Alexey
Sklyarenko: "Arch and grandiloquent,
Ada would be describing a dream, a natural history wonder, a special
belletristic device - Paul Bourget's 'monologue intérieur' borrowed
from old Leo - or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord,
a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a
nagol'nïy tulup, 'a muzhik's sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side
in,' as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never
to be procurable by Elsies. (1.10) [ ] In a letter of December 27,
1889,* to Suvorin Chekhov pairs Paul Bourget (the author of Le
Disciple, 1889) and Leo Tolstoy:...
Jansy Mello: In this quote, from ADA, Nabokov reiterates
what he observed in his LL on Tolstoy's Anna Karenin, concerning Tolstoy's
priority in the use of "interior monologue" A. Sklyarenko encountered an
interesting reference to both Paul Bourget and Leon Tolstoy in
one of Chekhov's letters.
Not always reliable wiki, on "stream of consciousness" and
"interior monologue," offers a brief historical overview* Wiki
precursors are Lawrence Sterne, Edouard du Jardin and E.A. Poe**
The names of Tolstoy and Paul Bourget are not mentioned, nor Arthur
Schnitzler's admirable "Fräulein Else" (1924). There is a reference to
Schnitzler (paired with Joyce, Proust and Chekhov), in:DISPATCHES FROM
ZEMBLA (Feb.04,2007)
http://marcelproust.blogspot.com.br/2007/02/arthur-schnitzler-fraulein-else.html .
The author notes that " the well known critic theatre and film critic John Simon
says:
'For me, Schnitzler
belongs in the vicinity of Proust, Joyce, and Chekhov. Like Proust, he can
analyze psyches down to their subtlest, most secret tremors and convey this in
complex, refined, and chiseled language. Like Joyce, and well before him, he put
the stream of consciousness to supremely character-revealing use while also
evoking the atmosphere and essence of a big city. And like Chekhov--both in
drama and narrative--he brought to pulsating immediacy any number of dashingly
histrionic or shadowily marginal lives, bestowing on most of his characters a
fine compassion never veering into sentimentality, patronization, or special
pleading.' [ ] Schnitzler may not have the linguistic virtuosity of
the writers that Simon mentions but he makes up for that in how effectively he
maps the inner life a character."
Despite an epigraph from Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and the title rrelated
to "Zembla", the commentator doesn't remember Nabokov's priorizing Leo Tolstoy,
either.
Brian Boyd in Ada Online observes, in relation to "stream of
consciousness"
http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/ada110ann.htm:
61.07-09:
Ada would be describing . . . a natural
history wonder, a special belletristic device—Paul Bourget’s “monologue
intérieur” borrowed from old Leo: Darkbloom: “the so-called
‘stream-of-consciousness’ device, used by Leo Tolstoy (in describing, for
instance, Anna’s last impressions whilst her carriage rolls through the streets
of Moscow).” (See
Anna
Karenin, VII.28-30.) In his Cornell lectures on Tolstoy, Nabokov declared:
“The Stream of Consciousness or Interior Monologue is a method of expression
which was invented by Tolstoy, a Russian, long before James Joyce” (the
published text of
Lectures on
Russian Literature, p. 183, becomes defective at this point). In 1967,
while he was writing
Ada,
Nabokov wrote in his foreword to
King, Queen, Knave, his and
Dmitri’s translation of the 1928
Korol’, dama, valet: “Speaking
of literary air currents, I must admit I was a little surprised to find in my
Russian text so many ‘
monologue intérieur’ passages—no relation to
Ulysses, which I hardly knew
at the time; but of course I had been exposed since tender boyhood to
Anna Karenin, which contains a
whole scene consisting of those intonations, Eden-new a hundred years ago, now
well used.” (x)
French novelist and critic
Paul Bourget
(1852-1935) introduced the
term in his novel
Cosmopolis (1893), shortly after Édouard Dujardin
based a novel on the method,
Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888). (Although forgotten now,
Bourget is represented by 21 works, including
Cosmopolis, in the catalogue
of Nabokov’s father’s library.) Richard Ellmann reports James Joyce discussing
with Valéry Larbaud “the method of what Larbaud, borrowing a term from Paul
Bourget’s
Cosmopolis (1893), called the ‘
monologue
intérieur.’ ” (
James Joyce [New York: Oxford, 1959], 534).
Van
recalls Ada’s taxonomy and her literary observations in a passage of interior
monologue as he leaves Ardis for the last time, 299.31-300.08: “She walked to
the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner
monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. . . . Never, never shall
I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice. . . . ” Lucette has a brief passage of
interior monologue before her death, at 493.20-25. MOTIF:
Ada’s
taxonomy.
Further on, in ADAm we reach Van's own
brief "stream-of-consciousness" episode, when we read "Maidenhair [ ] Thus named because
of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform....N’est vert,
n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or... Ginkgo, gingko, ink,
inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia:
sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness..."
.......................................................................................................................................................................
* wikipedia: "In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative
mode that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written
equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior
monologue or in connection to his or her actions[ ]. Stream of
consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue
and soliloquy, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person
...it is primarily a fictional device.[ ]While the use of the narrative
technique of stream of consciousness is usually associated with modernist
novelists in the first part of the twentieth-century, a number of precursors
have been suggested, including Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century
psychological novel Tristram Shandy, while in the nineteenth-century it has been
suggested that Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" foreshadows
this literary technique. Because of his renunciation of chronology in favor of
free association, Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) is
also an important precursor to the stream of consciousness narratives of James
Joyce and Virginia Woolf[ ]There are also those who point to Anton
Chekhov's short stories and plays and Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890), and Mysteries
(1892) as offering glimpses of the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative
technique at the end of the nineteenth-century. Marcel Proust is often presented
as an early example of a writer using the stream of consciousness technique in
his novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) but Robert
Humphrey comments, that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of
consciousness" and, that he "was deliberately recapturing the past for the
purpose of communicating; hence he did not write a stream-of consciousness
novel".
** - "Literature"
- A variety of readings. by Michael
Comenetz -
April 17, 2010 http://michaelcomenetz.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/inconsequence/
Check for this text in the VN-L (excerpts only).
"....
How and when did it achieve literary representation? Vladimir Nabokovclaims that
this "method of expression . a kind of record of a character's mind running on
and on, switching from one image or idea to another without any comment or
explanation on the part of the author," was invented by Tolstoy for the occasion
of Anna Karenina's last afternoon. There the device is in "rudimentary form,"
whereas James Joyce will advance it "to an extreme stage of objective record"
(Lectures on Russian Literature). But do we regard it as essential that the
artist present the stream as inward? There seems no good reason to, since
however disorderly the phenomenon inadequately called a "stream" may be, its
presentation has in any case the linearity of speech. Abandoning this
requirement, we can easily discover the "record of a mind" before Tolstoy.
Dickens has it in Nicholas Nickleby.[ ] ... But setting aside some
metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind,
that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which
succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux
and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our
perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our
other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single
power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment.
The mind is a kind oftheatre, where several perceptions successively make their
appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of
postures and situations.There are probably 18th-century examples-Fielding?
Sheridan? Not Sterne, I suspect, for all his apparent wandering.I don't see why
there may not be occasional instances of purely random sequences of ideas,
although it seems that, as a rule, either thoughts are aroused by outer stimuli
or else one thought leads to another.
It may be from Sancho Panza that
[Molière's] Sganarelle learned to string sayings together, although Sancho's,
while numerous, are much more to the point than his. Sancho can also tell a
story as digressively as Mrs. Nickleby or Miss Bates. (Ellipses in brackets
indicate omitted interruptions by others.)[ ]Sancho differs from Miss Bates and
the others if, as I think likely, his digressions are calculated to serve his
purpose.From such examples we may go further back to the rambling essays of
Montaigne, the lists of Rabelais, and Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas, which
promises so ill that the Host suppresses it, a fitting punishment for tedious
digressiveness, a flow that goes on and on without excuse, its causes hidden in
the mind of the perpetrator, rather like this post."