Reviewers of Mauro Javier Cardenas’s first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), as well as his most recent, Aphasia, have referred to his narrative strategy in both as “stream of consciousness,” and it seems an accurate enough characterization. While the term is often used very loosely in describing almost any attempt to suggest “what’s happening” inside the mind of a fictional character, in Cardenas’s case the effort is not just a routine exercise in “free indirect discourse” or the creation of an especially introspective first-person narrator. Each of the novels, most emphatically Aphasia, offers propulsive but meticulous renditions of subjective states of rumination and perception, not always reflecting a habit of strictly linear thinking. Because Aphasia focuses on the consciousness of a single character (unlike The Revolutionaries Try Again, which features an assorted cast of characters), it really does seem to evoke the more or less constant “flow” of this character’s mental awareness.
The notion that narrative discourse in fiction might be shaped to mimic the human thought process is of course most familiar from the work of the early modernists (perhaps also encompassing Henry James’s emphasis on a “central consciousness”). In its historical context, this strategy can be regarded as part of the broader modernist search for alternatives to the reigning assumptions of realist fiction: Stream-of-consciousness implicitly proposes that reality is to be discovered in its most essential manifestation in the phenomenon of perception, while at the same time in enacts a radical experiment in point of view, effectually inverting the synoptic vision of the third-person omniscient perspective employed by many 19th century novelists, in favor of a severely limited point of view confined to the subjective outlook of the created character’s understanding. This paradigmatic version of the stream-of-consciousness technique has not been that frequently invoked by subsequent writers (Eimar McBride in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing would be a relatively recent example, however), although its influence has indeed been profound in the widespread appeal to what is more broadly called “psychological realism” in the years following on high modernism.
Whether through stream-of-consciousness or the less strict adherence to continuous thought of psychological realism, it has become an almost reflexive assumption (one might say item of faith) among many writers and readers that the job of serious fiction is to penetrate the veil of speech and action and reveal the human mind at work. It is often said, in fact (think James Wood), that what separates the art of fiction from all other modern narrative practices is precisely that it is able to “go deep” beneath the surface of ordinary reality and to capture the role of consciousness in processing and shaping that reality, thus enhancing the ostensible story a work of fiction relates with, in effect, an additional story (even the “real” story): an account of the mind attempting to make sense of the world it confronts. But is it actually the case, even if we accept that fiction can effectively create the illusion of psychological depth, that this is therefore the presumed goal that writers of fiction should pursue if they want to fulfill fiction’s artistic mission? Is stream-of-consciousness literary fiction’s consummate achievement?
Missing from most criticism considering the devices that produce psychological depth is the acknowledgement that the impression of such depth is indeed an illusion created by the writer successfully exploiting artificial devices. It seems highly unlikely that most—if any—emulations of Mind in fiction could prove to actually resemble the phenomena of consciousness as understood by psychologists and neuroscientists. What the best psychological realism brings to the treatment of human thinking in fiction is art, the verbal artistry we should expect from novelists and poets, not some special insight into the way the brain works. Unfortunately, the moves required to invoke the illusion of a perceiving mind have become sufficiently routine through repetition that they have come to function more as shorthand than as expressions of literary art, although for this very reason writers who do manifestly bring literary art to the portrayal of a character’s internal state are perhaps all the more noteworthy. Happily, this is precisely what Mauro Javier Cardenas brings to his account of the experience of Aphasia’s harried protagonist, Antonio.
Antonio is a Colombian-American immigrant writer and database manager attempting to manage several ongoing and overlapping dilemmas in his own life. He is a divorced father of two daughters attempting to preserve a relationship with them by living in an apartment in the same building in which they and Antonio’s former wife live. Although he is trying to maintain a civil relationship with the former wife, he is also seeing a number of women through a “dating service” called Your Sugar Arrangements (resulting in liaisons with mostly younger women) but hoping to keep this hidden from the wife. Most stressfully, he is doing his best to avoid thinking about his mentally ill sister, who has fled the institution to which Antonio and his mother have confined her and is currently subject to arrest. These strands, as well as others related to them—scenes of Antonio speaking to other characters, passages in which he considers other literary works he is reading—braid through and around Antonio’s consciousness, combining seamlessly together in continuous passages of unbroken paragraphs consisting of multiple phrases and clauses fused into a single sentence. The audacity of this strategy is admirable, but more so is the way in which Cardenas is able to achieve a kind of dramatic momentum while also maintaining clarity and recognition for the reader through syntactical linkages and variations. Readers must slow down while negotiating Cardenas’s prose in Aphasia (in The Revolutionaries Try Again as well), but this serves the illusionist goal of mimicking the “flow” of Antonio’s active awareness.
Although the effect the story gains could be called realist, the effort to simulate this awareness seems almost as much a kind of convenient camouflage for an exhibition of the prose style in and for itself. The meandering sentences, approaching a conventional end point but refusing it in favor of the next turn of thought or expository element, might seem reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, or the Garcia Marquez of The Autumn of the Patriarch, or Mathias Enard’s Zone, although Aphasia is more concentrated in its scope, less rhetorical than a Bernhardian “rant” and less dependent on narrative than Garcia Marquez and Enard (even the nested, retrospective narrative of Zone). Discursive as they are, Cardenas’s long sentences in a sense seem more crafted, more deliberately composed to signify the presence of consciousness. If writers such as Marquez and Bernhard are among the writers who first challenged not just conventional narrative form or the protocols of realism but the structural and syntactical expectations of fictional discourse itself, Cardenas is able to adapt their practice to a self-sufficient verbal strategy that uses this disrupted discourse as an available aesthetic resource.
What is most admirable about Aphasia is the way in which he does in fact execute this strategy not just for the purpose of depicting his protagonist’s stream of consciousness—not even primarily for that purpose—but to realize what turns out to be a fully developed and conventionally recognizable—if not exactly plot-driven—crisis narrative in which the protagonist faces the various causes of his crisis and in the end manages, if not a solution to all of his problems, at least a reprieve. Along the way, much is revealed about Antonio and his past, contributing to the creation of a “well-rounded” character, as at the same time we are provided an account of his present actions (principally his interactions with his former wife and daughters, but also his “arrangements” with the women from the dating app) and his ultimate reunion with his sister, who is again being treated for her mental illness. In addition to these channels of Antonio’s direct experience, the separate chapters focused on Antonio’s reading of various works of fiction (presumably as a substitute for his own current inability to write much himself) are integrated into the novel’s narrative structure, and while these are not exactly passages of literary criticism—although Antonio seems like a pretty good critic—they are, through association, incorporated into Antonio’s ongoing reckoning with his circumstances.
Cardenas’s endeavor to create the appearance of stream-of-consciousness, then, is not simply carrying out the imperative to provide psychological depth (to “get inside” for its own sake) but is another means of accommodating the breadth of Antonio’s experience, through something other than usual formal and stylistic conventions. In short, Cardenas uses stream-of-consciousness as an aesthetic device, not as a revelation of the human mind at work. The former, I would argue, is what makes Aphasia most worth the reader’s attention, what signals to us an author taking his medium seriously as literary art, not the novelist's putative authority to probe the human mind. Indeed, to the extent that the impression of Antonio’s mind at work is largely created by the writer’s loosely joined, onrushing sentences (better to suggest a sense of “flow”), Aphasia could be called an exercise in style, albeit one absent the standard sort of decorative lyricism that often passes for style in American fiction.
It is through style that we come to know Antonio, even though the novel is not a first-person narrative. Although Antonio is currently suffering a writer’s block of sorts, being a writer, not his routinized job as a data analyst, seems an essential ingredient in his sense of identity, and it is more likely that the novel’s prose is a reflection of Antonio’s own writing than a facsimile of his thought process. Such a presumption is only reinforced by those parts of the book that are not in fact representations of thought but include Antonio’s transcriptions of tapes of his mother speaking, his conversations with former girlfriends, and his reunion with his sister (which Antonio is also taping). These sections employ the same elongated sentences as those depicting Antonio’s solitary deliberations, indicating clearly enough that Aphasia’s focus on the protagonist’s internal state provides a suitable context for Cardenas to effect the sort of prose style he favors, not the subject in service of which a prose style has been fashioned.
Rendering the internal perspective is not finally the most serious task that a work of fiction might undertake. At best it can fool us into believing we have access to a character’s inner self (and by analogy to human inwardness in general). This is not an inconsequential feat, if not the form’s raison d’etre. Even if you think that pulling off such a feat is the preeminent achievement of fiction, however, Aphasia would surely be judged a success in satisfying this goal. But in this case it would hardly suffice in acknowledging either the novel’s ambition or its value to say it is a successful work of psychological realism. Yes, we might say we are provided with a vivid portrayal of Antonio’s state of mind, but that is not really the point. What Cardenas has really done is in a sense to merge style and form so that style actually produces form, a move that is seriously impressive.
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