Interior Weather: A Narrative Review of the Modernist Novel and Stream of Consciousness from Joyce to Faulkner

Abstract

The modernist novel---Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner above all---rebuilt fiction's architecture around consciousness itself, and its stream-of-consciousness technique remains the century's most consequential narrative invention. This article presents a narrative review of the technique's canonical line: James's late style as preface, Joyce's 1922 Ulysses, Woolf's 1925 Mrs Dalloway and 1927 To the Lighthouse, Faulkner's 1929 Sound and the Fury, Humphrey's 1954 and Friedman's 1955 taxonomies of interior monologue, Kenner's 1955 Dublin's Joyce, Forster's 1927 Aspects of the Novel, Bradbury and McFarlane's 1976 Modernism, Levenson's 1984 genealogy, and the contemporary narratological synthesis. The synthesis is organized around three themes: technique, in which interior monologue, free indirect discourse, and time-dilation formalized the representation of thought; form, in which mythic structure, day-frames, and temporal fragmentation reorganized the novel's architecture; and history, in which modernism's interiors answered urbanization, war, and the crisis of liberal subjectivity. It is concluded that stream of consciousness remade the novel's contract---from event to attention---and that its techniques, formalized by narratology, are now the common property of world fiction.