Inside Game

Whether through "strea of consciousness" or the less strict adherence to continuous thought of psychological realism, it has become an almost reflexive assumption among many writers and readers that the job of serious fiction is to penetrate the veil of speech and action and reveal the human mind at work. It is often said, in fact (think James Wood), that what separates the art of fiction from all other modern narrative practices is precisely that it is able to "go deep" beneath the surface of ordinary reality and to capture the role of consciousness in processing and shaping that reality, thus enhancing the ostensible story a work of fiction relates with, in effect, an additional story (even the "real" story): an account of the mind attempting to make sense of the world it confronts. But is it really the case that this is therefore the presumed goal that writers of fiction should pursue if they want to fulfill fiction's artistic mission? Is stream of consciousness literary fiction's consummate achievement?

Reviewers of Mauro Javier Cárdenas's first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), as well as his most recent, Aphasia, have referred to his narrative strategy in both as stream of consciousness, and it seems an accurate enough characterization. While the term is often used very loosely in describing almost any attempt to suggest "what's happening" inside the mind of a fictional character, in Cárdenas's case the effort is not just a routine exercise in "free indirect discourse" or the creation of an especially introspective first-person narrator. Each of the novels, most emphatically Aphasia, with its focus on the consciousness of a single character, offers propulsive but meticulous renditions of subjective states of rumination and perception, not always reflecting a habit of strictly linear thinking—indeed, Aphasia really does seem to evoke the "flow" of mental awareness.

The notion that narrative discourse in fiction might be shaped to mimic the human thought process is of course most familiar from the work of the early modernists (perhaps also encompassing Henry James's emphasis on a "central consciousness"). In its historical context, this strategy can be regarded as part of the broader modernist search for alternatives to the reigning assumptions of realist fiction: Stream of consciousness implicitly proposes that reality is to be discovered in its most essential manifestation in the phenomenon of perception, while at the same time in enacts a radical experiment in point of view, effectually inverting the synoptic vision of the third-person omniscient perspective employed by many nineteenth-century novelists, in favor of the subjective outlook of the created character's understanding. This paradigmatic version of the stream of consciousness technique, if not the technique itself, has been profoundly influential in the widespread appeal to what is more broadly called "psychological realism" in the years following on high modernism.

Missing from most criticism considering the devices that produce psychological depth is the acknowledgement that the impression of such depth is indeed an illusion created by the writer successfully exploiting artificial devices. It seems highly unlikely that most—if any—emulations of Mind in fiction actually resemble the phenomena of consciousness as understood by psychologists and neuroscientists. What the best psychological realism brings to the treatment of human thinking in fiction is art, the verbal artistry we should expect from novelists and poets, not some special insight into the way the brain works. Unfortunately, the moves required to invoke the illusion of a perceiving mind have become sufficiently routine through repetition that they have come to function more as shorthand than as expressions of literary art, although for this very reason writers who do manifestly bring literary art to the portrayal of a character's internal state are perhaps all the more noteworthy. Happily, this is precisely what Mauro Javier Cardenas brings to his account of the experience of Aphasia's harried protagonist, Antonio.

Antonio is a Colombian - American immigrant writer and database manager attempting to manage several ongoing and overlapping dilemmas in his own life...