Les Lauriers sont coupés
Les lauriers sont coupés (French pronunciation: [le lɔʁje sɔ̃ kupe], "The laurels are cut") is an 1887 novel by French author Édouard Dujardin, first published in the magazine Revue Indépendante. He was an early user of the literary technique stream of consciousness, and Les Lauriers exemplifies the style. Dujardin claimed later, in a study of the technique and its application in Joyce's Ulysses, that he was the first to use it in Les Lauriers.
The title derives from a French children's song, "Nous n'irons plus au bois" ("We'll go to the woods no more"), where the withering of the laurel tree is a prelude to regrowth, the latter period marked by joyous song and dance. The novel adheres to that spirit, capturing the thoughts of a student in Paris over a six-hour period in the spring.
Like many symbolists, Dujardin believed music to be an expression of interior life. In turn, interior monologue, being a-rationalist and anti-intellectual, could point the novel's way toward expressing the unconscious. Analogous with music (music being taken as the origin of language), interior monologue had an affinity with a more primitive and thus more original language. Like many symbolists, Dujardin had been greatly impressed with the music of Richard Wagner, and how important Wagner was to him and others was made clear by the foundation (with Téodor de Wyzewa) in 1885 of the journal Revue wagnérienne. Interior monologue, then, was to be the translation of the musical (and Wagnerian) idea of the Leitmotif into the novel, and narrative subjectivism to be the dominant perspective.
The novel's plot is purposely underdeveloped, as Dujardin acknowledged in a later essay on his novel and its technique, Le Monologue intérieur (1931) and especially in a letter written a year after the novel's publication. His is a "roman de quelques heures, d'une action banale, d'un personnage quelconque"—a novel whose narrative time is only a few hours, of a banal action, with a random [main] character. It concerns a naive and amorous student, Daniel Prince, who is about to be taken in by an actress, Lea d'Arsay, whose only interest is his money. As the novel develops, Prince daydreams of proposing the actress to elope with him, and when he is in her apartment, before they are to take an evening stroll, he falls asleep and dreams of his past, of his parents and the first girl he fell in love with.
...
Wikipedia