Something new happens, James Wood says, with Chekhov and his characters; he bestows them a freedom - 'they act like free consciousnesses, and not as owned literary characters'. Chekhov discovers what would come to be called the stream of consciousness, which allows, says Wood, for a kind of forgetfulness to enter fiction.
A stream of consciousness? Perhaps a river instead, and downstream when it rolls along, braiding, meandering, and perhaps isolating itself in those still pools whose stagnancy recalls that stultifying rural Russia Chekhov evokes so well. Chekhov's 'beautifully accidental style, his mimicking of the stream of the mind, is that it allows forgetfulness into fiction'.
A forgetting, a braiding of thoughts, a meandering away from intention, from purpose - and this is what Chekhov allows: the characters, while not forgetting to be themselves 'They forget to act as purposeful fictional characters. They mislay their scripts'.
Woolf follows Chekhov and perfects the art. Forgetting, with Woolf, becomes a kind of absentmindedness:
A character is allowed to drift out of relevance, to wander into a randomness which may be at odds with the structure of the novel as a whole. What does it mean for a character to become irrelevant to a novel? It frees characters from the fiction which grips them; it lets character forget, as it were, that they are thickened in a novel.
Characters freed, then, from the iron collar of narrative. Characters set free to wander, but to do more than run away with their author, surprising him by their vividness, by the life they seem to want to live. To do more - for they've forgotten they're in a narrative at all; the book falls away in irrelevance.
So with Mrs Ramsay, who forgets for 20 pages she's to be at the centre of Lily Briscoe's painting in To the Lighthouse. Forgets, and bears the reader along with her for those 20 pages. We travel with her; we experience forgetting with her, Wood says; 'and in this way out of her'. Out of her? Of Mrs Ramsay? Is it still Mrs Ramsay's stream of consciousness that rolls through those pages?
It is as if the novel forgets itself, forgets that Mrs Ramsay is a character. She has been at the centre of the novel all along and we have hardly notced it, because we have inhabited her own invisibility.
Into what are we drawn as readers? Into the self-forgetting of the novel, that sets free its central characters and all of its characters, that sets free its plot and lets wander; and finally sets free its narrative voice, that speaks only in the invisibility Mrs Ramsay has been allowed to inhabit. As though her thoughts had turned her inside out like a glove. As though there was a kind of streaming that is more than consciousness - a current that has drawn us drowning beneath the water.
Wood does not go so far.
Yet Woolf's delicate method shows us that we are never thinking about nothing, that we are always thinking about something, that it is impossible for us not to think, even if the thought is merely the process of forgetting something.
Thought is intentional, as the phenomenologist would say; we cannot help but think of things; thought thinks thoughts, and to forget, as Descartes would admit, is to continue to think. Is it this that To the Lighthouse shows? For Wood, 'it brings us closer to what Woolf called "life". In her novels, thought radiates outward, as a medieval town radiates outward - from a beautifully neglected centre'.
This is beautiful. Thought radiates outward. Thought laps outward, but from what centre? From that, now, that displaces character, narrative, and the fiction itself. And by so doing, perhaps allows another voice to come forward, murmuring, rustling, concerned with itself and turning in itself. This is the voice that speaks invisibly in the novel's visibilities; it is what turns into darkness even as the surface of the stream seems to dissolve into light. But in its darkness, isn't also what allows light? And is its plunge from the surface what allows its glitter?
Perhaps there is a thinking that is more than intentional, or that runs backwards from the intended object to the would-be thinker. A thought that is more than can be thought, that splits consciousness wide and lets there run a stream of non-consciousness, the stream that rustles darkly in itself, whose laughter is like that of Odradek and, says Janouch, Kafka: the sound of dead leaves. Might we call it life, too? Might it also be called life, that impersonal current that neglects itself in any narrative, and that neglects us too, so that we continually miss it?
As I Lay Dying is a great book because Faulkner, like Joyce and Woolf (and presaged by Chekhov) uses the innovation of stream of consciousness to allow his characters to forget themselves, to break free of the author's incessant memoranda, to be in their own verbal confusions.
This from Wood later in the volume and it seems almost a retreat. For it is the novel itself that is forgotten with Woolf (with Wood's Woolf) - that forgets itself as the narrative voice that drifts through Mrs Ramsay, the other characters, and the plot itself. Perhaps it can be presented as a thought, or as a kind of thinking - only one, now, that is greater than the thinker, like Descartes' idea of God. Greater, and found first of all, there among the contents of the thinker's consciousness. There first of all, that point which, I imagine, might be pulled upon so that consciousness itself turns inside out like a glove.
Dream of that book where thought thinks itself outside the thinker. Dream of a narrative voice uncontained by the narrative, of a forgetting that draws it back into the novel, back, even as it is nothing but its flowing surface. After the stream of consciousness comes, with Blanchot, another innovation: the streaming of that impersonal voice of which consciousness is itself a fold. Isn't this what he sought to discover from the 1930s onwards in his fiction, his literary criticism?
Assertions here, not arguments. I will return to this topic on another occasion.