Reading Novels

6. Monologue and Stream of Consciousness

104 6 Monologue and Stream of Consciousness The modern sense of monologue is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , a “dramatic composition for a single performer” or “a long speech or harangue delivered by one person.” It is also “a literary composition of this nature.” Insofar as it resembles a speech, then, a first-person novel may be seen as a kind of monologue. But we also find sections in thirdperson narratives where long speeches are given over to a single speaker and function as monologue. Monologue may be addressed directly to the reader, or to other characters in the novel. It is also important as a way of representing the inner life or the flow of consciousness. For the purposes of analysis we need first to ask whether the entire work we are looking at can be seen as a monologue, or whether the monologue is quoted within a work. Are we given theatrical-style monologue, which is to be imagined as spoken aloud? Or are we given interior monologue of the self-reflective consciousness? Quoted Monologue Quoted monologue, of the type that is to be imagined as spoken aloud, is frequently used as a form of embedded narrative in traditional forms of the novel.1 We often find this when a new character is introduced (someone who gives his or her life story), or when a character has been off-scene for some time and returns to tell the others what has happened. In Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, the heroine goes to stay with Lady Delacour, comes to understand that something is wrong with her, and is then summoned to her room. Lady Delacour starts to tell “the history of her life and opinions in the following manner”: monologue and stream of consciousness 105 “I do nothing by halves, my dear—I shall not tell you my adventures, as Gil Blas told his to the archbishop of Grenada—skipping over the useful passages—because you are not an archbishop, and I should not have the grace to put on a sanctified face, if you were. I am no hypocrite , and have nothing worse than folly to conceal. . . . But I begin where I ought to end, with my moral, which I dare say you are not impatient to anticipate—I never read or listened to a moral at the end of a story in my life—manners for me, and morals for those that like them. My dear, you will be woefully disappointed, if in my story you expect anything like a novel. . . . Of all lives, mine has been the least romantic.” (Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, 1801, vol. 1, chap. 3) This obviously draws on theatrical traditions (Lady Delacour dramatizes her life of suffering and bravery for the young listener, while readers are placed in the position of an audience in the theater). But it also suggests traditions of the storyteller, and plays with ambivalences between spoken and written modes of narration. The sentences broken with dashes (which are unlike Edgeworth’s usual style) suggest oral narratives, just as mention of “the moral at the end of a story” may suggest traditional fables or children’s tales. Lady Delacour, however, blends different modes, since she says she has “read or listened” to them. She talks of Gil Blas telling his story—but Gil Blas’s tale has not come to her or Belinda through oral tradition: it is something she has read in the novel with that title. She denies that what follows will be an account of life “like a novel”—though most readers are going to read it as just that.2 Embedded monologues containing life-stories of the kind Lady Delacour tells are no longer common, but monologue in the novel can still draw on echoes of the theatrical, when the novel quotes a public speech or sermon. In Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Father Quigley’s sermon is a long rant against the modern world: “You know what I mean, you people up there,” he shouted in hard flat Ulster tones. “You that’s jiggling your feet and rubbing the back of your heads along the fresh paint that was put on the walls. I mean the disrespect to the Holy Tabernacle and the Blessed Body of Our Lord here in it. I mean coming in late for Holy Mass. I mean inattention, young boys giggling with young girls, I mean running out at the Last Gospel before the Mass is over...