Is Henry James's "narrative consciousness" similar to James Joyce's "stream of consciousness'?

Question

I'm reading James's "The Portrait of a Lady" and Joyce's "The Dubliners"; I prefer James's whose prose's more readable and understandable than Joyce's. Any comments?

Answer 1

Henry James's "narrative consciousness" is a rigid adherence to the limited omniscient point of view in fiction, in which the author sees and tells the story strictly through the consciousness of one of the characters, such as Isobel in Portrait of a Lady or Strether in The Ambassadors. James was particularly critical of a novelist like Anthony Trollope, who spoke directly to the reader, letting his omniscient point of view step outside the limitations of characters' consciousness and comment as the author/God. In James's work, realism necessarily involved the exploration of a character's pscyhology by careful attention to their consciousness.

James Joyce simply took narrative consciousness one step further and let the consciousness of the character or character(s) be presented with all of the fits and starts that characterize one's inner consciousness. Stream of consciousness, with him, sometimes even delves into the subconscious or unconscious mind; for example, in the Molly Bloom soliloquy in Ulysses as she accepts her husband Leopold into her bed, probably achieving orgasm with the last phrase of the chapter: "his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Here's the way one critic [1] traces this development of point of view in early modern fiction.

"When the limited omniscient position is used, the author still narrates the story but restricts (limits) his or her revelation—and therefore our knowledge—of the thoughts of all but one character. This character may be either a main or peripheral character. One name for this character is 'central consciousness.' A device of plot and characterization that often accompanies this point of view is the character’s gradual discovery of himself or herself until the story climaxes in an epiphany. . . . Sometimes the author restricts the point of view so severely that we see everything solely through the mind of a single character, like sunlight filtered through the leaves and branches of a tall tree. The later fiction of Henry James experiments with this severe restriction of the limited omniscient point of view. His story “The Beast in the Jungle” and his novel The Ambassadors are examples. Other writers, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, carry James’s experiments further with a 'stream of consciousness' technique, which puts the reader literally in the mind of a character. In the first section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury we experience the chaotic thoughts of a mentally retarded man, and we view the novel’s world solely though his mind."

James Joyce's stream of consciousness progresses ever more deeply into consciousness from The Dubliners to Ulysses to Finnegan's Wake.

Henry James's seminal ideas on point of view in fiction were further developed and explicated by his friend and editor, Percy Lubbock. As Lubbock "stated in his classic work The Craft of Fiction--an early study of technique--'The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of the point of view--the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story.'" [2]

James, and Lubbock, have been so influential that virtually all contemporary fiction is written in either first-person point of view or limited omniscient (thrid person)--though some authors switch from the consciousness of one character to another between chapters or even within chapters. (The other points of view in fiction, by the way, are unlimited omniscient, as Trollop and most Victorian novelists used, and objective, in which the reader is not permitted to see inside the mind of either the author or the characters.)

Answer 2

Henry James falls under a group of writers usually known as Realists and Naturalists. There was an emphasis on capturing reality carefully and without judgment, depicting the real world. In a way, though, James' fiction does delve into the psychology of his characters, therefore acting as a bit of a precursor to the stream of consciousness writing popularized by early 20th C. writers like Joyce. I, too, find James much more readable, although successfully completing a stream of consciousness text always feels like a victory! For deeper research, look into the Realists for James and the Modernists for Joyce. Happy Reading!

Answer 3

Central Consciousness

Answer 4

It is a great piece of writing. It isn't the easiest book to understand, but one of the more important novels of the 20th century. The supermarket novels are much easier reading, but most of those books won't be around for future generations to enjoy.