Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 1, April 2013
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Stream of Consciousness Technique in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
by
Government Arts College (Autonomous) (Affiliated to Madras University), Chennai, India.
Regarding technique we find that in order to reveal Willy Loman’s chaotic state of mind Miller has adopted a method generally used by writers of the stream of consciousness fiction. The play achieves much of its emotional intensity by exploring the anguished thoughts and pitifully fragmented memories of its hero in dramatic sequences of great beauty and depth. It would be a mistake to consider the technique of this play as merely a way of narrating by means of flashbacks; it has much greater psychological complicity, for what is revealed is not simply the memory of an earlier event, but a new experience, a fusion of past and present. Commenting upon his method, Miller says, “I wished to create form, in itself as a form, would be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind” (23-24).
The phrase “Stream of Consciousness”, coined by William James, properly belongs to the domain of psychology. As a literary label it is used to indicate an approach to the presentation of psychological aspects of character in fiction. The novels that are said to use the stream of consciousness technique have as their subject matter the consciousness of one or more characters. The depicted consciousness serves as a screen on which the material in these novels is presented. It differs from psychological fiction in that it is concerned with those levels that are more inchoate than rational verbalizations. Two levels of consciousness may be distinguished: the speech level and the pre-speech level. Stream of consciousness novels deal essentially with the pre-speech level of consciousness. The pre-speech levels of consciousness are not censored, rationally controlled, or logically ordered. In stream of consciousness fiction the basic emphasis is placed on exploration of the pre-speech levels of consciousness for the purpose, primarily, of revealing the psychic being of the characters.
When William James was formulating psychological theory he had discovered that “memories, thoughts, and feelings exist outside the primary consciousness and further that they appear to one, not as a chain, but as a stream, a flow” (239). The representation of the flow of consciousness is a matter of technique. Stream of consciousness is not technique for its own sake. It is based on a realization of the force of the drama that takes place in the minds of human beings. The realm of life which stream of consciousness literature is concerned with is mental and spiritual experience - both the whatness and howness of it. The whatness includes the categories of mental experiences: sensations, memories, imaginations, conceptions, and intuitions. The howness includes the symbolizations, the feeling and the processes of association. The great advantage rests on its potentialities for presenting characters more accurately and more realistically. In short, the stream of consciousness novelists, like the naturalists try to depict life accurately: but unlike the naturalists, the life they are concerned with is the individual’s psyche.
Virginia Woolf believes that the individual is constantly in search of meaning and identification. She uses this technique to reveal this search. Her novels are a record of these preparations for the final insight, the moment of truth. The preparations are in the form of fleeting insights into other characters and syntheses of present and past private symbols. James Joyce achieves a marvelous degree of objectivity. He gains more than any other novelist by this technique, dramatic immediacy. The author is almost refined out of existence in Ulysses. The effect of this great accomplishment is to make the reader feel he is in direct contact with the life represented in the book. He presents life as it actually is, without prejudice or direct evaluation. This is the goal of the realist and the naturalist. The thoughts and actions of the characters are there, as if they were created by an invisible indifferent creator. We must accept them because they exist.
Four basic techniques are used in presenting the stream of consciousness. They are direct interior monologue, indirect interior monologue, omniscient description, and soliloquy. Interior monologue purports to imitate a concealed linguistic activity whose very existence cannot be objectively attested. It is the speech of a character intended to introduce us directly into the interior life of that character without author intervention through explanations or commentaries. It differs from traditional monologue in that in its matter it is an expression of the most intimate thought that lies nearest the unconscious. In its form it is produced in direct phrases reduced to the minimum of syntax. Interior monologue is, then, the technique used in fiction for representing the psychic content and processes of character, partly or entirely unuttered, just as these processes exist at various levels of conscious control before they are formulated for deliberate speech. This is the differentia which separates interior monologue from dramatic monologue and stage soliloquy.
We may distinguish two basic types of interior monologue. They can conveniently be designated as “direct” and “indirect”. Direct interior monologue presents consciousness directly to the reader with negligible author interference; that is, there is either a complete or a near complete disappearance of the author from the page, with his guiding “he said “s and “he thought ”s and with his explanatory comments. There is no auditor assumed; that is the character is not speaking to anyone within the fictional scene; nor is the character speaking in effect, to the reader. In short, the monologue is represented as being completely candid as if there were no reader. It proceeds in spite of the reader’s expectations in order to represent the actual texture of consciousness; in order to represent it finally, however, to the reader. The other important characteristic of the movement of consciousness is ability to move freely in time - its tendency to find its own sense. The premise is that the psychic processes, before they are rationally controlled for communicative purposes, do not follow calendar continuity.The chief technique in controlling the movement of consciousness in fiction has been an application of the principles of psychological free association. The psyche which is almost continuously active cannot be concentrated for very long in its processes, even when it is most strongly willed; when little effort is exerted to concentrate it, its focus remains on any one thing but momentarily. Three factors control the association; first, the memory, which is its basis; second the senses, which guide it; and third, the imagination which determines its elasticity (Humphrey 43). Miller has employed the direct interior monologue technique to present the stream of consciousness of Willy Loman and is dependent largely on the principle of psychological free association to give direction to the materials of consciousness. The structure of events and the nature of its form are the direct reflection of Wily Loman’s way of thinking.
When All My Sons took shape it followed the constructive principles of Ibsenesque realism, progressing in a tightly controlled chronology with one scene leading causally to the next and transitional moments bridging scenes; as Miller describes it the play proceeds “ a stitch at a time . . . in order to weave a tapestry.” But when the playwright conceived Salesman he wanted a form with a kind of “moment -to- moment wildness” that All My Sons did not have. Miller tells us:
The first image that occurred to me which was to result in Death of a Salesman was of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man’s head. In fact the Inside of His Head was the first title. . . . The image was in direct opposition to the method of All My Sons – a method one might call linear or eventual in that one factor incident creates the necessity for the next. The salesman image was from the beginning absorbed with the concept that nothing in life comes ‘next ‘but that everything exists together and at the same time within us; that there is no past to be ‘brought forward ‘in a human being, but that he is his past at every moment and that the present is nearly that which his past is capable of noticing and smelling and reacting to. . . . The way of telling the tale. . . is as mad as Willy. . . . It is not possible, in my opinion to graft it onto a character whose psychology it does not reflect, and I have not used it since because it would be false to a more integrated – or less disintegrating – personality to pretend that the past and the present are so openly and vocally intertwined in his mind. In the hands of writers who see it as an easy way to elicit anterior information in a play it becomes merely a flashback. There are no flashbacks in the play but only a mobile concurrency of past and present. . . . The play’s eye was to revolve from within Willy’s head, sweeping endlessly in all directions like a light on the sea, and nothing that formed in the distant mist was to be left uninvestigated. It was thought of as having the density of the novel form in its interchange of view points, so that while all roads led to Willy the other character were to feel it was their play, a story about them and not him (23-30).
Miller’s observation of the play encompasses elements that are usually found in stream of consciousness fiction. The play mirrors the processes of a disoriented mind which has destroyed the boundaries between now and then. It is especially important to notice that Miller is aware that the “density “ he sought might be found in a complex, mind-centered point of view which would result in a new form in drama. Neil Carson observes, “The most original feature of the play is its form – a form which Miller had been searching since the beginning of his dramatic career “(45). The form of the play is loose and accommodative. The barriers of time and space disappear. The skeletal set is conceived of to let Willy Loman move from the present to the past. A rich interpretation of past and present is accomplished by the author’s employment of the stream of consciousness form. Robert Hogan aptly observes: “The play is a notable achievement, for in it Miller broke out of the realistic confinement of time and space and psychology “(23).
The present is never erased by the past but is rather made richer by it. Whereas the film version of the play shows Willy’s memories as flashbacks – substituting one time and place for another – the stage production shows past and present existing simultaneously as a stream of consciousness fiction does. T he result is an enlargement of the dramatic form to include the world of subjective experience normally excluded from the stage. It is the very richness of Salesman which is at once its greatest strength and its principal problem. On the other hand the form permits an intricate interweaving of thematic material in which incidents are thrust into the play with a minimum of exposition and developed so long as they are thematically relevant. On the other hand, the mixture of verbal and theatrical images defies simple analysis and conveys to many readers and spectators an impression of narrative confusion. This is largely due to the fact the story proceeds in two dimensions - real time and remembered time. The “ external plot “ deals with the last twenty-four hours of Willy’s life from his return home on late Monday night to his death Tuesday evening. Then there is the “internal plot “which treats the past from Willy’s earliest memories of his own father to the fateful summer of Biff’s failure in high school. It is the presentation of Willy’s internal life which is the most striking feature of the play, and the one which must be understood before final assessment of the work can be made. The stream of consciousness form in which the play is cast is perfectly suited to the nature of its protagonist’s psychological imbalance in which the memory of the past challenges the reality of the present in a surrealistic battle for supremacy.
One of the most important manifestations of this structure is the breakdown of chronological time in order to dredge the important elements from the past into the troubled present. The application of the interior monologue technique helps the author present characters and events concentrically, almost kaleidoscopically out of the vast whirlpool of Willy’s semiconscious existence. Miller dramatizes three types of time: objective time present (we see what occurs as if in real life), subjective time past (enacted as Willy presently imagines the past), and a mixture of both. The four scenic units in the first part of Act One clearly illustrate this pattern. The play begins with objective time present (Willy and Linda, Biff and Happy, Willy and Linda), continues with subjective time past (Willy imagines himself with his family in 1932), follows with objective time present (Willy, Happy, and Charley), the mixture of objective and subjective (Willy talks to Charley and his dead brother), and so forth. In the restaurant scene of Act Two, Miller dazzlingly employs combinations of time in rapid sequence. The stream of consciousness form is integral to the theme and characterization of the play in at least two ways. First, it indicates the agonizing intensity of the salesman’s search for the meaning of his life. He recreates the incidents and individuals as if they were all witnesses in an inquest, and reaches out to them in an almost delirious attempt to find answers for his fall. The second important consequence of Salesman’s structure is that by insolubly linking the final days of Willy’s life with the years that have shaped them, it gives his life and death a dramatic cohesiveness. Classically, Miller introduces his protagonist shortly before his destruction, but by showing the audience Willy’s life instead of piecing it together through exposition, the playwright escapes the snare of wordiness and the long ponderous development. The suspense that would ordinarily preclude Willy’s death is eradicated, but as the play’s title indicates Miller did not intend the ending to come as a surprise. More pertinently, the salesman’s suicide is graphically joined to the past events which have paved its way.
The real action of the play is internal, taking place in the several reveries that consume Willy at critical moments. In Willy’s reveries, which are dramatized on the apron of the stage, the set becomes imaginary, with Willy recreating moments that took place in the Loman home and backyard and in a hotel room in Boston, involving not only characters from the present action but brother Ben and the woman with whom Willy had an affair. Willy slips into the past whenever he is confronted with a crisis too difficult for him to accommodate and, finally, when he needs to make a decision about suicide. Schlueter and Flanagan point out that, “ His (Willy’s) reveries . . . may well be more - or- less- than recall; they may be Willy’s way of reconstructing history and self” (61). Ben appears in Willy’s reveries as a sixty-year old man. Years earlier, Willy might have gone to Alaska with Ben but he chose instead to conquer New England territory. He has wondered since about the road not taken and looked to Ben for assurance that he has not made a mistake. At his first appearance, Willy defends his life in Brooklyn to brother Ben and boasts of his sons’ physical prowess, shamelessly seeking Ben’s endorsement which he receives. Ben returns to Willy’s mind when the salesman is fired. He recreates the moment of his refusal: he did not go to Alaska because he was “building something with his firm.” This time Ben offers the contrary reaction: “There’s a new continent at your doorstep, William. You could walk out rich. Rich! “. Willy shouts after him, “We’ll do it here, Ben! You hear me? We’re gonna do it here!” even as he sits in Howard’s office without a job (183-84). It is particularly telling that Willy’s final psychic departure from the present takes him not into the past, as all his other reveries do, but into a fictional present in which he can discuss the future – more specifically, suicide – with Ben. Essentially the reveries fall into two categories, each defining a crucial fact of Willy’s life. One grouping comprises the events involving Willy and his brother Ben, who appears to Willy’s disintegrating mind as a cold, righteous, self-assured deity, and objectification by contrast of Willy’s uncertainty and insecurity. In every confrontation with Ben, Willy is portrayed as the adoring, fearful, and supplicating child seeking guidance and assurance from the archetypal authoritarian father. But in these Willy is dispensing advice rather than seeking it. He is self-contradictory. The second set of episodes, which centers on Willy and his sons, shows Willy the father trying to substantiate his ecstatic belief in the success ideal by superimposing it upon his children.
Both sets of reveries culminate in the one involving Willy’s infidelity – the fact and symbol of his final degradation, the revelation of his insecurity and failure, and the verification of his bleak loneliness and alienation. Ultimately, each event dredged out of his past makes the same point about Willy Loman: his life is caught between an irresolvable dichotomy between fact and fancy. He is unable to separate his individuality from his conception of himself as a salesman – because he cannot truly differentiate between the two. Miller relies on the principle of psychological free association to give direction to the movement of consciousness. Willy’s memories do not materialize at random. The memories, generally concerned with the disintegration of his family and his professional aspirations, are triggered by analogous happenings in the present. Thus, after he is fired by Howard, Willy remembers his refusal of a vocational opportunity that might have led to magnificent accomplishment instead of the present ignominy. And Biff’s unfavorable report of an attempt to acquire financial backing for a business venture turns Willy’s mind back to the hotel room in which Biff discovered him with his mistress: a discovery that the father fears has inflicted his son’s failures. Transitions in place and time are cleverly implemented by ingenious stage effects, a skeletonized house-set, multiple playing areas (apron, forestage, and two levels of the house), and the repetition of key words or topics before, during, and after each recollection. Miller’s skill in executing imaginative, meaningful transitions is apparent in the opening scene, which introduces the subject of family disharmony. A conversation with Linda about his driving that day reminds Willy of the old “chevvy” he owned when his boys still loved and obeyed him. As he “loses himself in reminiscences,” sitting in his kitchen interest moves to another playing level, the upstairs bedroom, where the brothers too have been discussing their father’s careless driving. Then, when they recall their popularity with girls in their youth, they in turn are interrupted by Willy’s “mumbling” downstairs to an imaginary Biff on the same subject: “ the girls pay for you? . . . Boy you must really be makin’ a hit” (142-43).
During this transition as in others, recurring themes are grouped in psychologically significant combinations. While Willy visualizes a joyful, affectionate family group, another intimate but less innocent scene from a still earlier time – again involving a “girl” – breaks in on the word “make”:
Willy (to Linda): There’s so much I want to make for –
The woman: Me? You didn’t make me. Willy I picked you (150).
Willy’s family – dream returns, with Linda mending stockings (his mistress had asked for a lot of stockings); But since innocence has been corrupted, shame colors the recollection. Now the mention of girls and car, punctuated by “the woman’s laugh,” denotes Biff’s (and by implication, Willy’s) irresponsibility, not worth. Changed to waking nightmare, the day – dream disappears and leaves Willy alone in his kitchen, guiltily denying responsibility for his son’s decline
Virginia Woolf has made use of montage in her novels. But it is Joyce who is most frequently noticed as the brilliant exponent of this device. Both Joyce and Woolf use it, as do other stream of consciousness writers, because the quality of consciousness itself demands a movement that is not rigid clock progression. It demands the freedom of shifting back and forth, of intermingling past and present, and imagined future. The chief function of all the cinematic devices, particularly of the basic one of montage, is to express movement and co-existence. It is the ready-made device for representing the non-static and non-focused which the stream-of-consciousness writers have grasped to aid them in accomplishing what is, after all their fundamental purpose: to represent the dual aspect of human life – the inner life simultaneously with the outer life. Joyce utilizes space-montage as his basic technique and superimposes interior monologue on it. Miller practices Woolf’s method in this regard. He resorts to the use of time-montage to depict the subjective world of the protagonist. Willy remains fixed in space and his consciousness moves in time. It is to be noted that the opening conversations between Willy and Linda presents a perfectly naturalistic dialogue which points to the overstrained anxiety of the salesman, and also his nostalgic longing for the past. This conversation is followed by the dialogue between Happy and Biff who are apprehensive of their father’s mental strain and their own future. Even before the two brothers finish their conversation we see Willy in the kitchen muttering to himself – imagining young Biff listening to his advice. This fantasy is interrupted when Happy comes down the stairs and Charley, his next-door neighbor, comes up to suggest a game of cards. Up to now there is the clear division between scenes of actuality and those of fantasy: the opening conversation is followed by Willy’s recollection scene of the happy early days which “fades-out” to give place to Happy and Charley’s actual appearance. Then Ben appears and the kitchen-room is at once converted into a dramatic space in which the distinction between actuality and dream is sacrificed to present the picture of a mind which has lost all sense of time sequence. “As action progresses. . . past and present, dream and actuality coexist as in a montage,” says Choudry.(102)
The dramatic density brought about by this technique is further buttressed by the excellent use of dramatic irony. All through the play irony plays a vital part in sharpening our sense of enjoyment. He was, however, vaguely aware of the contradictory world around him, though he was unable to read the meaning of the chaos of his experience. The situation is indeed ideal for the use of dramatic irony, and Miller fully exploits it to his advantage. Willy’s whole life is a study in irony: his trust in the clichés and legends of the business world is ironical; he loves his family and children, but he cannot keep them together; he loves Linda and is yet unfaithful to her; he loves his children but they do not respect him. There are numerous scenes in which the edge of irony is sharp enough to reveal the gap between illusion and reality; at the end of the memory scene in the first act Willy gives the woman fresh silk stockings, and in the actual scene that follows immediately Linda is seen mending a pair of her silk stockings; Charley and Bernard are not “well-liked” but Willy in Charley’s office in the second act asks Bernard the secret of his success; Willy went to the hotel to have a grand dinner and to evoke a sense of comradeship with his sons, but he came home crushed and alienated. Another important ironical situation is the funeral scene which is attended only by his family and Charley. No salesman came from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, or New Jersey to attend the funeral of Willy Loman. He told Ben in the garden that the funeral would be an event in the life of the family. His life and death were equally unrecognized.
Another set of controls is of less importance than free association and the cinematic devices. This set comprises the mechanical devices. Typographical and punctuation controls serve to give the effect of directness to interior monologue, and at the same time, they allow the author on-the-spot control of the monologue. These devices, although they are usually functional, serve an important purpose. They are often signals for important changes in direction, pace, time or even in character focus; occasionally they are the only indications of such change. Virginia Woolf’s reliance on punctuation to control the representation of consciousness movement is limited to the use of parentheses. Miller substitutes these devices of the novel with music and selective lighting. They indicate not only change in time but also the emotional states of the protagonist. Once it has been established that Willy’s father not only sold flutes all over the country, but made them as well, the sounding of the instrument on Miller’s stage evokes the whole spirit of a vanished, unobtainable past. Barter aptly observes: “The flute . . . is a principal organizing force: opening the proper atmosphere: opening the curtain and closing it, the flute establishes the play’s proper atmosphere” (124). The main role of the flute is to inform the audience that the past is about to merge with the present. The crucial hotel bedroom scene, in which Biff discovers his father’s adultery, is heralded by a shrill trumpet blast, and Willy’s final disaster is conveyed by musical shorthand: his decision to commit suicide is accompanied by a prolonged, maddening note, which collapses into a crash of discords, to represent the car crash off stage, and then modulates into a dead march to introduce the requiem scene. Certain characters and situations also have what amount to leit-motifs: besides the flute music, we are told there is a “boy’s music”, raucous sex music for the scene of Biff’s discovery and the bar room scene where Biff and Happy pick up women; and a special music to herald the appearances in Willy’s memory of elder brother, Ben. Music, therefore, creates the atmosphere appropriate to the individual scenes.
The set is appropriately lit. The apartment silhouettes are bathed in angry orange; when Willy remembers the past, the house is draped by the green of vanished trees; when Biff and Happy pick up two women and neglect their father, the direction requires a lurid red; and at the end, when Willy insanely tries to plant seed by night, the “blues” of the stage direction simultaneously suggest moonlight and his mood of despair. Art, in general, demands pattern, discipline and clarity. A work of art especially that which has employed the interior monologue technique to represent the flux of consciousness is subject to formlessness. The content of a psyche has no meaning in itself for another consciousness; it is too informed, undisciplined; it offers no essential point of reference; it has no specific ordering; it is capricious and fluid; it offers, in short, no basis for analysis and interpretation. Consequently, the writer must impose pattern or form on his material. Some of the most important and in some ways the most interesting means Joyce uses to accomplish for lack of plot and for the intricacies of presenting character on the level of psychic processes are the unities of time and place. The action of Ulysses takes place in one day and in one city. Joyce’s extreme adherence to the unities in his superficial narrative serves a very important function in the novel. It becomes a point of reference for following and interpreting the chaotic psyches he depicts. Further, it emphasizes the nature of these psyches by establishing a contrast of rigid form to their formlessness. There are still other devices for formal order in Ulysses. One that is predominant is the use of motif. Joyce’s motif may be classified as image, symbol or word-phrase motifs.
Miller achieves pattern and clarity in Salesman by the more familiar devices of images and symbols. Some of the images have the extraordinary power to evoke a tender and nostalgic mood, bringing in a sort of poetic dimension to the whole play. In Act One as Biff and Happy sleep, the “apartment houses are fading out. And the whole house and surroundings become covered with leaves,” leaves of memory that bury the harsh reality of the present and make the past more real than the present (142). A little later we see Charley and Willy playing cards and Ben suddenly materializes. Willy says that he remembers walking away down some open road and the family moving from one place to another in a wagon, father stopping in the towns and selling the flutes that he has made on the way. This image of a man walking away down some open road and the family moving in a wagon from Boston to Ohio and Indiana and all the western states is part of the picture of the American dream. Again, the image of a man making flutes, symbol of carefree happy life, and selling them offers a sharp contrast to Willy’s life of drudgery in the city. One other image at the end of the play is worth noting. Biff and Happy leave Willy alone in the restaurant. Willy understands, although he refuses to accept fully, that his subjective interpretation of the concept of success and of life in general has been ill-founded. In an effort to defy fate and convince himself of his usefulness, he brings home seeds that will grow into carrots, beets, and lettuce: an attempt to create something fresh and living in his life. There are other images which project his idealized past or hopes so as to accentuate the starkness of his present position. Often they are ironic in effect, bringing home Willy’s failures and inadequacies. In Act One Linda says, “Willy, darling, you’re the handsomest man in the world,” but the laughter of a woman interrupts (149). It points to his moral degradation. The images criss-cross one another focusing the unreality of a dream and yet intensifying their inherent tension. Further, Miller’s adherence to the Unities like Joyce in Ulysses perfects the symmetry of the structure of this stream of consciousness play.
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