About fifty years ago, Shiv Kumar and Shirley Rose engaged in arcalie and seemingly inconsequential debate over whether Dorothy Richardson's flowing narrative style could be described in terms of Henri Bergson's notion of flux--life evolv[ing] before our eyes as continuous creation of unforeseeable form (Bergson, Creative 30).(1) Examining mental processes of Richardson's protagonist Miriam Henderson, Kumar was struck by the indeterminate and primordial flow of her stream of sensory impressions (495). He argued in 1959 that Pilgrimage was faithful rendering in fluid medium of Bergsonian concept of becoming (499).A decade later, Rose countered that whereas Bergson asserts fluidity and alteration of apprehensible reality, Dorothy Richardson argues for its and changelessness (371), citing Richardson's own rejection of stream-of-consciousness metaphor (she called it a muddle-headed phrase [qtd. in Rose 370], one isolated by its perfect imbecility [367]), as well as Richardson's declaration that while life did seem to exhibit a sort of streamline, itself sits stiller than tree (368).(2) I would argue that this exchange rests on false opposition. Kumar and Rose imply that ever-changing movement and stable self-knowing are mutually exclusive, while Richardson's massive project (Pilgrimage consists of twelve volumes published between 1915 and 1938, as well as thirteenth, unfinished volume that appeared posthumously in 1967) elaborates they are not. But before proposing alternate reading, perhaps it is necessary to address more basic question: Why should such obscure point matter? As Martha Nussbaum points out, formal characteristics of texts are bound up with their authors' conceptions of how human beings should live (144); literature cannot help but be philosophical. And Richardson's work expressly situates itself in reference to multiple philosophical influences--including, as Deborah Parsons Longworth has demonstrated, William Stanley Jevons's logical empiricism, Herbert Spencer's evolutionism, John McTaggart's idealism, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism. Thus, it is hardly surprising that critics tend to read Pilgrimage through lens of philosophy. Jean Radford has proposed that Richardson's investigation of subjectivity and signification make her precursor to Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous (Dorothy 109-15), and more recently has invoked Edmund Husserl's description of intentionality of to argue that Pilgrimage's analysis of subjectivity is not egoic, but rather an extended exercise in impersonal method (Impersonality 88). Longworth contends that Miriam's Emerson-inspired intuitive-empirical vision of reality demonstrates lived resolution of Idealist/New Realist deadlock that gripped Britain as Bertrand Russell's New Realism challenged and gradually replaced John McTaggart's idealist metaphysics. She suggests that William James's radical empiricism, eradicating distinction between mind and matter by attending strictly to experience, provides best philosophical lens through which. to understand Richardson's work. What all these claims have in common is assumption that Pilgrimage, no less than any philosophical text, makes argument about nature of reality. I agree that Pilgrimage can and should be approached in this light, yet it seems to me that none of above readings account for richness of Miriam's both/and consciousness. Rose's focus on stability and changelessness (371) minimizes flowing features of Richardson's text. Kumar's insistence on flux disregards stable witnessing presence at heart of work. Radford's use of Husserl's intentionality to stress that Miriam's consciousness is always of something (Impersonality 90) similarly overlooks Miriam's awareness of pure presence apart from contents of her consciousness. …
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Nov 29, 2021
John J Stuhr 
Open Access