Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T05:34:38.658Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Monologue Intérieur: The Origins of the Formula and the First Statement of its Possibilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Gleb Struve
Gleb Struve*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 4
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Who “Invented” the monologue intérieur or “inner monologue” as a literary device? And who was the first to coin and use this literary formula? These two questions have been for some time a matter for debate. Edouard Dujardin, in a book which was a mixture of naive arrogance with interesting and penetrating observations, defended somewhat heatedly his own priority as the “inventor” of this literary method, and dismissed rather airily various rival claims put forth on behalf of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Poe, Browning, and others, by André Gide, Charles du Bos, and René Lalou. Dujardin's own priority had been recognized by Joyce, whom Dujardin himself regarded as the most thorough and perfect practitioner of the method initiated by him, and by Valery Larbaud, who had applied the formula to Joyce's Ulysses and later practiced the method himself.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 69 , Issue 5 , December 1954 , pp. 1101 - 1111
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 I prefer this rendering in English to the more common “internal monologue” or the even worse “interior monologue.”

2 Dujardin, Le Monologue intérieur: Son apparition, ses origines, sa place dans l'œuvre de James Joyce (Paris: Messein, 1931).

3 See Wm. Leonard Schwarz, “The Interior Monologue in 1845,” MLN, lxiii (June 1948), 409-410. The use of this expression by Dumas may be a hint to its earlier origin but hardly as a literary term.

4 Readers who know no Russian can read an account of Chernyshevsky's views on literature in Charles Corbet, “Černyševskij esthéticien et critique,” Revue des études slaves, xxiv (1948), 107-128.

5 This and the following quotations are translated from the most recent edition of Chernyshevsky's Works: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. V. Ya. Kirpotin et al. (Moscow, 1947), ii, 421-431.

6 Two other contemporary critics, who belonged to the anti-utilitarian camp, Pavel Annenkov (1813-97) and Alexander Druzhinin (1824-64), had, prior to Chernyshevsky, noted some of these peculiarities of Tolstoy's psychological analysis, but neither discussed them at the same length nor spoke of “inner monologue.” The italics in the quotation are mine.

7 Leo Tolstoy, Tales of Army Life, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy Centenary Ed. (London, 1932), pp. 139-141. There are in Tolstoy's Sevastopol Stories other examples of inner monologues. The passage immediately following the one quoted by Chernyshevsky also contains such a monologue.

8 Here again Chernyshevsky gave proof of his perspicacity, for he had no knowledge of Tolstoy's diaries and his constant self-searching. It may be noted here that as a young man Chernyshevsky himself kept a diary, not unlike Tolstoy's, to which he gave the curious name of “Psychatorium.”

9 James Joyce (Norfolk, Conn., 1941), p. 93.

10 The present article was in the main written when I came across a recent contribution to the subject of inner monologue by C. D. King: “Edouard Dujardin, Inner Monologue and the Stream of Consciousness,” French Studies, vii (April 1953), 116-128. Mr. King's conclusions seem to favor Dujardin's claim to priority: speaking of Dujardin's predecessors he says that “in fact none of them wrote anything quite comparable with Les Lauriers sont coupés,” and farther on: “The intentions of Dujardin were new; he consciously used the form for the whole of his story, as an end in itself. The matter of his book is, very largely, the way it is expressed, just as the matter in music is the expression.” It is interesting to note that Mr. King sees the closest approximation to Dujardin's use of monologue intérieur in a Russian work which appeared ten years before Dujardin's novel and was translated into French in 1887, the year when Les Lauriers was published in the Revue Indépendante— in Vsevolod Garshin's Four Days (1877). It is unlikely that Dujardin could have known it. Mr. King sees, however, a big difference between the two works in that “Garshin used the technique as the most telling way of rendering an abnormal state, while Dujardin's character, Prince, is quite normal, and lives in normal surroundings.” To this it may be said that while it is true that Garshin's hero is placed in abnormal circumstances, there is nothing abnormal in him. Nor does Mr. King mention the fact of Garshin's dependence in his Four Days on Tolstoy, and especially on his Sevastopol Slories. The “inner monologue” of Garshin's wounded soldier has its sources in Tolstoy, and this takes us back to Chernyshevsky.

10a Some interesting considerations on this subject will be found in Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1954). See esp. pp. 23-61. The present essay was already in the press when Dr. Humphrey's book came out.

11 Bely's most Joycean work—Kotik Letaev—was written in 1917 and published in 1922. Bely had no knowledge of Joyce. Much earlier, in his four Symphonies (1902-08), he had already used a similar technique. What is more, it was motivated by the same desire which, according to Dujardin's own later explanation, underlay his novel. Dujardin says (p. 97): “Les Lauriers ont été entrepris avec la folle ambition de transposer dans le domaine littéraire les procédés wagnériens que je me définissais ainsi:—la vie de l’âme exprimée par l'incessante poussée des motifs musicaux venant dire, les uns après les autres, indéfiniment et successivement, les ‘états’ de la pensée, sentiment ou sensation …” In the preface to his Second (Dramatic) Symphony (chronologically speaking, his first, published in 1902) Bely said: “This work has three senses: a musical sense, a satirical sense, and besides, a philosophical-symbolical sense.” There is no doubt that in Bely's “musical” stream-of-consciousness fiction Wagner (as well as Nietzsche) also had some say. There is no reason to suppose that Bely knew anything about Dujardin and his novel, although this question might bear investigation. The only extensive non-Russian work dealing with Bely is Oleg A. Maslenikov's The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1952). Unfortunately, this partial biography is not of much help in understanding Bely the writer.

12 In what is perhaps the most remarkable single piece of literary criticism in Russian (and therefore long overdue for translation), in Konstantin Leontyev's cumbersomely entitled essay on Tolstoy—Analiz, stil' i veyanie v proizvedeniyakh grafa, L. N. Tolstogo (Analysis, Style and Atmosphere in the Works of Count L. N. Tolstoy, 1890)—the “inner monologue” formula is not used, but Leontyev has the same thing in mind when he speaks of Tolstoy's psychological “eavesdropping” and of his habit of interrupting the narrative and suspending his outward powers of observation “to fling open before the reader the doors to human psyche” and almost forcing him, “with the aid of a psychic microscope of his own devising,” to plunge into a world of fantasy—“now in a state of waking, now in a half-dream, now in a dream, be it in the midst of a battle or in the throes of a slow and gently-consoling death.”

13 In a recent Soviet volume of Tolstoy studies, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy: Sbornik statey i materialov, ed. D. D. Blagoy et al. (Moscow, 1951), there is an article by A. I. Shifman on Chernyshevsky and Tolstoy (“Chernyshevsky o Tolstom,” pp. 189-267). It is written in a spirit typical of Soviet Party-line criticism today and contains some significant polemic with earlier judgments by Soviet critics and scholars, including Boris Eichenbaum, one of the best Tolstoy scholars and one-time leader of Russian Formalism, who once ventured to express the view that Chernyshevsky may have been at heart “an oldfashioned aesthete.” Shifman discusses at some length Chernyshevsky's 1856 article on Tolstoy and mentions “inner monologue,” but does not go into the history of this formula. Soviet scholars today are probably unaware of the controversy around it. But the use of inner monologues by Tolstoy has become an accepted commonplace with Russian literary historians and critics. Eichenbaum in his book on Tolstoy (Lev Tolstoy, Leningrad, 1928, 1931), aptly said of Tolstoy's characters that “he hears everything they think.” I know, however, of only one work dealing specifically with the subject of Tolstoy's “inner monologues,” a short article by I. N. Strakhov, “Struktura vnutrennikh monologov v tvorchestve L. N. Tolstogo” (The Structure of Inner Monologues in the Work of L. N. Tolstoy) in Nauchny Byulleten' of the University of Leningrad (1946, No. 9, pp. 36-38). Strakhov, a professor of psychology, discussed the subject from the psychological rather than the literary point of view. He also wrote on inner monologues in Chekhov (ibid., No. 10, pp. 44-46). He did not raise the question of literary priority.

14 It is interesting to note that a formula similar to Chernyshevsky's and Larbaud's, viz. Gedankenmonolog, was used, long before Larbaud but after Chernyshevsky, by Arthur Schnitzler to describe the technique of. Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés, of his own Leutnant Gustl, and of Dostoevsky's “Krotkaya” (The Gentle Heart). Schnitzler used it in an unpublished letter to Georg Brandes, dated 11 June 1901, in which he wrote: “Ich freue mich, daß Sie die Novelle vom Lieutnant Gustl amüsiert hat. Eine Novelle von Dostojewski, Krotkaja, die ich nicht kenne, soll die gleiche Technik des Gedankenmonologs aufweisen. Mir aber wurde der erste Anlaß zu der Form durch eine Geschichte von Dujardin gegeben, betitelt les lauriers sont coupés. Nur daß dieser Autor für seine Form nicht den rechten Stoff zu finden wußte.” To this Brandes replied: “Zwar ist Krotkaja ein Monolog,—es gibt so viele Monologe, Flauberts St. Antoine ist auch ein Monolog—aber das kleine Buch hat gar keine Form-Ähnlichkeit mit dem Ihrigen. Les lauriers sont coupés las ich vor 16 Jahren glaub ich, als die Erzählung in la Revue Indépendante stand, und es machte mir einen starken und originellen Eindruck, aber das Einzelne hab ich vergessen.” The very interesting correspondence between Schnitzler and Brandes has been prepared for publication by Dr. Kurt Bergel, of Chapman College, and I want to express my thanks to him here for the permission to quote the above passages from his MS. entitled “Georg Brandes und Arthur Schnitzler: Ein Briefwechsel” (pp. 41-42). In his book on inner monologue Dujardin says that in 1926, in reply to an enquiry made by Valery Larbaud and Miss E. Weyel through Ernst Robert Curtius, Schnitzler stated that it was only after the publication of Leutnant Gustl that he came to know, through Brandes, Dujardin's novel. The above exchange of letters shows this to have been an error. As Dr. Bergel points out, Schnitzler “sich nicht mehr genau an die 26 Jahre zurückliegenden Ereignisse der Entstehungsgeschichte des Leutnant Gustl erinnerte” (p. 186). Dostoevsky's “Krotkaya” was cited as an example of inner monologue by André Gide in a letter to Dujardin (Le Monologue intérieur, p. 66). Since Schnitzler in his letter to Brandes admits his ignorance of Dostoevsky's story it is not clear who it was who pointed out to him the similarity between its technique and that of his Gustl.