French author Édouard Dujardin played a pivotal role in the early development and theoretical understanding of interior monologue as a literary technique. His 1887 novel, *Les lauriers sont coupés* (The laurels are cut), first published in the magazine *Revue Indépendante*, stands as a significant early example of stream of consciousness writing, specifically employing interior monologue. Dujardin's work and subsequent reflections on the technique highlight
his belief in its capacity to express the unconscious and its connection to musicality.
The Symbolist Influence and Musical Analogy
Like many symbolists of his era, Dujardin held the conviction that music served as a profound expression of interior life. This belief directly influenced his approach to interior monologue. He saw this literary device, with its a-rationalist and anti-intellectual qualities, as a means for the novel to express the unconscious mind. Dujardin drew an analogy between interior monologue and music, considering music as the origin of language. He argued that interior monologue possessed an affinity with a more primitive and thus more original form of language.Dujardin's admiration for Richard Wagner's music was particularly strong, a sentiment shared by many symbolists. The importance of Wagner to Dujardin and his contemporaries was evident in the foundation of the journal *La Revue wagnérienne* in 1885, which Dujardin co-founded with Téodor de Wyzewa. For Dujardin, interior monologue was intended to be the literary translation of Wagner's musical idea of the Leitmotif into the novel, establishing narrative subjectivism as the dominant perspective.
*Les lauriers sont coupés*: A Case Study in Inner Thought
*Les lauriers sont coupés* exemplifies Dujardin's innovative use of interior monologue. The novel captures the thoughts of a student in Paris over a six-hour period during the spring. The title itself, derived from a French children's song, "Nous n'irons plus au bois" ("We'll go to the woods no more"), suggests a cycle of decline and regrowth, with the withering of the laurel tree preceding a period of joyous song and dance. This spirit is reflected in the novel's focus on the internal world of its protagonist.The plot of *Les lauriers sont coupés* is intentionally underdeveloped, a point Dujardin himself acknowledged in a later essay on his novel and its technique, *Le Monologue intérieur* (1931), and in a letter written a year after the novel's publication. He described it as a "roman de quelques heures, d'une action banale, d'un personnage quelconque"—a novel with a narrative time of only a few hours, a banal action, and a random main character. The story concerns Daniel Prince, a naive and amorous student who is about to be exploited by an actress, Lea d'Arsay, interested only in his money. As the novel progresses, Prince daydreams of proposing to the actress to elope with him. Later, in her apartment, before an evening stroll, he falls asleep and dreams of his past, including his parents and his first love. This focus on internal experience and minimal external action underscores the novel's pioneering role in showcasing interior monologue.
