Pilgrimage is often described as one of the earliest examples of the use of stream of consciousness in fiction, although Dorothy Richardson herself objected to this statement. In this excerpt from his introduction to Volume IV of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Dorothy Richardson (Pointed Roofs and Backwater), Prof. Scott McCracken offers a better explanation of what Richardson was trying to achieve.
Richardson’s method was many years in the making. A series of fragmentary notes, possibly written when she was composing the Foreword for the 1938 edition, give some indication of how her ideas developed. One gives a critical account of her early attempts:
1909. Wrote a mass of material each part expanding in the mind unmanageably, choked by the necessities of narrative. Close narrative too technical, dependent on a whole questionable set of agreements & assumptions between reader & writer.
But another note suggests a breakthrough:
deliberately composed narrative, incidents & figures. Became aware of the mass lying unexpressed behind any way of presentation I had met. Except Bunyan & the mystics. To write what one knows, regardless. The novels <to date> exclude the essential: first-hand life. Assume life. Describe humanity in terms of humanity, therefore not at all.
To get at the essence of experience she needed to find a way to get by standard modes of representation. As she told Louise Morgan, ‘I suddenly realized that I couldn’t go on in the usual way, telling about Miriam, describing her. There she was as I first saw her, going upstairs. But who was there to describe her? It came to me suddenly.’ After this revelation, Richardson cut out the contextual material that framed Miriam’s experience, allowing only Miriam to represent her incomplete and unfinished understanding of her environment’. The result was not just the narration of Miriam’s experience, but, Richardson hoped, a new relationship with her readers that would transform their understanding of what experience is. In order to maintain the impression of immediate experience, information in Pilgrimage is only given indirectly. As noted above, the narrative is marked by absences indicated by ellipses and gaps between sections, which indicate the gaps and breaks in Miriam’s consciousness. These silences are not empty. They imply rather than describe the broader culture in which Miriam is immersed. Pilgrimage contains a web of allusions to a wealth of partially disclosed intertexts. As Miriam gains experience and understanding of the world, more information is given, albeit not necessarily reliable information: the reader participates in Miriam’s misunderstandings as well as her insights, her poor judgements and prejudices as well as her delight in the possibilities of her environment. Pointed Roofs and Backwater can be read as early parts of what is both a Bildungsroman and a Künstlerroman. Miriam’s errors, if not quite portals of discovery like those of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, are instead steps to knowledge, a process that Pilgrimage incorporates into its method, so that ‘the reader’s collaboration is secured’ in an adventure of the stable contemplative human consciousness’