Richardson’s Use of Details

 

From Dorothy Richardson, by Jean Radford. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991.

To read Pilgrimage is to enter into a mass of detail, descriptive detail whose relevance to story, characterisation or theme is rarely made explicit. As critics frequently note, with irritation or pleasure, the book seems composed of minute observations of the particular, the details of colours, sounds, scents and textures as these are registered in Miriam”s mind. It is often difficult to assign a meaning or function to any specific detail in relation to the structure, a mosaic of particularities makes it hard to see the overall pattern.

At one level Miriam”s continual scrutiny of the details of objects, clothes, accents, furnishings, rooms, expresses her hermeneutic quest. She scans the particular world about her in an attempt to dissolve the old generalities, to find new meanings and new ways of reading. To read detail in this way is to find a thematic function for it. But there are many “superfluous” details whose presence in the text is harder to justify in these terms.

At another level one might argue that the detail becomes a privileged point of contact between reader and text, a hook to which the reader may fasten their own fantasies, asssociations. At one point in the text the question of detail explicitly is raised as a problem for the heroine. Staying for the first time at the house of friends Alma and Hypo Wilson she sees, “the copper candlestick, twisting beautifully up from its stout stem. What made it different from ordinary candlesticks? What? It was like a . . . gesture” (from The Tunnel).

The detail of the candlestick “twisting beautifully up from its stout stem” is never explained. It may suggest the stout body of Hypo Wilson and the way in which he is different from other men, it may represent simply her encounter with the Bohemian world, or it may signify neither of these. By activating the reader”s own questions, the passage draws the reader into a parallel activity (“side by side”) thus producing a collaborative reader. Reading the world and reading the text are paralleled so that in staging Miriam”s attempt to read it, the passage itself operates as a “gesture” to put the problems of signification (what signifies?) before the reader.

Roland Barthes, discussing the relation of detail and structure in nineteenth-century narratives, notes the existence of “superfluous” detail:

these details are scandalous (from the point of view of structure), or, even more disturbingly, they seem to be allied with a kind of narrative luxury, profligate to the extent of throwing up “useless” details and increasing the cost of narrative information.

According to Barthes, the inclusion of such descriptive detail in nineteenth-century narratives (trivial gestures, insignificant objects, superfluous dialogue) is used to produce a “reality effect”; that is, excessive detail which is not integrated into the narrative or thematic codes serves to signify the category of “the real”. Its function is to confirm the mimetic contract and to guarantee that the text is about the real world, and after a process of recognition and identification the reader can then interpret or give meaning to what has been identified.

But where there is an excessive proliferation of elements whose function seems purely referential, as in the six-page description of the room at the beginning of The Tunnel, the interpretive activity is problematised. The reader can construct the room (or object) but finds it difficult to construct a meaning for it: “A mania of precision produces a thematique vide.”

Pilgrimage breaks with the nineteenth-century contract described by Barthes. It uses physical description, descriptive detail, repeatedly and at great length, not to ensure the “reality effect” but to produce a resistance to meaning. Often Richardson”s use of detail is a device to delay or impede meaning-construction, to slow up the reading and “hold up the development of the whole” (from Richardson’s Foreword to the 1937 J. M. Dent edition of Pilgrimage) which Richardson thought desirable in the novel. “What one was assured were the essentials seemed to me secondary to something I could not then define, and the curtain dropping finalities entirely false to experience” (from Journey to Paradise: 139).

In terms of her aesthetic, the valorisation of the detail over the whole, the particular over the general may be necessary when the conventions governing the whole are “false”. Or as Miriam claims in Deadlock:

It was history, literature, the way of stating records, reports, stories, the whole method of statement of things from the beginning that was on a false foundation.

In other words, the particularism of Pilgrimage is a reaction to master narratives, to the conviction that all the major discursive modes — “history, literature, the way of stating records” — were “on a false foundation”. The point then is not to construct an alternative version of the master narrative, “a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (from Richardson’s Foreword), but to lead the reader towards a new “method of statement” for both literature and history.