To catch thought as it flies has long been an ambition of the high-end literary novel. From one point of view, it is possible to see the form’s history as an incremental refinement of the means by which consciousness is represented on the page. Jane Austen’s free indirect speech, the folding of soliloquy into third-person narration (“She had no hope, nothing to deserve the name of hope, that he could have that sort of affection for herself which was now in question”), marked the first significant breakthrough. Flaubert, James, Tolstoy, and others took this technique and ran with it. In the climactic chapters of “Anna Karenina,” Anna’s mind, overwrought by the crisis of her deteriorating affair with Vronsky, seems to commandeer the narrative altogether (“How proud and happy he’ll be when he gets my note! But I’ll show him … What a terrible smell that paint has”), so that mind and narrative become hard to tell apart.

From Tolstoy to the fractured, telegraphic stream of consciousness in “Ulysses” or the smoother, more overtly stylized variety in “Mrs. Dalloway” is not far. The main difference is one of attention span. Tolstoy gives us only a few pages of full immersion in the spume of Anna’s thoughts, and they come during the book’s most dramatic episode—a time when Anna has a lot to think about. The pages of Joyce and Woolf, on the other hand, abound with brain lint, the stuff of ordinary minds on ordinary days. Consider Leopold Bloom, whose consciousness is flypaper for hearsay and popular misconception, pondering the life of the blind after passing a sightless beggar on the street:

Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers. Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains … . Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the spring, the summer: smells. Tastes? They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure.

The unbuttoned naturalness of this seems to make no concessions to the demands of form; it is as though—finally—we are seeing thought as it happens, in real time.

This is to put the matter far too simply, of course. Nabokov complained that Joyce “exaggerates the verbal side of thought. Man thinks not always in words but also in images, whereas the stream of consciousness presupposes a flow of words that can be notated.” Nabokov illustrates, and perhaps hams up, these defects in a parody of Joyce in “Ada,” when Van Veen, having left his lover, the eponymous heroine, is travelling to the train station at Maidenhair:> Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the interior monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her “botanical” voice fall at biloba, “sorry, my Latin is showing.” Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now.

This unpleasantly thick verbal stew raises a difficult question: How much thought can a novel contain before bloating, or bursting, occurs? In its painstaking description of thought’s leaps and tics and swerves (“Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure”), “Ulysses” often comes rather close to life’s actual tedium; since the heyday of modernism few major novelists have sought to emulate that book’s exhaustive treatment of the ordinary mind at work.

In this respect, the Scottish writer James Kelman is something of a throwback. His novels take to new lengths the old modernist preoccupation with the mind’s slurry. Most of them employ a relentless stream-of-consciousness narrative, heavily inflected with the Scottish dialect spoken by Kelman’s working-class Glaswegian characters. In the Booker-winning “How Late It Was, How Late” (1994), Sammy Samuels, an ex-convict, is blinded after being beaten up by the police. At first, he deals with this new state of affairs quite well. Uncomplainingly, he buys a pair of sunglasses, fashions a walking stick by sawing the end off an old broom, listens to country music (which he much prefers to his girlfriend’s soul music, where the singers “all seemed to speak during the songs. That was what Sammy didnay like. Fine if they just fucking sang their song man but they didnay, it was all this: Girls, you know the song I’m gonna sing…”). It is only when the police show up again, halfway through the book, and throw him in jail that Sammy starts to feel that “life, fucking life” has really done a number on him: