Dorothy Richardson's "Unreadability": Graphic Style and Narrative Strategy in a Modernist Novel

Dorothy Richardson's "Unreadability": Graphic Style and Narrative Strategy in a Modernist Novel John mepham Kingston University IT WAS FROM 1919, with the publication of The Tunnel and Interim , and the serialisation of the latter in the Little Review, that Dorothy Richardson's work developed the reputation of being "unreadable." What was it that gave rise to this charge? The argument of this article is that radical innovations in narrative and graphic style in these two works caused the problem. Here Richardson went too far in her experiments , further than she had gone in the "difficult" earlier volumes oÃ- Pilgrimage , and further than even some sympathetic readers were prepared to follow. One aspect of her "unreadability" was the graphic style of her "feminine realism" in The Tunnel.1 The following volume, Interim , made even more severe demands on the reader. Here Richardson introduced new layout, punctuation and notations for reported speech that were unlike anything that she used in any other volume of Pilgrimage . These choices and revisions of textual style have not been scrutinised or explained in detail, and the broader textual history of Pilgrimage, with its radically shifting stylistic strategies, merits closer study. Most critical comment on Richardson's style makes no mention of the ways in which the different volumes differ so significantly from each other. Experiments in graphic style were of great interest to modernist writers, but in this respect poetry has been studied more thoroughly than fiction.2 The study of the styles ofPilgrimage should be seen in that broader context. In later years, Richardson abandoned some of the more radical, avant-garde features of her graphic style and in the now standard edition ofPilgrimage, which she herself prepared in 1938, Interim in particular was drastically re-set, without explanation or com449 ELT 43 : 4 2000 ment, so that modern readers tend to have no idea of the extent of Richardson 's earlier stylistic experimentation. By 1917 Richardson had published three volumes of her novel sequence to good reviews (Pointed Roofs, 1915; Backwater, 1916; Honeycomb , 1917). She had already built up a reputation as a writer of the first rank. Her name was mentioned along with those of Proust and Joyce as a trail blazer in the modernisation of fiction. By 1919 she was, says her biographer Gloria Fromm, one of the "most talked about novelists of the day."4 In April 1918, May Sinclair's review of these volumes appeared in the Little Review and a shorter version appeared in the Egoist. This review is celebrated for introducing the term "stream of consciousness" into the discussion of literature. Sinclair praised Richardson's trilogy in the highest terms. It made such a good pitch for Richardson's work that her publishers, Duckworth, printed a large extract from it as publicity at the back of the next volume in 1919, The Tunnel. J. D. Beresford, in his introduction to the first volume, warned readers that they might find it "difficult," that it was so unconventional as to amount to "a new form of fiction." The difficulty was perceived to arise partly from the unexpected lack of familiar narrative shape. Although the three novels (or they might have been chapters of one novel, it was not clear) told a familiar growing-up story, recounting the first twenty years of the life of the young Miriam Henderson, the story lacked both the expected narrative continuity and the usual sense of an ending. The lack of narrative continuity was established in part by the visual style of the text, which was in places divided into short numbered sections (these were deleted from all editions from 1938 on and readers of editions now in print will not have come across them). In going from one section to another, the reader is often left without the usual narrative scene-setting that provides clues about the relationships within fictional time and space. Moreover, there were the famous stream-of-consciousness sections, characterised again by visual style, with ellipses, gaps and italics as well as informal syntax mimicking the language of thought. The third respect in which Richardson experimented with unfamiliar visual style was in her punctuation and layout of reported speech, but...