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163 DOROTHY RICHARDSON'S FOCUS ON TIME By Shirley Rose (University of Alberta, Edmonton) Reflecting the aesthetic temper of the modern period, Dorothy Richardson was acutely sensitive to the problems created by the literary expression of time. A strongly mystical quality of thought and perception led her to seek and ultimately find stability within time's apparent relentless movement, in the immutable core which underlies phenomena. Her investigation of time and timelessness influenced her consideration of certain correlative ideas: the levels and functions of individual memory and collective memory (history)ι the relationship of the annual cycle to the individual consciousness ι the paradox of being and becoming ι and the involvement of eternity in temporal time. Her views on the permutations effected by time on life and artistic endeavor may be found throughout her work, in discursive form in essays , as well as in Pilgrimage where theories become narrative. Dorothy Richardson's deliberations about time focus mainly on the apprehension of its passage and the synthesizing action of the consciousness that perceives it. Throughout, the emphasis is on the permanence of life implicit in the movement of time. In an early essay, Richardson experimented thematically with the concept of time by a method she continued to employ in her later, far more important work, the novels of Pilgrimage. The metaphor of the title "The Open Road" calls attention to the continuity of events in time stretching backward as memory of the past and forward as—anticipation of the future.! She studies time by comparing its effect on different levels of objective and subjective experience, creating thereby time-linkages through carefully connected series of allusions. Three principles of her thought and art are already at work: that there is an analogy between the minute homely experiences and perceptions of the present moment and the seemingly limitless expanse of the past ι that there is an essential enduring vitality within the phenomenal world around usi and emerging from these two principles, that moments of illumination and inspiration occur only during states of solitude and equilibrium. Later, Richardson is to suggest that the major blow to man's sensibilities is the destruction by the evolutionary theory of his sense of personal stability. Scientific evolution catapulted the idea of flux, of becoming, into the central position in man's idea of himself. While revolutionizing the scientific temper and redirecting philosophical thought, the theory was regarded by Richardson as false doctrine because it ignored the basic experience of the individual. As a result, "Everday humanity was left to make its choice between denying the deductions of science and being whirled headlong into the dizzying conception of a universe devoid of stability, existing only at the price of an eternal becoming,"2 However, with the advance of psychology's study of man came the assertion of an unchanging core within him. Richardson interprets the findings of psychology not only as affirming 164 the "collaboration between the spirit of man and the outspread scene. . . but [also] that there is within us an unchanging centre of being." In spite of the authority of science, these conclusions are corroborated by mankind generally through the recognition of the permanence inherent in nature. Nature, then, becomes a reflection of ourselves. The response of pleasure, for example, with which we greet the spring is reflective of the pleasure in ourselves. In Pilgrimage. Miriam feels the benediction of the season as analogous to an act of grace. She is an "enchanted guest. . . of spring and summer," the movement of these seasons "advancing upon her bringing hours upon hours of happiness. . . whether or no she was worthy."3 In other words, the response to spring is a salutation of the self to what is paradoxically permanent in nature and manifest within its cycle ι "we know," says Richardson, "that what greets nature's perfection is the unchanging centre of being in our painfully evolving selves."4 The "unchanging centre of being" and "our painfully evolving selves" - is there any way of reconciling these two supposed contraries ? Dorothy Richardson's general view suggests that to the consciousness, these seemingly irreconcilable states are not contraries ) that the synthesizing activity of the consciousness absorbs through contemplation the continuity of experience as...

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