Pollan, M. (2026). A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Penguin Press.

Pages 166-174:

... One more theory -- from Michael Levenson, a literary critic I interviewed -- is that the rise of modern urban life and the "mass man" fired a curiosity about what was going on inside the minds of all these opaque new strangers in our midst. These are mere guesses, of course, but whatever the cause for this sudden change in the psychological weather, it seems clear that the dialectic of spontaneous and constrained thought plays out not only in our individual minds but in our cultures too.

What is this crew of fiction writers doing in a nonfiction book about consciousness? I hope the answer is clear: Scientists aren't the only ones exploring this territory, and sometimes it's the artists who get there first. There is little in the science of spontaneous thought that novelists and poets didn't already know and describe a century ago, long before anyone ever slid into an MRI machine to get their brain scanned. These writers had nothing to work with but their own powers of introspection. That, and the mighty pen.

Rereading these novels, I had a fantasy about going back in time to interview Woolf and Joyce, maybe even Eliot and Tolstoy, to pick their brains about the stream of consciousness. Because on the evidence of their work, they understood things about the vagaries of human thought that the scientists I was interviewing were just beginning to explore. A time machine being unavailable, I turned to plan B: Find a stream-of-consciousness writer alive and at it today.

The full-on stream of consciousness novel is a rare bird these days, maybe even on the verge of extinction-for the most part, Anglo-American fiction has retreated to the comforts of a more traditional realism, though brief stream-of-consciousness passages are common. I suspect that most of us turn to novels hoping to find more order and meaning than our own minds hold. But I did turn up one excellent, if somewhat daunting, specimen of the genre. Published in 2019, Ducks, Newburyport consists of a single sentence unfurling over more than one thousand pages, chronicling the inner experiences of an unnamed middle-aged, middle-class woman, a mother of four living in Ohio during the first year of the first Trump administration. Her thoughts are not orderly or meaningful or even always interesting; what they are is a lot like our own.

I contacted the author, Lucy Ellmann, to see if she'd be willing to talk to me about what writing Ducks had taught her about consciousness. An American living in Scotland, Ellmann happened to be visiting her in-laws in Palo Alto when I reached her. So I drove down the peninsula to meet her at a hotel downtown, where we sipped tea and talked for a few hours one late winter morning.

The book is brilliant and wondrous, and I say that though I am nowhere close to having finished it and doubt I ever will. But, honestly, with this book, it doesn't matter. You can dip your toe into this woman's stream of consciousness at any point and feel yourself slipping into a kind of trance as you follow the movement of her mind as it meanders around its various byways, cul-de-sacs, associations, sudden leaps, wordplays, sense impressions, emotional eddies, and various rabbit holes of information. Listen to the (excellent) audiobook and you can zone out completely, even fall asleep for a spell, and still feel like you haven't missed anything. Picking it up to read a few pages feels more like lowering yourself into a warm bath of thoughts than following anything as orderly as a plot.

Here's a passage from one of the novel's first pages:

... the fact that there are two cardinals right now in the lilac tree, brown sugar, the fact that eleven percent of Americans carry on driving when the fuel-tank-empty light comes on, the fact that, boy, you'd think it'd be more like eighty percent, Ronny, chicken feed, the fact that there are macrophages, the fact that I dreamt I flew all the way to India to get a teaspoon of cinnamon but when I got home I realized I needed flaked almonds too, security, holding pattern, go figure, not in my back yard, the fact that we have to do our taxes and try to remember every little bit of income and expenditure, the fact that there was more of the latter than the former, Family Dollar, Zyker's, password, username, "Your card is now active and ready to use" the fact that not only do we have to calculate our income and expenditure but we gotta figure out how to get more money, and keep on getting money till we're dead, Medicare For All, M4A, the fact that by the time Leo's old enough to get Social Security it probably won't even cover the price of a ham sand- wich, much less a bottle of wine, the fact that we're in for a wineless old age, oi veh, OJ....

Things that make no sense whatsoever will make some sense in time. Our narrator has a home-based business baking pies, for example, hence the dream and the reminders to buy this or that ingredient. Leo is her kindly second husband. Seriously ill a few years back, she was mistreated by the American medical system. (That might explain the macrophages, but we have no idea who Ronny is.) Often we overhear her thoughts while she's scrolling on her phone, picking up newsy factoids like so much lint (hence the stray statistics). As for the almost incantatory repetition of "the fact that," Ellmann says the phrase, which came to her with the very first sentence of the novel, serves as a spacer berween thoughts, helpful in the absence of full stops. After a while, this collocation becomes a tic that can grate on the nerves; it's exactly the kind of superfluous verbiage that The Elements of Style taught us to cut out. But it also serves as a reminder that even our most evanescent or fanciful thoughts are facts—the facts of our mental lives.

Ellmann seemed a bit shy when we met for the first time that morning. This surprised me, because in interviews she comes across as self-assured, opinionated, even sassy. I suspect that I'd made the mistake of telling her I regarded her as a consciousness expert, which is true but bound to make anyone except a neuroscientist or philosopher feel put on the spot. Ellmann, who is in her sixties, has a round, open face framed by a cascade of blond curls. It had never been her plan to write a stream-of-consciousness novel until that first line popped into her head, drawing her deep into a mind and a sentence that would go on without stopping for eight years and one thousand pages.

"I'd love to get into anybody's head and really know what they're thinking," Ellmann said, by way of explaining her motivation for spending a good chunk of her life writing Ducks. "But I can only really get into my own and only partially into that." She soon discovered that "how you think is hard to think about." Like picking up mercury with a pin, as a novelist friend once put it.

I asked Ellmann whether or not she had done any research into the science of consciousness before writing Ducks. "No, I didn't read any of that. I thought, I have one right here. I'm going to study mine." Ellmann also made a point of not reading Joyce or Woolf before embarking on Ducks, and perhaps as a result, her novel is very different from any of theirs."[^1] In both Joyce and Woolf, the stream of consciousness comes and goes between passages of third-person narration (reports of the things characters actually say and do), but here we are plunged so deep into the character's mind that we never quite know what she's doing in the world while thinking all these thoughts. Without a narrator to tell us, we have to infer she's making pancakes for her kids, or reading about a school shooting on her phone, or sitting in the dentist's chair and getting her teeth cleaned while thinking about Abu Ghraib and microplastics.

"We don't think about how we think most of the time," Ellmann said early in our conversation. "And it's actually very odd how we think." Writing the novel required her to pay attention to her thoughts as thoughts, and that invariably changed them. "There's a block between consciousness and thinking about consciousness," she noted. All we have with which to observe our consciousness is our consciousness.

I asked Ellmann whether she found language up to the task of capturing consciousness. "No," she said, "you can never reproduce the whole thing in words. You can make a stab, you can hint at what's going on, but the real flow has a greater richness, so many more associations. You can't include them all. And then there are the sensations coming in from all over the body! The smells and the memories and all the syndromes and neuroses and habits that drive the way you think. And so much of it is happening simuitaneously."

I'm guessing that Ellmann would find Hurlbur's attempt to fish a single pristine moment from the onrushing stream a fool's errand.

"If you tried to describe it all," she went on, "it would take forever to get through one minute of this woman's consciousness, and that would get boring. I'm bored with my own consciousness, and I didn't want to bore the reader.

"I've never believed that you're unable to think without words. There's a lot of nonverbalized stuff going on. Words allow us to connect with other people, but you'd still be able to think if you lived alone on an island and didn't have language. You'd still know how to build a house and catch a fish."

Yet words can give form and weight to our thoughts and feelings, making life on our separate islands more bearable.

"I was so pleased when I learned the word depression as a child," Ellmann confessed, "because I'd been feeling it for years but had no idea what it was and if other people felt it."

Ellmann is not sure that a stream is the right metaphor for the movement of our thought."I think it's more circular," she said. "You go round and round and you maybe make a little movement forward. I don't know if it's progress, but things gradually evolve and change a bit. So maybe consciousness moves more like a spiral."

She used many of her own spiraling thoughts in constructing her character's mind, but to my surprise, she doesn't much like the character she created (whereas I found her protagonist charming and funny). "She's the woman I might have been," Ellmann said, "had I stayed in America and settled in Ohio" -- curiously, a place Ellmann has never even visited -- "but I would not want to be her." Among other things, the book is a scathing critique of Americans "for their triviality and banality" in the face of Trumpism. "I am mystified by American niceness," Ellmann said. "It's an inch away from being horrific." Ellmann's protagonist is a good person and a good liberal who worries about gun violence and human rights and the cruelties of the Amercan medical system, but not enough to actually do anything about any of it. "She's a little prissy, and she doesn't push. And she's repressed."

Indeed. Her stream of consciousness is a feast of free association, which Freud regarded as a window into the unconscious mind and thus an invaluable tool of psychoanalysis."[^2] That method involves inducing a person to speak their stream of consciousness aloud, casting aside the usual censors that keep unconscious material from our awareness. To read a stream-of-consciousness novel like Ducks is to put ourselves into the role of psychoanalyst, picking up clues to bur- ied psychic treasure that the speaker is not aware of, or only dimly, On the page, this becomes a form of psychological irony: We know more about the characters than they know about themselves. Reading Ducks, we learn to notice that whenever a sexual reference pops up, like a cork in the stream of thoughts, Ellmann's narrator will awkwardly swerve to avoid it, grasping for another, safer branch on which to perch.

...the fact that today there's just snow and snow clouds, gray, the fact that that cloud has a face and a, uh, oh-oh, that cloud is male, oh my word, toadstools, phallic symbols, graffiti, the fact that it's Yellow Springs, where Young's Jersey Dairy is, 1 mean, the fact that Leo saw a lion cloud from the airplane last week....

In another extended passage, she plays a game of mental whack-a- she's forced to admit to herself that she'd rather think about almost mole with the word anal, which keeps popping up page after page, until anything" other than "the fact that some women do enjoy anal sex." There's her sexuality, there's her fury at the patriarchy and the medical system, and there's the lingering trauma of her mother's death. Says Ellmann: "It's all bubbling up and she's sitting on it as best she can."

Yet the consciousness that Ellmann unfolds for us is a good deal messier than Freud's or, for that matter, any other theorist's. There are several streams flowing all at once: conscious, unconscious, and half-conscious. "I think half-thoughts form a low continuum of repetitive thinking that goes on beneath the more verbalized thinking," Ellmann said. "I tried to imply this with the way the narrator sifts languidly through words of similar sound, and through random, inconclusive memories." She mentioned a recurring image of a bee on a windowsill, which is never explained. Not everything has to mean something. "I'm trying to convey on the page what thinking feels like," she explained. "I actually think it's kind of annoying how we talk to ourselves all the time, but it's also amazing. I mean, we're having these conversations with other people, but we never mention there is this monologue going on in our heads at the same time! There's all this private mental life going on, and we never talk about it."

Toward the end of our morning together, I asked Ellmann what she thought the stream of consciousness does for us. "It allows us to practice in our head what we're going to say," she began, but then paused, unsatisfied with her answer. "I really don't know what it's for. Nobody knows." I asked her what it would be like if the stream of self-talk simply switched off between mental tasks.

"That'd be scary —- lobotomy stuff." She paused, as if to consider that silence. "One reason we have this monologue may be to reinforce that we're alive, to keep reminding us we're still here. It's a reflection of the life force. If we're thinking, we're alive."

Ellmann's character has her own thoughts on the matter:

... the fact that I just realized that when this monologue in my head finally stops, I'll be dead, or at least totally unconscious, like a vegetable or something, the fact that there are seven and a half billion people in the world, so there must be seven and a half billion of these internal monologues going on, apart from all the unconscious people, the fact that that's seven and a half billion people worrying about their kids, or their moms, or both, as well as taxes and window sills and medical bills, shut-in, shutout, dugout, bullpen, the fact that that's not count- ing the multiple-personality people who must have several inter- nal monologues going on at once, several each, momologs, Mommalabomala, Bubbela, blogs, vlogs, log cabins, Phoebe's Christmas logs, the fact that animals must have some kind of monologue going on in their heads, even if it's more visual than verbal maybe, the fact that bald eagles certainly always seem to xsbe thinking about something when you watch them on the eagle-cam....

And on she goes for another five hundred pages or so, her spiraling, unstoppable stream of thoughts and feelings and facts bringing irrepressible proof of life.

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1. Ellmann is the daughter of Richard Ellmann, the legendary James Joyce scholar and biographer, but she regards this fact as neither here nor there.

2. From Freud's lecture "Resistance and Repression": "We tell the patient that without further reflection be should put himself into a condition of calm self-observation and that he must then communicate whatever results this introspection gives him -- feelings, thoughts, reminiscenses, in the order in which they appear to his mind," This allows the psychoanalyst to penetrate into tho patient's unconscious and bring to light repressed thoughts and feelings. See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol 16, Introductory Lectures of Psycho-Analysis (Hogarth Press, 1963), 287.