Humphrey's use of the term, the section might be said to be one long soliloquy. The following excerpt is taken from the portion detailing her thoughts while on the subway: Then the cry againflov/ahs I flowahs 1and the fading hooves along the cobblestones, beneath the sheltering cedars, vanishing flov/ahs flowahs into my dreams, in a strange bed, in a strange land. And I thought then, oh Bunny, v/hat has happened to me that I hate myself so today; Albert Berger said that I was blocked up in my sexual area but I know something else and so. Bunny, I would tell Albert Berger a misery: behold, we have not been brought up right and my memory of flowers and summer and larkspur is conjoined equally with pain: that all my 6 Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, 1962), p. 30. 78 dying. That when I lay down in Richmond in Grandmother's bed I saw her picture on the wall so benignly smiling, even on that day I heard the flov/er man clipclop along beneath the cedars, moved and peered at it in my slumber through half-closed eyes; a face that once rushed Longstreet's beard preserved behind the nacreous glass, still smiling and with a bulge of snuff: and I reached out my arms,cried mother mother mother, that image even then twenty years before turned to.bones and dust. The train stopped at a station . . . (p. 366). This passage qualifies as a soliloquy because the manner of expression implies an audience, and the content is concerned v/ith her emotions and ideas relating to the plot and action revealed in the foregoing pages of the novel. In this excerpt the reader follows her thoughts back to a time v/hen she v/as a child, with her father \7atching her as she napped and dreamed, thinking of the old Negro peddler, a process which makes her think of a strange bed, which in turn reminds her of her father and of her sexual relationships and v/hat a friend had remarked about them. The phrase "when I lay down in Richmond" is a transforma- tion of a recurrent thought, "when I lay dov/n in Darien with Earl Sanders," related to one of her several affairs. The reference to "a face that once brushed Longstreet's beard" is to her grandfather, told about by Bunny much earlier. Of course, the cry for "mother" is a reflection of her need for the mother-love v/hich she has never had. 79 In the passage as a whole, there are numerous recordings of physical sensations, both present and past, each usually with its own groups of associations. The most frequent sounds she hears, or imagines hearing, are thunder or guns, and the rustle of birds' feathers. Her sight perceptions frequently emphasize darkness, and wingless and flightless birds. Thirst, both for alcohol and v/ater, is the taste most often mentioned. The sense of smell, hov/ever, is not pictured exclusively in any one pattern; it varies from the smell of milk associated with Tony to a sour smell, most often that of sweat, which she connects with the Negro servant La Ruth. Pain in the form of menstrual cramps is the most consistently mentioned feeling. All of these sensations become part of the larger patterns of symbols. The first object, which is already a symbol to Peyton, is the alarm clock, with its endless time, repre- senting her "womb all jeweled and safe" (p, 329) where "all hope lies beyond memory" (p. 355) ; "the soaring dark soul-closet, lit only by jewels through the endless night . . . sheltered from the sun and drom dying, amid the jewels and wheels" (p. 356). After Harry refuses to have any more to do v/ith her, including the new clock, she walks away"with everything gone . . . " hearing "the last ticking, all /her/ order and all /her/ passion. 80 globed from the atoms in the swooning, slumbrous, eternal light" (p. 364)and throws the clock into a drain. Another symbol woven throughout the entire passage is that of water, in various forms, and the connected idea of drowning, ranging from "aqueous twilight" (p, 367) and "gallons of water to drink" (p. 366) to her repeated remark, "I's drowning," There are many such references, including objects associated with the sea, such as sand, sea gulls, and shells. It is her thoughts of the sea that most often lead her into some specific memory of her father. As she tells Harry in their last interview, speaking of herself and Bunny, "Once I had belief. When we v/alked along the sand and picked up shells" (p. 360). When she earlier tells Lennie that she is drov^nling, she remembers another time, a summer long ago: Once we went dovm where they were painting a boat on the beach: I remembered Bunny's hand, and the v/ay sand came up betv^/een my toes, the paint chemical and hot on the swarming sumiier air, swimmers beyond and gulls floating in the blinding blue; then he squeezed my hand and I remembered remembering I_ will remember this forever (p. 352). At Albert Berger's apartment, she watches a friend, "yet I watched her through water for a moment, my drowning, the submarine cave, the dwarf shapes floor-sprav/led, all immersed in transparent aqueous light. The voices came up as from the bottom of the sea" (p. 350); and the clock. 81 "perfect, complete, perpetual" (p. 319), makes her feel "sheltered from the sky like drowning, only better: the sun within submarine, aqueous, touching the polished steel with glints and flickers of eternal noonday light . . . " (p. 323) . In this manner the two symbols, water and clock, are intertwined. A further examination shows that for her both symbols are connected with the sex act, and that all references to t'hese tv/o objects lead to thoughts of her father Bunny or of Harry, her husband whom she tries to make into a father-substitute. The birds, however, are the most frequently used symbol, both specific kinds of birds and her special "wingless ones," Each reference, like water and her clock, is directly associated with sex, v/ith the men she has knov/n, and with her father. Rememberingwhen she first met Tonythat their conversation included talk of birds, she goes on trying to think; "There were birds in my mind, landbound birds whirling about, dodos and penguins and cassowaries, ostriches befouling their lovely black plumes, and these seemed mixed up with Bunny" (p, 325) . As she makes coffee, feeling the cramp recede, she thinks of "big birds with arched hobbling necks and skin beneath their legs, as big as stilts . . . yet these, along with all the others, stood flightless in my mind, and noiseless, leaving me alone; I feel better" (p. 326). It is the 82 noise of their rustling and their approach across the sand that she finds so disturbing, and it is the thought of sexual relations that causes the birds to be animated in her mind. When she thinks of Earl Sanders"the birds came back . . . and the birds came in a scamper across the darkening sand, /an47 surrounded /her/ once more" (p. 327) . Likewise, when she thinks of home, she believes that the birds follov/ her, "the flightless birds that /ihe/ couldn't see . . . " but "peaceful and without menace, ruffling their silent plumes." The first time she had dreamed about birds was after she and Dickie had first made love (p. 329) ; and because when they awoke Dickie r became frustrated, the dream becomes symbolic of her inability to respond sexually. This withholding of her- self in the ultimate sense is connected in her mind with the clock, symbolizing her womb as safe, where maybe inside the perfection of the clock she and Harry can have babies (pp. 329-330). In thinking of Harry and herself "dozing across the springs the wheels, the cogs and levers, all these should give way, run down; then our womb v/ould fall, we'd hear the fatal quiet, the dreadful flutter and lurch earthward instead of the fine ascent" (p. 332), the symbols are interlocked in the word flutter. On other occasions, also, the words flutter and whir are used in description of the clock. 83 In the scene in the bar when the soldier tries to strike up a mutual acquaintance in Tony, the "poor wingless ones" come again, as she thinks of Tony, Bunny, and Harry (p. 333). In remembering her first time with Earl Sanders, when he had hurt her physically, she recalls, "It was the first time I saw the birds, alive, apart from dreams . . . and I knew I v/as paying Harry back for his defection so small, I drowned on the terrace and when I slept afterwards I dreamt of drowning too" (p, 334). Thus it can be seen that not only are the birds connected to the clock but also to the recurrent drowning image. As she says, "Guilt is the very thing with feathers" (p. 335), and it appears that hers is the best interpretation of the symbolic birds; she also thinks of the clock as the place where "all our guilt will disappear among the ordered levers and wheels, in the aqueous ruby-glinting sun" (p. 337). But the source of guilt is even deeper, as re- vealed by her thoughts as she converses v/ith Albert Berger about Harry, v/hen she silently cries: "Don't I know my own torture and my own abuse? How many times have I lain dov/n to sin out of vengeance, to say .so he doesn't love me, then here is one that will, to sleep then and dream about the birds, and then to wake , , , and think my life hath kno\'m not father . . . " (p. 351) ; and with additional 84 information a bit later, it is apparent that "he" is Bunny. Later as she talks to Harry, she wants to tell him, "Oh, my Harry, my lost sv/eet Harry, I have not fornicated in the darkness because I v/anted to but because I v/as punishing myself for punishing you: yet something far past dreaming or memory, and darker than either, impels me, and you do not know, for once I woke, half-sleeping, and pulled away, No, Bunny, I said. That fright" (p, 359). Further on, she adds to this interpretation of her guilt when she wants to say that she has sinned "only in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new father, a new home" (p. 362) , At the close of this passage, as she jumps through space, "a guilt past memory or dreaming, much darker, impels" her, and from a broken prayer to the Lord, she thinks of her father, and inviting her "poor flightless birds" to "come then and fly," she says, "I am dying. Bunny, dying" (p, 368) After a brief return to Helen and Milton at the cemetery, the few remaining pages detail the revival scene where Daddy Faith preaches to the Negroes, among them Ella Sv/an, who alone survives the debacle of the family whom she has v/atched over for so many years. One is reminded of Faulkner's Dilsey, whose observation about the Compson family could so easily be Ella Swan's feeling about the 85 Loftis family: "'I've seed de first en de last . . . I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin,'"'^ From the foregoing it may be seen that Lie Down i.n Darkness is a typical example of the modern stream-of- consciousness novel. There are the indirect interior monologues of Loftis, Helen, Dolly Bonner, and others; and most clearly, there is the soliloquy of Peyton, with its combination of the internal stream and external action. Structurally, the funeral entourage on its way to the cemetery provides the reader with an adequate framework for the unities of action, time, and place, although the real action has really already occurred before the trip. With respect to typography, there is the familiar absence, characteristic of stream-of-consciousness fiction, of con- ventional paragraphing, syntax, and punctuation, especially notable in the Peyton section, but also present from time to time in the indirect interior monologues. Finally, there is extensive use of symbols and sensory impressions. The novel is clear evidence of the continuance of the in- fluences of Faulkner's incorporation of the stream-of- consciousness techniques into the context of modern American fiction. 7 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York, 1946), p. 313. CHAPTER III THE SEARCH OF THE ANTI-HERO Continuing in the same vein as William Styron earlier, John Updike, in the late fifties and early sixties, uses an adaptation of the stream-of-consciousness technique, especially in Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). David D. Galloway calls Updike "one of the most skillful stylists of our age." An examination of Rabbit, Run may show that part of the impression of stylistic excellence comes from Updike's employment of a number of approaches generally agreed upon as belonging to the stream-of- consciousness technique. Certainly this novel presents the psychological aspects of characters, by means which Humphrey suggests as distinctively identifiable with the stream-of-consciousness 2 novel, letting each character's personality unfold in his 3 own language or flow of being, as Faulkner does. By using the stream-of-consciousness method extensively, Updike David D. Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1966), p. 48 2 Humphrey, Stream, p. 1. 3 Warren, "Faulkner," p. 130. 86 87 has succeeded both in producing sympathy for characters who do not have strong virtues to recommend them and in creating stronger characters than a more conventional approach, restricted to surface action and external reality, might have achieved. Updike's most frequently used devices are centralized points of view; sensory impression; montage; omniscient description; interior monologues--with the usual disregard of formal syntax and punctuation; lack of inhibition; and a limited use of images capable of develop- ing into symbols. A structural pattern of a formal scenic arrangement can be discerned in Rabbit, Run, although it does not serve as a clearly unifying element. One additional feature which qualifies this novel as belonging to the stream category is its subject matterthe anti-hero dis- illusioned with society. Modern man is frequently pictured as rebelling against a society of commercialism, conven- tionality, and conformity. This rebellion is most often represented in a character who possesses more attributes of the typical villain than of the traditional hero, and his actions very often depict a betrayal of conventional morality. In order to enlist the understanding, at least, of the reader, a number of twentieth-century authors among them, Updikehave chosen the stream-of-consciousness method as a means of portraying a less-than-sympathetic character in his stiruggles to find significance in a meaningless world. 83 The story is, essentially, that of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom. Perhaps the surname itself is designed to evoke the word angst, which is so v/ell demonstrated in his search for "something out there that wants /him/ to find it" (p. 107). A former basketball star, he is disillusioned with the materialistic, middle-class society to which he is expected to conform. In Galloway's definition of the term. Rabbit is a rebel in refusing to avoid both his 4 desire for unity and the meaninglessness of life. He manifests his rebellion by leaving his simple v/ife, engaging in an affair with a prostitute, and rem.aining outside the moral laws of the Christian religion, although his angst and Lutheran upbringing seem to lead him in that direction. His search for meaning is unrewarded, but the novel ends on a note of hope by his reaching for the future in a continuing search, expressing this determination and freedom from his conventional life as "he runs. Ah: runs. Runs" (p. 255).^ The story is presented in a basically straight- forward fashion, covering about three months. One character- istic common to the stream-of-consciousness technique is 4 Galloway, Absurd Hero, p. 18. This page reference, as well as all following page references, is to the Crest edition of Rabbit, Run by John Updike (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1962) 89 a violation of chronology, but there is to be found only a limited use of this device in this novel. What digression from the sequential progress there is is to be found in the memory passages, which are always occasioned by some- thing in the-immediate present. The following excerpt exemplifies this procedure; Rabbit and Janice have just engaged in a verbal bout, v/hich ends with Janice angry and himself tiredly disgusted. She goes into the kitchen to begin supper preparations, and an immediate transition, within the same paragraph, is made to his thoughts; She should be really sore, or not sore at all, since all he had said v/as what he had done a couple hundred times. Maybe a thousand times. Say, on the average once every three days since 1956. What's that? Three hundred. That often? Then why is it alv/ays an effort? She used to make it easier before they got married. She could be sudden then. Just a girl. Nerves like new thread. Skin smelled like fresh cotton. Her girl friend at work had an apartment in Brev/er they used. . . . After v/ork, working both at Kroll's then, she selling candy and cashews . . . and he lugging easy chairs and maple end tables around on the floor above . . .his palms black and Chandler the dandy mincing in every hour on the hour telling him to v/ash his hands so he wouldn't foul the furniture. Lava soap . . . (p. 15) . /Ellipses mine^ Such abrupt switches to the interior of a character's mind are typical of the other memory passages. Other instances where chronology is not straight- forward are to be found in sections detailing events con- cerned with other characters, events which took place 90 simultaneously with those detailed in prior sections. For example. Rabbit and Ruth, after a short visit to a night club, return to her apartment, where Rabbit requires her to perform a sexual act distasteful to her (pp. 153-57). Following immediately with only a hiatus in the print, the next section shows Lucy, the Reverend Eccles' wife, telephoning various places trying to get in touch v\rith her husband because Janice's mother has called to say that the baby is about to be born (pp. 157-59) . These events, although one follows the other, occur in point of time concurrently with Rabbit's and Ruth's night club visit and' the apartment scene following. All events in the novel, regardless of time of occurrence, are invariably narrated in the present tense, a factor that gives the effect of continuous forv/ard progress. As the foregoing discussion.indicates, there are frequent sv/itches in point of view. Ostensibly, the v/hole story is told from an impartial third-per son observer, but this impression is soon dispelled with a very early entrance into the mind of Rabbit. However, the narration is not totally restricted to the third-person and to Rabbit's mind, for, early in the second division of the three sections comprising the book, there is a transition from Rabbit's thoughts to Ruth's mind, and the passage becomes an interior monologue (pp. 122-25), After a very brief return to 91 Rabbit and Ruth at the beach, the next passage focuses on Eccles, with scattered portions of it concerned with his consciousness (pp, 126-44), Then after a hiatus in printing, a return to Rabbit's consciousness is made (p, 144) The remainder of this middle division follov/s this pattern of frequent switches to various characters, including a very important portion devoted to a sustained account of Janice's mind (pp, 207-220). There are periodic returns to Rabbit, through whom the sense of progressive action in the novel is eventually conveyed. In the final division, after a brief opening interlude concerned with Eccles (pp. 221-23), the remainder is presented from the point of view of Rabbit's consciousness. Occasiona]dy, these transitions seem a bit unwieldy being somewhat arbitraryand contribute toward a feeling of fragmentation. The mechanical structure, hov/ever, actually reenforces rather than weakens the action, since the events and the accompanying emotions reach a culmina- tion, in the second division, of confusion, frantic be- havior, and tragic consequences. Also, these shifts in point of view among the consciousnesses of Rabbit, Ruth, Janice, and Eccles, allov/ each character "to unfold in his own language," much as Faulkner does in some of his books. See above, p. 4. 92 An outstanding elementand another device of the stream-of-consciousness techniquesused in this book, is sensory impression, often in connection with movement from place to place. During the first attempt at running away from dissatisfying circumstances. Rabbit, temporarily lost, tries to examine the road map: His eyes blankly founder. Rabbit hears a clock in "h^is head beat, monstrously slow, the soft ticks as far apart as the sound waves on the shore he had wanted to reach. He burns his attention through the film fogging his eyes dovm into the map again. At once "Frederick" pops into sight, but in trying to steady its position he.loses it, and fury makes the bridge of his nose ache. The names melt away and he sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net he is somev/here caught in. He claws at it and tears it . . . until he has a wad he can squeeze in his hand like a ball. He rolls down the windov/ and throv/s the ball out; it explodes, and the bent scraps like disembodied v/ings flicker back over the top of the car . . . (p. 34), Here, the series of impressions convey his sense of frus- tration and despair. It is also during this trip that a number of scenes become almost a list of sights, as the following passage shows: He comes into Brewer from the south, seeing it as a gradual multiplication of houses among the trees beside the road and then as a treeless waste of industry, show factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronic parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash-filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick (p. 36). 93 The foregoing is one paragraph and one sentence; however, the sentence gives an impression of being several, because of the wealth of details. The sense of movement is con- veyed by the repetitive use of a,nd to connect the successive impressions. Clearly, it is Rabbit's consciousness which is used here, a fact that is apparent not only from the direct statement, "seeing it , . , " but also from the more subtle clues of "elephantine," "lifting above," and so on. It is, however, as might be expected, in the scenes concerned with sex that the most vivid sensory impressions occur. But these scenes are deliberately intensified because almost all of them are perceived through Rabbit's consciousness and are designed to help the reader under- stand his overpowering need to communicate, in the deepest sense, v/ith his fellov/-man. This need is more than simple gratification; it is an urgency to become identified with man. The following passage, abbreviated, will show both the abundance of sensory impression and the desire to 7 "express his compassionto embrace the very soul of man:" Taste, salt and sour, sv/irls back with his own saliva. She rolls away . . . the precious red touch breaking, tv/ists. Cool new skin . . . and closes his eyes on the food of her again, . . . He wants time to stretch long, to great length and thinness. As they deepen together he feels impatience that through all 7 Galloway, Absurd Hero, p. 31. 94 their twists they remain separate flesh. . - . She floats through his blood as under his eyelids a salt smell, damp pressure, the sense of her smallness , , . and the ache at the parched root of his tongue each register their colors (p. 72), /Ellipses mine./ That such an ultimate spiritual union with the world as that suggested in this passage is denied him does not prevent him from continuing his search. And this he does throughout the novel. Understanding the unexpressed need in Rabbit creates sympathy for a character who otherv/ise might be seen as undeseirving of serious study. Closely associated v/ith the extensive use of sensory impression in Rabbit, Run is the cinematic device of montage, with some accompanying omniscient description, v/hich occurs from time to time in the novel. These passages are largely restricted to Rabbit's perceptions, although the use of third-person point of view may at first be mis- leading. The most effective use of this device is at times of spatial movement. For example, the following excerpt is at a point, early in the story, when Rabbit is going home, running for sheer enjoyment. The ellipses are mine. . . . Running uphill. Past a block of big homes, fortresses of cement and brick inset with doorways of stained and beveled glass and windows of potted plants, and then halfway up another block, which holds a development built all at once in the Thirties, The frame homes climb the hill like a single staircase. . . . Two tan windows, wide-spaced like the eyes of an animal . . . composition shingling varying in color from bruise to dung. The fronts are 95 clapboards, weathered and white except for those gaps which individual o\^mers have painted green and barn-red and v/heat-color . . . (p. 10) . This passage, typical of many others in the way it is brought in and in the manner of expression, is a somev/hat more formal type of montage than that displayed in montage sections employed by many other writers. Here, however, the perceptions are fully formulated, and at the same time give the impression of swift, successive stages of movement, Also, there are a number of places which clearly indicate that these things appear that v/ay to Rabbit, A few pages later. Rabbit is again on his way to another place, this time to his mother-in-law's-house, and the montage method is used to convey his passage, to deepen the reader's understanding of Rabbit as a sentient and sensitive person, and to build a more realistic setting. Selected phrases from this section also convey many sen- sory impressions, as the following passage shows. Again the ellipses have been used for the sake of brevity. Outisde it is growing dark and cool. The Norwegian maples exhale the smell of their sticky nev^ buds . . , silver patch of a tele- vision set . . . warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves. He walks downhill . , , He now and then touches with his hand the rough bark of a tree or the dry- twigs of a hedge, to give himself the small answer of a texture, , , . A mailbox stands leaning, . . . Tall two-petaled street sign, the cleat-gouged trunk of the telephone pole holding its insulators against the sky, fire hydrant like a golden bush: a grove. . . . The insulators giant blue eggs in a windy nest. 96 As he walks along Potter Avenue the wires at their silent height strike into and through the crowns of the breathing maples (p. 17). The passage continues, similarly at some length, until he finally reaches his parents' duplex, at which point the narration takes a definite inward turn into his memory. Updike's consistent use of the cinematic device is illustrated by a very brief excerpt, with ellipses added, from a long passage in the middle division of the book, as follows; He runs most of the way to the hospital. Up Summer one block, then down Youngquist, a street parallel to Weiser on the north, a street of brick tenements and leftover business - places, shoe-repair nooks smelling secretively of leather, darkened candy stores, insurance agencies with photographs of tornado damage in the v/indows, real estate offices lettered in gold, a bookshop. . . . The railroad tracks . . . slide between walls of blackened stone soft with soot like moss through the center of the city, threads of metal deep belov/ in a dark.aess like a river, taking .narrov/ sunset tints of pink from the neon lights. . . . Music rises to him. The heavy boards of the old bridge, waxed black v/ith locomotive smoke, rumble under his feet. . . . He runs harder . . . parking meters begin . . . a new drive-in bank . . . a limestone church . . . the clicks of a billiard game . . . an old Negro sweeping up in green aquarium light. Now the pulpy seeds of some tree are under his feet. . . . The St. Joseph's parking lot is a striped asphalt square. . . . He sees the moon . . . stops stark on his small scrabbled shadow on the asphalt to look up toward the heavenly stone that mirrors with metallic brightness the stone that has risen inside his hot skin. Make .it be all right, he prays to it, and goes in the rear entrance (p. 162). 97 Physical movement, detailed sensory perceptions, and emotion are all presented here. In a final passage of montage. Rabbit is not only physically running but also running away, away from the tangled emotions and misunderstanding of everyone at the graveside. Intense feeling is characteristic of this portion, and the setting of a patch of woods on the mountain crest reenforces the primitive atmosphere. A selection, shortened by means of ellipses, which exempli- fies these elements follov/s; Rabbit crouches and runs raggedly. His hands and face are scratched . . . Deeper inside there is more space. The pine trees smother all other growth. Their brov/n needles muffle the rough earth v>rith a slippery blanket; sunshine falls in narrow slots on this dead floor. It is dim but hot in here. . . . Dead lo\>:er branches thrust at the level of his eyes. . . . He turns to see if he has left the people behind. . . . No one is following. Far off . . . glov^/s . . . perhaps the green of the cemetery. . . . In turning he loses some sense of direction. But the tree-trunks are at first in neat rows, that carry him along between them, and he walks always against the slope of the land. . , , Only by going downhill can he be returned to the others. . . . These are older trees. The darkness under them is denser and the ground is steeper. Rocks jut up through the blanket of needles, scabby with lichen; collapsed trunks hold intricate claws across his path. . . . Pausing . . . he becomes conscious . . . of a whisper that fills the brov/n tunnels all around him. . . . The surrounding trees are too tall for him to see any sign, even a remote cleared landscape, of civilization. , , , He becomes frightened, . . . He struggles against his 98 impulse to keep turning his head . . . but his fear fills the winding space betv/een the tree-trunks with agile threats, (pp. 245-46), In this excerpt can be seen traces of omniscient description- Humphrey's term to denote that which expresses the psychic life of a character. Certainly, a great deal of inner feeling affects what he experiences in the tangible world presented here. Other scenes in which minute details are noted by the consciousness of Rabbit may be found at points where a sense of the passage of time is necessary, as in Mrs. Smith's parlor (p. 185), or where a series of little details convey a sense of day-to-day action, as in the section con- cerning Rabbit and his son's activities while Janice is still in the hospital (pp. 187-90). Perhaps one of the most effective uses of montage in the novel is in the funeral parlor scene, where the multiplicity of details emphasizes the ugliness, the obscenity connected v/ith the death of the innocent (pp. 239-42), Montage, expressing action and coexistence of the inner with the outer life, forms an important element in the stylistic technique of this book. A further feature of the stream-of-consciousness method in Rabbit, Run may be found in the interior mono- logues used in the book. There are three characters whose inner thoughts are presented at some length, and the con- sciousness of the main character is given in various forms 99 throughout the book. Some of these portions which may be designated as interior monologues seem, at first, to be the indirect form, in which the words of the author are used and in which directed thinking and rational control are apparent.- However, upon closer examination, many of these monologues seem more clearly direct interior mono- logues, the form of the monologue in which the psychic content is partly or entirely unuttered. A look at a passage focused on the Reverend Jack Eccles may serve to illustrate the more indirect classification. Early in the middle section of the book, the reader is allowed into the mind of Eccles, who until nov/ has been seen through Rabbit's consciousness. With an abrupt shift from Ruth and Rabbit at the beach, the narration centers upon Eccles v/ith this statement: "Making awkv/ard calls is agony for Eccles; at least anticipation of them is.
Usually the dream is worse than the reality: so God has disposed the world. The actual presences of people are always bearable" (p, 126), Combined with Eccles, actions in visiting the Springers, then Rabbit's parents, and finally, the Lutheran pastor, Kruppenbach, is a pro- gressive penetration into his thoughts. The process ranges from his impression of Mrs. Springer as "a long-suffering fat factory wife" (p. 127), to Harry (Rabbit) as "a son of the morning" (p, 127), and to his congregation, which is 100 like Mrs. Springer's "talk of the smiling gossip encircling this affair , , . surrounding him with a dreadful reality, like the reality of those hundred faces . , , on Sunday mornings at 11:30" (p. 129). When Mrs. Springer at one point mentions calling the police, he reacts silently as follows; He seems to hear that she is going to call the police to arrest him. Why not? With his white collar he forgets God's name on every word he speaks. He steals belief from the children he is supposed to be teaching. He murders faith in the minds of any who really listen to his babble. He commits fraud v/ith every schooled cadence of the service, mouthing Our Father when his heart knows the real father he is trying to please, has been trying to please - all his life. When he asks her, "What can the police do?" he seems to himself to mean what can they do to him, (pp. 129-30). On leaving the Angstroms, Eccles "gets into his car thirsty and vexed. There was something pleasant said in the last half-hour but he can't remember what it was. . . . He's scratched . . .he's spent an afternoon in a bramble patch. . . . Down there between the brambles there seamed to be no Harry at all . . . " (p. 140). This and a passage almost immediately following, in Kruppenbach's den from where he sees the golf course and thinks of lying to Mrs. Angstrom about Harry and his golf, provide the most intimate knov/ledge of Eccles except for sporadic glimpses in the remaining pages. 101 The several quotations just cited can be seen as the words of the author in presenting Eccles' thoughts and feelings. There is, hov/ever, some penetration into his flow of being, suggested in his thoughts of the church and his failure, and in his feeling that he has physically been scratched by Mrs. Springer's words, though she has not even touched him. The reader, despite this intimacy, remains aware that Eccles' thoughts are being presented through an unknov/n narrator, and rational control is apparent. This method is in keeping with the character of Eccles and with his relative importance to the story. He is not the focus of concern and so must remain beyond the reader's grasp until he is perceived through Rabbit. That his mind is conveyed at this second-hand level seems to point up that portion of society, orthodox Christianity, which Rabbit finds so unsatisfactory. Another interior monologue is a long passage concerned with Ruth. During the beach scene, Ruth angrily asks Rabbit if he does not think that he will ever "have to pay the price" for deserting Janice; v/ith these words, her eyes begin to sting with tears and she turns av^ay to hide them, "thinking. That's one of the signs" (p. 122). Then, for more than three pages, her thoughts ramble, from the tell-tale signs of her pregnancy, to Rabbit; to men in general whom she has known in her role as a 102 prostitute; to certain forms of the sex act; to her high school days and her first experiences; and then back to Rabbit and her desire to tell him, "I can't, you dope, don't you know you're a father 1" (p. 125). The passage continues in her mind for a space and then comes back to the present to the sound of Rabbit's answer to her earlier question about paying: "'If you have the guts to be your- self, other people'11 pay your price'" (p. 125). All of the material between the question and its answer is in two paragraphs, the division marking the end of her thoughts of the past and the beginning of the immediate, pressing problem of Rabbit and his possible reaction on finding out that she is pregnant. Also, there is a dis- regard of normal syntax and punctuation, typified in the following brief excerpt: "But there isn't much taste to it a little like seawater, just harder work than they probably think, v/omen are always v/orking harder than they think" (p. 123). Here, too, can be seen other qualities to be found in the stream-of-consciousness technique: discontinuity and private implications, and absence of inhibition. Ruth's monologue may be classified as a direct interior monologue because it is her language and her style of expression that are used and because there is evidence of free association with little rational control. That 103 the passage never reaches the incoherence of many instances of the stream-of-consciousness mode is in keeping with Ruth's nature of placidity and resignation. The monologue allows for insight into her real character and creates sympathy in the mind of the reader for a character who at first seems to possess all of the less desirable qualities of one in her trade. As a by-product of this insight and sympathy. Rabbit is given another dimension, because he is seen not through his own consciousness, nor through the reader's sensibility, but through the eyes of a third person. In the Janice section of the fragmented middle division, a number of elements come together to form a sustained passage, thirteen pages long, in v/hich there are actions, interior monologue, memory, incoherence, and hallucination. The actions cover the second time that Harry runs away (this time after they have brought the new baby home from the hospital) leaving Janice with the care of the two children. She attempts to tend to them, but in the process gets drunk and accidentally drowns the infant. An excerpt from near the beginning of this section will show the state of her mind; Mother's neighbors will laugh their heads off if she loses him again, she doesn't know why she should think of Mother's neighbors except that all the time she was home Mother kept reminding her of hov/ they sneered and 104 there was alv/ays that with Mother the feeling she was dull and plain and a disappointment, and she thought when she got a husband it would be all over, all that. She would be a woman v/ith a house on her o\m. And she thought when she gave this baby her name it would settle her mother but instead it brings her mother against her breast with her blind mouth poor thing and she feels she's lying on top of a pillar where everyone in the tovm can see she is alone. She feels cold. The baby won't stay on the nipple nothing will hold to her, (p, 208) , The run-on sentence structure clearly portrays the frantic feeling underlying her actions; the content gives a clue to the reason for her neurotic behavior and reveals the shallov/ness of her thinking. She is reminded of Harry v/hen her night govm blows against her, and the passage then develops into an interior monologue, which may be considered a direct one because her language and her manner of expression are used, as seen in the follov^ring excerpts. Ellipses again are used to reduce the length of the passage. If there would be a scratch at the lock and he v/ould come in the door he could do whatever he wanted with her have any part of her if he wanted what did she care that was marriage, , , . And then his going off to church and coming back full of juice. . , . What did he and God talk about behind the backs of all these v/omen exchanging winks that v/as the thing she minded if they'd just think about love v/hen they make it instead of thinking about whatever they do think about think about whatever they're going to do whenever they've got rid of this little hot clot that's bothering them. , . , Just plain rude. Here he called her dumb when he was too dumb to have any idea of how she felt any idea of how his going off had 105 changed her and how he must nurse her back not just wade in through her skin v/ithout having any idea of what was there. That was what made her panicky ever since she was little this thing of nobody knowing hov/ you felt and v/hether nobody could knov/ or nobody cared she had no idea. She didn't like her skin, never had it was too dark made her look like an Italian even if she never did get pimples like some of the others /sic/ girls and then in those days both working at Kroll's she on the salted nuts when Harry would lie down beside her on Mary Hannacher's bed the silver wallpaper he liked so much and close his eyes it seemed to melt her skin and she thought it was all over she v/as with somebody. But then they were married. . . (p, 209) . Farther on, she begins to feel as if there is someone watching her, and this feeling becomes the conviction of hallucination as "she determines to ignore him" (p. 217). The section ends as "her sense of the third person with them widens enormously, and she knows, knows, v/hile knocks sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her" (p. 220), These quotations show, first, incoherence, indicated by the fragmentary sentence structure; second, lack of inhibition, even though she is earlier shocked v/hen Harry has made her feel "filthy they don't even have decent names for parts of you" (p, 208); and third, the neurotic tendencies of her thought and memory, all couched in the hurried, frantic phrasing of her mind. It is note- worthy that all of the longer quotations are from the time previous to her having a drink. The alcoholic haze, which 106 later develops, is cleverly built step by step, with her first small drink, "with no ice cubes because the noise of the tray might wake the children" (p. 211) ; then the next one, "stronger than the first, thinking that after all it's about time she had a little fun" (p. 211); and the third one because Harry's "absence is a hole that widens and she pours a little whisky into it but it's not enough" (p, 212), This process continues until she is so dazed that she drinks the stale glassful left in the bath- room while preparing to bathe the baby, who is drowned in the bathtub shortly thereafter (pp,'218-220). One can see in this extended section reasons for much of Janice's behavior, as well as reflections of events in the development of the plot, and motivation for future action. The feeling of helpless rage at her bungling, her shallowness, her pettiness is developed sufficiently to provide a sympathetic reaction instead to Rabbit's past actions and those to follo-^. As is evident from the interior monologues just discussed. Rabbit is the central figure for the other char- acters in the book as well as for himself. The greatest proportion of the book is devoted to his consciousness; his memories, reactions, beliefs, and actions. In addition to the sensory impressions and the montage scenes, there are many interior monologues, both direct and indirect. 107 These range from memory passages, such as the one that he is reminded of as he goes to get his son, of the time when he was a young boy at home where he dreaded the quarrels of his parents ("when their faces v/ent angry and flat and words flew, it was as if a pane of glass were put in front of him"p. 21), to his hypnotic daze of anger while playing golf with Eccles, where in his head he talks to the clubs as if they're women. The irons, light and thin yet somewho treacherous in his hands, are Janice. Come on, you dope, be calm; here we go, easy, , . , Anger turns his skin rotten, so the outside seeps through; his insides go jagged with the tiny dry forks of bitter scratching brambles, the brittle silver shaft one more stick, where words hang like caterpillar nests that can't be burned av/ay (p. 109) . A three-wood with its reddish head is Ruth and "he thinks, 0,K. i^ you're ^o smart, " and the rough is the khaki color of Texas, which reminds him of the whore he met there who, in his mind, says to him, "Oh, you moron go home" (p. 110), Both of these passages are developed much more fully, but these selctions should suggest the variety of type and of place where interior monologues are employed. Q A clearer "quotation of the mind," however, is to be found in a lengthy paragraph v/hich portrays his mind as he rides a bus to the Springers' house after the news of the baby's death. The selection, in v/hich a liberal use 8 See above, p. 4, 108 of ellipses has been made, begins with his memory of riding such a bus after leaving Janice the night before. Unsuc- cessful in finding Ruth, he does not go to work the next morning because: Something .held him back all day. He tries to think of what it was because whatever it was murdered his daughter. Wanting to see Ruth again was some of it but it was clear after he went around to her address in the morning that she wasn't there probably off to Atlantic City with some madman and still he wandered around Brev/er, going in and out of department stores with music piping from the v/alls and eating a hot dog at the five and ten and hesitating out- side a movie house but not going in and keeping an eye out for Ruth. . . .No, v^hat kept him in the city despite the increasing twisting inside that told him something was wrong back home, what kept him walking through the cold , air breathed from the doors of movie houses and up and dovm between counters of perfumed lingerie . . . and jev/elry and salted nuts poor old Jan and up into the park . . . and then finally back dov/n Weiser to the drugstore he called from, what kept him walking was the idea that somev/here he'd find an opening. For what made him mad at Janice v/asn't . . . that she was right . . . but the closed feeling of it, the feeling of being closed in. . . . What held him back all day v/as the feeling that some- where there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill . . . (p. 225). This intense passage contrasts in terms of emotion v/ith one at the end of the book, as he leaves Ruth's apartment. The latter reflects a comparative calmness, a plateau which he has reached in his quest. Again the ellipses are mine. 109 Funny, ho-// what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded. Goodness lies inside, there is nothing outside, those things he v/as trying to balance have no weight. He feels his inside as very real suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net. I don't know, he kept telling Ruth; he doesn't know, \^/hat to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn't know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. . . , It's like when they heard you were great and put two men on you . . . so you passed and the ball belonged to the others^ and your hands were empty and the men on you' looked foolish because in effect there v/as nobody there (pp. 254-55) . From such selections and from the many others present in the book. Rabbit is developed as a very complex character, emerging from the reader's first impression of him as a contemptible character into a fully sympathetic persona. His quest, which reaches no end, is yet hopeful, as seen when he thinks of telephoning Jack, "I'm on the v/ay. I mean, I think there are several v/ays; don't v/orry. Thanks for everything" (p, 248). Perhaps this last statement is a precis of his character: his continued hopefulness, his need to affirm that hope in others, and his real sense of appreciation. Certainly his final running will separate him temporarily from his conventional milieu, but his quest, by its very nature, must eventually lead him back into society. That he feels the need to escape so desperately is reenforced throughout the book by the repeated use of 110 the symbol of the net. Other symbols include the obvious one of the rabbit, and in addition, the church and the mountain. It is the symbol of the net, however, that is emphasized, and its development from its literal meaning of the basketv/ork of strings hung from a basketball hoop, signifying his former success, into the dense net of society. It is a constant comparison in his mind, reflecting both his basketball background and continued love of the game, and his feeling that his life is a snare and the world a v/eb. The rabbit image undergoes a somewhat restricted development, although it is seen at the beginning and at the end. It is first used as a partial description of his features, and it obviously refers to his former quick- ness and speed on the basketball court. Ruth employs it when she tries to understand their dwindling communication and also when he evinces a certain timidity, when she thinks of him as "her gentle rabbit" (p. 156), There are other scattered references, such as that to the car as a "locked windowed hutch" (p, 37) -and the "pale, limp pelt" of Ruth's coat, which "sleeps in his lap" (p, 50), the latter probably symbolic of his eventual triumph over her as a victim of his mildness (p, 124), which she finds irresistible, Perhaps a broader implication might be a parallel betv^een the animal's procreative habits and his sexual relationships. Ill However, the more valid interpretation seems to reflect his essential gentleness, his ability to escape capture, and his propensity for runningav/ay from, but also into, life, A more compelling symbol is the church, in many forms. There is the church across from Ruth's apartment, which at first is a symbol of the unseen world v/hich he instinctively feels exists (p. 195), There is also the church of his childhood, with its harsh creed represented in Kruppenbach's "insane spiel" to Jack (pp, 143-44), Most pervasive is the Episcopal church, literally when he attends services there, and symbolically represented in Jack and his many encounters with Rabbit; but Rabbit "has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity" (p, 197), The church symbol is rounded out with his last departure from Ruth's apartment, when he looks to the church window for the light that "once consoled him by seeming to make a hole where he looked through into underlying brightness"; but at this time, "because of church poverty or the late summer nights of just carelessness, /it is/ unlit, a dark circle in a stone fagade" (p. 254). It seems that the church represents to society what Rabbit is seeking in his private world. That the church fails both society and Rabbit is understood by Eccles' feeling that he "commits fraud with every schooled cadence of 112 the service" (p. 129); and by Rabbit's turning away from the darkened, stone fa9ade to the light of mankind repre- sented by the streetlights which "retreat to the unseen end of SumTier Street" (p, 254) , A more profound symbol is the mountain, at the base of which the town of Brewer is built. This mountain constitutes a thematic structure on which the novel is built. Its height requires a number of concessions from the human beings who have established their temporal domain on its sides; there are circular routes and zig-zag roads and many ups and downs in the city. All of these seem symbolic of the twistings and turnings and the heights and depressions experienced by the characters, and, by inference, by society itself. Clearly the climax of the story is reached in a parallel form as Rabbit scrambles desperately to reach the crest, away from the "unnatural darkness, clogged with spider-fine tv/igs that finger his face in- cessantly, "and toward "the broad daylight whose sky leaps in jagged patches from treetop to treetop above him like a blue monkey" (p. 246) . As the light v/idens, he finds the road and "Janice and Eccles and his mother and his sins seem a thousand miles behind" (p, 247), But he must descend the mountain once again, descend into the social world, in order to find Ruth and his immortality, represented in the baby she is carrying, to "the vertical order of 113 parenthood, a kind of thin tube upright in time in which our solitude is somewhat diluted" (p. 254). And it is in the world of men, at the foot of the mountain, that the story ends with Rabbit running toward his future. From this examination, painstakingly detailed at places, there seems ample evidence that this book will find a lasting place among those v/hich present the anti- hero disillusioned v/ith society. The use of the stream- of-consciousness technique, in its many variations, creates sympathetic understanding of the anti-hero Rabbit, showing the readerto paraphrase a familiar quotation"what makes Rabbit run." If Updike's concern has been the presentation of the "individual personality in terras of 9 artistic sensibility" he has clearly succeeded, and the success can be largely attributed to his extensive employ- ment of numerous stream-of-consciousness techniques. 9 See above. Introduction, p. 8. CHAPTER IV ACCEPTANCE OF THE QUOTIDIAN Evidence of the continued use of the stream-of- consciousness technique in contemporary fiction may be found in Saul Bellow's most recent novel, Herzog (1964). This technique is used most effectively in detailing the
hero's introspection in his search "for knowledge of the center of meaning," A variation of the stream-of- consciousness technique from strictly internal perceptions to a combination of internal experience with external involvements "reaches its most profound statement in ' . 2 Herzog," Bellow's use of the stream of consciousness results in an original application of the techniques most often found in portraying the flov/ or flux of a character's mind. There are the usual constituents of interior mono- logue, omniscient description, and soliloquy, each in association v/ith devices of montage, imagery, and free association; but each also employed in unusual ways. An additional technique, used in an unusual v/ay in this book, is the variation of aesthetic distance, with the concomitant Humphrey, Stream, p. 119, 2 Betty Jane Taaffe, "The Quest of the Hero," Master's thesis, Texas Technological College (1966), p. 103. 114 115 manipulation of time, a complex treatment important to the whole of the novel. These various approaches are used to portray Moses Elkanah Herzog's attempt to accept the quotidian and his quest for meaning when he finally finds himself faced with the need "to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends" (p, 8),"^ The quest itself is conducted in privacy of his small estate in the Berkshires during a period of less than one week, though the range of time covered by his consciousness is much greater, Herzog is a middle-aged professor who is listed in Who's Who, but whose work in itself cannot supply him v/ith a raison d'etre. He has had two wives, of whom the first, Daisy, divorced him, and the second, Madeleine, also divorced, is now living with his former friend Gersbach, He has tv/o children, one from each marriage, of whom he is very fond but from whom he is also isolated. In addition, he has had a number of extra-marital affairs, both during and after his marriages. Doctors (both medical and psychiatric), lawyers, brothers, and friends of various persuasions, whom he calls "Reality Instructors," have all failed to help him find an answer that he can accept. He 3 Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York, 1965), Fawcett Crest edition; this and all subsequent page references are taken from the Fawcett Crest edition. 116 remembers all of these people v/hile he casts back over his life during the sojourn in the Berkshires. The main burden of his memory centers upon a period of about a year, although, as noted earlier, a number of events occur at indefinite times in the past, many of them during his childhood, v/hich was spent in Montreal and Chicago, The main events covered, not necessarily in order, are his break with Daisy and courtship of Madeleine; the develop- ment of the Madeleine-Gersbach affair; his own affairs, including the current one with Ramona; his activities in New York; his overnight trip to Maine; the courtroom scenes while waiting for his lawyer; and the Chicago visit. The courtroom scenes actually are the turning point, because it is then that he temporarily abandons the passive role of the man of ideas and becomes, instead, a man of violence, which leads him to Chicago. Once there, he visits his stepmother in the old family home and during the visit manages to get his father's old pistol and some useless Russian banknotes. He then goes to the housev/hich he is paying forv/here Madeleine and June, his daughter, live, and where Gersbach is also a household member, although an unofficial one. With some notion of confronting them, he peers through the window, but when he sees Gersbach bathing his daughter, his violence is defeated. After a fruitless attempt to get some sort of help from Gersbach's 117 own wife, he spends the night v/ith a scientist friend, Luke Asphalter, and arranges to see Junie the next day. Their outing, however, ends in an automobile accident, and even though there is no serious damage, he is arrested, pri- marily for having Papa Herzog's pistol, Madeleine comes to the station to retrieve Junie and while there tries to get him into worse trouble; but the police sergeant is not
deceived, Herzog's rich brother. Will, finally bails him out of jail, and shortly thereafter, he leaves for his country estate. It is there in the abandoned house that he reviews his past. Throughout the memories of past times, described above, and during the present time (on the estate), he composes letters, both mental ones and v/ritten ones, none of which are ever mailed. He \^^^ites to many people, knov/n and unknov/n, both the living and the deadprofessors, philosophers, authors, doctors, friends, loved ones, and even to God, These letters had first taken the form of random notes, jotted down as the thought occurred, whether on the train, in a cab, or in the classroom. The habit had begun in May when he realized, there in New York, that "his life was, as the phrase goes, ruined" (p, 10) ; and he continues the practice into this last week at the country place until, at the end, "he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word" (p. 416). 118 The letters, as used by Bellow, represent a sophisticated form of journal and serve a number of func- tions, among which are that of a link to the external v/orld, that of a vehicle for expressing his far-ranging ideas, and that of an outlet for his attempts to experience the brotherhood of man. As letters, of course, they must be directed to someone, thus fulfilling one requirement of the soliloquy in the stream connotation, namely, that of an assumed audience . That these letters also convey at the same time the discontinuity of experience in the con- sciousness is another indication of their qualification as solilo-quy. Finally, they also serve to relate exterior action to interior perception. For example, on the v/ay to Penn Station, the taxicab passes a cigar store where a year ago Herzog had bought a carton of Virginia Rounds for his mother-in-law, and he immediately begins a letter to her, stopping the letter temporarily at the thought of her having no husband. Following a number of thoughts about the divorced couple and their daughter Madeleine, he resumes his writing: No husband. No daughter, Herzog wrote. But he began again. Dear Tennie, I. went to s.ee Simkin about a certain matter, and he said to me, 'Your mother-in-lav/' s feelings are hurt' (p. 40) . Then the letter is dropped and his mind concerns itself with remembering the lawyer Simkin. The letter to Tennie 119 is never finished, although three additions are made in the remaining interval in the cab. The first excerpt from the letter is obviously connected to external action, but his second beginning of the letter results from psychologi- cal association, as do the three additional portions, not here quoted. As Herzog himself says in a later letter to Spinoza, "I^ may Interest you to know that i^n the twentieth ' century random association is believed to yield up the deepest secrets of the psyche" (p. 225). Perhaps the ultimate yielding to be had from such random, or free, association is found in a scene, near the end of the book, where his brother Will has come to see about him: Herzog is painting the piano to send to June, a very impractical project, and though he is trying to give Will "an impression of completest nomalcy," he realizes his extraordinary physical state must be noticeable, as well as his odd behavior; but he thinks, "My balance comes from instability. Not organization or courage, as v/ith other people. . . . Must play the instrument I 've got" (p. 402) . And though his "piano" may be impractical, he can finally accept it as he thinks, near the end, "I, am pretty v/ell satisfied to be, to be just a^ it ^s willed . . . " (p. 414) Other examples may help to clarify how this adaptation of the soliloquy to the letter form is a com- bination of exterior and interior action. Dressing to go 120 to Ramonas apartment, he looks at himself in the mirror and feels "the primitive self-attachment of the human creature," which feeling makes him think of the theory attributed, mistakenly, to Professor Haldane and then to Father Tailhard de Chardin, to whom he composes a letter. A bit later, still in the course of dressing, he is reminded of Ramona's remark about his clothes, about her
saying that he was "not a true, puritanical American" (p. 198), and then he recalls his years in the navy, and then his high school oratory, and then back to a repetition of Ramona's remark. In response to the idea of an ordi- nary American, he ponders what sort of mother Ramona would make in the daily routine, such as taking Junie to a Macy's parade. The parade idea, in turn, reminds him of a mono- graph on ethical ideas of the American business community, written by McSiggins, to whom he then composes a letter (p. 199). From this long series, one can easily trace the process of free association, which forms the connecting impetus from the external world for the composition of the letters. The impetus becomes incremental association which eventually produces the letter. The majority of the letters possesses a quality of coherence greater than that of an interior monologue per se, especially in the longer epistles, such as those to General Eisenhower (pp. 199-202) and to Harrison Pulver, 121 his former tutor (pp. 202-205). Nevertheless, their coherencethat is, of verbalized thought yet unspokenis frequently distorted by the intrusion, so to speak, of omniscient description and of interior monologue, both direct and indirect. The monologues will be discussed in some detail farther in the paper, but it may be advan- tageous at this point to see ho\^/ omniscient description breaks into the coherence of the letters and yet helps to retain for the reader the sense of direct participation in Herzog's mental processes. Hov/ever, there is a very definite blurring of lines to be drawn between omniscient description and indirect interior monologue, and both are combined at times, in this book, v/ith the soliloquies and with direct interior monologues. In the follo\>/ing passage, there can be seen more clearly the intrusion of omniscient description. This passage is found in the rather long letter to Pulver, near the end, about "the inspired condition," which belongs to all existence, as he has just explained. As he writes "And therefore", the letter is interrupted by the omniscient description in the manner indicated above. - And therefore-- Therefore, Herzog's thoughts, like those machines in the lofts he had heard yesterday in the taxi, stopped by traffic in the garment district, plunged, and thundered with endless-- infinitelhungry electrical power, stitching fabric with inexhaustible energy. Having seated 122 himself again in his striped jacket he was gripping the legs of his desk betv/een his knees, his teeth set, the straw hat cutting his forehead. He v/rote. Reason exists 1 Reason . . . he then heard the soft dense rumbling of falling masonry, the splintering of wood and glass. And belief based on reason /the letter resumes/ (p. 205). The italics indicate the words of the letter; the other portions describe his thoughts, as well as his appearance, in third-person terminology, in the normal narrative voice of an author. Just exactly which voice is used here will be a problem later considered in connection with distance. This interruption, by whatever third person, is a needed one, however, because the letter to Pulver has gone on without any break for nearly three pages. Since the imnaediately preceding letter, the one to General Eisenhov/er, has ended without a clear indication of Herzog's whereabouts before he begins writing to Pulver, the omniscient descrip- tion is a very welcome guideline for the reader. The wording itself is less that of Herzog's normal idiom than that of an observer. Another, but briefer, quotation may point out this same comToination of soliloquy and omniscient description. Again the italicized lines represent the letter; . . . And this is the root of the struggle for power. But that's all wrong 1 thought Herzog, not without humor in his despair. I'm bugging all these peopleNehru, Churchill, and nov/ Ike, whom I apparently want to give a Great Books course. Nevertheless, there was much earnest 123 feeling in this, too. No civil order . . . /the letter goes on/ (p. 201). Although this has a number of elements that might point to the interruption as an interior monologue, such as the language used to express his thoughts, it seems clear from the directly third-person statement, "thought Herzog," and from the concluding sentence that the passage should be placed within the range of omniscient description. That the technique of the letters as soliloquies also combines v/ith the method of the interior monologue may be seen a bit farther on in this same letter to Eisenhower. The mechanical indications made by the changes in typography are noteworthy in the follov/ing passage. The ellipses are mine. /The letter continue si/ I_t v/as v/ith such considerations, reading your Committee'^ report on National Aims, that I seem to have been stirred fiercely by a desire to communicate, or by the curious project of attempted communi- cation. , . , offering these ideas , . . like mocking flowers in the soil of fever and unacted violence. Suppose, after all, we are simply a kind of beast, peculiar to this mineral lump that runs around in orbit to the sun, then why such loftiness, such great standards? that I^ thought of the variation on Gresham's famous Law: /and the letter continues for a space.J/' (p. 201), This, it appears, is indirect interior monologue, even though no author (or third-person voice) is in evidence. The passage seems much too verbalized on the speech level, even though it is directed to himself and is actually 124 unuttered, and it is much too coherent to display the discontinuity associated with direct interior monologue. However, it might be possible to classify the passage as direct interior monologue on the basis of (1) no apparent evidence of author, (2) the use of the first-person pronoun, and (3) the images evoked by the words bent, violence, and beast, parts of symbolic patterns to be found in the novel as a whole. Nevertheless, it seems preferable to categorize the brief passage as an indirect one because it is, as far as the content is concerned, couched in the same form of language as the letter and is thought formulated into words at the level of deliberate speech. One last example that the soliloquy combines with other devices to produce the flow of inner consciousness follows: Lying in his hammock, after having written several lines to God, he is contemplating "life and void." In the course of the letter which he is mentally composing to his mother, the following interruptions are noteworthy; again such breaks are indicated by the typography: Some of my oldest aims seem to have slid av/ay. But I have others. Life on this earth can't be simply a picture. And terrible forces in me, including the forces of admiration or praise, powers, including loving powers, very damaging, making me almost an idiot because I lacked the capacity to manage them. I. may turn out to be not such a terrible hopeless fool as everyone, as you, as I myself suspected. Meantime, to lay off certain persistent torments. To surrender the hyperactivity of this hyperactive 125 face. But just to put it out instead to the radiance of the sun. J_ want to send you, and others, the most loving wish I have in my heart. This is the only way I have to reach out . . , (pp. 297-98), Judging from the more fragmentary thought represented in the choppy phrases, the lack of author interference or guidelines, and from the use of the first-person pronoun in portions not a part of the letter, the passage appears to belong to th'e group which combines the letter- soliloquy with direct interior monologue. As the fore- going discussion has pointed out. Bellow has used several such combinations of devices to project his hero's stream of consciousness. It must not be thought, however, that it is only in combination v/ith the letters that these devices are used. One long passage, typical of many found throughout the book, may be used to show how B.ellow uses such devices as omniscient description, both kinds of monologues, and external actionin combination, so blended that one becomes an immediate part of the next. The selection concerns his visit to Chicago during the week preceding his retreat to the country. Comments have been inserted at appropriate places within the rather lengthy passage in order to emphasize the spots where the fusion of devices occurs. Herzog, on his way to Asphalter's place, stops at Walgreen's: 126 v/here he bought a bottle of Cutty Sark for Luke and playthings for Junea toy periscope through which she could look over the sofa, around corners, a beach ball you inflated with your breath. /This is external action combined v/ith omniscient description, which turns into indirect monologue briefly at the dash^ He even found time to send a v/ire to Ramona. . . . Trust her, she'd find comfort while he was away, not be despondent in "desertion" as he would have beenhis childish disorder, that infantile terror of death that had bent and buckled his life into these curious shapes. /Here may ,be seen the resumption of indirect monologue which becomes very near to direct monologue after the dashJ7 Having discovered that everyone must be indulgent with bungling child-men . . . he had set himself up v/ith his emotional goodiestruth, friendship, devotion to children (the regular American v/orship of kids), and potato love. So much we knov/ nov/, /At this point, the passage turns from indirect interior monologue to direct monologue, which continues as follov/s^/ But thiseven this is not the whole story, either, /Notice the present tense^/ It only begins to approach the start of true consciousness. The necessary premise is that a man is somehov/ more than his "characteristics," all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases him to call "My Life," . . . This was by no means a "general idea" with him now. . . . /The direct monologue clearly reverts to the indirect form with the last sentence. The passage continues for a few lines^/ (p, 325). Since the problem of voice is to be taken up later, it may be sufficient to point out that these various devices and their fusion provide a range of the levels of consciousness and combine with external events having to do with the minimal plot. The plot action here is a necessary prepara- tion for the critical scene which is reached the next day in the courtroom scenes and in the police station. After these events, he goes to the Berkshires, 127 Perhaps the best example of extended direct interior monologue is to be found in the scene in the police station, although others exist in the novel, and certain ones are combined with the indirect form. The passage begins with the indirect .form, as the sergeant questions Madeleine, and as "Moses . . , unable to restrain associations," decides that everything is "ultimately unknowable." The quotation has been shortened by omitting portions of the passage as indicated by the periods. See, Moses? We don't knov/ one another. Even that Gersbach, , , . He was unknowable. And I myself, the same, , . . They put me dov/n, ergo they claimed final knov/ledge of Herzog. They knev/ mel And I hold with Spinoze (I . hope he won't mind). . . . Excuse me, therefore, sir and madam, but I reject your definitions of me. Ah, this Madeleine . . . such a mixed mind of pure diamond and Woolv/orth glass. And Gersbach v/ho sucked up to me. For the symbiosis of it. Symbiosis and trash. . . . Good-by to all (pp. 364-65). Although liberal use has been made of ellipses for the sake of brevity, the excerpt is sufficient to indicate the discontinuity of the v/hole passage and, to some extent, its incoherence. This, obviously, is not the verbalized level of the letters, and the sentences are much shorter than those of his usual idiom; though there are still identifying signs of Herzog's mindthe Latin terms ergo and symbiosis and knowledge of Spinoza. Additional evidence of direct interior monologue is seen in the exclusive use 128 of the first-person pronoun in the quoted passage, which comes to an end as the sergeant's question penetrates Herzog's subliminal perception. In addition to the stream-of-consciousness tech- nique already-shovm, there are still other devices to be found in the novel, and in abundance. One of these is montage, very closely akin to the cataloguing device used in modern poetry and sometimes producing much the same effect. One of the most useful applications of this device is the projection of a sense of movement, especially as related to external action, and, at the same time, to perceive this movement through the consciousness of the character. As Herzog rides the train to Vineyard Haven, madly v/riting letters to any and every one, his mind registers the scenery from time to time, usually resulting in an application to his present train of thought and usually changing its direction. Writing to Professor Hoyle concerning the theory of the formation of planets, he becomes aware of the passing scene: The v/heels of the cars storrried underneath. Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails of sidings sheathed in rust, the dipping racing wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound, deeper, stronger than before. Then the enameled shells of the commuters' cars, and the heaped bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old Nev/ England mills with narrow, austere windows; villages, convents; tugboats moving in the swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving 129 russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknov/1 edging that his imagination of the universe v/as elementary. . . (p. 63). This passage helps to establish the plot detail of his brief trip to escape Ramona, making it a reality in the external world v/ith which Herzog is seeking to reconcile his inner world and simultaneously, it makes a recognition of his acuity of perception of the "real" world, A number of other scenes detailing spatial movement also utilize this same cinematic device: in the cab on the v/ay to Penn Station (pp, 38-39) ; v/aiting after the feriry ride on the way to Libbie's (pp. 116-117); the train ride home to Philadelphia after seeing his son Marco (p. 132); driving to Ramona's apartment (p. 218); and his drive to Phoebe Gersbach's apartment (p. 317), Not only do these individual scenes convey necessary movement connected to plot action, but also provide the added dividend to be had when all of these, and others, are looked at as a whole. That dividend is the sense of frantic, aimless searching which ends only after the surcease of physical movement. Another way montage has been employed successfully in Herzog is in the compression of time. This compression is to be found in the lengthy passage (pp. 149-53) in which an overview of his and Madeleine's life in Ludeyville, the Bershires estate, is given. The house in its run-down condition is vividly presented in seven sentences, followed 130 by a short paragraph that depicts his difficulties in repairing the house, summed up in a final, separate sentence, "A year of work saved the house from collapse" (p. 150) . The next two pages detail unconnected, brief scenes in their undisciplined life. Excerpts from these paragraphs, separated by series of periods, may help to illustrate both their life and the means by v/hich it is conveyed: . , .His 'desk v/as covered with unpaid bills, unanswered letters. . Elbows on his papers, Moses stared at half- printed walls, discolored ceilings, filthy windows Egg yolks dried on the plates, coffee turned green in the cupstoast cereal, maggots breeding in marrowbones Dragging the ladder and buckets and rags and ; thinners, scraping with his putty knife, he patched and painted . . . laying paint on in big strokes or in an agony of finesse (pp. 151-153). The catalogue of details paints its ov/n picture. It must be remembered, hov/ever, that these are details as remembered by Herzog four or five years later. Certainly, the com- pression of time also contributes to the suffocation achieved through an overwhelming accumulation of minutiae. A different type of cinematic effect is used in the park scene where Herzog takes his daughter during his stay in Chicago. The device used in the first part is that of cutting; by which the tedium of unimportant detail is avoided, time is telescoped, and there yet remains enough to allow the reader to understand Herzog's essential 131 tenderness and love for children and for Junie in particu- lar, carrying out the father-image v/hich he himself holds. Perhaps this cutting device can be illustrated by the following excerpt. Again those portions which have been omitted are suggested by the period series. Against the clumsy, gray, gaping Museum of Science she looked so fresh, so new. . . . She loved the periscope. They spied on each other. . . . They v/alked by the lake, . . . He let her take o'ff her shoes and wade. . . . He bought her Cracker Jack, , . . The dandelions had blov/n their fuses and were all loose silk, , , . The mechanical mower was riding in circles. . . . The v/ater was a marvelous, fresh heavy daylight blue; the sky rested on the mild burning horizon , . . (p. 338). This pastoral scene is offset, however, by the automobile accident later, as they drive onto the freeway; but the transition has been made by the imaginary visions of Chicago which Herzog's mind creates, "as though he painted them v/ith moisture and color taken from his ov/n mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals" (p. 339). Negro slums, industries, sewage, the Stockyards, dull bungalows and scrawny parks, huge shopping centers, cemeteries, and so onall this with "infinite forms of activityReality. Moses had to see reality" (pp. 339-40) , Not only must he face Reality in his mind but also in his physical person, when the park episode eventually ends v/ith his arrest for carrying a gun. 132 Montage, then, can be seen as an effective device in conveying plot action in a short space and yet maintain- ing the inner life of the character, since the reader perceives just as the character does. Relying upon sensory impressions as it does, the resulting images create an artistic sensibility akin to that of poetry in its method of compression. As noted earlier (p. 114) aesthetic distance, with the accompanying problems of time and voice, constitutes a large portion of the stream-of-consciousness material in this novel. These sections, so to speak, contain multiple layers, with each level concerned with a self or conscious- ness at a certain time. But it becomes more complicated since each level may, in addition, be connected to several other layers, and each is alv/ays connected to the present or outer layer. This outer layer is the presence of Herzog in the Berkshires, and constitutes, as it were, a point of reference for the structural unity of the narrative. The problem of distance is encountered when the reader, who normally views Herzog directly with the author, is often obliged to become Herzog himself as he looks at himself, or, as Earl Rovit says, Herzog "looking at himself looking at himself." Since the problem is such a complex one Earl Rovit, "Bellov/ in Occupancy," in Saul Bellow and the Critics, ed. Irving Malin (New York, 1967), p. 179. 133 and since a full appreciation of the book is based, at least partly, on an understanding of this technique, further discussion must be undertaken to illustrate this multiple perspective. The present time in the v/orld of Bellow' s novel is the period of several days which he spends on his twenty-acre estate in the Berkshires. In this present time, the reader views Herzog directly, as the opening lines of the story reveal; "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Herzog" (p. 7) ; the closing lines of the book reveal the same perspective: "At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word" (p. 416). It would be a simple matter if all of the intervening material were told in the past, but this simplicity is absent. Instead, there are occasional reminders of Herzog in the present as he views himself in the past, in the present tense of the past action. As he catches a glimpse of his face in a webbed v/indow at a moment in the present, the time reverts to early spring (p. 8) when he remembers how he had been overcome with the need to find a meaning in life. He remembers lying on the sofa in the small apartment in Nev/ York, but the reader does not realize at this point that he is recalling these things from the vantage point of the Berkshires in the later present. Without any transitionthere is a division in the text 134 marked with a heavy black line, v/hich is used at numerous other places in the bookat least in content, from his looking in the windov/ (present) to his self-examination of the past spring, after several pages the following, passage is related, with ellipses added. Satisfied with his ov/n severity, positively enjoying the hardness and factual rigor of his judgment, he lay on his sofa, his arms rising behind him, his legs extended without aim. But how charming we remain, notv/ithstanding. Papa, poor man, could charm birds from the trees, crocodiles from mud. Madeleine, too, had great charm. . . . Valentine her lover, was -a charming man, too. . . . Herzog himself had no small amount of charm. But his sexual powers had been damaged by Madeleine. . . . The paltriness of these sexual struggles (p. 12). Note the manipulation of voice here. First, there is the use of third-person; remembering, hov/ever, that Herzog is thinking (in the Berkshires, in the present) this about himself, it must be assumed that the third-person voice is Herzog's voice. Distance, then, has been maneuvered so that the author's voice is removed, and Herzog is seen by the reader through Herzog's ov/n eyes. We have here, layer one, the Berkshires; and layer two, Herzog in the New York apartment examining his past (not shown in the above quoted passage). But the problem does not end so simply, for there is, next, the first-person voice of the italicized statement. Obviously it is Herzog's voice; but when? Is he saying this in the Berkshires, or did he say it at 135 the time in the apartment, or is it a part of his past beyond the apartment? The question also arises as to v/hy the statement is in italics, which, up until this point in the story, have been reserved for the words of the notations he makes, for what he reads, or for standard printing conventions; nowhere have.they been used to indicate speech. Could it be, then, that the statement is what he writes? The material follov/ing the italicized statement has been included for three reasons: (1) the reversion to normal typography, leaving the foregoing statement all the more pronounced; (2) the connection to the statement which is shov/n by content (v/hich explains the disproportionate number of ellipses); and (3) the connection to the statement, also italicized, which follov/s the paragraph. The final, italicized statement is of equal prominence by virtue of its typography, and the same questions can be asked in regard to the latter that v/ere brought up in connection with the first statement. One more point of evidence must be presented before an attempt is made to offer a possible solution. For the next seven pages following the quoted selection, the material is concerned with his past married life with Madeleine, their various moves, and the ultimate break-up of the marriage. As Herzog remembers the day she demanded the divorce v/hen 136 he had returned to the garden, he, in Nev/ York, watches himself v/ith detachment: as if he were looking through the front end of a telescope at a tiny clear image. That suffering joker (p. 19) ; and then the section is closed by mechanical means of the elongated bar. The question of voice-time-distance, then, applies to all three it'alicized statements. It seems reasonable that these statements are made--in Herzog's mind, of course- in the Berkshires, in the present, as he regards himself during his period of introspection. These statements seem to direct or evoke his flov/ of remembrances, although each memory has its ovm sentient consciousness, very much subject to the powers of association v/hich channels its own course in the stream. Hov/ever, the proposed solution is not meant to be definitive, especially in view of the fact that the succeeding pages follov/ no discernible pattern in the use of italics. Very often, direct thought, or direct interior monologue, is simply incorporated unnoticeably. But it m.ust be noted that the narrative is not simply a flashback with attendant sets of memories; there are too many inconsistencies and overlappings which come to light when the text is examined closely- For example, the opening lines of the book, noted above (p. 133), are repeated much later, on page 384, after he has v/ritten =-Nr -VjJ 137 Luke Asphalter predicting Luke's recovery from the shock of losing his pet monkey; he refrains from mentioning his o\m sense of v/ell-being because Asphalter "may think you've simply gone off your nut" (p. 384) and the opening statement (p. 7) is repeated except for the phrase "thought Moses Herzog," and the word but added at the beginning. Another such discrepancy is to be found in a reference to Professor Mermelstein. Having spent the night with Ramona, in Nev/ York, he returns to his apartment, feeling that he must do something practical and useful, and he castigates himself for his futility in solving his problems: While he delayed, others came up with the same ideas. T\^/o years ago a Berkeley professor named Mermelstein had scooped him . . . and deserved a place in the human community. But he, Herzog, had committe-d a sin of some kind against his ov/n heart, while in pursuit of a grand synthesis. What this country needs is a good five-cent- synthesis. What a catalogue of errors 1 Take his sexual struggles for instance. . . . (p. 255). Immediately following the repetition of the sentence, "But if I am out of my mind, it's all right with me," as noted above (p. 384), there is an extremely long letter to Professor Mermelstein, during the course of which he mentions synthesizing (p. 385) and at the end of the letter he says, to himself, "Very good, Mermelstein. Go, and sin no more" (p. 387). The connection to the selection on page 255 seems obvious without discussion. Also, in this 138 same selection, the phrase "sexual struggles" first appeared on page 12. Therefore, it appears to this writer that the real action is confined to his psychic processes during the week's stay in the Berkshires, with the external action involving only Herzog; his brother Will, who visits him; Ramona, who comes to Ludeyville; and the Tuttles, the couple who act as temporary caretakers. Perhaps the image in the v/ebbed windov/ is prophetic of his webbed memories which gradually emerge, with the web being held to the present framework of the pre sent-v/indow in the Berkshires. A simpler illustration of the time and distance problem is to be seen in the following brief quotation. He is in Ramona's apartment waiting for her to reappear, and he returns to his mental probing of v/hat is means to be a man; again, the ellipses are mine. . . . Youyou yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs. . . . Strong natures, said F. Nietzsche, could forget what they could not master. . . . (p. 248). He apparently is speaking to himself in Ramona's apartment, but he is remembering, v/hile he is in the Berkshires, having gone there; much later in the book, in the final chapter which very clearly takes place at the estate, he vnrites a letter to Nietzsche attacking his theories of 139 destruction (p. 388). So, again, the curve of the narrative back upon itself keeps the reader confined to the circle of the country estate. Perhaps one other illustration will point out the elaborate texture which time, distance, and voice cast to form a web of cross reference. An attempt has been made to keep the quotations at a minimum, though they are to be had in full by checking the page number cited for each point. Herzog, in his New York apartment, writing a letter about the definition of human nature, abandons this theme abruptly and begins a letter to Nachman, whom he has recently glimpsed in the streets (p. 161) . Then his mind recreates the past associations v/ith Nachman, eventually leading back to their childhood, then to thoughts of Nachman's Laura and death, and then to his own dead mother (pp. 166-67) . The thought of his dead mother leads him to recreate much of their family lifethe passage is indeed lengthyincluding the death of his mother's brother (p. 173), his sister's playing the piano /"Oh, the musicl thought Herzog. He fought the insidious blight of nostalgia in New York . . . " (p. 175^7; and eventually he recalls Uncle Yaffe, v/ho "from the past, seemed to find out his nephew at this very instant of time and to look at him with the brown eyes of an intelligent, feeling, satirical animal" (p. 176). When he remembers his mother 140 again, the narration is brought back momentarily with the follov/ing passage; ellipses have been added. To haunt the past like thisto love the dead! Moses warned himself not to yield so greatly. . . . But somehov/ his heart had come open at this chapter of his life and he didn't have the strength to shut it. So it was again a winter day in St. Anne, in 1923 . . , (p. 177). The time of the events of memory is clear, but when is "this chapter of his life?" But, to continue with the thematic aspects which should lead to some conclusion about time and distance, he continues his reminiscences, if the term can be used for passages of such immediacy: "engrossed, unmoving in his chair, Herzog listened to the dead at their dead quarrels" (p. 179) . A bit later, thinking of Father Herzog, he says, "It was more than I could bear that anyone should lay violent hands on him. . . . Whom did I ever love as I loved them?" (p. 183). Then mention of the Nachman letter is made again (p. 184) and he concludes that Nachman's v/ife must have died, and "as he had from that dark corridor, Moses nov^/ contemplated those two figures" (p. 185). The thematic strands of mother and death are brought together in the final chapter when he mentally addresses his mother (p. 397), and then he says to her, "I_ want to send you, and others, the most loving v/ish I_ have in my heart . . . " (p. 398) . Although there are many other references to mother and to death 141 especially, the foregoing schematic reference seems to offer an acceptable abridged interpretation. Possibly, then, the conclusion can be arrived at from this discussion that there is a most marked "inter- twining" among the thematic strands, the plot action (past and present); the speaking voice, and timeall of which contribute in their own fashion in establishing the variable distances to be experienced throughout the book. A corollary conclusion is that all these elements are in- extricably webbed with the present time and setting of the framework narrative of the novel. This latter condition, of "course, provides the basic structural unity on which the novel is constructed. Nevertheless, there is very little value in recognizing the many techniques and devices employed by a writer unless, in the process, it- is shown that these all work together to provide an aesthetic experience. That Herzog provides this experience is beyond question. Certainly, the reader who is able to enter fully into the flux of experiences, which is the central concern of the novel, will undergo Herzog's agonizing search for the answer to the universal question, "What is the purpose of life?" Whether Herzog solves or resolves the problem is debatable, but he at least reaches a plateau of some sort, at least a temporary satisfaction. To the vrriter of this 142 paper, the true resolution lies in his not finding a definitive answer but in finding in himself a \7illingness to accept a continuation of the search as a condition of participating in life. After such an in-depth self- examination, -the far past becomes bearable when he can reach out to the dead"out v/here it is incomprehensible" (p. 398). The immediate past, or perhaps more aptly, the recent present, is finally put into its proper niche when he can say, "And you, Gersbach, you're v/elcome to Madeleine. . . . You will not reach me through her. . . . I am no longer there" (pp. 387-88); and the present becomes something to experience in its completeness: the family represented in Will; his own father-role to be lived through his son Marco; the temporal or personal love to be enjoyed with Ramona; and his own intense feelings and ideas to be accepted instead of fought. The future, then even though it may prove to be the quotidian with v/hich he has struggled so longis to be met not with resignation but v/ith v/illing acceptance, whatever may be, for as long as he remains "in occupancy" (p. 4l'4) . Numerous other aspects of the book should be taken into account in a comprehensive analysis, such as the imagery (which has been suggested only), symbolism, ethical and moral values, the Jewish-American identity, and many others, because the novel is indeed rich in such elements 143 of texture. Hov/ever, the primary aim of this examination has been to point out those qualities which place this recent novel v/ithin that important segment of modern American fiction which continues to use, to modify, to adapt those techniques peculiar to stream-of-consciousness writing. In exploring the psychic content of one central consciousness. Bellow has used an unusual form of soliloquy by means of let'ters; omniscient description; and both direct and indirect interior monologues. Employing the devices of free association and montage, and manipulating time and distance with great complexity, he has succeeded in combining external action with internal psychic pro- cesses. His originality in using the stream-of-consciousness technique lies in his expert blending of the various forms. This fusion in itself does more than any single device to convey the undifferentiated flow of. consciousness. Saul Bellow has made a valuable contribution to that stream begun some forty years ago in America by William Faulkner, a stream that sometimes cuts new channels but one that continues to flow in depth. CONCLUSION The foregoing examination has produced abundant evidence that the stream-of-consciousness technique is a vital part of modern American fiction. Introduced in America by William Faulkner in 1929, the technique was first regarded by many with misgiving, distrust, and even ridicule, but i,t was eventually recognized for its unique values. The stream-of-consciousness method has remained an integral part of much of our fiction, although at times it has become temporarily submerged, and it seems apparent that it will continue to be used, especially by those writers attempting to depict man's unending search for total reality. The basic approaches for which modern writers have the greatest adaptation are the interior monologues and the soliloquy. In applying these techniques, the element of time has received the greatest variation of treatment. Other devices, which have become almost hallmarks of the stream-of-consciousness technique, are extensive employment of sensory impression, symbolic structures, various forms of montage, and free association based on psychological descriptions of mental activity. In representing the flow and discontinuity of psychic activity, most v/riters have resorted to the use of a number of mechanical aids, most 144 145 notably italics and fragmentary sentence structure, with a lack of conventional paragraphing, punctuation, and capitalization. One advantage of the stream-of-consciousness tech- nique is the involvement of the reader, often demanding of him a certain amount of creative activity in order to understand not only the immediate world of the novel but also the larger implications which its totality projects. Usually forced to form his own judgments, the casual reader abandons such novels in frustration, but the careful reader, especially v/ith some understanding of the stream-of- consciousness method, finds the experience most rewarding. The immediacy produced by the use of stream of consciousness results in an empathy v/ith the character, which is rarely encountered in the more traditional descriptive novel, and a sense of a broader concept of humanity is not the least of the advantages to be had from the experience of a stream-of-consciousness account. Ranging in degree of application of the technique from that of its usage in one or two scenes to an exclusive employment of it as the single technique of the work, modern novels have continued to use the stream-of-consciousness method. Because of its utility, advantages, and adapt- ability, it is to be expected that further applications will be made by future writers. Certainly it has made a w 146 valuable contribution to the existing body of modern American literature. LIST OF WORKS CITED Beach, Joseph Warren. American Fiction 1920-1940. N=w York, 1942. Bellow, Saul. Herzog. Greenwich, Conn., 1965. Booth, Wayne-C Tlie Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, 1961 Comfort, Alex. The Novel and Our Time. London, 1948. Edel, Leon. The Modern Psychological Novel. New York, 1964. . The Psychological Novel. New York, 1955. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York, n.d. . The Sound and the Fury. New York, 1946. . Three Famous Short Novels. New York, 1940. Friedman, Alan. The Turn of the Novel. Nevv/ York, 1966. Friedman, Melvin. Stream q.f Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method. Nev/ Haven, 1955. Galloway, David D, The Absurd Hero i_n American Fiction. Austin, 1966. Geismar, Maxwell, American Moderns; From Rebellion to Conformity, New York, 1958. Humphrey, Robert, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. Berkeley," 1962. Kumar, Shiv K, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel. Ne\^/ York, 1963. Liddell, Robert. A Treatise .on the Novel. London, 1955. Macauley, Robie, and George Lanning. Technique in Fiction, Evanston, 1964, O'Connor, William Van. "William Faulkner," University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 3. Minneapolis, 1965. 147 148 Prescott, Orville. Ijn My Opinion. Indianapolis, 1952. Rovit, Earl. "Bellow in Occupancy," Malin, Irving, ed. Saul Bellov/ and the Critics. New York, 1967. Styron, William. Lie Down in Darkness. New York, 1951. Taaffe, Betty Jane. "The Quest of the Hero," Master's thesis, Texas Technological College, 1966, Updike, John, Rabbit, Run. New York, 1962. Volpe, Edmund L. A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner. New York, 1964. Warren, Robert Penn. "William Faulkner," O'Connor, William Van, ed. Forms of Modern Fiction. Minneapolis, 1948, West, Paul, The Modern Novel, 2 vols. London, 1965,