If there is such a thing as a stream of consciousness, at least as we see it represented in literature, then its current is just as likely to be driven by sound as sense. Sometimes the resulting babble adds depth of meaning – an unconscious woman’s “senseless, scentless thigh,” the “fracture and fracas” of a battlefield, frozen fields along the St. John River a “lunatic lunar blue,” the “sail lofts on the estuary, statuary and spires” of London – but in each of these cases what is primary is the way one word suggests another, not the relation between associated ideas. If you ask what the narrator in the following passage is thinking about, the only answer is . . . cod: