Dorothy Richardson discussion
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The Tunnel
Pilgrimage
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4.The Tunnel
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Jonathan
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Jan 04, 2015 09:57AM
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"Although THE TUNNEL is the fourth book that Miss Richardson has written, she must still expect to find her reviewers paying a great deal of attention to her method. It is a method that demands attention, as a door whose handle we wrench ineffectively calls our attention to the fact that it is locked. There is no slipping smoothly down the accustomed channels; the first chapters provide an amusing spectacle of hasty critics seeking them in vain. If this were the result of perversity, we should think Miss Richardson more courageous than wise; but being, as we believe, not wilful but natural, it represents a genuine conviction of the discrepancy between what she has to say and the form provided by tradition for her to say it in. She is one of the rare novelists who believe that the novel is so much alive that it actually grows. As she makes her advanced critic, Mr. Wilson, remark: "There will be books with all that cut out--him and her--all that sort of thing. The book of the future will be clear of all that." And Miriam Henderson herself reflects: "but if books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing and just how somebody else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right. To write books knowing all about style would be to become like a man." So "him and her" are cut out, and with them goes the old deliberate business: the chapters that lead up and the chapters that lead down; the characters who are always characteristic; the scenes that are passionate and the scenes that are humorous; the elaborate construction of reality; the conception that shapes and surrounds the whole. All these things are cast away, and there is left, denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished, the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, the small sensitive lump of matter, half transparent and half opaque, which endlessly reflects and distorts the variegated procession, and is, we are bidden to believe, the source beneath the surface, the very oyster within the shell.
The critic is thus absolved from the necessity of picking out the themes of the story. The reader is not provided with a story; he is invited to embed himself in Miriam Henderson's consciousness, to register one after another, and one on top of another, words, cries, shouts, notes of a violin, fragments of lectures, to follow these impressions as they flicker through Miriam's mind, waking incongruously other thoughts, and plaiting incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life. But a quotation is better than description.
She was surprised now at her familiarity with the details of the room . . . that idea of visiting places in dreams. It was something more than that . . . all the real part of your life has a real dream in it; some of the real dream part of you coming true. You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. Coming events cast light. It is like dropping everything and walking backward to something you know is there. However far you go out you come back.... I am back now where I was before I began trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things can touch me here. They are mine.
Here we are thinking, word by word, as Miriam thinks. The method, if triumphant, should make us feel ourselves seated at the centre of another mind, and, according to the artistic gift of the writer, we should perceive in the helter-skelter of flying fragments some unity, significance, or design. That Miss Richardson gets so far as to achieve a sense of reality far greater than that produced by the ordinary means is undoubted. But, then, which reality is it, the superficial or the profound? We have to consider the quality of Miriam Henderson's consciousness, and the extent to which Miss Richardson is able to reveal it. We have to decide whether the flying helter-skelter resolves itself by degrees into a perceptible whole. When we are in a position to make up our minds we cannot deny a slight sense of disappointment. Having sacrificed not merely "hims and hers," but so many seductive graces of wit and style for the prospect of some new revelation or greater intensity, we still find ourselves distressingly near the surface. Things look much the same as ever. It is certainly a very vivid surface. The consciousness of Miriam takes the reflection of a dentist's room to perfection. Her senses of touch, sight and hearing are all excessively acute. But sensations, impressions, ideas and emotions glance off her, unrelated and unquestioned, without shedding quite as much light as we had hoped into the hidden depths. We find ourselves in the dentist's room, in the street, in the lodging-house bedroom frequently and convincingly; but never, or only for a tantalizing second, in the reality which underlies these appearances. In particular, the figures of other people on whom Miriam casts her capricious light are vivid enough, but their sayings and doings never reach that degree of significance which we, perhaps unreasonably, expect. The old method seems sometimes the more profound and economical of the two. But it must be admitted that we are exacting. We want to be rid of realism, to penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it, and further require that Miss Richardson shall fashion this new material into something which has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms. We are asking too much; but the extent of our asking proves that "The Tunnel" is better in its failure than most books in their success."
Jonathan wrote: "Here is Woolf's review in its entirety from the TLS in 1919: "Although THE TUNNEL is the fourth book that Miss Richardson has written, she must still expect to find her reviewers paying a great d..."
I hate to bring this up, especially since I'm a big Virginia Woolf fan, but Duckworth Publishing was owned by her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth. While I wouldn't want to accuse the dead of bias, we should consider that Woolf had a business and family connection to the publisher that would have swayed her opinion here, especially since Duckworth published Woolf's own first novel.
None of this is meant to detract from Richardson's achievement. I only wish to mention why Woolf's review cannot be considered truly objective, in this case.
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What I find most interesting about this review, and why I quoted it, is what it shows us about Woolf's view of Richardson's aims, and her ideas about "stream of consciousness" prose in general - the process of it etc
Jonathan wrote: "What I find most interesting about this review, and why I quoted it, is what it shows us about Woolf's view of Richardson's aims, and her ideas about "stream of consciousness" prose in general - the process of it etc..."Yes, Woolf certainly incorporated Richardson's innovations into her own work. I haven't read enough Richardson yet to know how far she developed her formal experimentation, but I'm certainly glad she was there to inspire Woolf.
Mod
"Richardson’s own experiments with writing ‘organic’ prose culminated with The Tunnel and Interim, and it is possible to regard ‘About Punctuation’ as an implicit comment on these two volumes’ unusual punctuation and typography. While earlier instalments of Pilgrimage also include unorthodox use of punctuation, Richardson’s experimentation with ‘organic’ prose is more extreme in the two novel-chapters discussed here, and especially so in Interim.17 The differences are vast between the version that was serialised in The Little Review between June 1919 and June 1920 – and published by Duckworth in December 1919 – and the revised version published in the Dent omnibus edition of 1938, on which the Virago edition of 1979 is based.
In the first version of Interim, Richardson takes her experiment with punctuation to extreme lengths, mixing reported speech with Miriam’s thoughts in long, uninterrupted paragraphs with highly idiosyncratic punctuation. There is no clear indication as to which lines should be read as other characters’ speech and which belong to Miriam’s own interior monologue. Being one of the most radical examples of represented consciousness in the modernist period, Interim is hard reading and demands much from its reader. It is not known why Richardson revised the volume for its republication; possibly her editor made demands for standard punctuation, or Richardson herself was disappointed in the critical reaction to her experiment, which was largely unfavourable.18 By 1924, when her essay was first published, two further instalments of Pilgrimage had appeared – Deadlock in 1921 and Revolving Lights in 1923 – and she was at work on The Trap (1925). In none of these three volumes, nor in the subsequent five instalments of the sequence, does Richardson repeat the experimental punctuation she attempted in The Tunnel and Interim. When she revised the volumes for the Dent edition of Pilgrimage in 1938 she added many punctuation marks, and especially commas, making the text conform to what may be described as standard usage. For example, the revised edition of The Tunnel includes 1752 added commas, or 6.32 commas per page.19 In Interim, this number is an added 5.53 commas per page.20
Even the simplest descriptions of Miriam’s actions and surroundings read differently with the added punctuation, as in this passage from The Tunnel, which describes Miriam’s brief escape into the warm waiting-room on a cold and tired afternoon at the Wimpole Street dental practice:
The long faded rich crimson rep curtains obscured half the width of each high window and the London light screened by the high opposing houses fell dimly on the dingy books and periodicals scattered about the table. Miriam stood by the mantelpiece her feet deep in the black sheepskin rug and held out her hands towards the fire (The Tunnel, 55).
In the revised edition, the same passage reads as follows:
The long faded rich crimson rep curtains obscured half the width of each high window, and the London light, screened by the high opposing houses, fell dimly on the dingy books and periodicals scattered about the table. Miriam stood by the mantelpiece, her feet deep in the black sheepskin rug, and held out her hands towards the fire (II, 61).
The added commas are of the ‘machine’ variety, the kind which does not push readers towards engaging more actively with the text. What is most noticeably lost with the addition of the commas is the sense of immediacy which characterises the first version, and this is especially the case with the second sentence in the passage. Without the commas, the reader will have to slow down and maybe even reread the line before its content becomes quite clear. The commas bring a slightly different structure not only to the sentence, but to the experience it describes. The first version emphasises Miriam’s simultaneous experience of the heat of the fire against her hands and the warmth of the rug around her feet; the absence of punctuation in the passage serves to unify this experience. Her intense presence, both in the moment described and in the subjective nature of the description, is lost in the revised version, where she is depicted as though seen from the outside."
From http://dorothyrichardson.org/PJDRS/Is...
It'll be interesting to see how the OUP editions handle this re=punctuating. The comma=less piece of Ray's that I read is just so fantastic --; I don't really understand how folks could get so upset about a few fewer commas. And how better a paragraph can be without 'em.
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But yes - maybe I will ask about this at the talk in May.
Jonathan wrote: "But yes - maybe I will ask about this at the talk in May. "McCracken's doing another thing? I had my fingers crossed.
Unpunctuated must be so much more difficult to write ; and much more freeing to read.
Mod
McCracken's doing another thing? I had my fingers crossed.
yep - that event you will be attending in spirit I sent the mass message about...
Mod
Another fantastic write-up!And I agree, The Tunnel was the best installment of the work for me as well (I think Deadlock was my second favorite).
Definitely looking forward to further installments from you, thanks for the great work!
Will be getting here soon...just need to get through a few more pages of other things...
Started this up yesterday. Rather a coincidence that I went to the dentist on the same day. Reflecting on what's changed regarding that particular institution might have helped me get back into it the swing of Richardson's writing. In any case, it's good to be back, and I'm eager to see how the narrative develops during this section and the next one.
Mod
Quite near the end of this section, and Miriam mentions loving Robert Elsmere by Mary Augusta Ward, aka Mrs. Humphry Ward. I can't speak to that one, but Ward's Marcella is a work of vastly underread/underrated excellence, so it's nice to see a shout out in this regard. And then Miriam later follows up with adoration for Villette, a work which is very close to my own heart, so it's all been a very nice bookception fest at this point.
Dorothy Richardson
Books mentioned in this topic
Robert Elsmere (other topics)Marcella (other topics)
Villette (other topics)
