Can anyone elaborate on what a "poetics of fiction" is?

The poetics of stream-of-consciousness novels, which has come into being through a combination of factors, takes ontological aesthetic creation, inner imagery reality and impersonal narration as the core elements; through the comparison of literary history, from the literary conception to the narration mode, it shows the aesthetic interest that is very different from the traditional view of literature, and occupies a place in the development of the art of modern novels.

Keywords: stream of consciousness; novel; poetics

Chinese Classification Number: I054 Literature Identifier: A ?

I. The Genealogy of the Academic Genealogy of the Poetics of Stream-of-Consciousness Novel

The Poetics of Stream-of-Consciousness Novel is an imported product, which in this case mainly refers to the theory of creativity and its materialized results represented by Joyce, Proust, Woolf and Faulkner. As a "philosophy" based on the natural psychological reality of human beings in the history of Western literature, it usually appears in people's view under the name of literary "stream of consciousness". Regarding its cause, it is unanimously recognized in the academic circles both at home and abroad that the American philosopher and psychologist William James injected the original blood pigment into it with the insight that there exists a kind of "stream of thought" in the world of man's mind as put forward by him in his Principles of Psychology, but it is much more complicated for it to obtain the status of "legitimacy" in the sense of literary theory. But it is much more complicated for it to acquire the status of "legitimacy" in the sense of literary theory. For example, on the level of philosophy and psychology, besides James's psychology of consciousness, Bergson's philosophy of life and Freud's psychoanalysis have given many inspirations and benefits to its conception. In fact, if we look more closely, the following aspects have a certain degree of relevance to its "molding".

First of all, at the level of literary theory, mimicry has dominated Western literary theory from ancient Greece to the 18th century, while expressionism, which evolved from sentimentalism at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries into the Romanticism of the early 19th century, replaced the former as the dominant position. It claimed that literary art was essentially the product of the externalization of the inner world of the creative subject; in terms of aesthetic criteria, it believed that only the world of the mind was real and beautiful. This thesis is found in the poetic theories of the English poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. Symbolist poetics with a mystical tendency emerged after this, on the other hand, proposed to take the objective world as a symbol of the subjective world, and advocated the use of sound and colorful objects to symbolize the inner world. In France, Weiland, Mallarmé, Moreas, Baudelaire and Valéry are the main representatives of this view. On the other hand, the Italian philosopher, historian, aesthetician and literary critic Croce is one of the heavyweights in the matter of the expression-intuition theory. The French brothers Goncourt and Zola represented the "heterodox" naturalism of mimicry, which advocated observing and depicting human beings from a physiological point of view. As for the aestheticists who practiced "art for art's sake" and initialized formalism, such as Gautier of France and Wilde of England, they preached that feeling and impression produce pure beauty, and pure beauty is the most real and valuable aesthetic claim. The "fruits" of this central logical thread in the development of Western literature undoubtedly laid the theoretical foundation for the "birth" of this poetics to a certain extent, especially the "fruits" of the theory of representation

Secondly, at the level of literary creation, the transmutation and alternation of the three main theoretical models in Western literature coincided with the launching of the literary achievements of Western writers one by one. The psychological portrayal in Euripides' Medea, the inner monologue in Shakespeare's plays, the allegorical symbolism in Dante's Divine Comedy, and the "psychological speed" in Stendhal's The Red and the Black [1] (p.35) are not lacking in the literary "stream of consciousness". There is no lack of literary "stream of consciousness", such as the "psychological speed" [1] (p.35) in "Black and White", which is somewhat of an accumulation of the results of the practice prior to its initialization. However, as far as narrative art is concerned, I am afraid that the French writer Flaubert was the first one to reveal the modern consciousness of shifting from the depiction of external behavior to the exploration of the world of the human spirit in the modern novel. He advocated that the writer's ideology should not be directly expressed in his works, and that the writer should be a psychologist, a hidden psychologist. The writer's narrative should be an "objectified narrative". Madame Bovary" is the representative result of his intention to put into practice the reform of the traditional novel form. The Russian writer Dostoevsky may be the one who pushed this achievement to a new stage. His "Crime and Punishment", "The Brothers Karamazov" and so on, while making a fine portrayal of reality, focus on the analysis of the subjective feelings of the characters, not only to the depths of people's hearts, but even into the region of deep consciousness. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Resurrection, which followed closely behind, had a different kind of "psychological analysis", which the Russian thinker and literary theorist Chernyshevsky called "dialectics of the mind". The significance of the results of the literary practice of these writers lies in the fact that they are different from the traditional literature, echoing modernism, and are concerned with the human psyche and the portrayal of the spiritual world.

If this component only played an indirect role in paving the way for the later surge of this poetics, then the name of the results of literary creation directly related to it may be mainly realized in these people. Domestic and foreign academics generally believe that Dujardin's novel The Laurel Tree Has Been Chopped Down (1887), which comes from the banks of the Seine River on the European continent, is the earliest attempt to speak out the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of a certain character in a particular situation in the form of a "doxology". In fact, before Dujardin, the representative works of American writer Henry James, An American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879) and Portrait of a Noblewoman (1881) have already foreshadowed the atmosphere of modern novels dedicated to subjective consciousness: "point of view" and "view". view" and "angle of vision". As for the several textual sketches of literary artists that brought fame to the American writer Ger Stein, such as Matisse (1909) and The Making of an American (1908), as well as the 12-volume Pilgrimage (1915-1938) by the British writer Dorothy Richardson, they intentionally emphasize the discontinuous nature of the flow of consciousness of the characters and the illogical relationship between the individual thoughts, and thus are not the same as those that have gained world fame. They deliberately emphasize the uninterrupted flow of consciousness of the characters and the illogical relationship between the thoughts, and thus are somehow related to the stream-of-consciousness novels that have gained a worldwide reputation, from the time they were conceived to the time they made their debut.

Again, on the level of sister arts, since the German opera composer Wagner called for the "synthesis of the arts," French Symbolist writers began to apply musical techniques, especially the fugue, to the creation of novels. Although this attempt did not have a significant impact, it did add a certain amount to the development of this poetics. However, the "Impressionism" that emerged in French painting in the second half of the 19th century gave this poetics a much more obvious volatile hormone. The painters represented by Manet, Monet, Degas and Renoir emphasized the depiction of subjective sensory impressions and opposed rational processing and refinement. Therefore, they paid special attention to the changing effect of light, and experimented with depicting fleeting impressions from a subjective point of view. This school of painting was formed on the basis of naturalism and aestheticism. Its entry into literature led a number of writers to try to convey their personal subjective impressions of things in their literary creations, rather than reflecting objective reality. This effectively stimulated the fecundity of this poetic muscle.

Of course, on the level of objective reality, the emergence of this poetics was related to a series of destructive social events since the second half of the 19th century, which caused people to change their views on the ideals of the Enlightenment, breeding pessimism and disillusionment, as well as the enlightenment given to the people by the recent achievements of the natural sciences at that time, such as biology and physiology, which resulted in the proliferation of irrationalist thinking (such as Schopenhauer's voluntarism, Nietzsche's superhumanism, and theories of the will), which led to a rise in the number of writers. The "will theory" of Schopenhauer and the philosophy of Nietzsche's Superman are also not unrelated. It was only through the "photosynthesis" of these factors that this kind of poetics has become more and more prominent in the Western literary world.

The core elements of the poetics of stream-of-consciousness novels

It is remembered that Sartre once said: "The novelist's aesthetic point of view is always to be traced back to his philosophy. The task of the critic is to find out the author's philosophy before evaluating his method of writing." [2] (pp.158-159) The implication is that it is only through the phenomenon that one can see the essence of things. The birth of stream-of-consciousness novel poetics is of course inseparable from its external survival climate, but the external cause must ultimately play a role through the internal cause, and this role can be fully realized undoubtedly lies in its internal genes to nurture the active, thus contributing to the writer's own "philosophy". The core elements of its construction are:

First, the poetics of stream-of-consciousness fiction emphasizes the aesthetic creation of ontology. Joyce says: "Human society crystallizes a number of unchanging rules, and the circumstances of the existence of men and women in society and their capriciousness encompass these rules, or cluster around them. The kingdom of literature is the kingdom in which these contingent modes of behavior and moods are active - a vast kingdom; and it is these modes of behavior and moods that are the main concern of the true literary artist." [3] (p.115) This is because, "Art is the human arrangement of things that can be felt and apprehended for aesthetic purposes." [4] (p.295) If literary activity were not so and so, as Proust claims, "If reality were really nothing more than that residue of experience, it would be almost exactly the same in every human being, for when we speak of 'bad weather', 'war,' 'cab stands,' 'brightly lit hotels,' 'gardens,' and so on, everyone understands what we mean-if reality is nothing but that residual experience, it is almost identical in everyone. everyone understands what we mean - if reality is like that, there is no doubt that it is enough to represent these things in a movie, and thus the 'genre', i.e. 'literature', can only isolate itself from simple sensory material and become a pretentious 'extra-volume'." [5](pp.7-8)

These views of theirs converge on one point, that is, literary creation is a means of casting reality aesthetically, and the end product of its operation is not an unobstructed facsimile or replica of nature or social life, but a unique aesthetic world that relies on the writer's imagination and aesthetic power to create in it, and that is self-supporting and outside the real world. world. This new aesthetic world is vividly infused with the writer's mobility and creativity, and it is only through the free play of this mobility and creativity that the independent status and value of literature as a work of art can be emphasized.

Secondly, the poetics of stream-of-consciousness fiction craves for the inner reality of imagery. Woolf said: "We are more conscious than ever of the never-ending wealth of human emotion. Here at ...... we gather all our energies together and then explode; here we are constantly expanding and bringing together prudent impressions, cumulative information, from all sides." [6] (p.55) What is its purpose? According to Proust, "It is only by getting rid of the intellect that the writer can really grasp things in the midst of all the impressions we get, that is to say, really reach the things themselves and acquire the only content of art." [7](p.1) "...... This pure thing of refinement desires nothing else but to be liberated and to multiply the wealth of our poetic love and life." [7](p.3) "It is only in that part, as in the telephone and telegraph rooms, that the poet can gain his contact with the beauty of the world." [8](p.98) And Faulkner likewise expresses something so similar: "Young men and women engaged in writing today have forgotten the problem of inner human conflict. Yet it is only this inner conflict that breeds masterpieces, because it is only this conflict that is worth writing about, that is worth suffering and agonizing over." [9](p.255)

These insights of theirs are nothing more than emphasizing that the external objective reality is superficial, while the transcendental or subjective reality is the only reality. This "inner image" of reality is determined by the infinite richness of human sensibility. Therefore, the writer's vision of creation does not have to stop at the external events in the objective world, but to keenly capture the momentary impression or true feelings of these events in the inner depths of the characters, and make every effort to present them in an internal, relative, and pluralistic form of art, in order to emphasize the aesthetic function of narrative literature.

Thirdly, the poetics of stream-of-consciousness fiction advocates an impersonal narrative. Joyce said, "The artist, like the God who creates all things, stays in the middle of, or behind, or far away from, or high above, the works he creates with his own hands, stealthy and invisible, hammered out of sight, indifferent, concerned only with pruning his fingernails." [4] (p.301) Faulkner, on the other hand, when talking about how Hustle and Bustle was transported, says: "I first told the story from the point of view of an idiot child, because I felt that it could be more moving when told by someone who only knew what was going on, but not what was going on. But after I finished writing it, I felt I still hadn't told the story clearly. So I wrote it again, telling the same story from another brother's point of view. Still not satisfied. So I wrote it a third time, from the perspective of a third brother. Still not satisfactory. I then strung the three parts together, and if there was anything missing, I simply added it in my own words. Yet it never felt perfect. It was not until fifteen years after the book was published that I wrote the story one last time and attached it as an appendix to another book, so that it was no longer on my mind." [10](p.262) Of narrative perspectives such as these, Woolf feels, "In imaginative literature, where the characters speak for themselves and the author doesn't make an appearance, we can always feel the need for that voice." [11](p.30)

Their intention of these rationalizations is obviously to be more in line with the objective facts and to respect the logic of the development of the characters' personalities themselves, in order to create an artistic atmosphere of polyphonic narration with a multidimensional vision; to vividly express the universal truths, eternal laws, and the true meaning of life in the world through the dramatic experience of the tides that fall in the center of the universe within the characters of the work.

It is undeniable that the representative writers of stream-of-consciousness novels have their own unique aesthetic consciousness based on the natural psychological reality of human beings, but they are in any case accompanied by and dependent on the same aesthetic interests as those mentioned above. The point of this dependence is fundamentally different from the objective reality honored by traditional novel theory in the sense of philosophical ontology. The former believes that "reality" is only a subjective experience of the empirical world, so the subjective becomes the first thing; while the latter generally regard "reality" as an objective existence, where the objective existence is considered to be the first.

Third, the value dimension of the poetics of stream-of-consciousness novels

Framing the core elements of the poetics of stream-of-consciousness novels is nothing but trying to show the basic outline of this poetic structure, and its value dimension is yet to be revealed through the vision of literary history, from the literary conception to the narration mode.

"The novel established itself in the middle of the nineteenth century as a literary genre of unrivaled diversity in breadth and depth. Trends such as Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism all left their mark on this literary form and gave it the familiar contours that are now taken for granted. Thus at the beginning of this century, when it seemed that there were no more frontiers to be exploited in this profoundly subtle literary medium, it turned introspective." [12] (p.367) This assessment by the British critics John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury has its own roots which they put forward.The trope of the art of the novel in the 19th century was to be centered on the portrayal of characters, to graphically reflect the times, the customs of the life of the various classes of the society, and to realistically present the historical events and the history of the society through the complete storyline and the specific depiction of the environment. This kind of art had stepped into the realm of perfection, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens and other novels can be called a model in this regard. And this "model", in terms of the evolution of the art of fiction, from not all emphasis on the fictional, story-telling "story", into a fictional, imaginary "fiction", is the history of the art of fiction. "This is a progress in the historical development of the art of fiction. However, it is not clear that once progress has become a solid, stagnant "paradigm", such progress will inevitably become a synonym for backwardness. Spit out the old and bring in the new is the only way to continue the vitality of any thing, a fixation on learning, the level of imitation is tantamount to pushing it into the quagmire of the end of life.

In fact, since the end of the 19th century, there have been various pioneering ideas and schools of thought that have made their debut on the stage of the world's literary world, all of which have attempted to break through the traditional barriers of literature and aesthetics. Among them, the "stream of consciousness" in literature has made an unusual debut. In the view of its accomplished promoters: "Stream of consciousness is their new weapon, with which they fire at the author's intrusion into the storytelling style of the novel. They recorded truthfully the fraught and unrelated thoughts within their characters, and sought to avoid seeping their own voices into their work, as Edwardian novelists must have done." [13](p.262) In this regard, Woolf's essay "The Modern Novel" perhaps best expresses their alternative "scheme".

In her essay "The Modern Novel," published in 1919, Woolf expressed her basic attitude toward the modern novel as an ordinary reader. She pointed out that "any examination of the modern novel, even the most casual and cursory, will inevitably give rise to the assumption that the art is always a step forward in modern practice." In fact, "when viewed from a hilltop high enough to see the whole picture, there is a tendency to go back and forth in circles. Needless to say, we do not presume to occupy (even for a moment) such a superior vantage point" [14] (p. 133). Why is this? In Woolf's eyes, Bennett's "concern for the flesh instead of the spirit" is not conducive to "saving the soul of the English novel". Because "looking inward", "life is not a series of symmetrical carriage lights, life is a halo, a translucent layer that always surrounds our consciousness. Isn't it the task of the novelist to convey this ever-changing, this fundamental spirit that is yet to be recognized and yet to be explored, no matter how out of the ordinary and intricate its manifestations may be, and to convey it truthfully, as far as possible, without mingling it with something outside of itself, something that is not intrinsic to it?" [14] (p.137) Only then does "the art of the novel come to life" [14] (p.142). Woolf on the art of the modern novel to the road of this discussion, in the final analysis, is to emphasize the narrative focus of the modern novel must be seen from the object does not see people of the "materialism" to the psychological activities of the "spiritualism", from the reflection of the external world to the structure of consciousness. The first is to show that the world is not the same as the world.

Woolf's The Modern Novel reflects the fervent desire of those who devoted themselves to the renewal of the art of the modern novel, such as Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner, and I do not think it is too much to ask that it should be regarded as an aesthetic manifesto for the poetics of the stream-of-consciousness novel of the twentieth century. Although some people have been labeled as "decadent", but with the passage of time, no one can derogate from these stream of consciousness novelists in the process of the development of the art of fiction in the artistic innovation of the theory of the charm of radiation. Regardless of the "noise and commotion" triggered by the influence of black humor, absurdist drama, expressionism, existentialism and magical realism, this kind of charm, compared with the traditional view of literature, shows a very different aesthetic interest. First, stream-of-consciousness fiction poetics emphasizes ontological aesthetic creation, while the traditional view of literature adheres to the principle that literary creation is the writer's fundamental task of reflecting and imitating the reality of the external world. Secondly, stream-of-consciousness fiction poetics craves for inner imaginative reality, while the traditional view of literature is obsessed with a kind of typical reality that is endowed with some kind of rational order. Third, stream-of-consciousness fiction poetics advocates impersonal narration, while the traditional view of literature prefers to play the role of an omniscient God between the lines of a literary work. From literary concept to narrative style, the aesthetic character of stream-of-consciousness novel poetics has undoubtedly infused the life of modern novel art with a new and vivid hormone. If we ignore its objective existence, then, to borrow the words of Ito Sho, one of the heavyweights of Japanese modernist literature: "Whether it is Joyce, or Proust, or Woolf, despite all the criticisms and criticisms of their works because of the obscurity of the expression of psychological realism, it is an unmistakable fact to this day that progress in fiction cannot be made by ignoring the new psychologism. psychological realism there can be no progress in fiction." [15] (p.238)