The name “stream of consciousness” was devised by William James; the thing itself is no doubt as old as the conscious brain. How and when did it achieve literary representation? Vladimir Nabokov claims that this “method of expression … a kind of record of a character’s mind running on and on, switching from one image or idea to another without any comment or explanation on the part of the author,” was invented by Tolstoy for the occasion of Anna Karenina’s last afternoon. There the device is in “rudimentary form,” whereas James Joyce will advance it “to an extreme stage of objective record” (Lectures on Russian Literature). But do we regard it as essential that the artist present the stream as inward? There seems no good reason to, since however disorderly the phenomenon inadequately called a “stream” may be, its presentation has in any case the linearity of speech. Abandoning this requirement, we can easily discover the “record of a mind” before Tolstoy. Dickens has it in Nicholas Nickleby.[ ] ... But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.There are probably 18th-century examples—Fielding? Sheridan? Not Sterne, I suspect, for all his apparent wandering.I don’t see why there may not be occasional instances of purely random sequences of ideas, although it seems that, as a rule, either thoughts are aroused by outer stimuli or else one thought leads to another.

It may be from Sancho Panza that [Molière's] Sganarelle learned to string sayings together, although Sancho’s, while numerous, are much more to the point than his. Sancho can also tell a story as digressively as Mrs. Nickleby or Miss Bates. (Ellipses in brackets indicate omitted interruptions by others.)[ ]Sancho differs from Miss Bates and the others if, as I think likely, his digressions are calculated to serve his purpose.From such examples we may go further back to the rambling essays of Montaigne, the lists of Rabelais, and Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas, which promises so ill that the Host suppresses it, a fitting punishment for tedious digressiveness, a flow that goes on and on without excuse, its causes hidden in the mind of the perpetrator, rather like this post…