Impersonality and the Damned Egotistical Self: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage

1In a diary entry for 1920, Woolf comments on the difficulties of achieving impersonality in writing, claiming that ‘the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce and Richardson.’1 While Joyce has been ably defended, most recently by Jean-Michel Rabaté, I want to return to the case of Dorothy Richardson to argue that the phenomenological account of consciousness in Pilgrimage constitutes an extended exercise in the impersonal method.2 By 1919, the year that T. S. Eliot launched his theory of impersonality (and his attack on expressivism), Richardson had published four of the 13-volume sequence of novels entitled Pilgrimage. Whereas Eliot calls for ‘the extinction of personality,’ Richardson’s project is centred on ‘personality’: a detailed representation of one woman’s emotional and intellectual development through ‘her own images; what she sees and thinks.’ (III, 285)3

2As modernism became institutionalised—and Michael Levenson gives Eliot’s assumption of editorship of The Criterion in 1922 as a key date4—the doctrine of impersonality became central to definitions of modernism. Writing on Pound and Eliot in The Poetics of Impersonality, Maud Ellmann for example claims that however contradictory and inconsistent one finds Eliot’s theory, ‘the notion of impersonality is crucial to modernist aesthetics.’5 Although current pluralist conceptions of modernism (s) deny any single definition of ‘modernist aesthetics,’ Ellmann’s point is historically important and crucial for Richardson’s case. For after an initial accolade in which her writing was widely and often favourably compared with that of Proust, Joyce, and Woolf, Richardson was found wanting in impersonality; her ‘subjective method’ dismissed as egotistical, solipsistic, or simply ‘Feminine without the charm,’ as Lionel Trilling charmingly put it at the height of institutionized male modernism. Woolf, writing fiction not poetry, and with a very different set of political and aesthetic concerns from Eliot, also subscribes to a notion of impersonality—as her strictures on Joyce and Richardson imply. Whereas Woolf was eventually recognised as a fully paid up modernist (the token woman of modernism), a supposed lack of impersonality was used to exclude Richardson and other women writers from the modernist canon.6

3Richardson, like Woolf an active reader and reviewer in this period, wrote her riposte to accusations of ‘subjectivism’ into Dawn’s Left Hand, the tenth volume of Pilgrimage published in 1931. Here her fictional persona, Miriam Henderson, maintains ‘that discovery about oneself is impersonal, as well as personal, like a discovery in chemistry.’ (1V, 140) The very terms of this statement signal Richardson’s engagement with the art-as-impersonality debates which feature in the pre-war exchange between Pound and Ford Madox Ford in which Pound claimed that ‘the arts, literature, poetry, are a science just as chemistry is a science.’7 They also link to contemporary psychoanalytic claims to scientificity which Richardson comments upon in her review of Barbara Low’s book on Freud in 1920 and to Husserl’s ambition to produce a scientific method in philosophy (Richardson was familiar with Husserl’s work through T. E. Hulme’s essay in The New Age and Husserl’s lectures at University College in London 1922).8 However, Miriam’s statement must also be read as a direct reference to T. S. Eliot’s image of impersonality in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science... The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum...’9 At the end of this passage, after the quotation from Aristotle’s De Anima, (‘Mind is no doubt something more divine and impassible’), Eliot goes on to say that, ‘[t]his essay will halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism....’ Richardson was not as cautious as ‘old Possum’ is here, and her representation of the mind and its emotions in Pilgrimage deliberately breaches the frontier between fiction, philosophy and religion. For as her heroine, Miriam Henderson ruefully decides in The Trap (1925): ‘She had reached the conclusion that fiction was at worst a highly flavoured drug and at best as much of an abstraction as metaphysics...’ (III, 426) Richardson’s fiction, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is a way of writing philosophy and not just in the sense that Derrida uses when he claims that ‘[m]etaphysical assumptions inhabit all literature,’10 but in the strong sense that Richardson is directly concerned with questions of ontology, epistemology and ethics; and her narrative innovations, her modernism, can be seen as an effect of her philosophical project—to write a phenomenology of the mind and its emotions.

4Like other women modernists including Woolf, Richardson rejects a notion of consciousness as thought or reason, in favour of a more complex and inclusive definition which includes sensation, emotion, and perception as well as thought. Her heroine, a student of philosophy, decides like Husserl that consciousness is always consciousness of something and that Descartes should have said, ‘I am aware there is something, therefore I am...’ (III, 171) For Richardson, thinking, feeling, perceiving or imagining, all mental activity is always intentional activity. But unlike Husserl, she did not wish to bracket out the content, the ‘qualia’ of subjective experience, but to present in all its specificity the intentional relationship between the mind and the world. It is in this phenomenological sense, I think, that she claimed that discovery about the self is impersonal as well as personal.

5In addition to phenomenology, Richardson also drew on what Eliot calls ‘mysticism.’ The mystics’ techniques of silence, ‘distance’ and contemplation enable what she calls ‘impersonality’: ‘impersonality where past and future, vanished from their places, lay powerless to nudge and jostle, far away within the depths of a perfect present.’ (IV, 453)

6In a non-fictional book about the Quakers, The Quakers Past and Present published in 1914,11 Richardson positions the Quakers as part of ‘the family of the mystics’ (v), and claims that their doctrine of Inner Light and the spiritual method of ‘centering down’ during Quaker meetings, anticipate developments in modern psychology, the cinematograph, and contemporary philosophies of mind (33): ‘like every seeker, on whatever level, they were led by feeling. Feeling passed into action. Thought followed in due course, and was deposited into doctrine...’ (36) In this early formulation, ‘feeling’ is accorded primacy and thought follows later—is a process of working through (though Richardson adds a caveat about ‘psychology’s trinity of thought, feeling and will as separable activities’). However, in successive chapters of Pilgrimage the presentation of emotion is more complex; it is cognitivist insofar as it emphasises the intentional, evaluative and appetitive aspects of emotion. But the ‘thick descriptions’ of the particular situations in which the heroine experiences those emotions, the insistence on cultural context, link her method to social constructivist theories of emotion as described by Rom Harré.12 Throughout, Richardson locates emotion in relations rather than in subjects.

7So, in Pilgrimage, both metaphysics and mysticism inform the presentation of emotion. The question of impersonality figures as both theme and method; it mediates between past and future (as in the above quotation—‘an impersonality where past and future, vanished from their places’), between self and other, masculine and feminine, reason and emotion. Impersonality or what Miriam calls ‘distance,’ operates as a way of dissolving or managing oppositions which is thematized throughout Pilgrimage. In the early chapters dealing with teaching, for example, the differences between ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowing’ are called impersonal (knowledge) or personal (the subject who knows); for the seeker/heroine, Miriam Henderson, the personal and impersonal are also ways of characterizing and critiquing gender positions: women are ‘personal,’ while men offer a ‘refreshing tide of impersonality.’ (IV, 47) The heroine (‘I am something between a man and a women, looking both ways’ [II, 187]) is torn between the truth claims of a particularist vision and the universalist abstractions of her male friends and her own male-identified intellectual commitments. Dimple Hill (1938) which presents Miriam Henderson’s search for a mystical solution/dissolution to these antinomies, reaffirms her commitment to ‘distance,’ as she later reflects: ‘Why do they say distance lends enchantment? Distance in time or space does not lend. It reveals.’ (IV, 607) In the last volume of Pilgrimage, March Moonlight, Miriam’s decision to write is framed as a quest for distance and perspective, Richardson’s terms for impersonality: ‘[To] travel, while I write, down to that centre where everything is seen in perspective...’ (IV, 619)

8Rei Terada claims that ‘It is only possible to construct a theory of emotion—or of anything—by asking how to represent it. The difficulty of representing emotion, in other words, IS the difficulty of knowing what it is....’13 The difficulty of representing emotion is at the heart of Richardson’s project. Reading Scott Moncrieff’s translations of two volumes of Swann’s Way in the winter of 1922, just before the publication of the seventh chapter of Pilgrimage, Richardson said that it was inaccurate to say he was writing ‘through consciousness....’ In her opinion, Proust was writing ‘about consciousness, a vastly different enterprise.’14 While Proust in these volumes uses the first person and the past tense more or less continuously,15 Richardson, writing through consciousness, uses the split between an experiencing self (first person) and an observing/ representing self (third person) to produce an objectified account of emotion. The split persona (the name Miriam contains, as Stephen Heath points out, the myriad—I—ams of a decentred identity) together with the alternation of first, second and third person pronouns, tense-shifts and radical punctuation is an attempt to objectify the persona, to prevent any simple identification between the reader and the character she has created. Richardson’s impersonalising techniques can be seen in the passage quoted below:

The bony old woman held Miriam clasped closely in her arms. ‘You must never, as long as you live, blame yourself, my gurl.’ She went away. Miriam had not heard her come in. The pressure of her arms and her huge body came from far away. Miriam clasped her hands together. She could not feel them. Perhaps she had dreamed that the old woman had come in and said that. Everything was dream; the world. I shall not have any life. I can never have any life; all my days. There were cold tears running into her mouth. They had no salt. Cold water. They stopped. Moving her body with slow difficulty against the unsupporting air, she looked slowly about. It was so difficult to move. Everything was airy and transparent. Her heavy hot light impalpable body was the only solid thing in the world, weighing tons; and like a lifeless feather. There was a tray of plates of fish and fruit on the table. She looked at it, heaving with sickness and looking at it. I am hungry. Sitting down near it she tried to pull the tray. It would not move. I must eat the food. Go on eating food, till the end of my life. Plates of food like these plates of food.... I am in eternity... where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched. (I, 489-90)

9This paragraph occurs after a double spacing (Barthes’ segmentation) at the end of the third novel. It starts in the third person, switches to second-person dialogue and then alternates between third- and first-person narration. There is no reference to the narrative event (her mother’s suicide) which precedes this passage and Miriam’s feelings of guilt and grief are not directly described or named for the reader; her emotions are presented through first-person repetitions (‘I shall not have any life. I can never have any life; all my days.’) and third-person descriptions of her body (‘There were cold tears running into her mouth’)—that is, the physical signs of emotion.

10The theme of guilt and redemption which runs through the novel is obliquely introduced the human, spoken absolution at the beginning of the passage (‘You must never, as long as you live, blame yourself...’ [I, 489-490]) is answered by the biblical references at the end ‘I am in eternity... where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched’). The biblical quotation refers to Jesus’s statement (Mark, 9.44) and echoes Isaiah 66.24. In the New Testament version, Jesus goes on to say that ‘every sacrifice shall be salted with salt’ and ‘Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another.’ (Mark 9.49-50)16 Since Miriam’s tears ‘had no salt,’ the reference signifies not only the extreme and enduring nature of her reaction (the hell she is in) but proleptically, points forward to the long journey she has to make toward peace and self-forgiveness.

11The passage is also an example of what one might call Nachträglich-keit—in Freud’s sense of a deferred action, by which a traumatic experience takes on its full meaning only at a later stage. The shock of the first event (the mother’s suicide) is re-presented in writing—this is to be a writing cure rather than a talking cure, one might say. As Peter Nicholls argues about Pound’s use of Noh plays,17 this belatedness creates a complex temporality whereby the meaning of the original emotional experience is deferred, and made different by its repetition. The paragraph cited here is both an attempt to represent, in all its immediacy, the original emotion and a displaced, distanced re-presentation of emotion which, in Derrida’s phrase is ‘a past that has never been present.’18 The reader is thus presented with two times: a past of repetition and a present which ‘celebrates its reworking.’ The doubling of temporalities is another of the ways in which Richardson attempts to impersonalize her life and emotions in fiction.

12The next volume of Pilgrimage (The Tunnel) opens without any reference either to these emotions or to the narrative event which in the last volume produced them. However the seventh chapter of The Tunnel, consisting of a single paragraph, presents a recurrence of these feelings. Here they are triggered by a specific place, a London street which features an advertisement for a brand of tea. Again the first-person is used to create immediacy, while the indirect method, by which the reader is forced to construe the significance of what is being narrated, operates as a check on any identification. The technique is an attempt to hold thought and emotion in balance:

Why must I always think of her in this place?... It is always worst just along here... Why do I always forget there’s this piece... always be hurrying along seeing nothing and then, suddenly, Teetgens Teas and this row of shops? I can’t bear it. I don’t know what it is. It’s always the same. I always feel the same. It is sending me mad... [my elision... ] I don’t know where this bit is or how I get to it. I come every day because I am meant to go mad here. Something that knows brings me here and is making me go mad because I am myself and nothing changes me. (II, 136)

13The presentation of Miriam’s emotion is charged with a number of questions about remembering and forgetting, the compulsion to repeat, the spatial nature of memory, and the ways in which in Bergson’s phrase, ‘the past gnaws into the present.’ The ‘Something that knows’ seems to suggest not only a divided self but the agency of the unconscious. Miriam’s ‘why?’ dramatises the character’s anguish but also activates these questions for the reader.19

14The loss of the mother is signified by a sign, literally, by an advertising sign above a teashop, ironically emphasising the ways in which emotion and language are implicated with one another and, in Freudian terms, the cathexis attached to these two words. The sign for Teetgens Teas is used in subsequent volumes to map the progress of Miriam’s psychic mourning. (See III, 107 and IV, 155) Only when she has worked through (durcharbeiten) the maternal loss in relationships with different love objects does the effect of this sign diminish: ‘She had forgotten it; perhaps somehow learned to avoid it. Her imagined figure passed from the haunted scene, and from the vast spread of London the tide flowed through it, leaving it a daylit part of the whole, its spell broken and gone.’ (III, 107)

15If one compares Proust’s use of the ‘madeleine’ with the ‘Teetgens Teas’ moment in Pilgrimage, one can see Richardson’s point about Proust writing ‘about consciousness, rather than through it.’ The narrator of Swann’s Way tastes the madeleine, describes and analyses his feelings (‘a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.’)20 The narrator in Pilgrimage presents Miriam’s emotional experience and demands that the reader provide the analysis.

16Although Richardson’s impersonal method was very different from Virginia Woolf’s, Woolf’s comment on ‘moments of being’ in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ is highly relevant to my reading of emotion in Pilgrimage. Woolf claims that, for her, writing is a way of recognising and ordering her emotions:

I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing this I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together... From this I reach what I might call a philosophy . . .21

17Richardson, I would argue, is involved in a similar project. Her forays into metaphysics and mysticism, and her 1800-page blockbuster represent a struggle to come to terms with emotion (by ‘putting it into words’) and thus to turn life into art and redeem what Woolf called ‘the damned egotistical self’: ‘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.’ (IV, 657)22