In the autumn of 1956, Elizabeth Bowen delivered three unscripted talks on the novel for the BBC Home Service. They were reprinted as “Truth and Fiction” in her 1962 book, Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood and Afterthoughts: Pieces on Writing. Bowen offered the following comments on Dorothy Richardson and Pilgrimage.
… But there is not only the question of showing, of presenting, of introducing the characters. There is the still—I think—trickier one of keeping them in play, perpetually in the view of the reader, engaged in the action and also furthering the development of the plot. And this is done in two ways; either by analysis or by dialogue. Analysis has always been used. It was the original loose, comfortable, descriptive method which the late eighteenth-century people and the Victorians employed. The writer stepped in, he inter¬vened, he explained the actions of his characters, and he himself described their thoughts or emotions. But the other, the more recent and the more subtle kind of character analysis, which I think is most peculiar to the early part of the twentieth century, was called the “stream of consciousness,” and that had as its exponents such people as Dorothy Richardson, George Meredith, Proust, Henry James (increasingly as his work went on), James Joyce, and sometimes, though not to so great an extent, Virginia Woolf. This showed characters, not through explanations, but through the thoughts which occurred to them and the sensations which they had.
Consider this from Dorothy Richardson, out of one of the novels in the Miriam sequence which is called The Tunnel.
At Gower Street it was eleven o’clock. She was faint with hunger. She had had no dinner and there was nothing in her room. She wandered along the Euston Road hoping to meet a potato-man. The shop fronts were black. There was nothing to meet her need but the empty stretch of lamplit pavement leading on and on. Rapid walking in the rain-freshened air relieved her faintness, but she dreaded waking in the night with gnawing hunger to keep her awake and drag her up exhausted in the morning. A faint square of brighter light on the pavement ahead came like an accusation. Passing swiftly across it she glanced bitterly at the frosted door through which it came. Restaurant. Donizetti Brothers. The whole world had conspired to leave her alone with that mystery, shut in and hidden every day the whole of her London time behind its closed frosted front doors and forcing her now to admit that there was food there and that she must go in or have the knowledge of being starved through fear. Her thoughts flashed painfully across a frosted door long ago in Baker Street, and she saw the angry handsome face of the waiter who had shouted “Roll and butter” and whisked away from the table the twisted cone of serviette and the knives and forks. That was the middle of the day. It would be worse at night. Perhaps they would even refuse to serve her. Perhaps it was impossible to go into a restaurant late at night alone. She was coming back. There was nothing to be seen behind the steamy panes on either side of the door but plants standing on oil-cloth mats. Behind them was again frosted glass. It was not so grand as Baker Street. There was no menu in a large glass frame with “Schweppe’s” at the top. She pushed open the glass door and was confronted by another glass door blankly frosted all over. Why were they so secret?
You see how that works. Outwardly we have a street and the entrance to the restaurant, but all of it is photographed in terms of subjectivity of a hungry, tired, and, above all, nervous and dread-filled young woman who is trying to make up her mind to go in and buy herself a meal. Why does the light show like an accusation? Because here is something that she must face—food; but has she got the nerve to go in and order her small cheap meal? And the idea of secrecy and the restaurant being kept back as a sort of conspiratorial mystery. Here is somebody alone in London, and the entire five books of the sequence are devoted to this extraordinary reaction of one personality to what are outwardly perfectly ordinary circumstances to the Londoner who takes them for granted.
Two things may be remarked about the “stream of consciousness” in the showing of character. It does take time and it deals almost always with prosaic experience seen or reacted to in a highly individual way. I do not know whether we should ever have, for instance, a stream-of-consciousness novel about somebody scaling Everest, because the scaling of Everest is exciting enough in itself. In the ordinary “stream of consciousness,” the excitement, the sense of crisis, resides
in the personaHty, and all the other characters in the novel are likely to be slightly out of focus.