1At the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of writers decided that traditional storytelling could no longer capture the movement of the human mind.
2Instead of orderly plots, they tried to record thoughts exactly as they flow, with all their sudden jumps, memories, and half-finished ideas.
3This technique, known as stream of consciousness, changed the novel forever and divided readers into passionate admirers and angry critics.
4Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway follows a single day in London, yet inside that ordinary day lies an entire lifetime of feeling.
5As Clarissa Dalloway buys flowers for her party, her mind travels freely between the present moment and her distant youth.
6Woolf believed that a mind receives countless impressions every day, and she wanted her sentences to hold them all.
7James Joyce went even further in Ulysses, filling whole pages without punctuation so that thought and language would merge completely.
8Many readers give up on these books at first, because they demand patience, attention, and a willingness to feel lost.
9Those who persist, however, often describe the experience as the closest literature has ever come to representing real consciousness.
10A hundred years later, their experiment still challenges every serious reader who opens their difficult and magnificent pages.