T.C.
İstanbul Üniversitesi
Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü
İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatõ Bilim Dalõ
Yüksek Lisans Tezi
An Analysis of Dorothy Richardson’s Novels Within the Context of Henri Bergson’s Philosophy
Ayşegül Deniz Toroser Ateş
2501020037
Tez Danõşmanõ: Prof. Dr. Zeynep Ergün
İstanbul 2005
T.C.
İstanbul Üniversitesi
Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü
İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatõ Bilim Dalõ
Yüksek Lisans Tezi
An Analysis of Dorothy Richardson’s Novels Within the Context of Henri Bergson’s Philosophy
Ayşegül Deniz Toroser Ateş
2501020037
Tez Danõşmanõ: Prof. Dr. Zeynep Ergün
İstanbul 2005
TEZ ONAYI
İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatõ Bilim Dalõ’nõn 2501020037 numaralõ öğrencisi Ayşegül Deniz Toroser Ateş’in hazõrladõğõ “An Analysis of Dorothy Richardson’s Novels Within the Context of Henri Bergson’s Philosophy” konulu YÜKSEK LİSANS TEZİ ile ilgili TEZ SAVUNMA SINAVI, Lisansüstü Öğretim Yönetmeliği’nin 10. Maddesi uyarõnca ...... günü saat ...... ’de yapõlmõştõr, sorulan sorulara alõnan cevaplar sonunda adayõn tezinin ...... ’ne* OYBİRLİĞİ / OYÇOKLUĞUYLA karar verilmiştir.
JÜRİ ÜYESİ KANAATİ İMZA ......
* BU KISMA SAVUNMA SONUCUNA GÖRE “KABUL”, “REDDİ” VEYA “DÜZELTİLMESİ” YAZILACAKTIR.
ÖZ
Yirminci yüzyõlõn başlarõnda Avrupa’da, Fransõz filozof Henri Bergson’un felsefesi oldukça yoğun bir tartõşma konusu olmuştur. Henri Bergson’un felsefesinin ve bu tartõşmalarõn çõkõşõ, on dokuzuncu yüzyõlõn sonlarõnda başlayõp hõzõnõ arttõrarak devam eden ve yirminci yüzyõlõn ilk çeyreğinde doruğa ulaşan Avrupa Modernizmi ile aynõ döneme rastlamaktadõr. Yine bu dönemde, yirminci yüzyõl başlarõndan itibaren yazmaya başlayan İngiliz romancõ Dorothy Richardson bir geçiş dönemi yazarõ olarak modernist yazõn alanõnda önemli bir yer edinmiştir. Richardson’un kõrk yõl boyunca yazdõğõ romanlarõnda Henri Bergson felsefesinin etkilerinin görüldüğü çeşitli eleştirmenlerce iddia edilmiştir. Bu tez çalõşmasõnda, Dorothy Richardson’un romanlarõ Henri Bergson’un felsefesi bağlamõnda ele alõnarak, romanlarda Bergson’un felsefesinin etkilerinin görülüp görülmediği, görülüyor ise bunun romanlara ne şekilde yansõdõğõ incelenmiştir. Bunun için, öncelikle bu dönemde gözlemlenen ve yazõn alanõnda İngiltere’de Richardson’un öncülü olduğu eleştirmenlerce iddia edilen Modernizm’in ne olduğu ve nasõl ortaya çõktõğõ araştõrõlmõş, daha sonra Bergson’un felsefesi Richardson’un Pilgrimage adlõ, toplam on üç romandan oluşan roman serisinde genel olarak incelenmiştir. Son olarak da, bu felsefenin romanlara yansõyõşõnõ detaylõ olarak görebilmek için bu seri içinden seçilen Revolving Lights ve March Moonlight adlõ romanlar aynõ bağlamda detaylõ olarak incelenmiştir. Bu incelemelerin sonunda, Richardson’un ilk romanlarõnda Bergson felsefesinden etkilendiği gözlemlenirken, son romanõnda sadece bu etkiler doğrultusunda yazmayõp, bu felsefeyi açõkça ortaya koyup desteklediği görülmüştür.
ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the philosophy of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, has been a matter of widespread discussions. The rise of Henri Bergson’s philosophy and these discussions coincide, in terms of period, with the European Modernism, which started at the end of the nineteenth century, gaining
iii force as it developed, and reached its peak during the first quarter of the twentieth century. During the same period, the English novelist Dorothy Richardson, who started writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, gained an important place in the field of Modernist literature as a writer of the transition period. It has been argued by different critics that in Richardson’s novels, which she wrote within a time span of forty years, effects of Henri Bergson’s philosophy can be observed. In this thesis, whether or not the effects of Bergson’s philosophy can be observed in Richardson’s novels, and if such effects can be observed, in what way this is reflected in the writer’s work are studied within the context of Bergson’s philosophy. For this, what Modernism, which is observed in the same period, and in the literary field of which some critics considered Richardson as the initiator in England, is and how it started has been analysed first. Afterwards, Henri Bergson’s philosophy has been studied generally in Richardson’s novel series of thirteen novels, called Pilgrimage. Finally, in order to observe thoroughly the reflection of this philosophy in the novels, two novels selected from this series, namely Revolving Lights and March Moonlight, have been studied in detail within the aforementioned context. At the end of these studies, it has been observed that while Richardson was affected by Bergson’s philosophy in the earlier novels, in her last novel, she did not only write in accordance with those ideas but also explicitly supported them.
iv FOREWORD
This thesis is an analysis of Dorothy Richardson’s novel series Pilgrimage within the context of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. The introduction focuses on the views on Dorothy Richardson as a Modernist writer and Henri Bergson as a philosopher whose ideas form the basis of the Modernist approach in literature during the first decades of the twentieth century. As Bergson’s ideas are a major basis for the Modernist literature and Richardson is the first English writer who applies the new ideas into her literary work, the first chapter focuses on the sources of Modernism in Europe and its reflection in literature. As well as the separate novels in the Pilgrimage series, Richardson’s novel series as a whole forms a major aspect of Richardson’s parallelism with Bergson. Therefore, the second chapter focuses on an overall analysis of Richardson’s novel series as a framework that presents the general aspects of parallelism between Richardson and Bergson. In the third chapter, Revolving Lights, the seventh novel in Richardson’s novel series is analysed in detail as to how Richardson is influenced by Bergson and how this is reflected in her work. The fourth chapter analyses Richardson’s final novel March Moonlight for its representation of Bergson’s philosophy both in technique and as the theme discussed throughout the novel. Finally, the conclusion includes the results arrived at by the analysis of Richardson’s novels in relation to Bergson’s philosophy and Modernism. I would like to thank Prof. Zeynep Ergün for her invaluable comments and support with my studies and Prof. Esra Melikoğlu and Assoc. Prof. Murat Seçkin for their overall encouragement and support.
v CONTENTS
Öz …………………………………………………………………….……...... iii
Abstract ……………………………………………………………………....… iii
Foreword …………………………………………………………………...... v
Contents …………………………………………………………………...... vi
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 1
1. Modernism Through Europe to England …………………...……………...... 6
2. Pilgrimage and Henri Bergson: An Overall Analysis ……………………… 16
3. Revolving Lights: Midpoint in Miriam’s Duration ……...………………...… 50
4. March Moonlight: Advocation of Bergsonian Philosophy …………...……… 68
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………...... 101
Works Cited …………………………………………………………………….. 105
vi INTRODUCTION
Ever since she wrote Pointed Roofs Dorothy Richardson has been referred to as the initiator of the stream of consciousness technique in England. Walter Allen, in his introduction to Pilgrimage writes, “to render current existence as reflected in the consciousness of her heroine, Miriam Henderson, was precisely the task she set herself…” (Allen, 1967: 3). According to Allen, Richardson had “the will to re- create the sense of immediate experience, the thoughts and sensations of human beings at the actual moment of living” (Allen, 1967: 3). May Sinclair refers to “the startling ‘newness’ of Miss Richardson’s method, and her form,” and states that Richardson’s form and method are perfect (Sinclair, 1979: 91-93). That Richardson is referred to as an innovator brings to mind the questions “why does she create something new? What are the motivations that push Richardson into forming a new novel technique?” The search for an answer takes us to the psychologist William James and the philosopher Henri Bergson. The ideas of these two people have been influential in the formation of the Modernist view, and Bergson has applied his theory to the field of aesthetics too. The initial point we find Richardson’s stream of consciousness technique embedded in is William James, the psychologist, and his work The Principles of Psychology. As Melvin Friedman, Walter Allen, and many other critics assert, James is the first person to use the phrase “stream of consciousness” in his work (Friedman, 1955: 74). Allen quotes James’s use of the term:
Every definite image of the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. The significance, the value of the image, is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it. Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. … It is nothing jointed; it flows. … Let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (Allen, 1967: 4)
According to Friedman, James “points up, impressively, the various movements of the mind, in their spontaneous and creative guises…” (Friedman, 1955: 74). Friedman also states that by the time James published his Principles of Psychology Bergson “had aligned himself” with the idea of the flow of consciousness which he
1 stated in his Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. In this work and in his other works such as Creative Evolution and An Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson discusses the flow within the consciousness of the human being. Related to this Bergson discusses how one can and why one would observe the consciousness. Bergson’s distinction between two types of information as absolute and relevant and his advocacy of the absolute attained through observation from the inside, brings us to the idea of observing the individual from the inside because according to Bergson the only thing an individual can know as absolute is himself and his own consciousness because he can observe it from the inside. The observation of the consciousness reveals that it is a continuous flow moving back and forth, in a flux. Bergson applies his idea to the novel and claims that the novelist is expected to represent the consciousness of his/her subject so that he/she can represent the character in its entirety. What Bergson asserts within his philosophy has been observed in the works of Dorothy Richardson by different critics. May Sinclair was a major critic studying Richardson after Pointed Roofs was published. Sinclair’s comments on Richardson’s work is quoted by Friedman:
In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just like life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on. And in neither is there any discernible beginning or middle or end. (Friedman, 1955: 178)
Sinclair states that some novelists criticised Richardson’s novels for having no beginning, no middle and no end (Sinclair, 1979: 93). Richardson’s deliberate attempt at giving her novels no specific beginning, middle or end is reminiscent of Bergson’s idea that the consciousness is an endless flow. Richardson displays a parallelism with the philosopher by representing the consciousness of her protagonist in its endlessness. Friedman argues that Dorothy Richardson is the first writer who introduced the stream of consciousness technique in England. Everything we read in Pilgrimage is revealed to us through the protagonist’s consciousness by Richardson’s analysis and representation of it. Further research on Richardson and Bergson shows that the
2 stream of consciousness is not the only point the two have in common. Bergson’s arguments on existence, durational experience, intuition as a support to intellect, and what art should represent and how the artist could do this are other points that need considering in Richardson’s novels. Nevertheless, before we get to the point of discussing Richardson and Bergson, what draws our attention is the emphasis both James and Bergson put on the individual. The representation of the individual’s consciousness takes us to the reasons for focusing so much on the individual at all. When the above mentioned technique and subject matters are in question the reader is left alone with the consciousness of the individual, thereby seeing everything through the individual’s eyes. It might be argued that earlier novels such as Jane Eyre or Tom Jones also focus on the individual and his/her development. However, there is great difference between the two trends. Earlier novels do have the individual as their subject matter but the individual is part of the society and the focus on the individual is on his/her social aspects. The individual’s experiences or character may present him/her as distinct from society; however, we find that in these novels the individual conforms to the society and ultimately becomes part of it, whereas in the Modernist novel, in Richardson’s novels, the protagonist as the individual being depicted is distinct from the society. The society is fragmented and the individual, now, has a problem of fitting into any part of it. Miriam Henderson in Richardson’s Pilgrimage does not become part of the society. She remains distinct and retains her individuality and subjectivity. In addition to this Kristin Bluemel claims,
other writers have certainly told stories about the private thoughts and public adventures of young women, but few and far between are those who allow their heroines to arrive at the end of their novels with their independence, good fortune, or good name intact. … Clarissa Dalloway may be the most famous modernist heroine who, like Miriam, is allowed happiness and survival, but she did not greet the public until 1925, ten years after Miriam Henderson made her debut. (Bluemel, 1997: 2)
Furthermore, with the stream of consciousness technique, the individual is observed from the inside, from his/her consciousness; therefore, the picture we have throughout the novel is that of the person whose consciousness is represented; in
3 Pilgrimage that is the protagonist. In the earlier novels the observation is made from the outside and represented by narrators. The first person narration, the narration of the omniscient narrator and the epistolary technique, which seem most to represent the individual’s mind, differ from the stream of consciousness technique because the first person narration is the conscious representation of the narrator of him/herself and the outside world the way he/she observes them. It is not synchronized with the narrator’s perception of things and is a successive conscious narrative. The epistolary is a step taken further back from the first person narration because it is the conscious depiction of the narrator’s thoughts to the outside world with the consciousness of a correspondence. The writer considers his/her correspondent in his/her revelation of his/her mind. The third person omniscient narrator is the observer on the outside. Though this narrator is “omniscient,” the representation is the outside depiction of the character’s thoughts and personality. Therefore, it does not convey the character in its “absolute” entirety. Thus the representation of the character as such is “relative” in Bergson’s terms. Furthermore, the narrators discussed above and the epistolary are not necessarily reliable; they do not necessarily reveal the reality about the character in question, whereas in the stream of consciousness technique the character’s consciousness is represented simultaneously with its flow, without any intervention. Therefore, it reveals the “absolute” reality about the character represented. The foregrounding of the individual as distinct from society is an aspect of Modernism. The political, economical, and technological developments of the period from the 1890s to the 1930s have resulted in a chain of changes in Europe. During this period and onwards the fragmentation within society has pointed out that the individual, though living in a society, is distinguished from other people by his/her subjective qualities, which define the individual. The chaos in the world, the changes that came with the World War have resulted in the individual’s distrust of the existing norms and policies, and has led the individual to doubt and question the notions of life and existence. Such and further Modernist aspects will be discussed in the first chapter of this study. The period in question is one during which various political movements have taken place. People seeking rights, not fitting into the existing political and social
4 groups form their own societies, like the Lycurgans in Richardson’s novel. The hopelessness in people as to the future improvements in the chaos of the society led people to turn to the individual in his/her experience of the world. This subjectivity and multiple points of view took their form in arts as well, especially in painting and literature. Thus the application of the stream of consciousness technique in literature to represent the consciousness of the individual. The Modernist movement in Europe and England and its taking shape in literature will be discussed in this thesis prior to the argument on Richardson and Bergson so that the motivations, sources, and applications of the ideas observed in the writer and the philosopher could be understood more clearly. In the chapters discussing Bergson and Richardson, Bergson’s ideas have been taken one at a time and an analysis of the novels has been made with respect to those ideas. A technical point necessary to be pointed out before moving on is the quotations from Richardson in this work. As Bluemel also writes, Richardson’s technique of representing Miriam’s stream of thought with ellipsis creates a problem when ellipses are required for the purpose of indicating extractions that are made from the original text quoted (Bluemel, 1997: xi). Therefore, as Bluemel has done in her work on Richardson, in this study, to present my own ellipses within quotations from Richardson I have enclosed the ellipses in brackets. The ellipses which are not given in brackets in quotations from Richardson indicate that they are Richardson’s original ellipses. This modification has been practiced only in quotations from Richardson. In quotations from other writers ellipses are presented without brackets and indicate an extraction from the original.
5 CHAPTER 1
Modernism Through Europe to England
Modernism is a stylistic phase the most significant products of which are accepted to have been produced between 1890 and 1930, while the gradual change from Realism to Modernism and then to Post-Modernism is considered to have taken place roughly from 1850's to the mid-twentieth century. The peak of Modernism is widely considered as the years between 1910 and 1925. Modernism is a style, or “a search for a style,” which challenged Realism by presenting “alternative ways of representing reality and the world” (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991b: 29). The term “Modernism” “has been used to cover a wide variety of movements subversive of the realist or the romantic impulse and disposed towards abstraction” (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991b: 23). They point out the movements in question as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism. Prior to the analysis of the sources of Modernism it is necessary to consider the features of Modernism. Bradbury and McFarlane state, “[W]e shall have to see in [Modernism] a quality of abstraction and highly conscious artifice, taking us behind familiar reality, breaking away from familiar functions of language and conventions of form.” Shocking, going beyond expectations and causing crisis are some of the elements of Modernism. As a reaction to Realism Modernism advocates aesthetic consciousness, turning to style and technique and setting the artist free by the notion of art for art's sake; it takes out the human element in art thus freeing the work of art from the function of representation to its own realisation. Some representations of Modernism in works of art are “anti-representationalism in painting, atonalism in music, vers libre in poetry, stream-of-consciousness narrative in the novel” (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991b: 26). Poetry moves away from the earlier metric verse, while prose concentrates on human subjectivity and consciousness applying techniques such as the interior monologue and defamiliarisation. As Childs states, Modernists try to
6
… overturn the existing modes of representation, partly by pushing them towards the abstract or the introspective, and to express the new sensibilities of their time: in a compressed, condensed, complex literature of the city, of industry and technology, war, machinery and speed, mass markets and communication, of internationalism, the New Woman, the aesthete, the nihilist and the flâneur. (Childs, 2000: 4)
Breaking away from earlier notions and 'boundaries' Modernist art is a response to disorder, chaos, depression, social anarchy, hostility and alienation to the point of nihilism. There is an inclination towards the irrational, the unconscious and the extraordinary. Bradbury and McFarlane summarize the quality of the modern age:
… to make audible or perceptible the mind's inaudible conversations, to halt the flow, to irrationalize the rational, to defamiliarize and dehumanize the expected, to conventionalize the extraordinary and the eccentric, to define the psychopathology of everyday life, to intellectualize the emotional, to secularize the spiritual, to see space as a function of time, mass as a form of energy, and uncertainty as the only certain thing. (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991b: 48)
However, although all of the above mentioned chaos and disintegration imply a breaking apart, it is not a negative “breaking apart” but a positive “falling together” in that the separation is not destructive but clarifies and frees the subject from the restrictions of others. According to the Modernists, time, hence history and life, is not chronological and does not have a sequence, it is a repetitive cycle and there are flashbacks. Modernism, unlike its preceding movement focuses on the individual rather than the society. With respect to sexuality and family “Modernism introduced a new openness with candid descriptions often sympathetic to feminism, homosexuality, androgyny and bisexuality…” (Childs, 2000: 19). One reason for the generation of Modernism is the social structure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and World War I at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Alan Bullock states in “The Double Image,” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century London, Paris and Berlin were the centres of “industrial, commercial and financial communications … based on capitalist premises of free enterprise and private profit” (Bullock, 1991: 59). As a result of the
7 existing capitalism and industrial expansion, in Europe there was “a society governed by class distinction, with undisguised inequality between rich and poor” (Bullock, 1991: 61). Through the imperialist attitude in Europe nations were exposed to alternative cultures and social structures. Childs states:
World War I and the years immediately before and after it brought the demise of many institutions and beliefs; the class system was rocked by the rise of trade unions and the Labour Party; beliefs in Kings and Country, patriotism and duty were betrayed by the carnage of war; the strength of patriarchy was challenged as women went to work outside the home and the suffrage movement gained hold. (Childs, 2000: 20)
The invention of new weapons and their being put to use during World War I, the long duration of the war and the death of millions of people during the war resulted in a change in people's beliefs and their standing in life. “[I]t became absurd to celebrate noble ideas like human dignity in art, or blithely to assert a belief in human progress,” claims Childs (Childs, 2000: 20). There was a total disillusionment concerning the pre-war ideals. The disillusionment of the Modernists after World War I reflected in their art as a palpable pessimism, a withdrawal into art and “an intense, aesthetic world where sense, shape and order could be achieved.” “The great war killed much else beside a generation of soldiers,” writes Bradbury in “Writers of the Great War” and continues:
It killed romanticism and sentimentalism, dreams of heroic action and imperial adventure. In the years after, the sensibility of the horror of what had happened seeped into the texture of the Western Literature. The war had upturned entire empires, overthrown ruling casts and classes, destroyed cities and changed the world balance of power. Europe was altered … [The war] had shattered language, old ideas of progress, established faiths. … It also created a crisis of artistic forms. (Bradbury, 1991b: 172)
Overlapping the industrial and imperial expansion was the technological revolution: “…the internal combustion engine, the diesel engine and the steam turbine; electricity, oil and petroleum as the new sources of power; the automobile… the telephone, the typewriter and the tape machine… the production by the chemical industry of synthetic materials–dyes, man made fibres and plastics” (Bullock, 1991:
8 59). As Bullock states, the improvement in economy and thereby technology is reflected in the works of art, in painting. The development in the field of chemical industry decreased the prices of paint, hence, the artist could paint using as much paint as he wanted, without economizing, resulting in a change in his style. The developments in engines resulted in the construction of trains, busses and later automobiles, which resulted in the change of the notion of time and space. Distance was not so great a problem anymore. The railways also meant that cities, even countries were now connected to each other, which meant that there would be interaction among them. Communication and travel being easier it was a new opening to the unknown. As a result, the urban way of living imposed itself over the society as a new possibility and international encounter increased greatly, resulting in exchange of ideas. With respect to the effects of the construction of railways and trains in art Childs claims:
The railway gave a new experience and perspective to modern life - a sensation of speed and motion that was very different from the view gained from the cart or the back of a horse. Time was compressed by the rapid career through the city and through the countryside. It gave a world of glimpses and of parallax – a realisation, which would be key to Cubism, that the landscape changed when it was viewed from a different position, that what was seen was always relative to where it was seen from. (Childs, 2000: 70)
The invention of the telephone, telegraph and radio also meant that communicating would be easier, which also contributed to the changing notion of time and space. According to Childs, “…technology was no longer affecting just industry, distribution and agriculture but the home, private travel and entertainment, such that art would have to readjust to the perspectives offered by the camera and the motor car” (Childs, 2000: 68). The invention of the motor car according to Childs is both a symbol of the individualisation of the age, giving individuals a chance to drive their own “train,” and a direct contributor to the idea of colour and light by moving at a much higher speed and through speed “compressing space and creating a more intense experience of time” (Childs, 2000: 71). During the 1890's the media was created with the first publishing of newspaper, the invention of the cinematograph and the photographic camera. The possibility of taking the photograph of objects
9 resulted in a new painting style, removing the artist from the idea that the painting should represent its subject as close to reality as possible. Therefore, the search for a new, non-representational style started. (Childs, 2000: 108). Apart from the social and economical effects of World War I and the technological revolution, developments in the field of science have been effective in the construction of the Modernist consciousness. Darwin's theory on the origin of species was a cornerstone in the rationalist attack against religious faith. “Darwin's argument that sex and natural selection were at the root of human development suggested a different kind of species from the previous belief in one unchanging humanity modelled in God's image. Humans were closer to animals than to God, and nature was evolving and not static” (Childs, 2000: 36). The Darwinian notion of evolution contradicted the Victorian idea of evolution for while the Victorians considered evolution as an improvement and progress Darwin suggested that it was synonymous with “degeneracy”. Thus, there was a change in the explanation of natural and social phenomena and the tendencies in art. In addition to Darwin, whose theory put emphasis on the individual and his connection with nature, thus distancing man from God and resulting in a sort of individualisation, Freud has been another cornerstone for the Modernist idea. Freud's works on the mind's functioning, the conscious and unconscious levels of the mind – psychoanalysis – was effective on the explanation of the individual. In all art as well as literature it was considered necessary to deal with the “hidden drives and desires” of the individual. “No single man, probably, has exercised a greater influence on the ideas, literature and art of the twentieth century than Freud…” writes Bullock (Bullock, 1991: 67). After the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, dreams became a subject for the artist. As Childes states, with the commencement of psychoanalysis the striving to reach God was replaced by the studying of the individual consciousness, the subjectivity of which was by now accepted. Through the notions of individuality and subjectivity the nineteenth century ideas of ‘absolute truth’ and the society’s superiority over the individual changed; “individual liberty in place of social constraint” gained importance. Subjectivity of the individual was supported in physics by Einstein's theory of relativity, which emerged during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
10 Einstein's theory on relativity claimed that nothing was absolute, in Childs's words: “no physical law is entirely reliable, but…the observer's position will always affect the result, will make the result relative and contingent” (Childs, 2000: 66). The influence of this scientific development in art was a “tendency towards narrative relativity” in Modernist fiction, using “perspective, unreliability, anti-absolutism, instability, individuality and subjective perceptions” (Childs, 2000: 66). According to Childs, “In relativity and Modernism the beginning of any analysis had to take into account point of view, perspective and parallax, the apparent change in the position of an object that is caused by an alteration in the observer's position” (Childs, 2000: 68). When we take a look at the spreading of Modernism throughout Europe we see that Modernism in Europe starts in Scandinavia, moving on to Germany and France and then to England. Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg are the major figures of the movement. In 1888 Nietzsche in Germany claimed that it was time to re-evaluate all existing values. As McFarlane also states in “The Mind of Modernism,” (McFarlane, 1991a: 79) Nietzsche questioned all certainties and emphasized relativity, interpretation and uncertainty. He attacked religious faith and the divinity of God; his attack on religion was influential for the writers of his time. He claimed that the responsibility of the artist was to be concerned with aesthetics and not morality. Childs claims that for Nietzsche “the highest goal humanity could achieve was an ‘overman’, a new creative being who could transcend religion, morality and ordinary society, could further culture not reason, and whose life-affirming slogan would be ‘Become what you are’” (Childs, 2000: 56-57). Nietzsche’s theory of ‘eternal recurrence’, claiming, “the individual should live each moment as though it were to be eternally repeated” (Childs, 2005: 59) emphasized cyclical time, in contrast to linear time, which is manifest in Modernist literature. As Childs states, Ferdinand de Saussure played a great role in the development of the Modernist language for during the realist movement language had been a tool to represent the world; however, with Modernism the language of literature was in need of a change for it did not convey one common reality. Childs writes that Saussure studied the relationship between language and meaning and
11 came up with the result that there was a difference between the concepts or objects in the real world and their representations in language, that the combination was arbitrary. This meant that language was constructed socially and “not divinely or naturally” (Childs 2000: 64) and that terms in language gained their meaning through their relationship with other terms in the system of language. Thus, the change in the language of literature. Henrik Ibsen is the cornerstone for the beginning of Modern drama. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century Ibsen was at the peak, celebrated for his innovations in drama. According to Fletcher and McFarlane, there were two points of Modernist drama – substansive and thematic, formal and linguistic – which both pointed to Ibsen: “On the one hand, there was the compulsive attention the eighties and the nineties gave to the problematic and the contemporary; on the other hand, there was the restless exploration of the resources of prose as a dramatic medium” (Fletcher and McFarlane, 1991: 499). Ibsen, living in Europe for a long time, had witnessed and was very much interested in the “political events and the social changes” of his age (1991:500). “…Ibsen himself never tired of insisting that everything he had written was the result of direct personal experience, of something ‘lived through’” (Fletcher and McFarlane, 1991: 501). Fletcher and McFarlane state that besides the social aspect, Ibsen was interested in the language of his art and after Peer Gynt he quit verse and started using prose in his plays. “The detection and the communication of subtleties and profundities below the surface of what might seem nothing more than the commonplaces of everyday speech opened up new and important possibilities in drama” (Fletcher and McFarlane, 1991: 501). Thus, according to Fletcher and McFarlane, through Ibsen, Modernist drama developed with its double layers of social criticism and undertones of dramatic dialogue. Around the same time with Ibsen, August Strindberg in Sweden was celebrated for his works. Mainly a playwright, Strindberg was also a novelist, an essayist and a critic. His style in his works was naturalism, expressionism and surrealism. According to McFarlane, Strindberg believed in “an assertive inner reality, the sense of the illogical's inner logic, and the recognition of the supremacy of those forces (both within and without the individual) which are not wholly under conscious control” (McFarlane, 1991b: 524). According to McFarlane, dreams and
12 transformations were major subjects for Strindberg because they made everything possible, time and space did not exist in dreams, there could be multiplicities, absurdities and freedom of all sorts. McFarlane states that one of Strindberg's developments in drama was that of “theme and mood”; “The desire to get behind the façade, beneath the surface; to strip man and woman naked in order to reveal the blemished reality; to expose the flawed thought process behind the words” (McFarlane, 1991b: 525). McFarlane's comment on Strindberg's technique follows as such:
On the one hand there was the encouragement Strindberg drew from the analogy with chamber music in its relationship to the fully orchestrated piece. He is eager to make the comparison, to call his late plays his 'last sonatas', to introduce the terminology of coda, cadenza, and the notion of ritardando, and to indicate the counterpointing that relates the various points in his drama: the set, the lights, the movement and the words. And on the other hand there was his enduring dislike of the staged, the bombastic, the strident, and the portentous in the theatre. He set himself to command the subdued, the simply subtle, the delicately modulated; to invite a reading between the lines and a listening between the words; to load the interstices- the pauses, the silences, the breaks – with profound significance. (McFarlane, 1991b: 526)
In “The Mind of Modernism” McFarlane writes that with respect to characterization in his plays, Strindberg’s technique was “fragmentation”. He rejected the idea of ‘fixed,’ predictable characters whose actions were the result of “one-to-one relationship of cause and effect” (McFarlane, 1991a: 81). McFarlane states Strindberg claimed that his characters were “modern characters, living in a period of transition,” they were “uncertain” and “disintegrated” (1991b: 81). This was the Modernist idea that human nature was not prescriptive, it was “elusive, indeterminate, multiple, often implausible, infinitely various and essentially irreducible.” Strindberg's fragmentation resulted in the idea that even the most ordinary events in life should be fragmented so that “a ‘realer’ level of reality” could be arrived at and the “moment-to-moment workings of the mind” could be understood. Between the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century England experienced experimental movements of Modernism.
13 Bradbury states that besides the “assimilation of foreign tendencies” into English writing and thought, “native preoccupations” still existed, hence the outcome was an English Modernism which “had its own distinctive preoccupations and character,” the tendencies of which were not exactly the same as elsewhere (Bradbury, 1991b: 176-177). According to Bradbury the common aspects of the writers of the age was “a prevailing sense of dislocation from the past, and a commitment to the active remaking of art” (Bradbury, 1991b: 178). “… there is a distinguishable English brand of Modernism, founded in the sense of transformation, often of liberation, affecting those who believed the era of Victorianism was ending and a new phase in society, art and thought beginning,” writes Bradbury (Bradbury, 1991b: 178). London was the centre of the English Modernist activity and national culture. There was a rapidly increasing population and an intense process of urbanization in London. It was one of the three main centres of industry and commerce in Europe along with Paris and Berlin. London was also the centre of communication and cultural activity. In “London in the 1890s” Bradbury writes that until World War I “London was at its most imperial and expansive, and welcomed writers, movements” (Bradbury, 1996b, 147). As Virginia Woolf writes, “on or about December, 1910, human character changed” (Woolf, 2000: 746) referring to Roger Fry’s Post- Impressionist exhibition, Bradbury also refers to the exhibition claiming, “It shocked London into either rage or modernity – and marked the start of a new age of movements and manifestos. … The philistines fell, the avant-garde triumphed” (Bradbury, 1996c: 180). According to Bradbury, due to its commerce, industry, crowd and rapid activity, London did not provide a suitable environment for artistic community. Expatriate writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound who had chosen to come to London before World War I for its variety and density, seeing the situation in the city, especially after the war, started to criticize it for its artistic desolation. The fact that the English society was Victorian and philistine made it difficult for experimental artists to survive in London; therefore, writers started to leave the country for Paris which resulted in a transaction between the two major cities. The British artist population, consisting mostly of painters, grew in Paris and through these artists the tendencies in Paris – Naturalism, Symbolism, Decadence,
14 Aestheticism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism – passed on to England (Bradbury, 1991b: 181-185). Bradbury writes that London was not only a national but also a cosmopolitan city; therefore, it contained in itself social and ideological contrasts. There was the problem of the East End and the West End for instance. Hence, London as a setting, and the contradictions, complexities and problems within it as the problems of the individuals within the fragmented masses became the subject of the artist because the artist, like other people, was being urbanized, “following the tide of metropolitan migration, feeling those emotions of isolation and separation, despair and hope that characterize the city life” (Bradbury, 1991b: 181). This sense of stress and trouble of the artist, according to Bradbury, meant that there was need for a new style in art, “an art of fragments and images, an art of language retrieved from chaos and misuse, an art which encounters the modern city but also arises from out of it in a new translucent form” (Bradbury, 1991b: 182-183). Daniel Schwartz argues that Modernist texts represent the “network that holds together the modern city … highlighting terrible moments of marginalization, isolation and loneliness” (Schwartz, 2005: 13).
15 CHAPTER 2
Pilgrimage and Henri Bergson: An Overall Analysis
Although she has been neglected as a writer, Dorothy Richardson is often referred to as the pioneer of the stream of consciousness technique. Although James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are considered to be the major writers using the stream of consciousness technique, it was Dorothy Richardson, as Robert Humphrey and other critics claim, who first applied the technique to her work and started a new method of representation. Until Richardson, there had been writers who took the individual as the focus of his/her writing; e.g. Samuel Richardson, Thomas Hardy, Henry Fielding and Charlotte Brontë. Nevertheless, the techniques of these writers differed from Richardson’s in their representation of the individual from the outside, in other words, depicting the individual through an outside observation rather than Richardson’s technique of representation from the inside, from the consciousness of the individual. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, as an epistolary novel, may be considered to represent the consciousness of its heroine in representing the mind of the heroine through the letters she writes to various people; however, while these letters reflect the mind of the individual, what the reader reads in them are the selected parts of the heroine’s mind which she chooses to reveal to her correspondents. In this, the epistolary differs from Dorothy Richardson’s representation because in Pilgrimage Dorothy Richardson aims to represent the mind of her protagonist as it works, without any selections, rather on the contrary, in full detail. Pilgrimage is Dorothy Richardson’s major work. It is a series of novels made up of thirteen novels in all. All the novels have Miriam Henderson as their protagonist and they follow a sequence in their representation of the heroine’s life from youth to adulthood. The publishing of Richardson’s Pilgrimage covers a time span of forty years, starting with the first novel in the series, Pointed Roofs, dated 1915 and ending in 1967 with March Moonlight. The last novel, March Moonlight was published ten years after the death of the writer. According to what Kristin
16 Bluemel writes in Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Richardson’s biographer Gloria Glikin Fromm states that “after the first three chapters of March Moonlight were published in Life and Letters,” it was only in 1967 when the compilation of the novels was published, was the last novel published in full (Bluemel, 1997: 15). Bluemel claims Fromm “speculates that March Moonlight was little more than two-thirds complete” (Bluemel, 1997: 15). My attitude, in this work, will be to consider the novel as fully completed because a study on a novel cannot be pursued on assumptions of what might have been, but on what “is”. The novel, published as it is, is the complete novel. The first three novels, Pointed Roofs, Backwater and Honeycomb are dated 1915, 1916, and 1917 respectively; the fourth and fifth novels, The Tunnel and Interim, were both published in the same year, in the February and December of 1919 (Bluemel, 1997: 15), two years after the third novel; Deadlock, the sixth novel of the series, appeared in 1921 two years after the aforementioned two novels. Revolving Lights, following Deadlock, was published in 1923, two years later again. The immediately following novel in the series, The Trap, is dated as 1935 in the J.M. Dent and Sons version of the series whereas Bluemel writes 1925 as the novel’s publishing date. Considering that the separate novels follow a sequence of subject, and that The Trap takes place as the last novel in the third volume, after Revolving Lights published in 1923, followed by Oberland, dated 1927, in the fourth volume I take as the novel’s publishing date Bluemel’s 1925. Oberland and Dawn’s Left Hand, in the fourth volume of Pilgrimage, were published in 1927 and 1931 respectively. Clear Horizon and Dimple Hill the eleventh and twelfth novels in the series were published in 1935 and 1938. I seek to analyse Richardson’s work with regard to the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s ideas due to the fact that Bergson was a major influence during the first two decades of the twentieth century throughout Europe and England. As Bradbury and McFarlane state, “Bergson’s ideas exercised an influence on the twentieth-century European Literature second only to Nietzsche’s” (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991a: 614). Henri Bergson emerges at the end of the nineteenth century, making his actual statements with his Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution.
17 Bergson’s studies comprise the workings of the mind of the individual; i.e. perception, attention, memory and in connection with these, time, sense of duration, “duree” as Bergson terms it, intuition, and the process of development of the individual. The technique Richardson uses in Pilgrimage and the subject matter of her work present connections, or rather parallelisms, with the philosopher’s theories. As Shiv K. Kumar states in his Bergson and the Stream Of Consciousness Novel, “Bergson’s philosophical theories of time, memory and consciousness provide[d] a more useful clue to the understanding of the new technique. The emergence of time as a new mode of artistic perception in the contemporary novel…” (Kumar, 1963: 4). Kumar states about Pilgrimage that “the entire work of Dorothy Richardson bears a very close resemblance” to Bergson’s idea of durée and “pure memory” (Kumar, 1963: 36). Regarding Bergson’s philosophy in categories such as his ideas on time, memory, intuition, the individual and art, as does Kumar, I will discuss, in this chapter, the manifestations of each category in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. When we consider Pilgrimage as a series of novels, the most striking aspect of the novels is the course of approximately fourteen years that elapses, in terms of plot, between the first and the last novel and the development the protagonist goes through within the course of that time. While the subject matter of the novels, all together, covers such an amount of time, Richardson does not focus on this measurable time in any of her novels. Since her subject is the inner world of her protagonist, Richardson prefers to emphasize Miriam Henderson’s subjective experience of time. In Henri Bergson and British Modernism Mary Ann Gillies writes that because Richardson is less concerned with the external world than the inner world, she sacrifices the “chronological plot line” for a “more chaotic story of the growth of consciousness” (Gillies, 1996: 152). While in the first novel, Pointed Roofs, we are told of the protagonist’s age, in the next two novels, Backwater and Honeycomb, we know it roughly, making an estimation of it by calculating the time that has elapsed in each novel. When we come to Revolving Lights, the seventh novel in the series, we do not know the protagonist’s age at all. Our knowledge of how much time has passed since Deadlock, the immediately preceding novel, and how old the protagonist is, is attained through other information such as the fact that several
18 years have passed since Miriam Henderson went into a relationship with Michael Shatov in Deadlock. Thus we estimate that in Revolving Lights she is at the end of her twenties because in Deadlock we find out that she is twenty-five (Richardson, 1967, 3: 29). The fact that Richardson does not clearly express clock time and creates vagueness is an expression of her purposeful neglect of it in order to emphasize subjective time. In A Reader’s Guide to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage George H. Thomson writes that Miriam is seventeen years old at the beginning of the novel series and thirty-seven at the end of it (Thomson, 1996: 124). This means that twenty years elapse between Miriam’s life in Pointed Roofs and March Moonlight. Shiv K. Kumar claims that “the psychic biography” of Miriam covers fourteen years (though we have to bear in mind that March Moonlight had not yet been published when Kumar published “Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel” in 1963 and therefore he does not regard March Moonlight here). Nevertheless, even if Kumar had considered March Moonlight, his estimation of fourteen years would not have gone up to twenty, considering the flow of experience and time revealed to us in the novel. A third critic, Mary Ann Gillies, claims that the life time of Miriam Henderson we read of in the novel series is ten years (Gillies, 1996: 153). Since three different critics arrive at three different conclusions, this shows us that there is vagueness in the novel series as regards the external time that elapses throughout. This ambiguity in the novel is one of Richardson’s devices to create “timelessness” in her novels. The ambiguity created by Richardson as to Miriam’s age and the time that goes by emphasizes the significance of duration in contrast to mathematical time, calculated by counting simultaneities according to Bergson. Time, in this novel series is not clarified. I have not attempted to calculate the external time in the novels because such an attempt would have been undermining Richardson’s intention in creating temporal ambiguity, which, as far as the different statements of the above mentioned critics prove, she has successfully achieved. Richardson’s emphasis on the insignificance of external time in Miriam’s life as opposed to her subjective experience of duration is integrated with her representational technique in the novels. The process of Miriam Henderson’s development from a young suburban girl, who does not choose to conform to the conventions of the society and prefers to
19 make choices of her own and act rather than stay passive, into an artist who has her own ethical and artistic values, takes approximately fourteen years. Nevertheless, Richardson’s focus, which is not on the external clock time that elapses or on the separate events taking place in Miriam’s life, but rather on Miriam’s personal experience of time, and how this affects Miriam as an individual, reminds us of Bergson’s idea of duration, which is “internal time” focusing not on the external world and the mathematical linear time associated with it but on the inner world of the individual and his/her subjective experience of time. Thus, duration has two sides to it; firstly that it is not linear time and secondly that it is subjective experience. Gillies explains this subjective experience of time as time seeming to collapse or expand when one is under stress and time seeming to fly when one wants to prolong a certain experience. Gillies adds that according to Bergson, “real time is that in which people live; it is qualitative not quantitative, in nature” (Gillies, 1996: 12). For the non-linear aspect of duration we could turn to Bergson himself. In Creative Evolution Bergson writes, “…our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present – no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances” (Bergson, 1913: 4-5). This tells us that the past is not something that contains experiences that are put away or eliminated once the experience is over but is, rather, something that pushes its way through and asserts itself into the future as a determiner of it. This description of duration in which the past is joined with the future, is directly connected with the notion of memory for it is memory that joins the past and the future. Bergson continues his explanation of duration describing what memory is. The type of memory he describes here is what he names as “involuntary memory” in Matter and Memory:
In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the
20 threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared… (Bergson, 1913: 5)
Bergson claims here that the mind works on its own, recording things as the individual experiences or perceives them. However, the mind works in such a way that among the thousands of memories that the involuntary memory stores “only that which can give useful work” can come up to the surface. This means that the memories stored by the workings of the “involuntary memory” do not just arise by chance, but rather according to their use for the present moment. How these ideas of duration and memory manifest themselves in the novels of Dorothy Richardson will be seen in the further parts of this chapter. In Creative Evolution Bergson claims that our entire past determines our will, desire and act. Asserting that the entire past of the individual co-exists with the individual, Bergson draws the conclusion that “consciousness cannot go through the same state twice,” (Bergson, 1913: 6) because the initial state once experienced becomes past, taking its part within the memory; therefore, the second experience of the same initial state cannot take place because the first experience will differ from the second in its comprising of the memories of the initial moment of experience. From this, Bergson reaches the statement that “duration is irreversible,” because to experience a single moment twice, the individual would have to “effac[e] the memory of all that had followed” the initial moment. Thus, Bergson claims as a result that each moment of the individual is “something new added to what was before” (Bergson, 1913: 6). This is Bergson’s idea of the individual’s “becoming” as a continuous process in order to find an explanation for “exist[ance]”. Bergson writes, “…for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly” (Bergson, 1913: 8). Kumar also quotes from Bergson on the relationship between change and existence: “Not things made but things in the making, not self maintaining states, but only changing states, exist…” (Kumar, 1963: 45). This idea of existence through changing and “creating oneself endlessly” very much applies to Miriam Henderson’s process of self- development in Richardson’s novels. We see in Richardson’s novels that Miriam is
21 in a constant state of change, which she openly advocates in Oberland when she thinks about other people that “They never lose themselves in strangeness and wake changed,” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 25) and pities “those who had never bathed in strangeness” considering how she “at the beginning of her life, in the face of obstructions […] had bathed and [then] under kindly compulsion was again bathing” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 24). Further examples as to how Bergson’s idea of change applies to Richardson’s protagonist will be given in the relevant sections of the present chapter. Time, in the general sense of “the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues” (Woolf, 1980: 1213) ceases to be of consequence in Richardson’s novels. When we read Interim, which is the fifth novel, we see that there is repeated mention of measured time in the form of the clock of St Pancras. It is clearly evident that the ringing of the clock is in the background as a symbol of the authority of the external world trying to assert itself on the individual; however, clock time is not effective or influential in Miriam’s life. Miriam asserts her subjectivity over it. In the same novel, clock time is presented as unreliable. For we see in the novel that preparing for the arrival of the New Year, Richardson’s protagonist listens to the bells of Westminster, St Pancras and Big Ben ringing at midnight: “St Pancras clock – striking down the chimney. […] In the air hung the echo of the first deep boom from Westminster. St Pancras and the nearer clocks were telling themselves off against it. They would have finished long before Big Ben came to an end. Which was midnight?” (Richardson, 1967 2: 322) The ringing of the bells is not synchronised, one of the clocks rings longer than the others; therefore, Miriam questions the clocks, not knowing which one informs of the actual time of midnight. This is significant in revealing that the measured clock time, which informs us of the time to which Bergson refers as the time of the external world, outside of the individual, is not as reliable as it would be expected to be. Since clock time represents the authority of the external world, the multiplicity of clocks ringing against each other symbolizes the multiplicity of authority in the external world. There is more than one authority, more than one external time. Here, the external time represents the fragmentation within the external world, which will be dealt with further on in this study. This shows a parallelism between Richardson and
22 Bergson’s idea of time. Bergson claims that although it is generally considered as reality, clock time, which belongs to the external world outside of the individual, regulating and organizing social time, is of secondary importance to the subjective inner time of man, which is duration. Man has an inner world in which duration, moments, have significance because they create personal time, which is what really matters for the individual because it is the individual’s own reality. The external time, which Bergson refers to as the counting of simultaneities, represents a symbolic reality of the external world, which does not apply to all the individuals of the society. Reality is subjective and changes accordingly. In Bergson and Philosophy, John Mullarkey writes that Bergson’s concept of “durée” is “qualitative, heterogeneous and dynamic” and in explaining that in durée each moment is different in quality “from the last” and that each moment brings a novelty, and time is time only when it is creative, he quotes from Bergson’s Time and Free Will: “Even the simplest psychic elements possess a personality and a life of their own, however superficial they may be; they are in a constant state of becoming, and the same feeling, by the mere fact of being repeated, is a new feeling” (Mullarkey, 1999: 9). To distinguish between the outer social time and the personal experience of time within the individual’s inner world I shall use Gillies’s explanation that a period of time mathematically short could seem very long to the individual if he/she does not want to go through the experience within that time; or conversely, a mathematically long period of time could seem short to the individual who wishes to prolong his/her experience within that time. In Richardson’s sixth novel, Deadlock, we see that at the very beginning of the novel, on the wall is a clock that is not running. The running of a clock traditionally symbolises the lapse of time which is conventionally associated with the flow of the individual’s life. Within the outside social world, the individual’s existence is measured by the time that elapses, hence the association between the elapse of time and the individual’s growing old which points to the individual’s life that flows. The fact that the clock depicted at the beginning of the novel is one that hangs on the wall of the dining room in Mrs Bailey’s house is noteworthy. The dining room is the part of the house where Mrs Bailey’s boarders come together in a social gathering, as part of their life in the outside world. That the clock in the room
23 where social activity is taking place does not work symbolises a problem with the accepted notion of time within the outer world. This reveals the idea that the individuals’ “real” life, in other words, their internal life, which in Bergson’s term is “durée”, is actually experienced outside the time that is measured through devices; measured time does not determine people’s lives. Clock time, here, is left aside; it is not running, and the individuals’ “real” lives, personal experiences and the ensuing effects of these experiences continue without it just the same. As in Schwartz’s interpretation of the clock without hands in Matisse’s The Red Studio, the fact that the clock in Mrs Bailey’s house does not work shows that time is suspended, “while calling attention to the perpetual presence of time, and express an awareness that clock time is an arbitrary measurement imposed by humans” (Schwarz, 2005: 15). This is another point which reminds us of Bergson’s assertion, also explained by Gillies, that the reality for the individual is his durée, his subjective inner world rather than the objective time of the outside world (Gillies, 1996: 135). It is significant that Mrs Bailey is aware that the clock does not work but does not attempt to have it fixed; on the contrary, it is clear that she does not mind it at all. This reveals to the reader Mrs Bailey’s stand against time; as in the instance of the gong she uses, which will be discussed in the paragraph following the next, here again, Mrs Bailey is bringing together objective time and subjective time in her own way. Despite the fact that there is a clock on the wall, the experiences within the room are subjective experiences related with the duration of the individuals as opposed to the outside world. This is a state that Mrs Bailey creates in her own house, introducing the social aspect of the external time into the subjective experience of time. When Miriam checks the clock on the wall to see what time it is, Mrs Bailey asks, “Are you wanting the real Greenwich, Miss Henderson?” (Richardson, 1967 3: 12). Since Mrs Bailey is asking Miriam whether she wants the Greenwich time, her question reveals that there is also some other time that Miriam could be wanting; that is, subjective time, duration. Greenwich is crucial within the context of time that belongs to the external world. It is the place where the prime meridian, longitude 0° passes; clock time is measured according to the distances on the surface of the earth measured towards east or west starting from Greenwich, each longitude covering a time span of two hours. This is mathematical time. Thus, Miriam’s choice between Greenwich
24 and her duration is a choice made between the external social world and the inner subjective world. Thus, still a step further away from the objective world. We read in the immediately preceding paragraphs and the immediately following sentence that before coming to the dining room Miriam runs up to her room with thoughts in her mind, “her mind [throwing] up images”; she withdraws into her subjective, inner, “real” world but seeing that she cannot escape her thoughts there, she, then, returns downstairs into the dining room thinking “The rest of the evening must be spent with people” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 11) socializing, in order to escape them. This seems to be a choice between the two worlds. Nevertheless, that the clock on the wall does not represent Greenwich time shows us that the choice Miriam needs to make here is not between her inner world and the outside world but between her inner world and the inner world of the house she is living in, that is the inner world of Mrs Bailey. A distinction between the representation of objective and subjective time is manifest in Richardson’s novels. In the first three novels, Miriam Henderson lives in the houses she works in; she does not rush going from one place to another, as in some of the later novels like The Tunnel. This is worth consideration because the settings of the first three novels are the suburbs of London or Hanover whereas the setting of The Tunnel is the middle of London. In the novels that are set in the suburbs there is a certain pattern in which a day’s work is done, which is not necessarily determined by clock time. For instance, in Honeycomb, Miriam Henderson has classes with the two children; however, there is not an exact time at which they start their lesson. The time of the lesson varies, depending on what the children are doing that day and we see at one point that Miriam waits for the children to come home so that they could start their lesson. There is a certain list of things to be done but the order in which those things are to be done is not defined by specific hours of objective clock time. Accordingly, we do not see a distinct manifestation of clock time asserting itself on the lives of Miriam and the others in the household. However, in The Tunnel and Interim, in which Richardson’s protagonist forms her new life living alone in the heart of London, working as an assistant to three dentists in a clinic, Miriam has to rush all day long. The time she goes to work and leaves work becomes a matter of consideration. All day long she deals with the organization of appointments, which are determined by measured clock time. Thus, in these
25 novels we see that clock time holds a certain place in the lives of the people when they have to experience the rush in the big city. While experiences in the suburbs are largely determined by the individuals’ subjective preferences, life in the heart of the great city, London, is determined by social concerns too. When social concerns assert themselves into Miriam’s life, as it happens at work, immediately following them comes the time of the outer world, asserting itself too. However, the place of external time is, still, not very significant in Miriam’s personal experience. Clock time, in Miriam’s case, is a means for making social organizations and arrangements. Apart from that, it is still of secondary importance in comparison to subjective time within these novels. Further on in the novel series, in Dimple Hill, Miriam lives in the country with the Roscorla family. Here, external time is completely out of Miriam’s life because she is completely free to experience her duration. The only social concern she has is the times she has meals with the rest of the household. That is, still, not completely external time because Miriam is constantly late for meals. Her duration takes over the external time in the house, which does not have dominance. Thus, as Miriam goes to the country she feels the authority of the external world less and she gets a chance to concentrate on and experience her own duration. It is “duration”, internal time, hence internal experience, which is emphasized by Richardson in her novels. For instance, in The Tunnel, when Miriam remembers her childhood at Babington “All the six years at Babington [are] that blazing alley of flowers without beginning or end, no winter, no times of day or changes to be seen” (Richardson, 1967, 2: 213). All that Miriam remembers of those days are her subjective experiences with Harriett, devoid of a sense of clock time. Later, in the same novel, tired of reading to Miss Dear, Miriam says in the end, “I ought to have gone; ages ago” which shows us that in addition to the passing hours spent reading, the interval becomes ‘ages’ when measured by Miriam’s internal time, considering the time that has passed much longer, revealing her negative attitude to being late and having stayed reading for so long (Richardson, 1967, 2: 261). Miss Dear’s response to this, “The time does pass quickly, when it is pleasantly occupied” (Richardson, 1967, 2: 261), expresses her subjective experience of the time that has gone by, referring to it as having gone by quickly because she finds it pleasurable and wants to prolong it. At this point, we see two different durational experiences of
26 the same interval of time that has elapsed. The fact that Miss Dear uses the article “the” referring to time also shows us that that time which passes quickly is a “specific time”, one which elapses “quickly” when it is enjoyed, hence “the time” which is subjective experience. Richardson’s merging of external time and inner duration within these novels is reminiscent of Bergson’s idea of the two types of time co-existing in the world of the individual. Gillies points out that while asserting the superiority of “durée”, subjective inner time, over “l’étendu”, clock time, Bergson does not reject clock time and realises that “durée alone is insufficient for human existence.” Bergson claims that for humans “to have an existence outside their inner world, they need to construct an external reality,” which is spatial time. According to Bergson, living in durée all the time would lead to isolation and ultimately madness, but living in external time continuously is also dangerous because it would prevent genuine growth and self-knowledge (Gillies, 1996: 12-13). In Interim, Richardson makes Mrs Bailey use a gong to call people to tea. This is also important in showing Richardson’s attitude towards the understanding of time. The gong is a means for informing the boarders in the house of the “time” for tea. This is a social event; however, there is not a definite hour at which tea is served everyday. Mrs Bailey prepares tea at her own convenience and uses the gong to inform everybody. The gong functions, on the one hand, like a clock, organizing the social world, on the other hand, it is not a time measurer but a device to reveal it is “Mrs Bailey’s time” for tea. Thus, the gong is somewhere between clock time and subjective durée. This is Mrs Bailey’s way of asserting her own subjective time to the others, and turning it into the objective time of the external world within the confines of her house. Looking at the separate novels in Pilgrimage, there are no instances of narration of time. Richardson never directly tells the reader how much time has elapsed; it is as if there is a continuing “timelessness”. Readers of the novels have to try and work out the time if they want to; however, the novel does not raise such interest because the time that elapses is of no consequence when it is compared with Miriam’s personal internal time, her durational experience, which holds in it Miriam’s feelings, experiences and the effects of her experiences on her character. In Richardson’s novels, expression of clock time remains secondary for the novels focus on Miriam’s subjective experiences. To use Kumar’s words, “Such an
27 experience of life obviously cannot be represented by such arbitrary symbols as hours, months and years” (Kumar, 1963: 51). In Deadlock, we find Miriam and Mr Shatov, the Russian who later becomes Miriam’s lover, sitting in Mrs Bailey’s drawing room talking about language, literature, and men of letters. At this point Miriam is in the position of an instructor of English to the foreigner and promises Mr Shatov that she would help him improve his knowledge of English. The next evening, when Miriam goes into the drawing room for her appointment with Mr Shatov, she contemplates her talk with Mr Shatov in the drawing room at Mrs Bailey’s house the previous night. Representing the consciousness of her protagonist Richardson writes, “It seemed so long ago,” of her protagonist’s experience at this moment and continues, “His mere presence there had been strange enough; youth and knowledge and prosperity, where for so long there had been nothing but the occasional presence of people who were in mysterious disgraceful difficulties, and no speech but the so quickly acrimonious interchange of those who are trying to carry things off” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 30). This shows us that Miriam enjoyed her discussion with Mr Shatov; therefore, she now feels that the interval since the evening before has been “so long”. This is an example of durational experience because although it has been a single day’s time length since their discussion, the interval seems very long to Miriam. The word “seem” also points out that as measured time one day is not long but it may “seem” long within the individual’s subjective experience of it. Later, when Miriam and Mr Shatov go to visit the museum, we read, “She felt they had been long acquainted” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 65). Although they have not been acquainted for a long time, that is the feeling her experience with Mr Shatov gives Miriam. This is an instance of Miriam’s subjective feelings about Mr Shatov, outside external, measured time. It is the experience of their relationship that makes her think so, not the external time that goes by. Yet, a better example of durational experience as opposed to external clock time can be seen in the same novel when these two characters are presented at an age of not what the calculation of years reveals but at an age they feel to be. Richardson writes, “[Mr Shatov] had been to see [Max Nordau, the German writer] and found a truly marvellous white-haired old man, with eyes, alive; so young and vigorous in his enthusiasm that he made Mr Shatov at twenty-two feel old. […] Miriam watched [Mr
28 Shatov] from afar, set apart from his boyhood, alone with her twenty-five years on the borders of middle age. […] [Mr Shatov’s] eyes might have belonged to a man of forty” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 29). Mathematical age is related with external linear time; years added up together make up one’s age. Nevertheless, here we have Miriam, who is mathematically twenty-five years old, “on the borders of middle age” and Mr Shatov, who is mathematically twenty-two, like “a man of forty” with his looks, manner and eyes. This is an expression of duration because it is not the years that count within the “real” world of the individual but his/her durational experiences. When Miriam compares herself to other women and decides not to be one of them she thinks, “She was mistress of her fate; there was endless time. … They had never known freedom or the endlessness of the passing moment. Time for them had been nothing but the continuous pressure of fixed circumstances” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 196). There is a differentiation of external and inner time here. What Miriam calls “the continuous pressure of fixed circumstances” is external time, the need of other women to fit into their “slots” within the passing “time” that will end, hence they are pressurized for they have to fit into fixed circumstances within fixed times. The endlessness of time Miriam describes for herself is her subjective inner time; she is “mistress of her fate” because her world is made up of her own inner reality, her durée; hence she is free and there is no end of time because her personal time can be prolonged. This complies with Bergson’s theory of duration because as Kumar claims, duration is “something incapable of measurement and intractable to such symbolical representations as hours, days … which are only its spatialized concepts” (Kumar, 1963: 8). Another parallelism with Bergson’s theory of time and Richardson’s usage of time in her novels lies in Bergson’s idea of “durational flux” in contrast to chronological time. As Gillies also writes in explaining Bergson’s theory of time, while chronology is the quantitative aspect of time, durational flux is its qualitative aspect (Gillies, 1996: 12). The “durational flux” is the “psychological time” which moves among past, present and future, the past reaching out into the future through the individual’s present, which is composed of the accumulation of present and past experiences, and memories. As Kumar also suggests, unlike chronological time,
29 which is separated into arbitrary sections like hours, months, years, durée cannot be separated because it is a flow from the past carried into the future. “The present moment,” writes Kumar, “which may outwardly appear to have an independent identity of its own, is in truth the shadow of the past projecting itself into the future” (Kumar, 1963: 52). A distinct manifestation of this idea in Richardson’s novels can be detected when Richardson writes in Interim “The present can be judged by the part of the past it brings up. If the present brings up the happiness of the past, the present is happy” (Richardson, 1967, 2: 402). This is very Bergsonian in its advocating of the significance and power of the past upon the present, claiming that the past experiences and memories are influential in determining the present. Thus, past and present are intermingled with one another. An aspect of the “durational flux” is that the individual’s past and present merge into one another in his/her consciousness. In Interim, we see that Miriam’s memories of the past intermingle with her present and her future expectation:
…she found the nearer past, her years of London work set in the air, framed and contemplable like the pictures on the wall, and beside them the early golden years in snatches, chosen pictures from here and there, communicated, and stored in the loyal memory of the Brooms. Leaping in among these live days came to-day. … The blouse belonged to the year that was waiting far off, invisible behind the high wall of Christmas. She dropped it on the bed and ran downstairs to the little drawing-room. (Richardson, 1967, 2: 312)
The years of London that “set in the air”, likened to pictures on the wall, are Miriam’s memory images of her London life in The Tunnel, the immediately preceding novel. Miriam comes to Mrs Philps’s house, the house she is in when she has the above contemplations, from London for a short holiday. Beside these images are the memory images of the Brooms, which take Miriam years back to when she was teaching in Banbury Park, in Backwater, the second novel in the series. Suddenly, Miriam’s present experience of holding her blouse in her hand intervenes among her memories and this experience causes her to think of the coming Christmas. Another instance of subjective time could be observed here because for Miriam, the year to come seems to be “waiting far off”, turning the Christmas in between into a “high wall”, which has the negative connotations of forming an
30 obstacle. This obstacle stands between Miriam’s expectation of the future and her present. The memory images Richardson represents, which bring together Miriam’s past and present life, give insight into Miriam’s character, claims Gillies (Gillies, 1996: 162). According to Bergson, the mind of the individual moves from the present into the future through contemplations and expectations of the future; it moves from the present to the past through recollections. These recollections are the products of what Bergson calls “involuntary” and “voluntary” memories, the former functioning of its own accord, recording all the experiences of the individual without the realisation of the individual, the latter functioning according to the individual’s conscious effort. In Richardson’s novels, sometimes an object or a person arouses memories in Miriam’s consciousness unawares, at other times Miriam tries to remember certain things from the past. Involuntary recollections are central to the novels, claims Gillies, and “The result is a novel structured around these memory-enhanced special moments” (Gillies, 1996: 162). Involuntary memory, according to Bergson, keeps the whole past of the individual within him/her. The individual is not aware of most of his/her memories or of many of his/her experiences until a certain object or event appears and suddenly there is an “associative recollection”, the relevant memory rising due to the new association. Thus, memories of the past are always there, whether they come out to the surface or not. In Interim, at one point, within Miriam’s consciousness we read of Miriam’s contemplation of her reasons for not having gone to visit her family but rather having preferred to see Mrs Philps and her daughters. Here, Miriam thinks of the troubles of her family and thinks “Forgetfulness blotted it out and let one live on. But it was always there, impossible, when one looked back. … The little house brought forgetfulness and rest. It made no break in the new life. The new life flowed through it, sunlit” (Richardson, 1967, 2: 316). These lines show us Richardson’s parallelism to Bergson in that memories are “always there”. Forgetting makes them seem gone; however, they do not disappear, they simply withdraw from the surface. Therefore, Miriam chooses to go to Mrs Philps’s to forget and not to allow the upsetting memories associated with her family and her past penetrate into her new “sunlit” life. Richardson also joins Bergson when she writes, in the same novel, “The tide of her own life flowed fresh all about her” (Richardson, 1967, 2: 318). The tide
31 that flows, here, is Miriam’s memories. Like Bergson’s idea of the activity of the mind as a “flow”, Richardson refers to the action of Miriam’s memories as a “flow”. The individual, according to Bergson, is made up of the compilation of his/her experiences, which are placed on top of one another to make up the constitution of the person. The person’s past experiences are influential in determining a person’s present behaviour and, as memories, are also affected by that present experience and are reshaped by it. Throughout the series of novels, there are recurrent instances of Miriam’s contemplation of experiences in the past, similar to those in the present, before she takes action. For instance, when Miriam stops in front of the restaurant, Donizetti Brothers, feeling very hungry, she is afraid of the expensive look of the place and “Her thoughts [flash] painfully across a frosted door long ago in Baker Street…” (Richardson, 1967, 2: 359) remembering the bad treatment she had received for having simply rolls and butter at a similar place. However, in this instance, we see that, remembering her past experience, Miriam does not recoil but takes a brave step and walks into the restaurant and consequently the experience she has in the new place is unlike her past experience. Although, at first, this might seem to clash with Bergson’s idea of the past determining the present, it is not. For Bergson also asserts that while the past influences and determines the present, it is also reshaped by present experience. Thus, Miriam’s new experience in the present reshapes the memory of her old experience. Experiences are functional in the “becoming process” of the individual. Throughout the thirteen novels, the reader witnesses the “becoming” process of Miriam Henderson. Unlike the realist novel where characters are “beings” and the focus is on the society and its state of “being”, Richardson focuses in her novels on the same “individual” and the “individual’s” process of “becoming”. The novels follow a sequence, which, when read consecutively, make up the personal development process of Miriam throughout her “journey” or “process of becoming” during which she goes through processes of personal, social, religious, intellectual and literary questioning. This is another parallelism with Bergson who advocates “becoming” as a process against “being” as a state, claiming, as Mullarkey states, that in duration, which is the real world of the individual, each moment, in quality, is different from the previous one and each moment brings a novelty; time is time only
32 when it is creative (Mullarkey, 1999: 9). Kumar states that Bergson’s notion of personality is a dynamic process and quotes from Bergson’s Time and Freewill: “This reality is to be realized in immediate experience as flux, to be grasped by intuition or intellectual sympathy” (Kumar, 1963: 10). Richardson’s protagonist’s journeying throughout the series of novels is significant in representing the personal change, “becoming,” she is going through. Miriam Henderson continuously journeys from one place to another, at the beginning of the series of novels to find herself work (the first three novels), and later to form her own life in London (in The Tunnel an Interim), and at times for holiday as in Oberland or for personal needs of rest and solitude as in Dimple Hill and March Moonlight. The novels thus hold in them numerous physical journeys and a spiritual journey (through the process of becoming) that intermingle with one another. For the protagonist’s physical journeys hold within themselves processes which induce, in the protagonist’s character, certain developments or “becomings”. At every stop in her journey Miriam Henderson’s character is reshaped significantly because she has new experiences, which are added to her former experiences that make up her duration. Meeting people from different social classes or groups and from different countries, she is introduced to new lives and new points of view at looking at life. This continuous change of place on the part of the protagonist is reminiscent of Bergson’s idea of flux, a continuous flow or change as well as a shift back and forth uncertainly. Miriam’s travelling, both temporal and topographical, symbolizes continuous change and mobility in contrast to fixation, or in other words, a “process of becoming” in contrast to a “state of being”. Kumar writes that the Bergsonian idea of “personality” is that the “character does not progress along a chronological sequence of events but evolves through a creative duration that flows both backward and forward” (Kumar, 1963: 38). This we could say for Richardson’s protagonist as well. From the moment Miriam sets out from her father’s house in Pointed Roofs through Backwater and Honeycomb she continuously seeks for a new and more suitable position for herself, which results in her journeying from Germany to Banbury Park in the West End and then to Newlands through the first three novels. In between the change of place between Germany and Banbury Park, which means at
33 the end of the first novel, and later when she is living in Newlands in Honeycomb, Miriam goes back to her father’s house, in Pointed Roofs, because the school term has ended, and in Honeycomb, because her sisters are getting married. The fluctuation between being abroad and at home gives Miriam a chance to experience both lifestyles, to think over her position and profession in life, for she is not content with being a teacher, especially a governess. It gives her a chance to see whether she could “become” a conventional married woman like her sisters or whether she should strive to “become” the independent woman she sees herself to be. After the three positions of work Miriam holds in the first three novels, in the fourth novel, The Tunnel, she finds herself a position as a dentist’s assistant in a dentists’ clinic on Wimpole Street in London. Totally free of dependence on others, be it her family or her employers (for she lived in her employers’ houses before), Miriam strives to construct her own life. In the fifth novel, Interim, Miriam still lives in the room in Mrs Bailey’s house in The Tunnel; however, in this novel, Mrs Bailey turns her “lodging” house into a boarding house. This time Miriam is staying in her place, not moving or journeying; however, the place is changing, a change which is effective on Miriam. The fact that the house is turned into a boarding house results in the continuous change of people staying there. There is a continuous “flow” of boarders, changing every so often. This is a significant occurrence, which gives Miriam more reason and opportunity to meet new people. For before the change in the house, Miriam does not come across anybody living there, she does not know who else is staying in the house. The only people she comes into contact with are the dentists, Mrs Orly, the wife of one of the dentists, her friends Mag and Jan, and Mrs Bailey. Through her introduction to the boarders in the house Miriam is introduced to different lifestyles, different points of view of seeing life. She has meals and discussions with the boarders. The people she meets there are doctors and artists. She meets a doctor, Mr Densley, through Miss Dear and some artists through Miss Szigmondy in The Tunnel; however, this is an opportunity for Miriam to see that people of the same profession can be very different in character and can hold different opinions. Dr. Densley, whom Miriam meets in The Tunnel, is implemental in Miriam’s becoming a creative writer because he advises her to take a rest, off work, in Clear Horizon during which Miriam starts writing. Furthermore, the fact
34 that food is served in the boarding house gives Miriam an opportunity to eat proper food at home in the company of other people rather than eating rolls and butter alone at A.B.C.’s, symbolising another change in her life style. Living under the new circumstances Miriam becomes more social, both inside and outside the house. One of the major changes that take place in the becoming process of Richardson’s protagonist is observed in the eighth novel, The Trap. In The Trap, Miriam moves to a new district, Flaxman’s Court, this time sharing her room with a young woman, Miss Holland, the only thing separating their personal spaces in the room being a sheet of cloth they stretch in the middle of the room to give themselves some privacy. This new house and street and the experience of sharing her room with somebody whose character is very different from hers is effective in the becoming process of Miriam. First of all, the street she moves to is in a poor district and her moving there for a room-share is for economic reasons. Secondly, this new house seems to contain in it all sorts of suffering a person could experience. The sculptor living downstairs has been degraded to only repairing other sculptors’ statues, he does not create works of his own. He has a good-for-nothing wife whom he cannot get along with. The pregnant young lady living downstairs breaks up with her husband, whom Miriam later finds out is not her husband but boyfriend. Thus, she is in dire straits, being pregnant without being married, with no job and nobody else she can depend on. Miss Holland, who has been living with the support of the church has moved out of the church now and she has to survive on her own with very low means. On the other hand, a positive side to the place is that W.B. Yeats lives right across the street; hence she is now in a place where she comes into contact with writers and poets and has a chance to observe them. Miriam’s roommate, Miss Holland, is a religious woman who wants to work but at the same time does not want to break her ties with domesticity. Thus, she becomes an object of interest for Miriam because Miriam is face to face with the actual living sample of what she criticises in people; Miss Holland is somewhere in between. Miriam goes through a major change in this novel because whereas she used to despise women giving parties and enjoying being a hostess, she suddenly starts to feel “a charm” in being a hostess herself. “In Mrs Philps’s smile there had been, unknown to Mrs Philps, the recognition of another victim joining the conspiracy of the regiment” (Richardson,
35 1967, 3: 454). This is the regiment of women, hostesses, who “[let] everything in the world go by” and work for the “comfort and happiness of [their] guests” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 454). Mrs Philps, who has known Miriam for a long time, since Banbury Park in Backwater, realises Miriam’s regression and thinks of her as another victim to society. This is a serious regression when Miriam’s past is considered because in the past she has continuously criticised and hated such women. However, this is only the beginning of a new phase for Richardson’s protagonist because Miriam’s discussions with Dr Densley serve to make Miriam conform to the generally accepted norms; it is a process of “normalising” her. Dr Densley, though “seeming to value” Miriam for her “intellectual heights” wants to make Miriam “come down” and “join the crowd” to experience “unguarded feeling” and freedom from criticism (Richardson, 1967, 3: 477). At the end of the novel we see that Miriam turns into the kind of woman she has always criticised, giving parties and “becoming” “one of the crowd”. This new state of Miriam, however, is still within the process of becoming because the novel does not conclude with a closed ending, implying that the “becoming process” is still continuing. And we see in the ensuing novels that Miriam does not become one of the crowd. On the contrary, she retains her subjective individuality and asserts her subjectivity onto the crowds by her writing. Besides the sense of “flow” and “change” among the boarders in Mrs Bailey’s house, there is the sense of going back and forth. Just as we see Miriam go back to her father’s house in Pointed Roofs, Backwater and Honeycomb in a state of uncertainty about her future life, we see that Dr Hurd, the Canadian who stays at Mrs Bailey’s boarding house, comes back very soon, with his parents, after having left for Canada. It is clear that nothing is fixed in Miriam’s life; firstly, she changes place, her friends change depending on the location she goes to; secondly, when she herself is fixed in a certain place, as the time she lives in Mrs Bailey’s house, then the people surrounding her continuously change. In addition to the physical journeys, which contain within themselves numerous experiences resulting in “spiritual journeys” of becoming, in Richardson’s Pilgrimage we observe a journey undertaken by the reader through Miriam Henderson’s process of becoming as an individual and an artist. Using Kumar’s
36 words, we could say that these “pilgrimages”, are experiences “through la durée rather than space” (Kumar, 1963: 38). Following the physical and the “spiritual” journeys, the journey on the part of the reader forms the third level of journeying in Richardson’s novels. In the process of reading the series of novels, the reader too goes on a journey, for throughout the novels Richardson uses narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue or the voice of an omniscient narrator, which make the reader enter the consciousness of the protagonist, thus associating and identifying him/herself with the character and taking the physical and spiritual journeys with her. To give an example to this three-level journey we could look at The Tunnel. While on one level Miriam starts her new life at Mrs Bailey’s house in London, on another level she undertakes her inward journey, through which she understands who she is (living, for the first time, totally on her own, providing for all her needs herself), what she wants to do in life, what her limits are and what her potential is. For instance, we see that Miriam is very nervous when she walks back to her own room at midnight, passing through the dark quiet streets. She is afraid of the unknown, for she has not had such experiences before. At her work as a dentists’ assistant she questions herself on what she is doing there and whether her job, as a line of work, is something that could be practiced, whether it is appropriate that she should work there or whether she should find herself a more suitable occupation. Richardson takes the reader into the consciousness of Miriam and makes the reader see through Miriam’s eyes, experiencing Miriam’s process of getting to know herself. In this case, while Miriam is finding out about herself, the reader is finding out about Miriam through Miriam’s own consciousness. The narrative technique Richardson uses in her novels to represent the duration and the becoming process of her protagonist exhibits a parallelism with Bergson’s philosophy. Richardson’s use of the stream of consciousness technique in her novels is significant, for according to Kumar, this technique “constitutes … a deliberate effort to render in a literary medium a new realisation of experience as a process of dynamic renewal” (Kumar, 1963: 2). The “dynamic renewal” in Richardson’s novels is the becoming process of her protagonist, the representation of “personality as a process” to use Kumar’s words (Kumar, 1963: 41). Kumar also states that the stream of consciousness novelist “does not conceive character as a
37 state but as a ceaseless becoming in a medium which may be termed Bergson’s durée réelle”, which is parallel to Richardson’s approach (Kumar, 1963: 1). Gillies claims that Richardson’s “major innovation lies in her approach to the character. She attempts to break down the barrier between subject and object (character and its representation) by altering the way in which character is represented” (Gillies, 1996: 162). Gillies, commenting on Richardson’s concern on “representation” and the “subject-object split” further claims that “Richardson practices stream-of- consciousness and is interested in breaking down conventional narrative structures and replacing them with what she sees as the flow of her character’s life” (Gillies, 1996: 152). That Richardson sees her protagonist in a process of “ceaseless becoming” is manifest in the open endedness of her novels. Richardson ends her novels quite suddenly, in the middle of things. For instance, The Trap ends when the quarrel between Mr and Mrs Perrance, the sculptor and his wife, comes to a pause because Mrs Perrance throws the lamp and breaks it and Mr Perrance tells her they “mighta been killed” and Miriam, listening to their quarrel, is on her way down, having shouted down to them “Stop! Stop! I’m coming.” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 509). The Tunnel, furthermore, ends with Miriam contemplating Mrs Bailey’s future boarding house just after Mrs Bailey tells her of her new decision of turning her house into one. In addition to the subject matter of the last paragraph of the novel, which is the future of the house and through the house the future of its residents, Richardson’s use of short and long sentences following one another, which reveal Miriam’s expectations, representing Miriam’s stream of consciousness, give the reader the feeling of continuation. The novel ends with Miriam’s expectations of the future, which shows, again, that it is not an ending but rather a new start because Miriam, herself, is to be one of the tenants of the house. Another open-ended novel in the series is Clear Horizon, which ends with Miriam saying goodbye to Mr Hancock, the dentist she works for, because she takes Dr Densley’s advice and quits work to rest for an unknown period of time. Whereas Miriam always placed things on her horizon, as she states at one point in this novel, as we get to the end of the novel Miriam’s horizon is clear and unknown. The novel ends with Miriam’s leave for an unknown period of rest, which again suggests a new beginning of which Miriam has
38 no idea of yet. That the novels in Pilgrimage have open endings, rather than closed endings, suggests that everything is continuing, without an end. Miriam Henderson’s “becoming” does not come to an end when the novels end. At this point, it is necessary to mention that the open endings of the novels representing the ceaseless becoming of the individual, explained above, is closely linked with the social context of the novels. If we look at the social time Richardson roughly represents in her novels, we see that the novels cover the first few decades of the twentieth century. Socially the world is in chaos; with the World Wars, class struggles, political oppressions and revolts. Richardson portrays the chaos between man and woman, between political attitudes and religions. Thus, the existence of multiple points of view, the striving for freedom and for rights, as with the suffragettes, as we see throughout Miriam’s journey, reveals a world where profound doubt prevails. There are too many questions the individual asks but there is not one right answer because the answers vary according to the individual, and that is still not an answer because of the different circumstances that may exist. There is no stable, everlasting certainty or truth that suits everyone. Thus, everything remains incomplete for the individual. Richardson carries this feeling of incompleteness to the end of her novels as a complement to show the reader the incompleteness and the ensuing process of becoming it entails. When we consider the initial inclination of both Richardson and Bergson in concentrating on the individual it is easily recognized that the source of Bergson’s philosophy is the chaos in the world and within society. Looking at the social, political and economical aspects of the time, it is explicit that the society is at a dead end. The inventions that seem to be advantageous for mankind have brought with them destruction as well, both materially and morally. People’s conceptions of things have changed, having different points of view has brought with it questioning of what is right and what is wrong. Ultimately, as we see in Richardson’s novels people like Hypo Wilson, Miriam Henderson and Amabel, who are unconventional and divergent characters, have emerged. It is significant that these people are people of the city. The city, London, the cosmopolitan, is the centre of both chaos and novelty, and within it we find these people along with Michael Shatov, a foreigner who is different from the society in many aspects. More conventional people, who stand
39 apart from the chaos of the city, live in the suburban or rural areas. To come back to what inclines Bergson to the individual, we could say that the society within chaos is fragmented, as we seen in Miriam, the individual does not have a unified society to live in, he/she has numerous choices, which are all right and good depending on the circumstances and personality of people, to see into what he/she fits. Therefore, within this multitude of alternatives and possibilities within a chaotic world the individual’s point of view and experience gains importance. The society is no longer an entity that can provide answers; the individual is on his/her own. Hence, as Bergson claims, the durational experience of the individual is important. What constructs the individual is his/her personal experience and consciousness. On the other hand, Bergson also proposes the superiority of intuition as opposed to intellect because the intellect fails to solve the extant chaos. However, as we think about a society of multiple points of view and alternatives, we have to bear in mind that this society still has a “centre”, a notion of morality, religion, politics and so on. The alternatives, yet, constitute the minority and not the majority of the society. Therefore, the Lycurgan meetings that Miriam attends are kept quiet about, or Amabel’s brother, who has taken care of her all her life, leaves Amabel on her own when she decides to get married to a Jew. There is still the oppression of the authority. In “Understanding Reality from Within” in An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson claims that there are two ways of learning; one from the outside and one from the inside; either by observing the object from the outside, from different points of view or from the inside, by going inside the object if possible. The first type of learning, he claims, reveals “relative” information because any information attained by observation from the outside gives limited information no matter what the number of points of view taken to observe are. On the other hand, once inside the object, the observer reaches the essence of the object and thus the “absolute” (Bergson, 1979: 51). Bergson applies his theory to the novel genre and claims that no matter what technique the author uses to depict his character from the outside, the reader cannot understand or identify himself/herself with the character unless the author takes the reader inside the character to show him/her in his/her “entirety”. Bergson claims: points of view “give me only what [the character] has in common with others, and
40 not what belongs to him and to him alone”; what “constitutes the [character’s] essence, cannot be perceived from without … nor be expressed by symbols” (Bergson, 1979: 52). He explicitly puts forward his preference of the second type of knowledge, claiming that the observation on the outside “will always remain imperfect in comparison with the object of which a view has been taken, or which the symbols seek to express” and that the knowledge attained through observation from the inside which reveals the essence of the object, is absolute; it is the “object and not its representation” and is “perfect, by being perfectly what it is” (Bergson, 1979: 52). “Intuition” is the term Bergson applies to the means of learning from the inside; it is, Bergson claims, “the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible” (Bergson, 1979: 53). The connection between Richardson’s narrative technique and Bergson’s philosophy is that techniques such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue and the narration of the omniscient narrator serve for the representation of the individual’s mind. Kumar claims that both Dorothy Richardson and Bergson claim that the artist’s “basic impulse behind the stream of consciousness technique” is his/her attempt to represent “the inner evolution of each impression” (Kumar, 1963: 50). This new object of representation arises from the idea, which comes with Modernism, which claims that within the new world and hence within its literature social phenomena are no longer the concern. The matter of concern, now, is the individual and his/her problems and their representation in literary work, which in our case is the novel. An individual’s life consists of his/her experiences and thoughts; the latter by constitution taking up more place in a person’s life than the former because the stream of thought runs along as the individual is doing something, it does not stop. For instance, in Revolving Lights, in approximately the first sixty pages, Miriam’s stream of consciousness as she walks down the stairs and out in the street is represented. Miriam walks down the stairs and on the street and in the meantime her stream of thought runs away. Thus, in order to depict the individual fully, the modernist writer realises that he/she needs to depict the thoughts of the individual too. Thence come the narrative techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, as ways of representing the mind of the character. Dorothy
41 Richardson starting to write her novels at the time when Modernism was taking shape, which Virginia Woolf’s famously quoted words “on or about December, 1910, human character changed” from “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” depict as the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, needed an “innovative syntax and language to depict the secret recesses of” her protagonist’s “psyche and the impact made upon it by experience” (Schwarz, 2005: 31). Richardson’s use of stream of consciousness in Pilgrimage points to what Bergson claims in Creative Evolution, that the artist breaks the distance of space between himself and his model (Bergson, 1913: 186). Here we see that Richardson goes inside her character, into Miriam’s consciousness and thus seeing her fully from the inside, represents her in her novels. Intuition is necessary to do this. The stream of consciousness technique is the representation of what Richardson sees from the inside, intuitively, other than an observation from the outside. We might even say that Richardson’s representation of Miriam’s letters to people or others’ letters to Miriam is Richardson’s display of intellect, for at those moments, she becomes the observer on the outside, and as omniscient narrator, knows everything due to the attainment of all possible points of view. When examining the technique of the Modernist writer in representing the mind of the individual, we need to consider Richardson’s Pilgrimage on two levels. On the first level is Richardson’s own technique; her subject matter being the individual, Richardson uses the techniques of stream of consciousness, interior monologue, omniscient narrator and at times, as Kumar states, the epistolary in the representation of her protagonist’s mind. The dominance of the techniques within the novels varies from one novel to the other. On the second level is Richardson’s protagonist’s approach to literature. Here, we have Richardson representing Miriam’s thoughts on what language and literature are, what the subject matter of literature should be and what narrative technique should be used. Kumar also refers to these two layers when he writes, “The fact that Pilgrimage is still an endless ‘stream of consciousness going on and on’, is evident not only from the extremely fluid and indeterminate form of narrative employed by Dorothy Richardson, but also from her innumerable allusions, both directly and oblique, to consciousness as a flowing stream” (Kumar, 1963: 46). The “fluid and indeterminate form” being that of
42 Richardson and “the allusions, both directly and oblique,” being Miriam’s stream of consciousness. For instance, we see that in The Trap Richardson’s protagonist says, “Nothing can ever be expressed in words” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 463). This is the problem of the Modernist writer who wants to represent in his/her writing the mind of the individual. The words he/she uses, then, are insufficient to represent what he/she wants to depict. Deadlock is a novel loaded with Miriam’s ideas on language and literature. Here, we see that Miriam is very much interested in the use of language and literary technique. She claims that satire is not an achievement and that “in the long run” it is a waste of time (Richardson, 1967, 3: 45). When Mr Shatov reads to her out of Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina Miriam is fascinated with the literary technique of the text: “What was the mysterious difference? Why did she feel she could hear the tone of the voices and the pauses between the talk; the curious feeling of things moving and changing in the air that is always there in all conversations? Her excitement grew…” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 60). Richardson represents Miriam’s stream of thought on her reading and the way she focuses on the language of the text, its syntax, rather than meaning:
It was not only that her own perhaps altogether ignorant and lazy and selfish way of reading everything so that she grasped only the sound and the character of the words and the arrangement of the sentences, and only sometimes a long time afterwards, and with once-read books never, anything, except in books on philosophy, of the author’s meaning … but always the author; in the first few lines, and after that, wanting to change him and break up his shape or going about for days thinking everything in his shape. (Richardson, 1967, 3: 131)
Though we see in the next novel, Revolving Lights, that this time Miriam criticises those who do not care for the meaning of the text but only care for form (Richardson, 1967, 3: 366). This exhibits the durational process Miriam goes through in each novel in her changing and developing opinions on literature and writing. Miriam is constantly very conscious about expressions. When she tells Mr Shatov of her childhood accident she is not satisfied with her narration of the incident, she thinks she could not express herself well. Kumar claims that for Bergson and Richardson speech is an “impediment to the smooth flow of
43 consciousness”; hence the use of “linguistic devices such as frequent use of parenthesis, prepositional participles, co-ordinative conjunctions, the imperfect tense, dots, etc.” (Kumar, 1963: 33). This explains Miriam’s attitude to her narration of her experience. What she has in her mind cannot be fully represented with words; hence the picture she creates for Mr Shatov is not the same as the one she has in her mind. Therefore, she feels unsatisfied. Kumar’s assertion along with Gillies’s assertion that “Punctuation, sentence structure, and paragraphs cease to be important and apparently haphazard shifts in narration and tense occur frequently” (Gillies, 1996: 154) applies to Richardson’s own technique, the first level, too. Richardson, in her representation of her protagonist’s stream of consciousness, forms her own use of “punctuation and sentence structure”. She uses sentences without verbs following one another representing the way thoughts flow through one’s mind. She also uses dots (…) to represent the break of thought and the passing from one thought to another. There is a constant shift of point of view, suddenly going into or coming out of Miriam’s consciousness, reading the first person point of view. The sudden shift in and out of Miriam’s consciousness can also be associated with the chaos that was mentioned above. The existence of different points of view, I claimed above, resulted in profound doubt and acceptance of alternatives. As the reader reads Richardson’s novels, he/she constantly moves in and out of Miriam’s consciousness, which makes the reader doubt or at least question what he/she is reading; whether it is Miriam’s stream of consciousness or not. The stream of consciousness technique used by Richardson to represent Miriam’s thoughts also serves to reveal, without description, information on Miriam’s life. It is through Miriam’s consciousness that we learn that her mother has died and her father is living with her sister. Richardson does not use narrative to inform the reader of such information because that would be concentrating on the external world and its events and actions, whereas Richardson’s aim is to represent the stream of consciousness of her protagonist in revealing her subjective durée. The significance of Mrs Henderson’s death lies in its meaning for Miriam, her experience of it within her subjective durée, rather than being one of the many events taking place in the external world, which has no significance for the individual. Although Miriam did not agree with her mother’s ways and point of view in Pointed Roofs and
44 Backwater, we see later, after her mother’s death, that she misses her and wants to see her if only for ten minutes. Thus, Miriam’s durational experience of Mrs Henderson’s death is revealed through Miriam’s consciousness as she sees it and in no other way. Kumar claims that memories are important for the artist and that Richardson finds “the secret of all art in passive remembrance of things past” (Kumar, 1963: 51). Memories, he claims, form the link “with reality of aesthetic experience,” (Kumar, 1963: 55). Hence, we could say, Miriam’s continuous memories prevailing in her consciousness, serve in her process of becoming an artist. “Memory being a conditioning factor in all our mental processes, constitutes the essence of the stream of consciousness novel” (Kumar, 1963: 25). Bergson’s theory of intuition is another point where Richardson displays parallelism with Bergson. In analysing Bergson’s idea within Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway Kumar writes, “Reality, which is a process of becoming, is a dynamic continuity that cannot be sliced into proportionate bits and can be apprehended only through intuition” (Kumar, 1963: 76). In Richardson’s novels, Miriam, contemplating Michael Shatov and others, thinks that they are missing “something” or that they lack “something”. This “something” the reader understands, according to Miriam, is very crucial for understanding life, and it is different than and beyond the reaches of intellect. This same thing is for the first time called “intuition” in Deadlock and we find out that this is “something” in matter that has not been explained yet (Richardson, 1967, 3: 24,175). Gillies claims that Miriam has a growing confidence in her “intuitions about the world” (Gillies, 1996: 157). Miriam’s interest in writing and her act of writing could be evaluated as an attempt to escape from the outer world. In the first three novels of Richardson, Pointed Roofs, Backwater and Honeycomb, it is emphasized that Miriam criticises both women and men. She cannot find herself a place among the conventional women like her mother and sisters, who are the “wives” of their men, brought up to get married and bear children and be responsible for the keeping of the house while their husbands go out into the world to provide the sustenance of the family. Conventional society is made up of the compliant woman of senses in the house and the working man of intellect. Miriam cannot bear the standpoint women are taking in
45 life, making themselves sufferers and inferiors with no personal freedom and having no intellectual side to them. On the other hand, Miriam criticises the male figures she sees around her for not being sympathetic enough or for lacking “something” that is necessary to “understand”. This is clearly seen in the instance when Miriam, sitting in the room next to Mr and Mrs Henderson’s bedroom, hears them talk and Mrs Henderson starts to cry.
A voice level and reassuring; going up now and again into a hateful amused falsetto. Miriam refused to listen. She had never been so near before. Of course they talked in their room. They had talked all their lives; an endless conversation; he laying down the law … no end to it […] A tearful, uncertain voice. … ‘Don’t mother … don’t, don’t … he can’t understand. … Come to me! Come in here.’ […] [Miriam] turned about, straining away from the wall and burying her head in her pillow. Something seemed to shriek within her, throwing him off, destroying, flinging him away. Never again anything but contempt. (Richardson, 1967, 1: 460)
As Richardson’s novels proceed that “something” necessary to understand is referred to as “intuition” – the perception that exists within the individual, which is distinct from perception via senses. Thus, not identifying herself with either men or women Miriam starts her journey into her own character. During this journey, Miriam analyses numerous social systems such as families, religious institutions, civil organizations, social groups and political societies such as Lycurgans, Quakers, Suffragists and Suffragettes. Within this search for determining who she is and with whom she fits with, Miriam changes ceaselessly as she tries to understand what suits her politically, religiously, socially and sexually. Writing is the one aspect in Miriam’s life which changes form but is constantly present in her life; at first in the form of reviews and later as creative writing. Considering the years encompassing the thirteen novels, when Miriam’s writing process is analysed, it is seen that at the beginning Miriam writes letters to her sisters and friends, later she reviews lecture notes or writes reviews for newspapers and magazines, and finally she does creative writing and writes fiction. Taking a look at the places Miriam does her writing activity shows us that she always writes in solitude, either in her own room as in Mrs Bailey’s house or Flaxman’s
46 Court or in a small quiet room, isolated from the rest of the household, upstairs in Roscorlas’s house. Writing for Miriam is a journey into herself, into her consciousness; it is when she gets the chance to be completely on her own, finding her own individuality. It is a journey from the outside towards the inside, from the objective to the subjective. Writing allows Miriam to withdraw into her subjective inner world; it gives her the freedom she seeks within the society she lives in. It is a way of escape from the chaos and problems that surround her, the chaos she finds through experience as she analyses the different aspects of life. Since the individual cannot live in isolation he/she has to find a means for coping with and escaping his/her surroundings and Miriam’s means for this is writing. The freedom she seeks throughout the thirteen novels comes when Miriam withdraws into herself and expresses herself in writing. “To write is to forsake life. Every time I know this, in advance. Yet whenever something comes that sets the tips of my fingers tingling to record it, I forget the price; eagerly face the strange journey down and down to the centre of being. And the scene of labour, when again I am back in it, alone, has become a sacred place” thinks Miriam in March Moonlight when she has become a writer of fiction (Richardson, 1967, 4: 609). Discussing Kafka’s art Gabriel Josipovici writes, “… the act [of writing] itself, the time spent alone in a room, filling blank pages with words, is surely a prime example of the assertion of will” (Josipovici, 1976: 260). Miriam’s writing is her way of asserting her own will and subjectivity into the society she criticises. Asserting her subjective inner world into the outer social world through writing is the means for Miriam to escape and survive within the outer world while realizing within that world her own subjective world, which actually counts for her. Giving Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu as example Josipovici writes about “the spiralling mode,” which is a “backward and forward movement” which “can allow the huge novel to unfold, and even when it does start to move forward it keeps turning and returning to its roots…” (Josipovici, 1976: 267-268). This is an explanation of Bergson’s notion of “flux” as represented in literature. Bergson’s notion of flux is that the individual’s ceaseless process of becoming contains a back and forth movement. The individual’s memories of the past and their influence within the present is an example of this. Otherwise, when we consider
47 Richardson’s novels, the fact that some of the characters recurrently appear in different novels, even if very briefly, within a single moment of thought, represent a flux. In Dawn’s Left Hand Miriam meets Amabel and later Michael Shatov, who first appears in Miriam’s life in Deadlock years earlier and continuously reappears in the ensuing novels and finally, in March Moonlight Amabel and Michael get married. Thus, we see that in Miriam’s life there is a reappearance of people from the past, making a connection between Miriam’s present and past. That Miriam is continuously going on a journey at the beginning of most of the novels, otherwise sometime within each novel, is another example of flux. Miriam is continuously setting out on a new journey and therefore new experiences, and is arriving at new or sometimes well-known places like the Brooms’s house or Roscorlas’s house to set out on a journey again soon. That the past recurrently appears in Miriam’s life or her consciousness is the flux she experiences. For instance, when Miriam visits Amabel and Michael in March Moonlight, they are living at Flaxman’s Court and Amabel has decorated Miriam’s room the way it was when Miriam used to live there. Furthermore, in Dawn’s Left Hand Miriam moves from Flaxman’s Court back to Mrs Bailey’s house in Tansley Street. Thus, Miriam, in a sense, keeps ending up in the same places or situations all the time; however, every time this happens, it is a new experience because Miriam continuously experiences things and changes between the first and the latter occurrences of similar events. This complies with Bergson’s notion of a ceaseless change, that in every passing moment the individual changes because he/she has experienced another thing within that moment and that experience will be with him/her from then on. Josipovici writes that both fragmentation and spiral movement “…are responses to the deep dissatisfaction felt with purely linear modes by all the major artists of this century” (Josipovici, 1976: 268). This corresponds to Bergson’s idea that the human consciousness does not work linearly but rather in a back and forth movement. The Modernist writer who intends to represent the mind of his/her character/s represents the back and forth movement within the character’s consciousness and experience as well. However, every time the character remembers something of the past or has an experience related or similar to his/her past experience, the new present experience or consciousness is different because, as
48 Mullarkey writes in his Bergson and Philosophy, according to Bergson, in real time, which is durée, “each new moment is qualitatively different from the last” (Mullarkey, 1999: 9). If we consider the way Miriam perceives Michael in Deadlock first, as a sort of hero who introduces her into a new world of socialism, and later in the latter novels, as a man who is constantly in need of support, we see that Miriam’s subjective experiences of socialism, Lycurganism and economical situation have changed Miriam and her view of Michael. As Kumar states, “after each experience, [Miriam] is never her old self again” (Kumar, 1963: 45). By representing Miriam’s inward journey Richardson makes an innovative approach by stepping back from an analysis or criticism of the society and its members. Rather, she presents an analysis of the individual, and her individual becoming and suffering within the fragmented society, which shows us that the individual within the society has become an object of consideration.
49 CHAPTER 3
Revolving Lights: Midpoint in Miriam’s Duration
Revolving Lights is the seventh novel in Dorothy Richardson’s novel series. This novel is the midpoint in the durational becoming of Richardson’s protagonist Miriam Henderson. As Richardson makes Miriam her protagonist in this novel too, as in the earlier novels, many aspects in the novel are related to the previous novels while many are also novelties. In this chapter I shall try to point out the parallelisms between Richardson and Bergson, i.e. subject matter, technique, and protagonist, and how these parallelisms function in Richardson’s Revolving Lights in connection with the whole novel series, Pilgrimage. I shall take the elements of Bergson’s philosophy one at a time and discuss the way they are reflected in Revolving Lights. Within the context of Henri Bergson’s philosophy the points that need to be discussed in this novel are Richardson’s literary technique, her subject matter, i.e. the novel’s focus on a single individual, her representation of Bergson’s ideas of duration and flux. In this novel, as in her earlier novels, Richardson focuses on a single individual and specifically on the representation of the individual’s psychology rather than her social aspects. The reasons for the Modernist artist’s representation of the individual and his/her consciousness within his/her work of art have been discussed in the chapter on Modernism. Therefore, I shall not repeat them in this chapter but shall move on to Dorothy Richardson’s specific protagonist, Miriam Henderson. Throughout Revolving Lights Richardson represents to us Miriam’s stream of consciousness. Everything we know of in the novel is through the eyes of Miriam. A lot of the time Miriam’s consciousness is represented in first person narration. Richardson’s technique is significant in this novel because Revolving Lights, among the other novels in Pilgrimage series, is the one in which Richardson focuses very much on the representation of her character’s mind. This novel covers about three months of Miriam’s life but the first sixty pages of the novel cover a single evening spent by Miriam. What Miriam does at the present time throughout these sixty pages is that she comes out of a Lycurgan meeting, goes down the stairs,
50 walks along Piccadilly onto Piccadilly Circus, goes into a coffee shop there and walks up Shaftsbury Avenue. Though what Miriam does may seem numerous when considered one by one as above, what Miriam does in these pages, after all, is go down the stairs and walk along the street. The information on what Miriam is doing is given as short insertions among Miriam’s numerous contemplations and recollections as she walks. This is the longest representation of Miriam’s consciousness in all Pilgrimage. Richardson’s representation of her protagonist’s consciousness and her technique of doing it show parallelism with Bergson’s idea of art. The reason for Richardson’s representation of Miriam’s consciousness is that she aims at representing her protagonist in her entirety. This stems from Bergson’s idea that in order to understand a moving object completely one has to enter inside it and view it on the inside, becoming one with it. Any observation made from the outside of the object is bound to present relative understanding of the object because it will depend on the viewer’s point of view. Thus in her novel Richardson represents the inside, the consciousness, of her character so that the reader’s information on Miriam is “absolute” and not “relative” in Bergson’s terms. (Bergson, 1979: 51) According to Bergson, the inner life of the conscious being consists of a “variety of qualities, continuity of progress and unity of direction”. Inner life, “cannot be represented by images”; “no image can reproduce exactly the original feeling I have of the flow of my own conscious life”. Therefore, the representation of inner life depends upon intuition (Bergson, 1979: 56). Bergson also claims that since the inner life is a compilation of perception, memory, and tendencies and motor habits, it is impossible to represent it through outside analysis. This idea applies to the Modernist writers’ approach to using the stream of consciousness technique rather than narrative depiction in their attempt to represent their characters’ inner life. Representation through analysis from outside points of view is not sufficient to depict the inner life; therefore, the author tries to go into the consciousness of his/her character and represents the character’s consciousness. Hence Richardson’s technique and subject matter. In Revolving Lights Richardson’s representation of Miriam’s consciousness changes in technique from third person narrator to first person narration and to direct
51 representation of stream of consciousness presented without narrator, with an innovative use of punctuation and ellipsis. As Miriam goes down the stairs and walks in the street at the beginning of the novel she contemplates socialism, the difference between Englishmen and Russians, herself, the West End and numerous other things. Richardson presents some of these thoughts in first person narration of Miriam as, “Then I am attached for ever to the spacious gentle surroundings in which I was born? […] It is my strange bungling in misery that makes every one seem far off. A perpetual oblivion not only of my own circumstances […]” and then changes to third person narration as, “There was something within her that could not tolerate either the people or the thoughts existing within that exclusive world. […] At this moment, if it were possible, she would reverse it and return. The joy she had found in her invisible life […]” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 244-245). As Kristin Bluemel claims both the third person narrations of Miriam and the “first person utterances of her thoughts” are Miriam’s monologues and the shift from one to the other is “another example of how Pilgrimage breaks the rules of narrative, demanding a corresponding break in readers’ novel-reading habits” (Bluemel, 1997: 5-6). Referring to Dorrit Cohn’s definition of these two types of interior monologue, Bluemel explains the first person narration as “quoted monologue, a character’s mental discourse” and the third person narration as “narrated monologue…a character’s mental discourse in the guise of the narrator’s discourse” (Bluemel, 1997: 175). As Bluemel also states, Richardson uses this third person narration extensively. In Revolving Lights there is constant shift from one narration to the other, demanding a lot of attention from the reader. Richardson’s technique requires of the reader to be alert and attentive at all times; the novel can only be understood by the conscious effort of the reader to understand what he/she is reading. And this brings us back to Bergson’s assertion that to attain “absolute” information the observer has to go into the object; thus the situation of Richardson’s reader. Later when Miriam arrives at Piccadilly she contemplates some male writers and Richardson presents Miriam’s consciousness to us using ellipsis and grammatically incomplete sentences:
52 Light seems to change, a large comfortable stretching of the mind, things falling into an orderly scheme, the flattering fascination of grasping and elaborating the scheme. But the after reflection is gloom, a poisoning gloom over everything. ‘Good writing’ leaves gloom. Dickens doesn’t. … But people say he’s not a good writer. … Youth … and Typhoon. … Oh, ‘Stalked about gigantically in the darkness.’ … Fancy forgetting that. And he is modern and good writer. New. They all raved quietly about him. But it was not like reading a book at all. … Expecting good difficult ‘writing,’ some mannish way of looking at things, and then … complete forgetfulness of the worst time of the day […] (Richardson, 1976, 3: 275-76)
As Bluemel states the ellipses Richardson uses in her text indicate gaps in Miriam’s thoughts; “…depending on the circumstances, they may signal the passing of time, the straying of attention, or the pressure of unconscious thought,” writes Bluemel (Bluemel, 1976: 5). Sometimes, Richardson presents a whole stream of Miriam’s thoughts in a single sentence, without using any full stops, giving only a semi-break by using semicolons. As Miriam walks outside with Michael and the Lintoffs, she thinks:
That lovely line about Beatrice, bringing bright, draped, deep-toned figures, with the grave eyes of intensest eternal happiness, and heads bent in an attitude of song, about her in the upper air; the way they had come down, as she had lowered her eyes to the gleaming, wet pavement to listen again and again into the words of the wonderful line; how they had closed about her; a tapestry of intensifying colour making a little chamber filled with deep light, gathering her into such a forgetfulness that she had found herself going along at a run, and when she had waken to recall the sense of the day and the season, had looked up and seen November in the thick Bloomsbury mist, the beloved London lamplight glistening on the puddles of the empty street, and spreading a sheen of gold over the wet pavements; the jewelled darkness of the London winter coming about her once more; and then the glorious shock of remembering that August and September were still in hand, waiting hidden beyond the dark weather. (Richardson, 1967, 3: 308-309)
Richardson applies this representation of Miriam’s thoughts with an unconventional use of punctuation in order to display the flow of thought without any break. There are no gaps in Miriam’s thoughts; her thoughts do not move from one thing to another. There is a continuity of thoughts on a single subject without any pauses or sways to other thoughts.
53 Another technical device in Revolving Lights, though not used as often as it is used in some other novels of Richardson, is the use of gaps between paragraphs. Richardson’s technique is reminiscent of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy with its blank page (page 389), black pages (pages 29-30), pictures (pages 237, 185-186) and drawings which resemble scribblings (pages 391-392, 506) that Sterne inserts within his text. All of these pages serve to express Sterne’s idea that sometimes words lack the ability to represent the individual’s consciousness. The blank page allows the reader to fill in the gaps him/herself, with whatever he/she wants. The scribblings represent, at one instance, the narrative sequence the narrator wants to tell his uncle Toby’s story, at another instance, how the Corporal moves his stick. Here, words are complemented with figures to express the exact idea in the narrator’s mind. Richardson divides her novel into chapters; however, within each chapter she inserts breaks between some of her paragraphs, indicating them by gaps of one or two lines, varying. These gaps indicate a shift either in Miriam’s thoughts, her thoughts moving to something very irrelevant or to a memory of the past, or the elapse of time between the paragraphs preceding and following the gap. Miriam’s shift of thoughts from the story of Exeter to Eleanor Dear, as she walks along Piccadilly, is indicated by such a gap of a single line (Richardson, 1967, 3: 286). These gaps could be considered as a guideline to the reader in drawing his/her attention to the changes. The change in Miriam’s reflections from her separation from Michael to Madame Lintoff during their meeting with the Lintoffs together is indicated by Richardson with two blank lines between the two paragraphs. That the gap is longer indicates both the shift of thoughts and the time that elapses in between. As in Tristram Shandy, the text demands the reader’s cooperation to fill in the blanks on his/her own. The shifts of thought or lapse of time, forwards or backwards, resembles Bergson’s theory of durational flux. The reader, in Miriam’s consciousness experiences the durational flux through Richardson’s technique. Richardson’s technical devices in Revolving Lights are not all that associate Richardson with Bergson. Revolving Lights, among all the novels in the Pilgrimage series, presents to us an important phase of Miriam’s development, in Bergson’s terms her “becoming”. In this novel, we can observe Bergson’s concepts of ceaseless change and duration in Richardson’s protagonist. Bergson’s concept of “duration” is
54 an extensive one, which involves the notions of change, flux, memory and becoming. In his argument on form and becoming Bergson advocates the importance of becoming and claims, “what is real is the continuous change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition” (Bergson, 1913: 319). According to Bergson, “there is more in a movement than in the successive positions attributed to the moving object, more in a becoming than in the forms passed through in turn, more in the evolution of form than the forms assumed one after another” (Bergson, 1913: 333). Richardson’s protagonist Miriam, in Revolving Lights, is in such a state of changing and becoming. Throughout the novel Miriam attends Lycurgan meetings, goes out to the East End with Michael, meets the Lintoffs, who are Michael’s revolutionary friends, goes on a month’s holiday and visits Alma and Hypo Wilson at their house and then comes back to her work at Wimpole Street. What is worth consideration in this is that all of these events constitute Miriam’s social life. The Lycurgan meetings hold an important place in Miriam’s political attitude as well as a place for her socializing. The Lycurgan meetings are her first contact with a possible social and political order other than that which exists; they are her introduction to socialism. Miriam’s relationship with Michael, apart from being an emotional one, is also a social one because while Miriam learns about socialism from Michael she gets to meet Russian revolutionaries and has a chance to observe them when she sees the Lintoffs. Having beer and dinner at the East End is a new experience for Miriam, which is another social activity on her part. Holiday at Alma’s house allows Miriam to socialize both with her old friends, especially Alma, and to come into contact with literature through Miss Prout, the novelist who also visits the Wilsons and Hypo, who is also interested and involved with writing. Walking on Shaftsbury Avenue Miriam sees an ill old woman and is afraid that she might be like her when she is middle aged, all lonely and deserted. It is clear that in this novel Miriam tries to further her social contacts and construct herself a socially active life. Bergson asserts that there are two different selves of the individual, “one of which, as it were, the external projection of the other, its spatial and so to speak, social representation” (Bergson, 2001: 231). Bergson claims that the fundamental self is reached through “deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states … which permeate one another and of
55 which the succession in duration has nothing in common with juxtaposition in homogenous space” (Bergson, 2001: 231). Why, then, does Miriam seek such a social life if the inner world of the individual, his/her subjective experience, is more important than his/her external world as Bergson asserts in his argument on duration? This could be explained by Bergson’s statements in Time and Free Will. Bergson makes a distinction between the external world and the inner life of the individual. The external world is quite distinct from us and is the common property of all conscious beings, while the inner world is one with the individual and is solely the property of the individual in question. “…as the conditions of social life are more completely realized, the current which carries our conscious states from within outwards is strengthened,” writes Bergson in Time and Free Will (Bergson, 1913: 138-139). The fundamental self is the free one; however, the individual is rarely free because one lives most of one’s life outside him/herself, living “for the external world rather than for” oneself. “To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration,” writes Bergson (Bergson, 2001: 231). This could only be realized when, first of all, Miriam understands and possesses the external world because Miriam wants to be free and to act rather than be acted upon. This is Miriam’s duration of going through the changes necessary for her to have full possession of her inner self and experience her duration. Miriam attains full possession of her inner life and duration, and hence her freedom, at the end of March Moonlight. This will be discussed in the chapter on March Moonlight. Miriam changes throughout Revolving Lights. This novel is one in which relationships between men and women are discussed extensively. As she is walking, having come out from the Lycurgan meeting, Miriam remembers an argument she had with Hypo on the various aspects of men and women (Richardson, 1967, 3: 256- 260), then another memory arises in which Miriam’s ideas are revealed,
Between men and girls, throughout English life, there was no exchange, save in the ways of love. Except for those moments when they stood, to each other, for all the world, they never met. And the sense of these sacred moments embarrassed, even while it shaped and beautified, every occasion. […] Yet American girls with their easy regardlessness seemed lacking in depth of feminine consciousness […] and the men, with their awakened understanding and quick serviceableness, by so much the less men…
56 (Richardson, 1967, 3: 270-271)
After this Miriam asks herself a series of questions on the same subject. Through questioning Miriam wants to understand fully what the truth is, if there is a truth. Miriam remembers a time when she sat talking to Hypo about a possible marriage with Michael Shatov. Her attitude is negative because during her relationship with him, from what she sees on the inside, Miriam concludes that in Jewish families women are inferior to men, rather like servants to them, and that men have a consciousness of superiority over women. Miriam thinks that the inequality between men and women in Jewish families is beyond what she has been trying to avoid in the conventional Christian families in her own society. Through Michael and the Lintoffs Miriam sees that she does not conform to the ways of the Jews and that neither do they to Miriam’s. This is a recollection of Miriam; however, in the present in Revolving Lights Miriam separates from Michael, though she feels sorry for him and is reluctant to do so. This is significant in showing how one’s past follows one in the present. Miriam’s thoughts on Michael are formed much earlier than when she separates from him. Part of chapter II of Revolving Lights presents us with Miriam and Michael Shatov’s visit to the Lintoffs, the Russian revolutionaries. Madame Lintoff is Jewish and this brings into mind Miriam’s past discussion with Hypo on how a Jewish woman could marry a non-Jewish man but a non-Jewish woman could not marry a Jewish man. Miriam thinks Jewish families are more conventional than the English; therefore, it would be impossible for Miriam to conform to it if she married Michael. We read at this point, the disturbance and questioning in Miriam’s mind about the difference between English and Russian people and their ways. Miriam thinks about politics and Michael’s personality; meanwhile, she finds out that Mr Lintoff cares for the “people”. Miriam realises that she is different from them all. She had in the past distanced herself from the bourgeoisie she had been criticising; now she is distancing herself from the socialists (Richardson, 1967, 3: 290-301). At the end of their visit to the Lintoffs Miriam persuades Michael into a separation. This is a durational experience for Miriam. Until the moment of separation Miriam experiences different things with Michael as man and woman, with socialism as a political point of view,
57 with Michael as an individual. “He had never for a moment shared her sense of endlessness,” thinks Miriam (Richardson, 1967, 3: 304). Miriam’s sense of endlessness points to her durational experience. All of this results in a change in Miriam. By the time the separation takes place Miriam has been going through a process of duration and becoming and the separation is just another instant within the whole of Miriam’s durational experience. Miriam’s feeling after the separation is an example of flux within duration. “The unburdened years were speeding towards her; she felt their breath; the lifting of the light with the presence, just beyond the passing moments […]” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 305) manifests the permeation of the future into the present by Miriam’s expectations and foresight of the future, concluding on it by the consideration of the change the separation brings to her life in the present. In accordance with Bergson, Miriam, here, does not make a prediction but draws conclusions by considering the well-known facts of the present. Bergson’s durational flux includes the idea of the presence of the past within the individual’s consciousness. “Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real duration,” Bergson claims, are attributes which the living being shares with consciousness (Bergson, 1913: 23). The preservation of the past is provided by memory. “We trail behind us, unawares, the whole of our past; but our memory pours into the present only the odd recollection or two that in some way complete our present situation,” writes Bergson in his Creative Evolution (Bergson, 1913: 176). According to Bergson, the past that trails behind the individual influences and determines the present experience of the individual. The preservation of the past through what Bergson terms “involuntary memory” is a theme that prevails in Revolving Lights as we read the recollections of Miriam within her consciousness. Apart from Miriam’s contemplation of the present, Miriam’s mind is continuously occupied with the past. She continuously remembers past experiences. However, these memories are recollected due to certain present acts or thoughts, which cause them to be foregrounded amongst the load of memories Miriam carries within her. At her arrival at Alma’s house Miriam and Alma talk about their lives and Alma tells Miriam that she saw one of the Specks and asks Miriam if she remembers them. The Specks are their acquaintances from their childhood and Miriam remembers them. Before they start talking about how the Specks used to be, by the mention of the
58 name Speck Miriam remembers “the unbearable happiness of that last school summer, a sunlit flower-filled world opening before her, the feeling of being herself a flower expanding in the sunlight” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 334-335). The name gives rise to a memory, which Miriam might not have realized she had otherwise. It takes her back to the time she finished school, back to Pointed Roofs. And within her duration Miriam “could not regard it as a past. All that had happened since was a momentary straying aside, to be forgotten. To the other world she was still going forward” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 335). This points to a time when Miriam moved from one phase in her life to another, from being a student to becoming an adult who goes out into the world. The reason Miriam does not consider it a past is because she is still in the process of becoming, what she has been experiencing are only details within the durational experience. Her duration is ceaseless; she is still continuing that duration at one point of which her school was over and she was ready to leave her father’s house for her quest into herself and to the external world. Miriam’s recollections of Eleanor Dear and her arrival at Mrs Bailey’s boarding house is another instance of durational flux in which Miriam’s past permeates into her present, and the flow within the consciousness of the individual. When Miriam enters the coffee shop on Piccadilly Circus she is reminded of the time she went there with Michael. Thinking of Michael, Miriam starts to think of the constitution of men in general. As she orders herself coffee Miriam contemplates a comparison between men and women, asking herself questions on why men are “so clever and yet so fundamentally stupid,” or whether “the absence of personality” is original in men. Deciding that man is pitiful and that his chaos comes from “his own rootless self,” Miriam thinks the key is at his side. “In women like Eleanor Dear?” continue Miriam’s thoughts in her consciousness, considering the woman as key. Thus Miriam’s stream of thought moves on to Eleanor Dear and she remembers how Miss Dear had showed up suddenly at Mrs Bailey’s house. Richardson’s representation of Miriam’s duration in the novel is parallel to Bergson’s “flux” too. Just as Miriam’s past and present permeate into one another and through her recollections she experiences both the past and the present at once within the present, Richardson’s revelations of events taking place in Miriam’s life are not given in their chronological order. Just as Bergson asserts that our memories
59 are recorded without conscious awareness and they suddenly come up when they are relevant to something in the present, surprising the conscious individual as to their existence, Richardson leaves the representation of certain events in Miriam’s life to a later time in her life and they are revealed within Miriam’s consciousness as she remembers them. The last chapter of Revolving Lights starts with Miriam returned from holiday to her work with Mr Hancock with a day’s delay. Here, Miriam remembers her reasons for her late return. It is revealed for the first time that as she was at the Wilsons’s house Hypo asked her to stay a day longer to see the Grahams. Miriam thinks about Mr Graham, who has got cancer, and how the Grahams were serene, “finding life marvellous in the way no one else seemed to do” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 386). Then, Miriam’s thoughts go even further back, revealing to us the discussions she and Hypo had during her fortnight of staying there. Thus, Richardson does not create a chronological linear representation of Miriam’s experiences, thus complying with the working of the individual’s stream of consciousness, which does not follow a linear sequence but works in a flux, going back and forth, as Bergson states. As Sinclair states, Richardson, “is not concerned with the strict order of events in time. … It is Miriam’s consciousness that is going backwards and forwards in time. The time it goes in is not important” (Sinclair, 1979: 95). As Miriam returns to Wimpole Street in the last chapter of the novel, and we read about Miriam’s stream of consciousness, there are sudden changes in Miriam’s consciousness from the inside to the outside world and then back inside into Miriam’s thoughts. At the dental clinic Miriam thinks of Mr Hancock and what it is like to be with him. This is revealed to us in Miriam’s first person narration. During her contemplations “Mr Hancock’s showing-out bell sound[s] in the hall” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 391), drawing Miriam out into the external world from her consciousness. For a single paragraph, Miriam withdraws from her previous thoughts and starts to think about what the bell means and what will happen next. Afterwards, her thoughts go back to her contemplations before the bell’s ringing. Richardson’s form of introducing this shift of thoughts is presented by repetitions. Before the bell rings, Miriam thinks to herself, “Again the enlivening power of anger, the relief of the clean cut […] free of everyone, homesick for London” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 391). After the single paragraph in which her thoughts turn to the bell, the following
60 paragraph starts with “Homesick for London” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 392). Thus the repetition forms the connection between the two paragraphs, which are both the representation of Miriam’s stream of thought. This manifests that Miriam’s stream of thought continues from where it was broken off when the dentist’s bell rang. The flow of thoughts in Miriam’s consciousness are not always indicated by the writer. There is no narrative that points them out. Richardson does this on purpose to point out and create a parallelism with working of the individual’s consciousness. The consciousness wonders into its own depths and then the person suddenly has to come out of it into the outside world due to some stimulus coming from it, just as in Miriam’s case, and then, when that urgency passes, the mind wonders back into its own depths again, either taking up from where it had left or being directed to something else due to a new stimulus. However, this movement, in and out, is done without conscious awareness. Richardson leaves her novel, Revolving Lights, open ended, not arriving at a resolution at the end of the novel. The novel ends with two offers to Miriam. The first offer comes from Mr Hancock, who tells Miriam that he has decided to leave Mr Orly to start up his own clinic. Mr Hancock tells Miriam that he will be needing help when he goes. Thus offering Miriam an alternative position of work other than her present position at Mr Orly’s clinic on Wimpole Street where she has been working since her arrival at London in The Tunnel. The second offer comes to Miriam from Hypo. Miriam receives a letter from Hypo in which he reveals to Miriam that he has put an end to his affair, that it is Miriam who brought him out of it and that he desires to see her “just to talk” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 395-396). The novel ends with two options that Miriam is to consider and act upon. Thus the reader is left abruptly in the middle of Miriam’s duration. Richardson’s technique suggests to the reader that this is not the end of Miriam’s becoming; she has novelties to experience yet. As it has been mentioned earlier, Richardson’s technique is parallel to the workings of the mind, to its ceaseless flow. Since Richardson has been representing Miriam’s stream of consciousness throughout the novel, the ending of the novel serves to prove that Miriam’s stream of thought and her duration will continue to flow on receiving the two offers. The end of the novel, the ending of the representation of Miriam’s
61 consciousness is not an end for Miriam, new events and consciousnesses are on their way. In Revolving Lights Richardson focuses on Miriam’s social becoming, which partly belongs to the external world, in that the individual has to step outside of his/her inner world; however, Miriam’s durational experience of this socializing is the focus of the novel, and not its reflection in the external world. Richardson does not represent what Miriam is within the social external world but how Miriam integrates the external world with her inner subjective world, and what her experience of the external world is. As it has been mentioned earlier in this chapter, Bergson claims that as one’s social life is more completely realized, one’s subjective consciousness carried from inside outwards is strengthened (Bergson, 1913: 138). Within Richardson’s representation of Miriam’s socializing in the novel, we find that Richardson foregrounds the experience of duration as opposed to the mathematical time of the external world, which, according to Bergson deals with simultaneities which cease to exist when the next appears (Bergson, 2001: 227). Richardson’s exposition of “time” throughout the novel is durational and any contemplation of “time” within the novel is laid insignificant to the durational experience. An example to this is the chimes of St Pancras, which is heard by Miriam. The ringing of the bells of St Pancras is a reminder of the external world that tries to assert its authority over the individual; however, in Revolving Lights, as well as in the earlier novels of Richardson such as The Tunnel and Interim, the individual is more involved with her inner self, her durational experience than the simultaneities of the outer world. In Revolving Lights, Miriam remembers a time when she and Michael had been taken to a Quaker meeting. At their return, St Pancras’s clock strikes two. “But there was no sense of night in the soft wide air; pouring in now more strongly at the open casement, rattling its fastening gently, rhythmically, to and fro, sounding its two little notes. […] Of course she was not tired and there was no sense of night,” is what we read of Miriam’s thoughts. The clock of the external world has no authority over Miriam’s subjective experience here. She does not sense the time that belongs outside herself. When Miriam and Michael visit the Lintoffs, Miriam is carried away in her stream of thoughts and when she is addressed in person she thinks of the amount of
62 time they had been spending together. “The time was drawing to an end. Presently they would separate for good. […] She sat up briskly to listen. There was still time in hand. They had been ages together” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 317-318). This is a durational experience of Miriam; their separation being close Miriam thinks of the duration in between now and then in the future as time coming to an end. This is not mathematical time, which does not come to an end for simultaneities follow one another. That there is still time in hand is another point of view Miriam has of the duration between now and the time of separation. Her desire to put an end to the meeting is revealed when she thinks of the time spent together as “ages”. This is not mathematical time but Miriam’s durational experience of it. Miriam’s thoughts on the “endlessness” of her weeks of holiday when she goes to Alma’s house also point to a durational experience of time. After her tiring days at work, the four weeks of holiday to be spent away from everything at home seems “endless” for Miriam. “There was so much time that fatigue was an asset, the shadow against which all this brightness shone out” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 331). “Four weeks” is a time measured in the external world; its length of duration depends on the subjective experience of the individual. Miriam, in this case, is so looking forward to it and will have nothing to do in the meanwhile that it seems endless to her. “Ages already, she had been here, blissful. Getting every moment more blissful. […] The four weeks of long days, each day in four long bright separate pieces, spread out ahead, enclosed; a long unbroken magic. Poor Miss Prout with her short week-end,” flows Miriam’s stream of thought at Alma’s (Richardson, 1967, 3: 340). Her freedom from having to do anything makes Miriam’s duration of the holiday quite long. That Miriam’s age is not revealed in Revolving Lights also points to the insignificance of external time in contrast to duration. Richardson only reveals the inner time, the duration that matters for Miriam. We only learn in this novel that it has been a few years since Miriam started her relationship with Michael Shatov. When we read the previous novels, we can make out Miriam’s age roughly, that she is in her mid-twenties; still, we cannot be sure. Thus we can say that mathematical time is deliberately left aside. Revolving Lights is an important novel in Richardson’s novel series in presenting to the reader an important phase in Miriam’s ceaseless becoming process as a writer. When Miriam goes to Alma’s house for holiday, Hypo, Alma’s husband,
63 and Miriam discuss Hypo’s writings. Miriam criticises them for having pathos which Hypo does not feel himself, and advises Hypo to cut out those parts because they weaken his argument by coming forward too much. It is explicit, here, that Miriam is a critic. From Hypo’s writing their discussion turns to Miriam and her socialism, and Hypo tries to persuade Miriam to become a Lycurgan, to work for the Lycurgans as a talker, writer or editor. Hypo’s faith in Miriam comes from his belief in her “tenacity” in arguments. Hypo thinks Miriam is a good critic and she could argue anything when she is “roused.” He tells Miriam, “You shall learn to write, passably, in the interests of socialism” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 253). This is a significant point because the type of writing Hypo suggests to Miriam is one in which Miriam thinks she will have to “sit in a dusty corner, loyally doing odd jobs, considered by him ‘quite a useful intelligent creature,’ among other much more clever […] all working submissively in the interest of a theory that he understood so well that he must already be believing in something else” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 253). Miriam thinks she is “already a useful fiercely loyal creature,” as Hypo describes her, “at Wimpole Street —— But that [is] for the sake of freedom” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 253). Hypo’s offer is not one that would allow Miriam to write freely; it is a restrictive and less creative one. Later, at Alma’s, again, Miriam finds out that Edna Prout, the novelist, uses real people as her characters, only changing their names, and narrates real events that she has experienced.
She had put people in. … People [Hypo] knew of. They joked about it. Horrible. … She gazed, revolted and fascinated, at the bundle of pages. Someone ought to prevent, destroy. […] That was ‘writing’; from behind the scenes. People and things from life, a little altered, and described from the author’s point of view. Easy; if your life was amongst a great many people […] a cheap easy way. […] making people look seen-through and foolish […] while the authors remained admired, special people […] supposed, by readers who did not know where they got their material, to be creators. (Richardson, 1967, 3: 342)
It is clearly seen here that Miriam is introduced into to different styles of writing at Hypo’s house. However, Miriam criticises both of them, one for its restrictive aspects, turning the act of writing into factory work, the other for its pretentious creativity. These are instances of durational experience within Miriam’s process of
64 becoming a writer. It is seen in March Moonlight, when Miriam becomes a writer, that her act of writing is very different from what she sees here for its aim, technique and subject matter. Miriam’s experience with different types of writing form Miriam’s past and remain within her memory; therefore, the writer Miriam becomes in March Moonlight contains in herself what she experiences much earlier. This is Miriam’s phase of considering and finding out, in all its aspects, what should and should not, can and cannot be done in the act of writing. Along with the formation of Miriam’s thoughts on writing, the formation of her thoughts on language, the means for writing, is revealed in this novel. Recalling Eleanor Dear’s story of how she bore a child before she got married to Rodkin, Miriam thinks Miss Dear’s story is a tempting one to tell. Miriam’s thoughts run on,
Knowing a story like that from the inside, knowing Eleanor, changed all ‘scandalous’ stories. They were scandalous only when told? […] Speech is technical. Every word. In telling things, technical terms must be used; which never quite apply. To call Eleanor an adventuress does not describe her. You can only describe her by the original contents of her mind. Her own images; what she sees and thinks.
(Richardson, 1967, 3: 285)
It is significant that the story Miriam wants to tell is one that she knows very well from the inside; Miriam knows both the story and its heroine very well. At this point Miriam’s ideas on technique resemble Bergson’s ideas on writing. In Time and Free Will Bergson claims that the novel is a means for picturing “the mental conditions of a person at a given moment” (Bergson, 2001: 185). Miriam wants to depict the contents of Eleanor’s mind, what she sees and thinks. Furthermore, Miriam’s idea that words do not apply in telling things because speech is technical is parallel to Bergson’s idea on language. Language, claims Bergson, denotes the states of the self using the same words; therefore, it represents objective, impersonal states. “We estimate the talent of a novelist by the power with which he lifts out of the common domain, to which language had thus brought them down, feelings and ideas to which he strives to restore, by adding detail to detail, their original and living individuality,” writes Bergson in Time and Free Will (Bergson, 2001: 164). In order to achieve this, what is to be done, claims Bergson, is to “take these psychic states
65 [of the individual] with the particular colouring which they assume in the case of a definite person, and which comes to each of them by reflection from all the others” (Bergson, 2001: 164). In Revolving Lights Miriam’s act of writing is on the level of writing reviews as a critic. Her dialogue with Hypo reveals to us that at the present she is writing a review on The House Of Lord and that she has already written one on Whitman. As George Thomson also states, Hypo’s comment on Miriam’s reviews as “The last two or three have been astonishingly good” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 369) suggests that Miriam has been writing reviews for some time. Hypo claims that she is a good critic with a good critical eye, but not a creator. Creation, he says, comes with writing directly with a pen. Miriam objects to a pen for the difficulty of writing with it and suggests a quill. However, she then claims that both fountain pen and quill are the implements of “man” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 370). This is significant in the development of Miriam as a writer because throughout the novel series it is explicitly manifest that men are associated with the intellect and the only way to write properly, which is to represent the consciousness of the individual, as it is revealed in March Moonlight as well as Revolving Lights, is through intuition. And, according to Bergson, intuition is associated with the metaphysical and subjective. Therefore, Miriam’s description of the pen as “a fat slippery barrel” and a “writing-machine”, and of the quill as “mak[ing] people too objective, so that it’s as much a man’s pen, a mechanical, see life steadily and see it whole (when nobody knows what life is) man’s view sort of implement as a fountain pen” “which squeaks out an important sense of writing” (Richardson, 1967, 3: 370) reveals to us that Miriam’s rejection of the two implements is related with their being objective and mechanical which cannot make a woman, who is associated with intuition, write. The significance of this rejection increases when Miriam tells Hypo about Michael’s restraint from helping a woman carrying a perambulator and telling Miriam to help her. Miriam is angry at Michael’s attitude but tells Hypo that she did not even discuss this with Michael because “[it’s] useless to talk to instincts.” According to Bergson, intuition is “instinct that has become disinterested, self conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely” (Bergson, 1913: 186). This shows us that
66 Miriam is not satisfied with the intellect or instinct of man; therefore, she cannot use their means to write. Finally, it could be said that both Richardson’s technique and subject matter display parallelisms between Richardson’s Revolving Lights and Bergson’s philosophy of duration, becoming and art. In this novel Miriam is at a midpoint within her durational experience, which is represented in the Pilgrimage series. Richardson’s stream of consciousness technique is a major aspect in the novel revealing Miriam’s durational process by the representation of her past in the form of reminiscences. What seems to be the present in this novel becomes “past” in the ensuing novels. However, the present of Miriam within the novel is important in Miriam’s development as an individual and becoming a writer in March Moonlight.
67 CHAPTER 4
March Moonlight: Advocation of Bergsonian Philosophy
March Moonlight is the last novel in the novel series Dorothy Richardson wrote. It was published in 1967, almost thirty years after Dimple Hill, the immediately preceding novel, which was first published in 1938. Critics write that Richardson wrote March Moonlight around the 1950’s before she died in 1957. Thus the novel in question in this chapter was published ten years after the death of its author. In March Moonlight, Richardson’s protagonist is Miriam Henderson again, as in all the preceding novels. Miriam’s process of becoming continues in this last novel too. The reader, going into Miriam’s consciousness, witnesses the changes Miriam goes through as an individual. In this novel there are explicit manifestations of Bergson’s philosophy in the character of Miriam, in her position as a writer, and in the representational technique Richardson uses throughout the novel. In March Moonlight Miriam reaches the peak of her becoming process by becoming a perfect individual, an artist, an individual who can use, both her intellect and her intuition. In the first chapter of this work I have discussed the significance of journeys in Pilgrimage. In March Moonlight Miriam goes on journeys to London and Dimple Hill. These journeys hold a significant place in Miriam’s duration because Miriam’s journeys in March Moonlight are both journeys into her self to attain knowledge as to who she is, as in the other novels, and journeys which bring together Miriam’s past and present in a durational flux. In this last novel, Miriam goes to both new places like Mrs Gay’s and to known places like London, Dimple Hill, Sarah’s house and the Brooms’s. While her moving to Mrs Gay’s is something newly introduced to Miriam’s life, her other travels to known places, while bringing her past and present together also bring new experiences to Miriam. This is quite parallel to Bergson’s idea that within the “continuous flux” of the individual’s duration “there are no identical two moments in the life of the same conscious being” because each moment that follows another contains “over and above” a previous one, “the memory that the
68 [former] has bequeathed to it” (Bergson, 1979: 54-55). When Miriam goes to an already known place her present experience is different from her former one because time has elapsed and every moment that has passed has brought to Miriam something new. Miriam has changed since her former presence in those places; therefore, her present perception of the new experience is different though the same people and places are concerned. Moreover, the other people that partake in Miriam’s present experience have also changed since the previous experience; thus the present experience becomes a totally new one. Miriam’s journeys in this novel form a zigzag going back and forth between London and Dimple Hill. At the beginning of the novel Miriam is at Sarah’s house in London. There, Miriam visits Amabel and Michael. This visit, a journey in London, takes Miriam back to her life in Flaxman’s Court in her consciousness because Amabel decorates Miriam’s room the way it was when she lived there. Seeing this takes Miriam back to her past at Flaxman’s Court and Miriam realizes that she does not have the same feelings for the place as she used to have in the old days. This durational experience of going into her past within her consciousness makes Miriam realize that she has changed. Bergson claims that the self is in a continuous process of passing from one state to another. The conscious being is in the process of a ceaseless change; even the states are processes of change. Memory, in this continuous process of change, “conveys something of the past into the present”. Therefore, the mental state of a conscious being continuously “swell[s] with the duration which it accumulates” (Bergson, 1913: 2). Thus, we see that at this point the reader witnesses the duration of Miriam during her process of change because we see that Miriam realizes the change in herself, which results in a change of her conception of herself. Miriam’s journey from London back to Dimple Hill after she stays at the Young Women’s Bible Association for four months is another example of durational flux in Miriam’s life in March Moonlight. When Miriam goes back to Dimple Hill, she returns to a place she has stayed at for a long time, the house of the Roscorla family. Although at first this seems to be a return to the old established life, it proves not to be so the moment Miriam arrives at the house. The past is still there; however, it has been transformed. As Miriam stands outside the house she finds the door closed, unlike the way it used to be always open before. Miriam considers this as an
69 unwelcome attitude towards herself. The attitude of the household towards her has changed; they do not treat her in as friendly a manner as they used to due to the revelation Miriam makes to Charles about her making love with Hypo, which Charles, in his distress reveals to the others in the house. Having come back, Miriam does not feel the way she used to when she sits in her room. With her revelation, Miriam has changed and become a new person for the Roscorlas and Charles. They have changed; and therefore, their attitude towards Miriam has changed. Consequently, Miriam’s feelings for the house change. The room she had before does not give her the feeling of welcome and peace as it used to. As Bergson claims that every moment brings with it a novelty because each moment that has elapsed is stored within the memory of the person, changing his perception, as John Mullarkey also asserts in his Bergson and Philosophy (Mullarkey, 1999: 9), Miriam changes within the duration of the four months she spends at the Young Women’s Bible Association. Miriam’s reason for going there, in the first place, is to be left in solitude while Rachel Mary Roscorla is away and to live with the least expense in the meanwhile. She thinks that it is a suitable place for her to “get on with [her] sketches for the Friday Review” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 628). It is clearly seen here that Miriam has changed from being a person who was against institutional religion to someone who, while still against it, inserts it into her own life to make use of it for her own interests. During her stay at the Association, Miriam realises this herself. She does not go there for religious beliefs but for her own convenience. Miriam thinks she is the “unqualified guest” there because she has no belief in her; she is not like the other people staying there. In a session of prayer, Richardson presents Miriam not as one praying but as one observing those who are praying around her (Richardson, 1967, 4: 632). Miriam is the observer inside. Just like Miriam does, Charles, Rachel Mary and Richard change as well. Charles, though still in love with Miriam, acts indifferently towards her. His reaction to Miriam’s revelation is in the form of putting a distance between Miriam and himself. Richard and Rachel Roscorla, being quite conventional, also cannot accept the “new” Miriam. Consequently, they treat her as a paying boarder staying at their house. Thus Miriam’s arrival at Dimple Hill, this time, is a totally new experience because everybody’s perception has changed. Consequently, Miriam finds herself another place to stay at, moves out from
70 Roscorlas’s house to Mrs Gay’s house, which manifests a new beginning for Miriam, which shall be dealt with later in this chapter. The journeys in this novel exhibit that it is impossible to experience two identical states, very much in conformity with Bergson’s theory. Bergson claims:
… consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they find him at a new moment of his history. Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without ceasing. By changing, it prevents any state, although superficially identical with another, from ever repeating it in its very depth. That is why our duration is irreversible. (Bergson, 1913: 6)
The returns made to the old, to the known do not provide the old experiences but rather things quite new because everything is in a process of a ceaseless change and the experiences of the individuals change them. In Richardson’s last novel, not only Miriam’s process of becoming but also that of Amabel’s and Michael’s is revealed. In March Moonlight, these two characters are also represented as to have changed greatly from the way they were when they were first introduced into Miriam’s life. Taking place in Miriam’s both external and inner world, constituting part of Miriam’s social life and also her duration, these two characters constitute another level of the novel, in which Bergson’s idea of duration and ceaseless change can be observed. Although Amabel is first introduced in Pilgrimage, in Dawn’s Left Hand, as “an adventurous and determined young woman of upper middle class British background who has made her family send her to Paris to study art and who is continuing an affair with her lover” as George Thomson writes (Thomson, 1996: 93), in the last novel we find her as a married woman who has given up her ambitions and freedom, and become a wife and a mother. Although Amabel works actively as a suffragist earlier in her life (presented in Richardson’s previous novels), before she serves time in prison and gets married to Michael, in March Moonlight we find that Amabel is no more interested in the suffragist movement, not even as an idea, when she claims, “Marriage, and Paul, have swept away all my interest in votes for women” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 658). Nothing remains of the “determined young woman” who
71 can “make” people do things for her. Miriam cannot even tell Amabel that there is a “large proportion of wives and mothers among the active suffrage workers” because Amabel suddenly ends the talk to perform her work as a housewife. Furthermore, Amabel’s reaction at hearing the clock strike as she speaks to Miriam as “Holy Moses! I must get supper!” shows us that via her husband Michael, who is Jewish, Amabel has been introduced to Judaism and has internalised it. Her hurry to get supper ready in time manifests that she has lost her subjective individuality; and, rather than conforming to her inner subjective duration, she now conforms to the authority the external world asserts on to her, like getting supper ready at a certain time. The clock here has lost its insignificance for Amabel; it has turned into a reminder of the authority of the outside world. Amabel has lost control over her individuality and far from experiencing her subjective inner world she has become subject to the objective external world, which, Miriam had anticipated earlier, would happen to any woman who married Michael. When we consider Bergson’s idea of “perfect individuality,” in Creative Evolution (Bergson, 1913: 14), in which the individual does not perpetuate in time and thereby remains complete, we see that Amabel is far from becoming such a person with her baby born, and she having become a part of the conventional family structure, which imposes certain established roles on women depending on which structure one belongs to, in Amabel’s case, a Jewish family. That Amabel was closely involved with art and studied art in her youth is significant in expressing her artistic side. Creativity, as Bergson asserts in Creative Evolution, comes with intuition at the end of a durational process in which the assets for the creative activity are gained in time. In March Moonlight there is a regression rather than an improvement in Amabel’s durational process. Amabel cannot use her creative side in relation to art; she could not create a work of art, so she uses her creativity to decorate her house. What Amabel actually creates is a baby, which is what Hypo Wilson had advised Miriam to do years ago; however, Miriam does not even consider the idea. Amabel finally conforms to the norms and becomes what the external world wants her to be. That Amabel has an affair with her lover Basil when she is first introduced into Pilgrimage in Dawn’s Left Hand is another instance of what George Thomson refers to as being “free- spirited”. While this is the Amabel the reader first meets, in Richardson’s final novel
72 Amabel becomes a housewife married to a Jew, living a conventional life. This is important in revealing another point of Bergson’s idea of becoming; that the ceaseless change the individual is in does not necessarily mean that it is an improvement; it can be a regression too. It is pure change. Amabel stands as an alternative character to Miriam. She represents an alternative process of becoming, what Miriam might have become if she had not had her intellect and intuition in integration or if she had married Michael Shatov and given up her individuality. In March Moonlight that Amabel has changed is seen when Miriam thinks,
This is no acting. With her head bowed on my knees, for the first time neither in irrepressible mirth over my stupidity nor in half-amused adoration, Amabel is not being audience for her own performance. Her whispered words held their despair touched by real fear, leaving one isolated with the misery she has so quietly described. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 604)
Amabel is not a cheerful, excited young woman anymore. She does not act out a role and watch the effect it creates on other people, on Miriam, as she used to. She is now in despair, and rather than mocking Miriam, she, now, seeks refuge on Miriam’s knees. Michael is not present in this scene and his attitude to Amabel, which is no solution but rather an addition to her suffering, is revealed in Miriam’s contemplation of him. Michael and Amabel are not happy with their life. Amabel’s question of “what are we to do?” which is revealed to us through Miriam’s consciousness, takes Miriam back to the previous time she had heard Amabel ask the same question just before she and Michael moved out from their old lodgings (Richardson, 1967, 4: 604). This shows us that though their life has been changing Amabel and Michael still have problems. When Amabel and Miriam talk about Miriam’s return to Dimple Hill to stay with the Roscorlas, Amabel says to Miriam, “You’re going back, Mira” and repeats it soon. To Miriam’s comment, “Yes, but I don’t know what to. … I believe I’d go more gladly if he were not to be there,” Amabel replies, “I know.” “Passion, this time, in her voice. Nostalgia, awaiting opportunity to confess, for the perspectives she has sacrificed to matrimony?” thinks Miriam within her consciousness (Richardson, 1967, 4: 601). This is an instance of Amabel’s change
73 and her having lost the understanding that she used to have when she was free and passionate. Her perspectives have been sacrificed to her marriage with Michael and so she needs to emphasize that she knows. However, absolute knowledge comes from interior perspective and Amabel having succumbed to the authority and demands of the external world has lost it. A significant instance to Miriam’s durational change in March Moonlight is her conception of “home”. In this novel Miriam refers to Dimple Hill as “The place I found and where I belong, amongst those who regard even the loveliness now increasing all about them and calling to me with claims as powerful as their own, as being merely ‘pleasant.’ Who rob the world of its power,” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 586). In Dimple Hill, the preceding novel, Miriam stays at the house of the Roscorlas, a Quaker family. Miriam is not religious, neither is she a Friend, one who is a Quaker; in fact, she is frustrated at the idea of being considered as one. Nevertheless, she finds serenity in this house. She receives good treatment from the household and loves the life she leads in this country house the members of which earn their living by agriculture and farming. This a totally new life style for Miriam because throughout Pilgrimage the furthest she is away from the heart of London are the times she is at her father’s house, a suburban place, or in Hanover, Germany in Pointed Roofs. In March Moonlight Miriam refers to Dimple Hill as “home.” This is significant because earlier, in The Tunnel home used to be London and Mrs Bailey’s house for her. This shows us that Miriam has changed; she is not the old Miriam who enjoyed the rush of the city, the work and visiting friends in the evening. Miriam enjoys the quietness, the vast plain lands surrounding Roscorlas’s house and the daily activity taking place there. The chaos and the fragmentation in the city are reduced here. Miriam feels a sense of tranquillity and peace. The most important reason for Miriam’s calling the place “home,” though, is due to the fact that in this house Miriam has a top floor room spared for her to do her writing in. In this room Miriam could be alone to be creative. This is important because at one point in Pilgrimage Miriam complains about not having been able to write while she was in Oberland. Furthermore, in Clear Horizon, Doctor Densley advises Miriam to take a long rest and Hypo suggests she might go to the country to try her writing there. Thus, Roscorlas’s house provides for Miriam both a place to rest and a place to write.
74 Nevertheless, at the end of March Moonlight, when Miriam moves to Mrs Gay’s house, Miriam’s idea of “home” changes and Mrs Gay’s house becomes “home” with “indefinable quality” providing Miriam with a room on the top floor with no one else staying on the same floor, providing her with the solitude that she seeks in order to write. Miriam’s thoughts on Mrs Gay’s house run as follows:
Here, the very sunlight, compared with the sunlight along the main roads, seems more mellow and leisurely. In the brief local roadways and odd passages people go about as if at home, at ease. […] Above the passageway alongside the sculptor’s studio, some large room whence daily the tremendous last movement of Chopin’s last sonata encompasses me. Joining forces with my silent lime tree it sets aside all personal problems. Abolishes, so long as one is alone, […] even tragedy. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 656)
All the places Miriam has stayed in have, soon, offered themselves as her “native heath” but this one is different in its offer of tranquillity and art. In this house Miriam is surrounded by artists again, each from a different profession; a musician and a sculptor. It is revealed at the end of the novel that Miriam has been staying in this house for the past two years and has been able to write there. The ceaseless change we observe in Miriam stems from Miriam’s ceaseless questioning and doubt, which comes with the multiplicity and fragmentation she finds in the society. Miriam thinks:
Are we English, on the whole, static? Living in the Now because we have a relatively good Now to live in? […] Is the English consciousness static? While carrying our sporting sense of justice and fair play to the ends of the earth, we regard all un-English humanity, all ‘foreigners,’ as in some way inferior. At the same time, all the other races, however differing from each other, are united in perception of our oddity. Are we motionless? (Richardson, 1967, 4: 637)
The question about immobility is repeated three times. This reminds us of Bergson’s statement that existence can only take place if there is continuous change, so where there is no change there is no existence; and change comes with movement, a non- linear movement of the consciousness. If the English are static, that means they do not exist. Living in the Now means living in the present; however, the present is only
75 a very brief moment, it is not eternal as Miriam thinks when she thinks about the Now of the girls in the Young Women’s Bible Association. Considering Bergson’s ideas we can say that one cannot simply “be” because that moment of “being” in the present is to pass into the past fairly soon. If the person does not “become,” once the present moment of “being” has elapsed, that “being” will not “be,” will not exist. Thus, existence is associated with movement, and death or non-existence with being static, motionless. Apart from parallelisms with Bergson’s philosophy, in March Moonlight we find Bergson’s ideas being discussed under various contexts. At the Young Women’s Bible Association Miriam thinks, “[…] even the simplest of these young women live, even if unknown to themselves, in the Now, the eternal moment, fully; that their sense of Being, whatever their discontents and longings, outdoes for most of them, the desire to Become. Will triumph, throughout their lives” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 635). These people are content with “being” whereas actual existence comes via continuous “becoming” according to Bergson. This is important because while Miriam thinks so about these women, she is, herself, in a ceaseless process of becoming. In this last novel Miriam questions Bergson’s ideas. This questioning is not a negative attitude towards Bergson’s ideas; it is part of Miriam’s durational experience of becoming. Miriam questions everything she is exposed to, which serves as a means to understand and form her own individuality. The lines quoted above are followed in the next paragraph by,
Is this conviction of the wonder of mere existence, the amazingness of there being anything anywhere, the secret of my feeling, wherever I go, upon my native heath and wishing to stay there? Belgium; Holland, though seen only in passing through; Oberland; Dimple Hill; and now this half-nunnery? Only from Flaxman’s did I fly, from enclosure in squalor I was powerless to mitigate; ready to agree with. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 635)
Miriam thinks existence itself is a wonder; she is certain that existence is a wonder and this certainty allows her to feel in her native grounds wherever she is. She is amazed at the fact that anything exists anywhere; therefore she enjoys it all, feels at home with it all.
76 Marriage, as an institution of society of the external world, stands as an obstacle for Miriam’s inner world. In March Moonlight Miriam remembers Ted, in whom she had been interested when she was young (Honeycomb). Miriam thinks she will never know whether it was the sudden descent of her family in poverty that drew Ted away from her. On the other hand, Miriam remembers that she knew, right after her sisters Sally and Harriett were married that “the routine life of enclosed suburban housewives is not for [her]” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 645). Miriam thinks that when Densley implied marriage to her, in Dawn’s Left Hand, she saw her “unsuitability to manage the background of a Harley Street practice.” Becoming Densley’s wife would have put a stop to Miriam’s process of becoming. From a conventional point of view, she would have suited the doctor as a social match; however, the position she would be taking as a doctor’s wife would have meant that she stay at home and run the house, which would have stopped her development. Then, not continuing her becoming, as Bergson sees it, she would have ceased existence. Miriam’s idea on marriage is revealed when she thinks of the time Densley proposed to her:
Sacred that moment had been, undisturbed by my knowledge of our incompatibilities. For I knew that in one way or another all men and women are incompatible, their first eager enthusiasms comparable to those of revivalist meetings and inevitably as transient. Only in silence, in complete self-possession, possession of the inwardness of being, can lovers fully meet. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 645)
Charles Ducorroy’s idea of marriage in March Moonlight, on the other hand, is that the success of marriage depends “upon the husband’s unquestioned leadership” and the wiping away of the woman’s own ideas. Then the husband and wife become one soul (Richardson, 1967, 4: 642). This is exactly the kind of view that Miriam wants to escape throughout her spiritual journey. When she is at her father’s house for her sisters’ marriage, in Honeycomb, this is the type of life Miriam thinks marriage brings upon women and decides she never wants to get married. Nevertheless, although she knows Charles’s opinion on marriage, Miriam’s falling in love with Charles prevents her from discarding the idea of marriage. Furthermore, her past flows into her present, and the fact that she made love to Hypo earlier troubles her. “Can I face such a life, become in its background, a kind of Rachel Mary, ceaselessly
77 busy, my share in his life that of recipient of the record of his daily doings? Can I even promise myself to him without confessing the past? This I must soon decide,” thinks Miriam (Richardson, 1967, 4: 647). Miriam is doubtful because marriage with Charles promises her no future, no personal improvement, no freedom; rather, a future as a housewife who, in the evenings, will listen to her husband tell her what he has been doing during the day. On the other hand, there is the problem that Miriam is not a virgin anymore. In Dawn’s Left Hand Miriam makes love with Hypo Wilson. This is not something Miriam expects Charles to accept; therefore, she doubts whether she should tell him or not. Finally, at the end of the novel, Miriam remains unmarried, having both told Charles the truth and decided to stay out of marriage in order to pursue her own individuality against society and its institutions. Thus Miriam’s inner world prevails in accordance with Bergson. One of Bergson’s theories Richardson reflects into March Moonlight is that “… creation of self by self is the more complete, the more one reasons on what one does. …the same reasons may dictate to different persons, or to the same person at different moments, acts profoundly different, although equally reasonable,” says Bergson but adds that they are not the same reasons because “they are not those of the same person, nor of the same moment” (Bergson, 1913: 7-8). Therefore, they cannot be dealt with from the outside; an outsider cannot solve one’s problems for just the fact that he/she is on the outside. “Each must solve them from within, on his own account,” claims Bergson (Bergson, 1913: 8). This applies to Miriam’s situation in March Moonlight. While in the earlier novels Miriam tries to help Michael whenever he is in trouble, in March Moonlight when Amabel asks Miriam, “What are we to do?” Miriam’s answer is “I don’t know,” and she thinks, “No remedy. Nothing to be said or done” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 605). It is only Amabel and Michael who could find a solution to their problems from within; Miriam cannot do it for them from the outside. Furthermore, there are two tragic sufferers in the novel series; Olga, the Russian girl in the Young Women’s Bible Association and Mrs Henderson, Miriam’s mother. Both of these women commit suicide. This manifests that no outside observer can help the sufferer but him/herself. Their problems have to be solved by themselves from within. Miriam takes her mother on holiday so that her health would improve; however, the holiday she goes on to does not solve Mrs
78 Henderson’s problems and cannot stop her from committing suicide. The help or solutions suggested from the outside are not really solutions for the individual. In March Moonlight, as in the other novels in Richardson’s novel series, Richardson’s protagonist lives in a continuous flux. What I mean by flux, here, is the continuous flow of the past into the present within the individual’s duration through the individual’s memory. According to Bergson, there are three things one finds in contemplating oneself: the perceptions which come to one from the outside material world, the memories which serve to interpret the perceptions coming from the outside world, and tendencies and motor habits bound to “perceptions and memories” (Bergson, 1979: 54). However, when one examines oneself towards the centre, claims Bergson, one finds beyond these, “a continuous flux,” which he explains as “a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it” (Bergson, 1979: 54). Each state extends into one another. Bergson asserts “… our past follows us, it swells incessantly with the present that it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory” (Bergson, 1979: 54). Miriam’s journey into herself, observing herself from the inside, is a continuous flux in which her past and present amalgamate within her consciousness. Through her memory, Miriam carries with her consciousness all her past, everything she has experienced; and, this memory swells as she continues living because every moment joins the preceding ones in her consciousness. Bergson claims that incidents which seem to be disconnected from the individual’s consciousness may appear; however, these incidents are not irrelevant, in fact “they stand out against the continuity of a background on which they are designed, and to which indeed they owe the intervals that separate them” (Bergson, 1913: 3). The ideas mentioned above are explicit in Richardson’s novel. At the beginning of March Moonlight there is a continuous shift from Jean’s letter to Miriam’s stream of consciousness and then back to Jean’s letter (Richardson, 1967, 4: 555-577). These shifts reveal that while reading Jean’s letter Miriam’s thoughts flow from one related thing to another and she gets caught in the stream of thoughts. Miriam’s present perceptions from the letter or from what surrounds her (like the chestnut tree), raise memories of her past in Miriam’s consciousness. Reflecting on what she perceives or remembers, Miriam returns to Jean’s letter she is reading at the
79 present. As Miriam reads the letter she remembers the Lauriers, the place she stayed at with Jean in Oberland. This shows us that Miriam’s past has not been left somewhere in the past but follows her, rising when relevant stimuli occur in the present. In this case, Jean’s letter is the stimulus, which raises memories of the past within Miriam’s consciousness. Furthermore, as she stays at Sarah’s house Miriam remembers and thinks of the Roscorlas, the family in whose house she had been staying before coming to Sarah’s. As Miriam, Sarah and her children sit together at a meal time, Miriam behaves like Richard Roscorla unawares, and afterwards feels she is imitating him, although she does not think he is the model to be presented there (Richardson, 1967, 4: 592). This incident expresses that Miriam carries her past in Dimple Hill within her consciousness, and it inevitably follows her and emerges into the present when there is a possible use for it. When Miriam visits Amabel at her house, she sees that in her house Amabel has recreated Miriam’s room at Flaxman’s Court, in which she stayed years ago in The Trap. Miriam does not know how to respond to what she sees; “How cross the chasm standing between today, already itself flooded by the rapidly approaching morrow, and the far past Amabel had here so charmingly recreated and that for her, still living within the frame work of the London that was its background, seems only yesterday?” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 599) Today is already flooded by the approaching future, because plans for the future have been made; Miriam is to leave for Dimple Hill the next day. The past recreated in the present by Amabel is the far past for Miriam but because Amabel still lives in London, which forms a background for Flaxman’s Court, it seems quite recent for her. Here, the past, present and future coexist within Miriam’s duration and the subjectivity of durational experience is revealed clearly with the different opinions of Amabel and Miriam of Flaxman’s Court. That Miriam’s past is in a ceaseless contact with her present in a form of flux is also manifest in the novel because Miriam is constantly reminded of the Lintoffs due to Olga. Olga, as a Russian with a background related to revolutionists like Kropotkin and Stepniak, reminds Miriam of the socialist Lintoffs. The Lintoffs are the Russian couple that Miriam meets during her relationship with Michael in Revolving Lights. The introduction of Olga to Michael and Amabel also constitutes a
80 durational flux in bringing together different phases of Miriam’s past and present and the changes within it. The moving of Amabel and Michael to Flaxman’s Court in March Moonlight also serves in integrating Miriam’s past and present because Miriam’s experiences with Michael, Amabel, them together and Flaxman’s Court all belong to different times in Miriam’s duration. Nevertheless, all the different durations in the past come together in the present at the Shatov house. The flux Richardson presents in March Moonlight by making Miriam go back and forth from London to Dimple Hill, then back to London and then finally back to Dimple Hill again, forms durational flux. When Miriam is at Sarah’s house, and they are all at table for a meal, Miriam does not feel comfortable about the way the conversation takes place. After answering Sarah, Miriam contemplates Roscorlas’s house in Dimple Hill and how they spoke to each other there. From this Miriam moves on to reflect on Oberland, the holiday resort she had been to before she moved in with the Roscorlas, which is different from both Dimple Hill and Sarah’s house, “where there was neither grace nor Quakerly silence, where communication flowed at once, there was at least an approach to the desirable atmosphere. Created by those in whom the Oberland quality went right through. By people like Harry Vereker and Mrs Harcourt” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 589). Vereker is the skier in Oberland and Mrs Harcourt is the person Miriam meets in Oberland and later takes money from. Miriam’s past, here, rises to the surface of her consciousness when she feels, in the present, the difficulty of continuing a conversation with her sister and her family. Miriam thinks to herself “What would a Quaker, other than Richard, be doing in this spiky atmosphere, with Sally now across the room dishing up the second course with brisk energy…and Marian, with thoughts no one could fathom, secretly contemplating a familiar scene. … Rachel Mary?” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 589) The difficulty of conversation arises from the different personalities Miriam and Sarah have. Sarah disapproves of Miriam’s ceaseless contemplation, her “going too deeply into things” and thinks of it as “Mim’s tiresome insistence on thought”. “That’s the sort of thing that keeps you without a home,” is what Miriam thinks Sarah would think to herself if she “were to produce what [she] had in mind” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 591). This is an instance of subjectivity in that “home” stands for very different things for the two sisters.
81 Sarah’s life represents what Miriam has been trying to avoid and has been putting up with the difficulties of existence for since she was seventeen. On the other hand, Sarah cannot conceive of an unconventional life like the one Miriam leads. While Sarah chooses to lead a life of comfort, repeating what she has seen being done conventionally, Miriam chooses to put up with any difficulty she might be faced with lest she lose her freedom. In the novel, the durational experiences of Miriam are revealed in the representation of Miriam’s stream of thought. While Miriam is on the train to Dimple Hill she contemplates what she will be doing during the forth-coming year:
Today, for the first time, even when the woods bring close alongside the doings of light and shade within their depths, there will be no longing for the train to go more slowly, but only gratitude for these instalments of wealth waiting ahead to be enjoyed for a period extending unenclosed. Perhaps for life. Perhaps, this time, there need be no return? Upon Mrs Harcourt’s gift of six months’ living, I can hold out at Dimple Hill for at least a year. Writing. […] No more argumentative articles. No more short-circuiting humanistic socialism. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 606)
Miriam does not want the train to go more slowly this time because she does not want to avoid anything; on the contrary, what lies ahead of her is desirable for her, it is “wealth”. Miriam does not know how long this future wealth will last, its extent is unknown and Miriam thinks maybe it will last a lifetime. She does not know whether she will return or not. This is an evident parallelism with Bergson’s idea of an unpredictable future. In Creative Evolution, Bergson asserts that the moments of personality are “unforeseeable” because “to foresee consists of projecting into the future what has been perceived in the past, or of imagining for a later time a new grouping, in a new order, of elements already perceived. But that which has never been perceived, and which is at the same time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable” (Bergson, 1913: 59). This means that the future cannot be predicted. In Time and Free Will Bergson discusses the same question of foresight and prediction in “Real Duration and Prediction.” Bergson discusses the notions of “probable conclusion” and “infallible foresight” and claims that, considering a person’s character in the present (which also contains his past), the attitude that person would hold to certain
82 circumstances in the future could be guessed by someone who knows the character of that person well. However, Bergson adds, this is not a prediction of the future but a logical conclusion arrived at by evaluating the person (Bergson, 2001: 183-198). In this instance in the novel even Miriam does not know exactly what she will be doing in the future. Considering the amount of money Mrs Harcourt gave her and her expenses at Dimple Hill, which means she considers her past, which permeates into her present, Miriam concludes that she can “hold out” at Dimple Hill for a year. The foresight about Miriam’s future stems from the knowledge of her past and present. Knowing at present that she intends to write, and that she does not want to write critical articles anymore, Miriam can draw conclusions as to her future writing. The conclusion the reader draws here is that if Miriam will not be writing critical articles, then she will be writing creative works of art. Nevertheless, the future is unpredictable for Miriam, as is seen in her thoughts quoted above. Bergson’s assertion of the superiority of durational flux against the simultaneities of external time (Bergson, 1913: 356-365) is reflected in the subjective perception of durations Miriam experiences in the novel. On her way to Dimple Hill Miriam reflects,
Last year this station had meant just the end of the journey towards an unknown refuge. Today it is the gateway to Paradise. […] On last year’s journey, though the coming six months’ freedom seemed an eternity, the Sussex woods, heavy with summer leafage, demanded breathless watching. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 606)
These thoughts reveal to us that a year has elapsed since Miriam quit work and went to Dimple Hill to rest. A year ago, the place had been an “unknown refuge” for Miriam because it was the first time she went there, not knowing anyone or what she would be doing there, only that she would be living off with the money she already had and what Mr Hancock had given her. She had had no plans for the future; the future had been a complete blank, a “clear horizon” for her. Firstly, that Miriam’s perception of Dimple Hill has changed is revealed when she refers to the place as Paradise and the station as a gateway to it. On the other hand, that she thought of the coming six months of freedom as eternity manifests her subjective experience of duration. It seemed like an eternity to Miriam then and she wanted to return because
83 her departure was not really a choice of pleasure but of necessity for her health. She had a life back in London, which she did not want to break her ties with. Moreover, the uncertainty the future held for her was a drawback for her. A year later; however, Miriam’s perception of the same experience of leaving for Dimple Hill is very different. Miriam thinks:
A year secure. Given by a kindly philistine for a purpose I mean to ignore. Three hundred and sixty-five days. Each with a morning, an afternoon, an evening. Three eternities. Yet they are not three eternities but one eternity. The ever-changing light, one light […] and I shall be at home […] we shall all feel ourselves quietly together again, free of space and time. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 609-613)
Miriam considers one year at Dimple Hill as eternity because all the past, present and future will be there, permeating into one another as she writes and creates. This time Dimple Hill becomes home for Miriam. To be free of time and space is a durational experience; Miriam will be detached from the external world, free to experience her inner world. In different parts of the novel Miriam’s subjective experience of time is foregrounded by Richardson. When Richard comes near Miriam in her room, “Time is suspended, but moments are ticking themselves away” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 622). This is a durational experience of time; mathematically simultaneities tick away; however, Miriam feels as if there is suspense due to her excitement and experience at the moment of meeting. Later, in Miriam’s contemplation of Charles Ducorroy we read, “Long ago now seems yesterday’s morning’s meeting in the hall. There he stands in my life, there he stood, throughout my afternoon walk […]” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 641). Bergson writes, “duration is absolute for my consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience…” (Bergson, 1913: 358). A day has passed since Miriam last saw Charles, and Charles is present in Miriam’s consciousness throughout her walk. Miriam desires to see him; therefore, the time that elapses since the day before seems long for Miriam, because she is impatient and wants her desire to be fulfilled.
84 The last part of March Moonlight, also the last part of Richardson’s whole novel series is the peak Miriam’s durational process reaches. The whole of Miriam’s past is in the background of Miriam’s present reflections. Despite the rivalry Amabel shows her, Miriam thinks they are still “what they were to each other when [they] first met” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 658). She thinks so because of the feelings she experiences when she holds Paul, Amabel and Michael’s baby, in her arms. The baby does not wake up when Miriam picks him up in her arms, as if she were his mother, not feeling any disturbance or insecurity. Miriam feels “perfect serenity” as she holds Paul in her arms. There is a connection between Miriam and Paul due to her shared past with both Paul’s mother and father. Holding the baby Miriam feels “freedom”. No other baby has made Miriam feel this way and she wanders, “If Jean’s marriage with Joe Davenport brought her a child, should I feel, in holding it, that same sense of fulfilment?” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 658) There is more than one explanation to this scene. On the one hand, Paul symbolizes for Miriam what she might have become if she had accepted Michael’s marriage proposal years ago. The union between Michael and Amabel, which Miriam was implemental in forming, has saved Miriam from being confined as a housewife, and losing her subjective individuality. Miriam feels a sense of fulfilment because the Shatov family is, in a sense, her own success, her own product. It is as if, now, Miriam has a family of her own, without losing her freedom, without giving up her process of continuous becoming. On the other hand, this scene could be interpreted as the realization of “perfect individuality”. Bergson claims, “For the individuality to be perfect, it would be necessary that no detached part of the organism could live separately” (Bergson, 1913: 14). The fact that humans reproduce, in Bergson’s words, “building up … a new organism with a detached fragment of the old” makes perfection impossible. “Its very need of perpetuating itself in time condemns it never to be complete in space,” writes Bergson about the organism in Creative Evolution (Bergson, 1913: 14). What is worth consideration here is that Miriam does not think of a baby of her own. She does not, at any point in the novel series, consider having a baby, even when Hypo suggests it to her as an alternative to writing. Thus Miriam reaches a perfection of individuality in the Bergsonian sense mentioned above. Miriam does not want to perpetuate herself in
85 time. What she cares for is her subjective experience of time, her duration; she does not want to be continued within the time of the external world. It is important to mention here that this last part of the novel is the part where Miriam has finally become a writer and has withdrawn into Mrs Gay’s country house for the past two years, to be in solitude and to experience her subjective world and be to detached from the external social world. By not reproducing and perpetuating in time, Miriam makes “her individuality” perfect. This is important because throughout her process of development, or becoming, Miriam has tried to attain absolute knowledge of her own individuality. Furthermore, her act of writing, either critical or creative, is an act of asserting her individuality. Hence, this individuality she has created becomes perfect when she does not consider having a child and thereby perpetuating in time. Intuition and intellect, which form a great proportion of Bergson’s philosophy, directly connected with the individual’s duration is a major theme in Richardson’s novel. In March Moonlight intuition and intellect hold an important place within Miriam’s durational process of becoming as a means for becoming a perfect individual, attaining the absolute of oneself and of life, and also as matter of discussion for attaining the absolute within the world of doubt, uncertainty and change. In Creative Evolution Bergson claims that although the intellect has an “unlimited power of decomposing according to any law and of recomposing into any system,” it can only form a clear idea of immobile, inert objects. “…the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living,” writes Bergson (Bergson, 1913: 173). Since intellect cannot understand mobility it “represents becoming as a series of states, each of which is homogenous with itself and consequently does not change” (Bergson, 1913: 171). Bergson claims that intelligence goes “round” life and tries to get as many points of view of its object as possible, drawing its object to itself rather than entering it. Going round the object as such, Bergson states in his discussion of duration in “Understanding Reality,” gives us only a relative knowledge. Bergson proves in his discussion of duration and change that the individual is an ever changing being which ceases to exist if it does not change. Thus Bergson proves that to understand becoming, hence the individual and life, something else is necessary. This is intuition. “…it is to the very inwardness
86 of life that intuition leads us,” claims Bergson, which means that intuition, by going inside the object, gives us absolute knowledge. Bergson states what he means by “intuition” as “instinct that has become disinterested, self conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely” (Bergson, 1913: 186). In the novel Richardson presents the reader with direct references to Bergson’s idea of intuition. This is another point of Bergson’s philosophy which is openly discussed in March Moonlight. Staying at Sarah’s house Miriam observes her sister’s children William and Marian. Miriam thinks that Marian has an intuitive perception and William does not. Miriam thinks William receives “no unspoken communications,” whereas intuition is just that. “[…] [William’s] acceptance of a rarely seen relative [Miriam] as an enlivening visitor from a world in regard to which his imagination remained incurious,” makes upon Miriam’s weariness
… a more exacting demand than Marian’s intuitive perception of that world [Miriam was thinking of] […] A perception so clear and so deep that for an instant at whose end their eyes met and Marian’s, obedient to her firm little will, produced their social smile, [Miriam] could believe the child actually discerning, where it lay sharply engraved upon the aunt’s consciousness, the experience of those final moments upstairs, the finding and hurried reading of the letters that Jean’s had driven from her mind… [Miriam] could believe the child aware of the meeting, in one post, of the letter embodying Rachel Mary’s incredible suggestion, and the one enclosing the astonishing bestowal of the means of carrying it out. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 584)
Before she sits with the children Miriam has just been reading letters from Jean, Rachel Mary and Mrs Harcourt; the first telling her about herself, the second inviting Miriam to Dimple Hill and the last offering money, which Miriam plans to use to go to Dimple Hill. Here, Marian does not know anything about the letters or their contents. As she is sitting with the children Miriam reflects on the letters and Marian’s eyes catching hers, Miriam feels the depth of Marian’s perception and is convinced that Marian understands the concerns in her mind. Richardson does not only reflect intuition into the novel but also explicitly foregrounds it. When Amabel visits Miriam at Dimple Hill she reacts at the country life she sees, “How does anyone endure country life without servants and a motor?”
87 (Richardson, 1967, 4: 603). Miriam thinks Amabel would not understand it; “How make her see the inexhaustible wealth of life down there apart from, and successfully competing with, any form of human association?” thinks Miriam to herself. Miriam’s perception of the place is different than that of Amabel’s because Amabel looks at the life in Dimple Hill as an outsider, without any effort or thought of seeing it from the inside while Miriam perceives it from the inside, experiencing it. This complies with Bergson’s assertion that one can only completely understand something if one observes it from the inside, by sympathy, which is intuition. A significant instance of intuition in March Moonlight is that which Miriam experiences on the train to Dimple Hill. As she reflects on different things, Miriam remembers her sister Harriet; she sees her as a vision, sitting on her own before her marriage takes place. “Within the depths of that moment I seemed to gaze into her being. Aware of it as if it were my own. For the first time I realized the unique, solitary person behind the series of appearances that so far had represented in my mind the sister called Harriett,” are Miriam’s thoughts (Richardson, 1967, 4: 608). Miriam thinks of this experience of hers as a “sudden glimpse of reality” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 609). Miriam’s memory of Harriett rising from the past results in an intuitive perception of her sister. Here, Miriam has an insight into Harriett. Gazing into her being and becoming aware of it as one’s own is attained by going into the consciousness of that person according to Bergson. Here Miriam feels she has gone into the consciousness of her sister; therefore, this is the first time she realises who her sister actually is, other than the sister Miriam has known as an outsider until then. Miriam thinks of what she saw as, “There she was, gazing, in solitude, into her own life, realizing it as it slipped, with the approach of marriage, away into the past, realizing that soon it would be inaccessible” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 608). This is intuition. Then, the vision disappears and “Returned to the heart of darkness, [Miriam] begs [herself] to remember, everyday this sudden glimpse of reality. But shall I? Amidst the daily call of things that come between me and the sense of any human presence?” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 609). Miriam wants this insight because it reveals to her the “absolute reality”. However, she knows that it will not be possible if she is busy with daily things. This is the state in which Miriam goes to Dimple Hill, which is remote from the rush and chaos of the city, where she
88 can have solitude and via solitude, her future insights which result in her creativity. At the end of this contemplation when Miriam thinks “A year is secure. Given by a kindly philistine for a purpose I mean to ignore,” it is revealed to the reader that Miriam is going to spend a year in Dimple Hill because she wants to “secure” at least a year for her creative act, her writing. According to Bergson, intuition, on its own, is restrictive for consciousness because once it is inside the matter it is limited; however, intellect, by going round the matter is free. And when consciousness is free it can “turn inwards on itself and awaken the potentialities of intuition which still slumber within it” (Bergson, 1913: 192). Thus Miriam first cultivates her intellect and once that is done and she is intellectually free, her consciousness turns into itself awakening her intuition and thus she has intuitive power to go into and understand matters. In Richardson’s novel series, Pilgrimage, Miriam, as a person who has both intellect and intuition, has a close relationship with women who have intellect; sometimes so close that some critics like Lynette Felber consider them to have a lesbian touch in them. “…relationships that appear to be to some degree lesbian form an important part of … Richardson's texts. The woman-to-woman relationships … provide a sense of feminine identity for the narrators, a discovery of self and a feminine language,” writes Felber (Felber, 1995). With men Miriam could form both romantic and intellectual relationships. Her romantic relationships do not work out well, as in the case of Ted and Michael; nor does her sexual experience with Hypo Wilson. On the intellectual level Miriam has a proper relationship with men; she has discussions on literature, politics and religion with men and at times refutes them; however, on the emotional level Miriam thinks men are insufficient because they lack “something.” According to Bergson, this “something” is sympathy and it comes with intuition. Men lack the ability to perceive things from the inside and thereby to attain absolute knowledge. Miriam has a very close relationship with Amabel, which can be regarded as a lesbian inclination in Miriam as Felber asserts. This is due to the coexistence of intellect and intuition in these women. Many women have sympathy, which they are not aware of or cannot understand, but no intellect; therefore, the “free-spirited” Amabel who has both intellect and intuition, though the situation changes form in March Moonlight, is the woman closest to Miriam. Jan and Mag
89 were Miriam’s close friends in The Tunnel and Interim but Miriam never had such a relationship with them as the one she has with Amabel because both Jan and Mag lack intellectual quality despite their difference in comparison to other women in their search and struggle for freedom. Neither of them is complete, neither intellectually nor intuitively. Miriam gains “perfect individuality” because she has both intellect and intuition and she can integrate them. When we consider Miriam and Amabel, Amabel gets married and has a baby whereas Miriam does not get married and pursues her life retaining her individuality. Miriam’s act of writing is her assertion of her perfect individuality upon society. Thus this perfect individuality and absolute knowledge of life attained through the integration of her intellect and intuition provide Miriam with complete freedom. Felber claims, “The relationships with the male lovers facilitate development of [Miriam’s] identity as [a woman writer] as [she] define[s] [herself] against the men and their … aesthetic” (Felber, 1995). As to the effects of Miriam’s relationship with women, Felber quotes from Bonnie Zimmerman: “‘a woman's identity is not defined only by her relation to a male world and male literary tradition ... that powerful bonds between women are a crucial factor in women's lives, and that the sexual and emotional orientation of a woman profoundly affects her consciousness and thus her creativity’” (Felber, 1995). Thus having touched upon the function of intuition as means of artistic creativity, we can now move on to discuss the artistic and creative side of Richardson’s protagonist in March Moonlight. Miriam’s becoming an artist and her creativity show parallelisms to Bergson’s statements on art and creativity. In Creative Evolution Bergson discusses the duration of the artist:
…to the artist who creates a picture by drawing it from the depths of his soul, time is no longer an accessory… The duration of his work is part and parcel of his work. To contract or to dilate it would be to modify both the psychical evolution that fills it and the invention which is its goal. The time taken up by the invention is one with the invention itself. It is the progress of a thought which is changing in the degree and measure that it is taking form. It is a vital process, something like the ripening of an idea. (Bergson, 1913: 359-360)
90 The initial idea here is that the work of art comes from inside the artist; the metaphysical aspect Bergson discusses here is intuition. The artist’s intuition is integrated with his consciousness and his character, which are formed by his history, in other words, his past. The work of the artist contains the duration in which it is created. The time the work takes is the process of transformation of thought into form. Bergson exemplifies his idea with the painting of an artist and claims that, even though we know the artist, what he will be painting and what he will be painting with, and that “the portrait will surely resemble the model and will surely resemble also the artist,” the result is an “unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time. Nought as matter, it creates itself as form” (Bergson, 1913: 360). Miriam’s duration as an artist is related to this idea. For years, throughout Pilgrimage, Miriam translates literary texts, writes reviews and reads, and most important of all, she questions everything about life ceaselessly. It is only after this duration that Miriam experiences that she can create her own work of art. Before she starts writing, Miriam explores language, literature, philosophy, politics, and all other phases of life. Finally, in March Moonlight, this continuous duration, the process of Miriam’s becoming, and her use of intuition integrated with her intellect result in creativity. In March Moonlight, Miriam’s ideas on writing and what a novel is are revealed through the representation of her consciousness. However, how her thoughts will take form is unknown. Miriam’s work is yet an “unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art.” The creation of this nothing takes time, it is a new duration for Miriam. In March Moonlight, when Miriam finally goes back to Dimple Hill with the intention to write, as it has been mentioned above within the context of duration, she does not know how long she will stay there or whether she will ever come back. For the amount of time Miriam’s creative act will take is unknown. The subject matter of Miriam’s writing which she starts at Dimple Hill is revealed in Chapter IV of March Moonlight. On the train to Dimple Hill Miriam contemplates her writing and this reminds her of the discussion she has had with Hypo earlier:
91 (‘I’ve thrown science and socialism overboard.’[…] ‘Everything’s changing all the time. That’s one of the things humanity has to learn.’ ‘Und ob alles in ewigen Wirbel kreist, es ruhet im Wirbel ein stiller Geist.’ ‘Geist, my dear Miriam, is a very questionable term.’ Spirit, at the centre. […] Spirit is central.) (Richardson, 1967, 4: 606-607)
The translation of the German sentence which Miriam utters given by George Thomson is “And even if everything turns in an eternal confusion, there rests in the confusion a still spirit” (Thomson, 1999: 266). There is a parallelism between Bergson and Richardson here because Bergson claims in his Matter and Memory that along with the matter there is a soul. This is important when Miriam thinks about writing and creativity because she thinks of a still spirit, which is in the centre within the confusion of the world. This still soul in the centre turns out to be the stillness within the individual, in Miriam herself, which she seeks to be left alone with desperately, so that she could write. We can make this out because in order to write the writer turns within him/herself because the thing one could best understand is that into which one could enter completely. The thing that the individual can enter best is him/herself, his/her consciousness. Miriam leaves science and socialism aside because they belong to the external world and observe things from an outside perspective, which is not enough because it reveals relative knowledge. Analysis, according to Bergson, is an endless process because it continuously tries to grasp different points of view in order to make a complete representation; hence the endlessness of this endeavour for obtaining new points of view. Nevertheless, “intuition, if intuition is possible, is a simple act” (Bergson, 1979: 53). Bergson writes, “if intuition is possible” because intuition is entering the object and attaining the absolute and Bergson claims that when he speaks of “an absolute movement, I am attributing to the moving object an interior and, so to speak, states of mind” (Bergson, 1979: 51). Therefore, for intuition to take place the object needs to have an interior, or states of mind. Since analysis is the tool of positive sciences, claims Bergson, intuition is the tool of “metaphysics” (Bergson, 1979: 53). Miriam’s assertion that everything changes adds to this because the relative knowledge attained by outside perspective is even more relative because everything changes continuously. Whereas once inside the object one receives absolute
92 knowledge because one sees it from the inside and experiences the change the object is going through from within the object. This is a complete reflection of Bergson’s idea of the attainment of knowledge as absolute or relative. In order to create Miriam needs to go inside her object and not deal with it from the outside. Bergson explains this in his “Understanding Reality from Within”. The knowledge attained by observation from the outside “depends on the point of view at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves,” claims Bergson (Bergson, 1979: 51). He also asserts that one’s perception of the moving object will change according to one’s point of view and one’s expression of the object will change according to the symbols one uses to express oneself. Therefore, information attained as such gives relative information. On the other hand, entering the moving object, one’s knowledge does not depend on points of view or symbols of expression; one has “rejected all translations in order to possess the original” (Bergson 1979: 51). Thus, the observer reaches the absolute knowledge of the object. In March Moonlight Miriam compares city life and country life. Until March Moonlight Miriam either lives in the heart of the city, starting with The Tunnel, or in suburban areas like Newlands. In Dimple Hill, the novel immediately preceding March Moonlight, however, Miriam lives in the country in order to rest and gain health. It is significant that in this last novel Miriam makes such a comparison. The difference is explicitly foregrounded both by Miriam’s discussion about it with Jean and with the way Miriam tries to avoid the chaotic atmosphere of the city in order to find solitude and serenity in the country, which brings her the intuition she needs in order to create and to reach the “absolute” through it. Miriam’s escape from the rush and chaos of the city into the countryside where she can have solitude gives her the chance to have insights, which she desperately wishes to receive after her insight of her sister Harriet mentioned above. In March Moonlight, Richardson presents Miriam’s ideas on writing as they take form in Miriam’s consciousness. On the train to Dimple Hill Miriam continuously contemplates her future act of writing and her past discussions on literature. Miriam decides to tell Jean her ideas on “thought,” that the nature of thoughts depends upon one’s metaphors. Miriam decides to give up thinking in words. She thinks “Metaphorocracy” is what governs thought and thinks that she will
93 tell Jean that she will give up thinking in words and expects that Jean will understand. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 606) This is a move, on the part of Miriam, towards intuition. Thoughts are the products of intellect and they are created by words, by language. Miriam does not want to be governed by words anymore because being governed by words is restrictive; it restricts the individual with intellect which is not sufficient for creating or reaching the absolute, the essence. Miriam reflects upon her discussion with Mr Godge, the editor of Friday Review, as George Thomson also claims he is. Mr Godge asks Miriam to write, “only when strongly moved to do so” and warns her that she cannot make a living out of “sketches like Auction” because “‘they take too much thought’”. Miriam asks herself, “What does he mean by thoughts? Imagination?” and thinks, “Imagination means holding an image in your mind. When it comes up of itself, or is summoned by something. Then it is not outside, but within you. And if you hold it, steadily, for long enough, you could write about it for ever.” (Richardson, 1967, 4: 613) “‘If you can describe people as well as you can describe scenes, you should be able to write a novel,’” remembers Miriam Mr Godge saying, but she thinks, “But it is just that stopping, by the author, to describe people, that spoils so many novels?” (Richardson 4: 613-614). Thus Miriam searches for a technique for her writing. “One after another the scenes passed before me, each with its unique claim. Impossible to choose. Impossible without special knowledge to convey,” thinks Miriam (Richardson, 1967, 4: 610). She feels the necessity to find the “special knowledge to convey” what she sees intuitively. Later, when Miriam has been staying at Mrs Gay’s for two years it is manifest that Miriam has formed her opinion on writing, which presents parallelism with Bergson’s theory. As it has been mentioned earlier, in this novel Richardson does not simply reflect Bergson’s ideas but rather advocates them through Miriam. In March Moonlight there is an evaluation of Bergson’s ideas. Miriam thinks,
While I write everything vanishes but what I contemplate. The whole of what is called ‘the past’ is with me, seen anew, vividly. No, Schiller, the past does not stand ‘being still.’ It moves, growing with one’s growth. Contemplation is adventure into discovery; reality. What is called ‘creation’ imaginative transformation, fantasy, invention, is only based upon reality. […] Fully to recognize, one must be alone. Away in the farthest reaches of
94 one’s being. As one can richly be, even with others, provided they have no claims. Provided one is neither guest nor host. With others on neutral territory, where one can forget one is there, and be everywhere. (Richardson, 1967, 4: 657)
Here we see the ceaseless flow of time, the connection of the past with the present, the ceaseless change, the “load of the past growing ‘heavier and heavier’ with the passage of years” (Kumar 1963: 51). Going into one’s being is going inside the object to fully perceive it as Bergson suggests. As Miriam writes, she journeys into her own depths, into her past. This is a journey within her consciousness into her duration and to do so Miriam needs to be left alone, without any interruptions so that she can actually do it. Richardson’s literary technique in March Moonlight, which she also makes Miriam adopt, is in agreement with Bergson’s theory of art and noel. In March Moonlight Richardson represents the consciousness of her protagonist, presenting her to the reader in her entirety by representing her from the inside and taking the reader inside Miriam by her stream of consciousness technique. A significant aspect of Richardson’s representation in this novel is that the shift in and out of Miriam’s consciousness, the change from Miriam’s contemplation of the present to her recollections of the past becomes almost impossible to determine because Miriam continuously contemplates her duration, her past, present and future. In his reader’s guide to Pilgrimage, Thomson writes, “The RECALLS [sic] in this book are so profuse and integrated that it is not appropriate to assign them individual entries” (Thomson, 1996: 87). The novel requires the ceaseless effort of the reader because there are no narratives to guide the reader. This also results in the fact that the reader views everything from Miriam’s eyes because he/she constantly reads Miriam’s stream of thought. Richardson invented a controversial technique, where the characters were not depicted from the outside. As it has been expressed earlier, Richardson makes use of the technique, in this novel too, to express that the inner world and durational experience of the individual, in this case her protagonist, is primary to the external world the individual lives in. Wallace claims that, in developing her new technique, Richardson “was also rebelling against literary traditions that presented a male, and therefore inaccurate, view of women.” Wallace
95 quotes from Woolf on her description of Richardson’s innovation “… It is a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything she may discover in the psychology of her sex” (Wallace, 1989: 153). Hence the representation of the female protagonist’s consciousness by Richardson. As to the readers’ contribution to the novel in the process of reading, in her foreword to Pilgrimage Richardson writes, “News came from France of one Marcel Proust,” who introduced a new “reconstruction of experience from within the mind of a single individual” (Richardson, 1967, 1: 10). In March Moonlight, and Pilgrimage in general, Richardson is observed to have followed his steps, in line with Bergson’s theory in producing, in Richardson’s own description of Proust’s style, “a prose style, demanding, upon the first reading, a perfection of sustained concentration akin to that which brought it forth, and bestowing, again upon the first reading, the recreative delights peculiar to this form of spiritual exercise” (Richardson, 1967, 1: 11). In accordance with Bergson’s idea, in this novel, as well as the preceding novels of Richardson, there is no chronological narration or representation of issues. Richardson reveals events that have taken place within the consciousness of Miriam, as she reflects on events or people in the past. At the beginning of the novel, at Sarah’s house, as William and Marian leave the room, Miriam remembers Rachel Mary Roscorla from Dimple Hill, at whose house she stayed in Dimple Hill. Through Miriam’s contemplation of Rachel Richardson reveals that Rachel’s mother, Mrs Roscorla, has died. That Amabel and Michael have lived somewhere else for six months and then moved to Flaxman’s Court is also revealed by Richardson after a long time has elapsed over it. Richardson does not reveal such information chronologically but rather as the events take on significance in Miriam’s life. The Shatovs’s life in Flaxman’s Court is only noteworthy when Miriam’s personal experience of the place is involved (Richardson, 1967, 4: 597). Thus, Richardson does not lay the emphasis on the events themselves but on the way her protagonist endures them within her subjective experience; the effects of the events on the individual is important rather than the events themselves. According to Wallace, Richardson thought that the conventional plot of the novel with a “beginning, middle
96 and end” using a “linear structure” was the work of the masculine mind, where the focus is on action due to the “demands on man” for action. While men focus on action, women focus on being and “value themselves for what they are” (Wallace, 1989: 152). Hence Richardson’s focus on the individual’s subjective durational reality. One of the technical devices Richardson applies in this novel is the use of punctuation. In representing Miriam’s stream of thought in March Moonlight Richardson does not use punctuation marks conventionally. There are instances of lines of sentences formed by joining what would conventionally be separate sentences with comas, semicolons and conjunctions such as ‘and’ or ‘but’, including dialogues which are not written within quotation marks. This can be clearly observed in Miriam’s contemplation of Sally,
But they are no longer the buds Sally had looked out upon when she came upstairs holding the little pile of letters and slapped them down, with a gesture of mingled congratulation and protest, upon the bedside table; swiftly withdrawing her hand as though it had been at once charmed and chilled by contact with the evidence of so many unknown ties; putting so much of herself into the small manœuvre that nothing was left for speech; and then at once aware, as I said have you seen the chestnut buds, of the morning quality of this usually shrouded spare room, now full of upper garden light, less screened by the trees than the light entering the kitchen. (Richardson 4: 555-556) and in her reflections on Jean and Joe Davenport:
Landed amongst strangers, their presence the inevitable price of access to joy whose sure approach alone made bearable those last weeks at Dimple Hill, I watched her, from the depth of my weariness, making conversation as though she were giving it the whole of her attention, though now I know that her clear intelligence and her gentle heart were all the time aware of every point within the compass of her surroundings, with the mild, neat-featured young man whose gentle, rather high-pitched voice had the Balliol accent and the apologetically plaintive cadences so often accompanying it, and who, two days later, turned into Jim Davenport quietly and efficiently building a pine-branch fire for our picnic in the snow at the top of the world and, later, in the swiftly descending after-sunset cold, when the off-horse, on the narrowest part of the high path between precipice and mountain face, got a leg outside the long rein and began to plunge, rising from the last, most wildly swinging luge of the tail and somehow getting himself, serenely
97 watchful, along past the row of slithering luges and the rocking sleigh, to the horse’s head. (Richardson 4: 574)
Such use of language and punctuation marks allows Richardson to represent Miriam’s mind as smoothly or roughly as it flows, without altering it by full stops, for instance, which would put a nonexistent pause into her flow of thought. Another device Richardson applies in her novel is the first person narrative. March Moonlight is full of first person narrative along with third person narrations and direct representation of Miriam’s stream of consciousness. The use of first person narrative in this final novel in which Miriam comes to the height of her durational process is significant in expressing Miriam’s individuality. The novels in the Pilgrimage series leading to March Moonlight are novels in which Miriam ceaselessly strives to understand her subjective individuality and tries to find herself a standpoint within the external world. That Richardson continually represents Miriam’s consciousness in the first person demonstrates that in this last novel Miriam has understood “absolutely” her subjectivity and has found her standpoint in society. Miriam’s continuous repetition of “I” reveals Miriam’s assertion of her individuality on to the external world. That March Moonlight has an open ending is reminiscent of Bergson. Bergson discusses the notions of “probable conclusion” and “infallible foresight” and claims that, considering a person’s character in the present (which also contains his/her past), the attitude that person would hold to certain circumstances in the future could be guessed by someone who knows the character of that person well. However, according to Bergson, this is not a prediction of the future but a logical conclusion arrived at by evaluating the person. At this point, considering Bergson’s idea of ceaseless change, the question of “will not the person change until that future?” may arise. Bergson clarifies this point by saying, “Although our feelings, our ideas, our character, are constantly altering, a sudden change is seldom observed; and it is still more seldom that we cannot say of a person whom we know that certain actions seem to accord fairly well with his nature and that certain others are absolutely inconsistent with it.” This, according to Bergson, “is not to bind the future to the present” (Bergson, 2001: 183-191). Richardson’s March Moonlight ends
98 suddenly and does not have a resolution. Miriam’s durational process continues and though the reader knows Miriam well because he/she has been in Miriam’s consciousness throughout the novel, or the novel series, Miriam’s future is unpredictable. Miriam’s becoming continues; therefore, the novel cannot be brought to a closing. March Moonlight ends with Miriam’s contemplation of how she would feel if Jean has a baby in the future and she holds it in her arms. Thus the novel still pursues a continuation, a future. The reader is left in the middle of Miriam’s stream of thoughts. As Jacques Sauvage quotes from Edwin Muir, “The characteristic modern novel is a story without an ending. … This is another way of saying that the contemporary novelist has an imaginative grasp of origins but not of ends. … And the novel describing the life we live is a symptom of the order in which we live, its incompleteness is a reflection of the incompleteness of a whole region of thought and belief” (Souvage, 1979: 179). It is manifest in March Moonlight through both technical devices and subject matter that the durational experience of the individual in his/her inner world, which is a ceaseless flux, is the only way for the individual to survive and retain his/her subjective individuality within the chaotic external world, in which the established institutions and norms no longer retain their authority or solidity, or rightness for the various members of society. The Russian socialist Olga Feodorova, who stays at the Young Women’s Bible Association, feels utmost sorrow for humanity. She leaves her luxurious home in Russia and comes to England in search for answers; she wants to understand the reasons for the optimism of the English. However, Olga has not realized the necessities for perfecting one’s individuality through intellect and intuition, as Bergson asserts. She has not distinguished between the external and inner worlds of the individual; therefore, she cannot survive in this chaotic world of confusion and commits suicide. Mrs Henderson also commits suicide because she is the conventional mother figure, a housewife; she does not have a say in family affairs and has to put up with the bankruptcy the family is goes through. She does not have a grasp of her subjective inner world; therefore, she cannot survive either. The death of these two people, along with Miss Dear’s death, demonstrate that within the changing chaotic external world it is difficult and even impossible to survive unless the individual gains hold of his/her subjective inner world and finds ways to escape
99 the chaos and assert her subjectivity onto the external world. This is perfectly accomplished by Miriam. Throughout her duration Richardson presents in Pilgrimage Miriam explores her inner world and seeks means for asserting her inner world onto the external world. At first she becomes a teacher and a governess, and asserts her individuality on to her pupils, later by her translations, and her critical articles published in Friday Review, and finally by becoming a writer and creating her own fiction she asserts her subjective identity on to the external world. When the individual cannot integrate his/her inner world and subjectivity with the external world, the result is people like Amabel and Michael, who are not happy because they are deprived of their individuality, not finding themselves a standpoint, living according to the circumstances that arise. As it is seen in the explanations above, in March Moonlight Bergson’s philosophy is foregrounded as a matter of contemplation or discussion. In all the previous novels we detect parallelisms between Richardson’s texts and Bergson’s theories. In the final novel Richardson explicitly puts forth Bergson’s various ideas as points to think about. As it is seen in Miriam’s contemplation of the matters of being, becoming and existence in March Moonlight, Richardson makes Miriam question and support Bergson’s ideas.
100 CONCLUSION
The aim of this thesis has been to analyse Dorothy Richardson’s novels to detect any influences of Henri Bergson in her writing. Henri Bergson is a major philosopher who asserted his ideas on individualism, duration, intuition, and artistic representation at the beginning of the twentieth century. His ideas formed the basis of a new literary movement during Modernism. Dorothy Richardson, on the other hand, is considered as an innovative Modernist writer in English literature for introducing a new technique and subject matter into literature. Both the writer and the philosopher being associated with Modernism, it has been necessary, first of all, to consider, briefly, Modernism and its sources, both in Europe and England, and its reflection in literature. After this, Richardson’s novels have been analysed according to Bergson’s philosophy. Initially, Richardson’s novel series, Pilgrimage, has been considered as a whole novel in the second chapter of the thesis. The reason to such an approach has been the fact that in all the novels Richardson’s protagonist is the same character, Miriam Henderson, and the plot line focuses on the process of change this character goes through throughout the years presented in the novels, that is, from about seventeen to her late twenties or early thirties. That all the novels are somehow connected to one another due to the protagonist and her durational experience which has ties with her past, which are revealed in the former novels, is another point that has been influential in considering it as a whole novel. On the other hand, each novel within the series is a novel in its own right that presents to us the durational experience of its protagonist. Reading the preceding novels is effective in understanding the separate novels; however, it is not a must. It is quite clear that each novel, also, stands on its own as a novel which represents the durational process of becoming and the stream of consciousness of its protagonist. With this view in mind, two novels have been chosen from the series to be analysed in detail. The reasons for the choices will be explained in the relevant parts below. In the analysis of the novels, the ideas that form Bergson’s philosophy have been taken separately one by one and any parallelisms with the novels have been studied. It is necessary to mention here that although the ideas have been considered separately, most of these ideas, after all, are very much integrated into one another.
101 Bergson’s idea of flux cannot be distinctly separated from his idea of duration, or from his assertions on memory because memory is the basis for the flux experienced. Durational experience cannot be discussed apart from memory, and so on. Therefore, the analyses of certain aspects of the novel have intermingled with each other. Bergson’s ideas on art and its representation have been discussed on two levels; by analysing Richardson’s technique in the novels, and by analysing Richardson’s protagonist, Miriam, in the process of her formation as a writer. The analysis of Richardson’s Pilgrimage as a whole, in the second chapter, has revealed to us that Dorothy Richardson is influenced by Bergson’s ideas and reflects them into her novels in the form of her protagonist, her subject matter and her narrative technique. That the novels follow a sequence, which represents the life of Miriam Henderson in her durational experience, shows us the major influence of Bergson. That Richardson uses the stream of consciousness technique to represent her character rather than depiction, and that this representation is not one that is chronological or linear also points to Bergson’s idea of artistic representation. The novels’ focus on the individual and her subjectivity and ceaseless change are also parallelisms with Bergson. The representations of memory, instinct and intuition are other parallelisms detected in the novels of Richardson. Revolving Lights has been chosen as the first novel to be analysed because it stands midway within Miriam’s becoming process in Pilgrimage, and it presents us with the philosophy of Bergson revealed in its narrative technique, and in Richardson’s representation of Miriam with her memories, and durational flux. In this novel, the phase Miriam goes through in her writing career is between her personal writings of letters in the earlier novels and her creative act as a writer in the last. At this point Miriam is a critic and writes reviews. In Revolving Lights Richardson reflects Bergson’s philosophy in the various elements of the subject matter of her work, that is, the individual as focus point, Miriam’s changing process, her memory, durational flux, intuition and art. Revolving Lights is the novel in which Miriam’s social life and external world is observed from within her consciousness in her inner world. This is a significant aspect in its representation of how Bergson finds a midpoint between the external and inner worlds of the individual, pointing out the necessity of the former for the sanity and the better self-expression of the
102 individual and the superiority of the latter as the real world of the subjective individual. The analysis of March Moonlight also reveals parallelisms with Bergson’s philosophy. However, this novel varies from Revolving Lights in its reflection of Bergson’s influence on Richardson. In this novel, Richardson’s focus is on the becoming process of Miriam Henderson again. Miriam’s durational experiences of flux, her memory, her becoming process as a writer, her intuitiveness all present parallelisms with Bergson. Furthermore, Richardson’s literary technique reflects a Bergsonian approach as in the other novels. However, in this novel Richardson goes beyond reflecting Bergson’s ideas into her work and actually puts them forth as arguments, which Miriam advocates. For instance, Bergson’s thoughts on artistic representation are not only revealed in Miriam’s attitude as a writer but also in her support of them presented to the reader by its representation within Miriam’s consciousness. Although Richardson makes Miriam contemplate on Bergsonian ideas briefly in other novels as well, this novel stands out as an advocation of Bergsonian philosophy. March Moonlight, as the last novel in the Pilgrimage series, presents to the reader the peak in Miriam’s process of becoming as an individual and artist. This research has revealed that Henri Bergson’s philosophy, along with William James’s assertions, has formed the basis of the Modernist movement in literature. The turn from the society, and from the individual as part of the society, to an emphasis on the importance of the individual in itself, with its subjectivity, the consideration of the individual’s consciousness as a flow and the representation of the individual’s stream of consciousness in order to fully present and understand him/her, the individual’s experience of his/her subjective inner world within the objective external world without losing touch with it have appeared with Bergson’s philosophy. His ideas have affected the perception of the world, and have been influential on the writers of the time. Apart from the stream of consciousness technique and the individual as subject matter, there are other aspects of Modernism that could easily be detected within Richardson’s novels. The society we find in the novels, in which the individual searches for her own subjective world, is a chaotic one in which social movements such as the suffragist movement, international
103 interaction are seen. The profound doubt of the society as something outside and distinct from the individual turns the point of focus on to the subjective durational experience. Hence the durational search of Richardson’s protagonist for meaning in life and for an existence. Richardson, as the first English writer who reflects Bergsonian ideas in her work, has been influenced in such a way that her novel series Pilgrimage has its own durational experience as each novel is separate and new but is also related with the past, with the preceding novels.
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