Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner: Associative Memory

Abstract

The stream-of-consciousness technique which unites the modem fiction writers Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner situates their approach to memory within an associationist context. The expression that William James himself had coined in 1890 in Principles of Psychology — ‘the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life’¹ — set the path for the literary experimentation with associationist memory in the early twentieth century. James had insisted on the notion of a fluid consciousness: ‘Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly … It is nothing jointed; it flows.’ These novelists intuitively saw that their characters could express the workings of the mind in the flow of words, images and ideas. This succession of thoughts depended for the most part on acts of perception. The reader is drawn into the flow of the key characters’ minds wherein memory occupies a dominant place. As all three writers were thoroughly obsessed with memory events in their lives, they transferred such obsessions to their novels. Moreover, their personal memories mingled with cultural ones as they depicted the change they witnessed in their respective societies in the years from 1890–1920: Woolf’s late Victorian England, Faulkner’s postbellum American South, and Joyce’s premodern Ireland.