Michael Fried - What Was Literary Impressionism - Harvard University Press (2018)

What Was Literary Impressionism?
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, manuscript, 1894. Clifton Walter
Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collec-
tions Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (Accession No. MSS 5505-a).
n
What Was Literary
Impressionism?
Michael Fried
the belk na p pr ess of

h a r va r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2018
Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fried, Michael, author.
Title: What was literary impressionism? / Michael Fried.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017043786 | ISBN 9780674980792 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Impressionism in literat ure. | Visual perception in literat ure. |
English literat ure—19th century—History and criticism. | English literat ure—20th
century—History and criticism. | American literat ure—19th century—History and criticism. |
American literat ure—20th century—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literat ure)
Classification: LCC PN56.I5 F75 2018 | DDC 823 / .9120911—dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2017043786
Cover art: (top) Joseph Conrad, first page, first version of chapter 11 of the manuscript of Almayer’s
Folly, late March or early April 1894. Philadelphia: The Rosenback Museum and Library; (bottom)
Illustration from Voyage pittoresque et Historique au Brésil by Jean-Baptiste Debret (1798–1848),
published in Paris, 1839 (color lithograph), after Jean-Baptiste Debret. Bibliothèque Sainte-Genev-
iève, Paris, France / Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images
Cover design: Jill Breitbarth

To the memory of Edward Said
Contents
Introduction: The Upturned Page 1

One Almayer’s Face 28
Two Invisible Writing 58
Three Ford’s Impressionism 89
Four Some Impressionist (and Non-Impressionist) Faces 125
Five “A Blankness to Run At and Dash Your Head Against” 161
Six Maps, Charts, and Mist 186
Seven The Writing of Revolution 228
Eight Versions of Regression 261
Nine How Literary Impressionism Ended 290
Coda: Four Modernists 317
Notes 337
Acknowledgments 387
Index 389
The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general anglosaxon
mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadère of Journalism,
of the newspaper & the picture (above all) magazine; who keeps screaming
“Look at me, I am the thing, & I only, the thing that will keep you in relation
with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time.”
If you are moved to write anything anywhere about the W. of the D. [The
Wings of the Dove] do say something of that—it so awfully wants saying.
But we live in a lonely age for literature or for any art but the mere visual. Il-
lustrations, loud simplifications and grossissements, the big building (good
for John [Howells’s son, an architect];) the “mounted” play, the prose that is
careful to be in the tone of, & with the distinction of, a newspaper or bill-
poster advertisement—these, & these only, meseems, “stand a chance.”
—Henry James to W. D. Howells, 1902
No theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing.

—Henry James to Robert Louis Stevenson, 1891
Introduction
The Upturned Page
N
L e t me begi n on a personal note. My engagement with the topic of

literary impressionism first came about in a somewhat indirect way.
In the late spring of 1982, about halfway through writing a book on the
French realist painter Gustave Courbet, I visited the large exhibition of
the work of the American painter Thomas Eakins that was then being held
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Eakins, too, was a realist; born in
1844, he was a full generation younger than Courbet, who proclaimed
himself a Realist, with a capital R, in 1855.) Naturally, I had looked at Ea-
kins’s paintings before, but had never known what to make of them—
they had always puzzled and disconcerted me, for reasons that I had never
been able to bring into focus. On this occasion, though, I began to have
a few ideas, based, to begin with, on certain partial analogies with the art
of Courbet.
For example (a key example, as everything I went on to work out flowed
from this), standing before Eakins’s stupendous early masterpiece The
Gross Clinic (1875) (Figure 1), I was struck by the fact that the famous
surgeon Samuel Gross holding a blood-tipped scalpel could be seen as
analogous to a painter standing with a paintbrush in his hand as if con-
templating his model or perhaps his canvas—here I thought specifically
of the figure of Velázquez in Las Meninas (1656) (Figure 2), a picture
1
2 w h at wa s l i t e r a ry i m p r e s s i o n i s m ?
Eakins would have seen in Madrid shortly before returning to Philadel-

phia in 1870 a fter spending nearly five years as a student in the Paris
studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme. This resonated with my emerging under-
standing of Courbet’s mature art as continually comprising disguised
or displaced and often partial representations of the painter (or as I tended
to say, the painter-beholder) in the act of painting, a view of his enterprise
that I went on to develop at length in my book Courbet’s Realism (1990).1
So, for example, I had come to see young and older laborers in The
Stonebreakers (1849) (Figure 3) as stand-ins for the painter-beholder’s left
and right (or palette-and brush-) hands, respectively; more broadly, cen-
tral personages depicted from the rear, often involved in two-handed
operations, as in After Dinner at Ornans (1848–1849) (Figure 4) and
The Wheat Sifters (1854), I saw as figures for the painter-beholder seated
before and working on his canvas. (The further point was that by
painting himself “into” his canvases in this way, Courbet would in effect
have neutralized or negated his status as beholder of his work, thereby
resolving a problem that had devolved upon ambitious painting in
France around the m iddle of the eighteenth century.2) But then I noticed
that the Gross Clinic included two personages wielding pencils—the so-
called recording physician, making notes on the operation, and (more
obscurely but unmistakably) Eakins “himself,” seated among the other
students toward the right-hand edge of the canvas and either sketching
the scene or making notes on it or both, along with a conspicuous third
figure, the assistant surgeon intently probing the incision in the pa-
tient’s thigh in order to remove a diseased portion of bone (the opera-
tion was for osteomyelitis). This last action struck me as much closer in
kind to writing or drawing than to painting, which is to say that the
Gross Clinic invited the thought that it presented the act of painting and
that of writing and / or drawing in close relation to each other—indeed,
as elements in a single compound “system” of representation (one that
differed precisely in that respect from anything to be found in Courbet).
It then occurred to me to go through the exhibition from start to finish
looking out for other signs of writing or graphic notation—and when I
did so I found them in abundance, not only within the paintings them-
selves (letters, numbers, sheet music, posters, stencils, decorative flour-
ishes, etc.) but also, in a few key instances, the most brilliant of which is
Introduction 3
Fig. 1. Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift
of the Alumni Association to Jefferson Medical College in 1878 and purchased by
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in
2007, with the generous support of more than 3,600 donors (Accession No. 2007-1-1).
that of Eakins’s portrait Professor Henry A. Rowland (1897), carved into

their original frames.
This was intriguing, as it suggested a new slant on Eakins’s achieve-
ment, but then I noticed something further: that in painting after
painting (though by no means in all), the “system” of what I came to call
writing / drawing was associated with the horizontal plane of inscrip-

tion, which is to say, with the plane of an upward-facing sheet of paper
lying flat on a table or desk or other hard support (along with Eakins’s
commitment to rigorous perspective, one of the basic features of his art
throughout his career). At the same time, I sensed in the paintings an-
other, antithetical or at least fundamentally different “system” oriented
to the upright or vertical plane of the canvas (significantly, photographs
of Eakins at work invariably show the canvas on his easel to be abso-
lutely vertical), with the result that in picture a fter picture one finds a
Fig. 2. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
(Inventory No. P01174).
Introduction 5
Fig. 3. Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849–1850 (destroyed, February

1945). Formerly at Staatliche Gemäldegalerie (State Picture Gallery), Dresden.
Fig. 4. Gustave Courbet, After Dinner at Ornans, 1848–1849. Palais des Beaux
Arts, Lille (Inventory No. P. 522). Photograph by Philipp Bernard. © RMN–Grand
Palais / Art Resource, NY.
structural and sometimes also a thematic tension or struggle or compro-

mise between the two orientations, or as I also came to put it, between
the “spaces” associated with each. The discomfort I had often felt
looking at his paintings had its source precisely t here.
Here it is relevant that Eakins when young had been trained as a writing
master, someone whose profession would involve if not the teaching of
writing, at any rate the “engrossing” of documents—his father’s profes-
sion, as a matter of fact. A crucial textbook on this subject was Rembrandt
Peale’s Graphics (first edition 1834), in which the issue of orientation—
vertical versus horizontal—emerges as central, the education of the young
draftsman involving learning how to accurately depict objects conceived
as essentially vertical (i.e., upright) on the horizontal plane of graphic
representation. As I went on to write in a long essay on Eakins, which in
slightly revised form became the first of two chapters in my book Realism,
Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane,
In Eakins’s art . . . t he crucial tension or conflict between planes

of representation takes place at a more advanced or anyway a dif
ferent stage. But the source of the conflict is, I think, the same as
in the passage from Peale: the mutual identification of writing and
drawing that Graphics systematically advocates and that all of Ea-
kins’s early training reinforced. That is, I suggest that that it was pri-
marily the strength and explicitness of that identification that defined
the “space” of drawing as essentially horizontal in distinction to the
vertical or upright “space” of reality on the one hand (Peale) and of
painting on the other (Eakins). Not that the “space” of writing is al-
ways and everywhere intrinsically or naturally horizontal; on the
contrary, t here have been cultures and epochs that would have found
that association positively unnatural (modern technological society
may be on the verge of doing so), and in any case the explicitness
with which Peale argues his position represents a specific cultural
formation. Given that formation, however, the emergence of a sense of
disjunction between planes of representation may be imagined to
have followed naturally enough, though it is only in Eakins, so far
as I am aware, that an attempt to come to grips with that disjunc-
Introduction 7
tion becomes the implicit project of a large and significant body of

painting.
What this meant in practice was that painting, in obvious re
spects the more comprehensive enterprise, had to be made to con-
tain or subsume writing / drawing, which in one sense it couldn’t fail
to do even while in another, ultimately more important sense the
disparity between the “spaces” of writing / drawing and of painting
was such that no true containment or subsumption, certainly
no perfect dissolving of the first into the second, could be accom-
plished. Thus the proliferation of images of writing in Eakins’s pic-
tures may be seen both as representing an effort at containment—
painting depicting writing and thereby mastering it—and as an
index of the less than complete success of that effort—writing in-
vesting painting and thereby escaping its control. 3
This barely summarizes my understanding of Eakins’s enterprise, but

it sets the scene for my immediately subsequent approach to the work of
the nineteenth-century American writer Stephen Crane (b. 1871), which
marked my first engagement with the question of literary impres-
sionism. When early in the summer of 1984 I sat down to write my essay
on Eakins, I was already familiar with Crane’s novels and stories. This
had come about fortuitously: roughly twenty years before, as a first-year
graduate student in the history of art at Harvard, I was looking for
something to read besides less than totally engaging monographs on
later sixteenth-century Italian painting and discovered a paperback of
John Berryman’s Stephen Crane in the Harvard Book Store. (I was
aware of Berryman’s poetry and was intrigued to find that he was also
a critic.4) I bought a copy, and I also bought The Red Badge of Courage,
which fortunately I had never previously encountered— fortunately
because I was thus able to come to it fresh—along with a collection of
Crane’s short stories and tales, both of which I immediately began to
read. From the very first, I found myself swept away, dazzled, stunned, as
by the most incandescent poetry—I had never i magined that prose could
do what Crane’s so palpably did, page a fter page, paragraph a fter para-
graph, sentence after sentence. And before long I began to harbor the
dream of eventually writing something about him. In particular I was

struck by a short two-part narrative, “The Upturned Face,” ostensibly an
account of the burial, under e nemy fire, of a dead officer by two fellow
officers. It opens:
“What w ill we do now?” said the adjutant, troubled and excited.

“Bury him,” said Timothy Lean.
The two officers looked down close to their toes where lay the
body of their comrade. The face was chalk-blue; gleaming eyes
stared at the sky. Over the two upright figures was a windy sound
of bullets, and on top of the hill, Lean’s prostrate company of Spitz-
bergen infantry was firing measured volleys.5
A grave is dug and Lean and the adjutant search the dead man’s clothes
for “things,” as the adjutant puts it. Lean rises “with a ghastly face. He
had gathered a watch, a whistle, a pipe, a tobacco pouch, a handkerchief,
a little case of cards and papers” (“UF,” 1283–1284). Meanwhile the bul-
lets keep spitting overhead u ntil the grave is dug; the completion of the
task is announced as follows: “The grave was finished. It was not a
masterpiece—poor little shallow thing. Lean and the adjutant looked at
each other in a curious silent communication” (“UF,”1284). The two of-
ficers proceed to tumble the dead man into the grave, d oing their best not
to feel the corpse. “They tugged away; the corpse lifted, heaved, toppled,
flopped into the grave, and the two officers, straightening, looked again
at each other—they were always looking at each other. They sighed with
relief ” (“UF,” 1284). A fter saying a mangled prayer, they are ready to
oversee the covering up of his remains. At this point, the first paragraph
of the second part of the narrative, the motif of the corpse’s upturned face
returns with new force:
One of the aggrieved privates came forward with his shovel. He

lifted his first shovel load of earth and for a moment of inexplicable
hesitation it was held poised above this corpse which from its chalk-
blue face looked keenly out from the grave. Then the soldier emp-
tied his shovel on—on the feet.
Timothy Lean felt as if tons had been swiftly lifted from off his
forehead. He had felt that perhaps the private might empty the
Introduction 9
shovel on—on the face. It had been emptied on the feet. T here was
a g reat point gained t here—ha, ha!—t he first shovelful had been
emptied on the feet. How satisfactory! (“UF,” 1285–1286)
The man with the shovel is struck in the arm by a bullet and Lean seizes
the shovel and begins to fill the grave himself; as the dirt lands it makes
a sound—“plop.” The text concludes:
Soon t here was nothing to be seen but the chalk-blue face. Lean
filled the shovel. . . . “Good God,” he cried to the adjutant. “Why
d idn’t you turn him somehow when you put him in? This—”
Then Lean began to stutter.
The adjutant understood. He was pale to the lips. “Go on, man,”
he cried, beseechingly, almost in a shout. . . . Lean swung back the
shovel; it went forward in a pendulum curve. When the earth landed
it made a sound—plop. (“UF,” 1286–1287; ellipses Crane’s)
As I went on to write in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” the second

chapter of Realism, Writing, Disfiguration (a two-chapter book):
Much of the cumulative effect of “The Upturned Face” has been lost
in my summary, but even so several points are clear. First, . . . we
find at the center of the scene a dead man lying on his back staring
upward; in fact, as I have noted, we are presented with such a figure
twice over, at the opening of the tale, where it is described as lying
at the feet of Lean and the adjutant, and at the beginning of the
second part, as the first shovelful of dirt is held suspended above it.
Second, the corpse’s chalk-blue face is on both occasions the prin-
cipal object of Lean’s and the adjutant’s attention, and once again
something uncanny and in a strong sense disfiguring happens to
that face—in fact the entire second part of the tale turns on Lean’s
repugnance at the prospect of having to cover the dead man’s face
with dirt. [“Once again” because in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned
Faces” I begin by considering two other passages featuring up-
turned faces, one from The Red Badge of Courage and the other, to
be cited and discussed shortly, from the remarkable story The
Monster.] . . . A nd third, although a thematics of writing is no
more than hinted at by the recurrent epithet “chalk-blue” and

perhaps also by the little case of cards and papers that Lean re-
moves from the dead man, the newly excavated and still empty
grave is characterized, indeed, is half-addressed, as “not a
masterpiece—poor little shallow t hing,” a phrase that, however
ironically, deploys a vocabulary of artistic valuation that one can
imagine the author applying (again ironically: Crane seems to have
thought especially well of this tale) to “The Upturned Face” itself.
I suggest that the ostensible action of the tale—the digging of a grave,
the tumbling of a corpse into its shallow depths, and then the cov-
ering of the corpse and specifically its upturned face with shovel-
fuls of dirt—and the movement of the prose of its telling are meant
as nearly as possible to coincide, as if each w
ere ultimately a figure
for the other: this is one reason why, for example, the text comes to
an end with the quasi-word “plop,” which is nothing more nor less
than the verbal representation of the sound made when the last
shovelful of dirt falls on the grave, or if not the very last at any rate
the one that covers the chalk-blue face once and for all. [Note, too,
that what I have called “the quasi-word ‘plop’ ” is foreshadowed
in the first part of the tale by the words, “They tugged away, the
corpse lifted, heaved, toppled, flopped into the grave . . .”—as if to
integrate it in advance into the narrative as a whole. Indeed, the
words just cited almost seem to imply that the corpse on its own did
the lifting, heaving, toppling, and flopping, as if displacing the
source of activity away from Lean and the adjutant to the dead body.
Iw ill return to this shortly.] That the protagonist’s name, Timothy
Lean, invites being read as a barely disguised version of the author’s
reinforces this suggestion, all the more so in that the adjutant re-
mains nameless and the dead man is referred to only once, by Lean,
as “old Bill.” All this is to read “The Upturned Face” as repre-
senting, and in a sense enacting, the writing of “The Upturned
Face,” which as a general proposition about a literary work is today
pretty much standard fare. [“Today” in mid-1980s literary studies
was still largely u nder the sign of the critical-theoretical movement
known as deconstruction, at least in American universities. More on
Introduction 11
this below.] What is interesting to consider, however, is why this

particular text lends itself so fully to such a reading. . . .
Here is a partial answer. Just as in Peale’s Graphics a primitive
ontological difference between the allegedly upright or erect “space”
of reality and the horizontal “space” of writing / drawing emerged
as problematic for the graphic enterprise [i.e., drawing upright ob-
jects on a horizontal plane], and just as in Eakins’s art an analogous
difference between the horizontal “space” of writing / drawing and
the vertical or upright “space” of painting turned out to play a critical
role with respect both to choice of subject m atter [for example, the
surface of the Schuylkill River in Eakins’s boating pictures or pat-
terned carpets in various interiors or indeed, the sheet of parch-
ment or vellum on which Eakins’s father is shown carefully writing]
and to all that is traditionally comprised u nder the notion of
style, so in the production of t hese paradigmatic texts by Crane
an implicit contrast between the respective “spaces” of reality and
of literary representation—of writing (and in a sense, as we shall
see, of writing / drawing)—required that a h uman character, ordi-
narily upright and so to speak forward-looking, be rendered hori-
zontal and upward-facing so as to match the horizontality and
upward-facingness of the blank page on which the action of in-
scription was taking place. Understood in t hese terms, Crane’s up-
turned faces are at once synecdoches for the bodies of those char-
acters and singularly concentrated metaphors for the sheets of
writing paper that the author had before him. (RWD, 98–100)
Or consider, briefly, the horrific passage from The Monster referred to

earlier. A black man, Henry Johnson, attempting to rescue a child from a
fire in a h ouse, is overcome by fumes and falls unconscious to the floor.
The crucial paragraphs read:
Johnson had fallen with his head at the base of an old-fashioned

desk. There was a row of jars upon the top of this desk. For the most
part, they were silent amid this rioting, but t here was one which
seemed to hold a scintillant and writhing serpent.
Suddenly the glass splintered, and a ruby-red snakelike t hing

poured its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled
and hesitated, and then began to swim a languorous way down the
mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and
fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment,
with mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed di-
rectly down into Johnson’s upturned face.
Afterward the trail of this creature seemed to reek, and amid
flames and low explosions drops like red-hot jewels pattered softly
down it at leisurely intervals.6
In my reading, the fact that Johnson lies face up at the base of a desk is
clearly important, as is the suggestion that the jars of chemicals on the
desk (the child’s father is a doctor) are not unlike jars of ink. Even more to
the point is the close conjunction of the words “rioting” and “writhing,”
which both visually and aurally all but spell out another present participle
(also a noun), “writing.” (The word “writhing” will come up repeatedly
in passages by other authors to be cited in the present book.) That the
burning chemical that destroys Johnson’s face is figured as a slow-moving
serpent is also characteristic: here as elsewhere in Crane, images of snakes
may be understood as figures for his own handwriting, indeed for the
movement of his hand and pen across the page. (As I note in “Stephen
Crane’s Upturned Faces,” the most elaborate treatment of the theme oc-
curs in the sketch titled “The Snake.”7 Snakes are to be found in other
writings treated in this book, as will be seen.)
I go on to relate the obsessive thematization of the scene and the ac-
tion of writing in Crane’s prose to the traditional designation of him as
an “impressionist,” and in this connection quote Conrad’s famous credo
from his preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897): “My task which
I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you
hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see! That—and no
more: and it is everything!”8 (Crane and Conrad became friends in
England in 1897, but my bringing Conrad’s preface to bear on Crane—
like my readings of Conrad in Chapters 1, 5, 7, 9, and elsewhere in this
book within a conceptual framework largely determined by my analysis
of Crane—has nothing to do with that fact.) I then say:
Introduction 13
By “[making] you see” Conrad of course had in mind making the

reader visualize with special acuteness scenes and events which are
not literally t here on the page but which the letters, words, sen-
tences, and paragraphs that are on the page somehow contrive to
evoke. But what if, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Crane’s
very commitment to a version of the “impressionist” project—his
attempt, before all, to make the reader see—at least intermittently
led Crane himself to see, by which I mean fix his attention upon,
and to wish to make the reader see, by which I mean visualize in
his [or her] imagination, those things that, before all, actually lay
before Crane’s eyes: the written words themselves, the white, lined
sheet of paper on which they were inscribed, the marks made by his
pen on the surface of the sheet, even perhaps the movements of
his hand wielding the pen in the act of inscription? Wouldn’t such
a development threaten to abort the realization of the “impres-
sionist” project as classically conceived? In fact would it not call
into question the very basis of writing as communication—the ten-
dency of the written word at least partly to “efface” itself in favor of
its meaning in the acts of writing and reading? But now imagine
that instead of recognizing the objects of his attention for what they
were—instead of understanding himself to be seeing and repre-
senting writing and the production of writing—Crane unwittingly,
obsessionally, and to all intents and purposes automatically meta
phorized writing and the production of writing (and the viewing of
these) in images, passages, and, in rare instances, entire narratives
[such as “The Upturned Face”] that hitherto have wholly escaped
being read in t hose terms. (RWD, 119–200; emphasis in original)
Indeed, I take this argument several steps further by proposing that

not only Crane’s recurrent imagery of disfigured upturned faces and
snakelike forms may be read in these terms but also an entire battery of
specific textual effects such as alliteration that threatens to spring the re-
peated letters or sounds f ree of the meanings of the words in which they
occur (“They w ere always busy as bees, deeply absorbed in their little
combats,” from The Red Badge of Courage; and, from the same passage,
the figuring of the a ctual process of writing (“He could see knots and
waving lines of skirmishers, who were r unning hither and thither and
firing at the landscape. A dark b attle line lay upon a sunstruck clearing”);
and the use of dialect, which at first distances the reader owing to the
unfamiliar groupings of letters, but then yields surprising effects of
voice, most brilliantly in the rendering of Bowery speech in Maggie
(“I met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city,” Pete brags to Maggie
and her younger brother Jimmie); and onomatopoeia (“plop” in “The
Upturned Face”); and pronominal ambiguity, a seeming fault that in
Crane’s prose is actually nothing of the sort, focusing the reader’s atten-
tion for a fleeting moment on a single word the application of which re-
mains to be made out; and the frequent occurrence of words or pairs of
words conspicuously featuring Crane’s initials as a hallmark of the fact
that the sentences in which they turn up were made by him, that they
bear his inimitable stylistic signature (“Sy Conklin” and “Sickles’s colt”
in “The Veteran,” for example, as well as that story’s final phrase, “the
color of his soul”). (And in “The Upturned Face,” the phrase “curious
silent communication,” not to mention the key word “corpse.” “Scin-
tillant” in the passage from The Monster is also to the point.) Other
characteristic features of his prose such as an obsession with numbers,
reflecting the counting of words, as in the last scene in The Monster
where Dr. Truscott counts fifteen places at the t able (his wife’s friends
who did not come); a tendency to depict diagrammatic or otherw ise
“visual” representations, usually involving a sharply downward shift
in scale, such as the little numbered diagrams on bandages, illustrating
the latter’s use, in “Death and the Child”; and certain effects of ani-
mism (“poor little shallow thing,” and the repeated strategic placement
of the seemingly neutral noun “thing” in contexts where it hovers be-
tween animateness and inanimateness) that express a compulsion to de-
clare but also to disguise and in a sense to disavow both the literal cir-
cumstances and the material product of his activity as a writer. (All these
and more are discussed in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” where I
remark that the word “thing,” said of an inanimate object, such as a
grave, suggests a certain animateness, whereas the same word said of
something alive nudges it toward deadness.) A disavowal of writerly
agency—put more strongly, a less than fully conscious defense against
the recognition of what, if I am right, his prose obsessively thematizes—is
Introduction 15
also in play in the aversiveness continually associated with figures of

writing in Crane (the dead faces, the acts of disfigurement, the snake
imagery, the very effort of Lean and the adjutant not to make physical
contact with the body of their comrade), just as it is what is at stake in
the displacement of the origin of act of writing away from the writer (the
fiery serpent again; the intimation in “The Upturned Face” that the
corpse itself did the lifting, heaving, flopping, toppling; even the flat state-
ment in the final sentence that it was the shovelful of earth, not in any
sense Lean, that “made a sound—plop”). (Just before that, Lean swung
back the shovel but “it went forward on a pendulum curve”—again, as if
on its own.)
All this is to imagine Crane’s project as profoundly conflicted, even in
a sense tortured—“Go on, man,” the adjutant cries, “beseechingly, almost
in a shout”—though it is also true that various commentators near to his
own time remarked on the “exquisite legibility” of his handwriting, a
phrase that extant manuscripts largely confirm. Fascinatingly, eyewitness
accounts of Crane actually writing also stress the extreme slowness with
which he formed letters and words, a phenomenon that led one of them
to wonder how Crane “could keep the story in mind while he was slowly
forming the letters.”9 So deliberate a manner of working must have courted
diverting the writer’s attention away from the larger flow of meaning in
his prose to both the act of inscription and the material product of that
act, in which event (as I wrote in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces”) “the
enterprise in question [would have] become merely the drawing of letters,
which of course [would have meant] that it ceased to be the enterprise of
writing. Presumably, Crane worked just too quickly for that to happen”
(RWD, 147; emphasis in original). (Think of the “languorous” movements
of the burning serpent as it makes its downward way t oward Henry John-
son’s face.) In sum, I argue that in Crane’s most characteristic texts
the materiality of writing [is] simultaneously elicited and repressed:

elicited because, under ordinary circumstances, the materiality pre-
cisely d
oesn’t call attention to itself . . . in the intimately connected
acts of writing and reading; and repressed b ecause, w ere that ma-
teriality allowed to come unimpededly to the surface, not only
would the very possibility of narrative continuity be lost, the writing
in question would cease to be writing and would become mere mark.

(RWD, xiv; emphasis in original)10
Again, it should be stressed that t here is much more than what I have
just quoted and summarized to my account of Crane’s project in “Stephen
Crane’s Upturned Faces”—in part icu lar I discuss key passages from a
wide range of texts (novels, stories, tales, sketches, newspaper articles,
poems)—so that ideally, I would have the reader of this book come to it
on the basis of that essay. But I hope enough has been explained to make
my argument clear.
n
The question now is how most fruitfully to go on from Crane, and
before turning to Conrad, who will loom large in what follows, I want to
introduce a little-k nown text by the American naturalist writer Frank
Norris, whose c areer, anyway, whose dates, almost exactly parallel
Crane’s.11 Crane was born in 1871 and died in 1900; Norris, less preco-
cious, was born in 1870 and died in 1902. Norris is best known for novels
such as McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1900), The Pit (1903), and Van-
dover and the Brute (written during the 1890s but not published u ntil
1914); several pages in the last of t hese will be of interest to us in Chapter 2,
along with passages from a lesser-k nown novel, A Man’s Woman
(1899 / 1900). But at this juncture I want to glance at a remarkable story
by Norris (if “story” is the right generic category), “A Memorandum of
Sudden Death,” published in 1902 and collected one year later in A
Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West.12 It begins by
describing a manuscript left behind by a young and talented writer named
Karslake that somehow survived his death at the hands of marauding In-
dians in the American Southwest. Karslake, the unnamed narrator ex-
plains, was planning a novel of military life in the Southwest and had
joined the United States Cavalry to gather material; his death (along with
that of three fellow cavalrymen) seems to have taken place in 1896, in his
twenty-eighth year (Crane died at age twenty-nine). The manuscript, we
are informed, was written “partly in pencil, partly in ink (no doubt from
a fountain pen), on sheets of manila paper torn from some sort of long and
narrow account-book. In two or three places t here are smudges where the
Introduction 17
powder-blackened finger and thumb held the sheets momentarily” (“M,”

104). (They are “powder-blackened” from firing his rifle, one presumes.)
The manuscript begins: “They came in sight early this morning just
after we had had breakfast and had broken camp” (“M,” 105). “They” are
a small band of Indians, and the rest of the manuscript narrates their pa-
tient stalking of Karslake and his companions over several days and then
the prolonged combat in the course of which the cavalrymen are picked
off one by one. (The end of the manuscript breaks off midsentence.) The
crucial passage, a long one that I w ill quote in its entirety, occurs shortly
after Karslake realizes that his death is inevitable:
We think now that they followed us without attacking for so long

because they were waiting till the lay of the land suited them. They
wanted—no doubt—an absolutely flat piece of country, with no de-
pressions, no hills or streambeds in which we could hide, but which
should be high upon the edges, like an amphitheatre. They would
get us in the centre and occupy the rim themselves. Roughly, this
is the bit of desert which witnesses our “last stand.” On three sides
the ground swells a very little—the rise is not four feet. On the third
side it is open, and so flat that even lying on the ground as we do we
can see (leagues away) the San Jacinto hills—“from whence cometh
no help.” It is all sand and sage, forever and forever. Even the sage
is sparse—a bad place even for a coyote. The w hole is flagellated
with an intolerable heat and—now that the shooting is relaxed—
oppressed with a benumbing, sodden silence—the silence of a pri-
mordial world. Such a silence as must have brooded over the Face
of the W
aters on the Eve of Creation—desolate, desolate, as though
a colossal, invisible pillar—a pillar of the Infinitely Still, the pillar
of Nirvana—rose forever into the empty blue, human life an atom
of microscopic dust crushed under its basis, and at the summit God
Himself. And I find time to ask myself why, at this of all moments
of my tiny life-span, I am able to write as I do, registering impres-
sions, keeping a finger upon the pulse of the spirit. But oh! if I had
time now—time to write down the great thoughts that do throng the
brain. They are t here, I feel them, know them. No doubt the su-
preme exaltation of approaching death is the stimulus that one
never experiences in the humdrum business of the day-to-day exis-

tence. Such mighty thoughts! Unintelligible, but if I had time I could
spell them out, and how I could write then! I feel that the w hole se-
cret of Life is within my reach; I can almost grasp it; I seem to feel
that in just another instant I can see it all plainly, as the archangels
see it all the time, as the g reat minds of the world, the g reat philos
ophers, have seen it once or twice, vaguely—a glimpse here and
there, a fter years of patient study. Seeing thus I should be the equal
of the gods. But it is not meant to be. T here is a sacrilege in it. I al-
most seem to understand why it is kept from us. But the very reason
of this withholding is itself a part of the secret. If I could only,
only set it down!—for whose eyes? T hose of a wandering hawk?
God knows. But never mind. I should have spoken—once; should
have said the g reat Word for which the World since the even ing
and morning of the First Day has listened. God knows. God knows.
What a whirl is this? Monstrous incongruity. Philosophy and
fighting troopers. The Infinite and dead horses. There’s humor for
you. The Sublime takes off its hat to the Ridiculous. Send a car-
tridge clashing into the breech and speculate about the Absolute.
Keep one eye on your sights and the other on Cosmos. Blow the reek
of burned powder from before you so you may look over the abyss
of the Great Primal Cause. Duck to the whistle of a bullet and com-
mune with Schopenhauer. Perhaps I am a l ittle mad. Perhaps I am
supremely intelligent. But in e ither case I am not understandable to
myself. How, then, be understandable to others? If these sheets of
paper, this incoherence, is ever read, the others w ill understand it
about as much as the investigating hawk. But none the less be it of
record that I, Karslake, SAW. I reads like Revelation: “I, John, saw.”
It is just that. T
here is something apocalyptic in it all. I have seen a
vision, but cannot—there is the pitch of anguish in the impotence—
bear record. If time were allowed to order and arrange the words of
description, this exaltation of spirit, in that very space of time, would
relax, and the describer lapse back to the level of the average again
before he could set down the things he thought, the things he
thought. The machinery of the mind that could coin the great Word
is automatic, and the very force that brings the die near the blank
Introduction 19
metal supplies the motor power of the reaction before the impres-
sion is made. . . . I stopped for an instant, looking up from the page,
and at once the g reat vague panorama faded. I lost it all. Cosmos
has dwindled again to an amphitheatre of sage and sand, a vista of
distant purple hills, the shimmer of scorching alkali, and in the
middle distance t here, those figures, blanketed, bearded, feathered,
rifle in hand. (“M,” 119–123; emphasis and ellipsis in original)13
The Indians close in and Karslake and his companions are killed.
Note, to begin with, the evident and I would say fully intended analogy
between the absolutely flat rectangular stretch of desert where the attack
takes place and the flatness and rectangularity of a piece of writing paper,
an analogy that is then underscored—bearing in mind the recurrence of
upturned faces as figures for sheets of paper in Crane—by Karslake’s lik-
ening the primordial-seeming silence of that killing ground to the silence
that “must have brooded over the Face of the W aters on the Eve of Cre-
ation.” (To what extent Norris understood that “Face” as a figure for the
sheet of paper remains an open question; to say the least, it’s not obvious
that he did not.) The passage soon becomes a meditation on the act of
writing, characterized at one point as “registering impressions,” but what
I find particularly striking in light of the general problematic I have
sketched is that under these extreme conditions, writing turns out to be
equated with an exalted mode of seeing (“Be it of record that I, Karslake,
SAW”), and although the author of the manuscript professes not to be able
to describe the content of that seeing (“I have seen a vision, but cannot . . .
bear record”), he gives a powerful clue to that content when he goes on
to say that the one time he looked up from the sheet of paper, “the g reat
vague panorama faded. I lost it all.” The implication is that what Karslake
saw in the act of writing was, before all, the sheets of manila paper them-
selves (or the sheets and the act of inscription together), though a further
implication would seem to be that had he known that this was what he
was seeing, he would not have felt himself to be seeing exaltedly—in a vi-
sionary mode—at all. (The downward gaze at the horizontal page is also
thematized in the references to the point of view of the wandering and
investigating hawk, as well as to the pillar of the Infinitely Still with God
Himself at its summit.)
Even more fascinating, however, is Karslake’s account of what might

be called the psychodynamics of exalted seeing / writing as he experiences
it, according to him, as never before. “If time were allowed to order and
arrange the words of description,” the manuscript reads, “this exaltation
of spirit, in that very space of time, would relax, and the describer lapse
back to the level of the average again before he could set down the things
he saw, the things he thought.” And then: “The machinery of the mind
that could coin the great Word is automatic, and the very force that brings
the die near the blank metal supplies the motor power of the reaction be-
fore the impression is made.” Simply put, exalted seeing / writing such as
Karslake evokes can only be accomplished u nder extreme pressure, here
figured by the imminence of sudden death; not only that, but the a ctual
writing, or, say, the stamping of the impression into the die (a figure both
for the writer’s registering of the impression and his impressing it onto or
into the page), is in some fundamental sense automatic (to repeat, “the
machinery of the mind that could coin the great Word is automatic”) in
that it takes place not entirely under conscious authorial control: think of
Crane as I have represented him, never quite allowing the scene and the
materiality of writing to surface explicitly in his prose, and yet never quite
acknowledging that that was what he was d oing, indeed, so far as one can
tell, never quite understanding his writerly enterprise in that light. (I have
suggested that numerous features of his prose defended against such an
understanding ever coming to pass.) To that extent, the scene of writing
for Crane—for literary impressionism generally—has something “primor-
dial” about it, being prior to a certain recognition of its very nature. (Is-
sues of automatism and split or double consciousness—more broadly, of
hypnosis and suggestion—will continually arise in the chapters to come.)14
In any case, Karslake stops for an instant, looks up from the page, and
loses it all. “Cosmos has dwindled again to an amphitheatre of sage and
sand . . .”; that is, to the merely ordinary, which in this exemplary instance
includes the ordinariness of imminent extinction (in other words, the
mere approach of death is no bestower of exalted seeing).
To sum up: I take “A Memorandum of Sudden Death” to provide
nothing less than a theory of literary impressionism such as I have anato-
mized the latter in connection with Crane. Indeed, “A Memorandum”
would appear to have Crane the writer in its sights from the start, bearing
Introduction 21
in mind Crane’s early authorship of The Red Badge (famously before he

had even seen a shot fired in anger) and then his well-k nown stints as a
war correspondent in Greece and subsequently during the Spanish-
American War, both of which resulted in memorable stories and tales such
as “Death and the Child,” “The Price of the Harness,” and (most notably)
“The Upturned Face.” In 1895 Crane also made a months-long trip to the
West and Mexico, two of the products of which are the incandescent “The
Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel.” (Norris would surely
have regarded the comet-like Crane as his foremost rival in his generation;
equally surely, he would have read extensively in Crane’s works.) It c an’t
be claimed that the name “Karslake” plainly alludes to Crane, but the two
names aren’t exactly foreign to each other, either (even as the shift from
hard C to K performs a certain work of masking).15 Intriguingly, too, “A
Memorandum” deploys certain words and phrases that evoke the signa-
ture play of s and c that, as I show in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned F aces,”
occurs so often and so tellingly in Crane’s prose, as in the sentences, “It is
all sand and sage, forever and forever. Even the sage is sparse—a bad place
even for a coyote.” (All those s’s and then a strategically placed hard c.)
This is followed in the next sentences by a reference to
a benumbing, sodden silence—t he silence of a primordial world.

Such a silence as must have brooded over the Face of the W aters on
the Eve of Creation—desolate, desolate, as though a colossal, invis-
ible pillar—a pillar of the Infinitely Still, the pillar of Nirvana—rose
forever into the empty blue, human life an atom of microscopic dust
crushed under its basis, and at the summit God Himself.
(I realize, of course, that the reader is unlikely to share my sense of the

significance of the play of consonants in the sentences just quoted, cul-
minating in the epithet “microscopic,” which may or may not have some-
thing ultimately to do with the fact that Crane’s handwriting was at times
minute; indeed, Ford refers to Crane’s “pen that moved so slowly in mi-
croscopic black trails over the immense sheets of paper that he affected.”16
But I ask for the reader’s patience.) Consider the trio of sentences further
on: “Seeing thus I would be the equal of the gods. But it is not meant to
be. There is a sacrilege in it.” And the sentences “Send a cartridge clashing
into the breech and speculate about the Absolute. Keep one eye on your
sights and the other on Cosmos.” And, toward the end, “Cosmos has
dwindled again to an amphitheatre of sage and sand, a vista of distant
purple hills, the shimmer of scorching alkali.” Earlier I remarked that it
is not clear that Norris did not understand the phrase “the Face of the
Waters” as referring to an upturned sheet of writing paper, and of course
he plainly meant the flat rectangular killing ground to be interpreted in
those terms. The play of s and c in the sentences just glanced at has a dif
ferent status. That is, even if one is prepared to take seriously the notion
that such a play is operative in them, it still seems implausible that Norris
consciously intended in that way to refer explicitly to Crane; but there is
nevertheless the possibility that Norris’s involvement with Crane’s writing,
as documented in “A Memorandum,” produced a kind of autosuggestion
or automimesis that issued in such signature effects without his being
aware of them as such (this would be a classic instance of m ental ma-
chinery working automatically, though of course the basic act of writing
“A Memorandum” would have been intentional in the ordinary sense of
the term).
In the end, however, the question of signature effects is much less
important than the various respects in which “A Memorandum” all but
explicitly offers an extraordinarily brilliant confirmation of my reading
of Crane, as well as a further introduction to the conflictual and often ex-
cruciated psychodynamics of literary impressionism generally.
n
Shortly a fter the publication of Realism, Writing, Disfiguration I
came to a further, unexpected realization: namely, that one or another
version of Crane’s impressionist project—more precisely, one or another
version of a project of writing keyed, as his was, not only to the scene of
writing but specifically to what I have been calling the materiality of
writing—lay at the heart of significant texts by some of the leading English-
language authors of the period from 1890 to 1914 (the second date in par
ticu lar is not absolutely fixed). The most eminent of t hose authors are
Crane, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, W. H. Hudson (no longer
widely read, but in his own time greatly admired by other writers, in-
cluding Ford and Conrad), H. G. Wells (a special case, as will be seen),
Introduction 23
Frank Norris, Jack London, and Rudyard Kipling. But impressionist or

impressionism-related writers also include R. B. Cunninghame Graham,
Erskine Childers (in The Riddle of the Sands), Edgar Rice Burroughs (in
Tarzan), Robert Louis Stevenson (in The Ebb-Tide), . . . the list could go
on. (As will emerge, Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” while not
an impressionist production, is nevertheless illuminated by the impres-
sionist problematic.) Among the impressionist writers apart from Crane,
the stakes seemed highest as regards Conrad, which led me to write an
essay centered on his first novel, Almayer’s Folly (finished 1894), “Almay-
er’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane, and Norris,” published
in Critical Inquiry in 199017 (revised, it forms Chapter 1 of the present
work). From that moment on I planned to someday write a full-dress, mul-
tiauthor study of literary impressionism, though I kept putting off em-
barking on such a study b ecause a series of art-historical, art-critical, and
even literary-critical projects kept taking precedence. Eventually I wrote
a second essay on Conrad, “ ‘A Blankness to Run At and Dash Your Head
Against’: On Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” which was published in the
journal ELH in 2012 and which constitutes Chapter 5 in the present
volume.18 In addition, several years a fter the first article on Conrad I wrote
an essay mainly dealing with Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau
for a collection of essays on Frankenstein and monstrosity edited by Ste-
phen Bann.19 I mention all this by way of indicating the long prehistory
of the volume now in the reader’s hands, my attempt finally to provide
the comprehensive (though by no means exhaustive) overview of English-
language literary impressionism, the path to which has lain open, as it
has seemed to me, for the past twenty-five years.20
Some remarks about the structure and character of this book are in
order. First, in addition to this Introduction it comprises nine chapters,
as follows: (1) on Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and a range of other
texts by him, including “The Black Mate,” Lord Jim, “The Secret Sharer,”
and the exemplary story “Youth”; (2) on W. H. Hudson, in part icu lar
Green Mansions, H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and In the Days of the
Comet, and Norris’s Vandover and the Brute and A Man’s W oman; (3) on
Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London, The Good Soldier, and several
passages from a late autobiographical book, Return to Yesterday; (4) on
no less than nine further examples of the central motif of highly charged
faces, disfigured and not disfigured, upturned and not upturned (but
often both); (5) on Conrad’s The Secret Agent, often considered his greatest
novel; (6) on the impressionist motifs of maps and charts, mist and fog;
(7) on Conrad’s Under Western Eyes; (8) on the impressionist motif of
regression or reversion as regards writing, printing, and publication; and
(9) on how literary impressionism came to a close, beginning with a short
account by Ford of a June 1914 conversation with Wyndham Lewis and
including a reading of Conrad’s last major novel, Victory. The shifting
relations between visuality and aurality in several impressionist texts,
crucially including Tarzan, The Ebb-Tide, and two famous stories by
Kipling, are also a key topic. Finally, a short Coda w ill offer some re-
marks on certain aspects of literary modernism, keyed to texts by Lewis,
Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. As this outline
suggests, Conrad w ill figure prominently in what follows, which in the
first place befits his stature and in the second reflects the consistency of
his involvement with the impressionist problematic, as I understand it.
In fact, there was a moment when I thought of simply writing a study of
his novels from such a perspective. But then the greater challenge of seeking
to do even minimal justice to the breadth and internal variety of the im-
pressionist project became irresistible.
Second, I wish to prepare the reader for the presence throughout this
book of extensive quotations, as should already be clear from my account
of “A Memorandum of Sudden Death.” T here is no help for this: in
order for my arguments to stand a chance of persuading, I need to present
sufficient evidence in the form of excerpts from the texts under discus-
sion, all the more so because a number of those texts will be unfamiliar to
most readers. Again, “A Memorandum of Sudden Death” is a case in
point, but beyond that, who today is even broadly familiar with the work
of W. H. Hudson and R. B. Cunninghame Graham, or even with Erskine
Childers’s masterly The Riddle of the Sands? Or for that matter, with
N orris’s A Man’s W oman or Conrad’s “The Tale”?
Third, a related point, different chapters will have different emphases.
Some will focus on single authors (Conrad w ill be the sole focus of three,
and works by him will figure in three others as well), and throughout the
book single works w ill be analyzed intensively, but several chapters w ill
be thematic in nature, surveying impressionist motifs such as upturned
Introduction 25
and other strongly marked faces, maps and charts, mist or fog, the rela-
tion of visual to aural signifiers, textual regression, and so on. This is to
say that the book as a w hole will present an inner diversity of approach,
even as its basic concerns will remain pretty much unvarying.
A fourth point, which by now scarcely needs stating, is that I have
chosen not to get u nder way by summarizing and commenting on other,
often highly intelligent and productive but in all cases very different in-
terpretations of literary impressionism. I have tried to pay my scholarly
dues in this regard, but my aim in this book is not to take issue with the
views of previous commentators but rather to put forward a sustained,
rigorously argued, and textually fine-grained account of what I regard
as a central problematic—at once obsessive in its focus and internally
diverse—in a large number of both major and minor English-language
novels, stories, tales, and sketches between roughly 1890 and 1914, when
for all intents and purposes literary impressionism as I understand it came
to an end (with the qualification that certain writers, notably Ford, Kipling,
and Cunninghame Graham, continued to produce impressionist works).21
In short, if my specific readings and my overall argument cumulatively
gain traction on their own terms, I shall consider this book a success.
A fifth point, in a similar vein, is that I have not tried to locate those
developments within a range of broader cultural or sociohistorical con-
siderations bearing on m atters of writing such as the burgeoning of illus-
trated journalism and its related technologies, the advent of mass literacy
(important especially for Wells), the evolution of newspaper and commer-
cial publishing in G reat Britain and the United States, the rise of a
market or markets for short fiction such as Crane’s, London’s, or Kipling’s,
and the proliferation of blatantly visual techniques of advertising, all of
which, beyond a doubt, are relevant to a fuller understanding of what took
place in English-language writing between 1890 and 1914.22 Such an at-
tempt would have amounted to an effort to write a second book largely
based on this one (in other words, I would still have had to write more or
less the same book first); moreover, that second book would necessarily
have been much more speculative, I would even say much more general
in its claims and suggestions, than the present one. At least in my hands it
would have been. The broader questions will be for someone else to in-
vestigate, should he or she think it worthwhile.23
A further admission is that although I am clear in my own mind that

the particular issues dealt with in this book belong crucially to the pe-
riod from 1890 to 1914, I d on’t seek to establish this by detailing precisely
how my overarching problematic differs in crucial regards from the the-
matization of writing to be found in previous authors, most importantly
the Americans Poe, Melville, and Thoreau—once again in the interest of
sticking to the task at hand. I will say, though, that in none of them do I
find even a hint of the conflictual structure keyed at once to the upturned
page and the process of inscription and to the suppression of explicit
awareness of t hese that I have tried to lay bare in Crane and that w ill
also characterize both major and minor texts by others among the
impressionists.24
Still another point, perhaps most important or all, is methodological,
or, say, theoretical. As is already clear, my accounts of impressionist texts
will deploy certain concepts, in particular those of the scene of writing
and the materiality of writing, usually associated, with good reason, with
the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. And in fact my
sense of indebtedness to Derrida’s writings is considerable, having
studied him with particular intensity during the second half of the 1970s
and 1980s. But already in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces” my ac-
count of Crane’s literary activity is thoroughly intentionalist, as is also
true of my early art criticism and art-h istorical writings, which is to say
that even during the years when I read Derrida most closely I remained
fundamentally non-Derridean in my basic orientation. (This even without
the further influence of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s 1982
essay “Against Theory” and Michaels’s subsequent writings in the same
radically intentionalist vein.)25 To be as plain as possible: throughout this
book I understand myself to be trying to elucidate one or another struc-
ture of writerly intentions on the part of Crane, Conrad, Hudson, Ford,
Kipling, and o thers, with the important proviso that I also imagine t hose
writers to be largely unaware of crucial aspects of those intentions,
which therefore are to be understood as having come into play as if au-
tomatically, below the threshold of conscious awareness, or at least below
the threshold above which they would be recognized as what they are.
(As has been seen, “A Memorandum of Sudden Death” is astonishingly
lucid in its emphasis on automaticity. I shall return to this point more
Introduction 27
than once in the chapters that follow.) Indeed, my further claim will be
that the necessary suppression of or displacement away from the content
of those intentions that is basic to the impressionist project—in the case
of Crane, the suppression, for example, of conscious awareness that the
“core” or “generative” subject of “The Upturned Face” is the writing of
“The Upturned Face”—turns out to have been a major source of the
sheer literary intensity amounting at times to unbridled violence of cer-
tain impressionist writings (the destruction of Henry Johnson’s face being
an especially vivid case in point). That such a point of view is fundamen-
tally at odds with Derrida’s emphasis on the essential drift of the signi-
fier and his general skepticism about intentionality and meaning scarcely
requires saying at this point in time. But that the present book is in a
certain sense marked by deconstruction is nevertheless true.
Finally, Chapter 3, “Ford’s Impressionism,” w ill include an extended
reading of Ford’s most famous novel, The Good Soldier, by Charles Pal-
ermo, a distinguished art historian who also happens to be a superb reader
of texts. As will become clear, the issues with which he engages are closely
interwoven with those central to the present book.26
Chapter One
Almayer’s Face
N
I n c ha p t e r 7 of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (fin-

ished 1895), a dead body is found by the edge of a river r unning
through the Borneo jungle village of Sambir; Kasper Almayer, the novel’s
protagonist, arrives just as his wife, a Malay, “threw her own head-veil
over the upturned face of the drowned man.”1 The villager who found
the body pleads with Almayer for a reward but is interrupted by an out-
burst of grief from Mrs. Almayer. “Almayer, bewildered, looked in turn
at his wife,” the passage runs,
at Mahmat [the villager], at Balabatchi [a Malay “statesman” who

has been plotting against Almayer], and at last arrested his fasci-
nated gaze on the body lying on the mud with covered face in a
grotesquely unnatural contortion of mangled and broken limbs, one
twisted and lacerated arm, with white bones protruding in many
places through the torn flesh, stretched out; the hand with outspread
fingers nearly touching his foot.
“Do you know who this is?” he asked of Balabatchi, in a low
voice. . . .
“It was fate. Look at your feet, white man. I can see a ring on t hose
torn fingers which I know well.”
28
Almayer’s Face 29
Saying this, Balabatchi stepped carelessly forward, putting his

foot as if accidentally on the hand of the corpse and pressing it into
the soft mud. He swung his staff menacingly t owards the crowd,
which fell back a l ittle. . . .
“I do not understand what you mean, Balabatchi,” said Almayer.
“What is the ring you are talking about? Whoever he is, you have
trodden the poor fellow’s hand right into the mud. Uncover his
face,” he went on, addressing Mrs. Almayer, who, squatting by the
head of the corpse, rocked herself to and fro, shaking from time to
time her dishevelled grey locks, and muttering mournfully.
“Hai!” exclaimed Mahmat, who had lingered close by. “Look,
Tuan; the logs came together so,” and h ere he pressed the palms of
his hands together, “and his face must have been between them, and
now there is no face for you to look at. There are his flesh and his
bones, the nose, and the lips, and maybe his eyes, but nobody could
tell the one from the other. It was written the day he was born that
no man could look at him in death and be able to say, ‘This is my
friend’s face.’ ” (AF, 96–98)
Note, to begin with, that unlike the passages from Crane’s “The Up-
turned Face” and The Monster cited in the Introduction to this book,
the passage just quoted doesn’t actually narrate the disfiguration of a
face—that is, the drowned man’s obliterated face is revealed to the reader
only at a remove, through the reported speech of Mahmat. (Later it will
emerge from Balabatchi’s report to the Malay raja he serves, Lakamba,
that the corpse’s face was actually destroyed by Mrs. Almayer, who
“battered the face of the dead with a heavy stone, and . . . pushed him
amongst the logs” [AF, 129] in order to pass the dead man off as Dain
Maroola, a Malay pursued for murder by the Dutch authorities. Here,
too, the reader is not “shown” that battering but merely told of it.) I see in
the novel’s indirection in this regard something akin to Mrs. Almayer’s
action of “[throwing] her head-veil over the upturned face of the drowned
man,” which is not to say that the dead man’s facelessness has been made
less vivid on that account; my point is rather that the effect of vividness
is achieved by these particular means, which foreshadow Conradian
narrative strategies to come and in part icu lar the emergence of Marlow,
a Conradian staple, as an internal narrator who fulfills a similarly dual
function. In any case, a relation to writing (and reading) is soon made
explicit, when Almayer demands that the corpse’s face be uncovered
and Mahmat describes, indeed mimes, the supposed action of the logs
and replies (the exact words bear repeating), “It was written the day he
was born that no one could look at him in death and be able to say, ‘This
is my friend’s face.’ ” Finally, another instance of veiling or covering turns
up several pages later when Mrs. Almayer “[covers] the body with a piece
of white cotton cloth” (AF, 104), an arrangement that prevails until Al-
mayer, who has been led to believe that the drowned man was indeed Dain
Maroola (the corpse wears the latter’s ring), defiantly exposes the face-
less corpse to the Dutch naval officers who have come to arrest Dain
(AF, 143).
All this is suggestive as far as it goes, but the full significance of the
juxtaposition of motifs of facelessness, veiling or covering, and writing
plus illegibility starts to become clear only later on, toward the end of the
eleventh (and next to last) chapter, when another face, Almayer’s, is made
the focus of the novel’s attention. Almayer has just realized that his
beautiful half-caste daughter Nina—t he center of his grandiose, unre-
alistic dreams of becoming rich and escaping with her to Amsterdam—
is determined to go off with Dain, who has returned to claim her. The
scene takes place on an islet in the mouth of the Pantai River, where Dain
and Nina are waiting for the arrival of a canoe that w ill carry them to
safety; Almayer, who had hoped to persuade Nina to remain with him,
has just sat down on the sand by Nina’s side:
“I shall never forgive you, Nina,” said Almayer, in a dispassionate

voice. “You have torn my heart from me while I dreamt of your hap-
piness. You have deceived me. Your eyes that for me were like truth
itself lied to me in e very glance—for how long? You know that best.
When you w ere caressing my cheek you were counting the min-
utes to the sunset that was the signal for your meeting with that
man—there!”
He ceased, and they both sat silent side by side, not looking at
each other, but gazing at the vast expanse of the sea. Almayer’s
Almayer’s Face 31
words had dried Nina’s tears, and her look grew hard as she stared
before her into the limitless sheet of blue that shone limpid, un-
waving, and steady like heaven itself. He looked at it also, but his
features had lost all expression, and life in his eyes seemed to have
gone out. The face was a blank, without a sign of emotion, feeling,
reason, or even knowledge of itself. All passion, regret, grief, hope,
or anger—a ll were gone, erased by the hand of fate, as if a fter this
last stroke everything was over and t here was no need for any record.
T hose few who saw Almayer during the short period of his re-
maining days were always impressed by the sight of that face that
seemed to know nothing of what went on within: like the blank
wall of a prison enclosing sin, regrets, and pain, and wasted life, in
the cold indifference of mortar and stones. (AF, 189–90)
The passage suggests a link between two seemingly unrelated items:

Almayer’s insistence to Nina that he will never forgive her and the blank-
ness and impassiveness of his face, the absence from it of all signs, not
just of emotion but of inner life. The nature of that link is clarified as Al-
mayer expands on his resolve not to forgive his d aughter. “I will never
forgive you, Nina,” he repeats, “and to-morrow I shall forget you!” (AF,
191). In Almayer’s confusion and pain, we are told, “only one idea re-
mained clear and definite—not to forgive her; only one vivid desire—to
forget her. And this must be made clear to her—and to himself—by fre-
quent repetition” (AF, 192). But of course, the connection between the
“idea” of not forgiving Nina and the “desire” to forget her is more than a
l ittle problematic. For t here is an obvious sense in which not forgiving
Nina necessarily w ill depend on not forgetting what she did, on keeping
her and her betrayal constantly in view; while forgetting Nina w ill in-
volve, not forgiving her exactly, but relinquishing all awareness of the
grievance that motivated the resolve to forget in the first place.
Rather than explore that tension or conflict, however, the novel in
its remaining pages throws all its emphasis on the side of the “desire,”
or rather it emphasizes a further connection between Almayer’s project
of hyperbolically forgetting Nina and the blankness and rigidity of his
face. After the canoe has arrived and Nina and Dain have begun to leave,
Almayer is described in the following terms:
He stood very straight, his shoulders thrown back, his head held
high, and looked at them as they went down the beach to the canoe,
walking enlaced in each other’s arms. He looked at the line of their
footsteps marked in the sand. He followed their figures moving in
the crude blaze of the vertical sun, in that light violent and vibrating,
like a triumphal flourish of brazen trumpets. He looked at the man’s
brown shoulders, at the red sarong round his waist; at the tall,
slender, dazzling white figure he supported. He looked at the white
dress, at the falling masses of the long black hair. He looked at them
embarking, and at the canoe growing smaller in the distance, with
rage, despair, and regret in his heart, and on his face a peace as that
of a carved image of oblivion. Inwardly he felt himself torn to pieces,
but [Almayer’s servant] Ali who—now aroused—stood close to his
master, saw on his features the blank expression of t hose who live
in that hopeless calm which sightless eyes only can give. (AF, 194)
This too isn’t without internal tensions: the notion of “a peace [like] that
of a carved image of oblivion” is at least potentially discrepant with that
of a “hopeless calm,” just as the implied sharpness of visual definition of
the carved image is at odds with the final figure of blindness. But what I
want to stress, what indeed the passage stresses, is the contrast between
Almayer’s blank expression and violent emotions raging within him, a
contrast that plainly violates the “realistic” convention that facial expres-
sions at moments of emotional crisis spontaneously and candidly repre-
sent a person’s inner state.2
The point is underscored a moment later as Almayer and Ali make their
way back to their canoe:
For all his firmness [Almayer] looked very dejected and feeble as
he dragged his feet slowly through the sand on the beach; and by
his side—invisible to Ali—stalked that particu lar fiend whose
mission it is to jog the memories of men, lest they should forget
the meaning of life. He whispered in Almayer’s ear a childish
prattle of many years ago. Almayer, his head bent on one side,
seemed to listen to his invisible companion, but his face was like
the face of a man that has died struck from b ehind—a face from
Almayer’s Face 33
which all feelings and all expression are suddenly wiped off by the
hand of unexpected death. (AF, 196)
Such a face, like the one described at the end of the preceding passage,
may be imagined to represent the inner state of a person who had suc-
ceeded in the project I have called hyperbolic forgetting. And in fact, the
novel goes on to suggest that Almayer’s blank, expressionless face already
represents the state of mind and feeling toward which his efforts at for-
getting are directed; put more strongly, it suggests that t hose efforts can
succeed only by making his inner state accord perfectly with an outward
representation whose uncanniness in the eyes of those who behold it con-
sists in its denial of all evocation of “depths.” (What makes the denial
uncanny is that the representation in question is a face.)
This is the gist of an exchange between Almayer and his friend Ford,
the captain of a steamer, who visits him several times a fter his return to
Sambir. Immediately after his return Almayer burned down the house in
which he had lived with Nina and moved into another, unfinished one
that he had built some time before “for the use of the future engineers,
agents, or settlers” of the larger company he dreamed of establishing
(AF, 33). (The second h ouse appropriately came to be called “Almayer’s
Folly,” giving the novel its title.) There he
set himself to wait in anxiety and pain for that forgetfulness which
was so slow to come. He had done all he could. Every vestige of
Nina’s existence had been destroyed [among those vestiges was her
trunk, the lid of which bore the large initials “N. A.” in brass nails
(AF, 198)]; and now with e very sunrise he asked himself w
hether the
longed-for oblivion would come before sunset, whether it would
come before he died? (AF, 201)
The exchange with Ford reads as follows:
One morning Ford found him sitting on the floor of the verandah,
his back against the wall, his legs stretched stiffly out, his arms
hanging by his side. His expressionless face, his eyes open wide
with immobile pupils, and the rigidity of his pose, made him look
like an immense man-doll broken and flung there out of the way.
As Ford came up the steps he turned his head slowly.
“Ford,” he murmured from the floor, “I cannot forget.”
“Can’t you?” said Ford, innocently, with an attempt at joviality:
“I wish I was like you. I am losing my memory—age, I suppose; only
the other day my mate—”
He stopped, for Almayer had got up, stumbled, and steadied
himself on his friend’s arm.
“Hallo! You are better to-day. Soon be all right,” said Ford, cheer-
fully, but feeling rather scared.
Almayer let go his arm and stood very straight with his head up
and shoulder’s thrown back, looking stonily at the multitude of
suns shining in r ipples on the river. His jacket and his loose trou-
sers flapped in the breeze on his thin limbs.
“Let her go!” he whispered in a grating voice. “Let her go. To-
morrow I shall forget. I am a firm man, . . . firm as a . . . rock, . . .
firm . . .”
Ford looked at his face—a nd fled. The skipper was a tolerably
firm man himself—as those who had sailed with him could
testify—but Almayer’s firmness was altogether too much for his
fortitude. (AF, 203–204)
What makes Almayer’s face so disturbing to Ford—t he “firmness” of

which the passage speaks—is the absence from it of all expression, and it
is that absence, that expressionlessness, that invites us to think of Almay-
er’s project of hyperbolic forgetting as seeking above all to make his
inner state coincide as if physically with his outward appearance.
It seems obvious that so bizarre a project cannot be understood “psy-
chologically,” that is, as an instance of plausible though extreme behavior
on the part of the character Almayer, if only because it is nowhere implied
that Almayer himself is in the least aware of what has happened to his fea-
tures. Rather, the “long solo for Almayer” (Conrad’s phrase in a letter to
his aunt, Marguerite Poradowska)3 with which Almayer’s Folly concludes
all but demands to be understood as symbolic or allegorical—but of what?
To begin with, of a particular representational project, one that seeks to
collapse the distinction between inner and outer (or inner and outward)
Almayer’s Face 35
by matching the former to the latter. In the most general terms, this is
consistent with my summary account of Crane’s impressionism in the
Introduction, and indeed—as the reader will already have surmised—I
understand the obvious affinities between recurrent images of disfig-
ured faces in Crane and Conrad—in the first place, in Almayer’s Folly—
as pointing to the functioning in Conrad as well as in Crane of a distinc-
tively impressionist problematic grounded in the writer’s relation to the
act and circumstances of writing. But unlike “The Upturned Face” or the
passage from The Monster narrating the destruction of Henry John-
son’s face, the quotations from Almayer’s Folly we have been considering
neither metaphorize the physical act of writing nor, a fortiori, evoke the
irruption and repression of the materiality of writing. Rather, they dra-
matize another relation to the act of writing, a relation I shall call, fol-
lowing the novel’s lead, erasure. The obliteration of the drowned man’s
face earlier in the novel first announces that relation, not only b ecause the
act of obliteration invites being read as one of erasure (this might also be
said, more or less, of the burning laboratory scene in The Monster), but
also by virtue of the indirect narration of that act, of the veiling and then
covering of the corpse by Mrs. Almayer, and finally of Mahmat’s remark to
Almayer, “It was written the day he was born that no man could look at
him in death and be able to say, ‘This is my friend’s face’ ”—the invoca-
tion of writing in the first words of the sentence setting the stage for the
thematization of erasure by its close. The pertinence of the notion of era-
sure to the descriptions of Almayer’s stricken face cited above is even
more evident, and in fact t hose descriptions speak both of “all passion,
regret, grief, hope, or anger” having been “erased by the hand of fate”
and of “all feelings and expression” having been “suddenly wiped off by
the hand of unexpected death,” figures of speech that soon emerge, in
arguably the most important scene in the book, as determining for Al-
mayer’s project of hyperbolic forgetting as well.
Toward the beginning of the paragraph that describes Almayer
watching Nina and Dain embark and leave, we are also told that as the
lovers walked down the beach to their canoe, Almayer, standing very
straight, “looked at the line of their footsteps marked in the sand” (AF,
194) until Ali points out in the distance the yellow triangle of a sail, which
Almayer follows with his gaze u ntil it disappears. (Earlier Almayer said
to Nina, “It is most import ant for me to see you go. Both of you. Most
import ant” [AF, 189]. This turns out to mean literally watching them
vanish.) Ali reminds him that they should be returning to Sambir. Then:
“Wait,” whispered Almayer.

Now she was gone his business was to forget, and he had a strange
notion that it should be done systematically and in order. To Ali’s
great dismay he fell on his hands and knees, and, creeping along
the sand, erased carefully with his hand all traces of Nina’s foot-
steps. He piled up small heaps of sand, leaving b ehind him a line of
miniature graves right down to the w ater. A fter burying the last
slight imprint of Nina’s slipper he stood up, and, turning his face
towards the headland where he had last seen the prau, he made
an effort to shout out loud again his firm resolve to never forgive.
Ali watching him uneasily saw only his lips move, but heard no
sound. He brought his foot down with a stamp. He was a firm
man—fi rm as a rock. Let her go. He never had a d aughter. He
would forget. He was forgetting already. (AF, 195–196)
This is a crucial passage. In the first place, Almayer’s notion that the
“business” of forgetting “should be done systematically and in order” is
indeed “strange,” not just b ecause the idea of systematicity seems at odds
with that of forgetting but also b ecause virtually all this w
ill mean—apart
from eradicating the footsteps—is burning down the h ouse he shared with
Nina in Sambir. (On the other hand, chapters 11 and 12 are nothing if not
systematic in their development of the double thematic of hyperbolic for-
getting and facial blanknesss.) More important, the passage links Almay-
er’s project of hyperbolic forgetting with one of erasure, as if not only the
imprint of Nina’s footsteps in the sand but Almayer’s entire store of mem-
ories of her, early and late, w
ere so much writing that now had to be un-
done, to use as neutral a verb as possible. But what of the act of erasure as
Conrad describes it? H ere one might be tempted to argue that b ecause
Almayer’s efforts to do away with all traces of Nina’s footsteps result not
in the restoration of a perfectly smooth surface but rather in “small heaps
of sand,” “a line of miniature graves right down to the water,” the pas-
sage shows that genuine erasure is impossible. But I think it would be
Almayer’s Face 37
truer to the obsessions of the text to say that the passage defines erasure
as a visible marking over of preexisting writing—more precisely, as itself
a mode of writing that renders irretrievable a prior writing (as the heaps
of sand and miniature graves obscure Nina’s footprints) but whose own
legibility as erasure depends on a certain material survival of the original
“text” (as the heaps of sand and miniature graves may be seen as inverting
the impressions Nina’s footsteps made in the sand).
Not that erasure so defined is fundamentally at odds with a thematic
of blankness. On the contrary, as we have seen, Almayer’s face is repeat-
edly described as blank and expressionless and is perceived by others in
those terms. But in the first place it has been made blank, much as the
faceless corpse was earlier covered by a white cloth, and in the second—
an equally decisive point—it never ceases to be a face, which as I have al-
ready implied is why it makes so indelible an impression on those who
behold it. Put slightly differently, a face under certain circumstances may
be described as expressionless, but such a face could not therefore be said
to be inexpressive: its capacity for representing “depths”—that is, thought,
emotion, feeling—is, so to speak, ineffaceable.4 But Conrad seems to be
suggesting that Almayer’s face a fter Nina’s departure calls that distinc-
tion into question, not that the various figures Conrad uses to evoke the
erasure of all expression from Almayer’s features are strictly consistent
with one another. More broadly, blankness in Almayer’s Folly emerges
both as the product of the representational act the novel calls erasure and
as a particular representation in its own right, not as a brute material fact
signaling the collapse of representation (as a wilderness of ice—Norris’s
version of blankness—w ill be seen to connote such a collapse in A
Man’s Woman). At the risk of getting ahead of myself I w ill suggest that
the restoration of an original—better, an originary—blankness that is
never merely a material blankness functions as a hyperbolic ideal not just
in Almayer’s Folly but throughout Conrad’s oeuvre. (One novel, The Se-
cret Agent, is an exception to the phrase I have just italicized, but that can
wait.) Indeed, a conception of erasure both as the disfiguring of a prior
representation and as the restoration of an originary blankness is im-
plicit in the unexpected image of Almayer’s s ilent shout, which I read as
hinting at an analogy between silence and blankness at the same time
that it depends for its effect on the contrast between the absence of sound
and the sight of Almayer’s moving lips. (Something similar takes place
toward the end of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” when the mortally ill
James Wait, at the end of his strength, rages impotently at Donkin—“and
not a word had the strength to pass beyond the sorrowful pout of those
black lips.”) 5
By insisting that the blankness in question is not merely material I do
not deny, rather I mean to affirm, that it is “before all” the blankness of
the white sheet of paper that confronted Conrad when he sat down to
write. A letter from Conrad to Poradowska, herself an author, written in
late March or early April 1894 when he was nearing the end of Almayer’s
Folly, is illuminating here. The letter is in French; the English transla-
tion is as follows:
My very dear Aunt,

Forgive me for not having written sooner, but I am in the midst
of struggling with Chapter XI; a struggle to the death, you know! If
I let go, I am lost! I am writing to you just as I go out. I must indeed
go out sometimes, alas! I begrudge each minute I spend away from
the page. I do not say from the pen, for I have written very little, but
inspiration comes to me while gazing at the paper. Then there are
vistas that extend out of sight; my mind goes wandering through
great spaces filled with vague forms. Everything is still chaos, but,
slowly, ghosts are transformed into living flesh, floating vapours
turn solid, and—who knows?—perhaps something w ill be born
from the collision of indistinct ideas.
I send you the first page (which I have copied) to give you an idea
of the appearance of the manuscript. This I owe you, since I have
seen yours. I for one like to observe the decencies.
I embrace you warmly. Always yours
J. Conrad (CL, 1:150–151) 6
here could be no more compelling “external” evidence in support of

T
my argument. To begin with, the letter’s occasion is significant, by which
I mean that it is in chapters 11 and 12 that the problematic of blankness
and erasure I have been tracing comes at last to the fore. (One has the
feeling that the main task of the previous chapters was to set the stage for
Almayer’s Face 39
what happens there.) As for the letter’s substance, Conrad’s distinction

between pen and page and his assertion that inspiration comes to him
“while gazing at the paper” can serve to make us aware that Almayer’s
Folly, like Conrad’s fiction generally, tends to minimize the role of pen
imagery, especially in contrast to Crane’s, which continually thematizes
the act of writing in all its scriptiveness, so to speak.7 (That Almayer
erases Nina’s footprints with his bare hands perfectly expresses that ten-
dency.) Moreover, Conrad’s emphasis on gazing rather than writing
evokes a state of heightened receptivity that, if inspiration were not to
arrive, might easily decay into passive fantasizing and anguished convic-
tion of failure;8 commentators on the novel haven’t failed to recognize
certain affinities between Almayer and his creator. There is also the
suggestion that the vistas and spaces the letter evokes become “visible”
to Conrad in the very blankness of the paper, much as if the paper w ere a
crystal ball, then at the height of its popularity as a mediumistic device
(compare the moment in Lord Jim when Marlow, sitting pen in hand
over a blank page, literally sees two figures “dodge into view with stride
and gestures, as if reproduced in the field of some optical toy”).9 Indeed,
Conrad’s account of the advent of inspiration strongly implies that the
field of boundless possibility at which or into which he represents himself
gazing was for him the precondition of imaginative vision altogether,
which in turn suggests that the continual restoration of blankness with
each new sheet of paper, but also as a consequence of nonliteral (that is,
representational or figurative) acts of erasure was the generative—as well
as the most anxious—moment in his enterprise. (More on that anxiety
further on.) Finally, Conrad’s decision to send Poradowska an actual
page of his writing testifies to his fascination with the look of his prose
as it filled up or, a verb he favored, “blackened” the blank sheet.10 Not
surprisingly, the page in question, which today reposes in the Rosen-
bach Library in Philadelphia, is heavily revised (see Figure 5).11
n
I have already intimated that I regard the problematic of erasure that
lies at the heart of Almayer’s Folly as fundamental to Conrad’s impres-
sionism. In the remainder of this chapter I want to look briefly at a range of
other writings by Conrad in an attempt, first, to support that claim, and
Fig. 5. Joseph Conrad, first page, first version of chapter 11 of the manuscript
of Almayer’s Folly, late March or early April 1894. The Rosenbach Museum and
Library, Philadelphia (Accession No. EL4.C75al).
second, to draw out a few larger implications of the argument I have been
pursuing.
For the most part I s hall restrict my comments to well-k nown works,
but I want to begin by considering “The Black Mate,” an obscure story
that nonetheless holds a privileged position in Conrad’s oeuvre by virtue
Almayer’s Face 41
of being, according to his testimony, his first written work (a version of it

is thought to have been composed as early as 1886).12 The story’s protag-
onist is Bunter, first mate on the Sapphire. The other mates of the ships
then lying in the London Dock are characterized as “a steady, hard-
working, staunch, unromantic-looking set of men, belonging to various
classes of society, but with the professional stamp obliterating the per-
sonal characteristics, which w ere not very marked, anyhow” (“BM,”
208). In contrast, Bunter, who “was no more black than you or I” (“BM,”
209)—in fact, the narrator adds, intriguingly from my perspective, that “to
call him black was the superficial impressionism of the ignorant” (“BM,”
209)—was given his nickname by the dock laborers because of his strik-
ingly black hair, heard, and bushy eyebrows. We are also told at the outset
that Bunter has a secret, and by the end of the tale we learn that his hair in
fact is white, and that (at the narrator’s suggestion) he dyed it black in order
not to be turned down for a post at sea b ecause of his age. The secret is re-
vealed because Bunter’s stock of hair coloring is washed away in a gale;
brooding about what to do, he falls and knocks himself unconscious one
night while on duty; he is put to bed, his hair shaven and his head swathed
in white bandages; and while lying there he concocts a tale to the effect that
he fell because he saw a ghost (the ship’s captain, an argumentative fool
who throughout the voyage tries repeatedly to convert Bunter to his spiritu-
alist views, is more than willing to believe his mate’s invention). When
Bunter’s hair begins to grow back white it therefore seems to everyone on
board as if the change in color w ere the result of his terrifying experience.
The story ends happily months later as Bunter is reunited with his wife
and explains the events of the voyage to her and the narrator.
The few commentators who have discussed “The Black Mate” have
rightly found its prose unremarkable and the narrative not at all deftly
managed, while the basic idea has seemed devoid of deeper interest.13 But
considered within the framework of my reading of Almayer’s Folly, “The
Black Mate” may be understood as an exploration of different modalities
of erasure, starting with “the professional stamp obliterating the personal
characteristics” of the other mates, continuing with the denial of a ctual
(i.e., racial) blackness and the white bandages swathing Bunter’s shaven
head (but leaving exposed his ebony eyebrows, “more sinister than ever
amongst all that lot of white linen” [“BM,” 264]), and culminating in the
completely white-haired older man—virtually another person—whom the

narrator encounters at the end of the voyage:
Whereas the black mate struck people as deliberate, and strangely

stately in his gait for a man in the prime of life, this white-headed
chap seemed the most wonderfully alert of old men. I d on’t suppose
Bunter was any quicker on his pins than before. It was the colour
of the hair that made all the difference in one’s judgment.
The same with his eyes. T hose eyes, that looked at you so
steely, so fierce, and so fascinating out of a bush of a buccaneer’s
black hair, now had an innocent, almost boyish expression in
their good-humoured brightness u nder those white eyebrows.
(“BM,” 279–280)
Erasure in this last instance is literally a return to an original blankness

(Bunter’s naturally white hair), but of course that blankness is the product
of age (it is something that happened to Bunter), and in any case the white-
haired mate now seems more youthful in manner and expression than
before, which further complicates the metaphorics of youth and age (or
originariness and secondariness) and thereby all the more inextricably de-
fines erasure and its effects as matters of representation.
In “The Black Mate” the apparent triviality of the core anecdote, de-
ceptively underscored by the reference to “superficial impressionism,”
throws the problematic of erasure into quasi-allegorical relief. And as we
have seen, the “systematic” treatment of Almayer’s expressionless face in
the last chapters of Conrad’s first novel, for all the differences between
Almayer’s Folly and “The Black Mate,” produces a not dissimilar effect.
But already in the novel that problematic functions differently: instead of
constituting meaning, erasure generates it, by which I mean that on the
one hand it is productive of plot, character, and theme, and on the other
these cannot be reduced to a thematics of erasure without severely im-
poverishing our view of Conrad’s achievement. (I would not wish to argue
that t here is nothing more to Almayer’s Folly, with its anguished brooding
upon questions of race, than an allegory of erasure. But any reading of
that novel that ignores its commitment to erasure has missed something
essential.) There is in this respect a contrast between Conrad and Crane,
Almayer’s Face 43
in whose work, so I argue in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” the con-

tinual surfacing and repression or appearance and disappearance of the
materiality of writing tend more often than not to disrupt thematic co-
herence, destabilize character, and foreground local effects of often
searing brilliance at the expense of a grasp of overall design.14 Not that,
with respect to the actual texture of his prose, Conrad is to any appreciable
degree a less obsessional writer than Crane, or that would-be totalizing
interpretations of his novels and stories have been able even remotely to
approach their ideal. So, for example, numerous discussions of Heart of
Darkness15 —perennially a prime focus of academic interest in Conrad—
have emphasized its resistance to univocal reading on virtually e very
level,16 while Almayer’s Folly itself teems with vivid, often hallucinatory
images of faces and facing, at once supported and deflected by prolifer-
ating near homonyms (e.g., “face” and “fate”), which, albeit preparing the
ground for the sustained present at ion of Almayer’s face in chapters 11
and 12, defy ordinary thematic integration as radically as anything in
Crane.17 My point, however, is that such obsessiveness in Conrad also, in
the end more importantly, takes the form of recurrent large-scale structures
of plot, character, and theme that have no exact equivalent in Crane, and
my further claim is that those structures reveal a common rationale when
they are understood in terms of the problematic of erasure I have been de-
veloping in these pages.
Here, for example, is André Gide, who knew and admired Conrad, in
his Journals: “Much interested by the relationship I discover between
Under Western Eyes and Lord Jim. . . . That inconsistent act of the hero,
to redeem which his whole life is subsequently engaged. For that which
has the greatest consequences is precisely the inconsistencies of a life.
How to efface t hose?”18 And: “Noteworthy that the fatal inconsistencies
of Conrad’s heroes (I am thinking particularly of Lord Jim and U nder
Western Eyes) are involuntary and immediately stand seriously in the way
of the one who commits them. A whole lifetime, afterward, is not enough
to give them the lie and to efface their mark.”19 Gide’s pioneering insight
has been confirmed by l ater critics, who in turn have speculated as to the
personal reasons behind Conrad’s attraction to the theme of self-betrayal
and attempted redemption, but my point is rather that the plot structure
Gide describes is a project of erasure—in Lord Jim (1900), to speak only
of that archetypal text, Jim’s project of ultimately erasing the appalling

shame of his leap from the deck of the Patna.
In this connection, it is worth noting that that novel, too, is punctu-
ated by an imagery of f aces and facing that, if somewhat less relentless than
in Almayer’s Folly, is no less highly charged. “There was nothing he could
not face,” Marlow says of Jim on the Patna shortly before the collision in
whose confused aftermath he leaps from the ship. “He was so pleased with
the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead; and when
he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of the wake drawn as
straight by the ship’s keel upon the sea as the black line drawn by the
pencil upon the chart” (LJ, 58). The conjunction of motifs of facing and
drawing (or writing / drawing) is hardly fortuitous; nor is the conjunction
of the white streak and black line, which adumbrates an entire the-
matics of the production of writerly blankness. Earlier we are told:
The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that plain, luminous and
smooth, unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the sky, left b ehind
her on the water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like
the phantom of a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of
a steamer. (LJ, 54)
The white wake is the first in a chain of related motifs, including the deli-
cate “white tracings” on the wings of Stein’s butterflies (LJ, 195) and
Marlow’s valedictory memory of Jim: “I s hall never hear his voice again,
nor shall I see his smooth tan-a nd-pink face with a white line on the
forehead, and the youthful eyes darkened by excitement to a profound,
unfathomable blue” (LJ, 296). Tan and pink because of the contrast
between the untanned forehead protected by the brim of a naval hat and
the tanned rest of the face; but why the “white line”—between the two,
presumably?
Immediately a fter the accident, while still on board the Patna, the light
of Jim’s lamp “fell upon an upturned dark face whose eyes entreated him
together with the voice” (LJ, 109), whereupon he slings the lamp in that
face and runs off to get at the boats. Subsequently, Jim discovers he
must face a hostile world, a world of faces demanding facts (LJ, 63),
while the facts themselves seem to him to compose something like a face,
Almayer’s Face 45
“a w hole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect

that could be remembered by the eye, and something e lse besides, some-
thing invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a ma-
levolent soul in a detestable body” (LJ, 65). For his part, Marlow, who
first lays eyes on Jim at the hearing a fter the disaster, is troubled by Jim’s
appearance precisely because he appears so sound. “I tell you I o ught to
know the right kind of looks,” Marlow famously says. “I would have
trusted the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single glance, and
gone to sleep with both eyes—and, by Jove! it wouldn’t have been safe.
There are depths of horror in that thought” (LJ, 76). In a sense, Jim’s
project will be to make the meaning of his life eventually coincide with his
appearance as Marlow t here describes it (cf. the last chapters of Almayer’s
Folly); and in fact, Marlow’s final view of Jim standing all in white on the
shore as the black night comes down b ehind him strongly suggests that,
with the narrative’s tragic denouement still to come, Jim has largely suc-
ceeded. But Marlow himself was not so sure. “He was white from head to
foot,” Marlow recalls,
and remained persistently visible with the stronghold of the night

at his back, the sea at his feet, the opportunity by his side—still
veiled. What do you say? Was it still veiled? I don’t know. For me
that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at
the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast from the
sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet,
he himself appeared no bigger than a child—then only a speck; a
tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened
world. . . . A nd, suddenly, I lost him. (LJ, 291)
(“You” in this passage is the novel’s framing narrator, who is quoting

from a letter from Marlow. In no rational sense can he be i magined to be
in a position to answer Marlow’s questions—“What do you say? Was it
still veiled?”—unless, of course, we take the crucial coordinates of the
framing narrator’s position to be those governing his relation to the
written page before him—and which page is that, exactly?) What has
baffled commentary is Marlow’s insistence, h ere as elsewhere, on Jim’s
enigmatic quality as, or as if as, an object of vision. “He was not—if I
may say so—clear to me,” Marlow says of him earlier in the book. “He
was not clear” (LJ, 173). In my reading, that unclarity is, before all,
Conrad’s experience of the blank page as a field of boundless possi-
bility, hence also of radical uncertainty.20
All this is in line with my argument, but the novel goes still further in
the extraordinary scene, extending over three chapters, in which Marlow
sits writing letter a fter letter (“I wrote and wrote; I liquidated all the ar-
rears of my correspondence, and then went on writing to people who had
no reason whatever to expect from me a gossipy letter about nothing
at all” [LJ, 169]), filling page a fter page, at one point—as was earlier
mentioned—even seeing two figures in the blankness of a sheet of note-
paper, until at last he brings himself to write recommending Jim to a friend
who owns a rice mill. (The friend gives Jim a job and would have made
him his heir had Jim not fled from the prospect of someday having to tell
him about the Patna episode.) Marlow hands the letter to Jim, who reads
it, thanks him ardently, then stammers: “I always thought if a fellow could
begin with a clean slate . . . And now you . . . in a measure . . . yes . . .
clean slate” (LJ, 179)—in effect, transforming the ultimate product of Mar-
low’s labors from a blackened page to a blank one. (Typically, Marlow
concludes, “A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our
destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a
rock” [LJ, 179].)21 The moral / psychological significance of the scene, un-
derscored by its length, is that from this moment on, Marlow accepts
responsibility for Jim, which eventually w ill lead to Stein sending Jim to
Patusan. But even as we register the point our attention is drawn, as if by
Marlow himself, to an act of writing that ultimately, with the phrase “clean
slate,” invites being read as emblematizing the author’s project of erasure.
And what is distinctively Conradian, too, is the perfect fit, expressive of
an unconscious mutual accord, between the two meanings, neither of
which may be understood as lying “deeper” than the other.
Another much discussed Conradian structure that bears on the issues
we have been tracing is that of the double, a structure which, more often
than not, leads in the end to the sacrifice or disappearance of one or both
members of the featured pair. (The matched fates of Jim and Dain Waris
in Lord Jim is a case in point.) Whatever else may be at stake in this, and
there is e very reason to think that Conrad’s predilection for doubling, as
Almayer’s Face 47
for the theme of self-betrayal and redemption, was overdetermined, I read

the many varieties of doubling in his work as figures for a two-stage pro
cess of inscription and erasure, the respective representations of which
are often indistinguishable from one another. A key text in this regard is
the author’s note to Conrad’s first collection of stories, Tales of Unrest
(published 1898), which begins by stating that the earliest of the stories
in the volume, “The Lagoon,” was “conceived in the same mood which
produced ‘Almayer’s Folly’ and ‘An Outcast of the Islands’ [Conrad’s
second novel], . . . told in the same breath, . . . seen with the same vision,
rendered in the same method—if such a thing as method did exist then
in my conscious relation to this new adventure of writing for print.”
Conrad continues: “I doubt it very much. One does one’s work first and
theorizes about it afterwards.” He then remarks, as if expanding on his
unconscious relation to that new adventure: “Anybody can see that be-
tween the last paragraph of An Outcast and the first of The Lagoon t here
has been no change of pen, figuratively speaking. It happens also to
be literally true. It was the same pen: a common steel pen.” And he goes
on to say that b ecause he thought the pen had been a good pen and had
done enough for him, he put it into his waistcoat pocket as a memento.
Later it came to rest among other odds and ends in a wooden bowl, where
Conrad would see it from time to time with satisfaction,
till, one day, I perceived with horror that t here w

ere two old pens
in there. How the other pen found its way into the bowl instead of
the fireplace or wastepaper basket I c an’t imagine, but t here the two
were, lying side by side, both encrusted with ink and completely un-
distinguishable from each other. It was very distressing, but being
determined not to share my sentiment between two pens or run the
risk of sentimentalizing over a mere stranger, I threw them both out
of the window into a flower bed—which strikes me now as a poet-
ical grave for the remnants of one’s past.22
The anecdote itself is most likely an invention (Conrad in an autobio-

graphical mode was notoriously unreliable, as was his friend and col-
laborator Ford), but it expresses about as lucidly as can be i magined the
figurative truth that not one but two pens, the second for the work of
erasure, had been involved in the impressionist enterprise of Almayer’s

Folly and the works that immediately followed it.23
As for Conrad’s actual narratives based on doubling, arguably the most
powerful of those, the later story “The Secret Sharer” (1909), ends with
the narrator / captain’s physically similar “secret self,” the inadvertent
murderer Leggatt, at last quitting the ship where he has been hiding, with
the narrator’s connivance, in the latter’s cabin, which in turn enables the
narrator to get his first voyage as captain under way.24 (Towards the be-
ginning of the story, Leggatt explains how on another ship he came to
strangle an insolent and unwilling seaman at the height of a gale, adding
that when the two of them were found by others of the crew, “He was black
in the face. It was too much for them” [“SS,” 90].) Shortly before Leggatt
goes over the side we encounter two mutually reinforcing figures for era-
sure (of that blackened face, to begin with), the first when Leggatt remarks,
“What does the Bible say? ‘Driven off the face of the earth.’ Very well. I am
off the face of the earth now” (“SS,” 114), and the second when the nar-
rator describes Leggatt studying the map of the region where he will
have to swim for it: “He looked thoughtfully at the chart as if surveying
chances and distances from a lofty height—and following with his eyes
his own figure wandering on the blank land of Cochin-China, and then
passing off that piece of paper clean out of sight into uncharted regions”
(“SS,” 116). But the crucial passage occurs near the end of the story: a mo-
ment earlier, the narrator impulsively snatched his floppy hat off his own
head and placed it on Leggatt’s; now the narrator’s problem is to bring
the ship sufficiently close to shore to give Leggatt a chance of swimming
to safety without running aground in the windless calm—all this on an
utterly black night. The passage reads:
I swung the mainyard and waited helplessly. She was perhaps

stopped, and her very fate hung in the balance, with the black mass
of Koh-ring [a mountain] like the gate of the everlasting night tow-
ering over her taffrail. What would she do now? Had she way on her
yet? I stepped to the side swiftly, and on the shadowy w ater I could
see nothing except a faint phosphorescent flash revealing the glassy
smoothness of the sleeping surface. It was impossible to tell—and I
had not learned yet the feel of my ship. Was she moving? What I
Almayer’s Face 49
needed was something easily seen, a piece of paper, which I could

throw overboard and watch. I had nothing on me. To run down for
it I d
idn’t dare. T
here was no time. All at once my strained, yearning
stare distinguished a white object floating within a yard of the ship’s
side. White on the black water. A phosphorescent flash passed
under it. What was that thing? . . . I recognized my own floppy hat.
It must have fallen off his head . . . and he didn’t bother. Now I had
what I wanted—the saving mark for my eyes. (“SS,” 122–123)
As Leggatt vanishes from the narrator’s life (itself an instance of erasure),

the white hat, substituting for a piece of paper, provides the object for the
narrator’s “strained, yearning stare” (think of Almayer watching Nina and
Dain’s canoe grow smaller in the distance, of Marlow watching Jim’s tiny
figure disappear, of Conrad gazing at the page in his letter to Poradowska)
that enables him to steer his ship to safety. And as if to leave no doubt as
to the story’s stake in figures of blankness, we are told at the end of the
same paragraph that Leggatt not only w ill be “hidden forever from all
friendly faces, to be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth,” but also, un-
like Cain, w ill bear “no brand of the curse on his sane forehead to stay a
slaying hand” (“SS,” 123).
Once again, decisive developments with respect to both the narrative’s
moral / psychological significance and a problematic of erasure share the
same imaginative space without e ither being reducible to the other. In-
deed, the mutual autonomy of the two meanings, or rather the indiffer-
ence of the second meaning to the precise moral and / or psychological
valences of the imagery that in a sense it generates, is epitomized by the fact
that of the two emblems of blankness the paragraph offers—the floppy hat
and Leggatt’s unbranded brow—the first is saving, the second poten-
tially dooming (to the narrator’s double if not to the narrator himself). To
generalize the point, in its most characteristic manifestations Conrad’s
problematic of erasure first makes the paper black, then makes it blank,
not just once but repeatedly, without regard for the internal consistency of
the moral, psychological, epistemological, and / or ontological issues that
appear to depend on, to have been developed in terms of, an obsessive
symbolism of black and white.25 Though even to say this is to impose too
rigid a schema upon Conrad’s prose, in which extremes of blackness and
whiteness often produce identical effects of a blankness that simulta

neously frustrates and exacerbates vision, and thereby suggests the
primal situation of the writer staring at the unmarked page. Think of Nos-
tromo and Decoud adrift on the dark Golfo Placido,26 of Marlow and his
crew enveloped by blinding white fog as they approach Kurtz’s camp
(HD, 40–44), of the late short story “The Tale,” in which, during war
time, a commanding officer has been ordered to take his ship and cruise
“along certain coasts to see—what he could see”;27 one rocky coast is
said to “[stand] out intensely black like an India-ink drawing on grey
paper” (“T,” 168), but soon a blinding white fog comes on, and the rest
of the narrative takes place in its grip. (I discuss “The Tale” at some
length in Chapter 6.)28 Alternatively, as I came close to suggesting earlier,
blankness may be figured by absolute silence, as in the pages that narrate
Decoud’s death from solitude near the end of Nostromo (N, 392–396; the
entire section can be read as a barely displaced representation of Con-
rad’s novelistic labors at their most sterile);29 or, as will later emerge, in a
thematics of deafness in the climactic pages of Under Western Eyes or in
the late story, a lesser production, “Prince Roman.”
Since Nostromo has come up in this way, let me briefly note the dual
thematic in that novel of the San Tomé silver, a figure for blankness, and
“material interests,” a virtual oxymoron in that all such interests are
shown to be fantasmatic, which is to say subject to “idealization.”30 Some
remarks by Conrad in a letter of 1923 to a Swedish professor, Ernst Bendz,
are pertinent:
Nostromo [the character] has never been intended for the hero of the
Tale of the Seaboard. Silver is the pivot of the moral and material
events, affecting the lives of everybody in the tale. That this was my
deliberate purpose there can be no doubt. I struck the first note of
my intention in the unusual form which I gave to the title of the First
Part, by calling it “The Silver of the Mine,” and by telling the story
of the enchanted treasure on Azuera, which, strictly speaking, has
nothing to do with the rest of the novel. The word “silver” occurs
almost at the very beginning of the story proper, and I took care to
introduce it in the very last paragraph, which would perhaps have
been better without the phrase which contains that key-word.31
Almayer’s Face 51
The last paragraph in Nostromo reads:
Dr. Monygham, pulling round in the police-galley, heard the name

pass over his head. It was another of Nostromo’s successes, the
greater, the most enviable, the most sinister of all. In that true cry
of love and grief that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to
Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a
big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the
magnificent Capataz de Cargadores dominated the dark Gulf con-
tining his conquests of treasure and love. (N, 447)
Typically, this final image of erasure follows closely on another, as the aged
Giorgio Viola, unaware that the man he has just killed is Nostromo, falls
asleep over a book, “his snow-white head rest[ing] upon the open pages”
(N, 446).
Finally, in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Conrad’s third novel and his
first g reat achievement, a dominant effect is the sheer rapidity with which
images of blackness and whiteness succeed each other, as in the amazing
sentence, which no other author could ever have dreamed of writing, “On
the black sky the stars, coming out, gleamed over an inky sea that, speckled
with foam, flashed back at them the evanescent and pale light of a daz-
zling whiteness born from the black turmoil of the waves” (NN, 47). Or,
more succinctly, by the fusion of euphemism and explicitness in the
skulking Donkin’s exclamation, “blank his black soul!” (NN, 32)—said
of Jimmy, naturally. Euphemism, in that the verb “blank” in this context
reads as a substitute for some other, harsher verb that the conventions of
literary discourse disallow from appearing in propria persona; and explic-
itness, in that the seeming invocation of those conventions enables the
baldest conceivable expression of Conrad’s project of erasure. Note, by
the way, how Donkin’s exclamation underscores the near identity of the
English words “blank” and “black”; no such situation prevails in French,
in which, on the contrary, the word “blanc” (or “blanche”) means both
“white” and “blank.” Put slightly differently, the French language, in
which Conrad read extensively and which he knew at least as well as he
knew English, offered no possibility of distinguishing between “white”
and “blank,” whereas not only did Eng lish allow that distinction, but
the means by which it did so enabled him to associate blankness with

both whiteness and blackness, as his project of erasure as a kind of over-
writing (in Lord Jim, the evocation of a clean slate) implicitly required. I
mention this, of course, for its possible bearing on the larger question of
Conrad’s choice of English over French as his literary vehicle.32 And in case
this seems far-fetched, let me point out that Jimmy’s dead body, having
been wrapped in a white blanket, is sewn into a shroud by a sailmaker who
had earlier served on a frigate called the Blanche (NN, 98)33 —which leads
me to ask w hether “Blanche” might be the unnamed name of Kurtz’s
Intended, whom Marlow visits at the end of Heart of Darkness and to
whom he tells the lie that Kurtz’s last word “was—your name” (HD, 79).
(The lie effectively erases the reality of Kurtz.) Apropos of names, it
might be noted that James Wait’s last name, pronounced with a Cockney
accent as it would have been by Donkin and no doubt other members
of the crew, would have come out “White.” (These few remarks barely
suggest the relevance of The Nigger to my argument.)
n
A topic of urgent concern to post-1960s historicist criticism, imperi-
alism, is central to the most famous of all Conrad’s narratives, Heart of
Darkness, as well as to a story that has received much less attention, the
superb “Youth” (1898). A passage in Heart of Darkness that will already
have struck the reader familiar with that novella as bearing on my argu-
ment is the one in which Marlow relates how, when he was little, he had
a passion for maps (for more on maps and charts in impressionist texts,
see Chapter 6):
I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia,

and lose myself in all the glories of exploration [he remarks to
his auditors]. At that time there w ere many blank spaces on the
earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a
map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say,
When I grow up I w ill go t here. The North Pole was one of t hose
places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not
try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the
Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres.
Almayer’s Face 53
I have been in some of them, and . . . well, we won’t talk about

that. But there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank, so to
speak—that I had a hankering after.
Marlow goes on to say that by the time he grew up “it was not a blank space
any more. . . . It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a
white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of
darkness” (HD, 8).34 As the story unfolds, darkness and blankness turn
out to be cognate with one another in innumerable respects (mediated by
the dire whiteness of ivory), but what I want to emphasize in this context
are not the vicissitudes and transformations of that initial image but rather
the analogy between the blank page as what I earlier called a field of
boundless possibility (also boundless anxiety) for the writer seated before
it and the white space on the map as a comparable field of imaginative self-
realization for the young male European (i.e., white) bourgeois subject in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Understood in this light,
maps of the world with their unmarked spaces, color codings, and exotic
place-names played a vital role in the technology of imperialism not only
because they gave objective expression to the struggle for geopolitical
domination, but also because they helped mobilize the youthful energies
of an entire class of persons in a seemingly individualist but in fact largely
collective (nationalist, racialist, “Western”) undertaking whose economic
and political consequences, when not actually occulted, at any rate need
not have been recognized as such.35 And the text of Conrad’s that more
brilliantly and concentratedly than any other dramatizes the efficacy of
that technology is “Youth.”
Very briefly, “Youth” is Marlow’s story of his first voyage to the East
as a young man, on a ship named the Judea loaded with coal for Bangkok
and bearing on her stern, “below her name in big letters, a lot of scroll-
work, with the gilt off, and some sort of coat of arms, with the motto ‘Do
or Die’ underneath.”36 All this, Marlow says, took his fancy immensely,
but what more than anything fired his imagination was the ship’s desti-
nation: “Bankok! I thrilled. I had been six years at sea, but had only seen
Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their
way—but Bankok!” (“Y,” 11). In fact, the voyage turned out to consist of
an unbroken series of false starts and outright disasters, through all of
which the youthful Marlow was sustained by the prospect of finally seeing
the fabled East; the last disaster, an explosion and fire, eventually sank
the ship, and as by now we might expect, the sinking involved an act of
erasure. In Marlow’s words:
As we pulled across her stern [Marlow and the crew had transferred
to boats] a slim dart of fire shot out viciously at us, and suddenly
she went down, head first, in a great hiss of steam. The unconsumed
stern was the last to sink; but the paint had gone, had cracked, had
peeled off, and there were no letters, there was no word, no stub-
born device that was like her soul, to flash at the rising sun her creed
and her name. (“Y,” 33–34)
Even then, Marlow explains, his enthusiasm remained undampened: “I

was steering for Java—another blessed name—like Bankok, you know.
I steered many days” (“Y,” 34). Finally, one night, utterly exhausted,
Marlow and his men reached land (we are never told w hether in fact it was
Java) and w
ere joined almost immediately by the other boats from the
Judea. The captain dispatched Marlow to find out w hether a nearby ship
in the harbor was English. “And then,” Marlow reports,
before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a
Western voice. . . . The voice swore and cursed violently; it rid-
dled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by
calling me Pig, and from that went crescendo into unmention-
able adjectives—in English. (“Y,” 36)
When the b earer of the voice realized that Marlow himself was English
its tone changed; a commitment was made to take the crew of the Judea
on board, whereupon Marlow returned to the jetty and went to sleep.
When he wakened it was broad day; in a flood of light, Marlow opened
his eyes and lay without moving. In a long paragraph, which I shall quote
in its entirety, the story reaches its climax:
And then I saw the men of the East—they were looking at me. The
whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze,
yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern
Almayer’s Face 55
crowd. And all t hese beings stared without a murmur, without a

sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the
sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing
moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch
stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of hidden h ouses
peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung
shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the
East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent
and sombre, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.
And these were the men. I sat up suddenly. A wave of movement
passed through the crowd from end to end, passed along the heads,
swayed the bodies, ran along the jetty like a ripple on the water, like
a breath of wind on a field—and all was still again. I see it now—the
wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of green infi-
nite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream, the crowd of at-
tentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour—the water reflecting it all,
the curve of the shore, the jetty, the high-sterned outlandish craft
floating still, and the three boats with the tired men from the West
sleeping, unconscious of the land and the p eople and the violence of
sunshine. They slept thrown across the thwarts, curled on bottom-
boards, in the careless attitudes of death. The head of the old
skipper, leaning back in the stern of the long-boat, had fallen on his
breast, and he looked as though he would never wake. Farther out
old Mahon’s [the first mate’s] face was upturned to the sky, with the
long white beard spread out on his breast, as though he had been
shot where he sat at the tiller; and a man, all in a heap in the bows of
the boat, slept with both arms embracing the stem-head and with his
cheek laid on the gunwale. The East looked at them without a
sound. (“Y,” 37–38)
“For me,” Marlow sums up, “all the East is contained in that vision of my
youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came
upon it from a tussle with the sea—and I was young—and I saw it looking
at me” (“Y,” 38).
In this fabulous scene, a problematic of erasure, already thematized
in the obliteration of the Judea’s name and device just before it sank, is
further expressed in the autograph Conradian motif of Marlow’s two
e xperiences of arrival—the cursing voice and the silent gazes—the second

of which effectively cancels, without exactly denying, the first. It is active
as well in the image of the sleeping Mahon’s upturned face with his white
beard spread out on his breast, but its most powerf ul manifestation lies
in the suggestion that the youthful Marlow was himself a blank page, as if
the scene by the jetty were visualized from the position not of the writer
staring at the white paper but rather of the paper under his eyes. And this
suggests in turn that one of the fundamental mobilizing strategies of the
“new imperialism” was to encourage its younger representatives to
imagine, for all their prior formation in European society and the actual
economic work they were carrying out, that they were engaged in a strictly
personal enterprise of self-realization that cast them in the passive role of
blank surfaces on which their experiences of the East, or Africa, or South
America, would inscribe the first identity-defining marks. Conrad’s sin-
gular achievement in “Youth” was, through the medium of erasure, simul
taneously to bear eloquent witness to the success of that strategy and to
allow the reader a glimpse of its merely strategic face.37
A final point. Such a reading, along with others in this chapter, points
to the inadequacy of the traditional emphasis—correct as far as it goes—
on the Conradian text’s exceptional mobility of point of view. What I
would stress instead is rather its exceptional mobility of implied subject
positions relative to all aspects of the scene of writing, including both the
writer himself and the originary blankness at which or into which we have
been imagining the writer gazing. (This would be a further difference
from Crane, in whose texts, for all their profusion of materiality effects as
well as their rampant animism, the implied relation between writer and
page remains relatively stable.) An especially interesting passage in this
regard is the one in Heart of Darkness that begins with the entry of Mar-
low’s steamboat into an area of blinding white fog (more on mist and fog
in Chapter 6) and the wounding and death of the helmsman during the
attack on the steamboat (the protracted description of the dying helms-
man’s upturned face with its “lustrous and inquiring glance” [HD, 47] is a
tour de force of its genre), goes on to tell of Marlow’s impulsive casting
overboard of his blood-soaked shoes one after the other (a moment of dis-
tancing or counter-identification), and concludes with Marlow breaking
off his narrative to ask for tobacco, whereupon the primary narrator re-
Almayer’s Face 57
ports: “There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and
Marlow’s lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and
dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention” (HD, 48)—
very much as if the import of the passage as a w hole were to produce a
momentary view of Conrad himself at work on his manuscript.
Chapter Two
Invisible Writing
N
S o me bi og r ap h y f i r st : William Henry Hudson was born on

August 4, 1841, on a ranch near Buenos Aires, Argentina.1 His par-
ents were Americans of British ancestry who had emigrated to Argentina
in the 1830s. From his earliest years Hudson was passionately interested
in birds, and starting in the 1860s he collected bird skins for the Smith-
sonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and for members of the London
Zoological Society; he also began to publish various observations on bird-
life in the Society’s Proceedings, as a result of which he was made a cor-
responding member of the Zoological Society. In 1874 he left Argentina
for E ngland, in the hope, it seems, of forging a career for himself as a
writer. In 1876 he married a former singer who owned the boardinghouse
in which he was residing, and for years the two subsisted mainly on the
proceeds of that boardinghouse or another. But their income was meager,
and they came close to living in poverty as Hudson struggled to estab-
lish himself as an author. In 1884 he published his first novel, The Purple
Land that England Lost (later reprinted as simply The Purple Land),
which was harshly received by the critics; a second, utopian novel, A
Crystal Age (1887), was likewise a failure; other fictions fell flat as soon as
they appeared. Finally Hudson decided to focus his energies on nature
writing, and there he found a certain success. The breakthrough came
with his 1892 volume of observations in Argentina, The Naturalist in La
58
Invisible Writing 59
Plata, which no less an authority than Alfred Russel Wallace declared

“altogether unique among books on Natural History”;2 it was followed
in 1893 by Idle Days in Patagonia, perhaps his finest book, and Birds in
a Village, the first of numerous studies of bird-and wildlife in the English
countryside. Over time, Hudson’s nature books won him a small but elite
and enthusiastic audience. In 1900, through the initiative of one of his
admirers, the statesman Lord Edward Grey, he was awarded a civil list
pension of 150 pounds a year, and a year later he met the critic Edward
Garnett, who in 1894, as a reader for Allen and Unwin, had discovered
Almayer’s Folly, and who now as a reader for Heinemann was swept off
his feet by one of Hudson’s most impressive short stories, “El Ombú.”
Garnett introduced Hudson to a number of writers including Conrad,
Ford (then Ford Madox Hueffer), Edward Thomas, and Walter de la
Mare, in whose company he enjoyed an honored place. In 1904 Hudson
published his most famous work, the romance (as Hudson called it)
Green Mansions; twelve years later, with an introduction by John Gals-
worthy, Green Mansions was brought out in the United States, where it
became Hudson’s first financial success (he was then seventy-five). One of
his most engrossing books, the autobiographical Far Away and Long Ago,
appeared in 1918. Indeed, illness and old age seem to have had l ittle effect
on his literary activity up until the moment of his death in 1921.
Especially in view of his present obscurity, the most striking fact about
Hudson’s career is the extremely high regard in which he was held by his
fellow writers. Ford is particularly eloquent on this score: repeatedly in
his volumes of reminiscences he asserts that he and Conrad (who w ere
not just friends but also collaborators) considered Hudson the greatest
living writer of English, if not of any language. As Ford put it:
Conrad—who was an even more impassioned admirer of Hudson’s

talent than am even I—used to say: “You may try for ever to learn
how Hudson got his effects and you w ill never know. He writes
down his words as the good God makes the green grass to grow,
and that is all you w ill ever find to say about it if you try for ever.”3
Ford goes on to discuss the corrections Hudson made on his rough drafts
that he, Ford, believes produced that special quality:
He would substitute for the simple word grew the almost more
simple word were. When the hedges were green for when the hedges
grew green, not so much with the idea of avoiding alliteration as
because there is an actual difference in the effect produced visu-
ally. You do not see hedges grow, but you do see that they are green.
And I suppose t hese minute verbal alterations, meticulously attended
to, did give his projected scenes their vividness. (Portraits, 65)
But he also insists that the secrets of Hudson’s prose ultimately defy tech-
nical analysis. “He shared with Turgenev the quality that makes you un-
able to find out how he got his effects,” Ford writes.
Like Turgenev he was utterly undramatic in his methods, and his

books have that same quality that [sic] have t hose of the author of
Fathers and Children. When you read them you forget the lines and
the print. It is as if a remotely smiling face looked up at you out of
the page and told you things. And those things become part of your
own experience. (Portraits, 62)
Not a disfigured upturned face with open unseeing eyes, as classically in

Crane, but a smiling upturned face looking into your own and telling you
things! And immediately Ford goes on to paraphrase a passage from Hud-
son’s Nature in Downland that describes (in Ford’s words)
how, lying on the turf of the high sunlit downs above Lewes in
Sussex, Hudson looked up into the perfect, limpid blue of the sky
and saw, g oing to infinite distances one b ehind the other, the eye
picking up one, then another beyond it, and another and another,
until the whole sky was populated . . . little shining globes, like soap
bubbles. They w ere thistledown floating in an almost windless
heaven. (Portraits, 62; ellipsis in original)
ere the upturned face is Hudson’s own, and what characterizes Ford’s
H
paraphrase (and the original passage) is that the face itself is only implied,
not actually described, which is about as far as you can get within a the-
matics of faciality from Crane and, apart from a few exceptional moments
such as the end of “Youth,” Conrad.
The basic notion that emerges from t hese remarks is of a prose that
steadfastly avoids calling attention to itself as writing or, perhaps more
accurately, that impresses and even awes as writing precisely because it
everywhere seems strictly subordinated to, in the service of, pure descrip-
tion of nature. Something close to this appears to be Galsworthy’s point
in his foreword to Green Mansions, where he writes: “In all his work t here
is an indefinable freedom from any thought of after-benefit—even from
the desire that we should read him. . . . He seems to touch e very string
with fresh and uninked fingers.”4 Similarly, Lord Grey, a passionate birder,
in an “Appreciation” composed just two years a fter Hudson’s death,
insists on the latter’s detachment from ordinary concerns such as “the
desire for personal success, wealth or fame.”5 For Grey, Hudson’s was an
essentially contemplative nature; his great gift was “for pure observation,”
his special power “the power of being moved to think and feel, without
any desire to interfere” (“Appreciation,” xii). Once again, Ford goes
further than anyone else: “If [Hudson] stood against an old gray wall in
a field,” he writes, “he was so gray that he would be almost invisible from
a few feet away u nless you looked specially for him” 6 —as if Hudson him-
self in this characteristically Fordian (i.e., hyperbolic) formulation per-
sonifies the all but “invisible” prose style that made him so exemplary a
writer in the judgment of his contemporaries. To put all this in terms of
my impressionist problematic, we may say that for Hudson’s admirers
during his lifetime the materiality of writing and indeed the act of writing
in the sense of inscribing words on paper with pen and ink are not re-
pressed (or elicited and repressed), as in Crane, but rather minimized or
indeed elided—which is why Galsworthy refers to Hudson’s fingers as
“uninked.” (As contrasted with Norris’s reference to the dark powdery
smudges on Karslake’s pages.) It is as though in the eyes of his admirers,
Hudson’s prose seeks to avoid the least hint of density or opacity, as in
Ford’s claim that reading him “you forget the lines and the print.” Or
think of Hudson replacing the phrase “when the hedges grew green” with
“when the hedges w ere green”: Ford assures us that the change wasn’t mo-
tivated by the desire to avoid alliteration, but it’s hard not to feel that,
at least in part, that was exactly its import; and (as is shown in detail in
“Stephen Crane’s Upturned F aces”) alliteration plays a conspicuous role
in Crane’s prose, as in the typical phrase from The Red Badge “the flag
fluttered,” which virtually simult aneously calls attention to the words
themselves and evokes not just the motion but, onomatopoetically, the
flapping sound of the banner to which they refer—that is, the phrase
both elicits the materiality of writing and then represses that materiality
by virtue of the vividness of the representation to which it gives rise.
(Hudson in his old age wrote his friend Morley Roberts asking that, after
his death, “not a scrap of written paper or manuscript” be allowed to
survive.7 The very terms of the request are revealing, all the more so if
Ford is right and the manuscripts w ere heavily revised.)
Nor is Hudsonian denial akin to Conradian erasure, even if, as I have
insisted, the blankness Conrad’s prose repeatedly thematizes is never
merely or brutely material (with one massive exception, The Secret Agent,
to be discussed at length in Chapter 5). As the image of Almayer erasing
all traces of Nina’s footsteps by “[piling] up small heaps of sand, . . .
a line of miniature graves right down to the w ater” strongly suggests,
effects of erasure in Conrad characteristically involve a quasi-material
density of their own, and indeed t here is no equivalent in Hudson to
Conradian atmosphere, which H. G. Wells, reviewing Almayer’s Folly,
presciently described as “a haze of sentences” looming between the
reader and the events of the narrative. 8 (A tendency of recent criticism
has been to explain that haziness or semi-opacity by attributing to
Conrad a desire to call attention to the inadequacy of language to repre-
sent actual experience—an explanation I find less than persuasive.)
Now consider the opening sentences of a chapter titled “Concerning
Eyes” from Idle Days in Patagonia (1893):
White, crimson, emerald green, shining golden yellow, are amongst

the colors seen in the eyes of birds. In owls, herons, cormorants,
and many other tribes, the brightly-tinted eye is incomparably the
finest feature and chief glory. It fixes the attention at once, appearing
like a splendid gem, for which the airy bird-body, with its graceful
curves and soft tints, forms an appropriate setting. When the eye
closes in death, the bird, except to the naturalist, becomes a mere
bundle of dead feathers; crystal globes may be put into the empty
sockets, and a bold life-imitating attitude given to the stuffed
specimen; but the vitreous orbs shoot forth no life-like flames, the
“passion and the fire [sic] whose fountains are within” have van-
ished, and the best work of the taxidermist, who has given a life to
his bastard art, produces in the mind only sensations of irritation
and disgust.9
The passage is of interest on several counts. First, it points to a

relationship—t hematized in Green Mansions, as w ill emerge—between
Hudson’s lifelong fascination with birds and his equal fascination in his
fictional writings with beautiful w omen with vivid flame-like eyes. Second,
the explicit concerns of the passage are not just ornithological or naturist
(I am trying to avoid the ambiguous adjective “naturalistic”) but aesthetic.
When a taxidermist inserts crystal globes in a dead bird’s eye sockets and
places the bird in an attitude it might actually have assumed, he is seeking
to imitate life, which makes him an artist of sorts (as Hudson as much as
says). But Hudson finds the result repugnant, not because the taxidermist
ought to have proceeded in some other fashion but because his entire
project is misconceived. One might say that in Hudson’s aesthetic death
is absolute and irredeemable (and not only in his aesthetic; he once called
death “the Monstrous Betrayal”);10 his concern is with living birds, more
precisely with what in the first chapter of his book Birds and Man he calls
“birds at their best,” by which he means “an unsually attractive aspect
of the bird, or a very much better than the ordinary one”—aspects that
produce, as he goes on to say, especially strong “impressions” on the
observer.11
Third, the contrast Hudson draws between the real and glass eyes of
living and dead birds invites comparison with a passage from William
James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) that I first cited in the Crane chapter
of Realism, Writing, Disfiguration. James is trying to characterize the way
in which “if we look at an isolated printed word and repeat it long
enough, it ends by assuming an entirely unnatural aspect” (it is, so to
speak, rendered merely material). “Let the reader try this with any
word on this page,” James writes. “He w ill soon begin to wonder if it can
be the word he has been using all his life with that meaning. It stares at
him from the paper like a glass eye, with no speculation in it. Its body is
indeed there, but its soul is fled.”12 The similarity of terms between the
Hudson and James passages could hardly be more striking. But even
without that similarity—even ignoring James’s remarks—Hudson’s revul-
sion against the glass eyes of stuffed birds may be read as expressing his
commitment to the version of impressionism I have been calling denial.
Or rather, that revulsion may be read as such once we recognize the
deeper significance of Hudson’s ornithological passion. Simply put, birds
constitute the ultimate descriptive challenge to Hudson the writer by
virtue of their particularly vivid sort of beauty, the sheer difficulty of ex-
periencing them “at their best,” and, not least important, the unique con-
junction in them of visual and aural characteristics. Thus, in the first
chapter of Birds and Man Hudson regrets
that the two subjects [sight and sounds] have to be treated consec-
utively instead of together, since with birds they are more intimately
joined than in any other order of beings; and in images of bird life
at its best they sometimes cannot be dissociated;—the aerial form
of the creature, its harmonious, delicate tints, and its grace of mo-
tion; and the voice, which, loud or low, is aerial too, in harmony
with the form. (BM, 20; emphasis added)
This seems to imply that the task of description is doomed from the start,
and in fact, Hudson repeatedly stresses that the (necessarily brief and un-
anticipatable) scenes of birdlife he cherishes most “live in their loveliness
only for him who has seen and harvested them: they cannot be pictured
forth to another by words” (BM, 19–20). In particular, trying to render
birdsong in words is a vain endeavor. “We have no symbols to represent
such sounds on paper,” Hudson explains in Idle Days, “hence we are as
powerless to convey to another the impression they make on us as we are
to describe the odors of flowers” (ID, 143). And this not only because our
knowledge of bird language is grossly deficient but also, more fundamen-
tally, b ecause we have no way of notating the “certain aerial quality
which makes [bird sounds] differ from all other sounds” (ID, 146; em-
phasis added).13 (He especially decries “the old method of spelling bird
notes and sound” [ID, 145; emphasis in original]; this in effect would be
to treat birdsong as a kind of dialect, in the manner of Crane.) But, of

course, Hudson w asn’t led by such considerations to give up writing about
birds; on the contrary, he published book after book on the subject (these
more than anything e lse made for his exalted reputation among his con-
temporaries), which suggests that his repeated claims that it was impos-
sible to capture the essence of birds should be taken less as acknowledging
ultimate defeat than as indicating his view of the stakes of possible
success.
What I mean is this: by Hudson’s own account, the essentially aerial
nature of birds—not only of their sounds but of their bodies as well—
called for an equivalent volatilization or, a favorite Hudson word, “ethe-
realization” of the prose medium as such. Accordingly, to do justice to
his experience of “birds at their best,” Hudson’s prose—the words on the
page—had to be wholly given over to the production of simultaneous ef-
fects of sight and sound; put more strongly, the words had to consume
themselves in the process, in which case the reader would indeed “lose
sight of the lines and the print,” as Ford said he did when he read Hudson.
It follows that birds as Hudson perceived them were the perfect if not the
sole truly fitting subject matter for his version of impressionism as the rad-
ical denial of the materiality of writing. Only a concentrated attempt to
represent his most vivid impressions of birds and birdsong put writing
under maximum pressure to undo its own materiality. And only u nder
maximum pressure could the feat conceivably be managed. Just how im-
material Hudson’s scriptive / representational ideal was can be gathered
from a remarkable passage further on in the first chapter of Birds and
Man. He has just quoted Sir Edward Grey as saying in a speech that the
pleasure of seeing and listening to birds was “happier than personal suc-
cess.” He grants that some who heard this must have found it hard to
understand. He then says:
Let us imagine that in addition to this miraculous faculty of the

brain of storing innumerable brilliant images of t hings seen and
heard, to be reproduced at call to the inner sense, t here existed in
a few gifted persons a correlated faculty by means of which these
treasured images could be thrown at w ill into the mind of another;
let us further imagine that some one in the audience who had
wondered at that saying, finding it both dark and hard, had asked
me to explain it; and that in response I had shown him as by a swift
succession of lightning flashes a score or a hundred images of birds
at their best—the unimaginable loveliness, the sunlit colour, the
grace of form and of motion, and the melody—how great the effect
of even that brief glance into a new unknown world would have
been! (BM, 37–38)
In this unreal limit case, Hudson imagines the direct thought transfer-
ence of sights and sounds from his mind to another’s. (In fact, Hudson in
a late book, A Hind in Richmond Park, expresses his belief in telepathic
phenomena.)14 In a similar spirit, Ford, a fter paraphrasing the passage
from Nature in Downland in which Hudson lay on his back watching balls
of thistledown floating in an almost windless heaven, goes on to claim:
Now that is part of my life. I have never had the patience—the con-
templative tranquillity—to lie looking up into the heavens. I have
never in my life done it. Yet that is I, not Hudson, looking up into
the heavens, the eye discovering more and more tiny, shining globes
until the w
hole sky is full of them and t hose thistle-seed globes seem
to be my globes. (Portraits, 62)
Ford and other admirers also speak of the pleasure they take in copying
out Hudson’s prose.
All these issues come to a head in one of the strangest, most unclas-
sifiable books in modern English or American literature, Green Man-
sions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904).15 The protagonist, Abel
Guevez de Argensola, flees his native Venezuela for the wilds of the Am-
azon after being involved in an abortive coup. (The narrative proper is
told in the first person as if in Abel’s voice, but a brief prologue makes it
clear that it has been set down by an unnamed narrator a fter Abel’s
death, on the strength of a conversation years before. The transition
from one voice to the other is marked by a single “he said,” and there
is no return to the original narrator at the story’s end.) One day while
exploring a part icu lar forest Abel hears “a low strain of exquisite bird-
melody, wonderfully pure and expressive, unlike any musical sound I
had ever heard before” (GM, 37). The sound recalls that of a bird called
the rialejo but, he says, “was purer, more expressive, softer—so low that
at a distance of forty yards I could hardly have heard it. But its greatest
charm was its resemblance to the human voice—a voice purified and
brightened to something almost angelic” (GM, 37–38). In fact, the voice
turns out to belong to a h uman being, the girl-woman Rima, with whom
Abel soon falls in love. But Rima is no ordinary human being. She is sev-
enteen years old, tiny (“not above four feet six or seven inches in height”
[GM, 65]); her face far surpasses in loveliness all the h uman faces Abel
has ever seen; the color of her skin, eyes, and hair continually changes
with each shift of mood and variation in the light (he later compares
her to “a hummingbird moving about in an aërial dance among the
flowers—a living prismatic gem that changes its colour with every change
of position” [GM, 97; emphasis added]); her expression combines human
intelligence with the “all-seeing, all-hearing alertness” of a wild creature
(GM, 82); and—a characteristic touch—her only garment is a “light
sheeny” dress she turns out to have made for herself “out of the fine
floating lines of small gossamer spiders” (GM, 116–118). Rima lives in the
forest with Nuflo, a coarse old man whom Abel recognizes at once cannot
be related to her, and indeed, it emerges that years before, he had res-
cued Rima’s mother who was then pregnant with Rima. B ecause she
could never be taught to speak Spanish or Indian, it was impossible to
learn where she was from or who the child’s f ather was; instead she spoke
only the wonderful melodious language with which she and her daughter
communed by the hour during the seven years they had together before
the mother died. (Rima herself speaks Spanish in addition to her mother
tongue, but regards the first as hopelessly crude in comparison with the
second. “That is not speaking,” she says of it. And: “I can tell you [in
Spanish], but it will not be telling you” [GM, 242–243].)
From my point of view, the crucial scene—the one that first led me to
think that Hudson belonged to my impressionist paradigm—takes place
fairly late in the book. At Rima’s insistence, Abel, Rima, and Nuflo have
journeyed by foot to a region called Riolama where Nuflo discovered
R ima’s m
other seventeen years before. Abel tries to persuade Rima that
her m
other must have been part of a community that was wholly destroyed
shortly before Nuflo found her, but Rima, unable to bear the thought, cries
out and collapses. Her eyes are closed, her face “still and deathly white”
(GM, 229); Abel carries her down into the cave where Nuflo had taken
Rima’s mother and “gaze[s] with unutterable anguish into her strangely
white face” (GM, 231). As Nuflo prays for her recovery, Abel thinks he de-
tects the first signs of a return to life:
Together we continued watching her face for half an hour longer, I

still holding her in my arms, which could never grow weary of
that sweet burden, waiting for other, surer signs of returning life;
and she seemed now like one that had fallen into a profound, death-
like sleep which must end in death. Yet when I remembered her face
as it had looked an hour ago, I was confirmed in the belief that
the progress to recovery, so strangely slow, was yet sure. So slow, so
gradual was this passing from death to life that we had hardly ceased
to fear when we noticed that the lips were parted, or almost parted,
that they were no longer white, and that under pale, transparent skin
a faint, bluish-rosy colour was now visible. (GM, 233)
Sensing that the worst is over, Nuflo stretches out and falls asleep. Alone
with Rima, “the mysterious loveliness of [her] still face . . . , its appearance
of life without consciousness,” produces in Abel “a strange feeling . . . ,
hard, perhaps impossible, to describe” (GM, 233).16 He continues to ob-
serve further changes in Rima’s face, “a more distinct advance toward
conscious life”; her color deepens, her eyelids lift slightly, her lips, too,
begin to part—and at last, Abel tells us, “the beauty of those lips could
no longer be resisted, and I touched them with mine.” Between kisses
Abel continues to gaze into her face, which becomes more and more ra-
diant; is she aware of his kisses or not? After a while there can be no doubt.
And gazing with those open, conscious eyes, it seemed to me that

at last, at last, the shadow that had rested between us had vanished,
that we were united in perfect love and confidence, and that speech
was superfluous. And when I spoke it was not without doubt and
hesitation: our bliss in those silent moments had been so complete,
what could speaking do but make it less! (GM, 236–237)
(The scene takes up no fewer than eight pages.)

By now I need hardly stress the analogy between the scene in the cave,
focused on Rima’s white, seemingly lifeless, in that sense disfigured
upturned face, and analogous scenes in Crane and Conrad. But what
distinguishes the scene I have just summarized from anything to be
found in their works, what makes it autograph Hudson (apart from the
fact that the face in question belongs to a beautiful w oman), is that u nder
Abel’s passionate scrutiny Rima’s face becomes progressively less disfig-
ured as warmth and color return to her features, she gradually recovers
consciousness, and her eyes not only open but gaze directly into his.
Similarly, instead of the shock and horror with which disfigured faces
are typically beheld in Crane and Conrad, the movement h ere is toward
ever more intimate communion, culminating in the virtual exchange of
kisses with which the scene concludes. Figuratively speaking, the move-
ment ideally is toward blending or merger (not of the signifier with the
signified but of the entranced reader with the dematerialized prose me-
dium itself), a suggestion borne out by a grammatical ambiguity that
Hudson cannot quite have intended as such. “And gazing with those
open, conscious eyes,” I have quoted Abel as saying, “it seemed to me that
at last, at last, the shadow that had rested between us had vanished, that
we were united in perfect love and confidence, and that speech was su-
perfluous.” Simply as regards grammar, Abel would seem to be doing the
gazing; yet the context makes it clear that the open, conscious eyes are
Rima’s, which is to say that the sentence fleetingly and inconspicuously
elides the distinction between the two. Indeed, the moment of elision,
rather than the exchange of kisses as such, is as near as Green Mansions
comes to suggesting coitus, an act that, in its sheer physicality, is at odds
with the overall logic of Hudson’s impressionism as I have defined it.
(Later, a fter Rima’s death, Abel likens their souls during her lifetime
to “two raindrops side by side, drawing irresistibly nearer, ever nearer”;
only now, after her death, does it seem to him that “they had touched and
were not two, but one inseparable drop, crystallised beyond change,
not to be disintegrated by time, nor shattered by death’s blow, nor re-
solved by any alchemy” [GM, 287].) In any case, it isn’t surprising that
the text associates the lovers’ brief moment of perfect felicity with silence
rather than speech. Throughout the narrative, ordinary h uman speech is
contrasted to Rima’s melodious outpourings, and in fact, what soon
introduces a note of sadness into their relations is Rima’s discovery that,

despite their rapport, Abel still finds her “secret language” wholly unintel-
ligible (GM, 241–242).
In itself, the scene as I have presented it may appear to have nothing to
do with writing. But certain other events in the story remove all doubt as
to its relation to the problematic I have been developing. For example, im-
mediately before Abel finally sees Rima his attention falls on a curious
natural phenomenon:
Just before me, where I sat, grew a low, wide-spreading plant, cov-
ered with broad, round, polished leaves; and the roundness, stiff-
ness, and perfectly horizontal position of the upper leaves made
them look like a collection of small platforms or round table-tops
placed nearly on a level. Through the leaves, to the height of a foot or
more above them, a slender dead stem protruded, and from a twig at
its summit depended a broken spider’s web. A minute dead leaf
had become attached to one of the loose threads, and threw its small
but distinct shadow on the platform leaves below: and as it trembled
and swayed in the current of air the black spot trembled with it or
flew swiftly over the bright green surfaces, and was seldom at rest.
(GM, 61–62)
Abel goes on tell how a small spider crept onto one of the leaves and mis-
took the erratically moving shadow for a fly, which it proceeded to stalk;
but having finally pounced on its imaginary prey, it of course discovered
that nothing was actually there (Abel’s words are that the spider found
“nothing under him” [GM, 63]). At that point Rima’s laughter rings out
from somewhere b ehind Abel, implicitly likening him to the spider. By
now it should not be surprising that I take this carefully constructed and
strategically placed l ittle vignette as a mini-allegory of an ideal of writing
as a necessarily material practice (note the complexity of the writing de-
vice itself) that nevertheless produces a completely immaterial result
(think of Ford on Hudsonian illusionism). As will emerge, indeed, as has
already been touched on in the notes to Chapter 1 apropos of Conrad and
Crane, shadows and shadow writing are a characteristic impressionist
motif, even if Hudson’s use of that motif in this passage is like nothing
else in the literature of his time.
But the most nearly explicit thematizations of writing come a fter the
scene of Rima’s swoon and revival. Shortly a fter her recovery Rima de-
cides to return in advance of Abel and Nuflo to the forest where she and
Abel first met; by the time Abel arrives Rima is nowhere to be found.
Because the forest is frequented by a tribe of Indians who had always be-
lieved Rima to be an evil spirit, Abel fears the worst, and he eventually
learns from one of the Indians that a week before his arrival Rima had
been forced by her pursuers to take shelter in a high tree; the tree was
then set on fire, and finally (in the words of the Indian),
from the top of the tree, out of the green leaves, came a g reat cry,
like the cry of a bird, “Abel! Abel!” and then looking we saw some-
thing fall; through leaves and smoke and flame it fell like a g reat
white bird killed with an arrow and falling to the earth, and fell into
the flames beneath. And it was the d aughter of the Didi [an evil
spirit], and she was burnt to ashes like a moth in the flames of a fire,
and no one has ever heard or seen her since. (GM, 270)
Presently, Abel takes his revenge by inciting the leader of an enemy vil-
lage to slaughter Rima’s killers to the last person. L
ater, living alone, he
is visited one night by a moth, which, Abel reports,
fluttered in and alighted on my hand as I sat by the fire, causing me

to hold my breath as I gazed on it. Its fore wings were pale grey, with
shadings dark and light written all over in finest characters with
some twilight mystery or legend; but the round underwings w ere
clear amber-yellow, veined like a leaf with red and purple veins; a
thing of such exquisite chaste beauty that the sight of it gave me a
sudden shock of pleasure. (GM, 289)
Abel rises and opens the door to allow the moth to escape (it has alighted
on a palm leaf directly over the fire) but instead it falls into the flames. Abel’s
commentary is hardly necessary: “Even thus had Rima fallen—fallen from
the g reat height—into the flames that instantly consumed her beautiful
flesh and bright spirit! O cruel nature!” (GM, 290).
Still later, Abel searches out the blackened tree and after a day of sifting
through the surrounding ashes discovers Rima’s calcined bones, which
he takes back to his hut and stores in an earthen jar. He then sets out to
ornament the jar’s surface using only purple and black (i.e., ink-like)
juices from certain berries. “A serpent was represented wound round
the lower portion of the jar,” he explains,
dull-hued, with a chain of irregular black spots or blotches ex-

tending along its body: and if any person had curiously examined
t hese spots he would have discovered that e very other one was a
rudely s haped letter, and that the letters, by being properly divided,
made the following words:—
Sin vos y siu dios y mi.
(Without you and without God and me.) (GM, 297)
Some months a fter that, Abel kills a serpent he finds sleeping in his
path, and begins to imagine that the creature’s severed head had grown
to something monstrous and that its lidless eyes denounced him as a mur-
derer. At last, Abel decides to return to civilization carrying with him
the urn containing Rima’s ashes, and in the course of his exhausting
journey other serpent fantasies assault him. The worst of t hese he de-
scribes as follows:
When the sun grew hot overhead and the way was over open sa-
vannah country I would see something moving on the ground at
my side and always keeping abreast of me. A small snake, one or two
feet long. No, not a small snake, but a sinuous mark in the pattern
on a huge serpent’s head, five or six yards long, always moving de-
liberately at my side. If a cloud came over the sun, or a fresh breeze
sprang up, gradually the outline of that awful head would fade and
the well-defined pattern would resolve itself into the motlings [sic]
on the earth. But if the sun grew more and more hot and dazzling
as the day progressed, then the tremendous ophidian head would
become increasingly real to my sight, with glistening scales and

symmetrical markings; and I would walk carefully not to stumble
against or touch it; and when I cast my eyes behind me I could see
no end to its great coils extending across the savannah. Even looking
back from the summit of a high hill I could see it stretching leagues
and leagues away through forests and rivers, across wide plains, val-
leys and mountains, to lose itself at last in the infinite blue distance.
(GM, 311–312)
The explicit parallel between Rima and the moth with the mysterious
writing on its wings points to an interpretation of her as personifying not
simply Hudson’s ideal of nature (the traditional view) but also, from my
standpoint more important, his ideal of writing, which is to say, at once a
certain quasi-literary practice (figured by Rima’s finer songlike language)
and a certain quasi-literary object (figured by Rima’s upturned face re-
turning to life and consciousness, and more broadly by her beauty, change-
ableness, etherealness). Equally, the parallel between Rima’s and the
moth’s respective fates suggests that of all conceivable ends, death by fire
is best b ecause it consumes the material body (or almost consumes it; what
is left behind is white ash, the most inoffensive of material remains); in-
deed, it may well have been the commitment to dematerialization implicit
in Hudson’s impressionist ideal, rather than any tragic view of life or the
demands of plot as such, that made Rima’s death—this particular death—
inevitable. (Apropos of fire and flammability there is in our purview the
horrific scene from The Monster, while two other stories by Crane in
which fire plays a decisive role are “The Veteran,” cited in its entirety at
the close of “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” and the late “Manacled.”)17
In a different register, Abel’s, and by implication, the first narrator’s (and
therefore, Hudson’s), a ctual inferior or “fallen” relation to writing is inti-
mated not only by the contrast between Abel’s language and Rima’s and
by his involvement in killing (the Indians, the serpent) but also by his
labors to ornament her funerary urn with the image of a serpent, every
other of whose black spots was a letter spelling out a b itter device. (Quite
apart from the serpent image as such, the integration of drawing and
writing is still another impressionist motif, as has already been suggested.
Examples of this include the Tibetan lama’s chart in Kipling’s g reat novel
Kim, to be discussed in Chapter 6 along with other instances of maps and

charts in impressionist texts. Two well-k nown Kipling stories, “The Eye
of Allah,” to be discussed in Chapter 9, note 22, and “Dayspring Mis-
handled,” are also to the point, as is the moment in Heart of Darkness
when Marlow comes across a book on seamanship containing “illustra-
tive diagrams and repulsive lines of figures” along with notes in cipher
penciled in the margins.18 In addition, there are H. G. Wells’s cartoon-
like “picshuas,” clearly relished by their creator, a generous selection of
which are reproduced in his Experiment in Autobiography.)19 More bi-
zarre and compelling in this regard is Abel’s fancy of being accompa-
nied throughout much of his journey by a sinuous mark in the pattern on
a huge serpent’s head (an opposite figure, one might say, to Rima’s up-
turned face). That the pattern was sometimes indistinguishable from
mottlings on the earth may be read as a “fallen” version of Hudsonian il-
lusionism (or camouflage, making the reader “forget the lines and the
print”), just as the becoming-visible of the head when the sun was bright
and hot suggests a kind of thematization of the page; that the serpent
kept pace with Abel from day to day, indeed, that looking back he could
see no end to its coils, perfectly expresses the ongoingness, the sheerly
scriptive continuity, of Green Mansions as a work of writing (Abel says of
his endless labors on the funerary urn that he might have inscribed on
it the words “Abel was d oing this” [GM, 296]).20 Finally, the purely priva-
tive character of the funerary inscription itself—“Without you and without
God and me”—epitomizes denial, but in an ironic or “fallen” mode.21
n
I come now to a well-k nown work by an author who enjoyed enormous
fame during his lifetime and who w ill figure more than once in the chap-
ters that follow, H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, originally serialized in
Pearson’s Weekly in 1897 and first published as a novel that same year.22
Simply put, I read The Invisible Man as something close to an allegory
of the fate of invisibility as a stylistic—specifically, a writerly—ideal. And
I take that fate to be that the ideal itself is doomed to collapse, even to
betray itself, under the pressure of a materiality it cannot effectively
deny—more accurately, that it can only deny but cannot in the end undo
or defeat. Not that I understand The Invisible Man as a response e ither
to Hudson’s prose or to the widespread admiration of it on the part of

writers such as Ford and Conrad, which in 1897 was scarcely under way.
Rather, my claim is that it expresses Wells’s own far from simple or un-
ambivalent relation to impressionist issues, in particular to the threat
that materiality as such, in the form of the materiality of writing con-
ceived as the mere inscribing of “soulless” physical marks on a material
surface, offered to the impressionist project, a threat that would have
been the same had Hudson never written a word.
What is decisive here is that the Invisible Man—originally an albino
medical student named Griffin—achieves invisibility through a height-
ened mode of transparency. And that is b ecause the crucial point about
transparency as it is represented in The Invisible Man is that it in no way
undoes or suspends the protagonist’s material existence; on the contrary,
under all sorts of ordinary circumstances it serves to make his material
existence far more burdensome, indeed, far more dangerous to him, than
was the case before he made himself invisible.
For example, in order to maintain his invisibility the Invisible Man
must go about naked in winter weather; not surprisingly, he contracts a
cold, which leads him to sneeze at inopportune moments. Also, his bare
feet are unused to the hard, freezing ground. And he must take care to
avoid crowds: the least physical contact with the bodies of o thers threatens
to give him away. Of course, no matter how much care he takes, he re-
mains fully perceptible to dogs, for whom—as he learns to his cost—the
sense of smell takes precedence over that of sight. (All this is said to Kemp,
a former University College classmate and now a doctor in the countryside,
into whose h ouse the Invisible Man stumbles by chance halfway through
the book. He tells his story in the hope that Kemp w ill help him turn the
tables on his pursuers, but instead Kemp alerts the authorities, who eventu-
ally hunt the Invisible Man down and kill him.) But perhaps the most bril-
liant, because most “visual,” evocation of the Invisible Man’s inescapable
materiality takes place in London just after he has managed to shake a dog
who has been pursuing him. Pausing for a moment at the top of the white
steps of a h ouse near Russell Square, he awaits the passing of a Salvation
Army parade (the band, as if in tribute to an overarching impressionist
problematic, plays the hymn “When S hall We See His Face?”) but fails
to notice two urchins who had stopped nearby.
“See ‘em,” said one. “See what?” said the other. “Why—them
footmarks—bare. Like what you makes in mud.”
I looked down and saw the youngsters had stopped and w ere
gaping at the muddy footmarks I had left b ehind me up the newly
whitened steps. . . . “There’s a barefoot man gone up them steps,
or I don’t know nothing,” said one. “And he a in’t never come
down again. And his foot was a-bleeding.”
The thick of the crowd had already passed. “Looky t here, Ted,”
quoth the younger of the detectives, with the sharpness of surprise
in his voice, and pointed straight to my feet. I looked down and saw
at once the dim suggestion of their outline sketched in splashes of
mud. (IM, 105–106; emphasis in original)
The Invisible Man is forced to flee once more.

In his first flush of enthusiasm at achieving invisibility, the Invisible
Man is full of a sense of the “extraordinary advantage” (IM, 102) his con-
dition gave him. But within a short time his assessment of his situation
changes dramatically:
“But you begin to realize now,” said the Invisible Man, “the full dis-
advantage of my condition. I had no shelter, no covering. To get
clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange
and terrible t hing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unas-
similated m atter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.”
“I never thought of that,” said Kemp.
“Nor had I. And the snow had warned me of other dangers. I
could not go abroad in snow—it would settle on me and expose me.
Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of
a man—a bubble. And fog—I should be like a fainter bubble in a
fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went
abroad—in the London air—I gathered dirt about my ankles,
floating smuts and dust upon my skin. I did not know how long it
would be before I should become visible from that cause also. But
I saw clearly it could not be for long.” (IM, 114)
Hence the decision to give up invisibility for a time by covering himself

with clothing and a hat and putting on a mask, dark glasses, grayish whis
kers, and a wig, with bandages to cover his ears and forehead (this is how
he is clothed when he arrives at the town of Iping at the beginning of
chapter 1). Even so, he soon realizes that he cannot eat without exposing
his missing face (which meant that he could only eat out of the sight of
others). As he later puts it to Kemp: “This invisibility, in fact, is only good
in two cases: It’s useful in getting away, it’s useful in approaching. It’s par-
ticularly useful, therefore, in killing. I can walk round a man, whatever
weapon he has, choose my point, strike as I like. Dodge as I like. Escape
as I like” (IM, 124). And yet, reading these words, we already know—the
Invisible Man has just conceded as much—that he enjoys nothing remotely
like that degree of action and movement.
The force of all this is to underscore, indeed, to harp upon, the extent
to which invisibility imagined as transparency makes materiality an in-
superable problem—a problem, it should be emphasized, that the mate-
riality of the body doesn’t present under ordinary circumstances. Put
slightly differently, we might think of The Invisible Man as a sustained
thought experiment leading to the discovery that t here exists an incom-
patibility verging on contradiction between transparency and materiality.
And if we then go on to read that discovery allegorically with respect to
the problematic of literary impressionism I have been developing, we
might say that Wells’s novel suggests that an ideal of authorial invisibility
i magined as scriptural transparency cannot be sustained in the face of
writing’s material basis, or rather of the visibility of that material basis.
As we shall see, The Invisible Man is not the only major work by Wells
that may fruitfully be read as investigating—as if by means of what I have
just called thought experiments—one or another aspect of the impres-
sionist project, and moreover as doing so with considerable openness, even
explicitness. But to stay with that novel, it is clearly significant that one’s
first encounter with Kemp finds him in his study, surrounded by book-
shelves crowded with books and scientific publications, seated at a writing
table, pen in hand (actually, what is said is that it is in his mouth [IM, 70], an
interesting touch in view of the ostensibly oral tenor of the story as a whole).
(There is also “a microscope, glass slips, minute instruments, some cul-
tures, and scattered bottles of reagents,” as if to imply a connection between
writing and science, about which there will be more to say shortly.) The sun
has just set, and as Kemp looks out of the window he notices “the little
figure of a man, inky black, running over the hill brow toward him. He was
a shortish l ittle man, and he wore a high hat, and he was r unning so fast that
his legs verily twinkled” (IM, 70; emphasis added). (The man is a tramp,
Thomas Marvel, and he is r unning to escape from the Invisible Man.) A
few paragraphs further on we are told: “All [the townspeople] he passed
stopped and began staring up the road and down, and interrogating one
another with an inkling of discomfort for the reason of his haste” (IM, 71;
emphasis added). (Note the awkwardness of the phrasing; Wells is never a
graceful writer but something other than mere idiosyncrasy is at work
here. He positively wants to work “ink-” words into t hese paragraphs.)
When we next see Kemp he is still writing in his study; then the Invisible
Man breaks into his h ouse, and a moment before Kemp realizes what has
happened—before he sees the bandage hanging in midair around the Invis-
ible Man’s wounded invisible hand—we are given the sentence, “All men,
however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings” (IM, 78;
emphasis added). (In the previous chapter a shattered mirror “came
smashing and tinkling down” [IM, 74; emphasis added].) By now it goes
without saying that I read all this as an announcement of the writtenness of
The Invisible Man itself, not only b ecause the scenes in question are explic
itly ones of writing (and so suggest a curious quasi-identification between
Kemp and Wells) but also b ecause the conspicuous repetition of the core
word “ink” further directs our attention to the act of inscription. Indeed,
the mere fact of verbal repetition was bound to compromise stylistic trans-
parency, as was the use of words in italics or quotation marks, both of which
abound in Wells’s novel; for example, the sentence following the one about
how all men retain some superstitious inklings reads, “The feeling that is
called ‘eerie’ came upon him” (IM, 78). And something else: when Kemp
first sees Marvel running, he says various things to himself including the
initially strange remark, “Spurted, sir” (IM, 71), and in fact, the word
“spurt” recurs more than once in the pages that follow. On the face of it,
“spurt” refers to a sudden burst of speed; but it also suggests an inadvertent
spurt of ink from a metal pen being wielded perhaps too quickly by the
writer. Again, it seems unlikely that Wells did not consciously intend the
suggestion. All this may seem to have something in common with certain
tendencies in Crane, the decisive difference being that Wells’s workmanlike
prose, here as everywhere in his oeuvre, is devoid of the least hint of tension
or crisis; whereas in Crane the last-second repression of the materiality of
writing is fully as important as the fevered eliciting of it (whence the electri-

fying intensity of his sentences), in Wells the declaration of writtenness is
at once so emphatic and undisguised as to seem hardly worthy of notice
(thus the word “eerie” with its three e’s slips by virtually unnoticed de-
spite having been placed in quotation marks).
Another important theme in the novel concerns the three big manu-
script volumes of the Invisible Man’s diary—the day-by-day record of the
experiments that led up to his discovery of the secret of perfect transpar-
ency. The volumes are important to the Invisible Man b ecause they hold
the clues he will need in order to reverse his condition, but he loses pos-
session of them early on and makes a considerable effort to get them back,
which he succeeds in d oing only to lose them again for good. They are
written in cipher (IM, 95), which is to say that they are the very opposite
of transparent to ordinary readers. And at the end of the story, following
the Invisible Man’s death, they are in the possession of Thomas Marvel,
the former tramp now become the owner of an inn called “The Invisible
Man” (what the text says is this: “The sign of the inn is an empty board
save for a hat and boots, and the name is the title of this story” [IM, 149]).
Marvel of course is wholly unable to make sense of his prize, but every
Sunday morning and every night after ten he takes all three volumes out
and looks at them. “The covers are weather-worn and tinged with an algal
green,” we are told, “for once they sojourned in a ditch, and some of the
papers have been washed blank by dirty w ater” (IM, 150). In an obvious
sense, the blankness of the pages serves as a half-ironic, half-devastating
commentary on invisibility as a writerly ideal, as if to say that only in this
way can writing truly efface itself and the reader be made, in Ford’s words,
“to forget the writer—to forget that he was reading” (Portraits, 216). But
in another, equally compelling sense, I find in Wells’s image of the ci-
phered manuscript pages washed blank by dirty water a literal or, say,
comic analogue (a sort of “pop” version) of what I have called Conradian
erasure, the restoration of a blankness that is at once the precondition for
and the product of a certain project of writing. Not that Wells would or
could have characterized the intent of his narrative in anything like these
terms. But that he seems consciously to have understood such passages
as bearing in some not precisely defined way on what I have been calling
the materiality of writing seems beyond question.
Finally, there is the obsession of so many impressionist texts with up-

turned disfigured f aces with open staring eyes, read by me as figures for
the upward-facing page of inscription (as, unforgettably, in Crane’s
“The Upturned Face”). Thanks to Kemp’s ingenuity, the Invisible Man
finally has been trapped and surrounded; a vicious struggle takes place
in the course of which a navvy wielding a spade “[strikes] something with
a dull thud” (IM, 146). The Invisible Man falls, rises again, but is soon
brought down; Kemp realizes that he is badly hurt, and in fact discovers—
feeling with his hands the naked body that he cannot see—t hat the In-
visible Man’s heart has stopped. As the townspeople watch in horror and
amazement, the Invisible Man, in death, gradually becomes visible again
before their eyes. The crucial paragraphs read:
When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect, t here lay,
naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a
young man about thirty. His hair and beard w ere white,—not grey
with age, but white with the whiteness of albinism, and his eyes wide
open, and his eyes were like garnets. His hands were clenched, his
eyes wide open, and his expression was one of anger and dismay.
“Cover his face!” said a man. “For Gawd’s sake, cover that face!”
and three l ittle children, pushing forward through the crowd, were
suddenly twisted round and sent packing off again.
Someone brought a sheet from the Jolly Cricketers; and having
covered him, they carried him into that house. And t here, on a
shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, ended the strange ex-
periment of the Invisible Man. (IM, 148)
n
The issue of materiality is also powerfully at stake in a memorable
passage from Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (written in 1895 but
not published u ntil 1914).23 The protagonist, an aspiring painter, is re-
turning by steamer to San Francisco from a brief vacation in southern
California. The homeward passage proves a disaster and the steamer
founders; in heavy seas Vandover and about forty others board a lifeboat
built to hold thirty-five, but just as the boat begins to pull away from the
rail of the ship, a “little Jew” whom Vandover noticed earlier leaps from
the ship into the w ater near the boat. A moment l ater the Jew grasps one
of the oar blades, and someone cries “Draw him in!” but the engineer in
charge of the boat refuses:
“It’s too late!” he shouted, partly to the Jew and partly to the boat.
“One more and we are swamped! Let go t here!”
“But you c an’t let him drown,” cried Vandover and the o thers
who sat near. “Oh, take him in anyhow; we must risk it.”
“Risk hell!” thundered the engineer. “Look h ere, you!” he cried
to Vandover and the rest. “I’m in command here and am respon-
sible for the lives of all of you. It’s a m atter of his life or ours; one
life or forty. One more and we are swamped. Let go t here!”
“Yes, yes,” cried some. “It’s too late! t here’s no more room!”
But others still protested. “It’s too horrible; don’t let him drown;
take him in.” They threw their life-preservers and the stumps of the
broken oars. But the Jew saw nothing, heard nothing, clinging to
the oar-blade, panting and stupid, his eyes wide and staring.
“Shake him off!” commanded the engineer. The sailor at the oar
jerked and twisted it, but the Jew still held on, s ilent and breathing
hard. Vandover glanced at the fearfully overloaded boat and saw
the necessity of it and held his piece, watching the thing that was
being done. The sailor still attempted to tear the oar from the
Jew’s grip, but the Jew held on, panting, almost exhausted; they
could hear his breathing in the boat. “Oh, d on’t!” he gasped,
rolling his eyes.
“Unship that oar and throw it overboard,” shouted the engineer.
“Better not, sir,” answered the sailor. “Extra oars all broken.”
The Jew was hindering the progress of the boat and at e very mo-
ment it threatened to turn broad on to the seas.
“God damn you, let go t here!” shouted the engineer, himself
wrenching and twisting at the oar. “Let go or I’ll shoot!”
But the Jew, deaf and stupid, drew himself along the oar, hand
over hand, and in a moment had caught hold of the gunwale of the
boat. It careened on the instant. T here was a g reat cry. “Push him
off! We’re swamping! Push him off!” And one of the w omen cried
to the mate, “Don’t let my little girls drown, sir! Push him away! Save
my little girls! Let him drown!”
It was the animal in them that had come to the surface in an in-
stant, the primal instinct of the brute striving for its life and for the
life of its young.
The engineer, exasperated, caught up the stump of one of the
broken oars and beat on the Jew’s hands where they were gripped
whitely upon the boat’s rim, shouting, “Let go! let go!” But as soon
as the Jew relaxed one hand he caught again with the other. He ut-
tered no cry, but his face as it came and went over the gunwale
of the boat was white and writhing. When he was at length beaten
from the boat he caught again at the oar; it was drawn in, and the
engineer clubbed his head and arms and hands till the water near by
grew red. The little Jew clung to the end of the oar like a cat, writhing
and grunting, his mouth open, and his eyes fixed and staring. When
his hands w ere gone, he tried to embrace the oar with his arms. He
slid off in the hollow of a wave, his body turned over twice, and then
he sank, his head thrown back, his eyes still open and staring, and
a silver chain of bubbles escaping from his mouth.
“Give way, men!” said the engineer.
“Oh, God!” exclaimed Vandover, turning away and vomiting
over the side. (VB, 102–103)
My basic supposition is that the sadistic-seeming destruction of the little

Jew’s face and hands in Vandover images the irruption of mere (or brute)
materiality within the scene of writing—t hat instead of Crane’s double
project of eliciting and repressing that materiality, or Conrad’s equally
conflicted project of fantasmatically returning to the blank page as a field
of endless scriptive possibility (such a “view” of the page elides its mate-
riality or at least strongly tends to do so), what is figured in the shipwreck
scene is a single, unstoppable process of materialization, involving both
the act of representation (the beating of the helpless Jew, the recurrence
of the word “writhing’) and the marking tool and a ctual page (the
stump of the oar, the Jew’s “white and writhing” face and then his
thrown back face with open eyes just before he sinks), the result of which
can only be the defeat of the very possibility of writing (as embodied in
the chilling phrase, “When his hands were gone,” which is to say, when
they w ere reduced to stumps). That the destruction of his hands is
worked by the “stump” of an oar underscores the point.
Significantly, in another, lesser-known novel by Norris, A Man’s Woman
(1899), a leading character, Richard Ferriss, loses both hands to frostbite
in the course of Arctic exploration (note the closeness of the names Norris
and Ferriss, suggesting a certain fantasmatic investment on Norris’s part
in such a fate).24 Ferriss’s close friend Ward Bennett, also an Arctic ex-
plorer, subsequently struggles to write a book about the ill-fated exhibi-
tion, but his handwriting turns out to be impossible, “not infrequently
driving the point through the paper itself,” his script all “pothooks,
clumsy, slanting in all directions, all but illegible” (MW, 215–216)—in
other words, brutely material, like the grimly irregular, all but impassable
Arctic wilderness described earlier in the book. (“In every direction, in-
tersecting one another at ten thousand points, crossing and recrossing,
weaving a gigantic, bewildering network of gashed, jagged, splintered ice
blocks, ran the pressure ridges and hummocks. . . . From horizon to
horizon there was no level place, no open water, no pathway” [MW, 4].
Nothing could be more opposite to the flat, rectangular killing ground
described in “A Memorandum of Sudden Death.”) In the end, the
woman Bennett loves, Lloyd Searight, takes up the pen, writing to Ben-
nett’s dictation, thereby producing a text that can be read (in principle;
the text itself isn’t cited), though it may be that the materialist (more
precisely, materialist-impressionist) book A Man’s W oman finally asks
the reader to envision is not Bennett and Searight’s composite account of
the failed expedition, but rather the new expedition Bennett has just em-
barked on at the novel’s end, or rather the material record in the Northern
ice and snow of the marks of Bennett’s passage when and if he succeeds
in conquering the Pole.
The two novels, Vandover and the Brute and A Man’s Woman, thus
have an intimate bearing on each other, a bearing, moreover, that engages
directly with the thematic of writing I have been pursuing, but rather than
try to analyze that relationship h ere, which would require a detailed con-
sideration of Norris’s particular brand of naturalism (hence an engage-
ment with still other works such as McTeague),25 what I want to stress is
the difference between Norris and Wells as regards the crucial m atter of
pain and difficulty. Simply put, Wells and Norris have in common a cer-
tain explicitness with regard to the near impossibility of the impressionist
project, at least as far as Norris’s A Man’s Woman is concerned. (I take
Lloyd Searight’s surname, with its scarcely disguised reference to the
words “see” and “write,” as well as the implicit whiteness of the Arctic
motif, to signal a commitment to impressionism in that book and, by
extension, Vandover.) But whereas the untrammeled violence of the ship-
wreck scene and the amputation of Ferriss’s hands, as well as the evoca-
tion of Bennett’s terrible handwriting (and the parallel between the latter
and the impassable Arctic landscape), suggest that in Norris the failure
of the impressionist project owing to its collision with the ultimately un-
elidable materiality of the scene of writing has consequences for his own
practice that are hard to assess, the death of the Invisible Man, and more
broadly, the failure of transparency as a mode of invisibility, culminating
in the becoming-manifest of the Invisible Man’s upturned albino face,
make themselves felt as oddly exemplary—as if the point of the novel w ere
ultimately to rebuke the very project of invisibility, in life and literature,
in favor of the ordinary world, centered in Kemp’s study with its books,
microscope, and writing table, to say nothing of the text’s preoccupation
with terms such as “ink” and “spurt.”
n
Here it is fascinating to note that Wells in his most personal book,
Experiment in Autobiography, insists on the incompatibility of his literary
project with that of Ford (whom he continues to call Hueffer), Conrad,
and Crane—in short, the literary impressionists. (Wells also includes
Henry James among the impressionists, and indeed, Ford would agree; but
James is not one of my impressionists, as will become clear.) Specifically,
Wells acknowledges his personal “indifference to intensity of effect” (EA,
527), which he attributes both to his natural makeup and to the influ-
ence of his scientific education. Speaking of a schoolmate, Sidney
Bowkett, who “felt and heard and saw so much more vividly” than he,
Wells grants that “that gave [Bowkett] superiorities in many directions,”
but goes on to say that “the very coldness and flatness of my perceptions,
gave me a readier apprehension of relationships, put me ahead of him in
mathematics and drawing (which a fter all is a sort of abstraction of form)
and made it easier for me later on to grasp general ideas in biology and
physics” (EA, 528). In any course in which sense impressions were of
primary importance (such as mineralogy) Wells experienced “an irre-
pressible boredom”; more broadly, his mind became what he called “an
educated mind, that is to say a mind systematically unified, because of
my relative defect in brightness of response. I was easy to educate” (EA,
528–529). Then:
hese vivid writers I was now beginning to encounter w

T ere, on the
contrary, hard to educate—as I use the word educate. They were at
an opposite pole to me as regards strength of reception. Their abun-
dant, luminous impressions w ere vastly more difficult to subdue to
a disciplined and co-ordinating relationship than mine. They re-
mained therefore abundant but uneducated brains. Instead of being
based on a central philosophy, they started off at a dozen points;
they were impulsive, unco-ordinated, willful. Conrad, you see, I
count uneducated, Stephen Crane, Henry James, the larger part of
the world of literary artistry. . . . A ll this talk that I had with Conrad
and Hueffer and James about the just word, the perfect expression,
about this or that being “written” or not written, bothered me, set
me interrogating myself. . . . But in the end I revolted altogether
and refused to play their game. “I am a journalist,” I declared, “I
refuse to play the ‘artist.’ ” If sometimes I am an artist it is a freak of
the gods. I am a journalist all the time and what I write goes
now—and w ill presently die. (EA, 529–532; emphasis in original)
(Wells also refers to his “inherent tendency to get things ruthlessly

mapped out and consistent” [EA, 529]. The mapping metaphor will be
of interest to us further on, with respect both to Wells and to other
writers; for the present I will simply note that flatness and mapping as
Wells mobilizes them here are materialist tropes.) 26
What is possibly misleading about Wells’s self-analysis, though, is that
it appears to imply that his writing is consistently straightforward, non-
figurative, willfully unimaginative in the usual sense of the term. But
nothing could be less true of texts such as The Time Machine, The First
Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau,
The Food of the Gods, When the Sleeper Wakes, and In the Days of the
Comet—the short novels usually characterized u nder the simplistic des-
ignation science fiction. In fact, my problem at this point is how to convey
a sense of their extraordinary inventiveness and complexity and differ-
ence from one another without devoting an entire small book to the topic.
(When the Sleeper Wakes could sustain commentary virtually page by
page.) But consider three short paragraphs from In the Days of the Comet
(1906), the story of “the Great Change” that had come to the people of
the earth owing to the near approach of a comet with a strange green line
in its spectrum.27 The Change is presented as almost miraculously ben-
eficial, bringing peace and generous feelings in its train (“a sort of intel-
lectual gentleness that abates nothing of our vigour” [DC, 702]), cutting
off a war between England and Germany that had begun shortly before,
indeed, transforming contemporary society across the world once and for
all. (It is also twice declared to have been strictly material, lest there be
any doubt as to its essential nature.) In the immediate aftermath of the
Change, the internal narrator, Willie Leadford, and Melmount, a famous
statesman, are walking on a beach and come across the body of a dead
man “who had just chanced to miss this g reat dawn in which we
rejoiced”—a sailor from the Rother Adler, a German battleship that lay de-
stroyed not four miles away:
I remember that poor boy very vividly [Leadford reports]. He had

been drowned during the anaesthesia of the green gas, his fair young
face was quiet and calm, but the skin of his chest had been crinkled
by scalding water and his right arm was bent queerly back. Even to
this n eedless death and all its tale of cruelty, beauty and dignity had
come. Everything flowed together to significance as we stood there,
I, the ill-clad, cheaply equipped proletarian, and Melmount in his
g reat fur-t rimmed coat—he was hot with walking but he had not
thought to remove it—leaning upon the clumsy groins and pitying
this poor victim of the war he had helped to make. “Poor lad!” he
said, “poor lad! A child we blunderers sent to death! Do look at the
quiet beauty of that face, that body—to be flung aside like this!”
(I remember that near this dead man’s hand a stranded starfish
writhed its slowly feeling limbs, struggling back toward the sea. It
left grooved traces in the sand.)
“There must be no more of this,” panted Melmount, leaning on

my shoulder, “no more of this. . . .” (DC, 801)
The dead sailor is still another corpse with an upturned face, but this time
the emphasis falls not on disfigurement but on the face’s “quiet beauty,”
which reads, one might think, as an acceptance of writtenness, or, say, as
a view of writing that is essentially unconflicted—except, of course, that
the young man is presented by Leadford as a needless victim of a world
in which various textural practices, specifically including journalism
and advertising, had proved to have disastrous societal effects. (Lead-
ford’s denunciation of “the press—those newspapers that are now so
strange to us” [DC, 745], with their clamorous headlines calling for war,
is particularly emphatic. T here is also a baleful description of what he
calls a “newspaper day” [DC, 745–747], and, on a somewhat different
note, a sustained imagining of the production of a newspaper in the imme-
diate aftermath of the Change [DC, 806–809].) This suggests a contrast
between writing as such—intrinsically good—and journalism and
advertising—h istorically bad—but then there is the short paragraph
about the stranded starfish near the dead man’s hand, a sort of hand in its
own right, which moreover slowly writhes, leaving “grooved traces in the
sand”—doubtless a figure for the act of writing, but is it positive or nega-
tive? (The same question might be asked apropos of Leadford’s name.) In
any case, when Melmount then says, “There must be no more of this”
(twice), it is less than clear exactly what “this” should be taken to be.
Significantly, though, the entire story is presented in a short framing
narrative—a prologue and epilogue in italics—as having been and indeed
still being written “in an easy flowing hand . . . with a thing like a foun-
tain pen” by a peaceful-seeming grey-haired man (Leadford in old age)
sitting at a desk in a beautifully appointed room in a very high tower (DC,
691–693, 857–860). This would appear to imply a positive relation to the
production of the text. In addition, Leadford writes late in the story:
One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by

some subtle trick of quality it summarises the Change for me. It is
the memory of a woman’s very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed
face and tear-bright eyes who went by me without speaking, rapt in
some secret purpose. I passed her when, in the afternoon of the first
day, struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton to send a

telegram to my m
other telling her all was well with me. Whither this
woman went I do not know, nor whence she same; I never saw her
again, and only her face, glowing with that new and luminous re-
solve, stands out for me. . . .
But that expression was the world’s. (DC, 814)
eedless to say, I understand the woman’s face as belonging to the the-

N
matics of writing that we have been tracking, the fact that it is not lifeless
and upward-facing and but instead is upright, flushed, new, and luminous
presumably marking an early effect of the G reat Change on writing itself.
(In comparison, the starfish and its traces in the sand are relics of the pre-
Change world.) What remains to be noted, then, is simply the lack of
agreement between the implications of In the Days of the Comet as I have
just developed them and Wells’s unequivocal declaration of his journal-
istic identity in Experiment in Autobiography (where in fact the epithet
“luminous” is associated with the impressionists)—which is to say that
Wells during his most creative years was without question a far more
complex and divided figure than he subsequently understood himself to
have been.
Chapter Three
Ford’s Impressionism
N
The Soul of London (1905)

In 1905 Ford Madox Ford, then still Ford Madox Hueffer, brought out a
slender book called The Soul of London, which in crucial respects epit-
omizes if not literary impressionism tout court, at any rate Ford’s im-
pressionism.1 In fact, The Soul of London has become an object of
considerable critical interest in recent years.2 But as so often with Ford,
indeed, as so often with all the authors featured in the present study, the
sheer page-by-page strangeness of The Soul of London seems barely to
have registered with its academic readers. Here, to begin with, are two
paragraphs from the third of five chapters, “Work in London”; Ford has
just remarked on how even poets, scientists, and critics have to undertake
ordinary jobs in order to support their vocations. Then:
London, in fact, if it make men eminently materialist in their working

hours (and that is the g reat cry of all idealists against the g reat place),
makes them by reaction astonishingly idealist in their interior souls.
I know a railway signalman. He spends dreadfully long hours, high
up in a sort of cage of wood and glass, above the innumerable lines
of shimmering rails just outside the dim cave of a London terminus.
He works himself dog-tired, pulling levers that are constantly bright
89
with the friction of his hands; he listens to the drilling sounds of

little bells, straining his eyes to catch the red and white placards on
the breasts of distant engines. At night in a cottage “down the line”
he spends hours, making out of pith and coloured paper little
models, like stalactite work, of the English cathedrals. His small
holidays go to making trips to Bath, to Exeter, to Durham, and his
small savings are spent on architectural drawings and photographs
of details. His ambition is to make a model of every cathedral in
this country, and, if life holds out, of those at Rouen, Amiens and
Notre Dame de Paris.
This is an ideal: his eyes grow hazy and romantically soft at
the thought of finally having in his working shed all these small
white objects. But he does not in the least care about architecture.
I once met by accident a man of forty, a cashier of a London bus
company. He rather disliked the country, but his ambition was to
cover, on his bicycle, e very road of the United Kingdom. He inked
over on his ordnance map each road that he travelled on, and he
saw, in imagination, as a glorious finale like a dream, one of the
sixpenny papers publishing a half-tone block representing this
map with all its coach roads inked and distinct like the filaments of
a skeleton leaf. (SL, 57–58)
Nothing could be more typical of Ford than if the railway signalman and
the cashier of the bus company were pure inventions (I assume that this
is the case), created out of whole cloth for purely literary purposes. But
the contrast between materialism and idealism is intriguing (for Ford,
the practice of writing could not be sheerly materialist); the profession
and situation of the signalman, working levers with his hands to make
sure trains pass smoothly, straining to read distant placards, looking
down on “innumerable lines of shining rails,” have their writerly aspects,
while the making of little models of cathedrals is a version of the the-
matic of represent at ion, usually involving a downward shift in scale,
that I first associated with literary impressionism in “Stephen Crane’s
Upturned Faces” (as in the little numbered diagrams of the correct use of
the bandages in “Death and the Child,” and the small model of an ele-
vator shaft and elevator worked by an engineer in the 1894 article “In the
Ford’s Impressionism 91
Depths of a Coal Mine”).3 As for the bus company cashier, the inking
over of the roads on an ordnance map is a literary impressionist project
with a vengeance, both the inking and the map being to the point; there
will be more to say about maps in Chapter 6, but in the meantime, think
of Wells’s reference in Experiment in Autobiography to his “inherent ten-
dency to get t hings ruthlessly mapped out and consistent,” 4 which of
course he understands as opposed to impressionism, but as w ill emerge,
the larger thematic of maps and mapping is not quite that s imple. T here is
also something provocative in Ford’s insistence that the signalman who
made the models “does not care in the least about architecture,” and that
the cashier pursuing his project of riding roads on his bicycle and then
inking those roads on an ordnance map “rather disliked the country,” in
that it suggests a possible application to Ford himself, or rather to his rela-
tion to his ostensible subject matter—as if to say that his stake in London
as the subject of his book is rather less than his stake in the writing of it
(the writing as such, the writing as writing, so to speak).
Earlier in his book, in the chapter “From the Distance,” Ford remarks
that a provincial who has come to live in London only becomes a Lon-
doner when his relation to the city has become instinctive. “He must have
had squeezed swiftly into him all the impressions that the London child
has slowly made his own,” Ford writes. At that point,
daily details w ill have merged, as it were, into his bodily functions,
and w ill have ceased to distract his attention [an interesting choice
of phrase—distract his attention from what?]. He w ill have got over
the habit of relying, in t hese t hings, upon personal contacts. He w ill
have acquired an alertness of eye that w ill save him from asking his
way. On his “Underground” he w ill glance at a board rather than
inquire of a porter; on bus-routes he w ill catch instinctively, on the
advancing and shapeless mass of colour and trade announcements,
the small names of taverns, of Crosses, of what w ere once outlying
hamlets; he w ill have in his mind a rough sketch map of that plot of
London that by right of living in he w ill make his own. [Another
map, n eedless to say.] Then he w ill be the Londoner, and to the mea
sure of the light vouchsafed w ill know his London. Yet, to the g reat
majority of Londoners whose residence is not an arrière boutique
[a back shop] London w ill remain a matter of a central highway, a

central tunnel or a central conduit, more or less long; a daily route
whose two extremities are a more or less permanent sleeping place,
and a more or less permanent workshop—a thing, figured on a map
[still another], like the bolas of certain South Americans, a long cord
with balls at the extremities. At the one there w ill gradually con-
gregate the parts of a home, at the other, the more or less familiar,
more or less hypnotising, more or less congenial, surroundings of
his daily work. It w ill be a matter of a daily life passing unnoticed.
(SL, 10–11)
I find this a fascinating passage on several counts. First, there is the

double reference to maps as well to the board in the underground and to
the names of taverns, crosses, and former hamlets now presumably part
of London on bus routes among or in some sense part of the “advancing
and shapeless mass of colour and trade announcements,” a description
that is hard to cash visually after all this time but which clearly exempli-
fies what I have called the writing / drawing aspect of the impressionist
episteme.
Second, there is the emphasis, characteristic of Ford (but think also of
“A Memorandum of Sudden Death” and, indeed, of the texts by Crane
and Conrad we have looked at), on a certain unconsciousness or automa-
tism, all the daily details of ordinary life having “merged, as it w
ere, into
[the former provincial’s] bodily functions,” the surroundings of his daily
work now become “hypnotising,” his entire daily life “passing unnoticed,”
as well as the idea, which on the face of it is somewhat strange, that having
reached this stage of intimacy with London, the former provincial w ill
no longer have his attention “distracted” by the myriad facts and details
of his ordinary existence. What seems strange is that one might have
thought that the hypnotic state that Ford describes itself amounts to a
mode of distraction, which is a typical way of characterizing the sort of
loss of awareness of surroundings that he evokes; but as will become clear
as this chapter proceeds, especially with regard to Charles Palermo’s
reading of The Good Soldier, distraction and its associated literary
modality, digression, are for Ford highly privileged conditions, ones
associated with his scriptive enterprise in ways that are nothing if not
counterintuitive. 5 (So that not being distracted by the facts and details
of his ordinary existence does not mean that he is not distracted by any-
thing else.)
Third, the reference t oward the end of the excerpt to “a t hing, figured
on a map, like the bolas of certain South Americans, a long cord with balls
at the extremities,” should strike the reader as at least a little odd, out of
place—why should Ford be resorting to so foreign an image in a sentence
meant to evoke the opposite termini, home and workplace, of a virtual
tunnel or highway within which the g reat majority of Londoners spend
their daily lives? I think there is a simple answer to this—namely, that the
bola, a throwing weapon used to trip up large running birds or other ani-
mals, was associated in Ford’s mind with a contemporary writer he and
Conrad admired almost above all o thers, a man born and raised in
A rgentina and who had written brilliantly about the customs of the
pampas, W. H. Hudson. (Hudson describes the use of the bola in various
of his writings, including the autobiographical Long Ago and Far Away.) 6
The question that then arises is w hether Ford intended the bola image to
be understood in those terms by even the most alert and informed reader,
or indeed whether he himself so understood it. On the face of it, both pos-
sibilities seem unlikely, but rather than try to settle the question at this
juncture, I want to suggest that two other writers, Conrad and Crane, are
similarly “present” in Ford’s text, Conrad by virtue of two unacknowl-
edged citations (for that is what I take them to be) of his signature
phrase, “before all,” as in “My aim which I am trying to achieve is, by
the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it
is, before all, to make you see!” (from the preface to The Nigger of the
“Narcissus”; emphasis in original).7
The first citation occurs early on:
To see London steadily and see it w hole, a man must have certain
qualities of temperament so exhaustive as to preclude, on the face
of it, the faculties which go to the making—or the marring—of great
fortunes. He must, it is true, have his “opportunities.” But before
all t hings [Ford’s variation on Conrad’s “before all”] he must have
an impressionability and an impersonality, a single-mindedness
to see, and a power of arranging his illustrations cold-bloodedly,
an unemotional mind and a great sympathy, a life-long engross-

ment in his “subject,” and an immense knowledge, for purposes of
comparison, of other cities. He must have an avidity and a sobriety
of intellect, an untirable physique and a delicately tempered mind.
These things are antitheses. (SL, 18)
The second citation comes several pages later:
For London is before all things an incomparable background; it is

always in the right note, it is never out of tone. A man may look down
out of dim windows upon the slaty, black, wet misery of a squalid
street, upon a solitary flickering lamp that wavers a sooty light upon
a solitary, hurrying passer’s umbrella. He may have received a mo-
ment before the first embrace of a w oman, or a moment before his
doctor may have told him that he is not very long for this world. He
w ill stand looking down; and a sudden consonance with his mood,
of overwhelming and hardly comprehensible joy, of overwhelming
and hardly fathomable pain, a sudden significance will be there in the
black wet street, in the long wavering reflections on the gleaming
paving-stones, in the engrossed hurry of the passer-by. It w ill be-
come, intimately and rightly, the appropriate background for a be-
ginning of, or for a farewell from life—for the glow of a commenced
love or for the dull pain of a malady ending only in death. It is that,
more than anything, that London has ready for e very man. (SL, 22)
Notice, to begin with, how the two citations are not quite consistent with
each other: the first concerns seeing London steadily and whole (while
suggesting that that may not be possible, it requires both impressionability
and impersonality, but of course these together are constitutive of Ford’s
literary impressionist ideal), while the second focuses on partial views
keyed to the shifting moods of a man looking down as if at a page of writing
from dim windows (nothing impersonal, unemotional, or cold-blooded
about such a figure), but h ere, as throughout The Soul of London, nothing
could be of less concern to its author than internal consistency in the or-
dinary sense of the term.
(Let me also call attention to the epithet “engrossed,” which in the sen-
tence just quoted means self-absorbed, but according to the dictionary
can also mean “written or transcribed in a large, clear hand.”8 Ford would
have known this, of course, which makes a subsequent appearance of the
word particularly interesting. Down at the Tilbury Docks, he writes, a
man emerges from a tin shed labelled “Office of the Steam Navigation
Co.” Then:
He slipped hastily between the black side of one of the huge sheds
and a grey, rusty, and sea-fretted liner. Her lower sides gaped in large
holes screened with canvas, and from moment to moment obscured
by grimy buckets of coal that r ose from a lighter; her square, white
upper deck cabins were being painted more white by painters in
white jackets. He hurried very fast, with a masterful and engrossed
step, a cheerful blue figure with pink cheeks, dodging mechanically
the pools of greasy w ater and the fat black mud between the sleepers.
He dived into another small office. He was the chief officer of the
liner that was coaling and he had a pencil behind his ear.
He was uniting as it were the labours of the men shovelling in the
buckets of coal, of the men uttering melancholy wails as they swung-
in a white boat, of the men hooking up long planks for the painters
to sit on, and of the painters themselves on the upper decks. With
that pencil he controlled all their labours, as if he were twisting them
into an invisible rope which passed through that tin office and up,
far away into town where other pencils and other pens recorded
these t hings on large pages, digested them into summaries and fi
nally read them out to Boards of Directors. [SL, 47–48]
It takes little imagination to see in the chief officer with a pencil behind
his ear a surrogate for Ford, and in the imagery of black and white—a
leitmotif of the book as a whole—a reference to ink and / or print and
page. [The repetition of the word “liner” is also suggestive here, as is the
frequent recurrence of the word “lines” throughout the book.] As if to
stress the point, black and white turn up one paragraph later in refer-
ences to Whitechapel and Blackwall, presented as antithetical limits of
London to two different camps of workers, the first expressing them-

selves “with a pen on paper [and seeing] his London from the west”
[SL, 48], the second, seeing from the east, comprising the painters, coal
haulers, and others of their ilk. Note that both camps of workers pursue
tasks related to writing, the first explicitly, the second at a remove—
painting, hauling coal, as black as any ink or type.)
As for Crane, in the chapter “Roads into London” Ford introduces the
electric tram as a means of getting into town and remarks on its modest
speed but also on the fact that because of its greater height than the auto-
mobile, it allows the passenger to see farther. So, for example:
The other day I saw from the top of an electric tram, very far away,
above the converging lines in the perspective of a broad highway of
new shops, a steam crane at work high in the air on an upper storey.
The thin arm stretched out above the street, spidery and black
against a mistiness that was half sky, half haze; at the end of a long
chain t here hung diagonally some baulks of wood, turning slowly
in mid-air. They w ere rising imperceptibly, we approaching imper-
ceptibly. A puff of smoke shot out, writhed very white, melted and
vanished between the h ousefronts. We glided up to and past it.
Looking back I could see down the reverse of the long perspective
the baulks of timber turning a little closer to the side of the
building, the thin extended arm of the crane a little more foreshort-
ened against the haze. Then the outlines grew tremulous, it all van-
ished with a touch of that pathos like a hunger that attaches to all
things of which we see the beginnings or the m iddle courses without
knowing the ends. It was impressive enough—the modern spirit ex-
pressing itself in terms not of men but of forces, we gliding by, the
timbers swinging up, without any visible human action in either
motion. No doubt men were at work in the engine-belly of the crane,
just as o thers were very far away among the dynamos that kept us
moving. But they w ere sweating invisible. That, too, is the Modern
Spirit: great organisations run by men as impersonal as the atoms
of their own frames, noiseless, and to all appearances infallible.
(SL, 29–30)
I take the steam crane (at work on a “storey”!) to refer to Stephen Crane,
and would remind the reader that Ford, who had known Crane in England
in the late 1890s, refers in Portraits from Life to “[Crane’s] pen that moved
so slowly in microscopic black trails over the immense sheets of paper he
affected,”9 a description that seems if not quite echoed, at any rate re-
fracted in the passage just quoted, with its epithets “spidery” and
“black,” its references to the “thin extended arm” of the crane, its em-
phasis on the extreme slowness of the raising and turning of the baulks
of wood, and of course the marvelous image of the puff of smoke that
“writhed very white”—that crucial verb again—before melting and van-
ishing between the h ousefronts. Indeed, the w hole scene is said to vanish
“with a touch of that pathos” that Ford says “attaches to all things of which
we see the beginnings or the middle course without knowing the ends”—
a condition that would seem to fit all serious writing, in part icu lar the
writing of a text as conspicuously unvectored and untotalizable as The
Soul of London. Finally, there is the reference to “the modern spirit ex-
pressing itself in terms not of men but of forces, we gliding by, the timbers
swinging up, without any visible human action in either motion”—not
quite a complete denial of writerly and indeed readerly agency, as Ford
goes on to acknowledge the men at work in the engine-belly of the crane
and among the distant dynamos providing electricity for the trams, but
certainly a displacement in the direction of Fordian “impersonality.”
Here we may return to the question of what Ford understood himself
to be d oing in t hese passages—specifically, did he consciously intend
them as referring to or otherwise evoking his impressionist writer friends
Hudson, Conrad, and Crane? (I am assuming, perhaps optimistically,
that the reader has been persuaded that all three are “present” in Ford’s
text.) Or, as seems likely, did his references to and evocations of t hese ex-
emplary figures—or, for that matter, the association of the chief officer of
the liner with the writer of The Soul of London, or the imagery of black
and white with the idea of print—take place largely or indeed wholly u nder
the sign of what I have been calling (following Ford, at least up to a point)
distraction?—whatever distraction is taken to imply in a part icu lar in-
stance about the precise nature and extent of Ford’s self-awareness in the
act of writing.10
At this point it will be instructive to look closely at the most famous of

his novels, The Good Soldier (1915).
The Good Soldier (1915)*

Carol Jacobs makes a provocative claim about passion and speech in
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: “Language,” she explains, oper-
ates in this tale less by way of expressing passion than by creating it.”11 As
an example of this power of speech, she cites a passage that is among
the most important in the novel. Immediately a fter his account of his
wife’s death, John Dowell recounts an interview between Leonora Ash-
burnham and himself. He says:
The odd thing is that what sticks out in my recollection of the rest
of that evening was Leonora’s saying:
“Of course you might marry her,” and, when I asked whom, she
answered:
“The girl.”
Now that is to me a very amazing thing—amazing for the light of
possibilities that it casts into the human heart. For I had never had
the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the
slightest idea even of caring for her.12
It seems that Leonora has put an idea in Dowell’s head. One might even
sense how alien to Dowell’s mind the idea was—he couldn’t even guess
who Leonora meant by “her.” Given what Dowell says, Jacobs seems quite
right to assert that speech among the characters, at least in this case, cre-
ates passion. Nevertheless, Jacobs’s formulation oversimplifies t hings a
l ittle. Matters become more complicated as Dowell continues: “I must
have talked in an odd way, as p eople do who are recovering from an an-
aesthetic. It is as if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely
unconscious of the other. I had thought nothing; I had said such an ex-
* This section of this chapter is by Charles Palermo; see the final paragraph of the Intro-
duction to this book.
traordinary thing” (GS, 75).Dowell states that was he who suggested that
he marry Nancy—or, at least, that is how he comes to understand the
events of that conversation, after Leonora helps him reconstruct the parts
of the exchange that d on’t “stick out in his recollection.” Now it might
seem not that talk created the passion, but that it merely made it conscious.
If Dowell spoke first, then he seems to have given expression to a passion
he had conceived and harbored unconsciously. If Leonora spoke first
(and then permitted or persuaded Dowell to believe he had), then she
either created a new passion within Dowell or forced into consciousness
a previously unconscious one. In short, it seems that accepting Jacobs’s
claim requires that we resolve questions about where and how passion
arises that the text holds in suspension.13
We might, on the other hand, just chalk this problem up to Dowell’s
infamous unreliability, as Mark Schorer does in his classic 1948 essay on
The Good Soldier.14 I think it would be a mistake, however, to stop so short.
To satisfy our curiosity about where Dowell’s passion for Nancy origi-
nates by appealing to Dowell’s unreliability would rob his words of some
revealing subtlety—a nd at a crucial moment in the text, as well. As
Dowell continues the passage from which Jacobs and I have been quoting,
he suggests that much depends on “his” utterance:
I don’t know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to

this story. I should say that it d
idn’t or, at any rate, that I had given
enough of it. But that odd remark of mine had a strong influence
upon what came after. I mean, that Leonora would proba bly never
have spoken to me at all about Florence’s relations with Edward if
I hadn’t said, two hours after my wife’s death:
“Now I can marry the girl.” (GS, 75)
Is it really true that, by expressing his (unconscious) desire to marry

Nancy Rufford, Dowell had given Leonora cause to think he had known
more about the “Ashburnham tragedy” than he did, and from an earlier
date than he did? Did that unconscious, but callous, reference to Flor-
ence’s death (“Now I can marry the girl”—as if he had been waiting for
Florence to die) cause Leonora to assume innocently that Dowell knew
about Florence’s adultery and suicide? Or was Leonora manipulating an

unwitting, “cataleptic” (GS, 78) Dowell—putting ideas in his head while
his reason languished in grief and shock?
T hese questions resemble the question of whether Dowell actually
spoke first. T here is no answer—what we have is a cause for doubt about
the origin of Dowell’s passion for Nancy.
The search for the origin of Dowell’s impulse acquires a new impor-
tance, though: if, as Dowell claims, “Leonora would probably never have
spoken to [him] at all about Florence’s relations with Edward” if he hadn’t
proclaimed his desire for Nancy, then that unconscious interjection is
the cause of his hearing “the saddest story [he has] ever heard” (GS, 9).
His interjection is therefore also the cause of our hearing it. And yet, we
cannot securely attribute that cause to a person.
It is a mistake to ask whether Dowell’s passion was already his own or
whether it was created by talking to Leonora. The incompatibility of the
alternatives, I w ill claim, is only apparent. The strangeness of Dowell’s
narrative is the strangeness of an inability to distinguish between uncon-
scious impulses and t hose suggested from outside. That apparent incom-
patibility is central to The Good Soldier. In fact, the sudden irruption of
thought—and specifically of thought that defies unqualified attribution
to either the interior workings of the unconscious or to the interpersonal
space of talk—is a hallmark of consciousness in Dowell’s world.
Leonora, for example, first intuits the possible attraction of her hus-
band to Nancy Rufford not from any behavior between the two, but upon
speaking with Dowell (“she told me afterwards that, at that speech of
mine, for the first time she had a vague inkling of the tragedy that was to
follow” [GS, 71]).
Another ambiguously spontaneous epiphany takes place in the scene
of flight from the Schloss. Dowell explains: “It came to me for a mo-
ment, though I h adn’t time to think it, that [Leonora] must be a madly
jealous woman—jealous of Florence and Captain Ashburnham, of all
people in the world!” (GS, 39; emphasis added). Presumably, he had
time to have the thought. (How much time does that take, one might
ask?) I take him to mean that he was unaware of having had the oppor-
tunity or the occasion to arrive at the thought. That is to say, he expe-
rienced the idea as the outcome of a train of thought that he never
c onsciously pursued. Yet, on a literal reading, Dowell specifically denies

originating the thought.
Nancy Rufford’s education in marital strife comes about in a similar
manner: she extrapolates the possibility of Edward’s unfaithfulness from
a newspaper account involving a Mr. Brand. Brand denies loving his al-
leged mistress, Miss Lupton, provoking Nancy to think: “Well, of course
he did not love Miss Lupton; he was a married man. You might as well
think of U
ncle Edward loving . . . loving anybody but Leonora” (GS, 146).
Her further reading in the newspaper accounts of the Brand divorce,
however, permits the story to work just that effect on Nancy’s mind: “If
he could love someone e lse than Leonora, her fierce, unknown heart
suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself?” (GS, 146).
Again, the unthinkable becomes something like an obsession, and the
transition appears sudden and takes on the character of a thought re-
vealed rather than arrived at.
Dowell describes another stage of Nancy’s growing awareness of
the events around her in similar terms. Nancy, beset by shocks and
voices, hears for the first time from Leonora what she had known
unconsciously—“within herself ”—for months: that “Edward was d ying
for love of her” (GS, 151). The question then becomes, how could Nancy
know that she had been nurturing such a conclusion in her uncon-
scious mind for months? A fter all, if the thought was unconscious, she
would, presumably, not have known of it.
An alternative explanation for Nancy’s realization immediately follows:
And it seemed to her to be in tune with the mood, with the hour
and with the w oman in front of her to say: that she knew Edward
was d ying of love for her and that she was d
ying of love for Edward.
For that fact had suddenly slipped into place and become real for
her as the niched marker on a whist tablet slips round with the pres-
sure of your thumb. That rubber at least was made. (GS, 152)
Does Nancy carry around the idea of Edward loving her for months in
her unconscious mind, or does she pick up the idea on the spur of the
moment, in response to “the mood,” “the hour,” and “the woman in front
of her”? The opposition need not be exclusive: there is no reason why the
idea Leonora voices cannot be seen as speaking to Nancy’s previously un-

conscious thought and as seeming to Nancy to suit perfectly the tenor of
her present situation.
Nevertheless, t here is a tension between the two accounts of Nancy’s
relationship to Leonora’s suggestion. Their separation (the first paragraph
ends chapter 3 of part 4 and the second begins part 4) marks the rift be-
tween the two views: one holds that the idea originated in Nancy’s un-
conscious mind independently of Leonora’s suggestion; the other ex-
plains that the idea was a response to Leonora’s suggestion, part of a game
played out among t hose four p eople. The rift, as I have said, is not com-
plete—it entails no contradiction. It is an apparent incompatibility, but
one that Ford underscores.
n
When Dowell tells us that he must have spoken the words “Now I
can marry the girl” as if he “had a dual personality, the one I being en-
tirely unconscious of the other,” he refers to a psychological phenom-
enon that enjoyed great fame in his time. The most celebrated instance of
“multiple personality” was, almost certainly, that of Miss Beauchamp,
whose case reached the world through Morton Prince’s The Dissociation
of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology in 1906.
Miss Beauchamp suffered from a range of ailments, and Prince’s inves-
tigation revealed—much to his professed surprise—t hat many of them
were directly related to the breakup of Miss Beauchamp’s personality
into several dissociated selves. Prince’s book became a tremendous
success, “furnish[ing],” as he predicted in his introduction, “a multitude
of plots for the dramatist or sensational novelist.”15 In fact, more than 500
plays—including a Broadway hit—took up the case’s offer of dramatic
possibilities (RS, 232; “RMB,” 174).
Prince explains “multiple personality” and its place among other
known and observed psychological phenomena:
The synthesis of the original consciousness known as the per-

sonal ego is broken up, so to speak, and shorn of some of its memo-
ries, perceptions, acquisitions, or modes of reaction to the environ-
ment. The conscious states that still persist, synthesized among
themselves, form a new personality capable of independent

activity. . . . In the simpler forms the secondary personalities are
manifested through highly synthesized “automatic” or hypnotic
phenomena, and are recognized only as subconscious states through
so-called automatic writing, and kindred manifestations, or else as
states of hypnosis. (DP, 3–4)
The kinship of hypnosis with dissociation, however, put the w hole class
of phenomena in doubt. Prince claims to have been a skeptic himself. He
first “met” Miss Beauchamp’s other selves while she was hypnotized: “My
conviction had been growing that so-called personalities, when developed
through hypnotism, as distinct from the spontaneous variety, w ere purely
artificial creations,—sort of unspoken and unconscious mutual un-
derstandings between the experimenter and the subject, by which the
subject accepted certain ideas unwittingly suggested by the experimenter”
(DP, 26–27; emphasis in original). Prince remains defensive about the
possibility that Miss Beauchamp, in her highly suggestible hypnotic
sleep, produced “Chris” at her physician’s instigation or in response to
his presence. He affirms more than once his refusal to grant “Chris” the
status of a dissociated self u ntil he has satisfied himself that Miss Beau-
champ was completely ignorant of multiple personality before “Chris”
appeared.16
I would argue that when Dowell talks about speaking as if he had a
“dual personality,” he places his exchange with Leonora under the sign
of hypnotic suggestion. Prince’s anxiety about w hether Chris is a person-
ality of “the spontaneous variety” or a “product of suggestion” is, I
think, the legitimate sibling of the quandary over “already existing pas-
sion” and passion created by talk.17 By referring repeatedly to phenomena
connected with hypnotism, suggestion, multiple personality, and the un-
conscious, I believe that Ford meant to construct a tale in which passion
seems to arise ambiguously both as if by itself and at the instigation (spe-
cifically in the form of suggestion) of an external source. I will also argue
that, in Ford’s works, instances of suggestion take place during moments
of distraction. Moreover, I w ill claim that Ford i magined the process of
writing as taking place in a similar state of distractedness and therefore
as a kind of automatic utterance.
n
A number of passages in The Good Soldier underscore the suscepti-
bility of the characters to suggestion. For example, Dowell tells us that,
before the Kilsyte case, in which Edward
was wrangled about by counsel with all the sorts of dirty-mindedness

that counsel in that sort of case can impute, he had not had the least
idea that he was capable of being unfaithful to Leonora. But, in the
midst of that tumult—he says that it came suddenly into his head
whilst he was in the witness box—in the midst of those august
ceremonies of the law there came suddenly into his mind the recol-
lection of the softness of the girl’s body as he had pressed her to him.
And, from that moment that girl appeared desirable to him—and
Leonora completely unattractive. (GS, 108–109)
What I find striking here (and throughout The Good Soldier and other
writings by Ford) is the combination of something like an openness to sug-
gestion with a stated distraction. Edward gets his adulterous idea “in the
midst of that tumult . . . in the midst of those august ceremonies of the
law.”18 What might be called a hypnotic model of consciousness supplies
a way of understanding the suspension of the conflict between the two
possible sources of desire. That hypnotic model also allows us to make
sense, as I will explain, of the tumult that accompanies the (apparent) sug-
gestion. Hypnosis places an emphasis on distraction, specifically as a
condition of “automatic” phenomena (writing or speaking). Distraction
and “automatic” thought are similarly—and, I believe, pointedly—linked
in The Good Soldier as well. That is why it is crucial that Edward’s phi-
landering impulse gets described as “in the midst.”
Take, for example, another of Edward’s “unconscious” desires. Ed-
ward assures Dowell that, before he declared his feelings for Nancy Ruf-
ford, “he had had no idea whatever of caring for the girl” (GS, 80). And
Dowell believes him:
And, in speaking to her on that night he w asn’t, I am convinced,

committing a baseness. It was if his passion for her h adn’t existed;
as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing that he spoke

them, created the passion as they went along. Before he spoke, there
was nothing; afterwards, it was the integral fact of his life. Well, I
must get back to my story. (GS, 83)
It is not merely that desire in The Good Soldier seems to be produced in

talking. Edward speaks the apparently passion-creating words “without
knowing that he spoke them.” Then Dowell does a curious thing: he tells
us he “must get back” to his story. Dowell’s move marks the passage—
pointedly, if not quite justly—as a digression.
I believe t here is a deep connection between Edward’s distraction and
Dowell’s digression. More specifically, I believe that distraction was
important to Ford as a mode of consciousness he found congenial, or even
vital, to writing. Ford’s interest in “hypnotic” metaphors is thus part of
his tendency to thematize distractedness as an integral aspect of his char-
acters’ m ental lives and as a mode of writing.
Consider Dowell’s account of the process of writing. Dowell constructs
a fiction for himself, one in which an imaginary talk with a s ilent auditor in
a cottage replaces the act of writing. Moreover, Dowell says he writes what
is, at least in great part, the story of his life at Nauheim and Branshaw “as
it reached [him] from the lips” of his companions—as if he had not been
there, and had no conscious recollection of t hose years to call his own.
It is almost as if Dowell imagines that Leonora and Edward speak
through him. In fact, it is not just that Dowell has the story from their lips;
he even tells it under circumstances markedly similar to those under
which he heard it from them, and in the very h ouse as well. As Miriam
Bailin points out, Dowell appears to seek some kind of identity between
the hearing and the (re-)telling of the story.19
It is also important that Dowell opens his narration by distracting him-
self from the substance of his story and directing his thoughts to a
“country cottage.” He no sooner begins envisioning the monologue that
will distract him from the task of writing than he finds himself distracted
from his monologue by the imaginary moon:
From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out
at the great moon and say: “Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!”
And then we s hall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a
sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest sto-
ries are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. (GS, 15)
The moon, in turn, appears to provoke a digression on Provence. In short,

Dowell’s approach to the enterprise of writing begins with a series of dis-
tractions from the task at hand, in a meditation on digression itself.
Dowell’s allusion to the story of a lovesick troubadour leads him to muse
briefly on his travels with Florence. Abruptly, Dowell checks himself and
considers whether he might not be digressing:
Is all this digression or isn’t it digression? Again I don’t know. You,

the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don’t tell me
anything. I am at any rate trying to get you to see what sort of life
it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. (GS, 17)
He then devotes a paragraph to recounting his first meeting with Flor-

ence, before turning to explain his own role in her life:
My whole attentions, my whole endeavours were to keep poor dear

Florence on to topics like the finds at Cnossos and the m ental spir-
ituality of Walter Pater. I had to keep her at it, you understand, or
she might die. For I was solemnly informed that if she became ex-
cited over anything or if her emotions were really stirred her little
heart might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to watch e very word
that any person uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off
what the English call “things”—off love, poverty, crime, religion
and the rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was
carried off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done.
Good God, are all t hese fellows monstrous i diots, or is t here a free-
masonry between all of them from end to end of the earth? . . .
That is what makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal.
Because of course his story is culture and I had to head her
towards culture and at the same time it’s so funny and she h adn’t
got to laugh, and it’s so full of love and she w
asn’t to think of love.
(GS, 18)
On the one hand, Dowell tells us that his attention first turns to Peire Vidal
as he thinks about Provence, inspired by the moon outside the imaginary
cottage where he tells his s ilent listener about his wife; on the other hand,
Dowell claims that his mind turns to Vidal’s adventures because he is
thinking about his wife’s restricted conversational diet. As elsewhere, at
the crux of Dowell’s self-contradiction is an underlying question of vital
importance: is Dowell’s reference to Vidal a digression or not? Viewed
as a result of distraction from the task of storytelling, it is. Viewed as an
elaboration on his duties toward Florence, it is not. The question is anal-
ogous to one we asked earlier: is desire in The Good Soldier suggested by
speech or formed unconsciously?
The turning of Dowell’s thoughts to Peire Vidal seems to be both the
spontaneous expression of his own purpose and a response to external
suggestion. The implied suggestibility that I discussed first in connec-
tion with Dowell’s passion for Nancy reappears—t his time, associated
with the very telling of his story, which is marked from this point on
as progressing by digression. Digression is, indeed, Dowell’s specialty.
His duty as Florence’s custodian consisted in knowing how to provoke
digressions, how to “head off ” a conversation that seems bound for
“t hings.”
The first t hing you have to consider when writing a novel is your
story, and then your story—and then your story! If you wish to feel
more dignified you may call it your “subject.” Once started it must
go on to its appointed end. Any digression w ill make a longueur, a
patch over which the mind w ill progress heavily. You may have the
most wonderful scene from real life that you might introduce into
your book. But if it does not make your subject progress it w ill di-
vert the attention of the reader. A good novel needs all the attention
the reader can give it. And then some more.
Of course you must appear to digress. That is the art which con-
ceals your Art. The reader, you should premise, w ill always dislike
you and your book. He thinks it an insult that you should dare to
claim his attention, and if lunch is announced or there is a ring at
the bell he w ill welcome the digression. So you w ill provide him
with what he thinks are digressions—w ith occasions on which he
thinks he may let his attention relax. . . . But really not one single
thread must ever escape your purpose. (IWN, 211–212)
This passage, which Ford wrote years after The Good Soldier, is a little
difficult to read. For example, the call to lunch and the ring at the bell—are
they to be i magined as in your book or as in the room with the reader? If it
is the former, then it is not clear how they are meant to ameliorate that
book’s tedious claims on the reader’s attention. Why should lunches and
doorbells in stories herald welcome and lively digressions? If they are to
be i magined as real distractions that compete with your book for the
reader’s attention, then it is more than a little odd that Ford calls them
“digressions” rather than, say, “diversions” or “distractions.” Certainly, the
word “digression” can refer to events rather than narratives. But is hard
to believe that Ford (the master stylist) would permit such an approximate
use of the word to collide with precise and literal references to digression
in a passage devoted specifically to the topic of digression—unless it served
his purpose to do so.
I believe Ford is inviting us to imagine digressions in his narratives as
being somehow equivalent or analogous to distractions in the physical en-
vironment. I think of this as part of what he is getting at when he has Dowell
use hypnosis and related states and phenomena as metaphors for his char-
acters’ modes of experience. “Automatic writing” experiments routinely
required that the subject be distracted. An 1890 paper published by Prince
in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal titled “Some of the Revelations
of Hypnotism” describes a number of experiments in automatic writing. In
the paradigmatic experiment, the hypnotized subject is given an arithmet-
ical problem or told to write a sentence, then suddenly awakened. The sub-
ject, who has no recollection of his mission, is given a pencil “and he is told
to read aloud, count backwards or do some similar task. If the experi-
ment is successful while he is doing this his hand, all unconsciously to him-
self, will write the answer to the sum or whatever has been ordered.”20 The
activities of reading aloud, counting backwards, singing, or speaking were
used to distract the hypnotized subject from the activity of writing.21
In a scene slightly later than the one with thoughts of the moon and
Peire Vidal, in which Dowell describes the sights on the way to the Schloss
at M——, he recounts his delight in watching two cows at a stream:
Why, I remember on that afternoon I saw a brown cow hitch its

horns under the stomach of a black and white animal and the black
and white one was thrown right into the middle of a narrow stream.
I burst out laughing. But Florence was imparting information so
hard and Leonora was listening so intently that no one noticed
me. As for me, I was pleased to be off duty; I was pleased to think
that Florence for the moment was indubitably out of mischief—
because she was talking about Ludwig the Courageous (I think it
was Ludwig the Courageous but I am not an historian) about
Ludwig the Courageous of Hessen who wanted to have three wives
at once and patronized Luther—something like that!—I was so re-
lieved to be off duty, because she couldn’t possibly be doing any-
thing to excite herself or set her poor heart a-fluttering—that the
incident of the cow was a real joy to me. I chuckled over it from
time to time for the w hole rest of the day. Because it does look very
funny, you know, to see a black and white cow land on its back in
the m iddle of a stream. It is so just exactly what one d oesn’t expect
of a cow. (GS, 36)
Dowell finds the scene to be one of pure delight. There is nothing dis-
turbing about the performance of the two cows, although he admits
there could be. (“I suppose I o ught to have pitied the poor animal; but I
just didn’t. I was out for enjoyment. And I just enjoyed myself ” [GS, 36].)
The episode is marked by Dowell’s status as detached—even amused—
spectator. The physical distance between him and the cows seems like
an extension of the psychological distance produced by his being “out for
enjoyment.” It is also curious that Dowell repeatedly uses the word
“drawn” in the passage from which the episode is taken (no fewer than
five times in two pages [GS, 36–37]). It is as if “drawn” alludes to an act
of marking and representation not wholly unlike writing, and also puts
Dowell in a passive position relative to that act of marking. He does not
draw, but is himself “drawn in a sort of triumph” (GS, 37) and “drawn
through brilliant green meadows” (GS, 36), and “it is so pleasant to be
drawn” (GS, 36). Note that once the group reaches the Protest draft, Flor-
ence immediately calls it “the pencil draft of the Protest they drew up”
(GS, 38; emphasis added). Even Dowell’s closing observation—that what
he saw was “just exactly what one d oesn’t expect”—works to distance him
yet further from the event.
In fact, it seems that the love of digression that Ford describes in It Was
the Nightingale as the reader’s eagerness for relief from the story corre-
sponds to a similar eagerness on his own account, and that such distrac-
tion manifests itself in a thematization of writing that distances writing
and transfers the activity of writing to other agents. For example, Dow-
ell’s pleasure in the scene is made possible by his belief that, as he enjoys
the spectacle the cows offer, Florence is safely lecturing. And so, he may
relax his attention. It is as if Florence’s speech becomes a kind of figure
for a text 22 —a form of narration or dictation—from which Dowell is
pleased to find himself distracted by the spectacle of the cows.
The mode in which Florence (re-)produces her text, however, is an-
other matter. She “impart[s] information so hard” (emphasis added),
Dowell says, as if to make her speech an action with something of the
manual pressure of writing. She seems to speak the way one might write—
bearing down hard becomes part of the expression—as if Ford wants
that pressure to evoke the physical immediacy of the act of writing. In
short, Dowell and Florence stand in two pointedly different relationships
to the act of writing. He looks on at a distance or listens distractedly,
untouched (that is, by the brutality of the cows’ play or by Florence’s
lecture). She, like the cows, seems to embody the intensity of physical
and intellectual engagement with writing—she bears down physically
and intellectually on the text of her lecture and, in doing so, eventually
collapses both the psychological and physical distance that ensures
tranquility.
Dowell does not come to understand fully the deeper relevance of
Florence’s speech until well after the incident. He begins to intuit some-
thing about its meaning only as he flees the Rittersaal with Leonora. The
scene bears citing at length:
“And there,” [Florence] exclaimed with an accent of gaiety, of tri-

umph and of audacity. She was pointing at a piece of paper, like the
half-sheet of a letter with some faint pencil scrawls that might have
been a jotting of the amounts we were spending during the day. And
I was extremely happy at her gaiety, in her triumph, in her audacity.
Captain Ashburnham had his hands upon the glass case. “There it
is—the Protest.” And then, as we all properly stage-managed our
bewilderment, she continued: “Don’t you know that is why we w ere
all called Protestants? That is the pencil draft of the Protest they
drew up. You can see the signatures of Martin Luther, and Martin
Bucer, and Zwingli, and Ludwig the Courageous. . . .”
I may have got some of the names wrong, but I know that Luther
and Bucer w ere there. And her animation continued and I was glad.
She was better and she was out of mischief. (GS, 38)
The first paragraph is marked by repetitions, or continuations, of motifs

from preceding passages. References to Florence’s gaiety, which punc-
tuate the pages leading up to this section, continue, as do mentions of
the names of the signatories (particularly Dowell’s uncertainty about
Ludwig of Hessen’s epithet).23
Another repetition that works to unite the above passage with the de-
scription of the approach to the Schloss that precedes it is the repeated
mentions of glass. The long paragraph that separates Dowell’s account
of the overturned cow from that of Florence’s history lecture remarks that
“gleams come from the city—gleams from the glass of windows; from the
gilt signs of apothecaries; from the ensigns of the student corps high up
in the mountains; from the helmets of the funny little soldiers moving
their stiff little legs in white linen trousers” (GS, 36–37). Once inside the
Schloss museum Dowell recalls their encounter with the contents of the
Schloss, including “the old glass” (GS, 37). A little further on, they climb
a set of stairs “immensely high in the air to a large old chamber, full of
presses, with heavily-shuttered windows all around” (GS, 37). In the first
instance, glass is part of the panorama of the city, gleaming along with
the signs of apothecaries, mixed with writing and light. Next, glass ap-
pears again, not linked with writing or any sign of its presence, but still
noteworthy for its ubiquity. Finally—within this single, long paragraph—
glass returns, implied by the shuttered windows and sharing pride of
place with the presses. (A note in the critical edition explains that
“presses” refers here to shelving, but in the context of the Protest as a
text, the choice of words perhaps implies, on the plane of Ford’s themati-
zation of writing, printing presses, too—as if one were to imagine the
Protest draft going to print on the spot, and via a device named precisely
for the physical pressure u nder which it produces writing.) 24
Florence no sooner enters the “old chamber” than she sees to opening
the shutters. “She told the tired, bored custodian what shutters to open;
so that the bright sunlight streamed in palpable shafts into the dim old
chamber. She explained that this was Luther’s bedroom and that just
where the sunlight fell had stood his bed” (GS, 37). The action of opening
the shutters, of exposing the glass, comes to stand not only for making
visible the interior of the “old chamber,” but also for a tactile coming into
being.
At just this point, Dowell speaks out of character, to criticize Florence’s
account of Luther’s stay at the Schloss (“As a matter of fact, I believe that
she was wrong” [GS, 37]), unceremoniously revealing his attentiveness
to the substance of her lecture. His new interest can be seen, I think, as
signaling a change—both of mood (from blithe unconcern to critical vig-
ilance) and of psychological distance (from remoteness to engagement),
prefiguring his dramatic encounter with writing in the climactic scene to
follow.
Florence throws open a final shutter, “in spite of the protest of the
custodian,” before turning to “a large glass case” (GS, 37–38). This final
mention of glass immediately precedes the passage quoted in full above,
and sets the stage for the culmination of a set of movements: each refer-
ence to glass has placed it progressively closer to the party, until—over
the custodian’s objection—Florence throws open the last barrier (a last
shutter) and approaches the glass case. Simultaneously, the mingling in
Dowell’s narration of glass and writing—signs and presses—ends in their
coincidence in the glass case that contains the Protest. Furthermore,
Dowell’s cheerful delectation of the gleam of the city gives way to an am-
bivalent remark on the extraordinary height of the “old chamber,” which
in turn is followed by his unique attack on Florence’s historical accuracy,
and then by the “protest” of the “custodian.” (As a custodian, the keeper
of the “old chamber” doubles the “nurse-attendant” Dowell, just as the
“chamber” alludes to a heart: e very heart has four of them, and Florence’s
also has a custodian.) In the custodian’s “protest” are figured both Dowell’s
increasingly apprehensive attention and the “piece of paper” that w ill
provide the occasion for Florence to justify his anxiety.25 It is as if the
closing-in on Dowell of the motifs of glass and writing cause him to be-
come both more attentive to Florence’s lecture and anxious, even angry.
At the height of this preliminary, expectant tension, Dowell’s anxiety
disperses; his simile belittles the Protest draft by comparing it to a record
of the group’s expenses on the day trip. Edward even touches the glass
case.
Florence, however, continues. She forges for her harmless history a new
relevance:
She continued, looking up into Captain Ashburnham’s eyes:

“It’s b ecause of that piece of paper that y ou’re honest, sober, indus-
trious, provident, and clean-lived. If it weren’t for that piece of
paper you’d be like the Irish or the Italians or the Poles, but par-
ticularly the Irish . . .”
And she laid one finger upon Captain Ashburnham’s wrist.
I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, some-
thing evil in the day. I c an’t define it and can’t find a simile for it. It
wasn’t as if a snake had looked out of a hole. No, it was as if my heart
had missed a beat. It was as if we w ere going to run and cry out; all
four of us in separate directions, averting our heads. In Ashburn-
ham’s face I know that t here was absolute panic. I was horribly
frightened and then I discovered that the pain in my left wrist was
caused by Leonora’s clutching it. (GS, 38)
Florence violates the rule of her custodian—or, rather, he fails to stop her.
Harmless disquisition on history becomes an attack on her prospective
lover’s wife. Of course, Dowell d oesn’t realize that at the time. Nor does
he acknowledge the insidious purpose of Florence touching Edward’s
wrist with her finger. Nevertheless, he becomes aware of something ter-
rible. How does Dowell gain this insight? Nothing has happened that
should cause Dowell, given what he knows at this point in his history, to
see any harm in what he has witnessed. He thinks of a snake (a loaded
figure in impressionist texts, as the Introduction and Chapter 2 have
shown), he feels as though his heart had skipped a beat, he feels himself
(along with his companions) impelled to flight, he even sees terror in Ed-
ward’s face. Suddenly, he discovers something specific that can account
retrospectively for his discomfort: Leonora clutches his left wrist so firmly
as to inflict pain.
The paragraph in which Dowell intuits the crisis is framed by wrists.
In fact, the horror reaches Dowell as the touch migrates, so to speak, from
Edward’s wrist upon the glass over the Protest draft to his own wrist. I
would suggest that the manifestation of the “evil in the day” to Dowell
can be seen as accompanying—a nd, in some sense, as being identical
with—the final step in the drawing-near of the “piece of paper.” In other
words, since Dowell recognizes Leonora’s grip on his wrist as preexisting
his explicit awareness of it, and since Florence touches Edward’s wrist
only moments before, the two appear to be, if not simultaneous, at least
approximately so. The near coincidence of the two touches in time, as
well as the similar coincidence of their locations on their objects’
bodies, suggests some kind of identity between the limbs in question
(Ashburnham’s and Dowell’s). Distraction becomes self-awareness, and
the psychological distance, which made the scene of the cows and the
gleams of the town so pleasant, disappears. When writing comes in con-
tact with the writer, it is horrific. The trance, as it w
ere, is broken.
A fter his flight with Leonora, Dowell faces her. Her expression is
terrible:
She looked me straight in the eyes; and for a moment I had the
feeling that t hose two blue discs were immense, were overwhelming,
were like a wall of blue that shut me off from the rest of the world. I
know it sounds absurd; but that is what it did feel like.
“Don’t you see,” she said with a r eally horrible bitterness, with a
really horrible lamentation in her voice, “Don’t you see that that’s
the cause of the w hole miserable affair; of the w hole sorrow of the
world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them. . . .”
Id on’t remember how she went on; I was too frightened; I was
too amazed. I think I was thinking of running to fetch assistance—a
doctor, perhaps, or Captain Ashburnham. Or possibly she needed
Florence’s tender care, though of course, it would have been very
bad for Florence’s heart. But I know that when I came out of it she
was saying: “Oh, where are all the bright, happy, innocent beings
in the world? Where’s happiness? One reads of it in books!”
She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over
her forehead. Her eyes w ere enormously distended; her face was ex-
actly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors
there. And then suddenly she stopped. She was most amazingly, just
Mrs. Ashburnham again. Her face was perfectly clear, sharp and
defined; her hair was glorious in its golden coils. Her nostrils
twitched with a sort of contempt. She appeared to look with interest
at a gypsy caravan that was coming over a little bridge far below
us. (GS, 39)
What we have, in Leonora’s face, is, I would argue, a figuration of writing.

Her distended eyes (not exactly unseeing, but fixed as though on an ap-
parition) indicate a kind of slackening of consciousness such as we have
seen in previous chapters of this book associated with upturned f aces and
the written page in Crane, Hudson, Norris, Wells, and Conrad. Under-
stood in that light, the “singular clawing motion upwards over her fore-
head” evokes the act of writing—both because it describes a motion like
that of writing in cursive script and because the words “singular clawing”
contain anagrammatically disguised within them the word “scrawling,”
a form of which Ford has already used to refer to the Protest draft.
Dowell then recovers from his lapse of recollection—which is not un-
like that in which he is alleged to have suggested he marry Nancy.
Leonora also recovers, becoming “just Mrs. Ashburnham again.” Her
hand ceases its clawing motion, and gives way to “glorious” hair in
“coils,” as if the act of writing ceases and is replaced by the (already)
written word, formed by coils. A gypsy caravan moving, perhaps, like a
trail of ink across a page, lies “far below.” The transformation of panic to
calm is, it appears, associated not only with Leonora’s recovery of com-
posure, but also with Dowell’s recovery of distance from the object of
attention—and, I would suggest, from the act of writing.
And then, quite suddenly, in the bright light of the street, I saw Flor-
ence r unning. It was like that—Florence r unning with a face whiter
than paper and her hand on the black stuff over her heart. I tell you,
my own heart stood still; I tell you I could not move. She rushed in
at the swing doors. She looked round that place of rush chairs, cane
t ables and newspapers. She saw me and opened her lips. She saw
the man who was talking to me. She stuck her hands over her face
as if she wished to push her eyes out. And she was not t here any
more. [The man Dowell was talking with had known Florence in
her earlier life and in fact had seen her “coming out of the bedroom
of a young man called Jimmy at five o’clock in the morning” (GS,
75). The implication of the scene is that Florence realized that he
would tell as much to Dowell; when Dowell soon after went to her
room, he found that she had taken poison and died.]
I could not move. I could not stir a finger. (GS, 74; emphasis
added)
The above scene takes place on “the 4th of August, 1913” (GS, 75): the
one day of the year during which Florence acts as though “hypnotised”
is also her birthday (GS, 59) and the day of her death. Furthermore, she
seems like a sheet of paper that is being written upon, for there is a “hand
on the black stuff ” that covers her. And, indeed, she is surrounded by
writing—newspapers.26
Florence then covers her face (the sheet of writing) with her hands,
pressing them to her eyes as though to blind herself, and she disappears.
Ford seems to hint at an identity of seeing and being present. It is not only
Florence who is affected by her actions, though—they seem to have an
effect on Dowell as well. He is unable to move. He is unable to see her.
He seems to experience a disturbance in his own recollections of the
evening: after this episode, the chapter and section close, and Dowell’s
narrative resumes with him speaking “as people do who are recovering
from an anaesthetic” (GS, 75). In fact, it is just a fter the lapse following his
wife’s death that Dowell spoke as if he “had a dual personality, the one I
being entirely unconscious of the other” (GS, 75). It is, I want to say, al-
most as if Florence’s hands press on Dowell’s eyes. I say that b ecause the
scene bears a striking resemblance to the one in which Florence touches
Edward’s wrist and the pressure transfers to Leonora’s grip on Dow-
ell’s wrist.
The logic of The Good Soldier depends on such moments in which
characters identify, even physically, with one another. The fate of each is
almost more than coincidentally bound up with the others’. The novel’s
resolution requires that two members of the novel’s “minuet de la cour”

(GS, 11) commit suicide and that a third, Nancy, loses her status as a
“personality,” as Dowell puts it: “What then, should they have done? It
worked out in the extinction of two very splendid personalities—for
Edward and the girl were splendid personalities, in order that a third
personality, more normal, should have a fter a long period of trouble, a
quiet, comfortable, good time” (GS, 155; emphasis in original). And as
he delivers his assessment, Dowell brings the time of the narration into a
new present: “I am writing this now, I should say, a full eighteen months
after the words that end my last chapter” (GS, 155). Dowell renounces
the currentness of the present tense of his previous narrative, which re-
cedes into the past along with the events of the story, and enters a “new”
present tense, as it w ere. That new presentness of narration is figured,
one might say, in the person of Nancy, who, although she is “gone—oh
utterly gone” (GS, 155), w ill sit in front of Dowell at dinner, “enigmatic,
silent, utterly well-behaved as far as her knife and fork go.” Nancy becomes
aligned with a certain kind of writing—in the suspension of her knife
and fork while she searches for a word (GS, 168), and in the “extraordi-
nary” quality of her face framed as it is by “her coiled black hair” (GS, 168).
She is, I think, a figure for the kind of writing Ford imagines and privi-
leges as digression.
Edward, on the other hand, exits under other circumstances. We meet
him “talking with a good deal of animation,” and he looks at Dowell
“frankly and directly” (GS, 169)—just the opposite of the abstracted
Nancy staring off into space. A boy hands him a telegram, and, as if to
repeat the transfer that takes place in the Schloss, he hands it presently
to Dowell. Like the Protest draft the group had gone to see, the document
seems, at first, trivial. “On the pinkish paper in a sprawled handwriting”
Dowell reads: “Safe Brindisi. Having rattling good time. Nancy” (GS,
169). And, as before, Dowell fails to respond. Edward, however, “whose
mind was compounded of indifferent poems and novels” (GS, 169), draws
with two fingers a “penknife—quite a small penknife” (GS, 169) from a
pocket. (In the word “penknife,” obviously, are conjoined both the in-
strument of writing and the means of Edward’s suicide.) Edward sends
Dowell away from the scene with a “direct, challenging, brow-beating
glare” (GS, 169) that recalls Leonora’s stare after Dowell’s flight with her
from the Schloss—the stare that marks the transition from the intensity
of an immediate encounter with the stuff of writing to Dowell’s detached
contemplation of the gypsy caravan snaking through the distant land-
scape. Just as the earlier stare permits the slackening of tension, so does
Edward’s glare soften and become “almost affectionate” (GS, 169). Dowell
sets off to deliver the telegram to a “quite pleased” Leonora, and Edward
vanishes (GS, 169). The scene ends the book, but, I want to say, it also
ends a fraught encounter with the scene of writing not unlike the one that
takes place in the Schloss. And of course, it also marks the end of Ford’s
encounter with the act of writing The Good Soldier.
From Return to Yesterday (1932)

Ford’s many writings are a virtual treasure house of impressionist meta
phors, themes, and allegories, to the extent that there is no point in trying
to survey even a representative fraction of them. But to convey something
of the extreme variety and, at times, the bizarreness of the texts and tex-
tual moments in question (qualities already suggested by the citations
from The Soul of London glanced at earlier in this chapter), here, with a
minimum of commentary, are four brief excerpts from one of Ford’s many
autobiographical writings, Return to Yesterday (1932)—a book in which
recollections of Crane, Conrad, W. H. Hudson, and Henry James play a
major role. (All of t hese excerpts might qualify as “digressions,” except
for the fact that Return to Yesterday is itself “digressive” in overall form.)
The first excerpt presents itself as a reminiscence of a scene glimpsed
while working on a life of the painter Holbein in Basel, Switzerland (ac-
cording to Ford, at some unspecified date between 1903 and 1906). Ford
was then residing, he reports, high up in the house of a Swiss professor;
the upper stories of the houses on that street came close together, and
immediately opposite Ford lived a chimney sweep. The reminiscence
continues:
He was jet black all over, wore a top hat, and carried behind his back
a ladder and sacks of soot. His apartment, which I could see into,
contained a baby and a blonde pink and white young wife. Apart-
ment, baby, and wife were all spotless. On the edge of the window
sill was a l ittle green and white fence, on one side of the window
hung a canary in a cage, on the other a goldfinch. The chimney
sweep never came home till dusk. By then the lights would be lit
behind a white blind. Then I would see the silhouette of the sweep,
framed by the window, in the black house-front that, itself a silhou-
ette, stood out with crockets and crow-steps against the dark sky
and the immense stars.
He would stride joyously into the room. His shadow would catch
the shadow of the baby from the invisible cradle and, top hat, ladder,
sacks all bobbing, he would throw the baby up to the ceiling, again
and again and again. I used to hang out over my window sill and
wonder with agony why God had made it impossible to transfuse
one’s soul into another being. If only I could have made my soul
enter that chimney sweep’s body whilst he was absent in sleep! His
could no doubt have found a home.27
The usual response of students of Ford to passages such as this (or the
ones in The Soul of London) is skepticism, or even, at times, irritation—is
it plausible that such and such ever r eally happened? And in fact, Ford in
an autobiographical mode is notoriously unreliable. But as regards his
account of the shadow images of the chimney sweep throwing his baby
into the air, is it clear that Ford wished to be believed? Or was his stake
in that account entirely different, a matter of giving free rein to a fantasy
of a kind of purely imagistic, in that sense immaterial, black-on-white pic-
ture writing that could have been expressed in no other way? And in
fact, Ford’s shadow chimney sweep is by no means the only such figure
in impressionist texts: Crane, in one of his earliest pieces of journalism,
describes with relish various “shadow pictures” cast on the canvas walls
of Ocean Grove’s Camp Meeting Association tents;28 Conrad has a com-
parable (though differently mooded) passage in his first novel, Almayer’s
Folly;29 and as was noted in Chapter 2, a carefully described shadow-
casting plant plays an emblematic role in Hudson’s Green Mansions.
(See also my discussion of Conrad’s short story “The Duel” in Chapter 4.)
What sets Ford’s passage somewhat apart from the others, though, is
the note of longing with which it ends, the desire, as Ford puts it, “to trans-
fuse [his] soul into another being”—the chimney sweep. Ostensibly, this
was to be done while the latter slept; ostensibly, too, though Ford does
not quite say so, the desire had its origin in his sense of the attractiveness
of the chimney sweep’s domestic life with his wife and child (and canary).
But there is also, I suggest, a sense in which the desire “to transfuse one’s
soul into another h uman being” is a response to the shadow imagery
itself, or, say, to its immaterial character—as if the silhouettes of the
chimney sweep and his equipment and his baby and of course his actions
communicated themselves to Ford (in actual fact or in his imagination)
with such immediacy that he found himself frustrated that the communi-
cation was less than total. At least I take this to be the essential content of
his mini-narrative, for all the likelihood that the latter was wholly or
largely pure invention. (I will note in passing that the desire in question,
or, say, the fact of such transfusion, has its equivalent in certain moments
in The Good Soldier, as well as in the metaphorics of thought transfer-
ence in Hudson.)
Another, briefer “recollection” occurs later in the book. Ford has been
describing his various collaborations with Conrad and more broadly,
Conrad’s agonizing over the effort to produce his novels, Nostromo in
particular. Then a Cockney-talking “hospital nurse” would come in,
speaking all but unintelligibly to Ford. (The presence of the nurse is never
explained.) But Conrad understood her. “He had served before the mast
with cockney deckhands. He would ask her how the other patients w ere.
That would give her an excuse to get g oing.” There follow two paragraphs
of direct quotation of her Cockney speech, immediately a fter which Ford
narrates an accident that she had previously undergone:
She had been standing on the top landing of the house. A servant
let the green baize door swing against her. It had precipitated her
down several flights of stone stairs. She lay at the bottom with her
skull smashed and her brains protruding. The servants put sheets
of newspaper u nder her head. They wanted to protect their mis-
tress’s stair carpets. When the surgeon came he could read the im-
print of the paper on her brain—an account of the dispersal of the
works of art from the collection of the Hon. Matthew L. Oldroyd.
That was her story—one of hundreds. Of thousands, perhaps.
Her appearance used to drive me frantic. It meant that Conrad
would not get to work for hours. Neither could I. I need a certain
period of quiet before words w ill come. (RY, 288–289)
Nothing further is said about the accident, but Ford goes on to report that
the nurse seemed to stimulate Conrad, who would listen to “her singular
tarradiddles for hours with an expression of the utmost interest and def-
erence.” The story of the nurse concludes: “Perhaps Nostromo would
never have got itself written but for her. Or perhaps Conrad’s next book
would have borne a Parisian imprint” (RY, 289). (Conrad had previously
been quoted by Ford as complaining about the limitations of English as
a literary language as compared with French.)
Ford’s narration of the nurse’s accident seems curiously heartless: her
skull was shattered, her brain exposed, yet nothing is said about her re-
covery or any aftermath. The imprinting of the newspaper has something
grotesque about it, and the reference to the art sale appears deliberately
comic, in a chilling sort of way (as if the reader is meant to recognize or
at least be amused by the somewhat odd name “the Hon. Matthew L. Old-
royd”; and how did Ford acquire so intimate a knowledge of what was
imprinted?). Once again, though, it seems highly unlikely—to say the
least—that anything of the sort ever took place, which leads me to read
Ford’s account as still another impressionist mini-allegory, this one not
of an immaterial writing but rather of a brutely material one—a direct
physical imprinting. Interestingly, such a writing is anything but Ford’s
ideal, or indeed Conrad’s: as Ford states earlier in Return to Yesterday,
he and Conrad shared the ambition
to write . . . as only Mr. W. H. Hudson writes—as simply as the

grass grows. . . . We wanted the reader to forget the writer—to
forget that he was reading. We wished him to be hypnotised into
thinking that he was living what he read—or, at least, into the con-
viction that he was listening to a simple and in no way brilliant nar-
rator who was telling—not writing—a true story. (RY, 216)
But of course, the “in no way brilliant narrator” who is quoted in the l ittle
story about the hospital nurse is the nurse herself, speaking her Cockney
“taradiddle” (“Last Peetient I ‘ad wus Lord Northcliffe. Hoperishun on
’is leg!” [RY, 288]), which suggests a certain equivalence between the
opacity of her Cockney speech and the material imprinting of the news-
paper on her exposed brain.
Here, too, I am not suggesting that Ford positively understood him-
self as implying any such equivalence. Rather, as with the thematization
of writing in Crane or the mini-allegory of immaterial writing in Ford’s
anecdote of the shadow chimney sweep in Basel, we are dealing with a
textual crux that bears the stamp of the working of an automatic m ental
machinery, to paraphrase Norris’s Karslake. (A similar machinery is said
by Dowell to be at work in key passages of The Good Soldier.) This is fur-
ther suggested, as the reader may already have noted, by the altogether
unexpected and in a sense disconcerting repetition of the word “imprint”
in the concluding sentence, “Or perhaps Conrad’s next book would have
borne a Parisian imprint,” which would seem to imply a further equiva-
lence between the direct transfer of print to the nurse’s brain and the no-
tion of Conrad’s next book appearing in French—not that I know what
to make of this (Ford loved France, read, spoke, and wrote French easily,
and greatly admired writers such as Flaubert and Maupassant, a taste he
shared with Conrad). My point is rather that the repetition of “imprint”
should alert us to the writerly stakes of the passage as a w hole, though I
might add that repetition of this sort, as if done in a state of distraction,
is one of the hallmarks of Ford’s impressionist prose generally.
Two other passages are worth glancing at in this connection. The first:
here was in those days [the early 1900s] an eminent politician of

T
very wide knowledge and ability. He was then on the verge of a dis-
agreeable affair. He honoured me by a belief, that was perhaps ex-
aggerated, in my knowledge of life and influence in regions where
he wanted influence exercised. One day he asked me to go with
him to the Zoo. In the Reptile h ouse, which also contained cages
of bright tropical finches, he gave me a most brilliant lecture on the
protective colouring of birds. It remains now vivid in my mind and
has been of the greatest use in helping me to form appreciations of
more modern art. On the face of it, the birds we were looking at ap-
peared, in their surroundings, astonishingly visible. But at home
they lived in tree-tops above jungles and had to fear hawks above
all. A finch with a scarlet stomach, sapphire blue wings, and em-
erald green head and back is a striking object in a dim London
building. Seen from above in the tropical rays of an immense sun
the effect of the light and shadows in the prismatic coloration of the
tree-tops is completely to break up the form of the bird.
My friend exhausted this topic and we looked at some snakes.
(RY, 245)
As has emerged, birds w ere the great subject of Hudson’s writing, a fact
that no doubt had a bearing on the present passage. But what I want to
suggest is simply that, understood as one more mini-allegory of impres-
sionist practice, the anecdote brilliantly imagines a double perspective ac-
cording to which, viewed u nder ordinary circumstances, like words in a
dictionary or simply thrown together in no particular order, the brilliant
birds are altogether conspicuous, but viewed from above, like words on
a page in a piece of Hudsonian writing (more precisely, in a piece of Hud-
sonian writing being read), they are for all intents and purposes invis-
ible, a sort of impressionist writerly ideal. That the anecdote takes place
in a reptile house and is immediately followed by Ford and his friend
looking at snakes is almost too good to be true. (A further possibility: that
the politician referred to by Ford is imagined as Lord Grey, well known
as an admirer of Hudson.)
The fourth and last passage I want to cite concerns Ford’s German
cook, Johanna, whom he describes cooking several floors below where
he and Conrad regularly ate lunch together (Conrad was then grappling
with Nostromo). “Then one day,” Ford writes, “no voice from the kitchen
answered mine in the speaking-tube. Johanna was lying face downwards
on the kitchen table with her varnished scarlet cheeks in a great sieve of
flour” (RY, 280); apparently she had been dealing with a bout of influenza
for some time. She is taken away, presumably to a hospital, and Ford as-
sumes the chore of cooking for himself and Conrad, who notices no dif-
ference as long as Ford imitates Johanna. Ford then reports: “But once I
cooked a civet de lièvre à la Parisienne. That is not jugged hare as you
have it in Anglo-Saxondom but has a sauce that is almost jet black with
richness. Conrad inspected it as he always did, carefully and with his
monocle screwed into his eye.” A fter tasting it, Conrad asks whether
perhaps he might have instead “a little of the admirable s addle of lamb

of the night before.” Ford serves him the lamb, and imitates Johanna
from then on (RY, 280). And that is the incident, or pair of incidents—
utterly trivial, the first in particular likely to make the reader doubt its
veracity. But Ford’s stake in the contrast of white and black—flour and
his sauce, paper and ink—is clear enough, and one is not surprised that
the chapter concludes:
I was in addition doing double tides of writing. I had decided that

I must do something of my own—I forget what it was—in order to
defray the extra costs of that barrack [the house that Ford was then
living in]. And Conrad had to be constantly bolstered up, to dic-
tate, to have passages written into Nostromo. It was at that time that
I wrote the pages of Nostromo that Mr. Keating possesses. I also had
the influenza. (RY, 280–281)
What relation, if any, is there between Conrad’s flinching before the black-
ness of the civet de lièvre sauce and his need for bolstering by Ford in his
struggles with Nostromo? It is impossible to say. I w ill only add that con-
trasts of black and white figure importantly throughout Ford’s writings,
nowhere more intensively than in The Soul of London, which in that
respect as in others is a sort of curtain-raiser to his long literary impres-
sionist career.
Chapter Four
Some Impressionist
(and Non-Impressionist) Faces
N
I hav e a l re ady suggested that a disfigured, upward-oriented face,

often but not always of a corpse, is a master trope, if not the master
trope, in literary impressionist writings. In “Stephen Crane’s Upturned
Faces” I begin by citing a passage from The Red Badge of Courage that
might be considered the archetypal example of such a motif. A young
man, Henry Fleming, mainly referred to as “the youth,” encounters the
first of several dead bodies that will draw his attention in the novel:
Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier. He lay upon
his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of
yellowish brown. The youth could see that the s oles of his shoes had
been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and that from a great
rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate
had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies the pov-
erty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.
The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable
dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the
ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand
were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the
body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes
the answer to the Question.1
125
In my commentary on this passage I note the way in which the succes-

sion of brief sentences seems almost to imply that the youth was acting
on the corpse through the medium of the wind, and I also remark on the
quasi-elision of the distinction between living and dead both by virtue of
the initial ambiguity of the pronoun “he” in the last sentence of the pas-
sage and because staring is precisely the action attributed to the corpse
in the second sentence of the first paragraph. I also stress
the salience in both paragraphs of a particular bodily position, that

of the corpse lying flat on its back . . . ; second, the characteriza-
tion of the corpse’s face as an object of another character’s keen at-
tention and the related fact that something, in this case seemingly
gentle, is done to the face or at least to a metonym for it (the tawny
beard); and third, the dramatization, through the image of the
protruding foot, of an unexpected detail—that the soles of the dead
soldier’s shoes “had been worn to the thinness of writing paper.”
(RWD, 94)
(Later I note that the ostensibly benign verb “raised” has implicit in it a
more violent one, “razed.”) By now I hardly need restate the obvious, that
I take this first corpse with its ashen face and staring unseeing eyes as a
figure for a sheet of paper in the process of being written on, indeed, for
the very sheet of paper on which Crane was writing when he composed
those deceptively simple-seeming paragraphs.
Already in this book other upturned faces have been adduced in sim-
ilar connections: the dead officer’s chalk-blue visage in “The Upturned
Face”; Henry Johnson’s face receiving the burning serpent that will de-
stroy it in The Monster; the dead Malay in Almayer’s Folly; Rima’s pale
face slowly returning to life and consciousness in Green Mansions; the face
of the little Jew being beaten with the stump of an oar in the shipwreck
scene in Vandover and the Brute; the Invisible Man’s lifeless albino face
at the end of The Invisible Man; the dead German sailor’s face and body
in In the Days of the Comet; and, figuratively, the Face of the W aters
brooded over by a primordial silence in “A Memorandum of Sudden
Death” (all but explicitly a figure for the page on which the doomed
Karslake is i magined writing). Plus, t here are “old Mahon’s face with the
Some Impressionist (and Non-Impressionist) Faces 127
white beard spread out on his breast” and young Marlow’s sleeping
upturned face in the climactic scene of Conrad’s “Youth,” and of course
Almayer’s startlingly expressionless face—not upturned, but plainly rel-
evant to my notion of Conrad’s writing as a practice of erasure—in Almay-
er’s Folly. (Other such f aces, not upturned but otherwise marked, w ill be
of interest in what follows.) I might also mention that in “Stephen Crane’s
Upturned Faces” I discuss a particularly brilliant New York City sketch,
“When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” that belongs absolutely to our se-
ries.2 My aim in this chapter is s imple: I want to adduce another half dozen
examples by various authors by way of demonstrating beyond all doubt
the primordiality (to adapt a term from “A Memorandum”) and obsessive-
ness of the motif of the (for the most part) upturned, often disfigured, at
all events strongly focalized face for impressionist writing, along with two
major-author instances of the same motif turned to different ends. I will
keep my commentaries to a minimum; the citations w ill be of different
lengths (the first in particular will be extensive).
n
R. B. Cunninghame Graham, a Scottish politician of diverse and
brilliant gifts who went to Harrow, spent years c attle ranching in Argen-
tina, travelled widely in Morocco and Mexico, and was throughout his
life a brilliant horseman, published no less than seventeen collections
of short tales and “sketches,” among other writings; he was a friend of
Hudson, Conrad, and Ford, so perhaps it is not surprising that at least
some of his pieces have affinities with their work. 3 (In a late essay, Ford
compares Cunninghame Graham to Crane as regards the keying down
of drama and a certain aristocratic negligence.)4 An especially vivid in-
stance of this is his sketch “The Orchid-Hunter,” set in the backcountry
in Colombia, most of which takes place on the deck of a river steamer;
the orchid-hunter, British in origin, is described by the unnamed narrator
as a slight, grave figure with hair touched by gray, and most of the sketch
is delivered in his voice.5 His story begins:
Yesterday, about two o ’clock, in a heat fit to boil your brain, a canoe
came slowly up the stream into the settlement. The Indian paddlers
walked up the steep bank carrying the body of a man wrapped in a
mat. When they had reached the l ittle palm-thatched hut over which
floated the Colombian flag, that marked it as the official residence
of the Captain of the Port, they set their burden down with the hope-
less look that marks the Indian, as of an orphaned angel.
“We found this ‘Mister’ on the banks,” they said, “in the last stage
of fever. He spoke but little Christian, and all he said was, ‘Doctor,
American doctor, Tocatalaima; take me there.’
“Here he is, and now who is to pay us for our work?” (“OH,” 54)
The orchid-hunter pays them, and goes to see the body, which has begun
to putrefy. His narrative continues:
I stood and looked at the man’s body in his thin linen suit which
clung to every angle. Beside him was a white pith helmet, and a pair
of yellow-tinted spectacles framed in celluloid to look like tortoise-
shell, that come down from the States. I never wear them, for I find
that everything that you can do without is something gained in life.
His feet in his white canvas shoes all stained with mud sticking
up stiffly and his limp, pallid hands, crossed by the pious Indians,
on his chest gave him that helpless look that makes a dead man, as
it w
ere, appeal to one for sympathy and protection against the terror,
that perhaps for him is not a terror after all; but merely a long rest.
No one had thought of closing his blue eyes; and as we are but
creatures of habit after all, I put my hand into my pocket, and taking
out two half-dollar pieces was about to put them on his eyes. Then I
remembered that one of them was bad, and you will not believe me,
but I could not put the bad piece on his eyes; it looked like cheating
him. So I went out and got two little stones, and after washing them
put them upon his eyelids, and at least they kept away the flies.
I don’t know how it was, for I believe I am not superstitious, but
it seemed to me that t hose blue eyes, sunk in the livid face to which
three or four days’ growth of fair and fluffy beard gave a look of ado-
lescence, looked at me as if they still were searching for the Amer-
ican doctor, who no doubt must have engrossed his last coherent
thought as he lay in the canoe.
As I was looking at him, mopping my face, and now and then

killing a mosquito—one gets to do it quite mechanically, although
in my case neither mosquitoes nor any other kind of bug annoys
me very much—t he door was opened and the authorities came in.
(“OH,” 55–56)
The authorities include a stout Colombian dressed in white clothes,

though the hut soon fills up with Indians, who stand staring at the dead
man, until the orchid-hunter felt “that the dead eyes would turn in anger
on them and shake off the flat stones.” Then:
The man clothed in authority and dusky white returned, accompa-

nied by one of t hose strange out-at-elbows nondescripts who are to
be found in e very town in South America, and may be best described
as “penmen”—t hat is, persons who can read and write and have
some far-off dealings with the law. (“OH,” 57)
A soldier is ordered to have a grave dug immediately, and the “penman,”

Perez, is told to search the corpse for papers. (The appearance of a
“penman” at this moment in the narrative is suggestive, to say the least.)
There follows a search of the dead man’s pockets; the orchid-hunter
remarks on Perez’s “g reat dread of touching a dead body” (“OH,” 57),
which of course recalls Lean’s and the adjutant’s comparable feelings,
and goes on to describe the discovery of a pocketknife, a box of matches,
and a b ottle of quinine, “but still no pocket-book, card-case, letter, or
any paper with the name of the deceased” (“OH,” 58). Finally, Perez
extracts from an inside pocket a letter case containing 2,000 American
dollars, which the commissary confiscates. At this point the search is
done, which leads the orchid gatherer to breathe more freely, “as every
time the dirty hands of Perez fumbled about the helpless body I felt a
shudder running down my back” (“OH,” 59).
The orchid-hunter is left alone with the body. The sketch proceeds:
Thus left alone with my compatriot (if he had been one), I took a
long look at him, so as to stamp his features in my mind. I had no
camera in my possession, and cannot draw—a want that often hin-

ders me in my profession in the description of my rarer plants.
I looked so long that if the man I saw lying upon that canvas
scissor-bed should ever rise again with the same body, I am certain
that I should recognise him amongst a million men.
His hands w ere long and thin, but sunburnt, his feet well shaped,
and though his face was sunken and the heat was rapidly discol-
ouring it, the features w ere well-cut. I noted a brown mark upon
the cheek, such as in Spanish is called a “lunar,” which gave his deli-
cate and youthful face something of a girlish look, in spite of his
moustache. His eyebrows, curiously enough, were dark, and the
incipient growth of beard was darker than his hair. His ears were
small and set on close to the head—a sign of breeding—and his eyes,
although I dared not look at them, having closed them up myself, I
knew w ere blue, and felt they must be staring at me, underneath the
stones. (“OH,” 60)
The description continues until the orchid-hunter takes the stones off
the dead man’s eyes and is relieved to find that the latter do not open.
He smokes and goes on sitting for perhaps “not above half an hour.
Still,” he reports,
in that time I saw the life of the young man who lay before me. His
voyage out; the first sight of the tropics; the landing into that strange
world of swarthy-coloured men, dank vegetation, thick, close atmo-
sphere, the metallic hum of insects, and the peculiar smell of a hot
country—things which we see and hear once in our lives, and but
once only, for custom dulls the senses, and we see nothing more.
Then the letters home, simple and child-like in regard to life.
(“OH,” 61)
The orchid-hunter’s imaginative recapitulation of the young man’s life

extends to the latter’s first words in broken Spanish, his first walk by the
harbor or through alleys, then a voyage up the river to the mine or rubber
station, the long and weary days, the fevers, “the rare letters, and the cher-
ished newspapers from home—those, too, I knew of, for I had waited for
them often in my youth.”
Most of all, as I looked on him and saw his altering features, I

thought of his snug home in Massachusetts or Northu mberland,
where his relations looked for letters on thin paper, with the strange
postmarks, which would never come again. How they would wonder
in his home, and t here I was looking at the features that they would
give the world to see, but impotent to help. (“OH,” 62)
Finally, the body is wrapped in a white cotton sheet, for which the orchid-
hunter pays, and it is carried to a plot of ground with an open grave. The
latter looks hard and uninviting, but the body is lowered into it by a
rope. The orchid-hunter takes “a last look at the white sheet which showed
the a ngles of the frail body underneath it” and says simply “Good-bye”
(“OH,” 63). The grave is filled in and the party returns to the settlement;
the orchid-hunter waits there for the steamer, on the deck of which the
story has just been told. The steamer arrives at its destination and the
orchid-hunter departs on a further expedition into the jungle; he is last
seen in the company of a small group of Indians, “walking quietly along,
a pace or two b ehind” (“OH,” 64).
Detailed commentary on “The Orchid-Hunter” seems almost beyond
the point. What interests me, or rather, what drew my attention to it in the
first place, is its obvious relation to the passages cited at the start of this
chapter, in particular to “The Upturned Face,” though in Cunninghame
Graham’s sketch the emphasis is not on the excavating and then the
filling in of the grave—the act of burying the dead man—but rather on
the protracted description of the corpse itself (which twice is said to re-
veal “angles” under its white sheet) and in particular its discoloring face
(above all its eyes), as the orchid-hunter attempts to “stamp” the dead
man’s features in his mind (a kind of printing, one might say); among t hose
features is the brown mark on the dead man’s cheek. He also mentions
killing mosquitoes “automatically,” a notion—automatism—that belongs
to the network of tropes that I have been pursuing. This leads to the
orchid-hunter’s imagining, or imaginative “seeing,” of the young man’s
life in Colombia up until the latter’s death; and among those imaginings,
in effect bringing them to a climax, is the orchid-hunter’s thought, ob-
serving the corpse’s “altering features,” of the letters on thin paper with
strange postmarks that now would never be written, and which his rela-
tions in Massachusetts or Northumberland would now never receive. In
the orchid-hunter’s summary: “How they would wonder in his home, and
here I was looking at the features that they would give the world to see,
but impotent to help.” The implication, of course, is that the letters and
the features are equivalent, and a further implication may be that Cun-
ninghame Graham’s sketch understands itself, I mean is understood by
him, not only to be unequivocally posing that equivalence but also to be
offering itself as if in compensation for a double loss, a scriptive and in-
deed an ocular stand-in for both the upward-facing, dead young man and
the letters on thin paper he would henceforth never write.
More broadly, putting f aces and corpses aside for the moment, a basic
strategy in Cunninghame Graham’s stories and sketches is to narrate a
journey, often a funeral procession, which the reader soon comes to re-
alize is to be understood as paralleling, progressing, as it were, alongside
and simult aneously with, the writing of the text itself, which in effect
emerges as, is recognized by the reader to be, a journey of another sort.
Such narratives include the fine first-person “A Hegira,” in which the
narrator’s journey is in effect doubled by that of eight escaped Mescalero
Indians, all of whom are killed by the time the tale reaches its conclusion
(the last image is that of a small dog squatting dejectedly on a freshly made
grave); “Andorra”; “An Arab Funeral”; “Bu Gidri”; “Ave Caesar,” fea-
turing not one but two funeral processions; “The Gold Fish,” which
concludes with an Arab runner having almost reached his destination but
having lost his way, lying dead beside the trail; and “Tschiffely’s Ride,”
a true story of one of the g reat personal feats of the 1920s (a three-year
journey on horseback from Buenos Aires to Washington, D.C.).6 Another
variant on this structure is “Beattock for Moffat,” singled out for praise
by Ford,7 which narrates still another journey, of a d ying Scotsman by
train in the company of his wife and brother, seeking to reach his home-
town of Beattock before he draws his last breath (he succeeds, barely). The
entire trip, that is to say, the narrative, is punctuated and broken by patches
of speech in all but unreadable Scots dialect, which has the effect of con-
tinually distancing the reader, making him or her aware of the task of jour-
neying through or rather along with the text. This by no means exhausts
the interest of Cunninghame Graham’s writings, though it will not be pos
sible to deal with them as they deserve in the present study.
n
In chapter 15 of Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), the young as-
piring writer sits in his “mean l ittle room” surrounded by a heap of man-
uscripts returned by the magazines to which he had sent them. Burying
his face in his arms as he sat at his work t able, he is reminded
of his first fight, when he was six years old, when he punched away
with the tears r unning down his cheeks while the other boy, two
years his elder, had pounded and beaten him into exhaustion. He
saw the ring of boys, howling like barbarians as he went down at
last, writhing in the throes of nausea, the blood streaming from his
nose and the tears from his bruised eyes.
“Poor little shaver,” he murmured. “And you’re just as badly
licked now. Y ou’re beaten to a pulp. You’re down and out.”8
(The word “writhing” is of interest, as is “pulp,” a word that w ill occur

twice more within a page or two. More on that in Chapter 8.) Six months
later the older boy, Cheese-Face, whips Martin again, but this time has
his eye blacked. There was more to come:
Next, he saw a narrow alley, between ramshackle frame buildings.

The end of the alley was blocked by a one-story brick building, out
of which issued the rhythmic thunder of the presses, running off the
first edition of the Enquirer. He was eleven, and Cheese-Face was
thirteen, and they both carried the Enquirer. That was why they
were there, waiting for their papers. And, of course, Cheese-Face
had picked on him again, and there was another fight that was inde-
terminate, b ecause at quarter to four the door of the press-room was
thrown open and the gang of boys crowded in to fold their papers.
“I’ll lick you tomorrow,” he heard Cheese-Face promise; and he

heard his own voice, piping and trembling with unshed tears,
agreeing to be t here on the morrow. (ME, 175)
What followed was a seemingly endless series of brutal fistfights between

the two:
The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed the after
noon fight. When he put up his arms, each day, to begin, they pained
exquisitely, and the first few blows, struck and received, racked
his soul; a fter that t hings grew numb, and he fought on blindly,
seeing as in a dream, dancing and wavering, the large features and
burning, animal-like eyes of Cheese-Face. He concentrated upon
that face; all e lse about him was a whirling void. T here was
nothing else in the world but that face, and he would never know
rest, blessed rest, until he had beaten that face into a pulp with his
bleeding knuckles, or until the bleeding knuckles that somehow
belonged to that face had beaten him into a pulp. And then, one
way or the other, he would have rest. But to quit,—for him, Martin,
to quit,—that was impossible! (ME, 177)
One day Cheese-Face fails to show up, but it turns out that that was
because his father had died suddenly. At this point the narrative jumps
forward; Martin is seventeen “and just back from the sea”; he encounters
Cheese-Face again and they agree to fight later that evening; both have a
gang of friends supporting them, and Martin hears himself say, “They
ain’t no hand-shakin’ in this. Understand? They ain’t nothin’ but scrap.
No throwin’ up the sponge. This is a grudge-fight an’ it’s to a finish. Un-
derstand? Somebody’s goin’ to get licked” (ME, 178–179).
The fight begins and it is brutal; Martin in his workroom watches its
progress:
It was to him, with his splendid power of vision, like gazing into a
kinetoscope. He was both onlooker and participant. His long
months of culture and refinement shuddered at the sight; then the
present was blotted out of his consciousness and the ghosts of the
past possessed him, and he was Martin Eden, just returned from
sea and fighting Cheese-Face on the Eighth Street Bridge. He suf-
fered and toiled and sweated and bled, and exulted when his naked
knuckles smashed home. (ME, 180)
The fight goes on and on; at one point Cheese-Face uses brass knuckles,
opening Martin’s cheek to the bone, but Martin demands the knuckles
and throws them into the w ater. They fight on, Cheese-Face having be-
come “a grisly monster out of whose features all likeness to Cheese-Face
had been beaten” (ME, 181). Sometime later, Martin’s right arm breaks
and drops to his side, but he fights on with his left arm only,
battering away at a bloody something before him that was not a face
but a horror, an oscillating, hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that
persisted before his wavering vision and would not go away. And
he punched on and on, slower and slower, as the last shreds of vi-
tality oozed from him, through centuries and eons and enormous
lapses of time, until, in a dim way, he became aware that the name-
less t hing was sinking, slowly sinking down to the rough board-
planking of the bridge. And the next moment he was standing over
it, staggering and swaying on shaky legs, clutching at the air for sup-
port, and saying in a voice he did not recognize—
“D’ye want any more? Say, d’ye want any more?” (ME, 182)
At that point, the seventeen-year-old Martin passed out, as does the

twenty-one-year-old Martin in his workroom; waking, he shouts, “I licked
you, Cheese-Face! It took me eleven years, but I licked you!” Then:
His knees w ere trembling under him, he felt faint, and he staggered
back to the bed, sinking down and sitting on the edge of it. He was
still in the clutch of the past. He looked about the room, perplexed,
alarmed, wondering where he was, until he caught sight of the pile
of manuscripts in the corner. Then the wheels of memory slipped
ahead through four years of time, and he was aware of the present,
of the books he had opened and the universe he had won from their
pages, of his dreams and ambitions, and of his love for a pale wraith
of a girl, sensitive and sheltered and ethereal, who would die of

horror did she witness but one moment of what he had just lived
through—one moment of all the muck through which had waded.
(ME, 182–183)
The chapter ends with Martin “confronting himself in [a] looking-

glass.” “A bit of hysteria and melodrama, eh?” he queried. “Well, never
mind. You licked Cheese-Face, and you’ll lick the editors if takes thrice
eleven years to do it in. You can’t stop here. You’ve got to go on. It’s to a
finish, you know” (ME, 183).
Nothing could be plainer than the association between the dreadful
fights with Cheese-Face (the name itself is unpleasant, disfiguring) and a
thematic of writing, though in this case the face undergoing disfiguration
is not upward facing except (it would seem) at the very end of the last fight,
and the issue is not writing as such but rather publication, the acceptance
of his work by the editors to whom he regularly submits it. (That the early
fights take place accompanied by the “rhythmic thunder” of newspaper
presses already suggests as much.) Even that is not quite right: as eventu-
ally becomes clear, indeed, as Martin himself comes to realize, when
success and money arrive and he is on his way to being recognized as a
famous author, he will not be satisfied to have work accepted for publica-
tion after it has been written, as strange as that may sound; all such accep
tances of what he repeatedly calls “work performed” strike him as hollow,
trivial, in any case less than fully satisfying. (“Work performed. The
phrase haunted his brain,” we read at one point [ME, 445; emphasis in
original].) What he discovers he requires if he is to realize his enormous
ambition is something hyperbolic, impossible: he wants writing and pub-
lication to be a single action, willed and executed by him, in no way sub-
ject to the decisions of editors, the laws of chance, or more broadly—in
Walter Benn Michaels’s terms—the logic of the market.9 More precisely, in
Michaels’s reading of Martin Eden it is the existence of the market that
makes possible a successful literary career—the very concept of a career
makes no sense outside that context. What Martin comes to require is a
career entirely under his control, willed and executed by him without in-
tervention from outside, or for that matter, interference from “within.”
The plain impossibility of actualizing such an ambition accounts for the
sustained extreme violence in the pages given over to his fights with
Cheese-Face, a level of violence approached in the other passages we
have considered only by the shipwreck scene in Vandover. (The destruc-
tion of Henry Johnson’s face is equally terrible, but it doesn’t involve sus-
tained battering as do the other two scenes.)
But there are crucial differences, as well. For one t hing, the fights with
Cheese-Face, although having taken place in the past, are consistently pre-
sented as being witnessed, viewed, by Martin Eden in the present. “He
watched the youthful apparition of himself, day after day, hurrying from
school to the Enquirer alley,” we are told. And: “It was to him, with his
splendid power of vision, like gazing into a kinetoscope. He was both on-
looker and participant.” (Several times, too, Martin is said to hear his
former self make various remarks to Cheese-Face.) Later in the novel there
is a reference to “Martin’s trick of vision,” which is glossed by the state-
ment that “whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin’s mind im-
mediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily
expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly automatic, and his
visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living present” (ME,
290–291). The stress on vision is an impressionist one, of course, and
so, more interestingly, is the notion that Martin’s visioning was “auto-
matic” (whatever precisely that means here) and the further suggestion of
a kind of doubling or paralleling of present experience with such visioning,
which would be one way of describing, more or less, Crane’s process of
automatically displacing his perception of the page and the act of writing
with narratives drawn from his imagination. (Conrad’s project of erasure
clearly fits such a description, while Ford’s distractive / digressive proce-
dures are also to the point. So, of course, is Norris’s “A Memorandum.”)
Beyond even that there is more than an intimation of a kind of psychic
splitting, in the first place between the young fighter of years ago and the
twenty-one-year-old Martin Eden, then between Martin in the present and
his image in the looking glass (an aptly named object), and finally, it may
seem counterintuitively, between Martin and Cheese-Face, who emerges
from these pages as more nearly a surrogate for the author than a simple
opponent. That is, the emphasis throughout the account of the fights is
less and less on any battering received by Martin, even if at one late point
his right arm snaps, and more and more on the tremendous punishment
he administers to his opponent, “a grisly monster out of whose features

all likeness to Cheese-Face had been beaten” and, a paragraph or so l ater,
“a bloody something . . . that was not a face but a horror, an oscillating,
hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that persisted before his wavering
vision and would not go away.” As we have seen, violence on this order is
not foreign to impressionist texts, but what I take from these descriptions
is a certain inexplicit sense not just of empathy for but also, unmistakably,
of identification with Cheese-Face (or with his massively disfigured face),
as if as the chapter moves t oward its conclusion that face (or non-face)
comes to represent some part or version of Martin that he longs at once
to disavow and embrace—with his fists, so to speak. (Cf. the battering of
the Jew’s hands to stumps by the “stump” of an oar in the shipwreck pas-
sage from Vandover. Note, too, the recurrence of the loaded word “thing,”
here chillingly applied to Cheese-Face’s hideous visage.) This is why the
words spoken by Martin to his reflection in the looking glass seem banal,
simplistic, a fter what has preceded them. And in light of what is to come:
Martin’s suicide by drowning, which, as Michaels puts it, satisfies what
is by then a desperate desire for “work to do.”10
n
Now consider the next-to-last paragraph from a strange but oddly riv-
eting story W. H. Hudson wrote late in life, “Dead Man’s Plack (1920).11
The story is set in Saxon E ngland, roughly a thousand years ago; its pro-
tagonist, Elfrida, a great beauty, had collaborated in the murder of her
husband, Earl Athelwold, in her ambition to be King Edgar’s queen; years
later, having married Edgar, and following his sudden death from fever
and the ascension of Edward, his son by a previous marriage, to the
throne, she takes advantage of a visit from Edward to contrive his murder
as well; eventually she retires to an abbey and thinks back bitterly though
not quite repentantly on her proud, violent life. Then one day she is found
lying drowned in a stream along the banks of which she had often walked.
The paragraph reads:
It was a hot, dry summer and the stream was low, and in stooping
to dip her hand in the w
ater she had lost her balance and fallen in,
and although the water was but three feet deep she had in her fee-
bleness been unable to save herself. She was lying on her back on
the clearly seen bed of many-coloured pebbles, her head pointing
downstream, and the swift, fretting current had carried away her
hood and pulled out her long abundant silver-white hair, and the
current played with her hair, now pulling it straight out, then
spreading it wide over the surface, mixing its silvery threads with
the hair-like green blades of the floating water-grass. And the dead
face was like marble; but the wide-open eyes that had never wholly
lost their brilliance and the beautiful lungwort-blue colour were like
living eyes—l iving and gazing through the crystal-clear r unning
water at the group of nuns staring down with horror-struck faces at
her. (“DMP,” 98–99)
Another corpse with an upturned face, in other words. But what is dis-
tinctively Hudsonian is, first, that the face is that of a beautiful woman,
and second, that Elfrida’s upturned face, although “like marble,” seems
barely if at all disfigured by death: in particular her eyes, still beautiful,
still “lungwort-blue,” appear alive and gazing—as if what horrifies the
nuns is precisely her seeming liveness despite being dead. Equally Hud-
sonian is the quiet assertion of the crystal clarity of the shallow stream
with its sharp-focus bed of colored pebbles; the effect is somewhat as if
the stream itself figures the transparency, the flowingness, that Hudson’s
admirers—R ichard Aldington, for example—held to be one of the signal
qualities of his ostensibly artless prose. “I felt,” Richard Aldington wrote,
as if I were sitting by a small stream of silvery water tumbling over

brown mossy stones among green reeds on a sunny day, so that in
one place the w ater seemed dark ochre, in another green, in another
blue where the sky was reflected, and white where the w ater splashed
over a little rock and gold when the sunlight touched the r ipples.
Only in this way can I express the feeling of fresh vivid colour and of
harmonious language beautifully clear.12
Indeed, if we bear in mind that in Crane and Conrad, to mention only

t hose two g iants, disfigured faces are metaphors for the upward-facing
page of inscription, the fact that Elfrida’s relatively undisfigured face is
seen through a flowing transparent medium suggests a kind of displace-

ment of emphasis away from the face (that is, from the page) toward the
disembodied prose medium itself; or if this feels too strong (the paragraph,
after all, climaxes with the image of the face), the combination of the trans-
parency of the medium and the seeming liveness of the face nevertheless
emblematizes the difference between Hudson’s “invisible” impressionism
and that of his more famous contemporaries. Finally, the account of Elf-
rida’s silver-white hair as “mix[ing] . . . with the hair-like green blades
of the floating water-g rass” suggests another, complementary figure,
according to which Hudson’s writing virtually merges with, all but be-
comes, the objects it describes. In fact, the two figures themselves flow
together in the operations of the stream’s “swift, fretting current,” which,
having swept away Elfrida’s hood, now plays with her “long abundant
silver-white hair”—m ixing it with the water-g rass—as if responding to
what remains of her once dazzling beauty. The rhetorical illusion h ere
is that the current does this on its own—in Lord Grey’s terms cited ear-
lier, that the author looks on but does not interfere. And in fact, Hudson
claims in a preamble to his story—like Martin Eden in his recollection of
the fistfights with Cheese-Face—that he “actually saw and heard” every
thing he is about to relate “as an event, or series of events . . . re-enacted
before [his] very eyes” (“DMP,” 9); while in a postscript he suggests that
the “revelation” he received came to him from Elfrida herself, whose ghost,
he further says, continues to haunt the place where she died (“DMP,” 135).
My point in citing this is not to suggest that Hudson in fact hallucinated the
events he narrates (though he elsewhere claims to have experienced tele-
pathic phenomena on two occasions, both times in the form of a familiar
face appearing before him, as if in the wind), but rather to show the extent
to which he himself was inclined to participate in the fiction that as a
writer he was nothing more than an observer.
n
In another of Ford’s autobiographical books, Portraits from Life
(1937), he discusses having edited the English Review and remarks, char-
acteristically, on how s imple it is to spot good writing from an unknown
author. “In the year [presumably 1909] when my eyes first fell on words
written by Norman Douglas, G. H. Tomlinson, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra

Pound and o thers,” he explains,
upon a day I received a letter from a young schoolteacher in Not-

tingham. I can still see the handwriting—as if drawn with sepia
rather than written in ink, on grey-blue notepaper. It said that the
writer knew a young man who wrote, as she thought, admirably but
was too shy to send his work to editors. Would I care to see some of
his writing? In that way I came to read the first words of a new
author:
The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling
down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the
corner with loud threats of speed but the colt that it startled from
among the gorse which still flickered indistinctly in the raw after
noon, outdistanced it in a canter. A woman walking up the railway
line to Underwood, held her basket aside and watched the footplate
of the engine advancing.
Ford continues:
I was reading in the twilight of the long eighteenth-century room

that was at once the office of the English Review and my drawing-
room. My eyes w ere tired; I had been reading all day so I did not go
any further with the story. It was called Odour of Chrysanthemums.
I laid it in the basket of accepted manuscripts. My secretary looked
up and said: “You’ve got another genius?” I answered: “It’s a big
one this time, and went upstairs to dress.”13
The genius, of course, was the twenty-four-year-old D. H. Lawrence,

and the story is t oday regarded as one of the strongest in his early oeuvre.14
Based in part on his family, it is set in Nottinghamshire near the Brinsley
Colliery; a miner’s wife with two c hildren, Elizabeth Bates, is waiting for
the arrival of her husband Walter at the end of a day. He is late, and she
assumes he is drinking in one pub or another; evidently, he does this often,
and her anger grows as the hours pass; eventually her anger, as we read,
becomes tinged with fear, and at half past ten, sitting in her house with
Walter’s m other, she learns that he was killed, smothered, in a cave-in at
the mine. Two miners accompanied by a manager arrive bearing the dead
man’s body on a stretcher, which they set down in the tiny room. “Never
knew such a t hing in my life, never! . . . ,” the manager says. “Fell over
him clean as a whistle, an’ shut him in. Not four foot of space, there
wasn’t—yet it scarce bruised him.” Then: “He looked down at the dead
man, lying prone, half naked, all grimed with coal-dust” (“OC,” 2:297).
The men leave the h ouse, and the miner’s wife and m other are left alone
with his body.
At this point, “Odour of Chrysanthemums” veers away from the im-
pressionist poetics it seems on the verge of embracing (of necessity, the
next quotations are long):
“We must lay him out,” the wife said. She put on the k ettle, then
returning knelt at the feet, and began to unfasten the knotted leather
laces. The room was clammy and dim with only one candle, so that
she had to bend her face almost to the floor. At last she got off the
heavy boots and put them away.
“You must help me now,” she whispered to the old woman. To-
gether they stripped the man.
When they arose, saw him lying in the naïve dignity of death, the
woman stood arrested in fear and respect. For a few moments they
remained still, looking down, the old mother whimpering. Eliza-
beth felt countermanded. She saw him, how utterly inviolable he
lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him. She could not ac-
cept it. Stooping, she laid her hand on him, in claim. He was still
warm, for the mine was hot where he had died. His mother had his
face between her hands, and was murmuring incoherently. The old
tears fell in succession as drops from wet leaves; the mother was not
weeping, merely her tears flowed. Elizabeth embraced the body of
her husband, with cheek and lips. She seemed to be listening, in-
quiring, trying to get some connection. But she could not. She was
driven away. He was impregnable.
She rose, went into the kitchen, where she poured warm water
into a bowl, brought soap and flannel and a soft towel.
“I must wash him,” she said.

Then the old m other rose stiffly, and watched Elizabeth as she
carefully washed his face, carefully brushing the big blond mous-
tache from his mouth with the flannel. She was afraid with a bottom-
less fear, so she ministered to him. The old woman, jealous, said:
“Let me wipe him!”—and she kneeled on the other side drying
slowly as Elizabeth washed, her big black bonnet sometimes
brushing the dark head of her daughter-in-law. They worked thus
in silence for a long time. They never forgot it was death, and the
touch of the man’s dead body gave them strange emotions, different
in each of the w omen; a g reat dread possessed them both, the
mother felt that the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the
wife felt the utter desolation of the h uman soul, the child within
her [she is pregnant] was a weight apart from her.
At last it was finished. He was a man of handsome body, and his
face showed no traces of drink. He was blond, full-fleshed, with fine
limbs. But he was dead. (“OC,” 2:299–300)
The story continues with the realization of the miner’s wife that she had
never r eally known him, nor he her. What the story says is,
she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they met
in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they
met nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in
seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he
was not; she had felt familar with him. Whereas he was apart all the
while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt. (“OC,”
2:300–301)
The two w
omen proceed to clothe him again, with difficulty. The story
ends:
At last it was finished. They covered him with a sheet and left him
lying, with his face bound. And she fastened the door of the little
parlour, lest the c hildren should see what was lying there. Then,
with peace sunk heavy on her heart, she went about making tidy the
kitchen. She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate
master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear
and shame. (“OC,” 2:302)
I was led to read “Odour of Chrysanthemums” in the first place because

of Ford’s reference to it in Portraits from Life, on the chance that it might
bear in some way on my impressionist concerns. And of course, I was im-
mediately struck by the introduction of the dead miner’s upward-facing
body, disfigured with coal dust and gazed upon by his w idow and his
mother. But what Lawrence goes on to make of that basic situation is some-
thing e lse entirely. For one thing, the two women engage physically with
the body in the most direct way, with l ittle suggestion of repulsion in their
actions and feelings. And for another, the story’s emphasis shifts from the
sight of the body as such, or indeed, its uncanniness, to the complex emo-
tions of Elizabeth as she realizes that she had never seen him, nor he
her—almost a repudiation of impressionist priorities. Nevertheless, it is
striking that so central an impressionist motif should play a crucial
role, albeit not an impressionist one, in the story that Ford singles out to
illustrate his claim that reading no more than an opening paragraph is
sufficient to judge the quality of the whole. It is striking, too, that Ford
begins by referring to his “eyes falling on words” by various writers, and
then remarks that he “can still see” the sepia-toned handwriting and the
gray-blue notepaper of the letter from a schoolteacher friend of Law-
rence’s that was meant to bring the young genius to Ford’s attention—
Ford’s impressionism, h ere, as always, is not in doubt.
Two further points. First, I cannot help registering a resemblance
between the first two sentences of Lawrence’s story—“The small loco-
motive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston
with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats
of speed, but the colt that it startled from along the gorse, which still flick-
ered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, out-distanced it at a canter.”—and
the first three of Crane’s The Monster—“Little Jim was, for the time, en-
gine Number 36, and he was making the run between Syracuse [one of
Crane’s s / c words] and Rochester. He was fourteen minutes behind time,
and the throttle was wide open. In consequence, when he swung around
the curve at the flower-bed, a wheel of his cart destroyed a peony.” (Law-
rence’s phrase “loud threats of speed” seems pure Crane to me.) Perhaps
this is mere coincidence, but if it is something more, it would represent
another hidden if indirect link with Ford. And is it not the least bit odd
that Lawrence twice uses the sentence, “At last it was finished,” which
recalls—at least to me—“The Upturned Face” ’s “The grave was finished”?
Second, Lawrence’s story deploys a device mentioned in passing in the
Introduction to this book and just noted at work in London’s account of
Martin’s battles with Cheese-Face—the strategic use of the word “thing.”
Said of an inanimate object, “thing” can imply a kind of animacy (“poor
little shallow t hing,” said of the open grave in “The Upturned Face”); but
said of something animate, a person, for example, it can imply the oppo-
site, a kind of diminishing or deadening (as when the miner’s mother
calls Elizabeth “you poor t hing!”). In both cases t here is a hint of the un-
canny, which comes to the fore when the miner’s m other then says, “it’s
a thing, it is indeed!” (at that moment she knows only that her son has
been in an accident). And somewhat later, as the body is brought in on
the stretcher, we read: “The horror of the t hing bristled upon them all.”
I think of this as an impressionist trope precisely b ecause in texts such as
“The Upturned Face” (“poor l ittle shallow thing”) it hovers between the
materiality of the page (and pen, and ink, and written script) and the
agency of the writer, at once acknowledging and displacing attention away
from both. W hether this is how it functions in Lawrence’s story is an open
question.
n
Just how resourceful the upward-facing motif could turn out to be
is suggested by Conrad’s long short story, “The Duel” (1908), set in the
early nineteenth century during and immediately a fter the Napoleonic
wars.15 To summarize the plot as briefly as possible, two young officers
in the French army, both lieutenants at the outset, Gabriel Feraud, a hot-
headed, indeed barely sane Gascon duellist, and Armand D’Hubert, the
story’s protagonist, fight a series of duels with varying results (Feraud is
wounded in the first, D’Hubert in the second, Feraud again in the third).
The origin of the personal combats was Feraud’s sense of outraged honor
simply because D’Hubert had conveyed a message from a superior officer
confining Feraud to his quarters for having earlier that day gravely
wounded or perhaps killed a civilian in a duel with swords. After each

encounter, Feraud might have considered his sense of honor to be satis-
fied, but his desire for vengeance proves insatiable, in addition to which
he had developed an idée fixe to the effect that D’Hubert “does not love
the Emperor” (“D,” 217). Eventually, D’Hubert becomes a general, as does
Feraud. Sometime a fter Waterloo, a wounded D’Hubert recuperates at
his married sister’s estate in Provence, where he becomes engaged to a
much younger w oman, the niece of a returned émigré nobleman. T here
he is discovered again by Feraud, now compulsorily retired and an ob-
ject of suspicion because of his loyalty to Napoleon. Feraud challenges
him to a further duel; D’Hubert is appalled, but agrees to meet his tor-
mentor near a wood on the estate, proposing a simple arrangement: each
man will have two pistols (i.e., two shots), each will enter the wood at
opposite ends, and they will fight to the death. Feraud agrees (he knows
he is a better shot than D’Hubert). At the duel, the two men make their
respective ways towards one another; Feraud fires at a distance and
misses; D’Hubert stands b ehind a tree but cannot see Feraud, then
“something white fluttered in his sight” (“D,” 251), and D’Hubert be-
comes aware that Feraud is coming straight toward him from one tree to
another, but he knows himself to be no marksman, and stays his hand.
The story now reaches its uniquely Conradian denouement. (In fact,
my impulse is to say that Conrad wrote this story precisely in order to
reach this moment, just as in writing Almayer’s Face the aim in view was
what takes place in chapter 11. Once more, lengthy citation is necessary.)
At first, D’Hubert lies on his stomach b ehind the tree; this protects
him, but it is also physically awkward—“to keep his chin raised off
the ground was irksome, and not much use e ither” (“D,” 252). Mean-
while, Feraud flits from tree to tree, coming closer. Then D’Hubert does
something surprising: he lays his pistols down, takes from his pocket
an elegant l ittle leather folding-case containing a small ivory comb,

and fitted with a piece of looking-glass on the outside . . . and then
with the utmost coolness and promptitude turned himself over on
his back. In this new attitude, his head a little raised, holding the
little looking-glass just clear of his tree, he squinted into it with his
left eye, while the right kept a direct watch on the rear of his posi-
tion. Thus was proved Napoleon’s saying, that “for a French soldier,
the word impossible does not exist.” He had the right tree [i.e., the
one b ehind which Feraud was standing] nearly filling the field of
his little mirror. (“D,” 253)
He then glimpses Feraud on the move, and shifts position, albeit without
realizing that now “his feet and a portion of his legs” are in plain sight of
his enemy (“D,” 253). For his part, Feraud is struck by D’Hubert’s clev-
erness in remaining out of sight b ehind his tree, though he has no idea
that D’Hubert is lying on the ground—he has been looking for him at
standing height. But then he catches sight of D’Hubert’s feet and legs,
and staring at them, becomes convinced that he must have killed
D’Hubert with his first, distant shot. The next paragraphs read:
General Feraud gazed at the motionless limbs, the last vestiges of

surprise fading before an unbounded admiration of his own deadly
skill with the pistol.
“Turned up his toes! By the god of war, that was a shot!” he ex-
ulted mentally. “Got it through the head, no doubt, just where I
aimed, staggered behind that tree, rolled over on his back, and
died.”
And he stared! He stared, forgetting to move, almost awed, al-
most sorry. But for nothing in the world would he have had it un-
done. Such a shot!—such a shot! Rolled over on his back and died!
For it was this helpless position, lying on the back, that shouted
its direct evidence at General Feraud! It never occurred to him that
it might have been deliberately assumed by a living man. It was in-
conceivable. It was beyond the range of sane supposition. T here
was no possibility to guess the reason for it. And it must be said,
too, that General D’Hubert’s turned-up feet looked thoroughly
dead. General Feraud expanded his lungs for a stentorian shout to
his seconds but, from what he felt to be an excessive scrupulous-
ness, refrained for a while.
“I will just go and see first whether he breathes yet,” he mumbled
to himself, leaving carelessly the shelter of his tree. This move was
immediately perceived by the resourceful General D’Hubert. He
concluded it to be another shift, but when he lost the boots out of

the field of the mirror he became uneasy. General Feraud had only
stepped a little out of the line, but his adversary could not possibly
have supposed him walking up with perfect unconcern. General
D’Hubert, beginning to wonder at what had become of the other,
was taken unawares so completely that the first warning of danger
consisted in the long, early-morning shadow of his enemy falling
aslant on his outstretched legs. He had not even heard a footfall on
the soft ground between the trees!
It was too much even for his coolness. He jumped up thought-
lessly, leaving the pistols on the ground. The irresistible instinct of
an average man (u nless totally paralyzed by discomfiture) would
have been to stoop for his weapons, exposing himself to the risk of
being shot down in that position. Instinct, of course, is irreflective.
It is its very definition. But it may be an inquiry worth pursuing
whether in reflective mankind the mechanical promptings of in-
stinct are not affected by the customary mode of thought. In his
young days, Armand D’Hubert, the reflective, promising officer,
had emitted the opinion that in warfare one should “never cast back
on the lines of a m istake.” This idea, defended and developed in
many discussions, had settled into one of the stock notions of his
brain, had become a part of his m ental individuality. W
hether it had
gone so inconceivably deep as to affect the dictates of his instinct,
or simply b ecause, as he himself declared afterwards, he was “too
scared to remember the confounded pistols,” the fact is that Gen-
eral D’Hubert never attempted to stoop for them. Instead of g oing
back on his m istake, he seized the rough trunk with both hands, and
swung himself b ehind it with such impetuosity that, g oing right
round in the very flash and report of the pistol-shot, he reappeared
on the other side of the tree face to face with General Feraud. This
last, completely unstrung by such a show of agility on the part of a
dead man, was trembling yet. A very faint mist of smoke hung be-
fore his face which had an extraordinary aspect, as if the lower jaw
had come unhinged. (“D,” 254–256)
Feraud has used his two shots and D’Hubert neither of his; accordingly,
Feraud expects to be shot, but D’Hubert has another idea: by the rules of
single combat, Feraud’s life belongs to him, and he elects not to take it,
but to keep it, as he says, at his disposal for as long as he chooses. Feraud
protests, but D’Hubert overrides him decisively: “ ‘Not one word more,’
he added hastily. ‘I can’t really discuss this question with a man who, as
far as I am concerned, does not exist’ ” (“D,” 258). In effect, then, D’Hubert
succeeds by these means in erasing Feraud from his life, an interpreta-
tion given added point—in effect, made incontrovertible—by a series of
events slightly earlier in the story. After the fall of Napoleon, D’Hubert
goes to Paris, where he learns that Feraud is due to go before a special
commission and is likely to face a firing squad; there is a list of twenty
general officers to be made an example of in this way. D’Hubert at once
feels honor bound to try to save his opponent from this fate, and uses all
his influence to procure an audience with the notorious minister of po-
lice, Joseph Fouché, the duke of Otranto. Finally, Fouché produces the
list itself and says, “Take one of these pens, and run it through the name
yourself. This is the only list in existence. If you are careful to take up
enough ink no one w ill be able to tell which was the name struck out”
(“D,” 229). D’Hubert does so, and Feraud is spared—by an otherwise un-
motivated act of Conradian erasure.
Again, extensive commentary is perhaps not necessary, but several
points are worth underscoring. First, not only does D’Hubert adopt the
position of an upward-facing corpse, but Feraud erroneously takes him
to be exactly such. Second, the sheer oddness of that bodily position
under the circumstances is driven home by the first five sentences, three
in style indirect libre, in the paragraph beginning, “For it was this help-
less position, lying on the back, that shouted its direct evidence at Gen-
eral Feraud!” Note especially the sentence, “There was no possibility to
guess the reason for it”—which on the one hand (in terms of the narra-
tive) captures the extreme unlikelihood of Feraud’s divining D’Hubert’s
basic strategem, but on the other hand (as regards what I have been calling
the “primordiality” of Conrad’s project of erasure) invites being under-
stood in quite different terms. Third, there is the extraordinary detail of
“the long, early-morning shadow of [D’Hubert’s] enemy falling aslant on
his outstretched legs”—a nother example of shadow writing to go with
those already considered, and one that reinforces the notion that
D’Hubert’s outstretched legs and, by implication, his entire body, are
in this instance a figure for the upward-facing page. (What makes this
detail particularly uncanny is the sense it conveys that D’Hubert

somehow felt the shadow falling on his legs.) And fourth, the rumina-
tions on instinct and mechanism recall Karslake’s claim in “A Memo-
randum of Sudden Death” that “the machinery of the mind that would
coin the great Word is automatic,” with the proviso that Conrad wonders
whether there might be an influence on instinct by one’s “customary
mode of thought,” in this instance by D’Hubert’s opinion, defended by
him in his younger days, “that in warfare one should ‘never cast back
on the lines of a mistake.’ ” In terms of the narrative, this has to do with
not stooping to pick up his pistols, it having been a “mistake” to leave
them lying on the ground; but the very choice of words—“never cast
back on the lines of a mistake”—appears governed by a textual or scrip-
tive figure of speech, as if to say, never literally go back and write over or
erase a sentence or a passage that you now see requires correction, but do
so virtually, by what follows, what you do now (with a second pen, so to
speak), in this case, declaring to Feraud in the starkest possible language
that henceforward his life is not his own, indeed, that he has been erased.
(Preparing for this, the first duel ends with D’Hubert slashing Feraud’s
“shortened arm,” following which Feraud passes out and lies “perfectly
still, his face to the sky” [“D,” 181]. A
fter a time, he opens his eyes but
does not move, “[staring] without any expression at the evening sky”
[“D,” 182]. Like a blank page, harbinger of the more radical acts of era-
sure to come. One might even say that something of the ferocity of Fe-
raud’s dueling madness is conveyed by the fact that it takes three such
acts to finally neutralize him.)16
n
Three other upturned faces and / or bodies are worth remarking
by way of bringing this chapter to a close. The first is Mark Tietjens’s
throughout the whole of The Last Post (1928), the final novel in Ford’s
g reat tetralogy Parade’s End.17 Mark, of course, is the older brother of the
series’ protagonist Christopher Tietjens; earlier, Mark had taken the word
of a caddish acquaintance, Ruggles, to the effect that Christopher was cor-
rupt, even living off the profits from women, which was wholly untrue.
For this, Christopher will never forgive him, an attitude of which Mark
thoroughly approves. Mark and his longtime French mistress and now
wife Marie Léonie are living with Christopher and his pregnant mistress
Valentine Wannop (Christopher would like nothing more than to marry
Valentine, but he is still bound to the dreadful Sylvia and does not
believe in divorce) in a cottage in West Sussex as Christopher works to
establish himself as a seller of British antiques (one of his areas of exper-
tise). Mark has had a stroke, though as we are taken into his confidence
through a long and brilliant interior monologue we learn that he under-
stands himself to be refusing to move or speak, perhaps in penance for
having failed Christopher. In any case, he lies propped up in a simple bed
in an outdoor shelter without sides. “He lay staring at the withy b inders
of his thatch shelter,” the first sentence begins (LP, 677); and a bit fur-
ther on,
For a man who never moved, his face was singularly walnut-
coloured; his head, indenting the skim-milk white of the pillows,
should have been a gypsy’s, the dark, silvered hair cut extremely
close, the w
hole face very carefully shaven and completely immo-
bile. The eyes moved, however, with unusual vivacity, all the life of
the man being concentrated in them and their lids. (LP, 677)
Much, indeed most of the narrative to follow is refracted through the acute
consciousness of this man, whose physical circumstances the reader is
never allowed to forget.
n
Then t here is Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), a dystopian
novel set in the f uture, the central character of which is a man named
Graham who falls into a trancelike sleep for 200 years before waking into
a new society in which the institution of compound interest has made him
supremely wealthy.18 The novel begins with an artist named Isbister vis-
iting Cornwall coming across a desperate man who cannot sleep and in-
deed is contemplating suicide to bring his condition to an end. From the
first, emphasis falls on the man’s face; thus we read, “He turned his head
and showed a ghastly face, bloodshot pallid eyes, and bloodless lips” (S,
8). That evening the man falls into a trance; Isbister bends over to look
up into his face and starts violently: “The eyes were void spaces of white.
He looked again and saw that they were open and with the pupils rolled
under the lids” (S, 11). Isbister fears that he is dead and sends for a doctor.
The second chapter is called “The Trance” and takes place twenty
years later; Isbister, his hair gray and his complexion ruddy, is talking
with Warming, a London solicitor next of kin to Graham, the man who
had fallen into the trance. The scene takes place in a room in a h ouse in
London:
It was a yellow figure lying lax upon a water-bed and clad in a flowing
shirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean limbs
and lank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This glass
seemed to mark off the sleeper from the reality of life about him, he
was a t hing apart, a strange, isolated abnormality. The two men
stood close to the glass, peering in.
“The t hing gave me a shock,” said Isbister. “I feel a queer sort of
surprise even now when I think of his white eyes. They w ere white,
you know, rolled up. Coming h ere again brings it all back to me.”
“Have you never seen him since that time?” asked Warming.
“Often wanted to come,” said Isbister; “but business nowadays
is too serious a thing for much holiday keeping. I’ve been in Amer
ica most of the time.”
“If I remember rightly,” said Warming, “you w ere an artist?”
“Was. And then I became a married man. I saw it was up with
black and white, very soon—at least for a mediocre man and I
jumped on to process. Those posters on the cliffs at Dover are by
my people.”
“Good posters,” admitted the solicitor, “though I was sorry to
see them there.”
“Last as long as the cliffs, if necessary,” exclaimed Isbister with
satisfaction. “The world changes.” (S, 13–14)
By now a scene such as this will be familiar to the reader, down to the
repetition of the word “thing.” Nor will the reader be surprised to learn
that a page or so later, Graham’s body is said by Isbister to be “not dead
a bit, and yet not alive” (S, 15). What might be noted, though, is the refer-
ence to Isbister having given up black and white and taken up “process,”
the making of colored posters that now partly cover the cliffs of Dover—a
reference to the rise of advertising posters. Indeed, further on, after he
has awakened and begun to explore the transformed London in which
he has found himself, Graham becomes aware of the proliferation of large
public inscriptions (S, 35, 172), huge advertisement dioramas proclaiming
“the most remarkable commodities” (S, 175), and g reat fleets of advertise-
ment balloons and kites (S, 116), t hese last to be viewed from aeroplanes,
as Wells presciently imagines them. One group of inscriptions, all touting
Christianity in grossly vulgar terms, leads Graham to say, “But this is ap-
palling! . . . Surely the essence of religion is reverence.” His companion,
Asano, explains: “Oh that! Does it shock you? I suppose it would, of
course. I had forgotten. Nowadays the competition for attention so keen,
and p eople simply h aven’t the leisure to attend to their souls, you know,
as they used to do” (S, 172; emphasis in original). (Another feature of the
new London is the disappearance of books.) Wells’s attitude toward ad-
vertising is far from simple; the key text is doubtless Tono-Bungay (1909),
with its explicit denunciation of advertising as a means of attributing value
to worthless commodities.19 But Tono-Bungay also illustrates three ideas
for posters clearly based on the sorts of “picshuas” mentioned in Chapter 2
(TB, 150–152; Figures 6, 7, and 8), examples of which are reproduced in
Experiment in Autobiography, where Wells also declares his disdain for
what he calls “the aesthetic valuation of literature” in favor of a commit-
ment to the values of journalism.20 In any case, the “competition for at-
tention” Asano refers to is clearly meant by Wells to be understood as
marking the economic and literary culture of his own time. As one of the
two epigraphs to this book goes to show, Henry James would agree.
Much more might usefully be said about When the Sleeper Wakes in
relation to literary impressionism, but I will settle for a few remarks about
two brief excerpts. At a crucial moment, a young w oman, Helen Wotton,
who goes on to play a decisive role in Graham’s political awakening, asks
him:
“Have you not heard our proverb, ‘When the Sleeper wakes?’
While you lay insensible and motionless there—thousands came.
Figs. 6–8. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay: A Novel (New York: Duffield & Company,
1908), sketches for advertisement posters for Tono-Bungay reproduced in the
novel. In this order: “Greek scene” with Discobolus; image with man in small
stovepipe hat; “The Happy Phagocyte.”
154
Thousands. E very first of the month you lay in state with a white
robe upon you and the people filed by you. When I was a little girl
I saw you like that, with your face white and calm.”
She turned her face from him and looked steadfastly at the painted
wall before her. Her voice fell. “When I was a little girl I used to look
at your face . . . it seemed to me fixed and waiting, like the patience
of God.”
“That is what we thought of you,” she said. “that is how you
seemed to us.”
She turned shining eyes to him, her voice was clear and strong.
“In the city, in the earth, a myriad myriad men and women are
waiting to see what you w ill do, full of strange incredible expecta-
tions.” (S, 156–157)
In an import ant sense, then, the dramatic developments that follow as

Graham, inspired by Helen, seeks to overthrow an unjust and exploitative
set of social arrangements, stem from the earlier experience of those
“myriad myriads” gazing down at the Sleeper’s upturned face.
The second excerpt has nothing to do with faces but is anyway irre-
sistible; it concerns a scene that takes place earlier, shortly after Graham
has escaped from his first official minders. Accompanied by a guide,
Graham hastens through a snowstorm past a maze of vast windmills
shrilling mechanically; suddenly, lights atop vast masts go on as far as
the eye can penetrate; the two men dart into the cover of a shadow and
stare out:
The scene upon which Graham looked was very wild and strange.
The snow had now almost ceased; only a belated flake passed now
and then across the picture. But the broad stretch of level before
them was a ghastly white, broken only by gigantic masses and
moving shapes and lengthy strips of impenetrable darkness, vast un-
gainly Titans of shadow. All about them, huge metallic structures,
iron girders, inhumanly vast as it seemed to him, interlaced, and the
edges of wind-wheels, scarcely moving in the lull, passed in g reat
shining curves steeper and steeper up into a luminous haze. Wher-
ever the snow-spangled light struck down, beams and girders, and
incessant bands r unning with a halting, indomitable resolution,

passed upward and downward into the black. And with all that
mighty activity, with an omnipresent sense of motive and design,
this snow-clad desolation of mechanism seemed void of all human
presence save themselves, seemed as trackless and deserted and
unfrequented by men as some inaccessible Alpine snowfield. (S,
64–65)
The scene is obviously a nightmare vision of the impressionist page, h ere

dazzling white but traversed by gigantic impenetrable shadows (Isbister
may have given up “black and white” but clearly Wells has not)—a vision
not so much of writing as of printing run amok, the production of some-
thing like text or perhaps merely images, suggestive of a certain intelli-
gence but nevertheless utterly trackless and alien.
n
Finally, something might be said about a story by Henry James, argu-
ably his greatest, which I do not consider an impressionist text but which
nevertheless is illuminated at least a little by the issues we have been
considering—“The Beast in the Jungle” (1903).21 The basic narrative: after
a lapse of some ten years, John Marcher meets May Bartram again at a
British country house; he barely recalls her (their first meeting had been in
Naples), but she remembers not just Marcher the man but also a fact about
himself that he confided in her on that first occasion. As she tells him:
You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest t hing
within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange,
possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or l ater to happen
to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and conviction
of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you. (“BJ,” 503)
Marcher confesses that the conviction is still with him, and before their
meeting is over she agrees to watch with him for the thing that will or will
not happen. This leads to their seeing each other frequently, and the
reader is given to understand that May Bartram would be prepared to
marry him (I am putting this crudely), while for Marcher the very basis
of their relationship—waiting for whatever lay in wait for him, “like a

crouching Beast in the Jungle,” seemed to him to rule marriage out (“a
man of feeling d idn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-
hunt” [“BJ,” 508–509])—at least, so he tells himself. They grow older
together, u ntil one day, at the end of a long intense conversation about the
situation, it emerges that May feels she knows what is to happen, though
as she says to him, “You’ll never find out” (“BJ,” 515).
Eventually, May falls ill. By this time it has become amply clear that
Marcher’s concern is exclusively for himself (again, I am being crude, but
the denouement will spell this out); long conversations between the two
subtly but devastatingly reveal the limitations of his self-understanding,
not to say the dimensions of his egoism. In the course of another conver-
sation, May, by now gravely ill, indicates to him that t here is still time
for something else to happen. “The door i sn’t shut. The door’s open,” she
says, “It’s never too late.” They stand facing each other; gazing at her
“wasted face” he sees that she has something more to give him—something
that “glittered almost as with the white lustre of silver, in her expression”
(“BJ,” 526). The treatment of this protracted moment is James at his finest;
the meaning of the moment (left unstated, but unmistakable) is that it is
still open for Marcher to declare his love for her, and the further, magical
implication is that if he w ere to do that she might yet be saved.
Characteristically, he stands t here waiting for some further revelation,
which fails to arrive.
Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first

in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to
a slow, fine shudder, and though he remained staring—though he
stared, in fact, but the harder—she turned off and regained her
chair. It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him
thinking only of that.
“What then has happened?” he asks her as her maid prepares to help her
from the room. “ ‘What was to,” is the answer (“BJ,” 527; emphasis in
original).
One last conversation takes place some time later—it is by now clear
that May w ill shortly die—in the course of which she explains to him that
the t hing he has been dreading has in fact taken place. He understands
nothing, of course. May dies, and still nothing is clear to him. He decides
to go on a long journey, but before leaving, visits May’s grave. “He stood
for an hour,” we read,
powerless to turn away and yet powerless to penetrate the darkness

of death; fixing with his eyes her inscribed name and date, beating
his forehead against the fact of the secret they kept, drawing his
breath, while he waited as if, in pity of him, some sense would rise
from the stones. He kneeled on the stones, however, in vain; they
kept what they concealed; and if the face of the tomb did become a
face for him it was b ecause her two names were like a pair of eyes
that didn’t know him. He gave them a last long look, but no palest
light broke. (“BJ,” 535)
All this is arresting, to say the least, but t here is more to come. Marcher
travels for a year, but with a sense of ordinariness—of himself, of every
thing he saw. The day following his return he revisits May’s grave, and
resolves to do so regularly. This he does, and with a growing sense that
these few square feet of earth are where “he could still most live,” a spot
“he could scan like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his
friend, and there w
ere the facts of the past, t here the truth of his life, t here
the backward reaches in which he could lose himself ” (“BJ,” 537; em-
phasis in original).
This goes on for months, then something untoward happens. It is au-
tumn, and Marcher encounters another man visiting a nearby grave, a man
whose face, “one grey afternoon when the leaves were thick, looked into
Marcher’s own, at the cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a blade”
(“BJ,” 538). The expression, that is, is one of rawest grief, and there is the
further implication that the man is offended by Marcher’s very different
relation to the scene—that, as James puts it,
the image of scarred passion presented to [Marcher] was conscious

too—of something that profaned the air. . . . The stranger passed,
but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder
in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not to be
healed. What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed
and yet live?
Something—a nd this reached him with a pang—t hat he, John
Marcher, hadn’t; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher’s
arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what pas-
sion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where
had been his deep ravage? . . . He gazed, he drew breath, in pain;
he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in sharper
incision than ever the open page of his story. The name on the table
smote him as the passage of his neighbour had done, and what it
said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed. . . .
The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance—he
had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time,
the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened. . . . This
the companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and
she had then offered him the chance to baffle his doom. One’s
doom, however, was never baffled, and on the day she told him her
own had come down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the es-
cape she offered him. (“BJ,” 539–540; emphasis in original)
The final paragraph is justly famous:
The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have
lived. She had lived—who could say now with what passion?—since
she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her
(ah, how hugely it glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and
the light of her use. Her spoken words came back to him—the chain
stretched and stretched. The beast had lurked indeed, and the beast,
at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold
April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even
then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him
and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it
had sprung as she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the
time he left her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified his fear
and achieved his fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he
was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips as he remembered she
had prayed he mightn’t know. This horror of waking—this was

knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in
his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, he tried to
fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the
pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of
life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, hor-
ribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had
been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the
lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the
air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to s ettle him. His
eyes darkened—it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hal-
lucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, on his face, on the tomb.
(“BJ,” 540–541; emphasis in original)
Like “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” “The Beast in the Jungle” is not

an impressionist text; that is, it is not engaged in one or another version
of the sort of engagement with the blank page and the act of inscription
that I have claimed to find in the works of Crane, Conrad, Hudson, Norris,
and others. (More broadly: in my construal of the term, James was not an
impressionist, though of course in other respects it makes perfect sense
to include him under such a rubric.) But more than Lawrence’s story, it
bespeaks a certain adjacency to impressionism—does it not?—that James
expressly characterizes May’s tomb with its two names becoming a pair
of eyes as composing a face, that the passages in question conspicuously
juxtapose the words “face” and “fate” (also “fall” and “fail”), that March-
er’s climactic revelation in the graveyard takes place when he encounters
the “scarred passion” (a phrase worthy of Crane) on another man’s face,
that the grave offers him “in sharper incision than ever the open page of
his story,” that May’s name on the t able smites him “full in the face” with
the knowledge that she is what he had missed, and that when the lurking
Beast, huge and hideous, finally springs to claim him, he flings himself,
“on his face, on the tomb.”22
Chapter Five
“A Blankness to Run At and Dash

Your Head Against”
N
T hi s cha pt e r will be given over to considering a single novel,

J oseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), one of the most admired
and intensely studied works in his entire corpus. I want to approach it
by taking seriously what Conrad himself tells us about its relation to
the protracted and tortuous labor of writing that went into the compo-
sition of its immediate predecessor, the stupendous Nostromo (1904).1 I
have in mind Conrad’s author’s note of 1920, in which he informs us
that the origin of The Secret Agent “may be traced to a period of mental
and emotional reaction.”2 “The inception of The Secret Agent,” he
explains,
followed immediately on a two years’ period of intense absorption

in the task of writing [Nostromo; also The Mirror of the Sea]. . . . It
was a period . . . in which my sense of the truth of things was at-
tended by a very tense imaginative and emotional readiness [note
that he stresses not the act of writing as such, but rather a state of
something like sustained attention] which, all genuine and faithful
to facts as it was, yet made me feel (the task once done) as if I were
left b ehind, aimless amongst mere husks of sensations and lost in a
world of other, of inferior, values. (SA, 3)
161
Conrad continues: “I d on’t know whether I r eally felt that I wanted a

change, change in my imagination, in my vision and in my mental atti-
tude. I rather think that a change in the fundamental mood had already
stolen over me unawares” (SA, 4). One expression of that change of mood
was the shift of canvas from the imaginary South American republic of
Costaguana, with its spectacular settings and highly differentiated dra-
matis personae, to the relentlessly dingy and claustrophobic London of
the hapless secret agent (actually a triple agent) Adolph Verloc and his wife
Winnie, whose twin consciousnesses, each as limited as the other, govern
the narrative perspective of much of the book. Another, equally impor
tant expression of the change of mood to which Conrad alluded in 1920
was the adoption of an unremittingly “ironic method” or “treatment”—a
mode of writing designed to secure the author’s “detachment” (his term
in the author’s note) from the characters, setting, and narrative—and ul-
timately, I shall suggest, from the blank page itself.3 The Secret Agent is
the unique instance in Conrad’s oeuvre of the application of such a
method, and in fact, that novel quickly proved to be easier for him to write
than Nostromo had been, which I take to have been the essential point of
adopting an “ironic” approach in the first place.4 What must be stressed,
however, is that much more was at stake in what Conrad meant by “irony”
and “detachment” than considerations of literary style, as the latter are
usually understood.
What I mean is this. Of all Conrad’s novels and stories, The Secret Agent
goes farthest toward imagining the workings of a strictly materialist uni-
verse, in the face of which the novelist’s traditional tools (also traditional
tasks) of imaginative projection and sympathetic evocation are not only
useless, but inappropriate. And my further claim is that that strict mate-
rialism in the present context must be understood as oriented “before all”
(to adapt Conrad’s famous credo) 5 to the blank sheet of paper understood
or imagined or “experienced” in this one case (this lone text in Conrad’s
entire corpus) as a strictly material entity, a mere blank surface, one that
would rebut imaginative projection and sympathetic evocation, indeed,
one that bore no “natural” or privileged relation to writing in any form
(what this means w ill become clearer as we proceed). It is as if the project
of composing The Secret Agent involved an attempt to maintain and pre-
serve that resistant blankness, to keep it, and the materialism it epito-
“A Blankness to Run At and Dash Your Head Against” 163
mized, the relentless focus of the narrative. So, for example, individual
characters are continually compared to dummies or automata, as if to sug-
gest that insofar as they may seem to have “inner” lives at all, those lives
are entirely determined either by external factors (the Assistant Commis-
sioner wants above all not to make his highborn wife unhappy by al-
lowing Michaelis, the darling of her aristocratic patroness, to be arrested)
or by internal drives, call them instincts, which are as good as mechanical
in their mode of operation (Winnie is, in effect, hardwired to feel “mater-
nally” protective of her mentally defective younger brother Stevie). (The
Professor’s hatred of society is another case in point.) Verloc is shown to
have been impelled in his failed attempt to blow up the Greenwich Obser-
vatory (in the course of which Stevie, whom Verloc had entrusted with the
bomb, is blown to bits when it accidentally goes off ) by an interview with
Mr. Vladimir, an official at the (unnamed) Russian embassy, whose large,
white, cleanly shaven face—a significant motif from an impressionist point
of view—haunts Verloc, which is to say, “materially” dominates his con-
sciousness (if we may call it that), throughout the rest of the novel.6 Later,
after the failed attempt on the observatory, Verloc is likened to “an au-
tomaton whose face had been painted red” (SA, 149). The next sentence,
a tour de force of Conrad’s “ironic” method, reads: “And this resemblance
to a mechanical figure went so far that he had an automaton’s absurd air
of being aware of the machinery inside him” (SA, 149). I call it a tour de
force b ecause although from the perspective of the novel Verloc is an
automaton, he is in fact not aware of the machinery inside him—or, fa-
tally for him, inside his wife (he never suspects that Winnie married him
solely b ecause he was prepared to care for Stevie, or that now that Stevie
is dead b ecause of him, she w ill kill him). Still later, Verloc, confronted
in his Soho shop by Inspector Heat with the discovery of his guilt, re-
sponds to Heat’s remark that he must have been mad with the words, “I
have been mad for a month or more, but I am not mad now. It’s all over.
It shall all come out of my head, and hang the consequences.” The pas-
sage continues: “There was a silence, and then Private Citizen Heat
murmured: ‘What’s coming out?’ ‘Everyt hing,’ exclaimed the voice of
Mr Verloc, and then sank very low” (SA, 158)—phrasing that implies
what is now to come out of Verloc’s head (the revelation of his being the
tool at once of the Russians and the British) is itself material. In a similar
vein, but at greater length, we are told of Winnie after she has learned that
her husband was responsible for the death of her adored Stevie:
Mrs Verloc’s m ental condition had the merit of simplicity; but it was
not sound. It was governed too much by a fixed idea. E very nook
and cranny of her brain was filled with the thought that this man,
with whom she had lived without distaste for seven years, had taken
the “poor boy” away from her in order to kill him—the man to whom
she had grown accustomed in body and mind; the man whom she
had trusted, took the boy away to kill him! In its form, in its sub-
stance, in its effect, which was universal, altering even the aspect of
inanimate things, it was a thought to sit still and marvel at for ever
and ever. Mrs Verloc sat still. And across that thought (not across
the kitchen) the form of Mr Verloc went to and fro, familiarly in hat
and overcoat, stamping with his boots upon her brain. He was prob
ably talking too; but Mrs Verloc’s thought for the most part cov-
ered the voice. (SA, 188)
ere, too, the statement that every nook and cranny of her brain is filled
H
with the thought of what Verloc did to Stevie implies that the thought is
material, an implication that is then confirmed by the image of the form
of Mr. Verloc g oing to and fro across that thought and stamping with his
boots upon her brain, as if what was taking place within Winnie’s mind
were far more physically immediate to her than the ostensibly primary
reality of her husband going to and fro across the kitchen (and “probably”
talking—but the thought “covers” his voice, again, as if the thought were
something material).7
More broadly, the protagonist of The Secret Agent is neither Verloc nor
Winnie, but rather what the novel calls “inorganic nature, . . . matter that
never dies” (SA, 17)—presumably because it was never alive. Indeed, the
novel is at pains to suggest that life itself is nothing more than a partic
ular state of m atter, or to put this slightly differently, that inanimate m
atter
is all t here is. (Hence the irony of saying in the above passage that the ef-
fect of Winnie’s thought is to alter “even the aspect of inanimate t hings.”)
One figure for inanimateness in the novel is the fatness of several of the
characters, notably Verloc himself (early on, he is described as “a soft kind
of rock” [SA, 17]) and the grotesquely obese Michaelis (whose elbow is
described as “presenting no appearance of a joint, but more like a bend
in a dummy’s limb” [SA, 37]). Sir Ethelred, too, is said to be “vast in bulk
and stature” (SA, 105). In fact, a further relation to rocks is implied in the
various references to “seven years hard” (SA, 74)—short for “seven years
hard labor,” a prison sentence typically spent breaking stones. The eli-
sion of the word “labor” suggests that the years themselves are imagined
as rocklike. Another, more elaborate materialist figure occurs in the scene
in which Winnie’s mother removes herself from the Verloc household to
charity housing. T here we are told, first, that “her big cheeks glowed with
an orange hue u nder a black and mauve bonnet” (SA, 123), which seems
straightforward enough. But we are then informed that her complexion
“had become yellow by the effect of age and from a natural predisposi-
tion to biliousness,” with the result that “under the influence of a blush
[it] would take on an orange tint” (SA, 123)—in other words, her com-
plexion changes according to the laws of the additive mixing of colors
(yellow plus red produces orange), a material operation if t here ever was
one. Just a few pages earlier, the Assistant Commissioner is struck by the
way in which all the habitués of an Italian restaurant (ironically described
as “a peculiarly British institution”) “had lost in the frequentation of
fraudulent [i.e., not really Italian] cookery all their national and personal
characteristics,” the implication being that regularly filling themselves
with “denationalized” dishes has had a matching effect on their very iden-
tities (SA, 115).8 And in Verloc’s final (non-)confrontation with Winnie,
he becomes so outraged thinking of Vladimir’s treatment of him that he
“pour[s] three glasses of water down his throat to quench the fires of his
indignation” (SA, 181), as if t hose fires were literal, not figurative.
But by far the most vivid and extreme evocation of the deathlessness
of the inorganic is the scene at the hospital in which Chief Inspector Heat
looks over Stevie’s disintegrated remains, which the narrative begins by
comparing to “an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal feast” (SA,
70). As Heat stands his ground before the heaped hospital t able, a local
constable says, “He’s all there. Every bit of him. It was a job” (SA, 70).
Heat notices that “a sprinkling of small gravel, tiny brown bits of bark,
and particles of splintered wood as fine as n eedles” are intermixed with
the bodily remains (suggesting that there is no fundamental difference
between the two) and remarks to the constable, “You used a shovel.”
“ ‘Had to in one place,’ said the stolid constable. ‘I sent a keeper to fetch
a spade. When he heard me scraping the ground with it he leaned his
forehead against a tree, and was sick as a dog’ ” (SA, 71). And com-
pounding the effect of nausea, as if to pass it on to the reader (a materi-
alist effect on the plane of reader response), the narrative goes on to
inform us that “the Chief Inspector went on peering at the t able with
a calm face and the slightly anxious attention of an indigent customer
bending over what may be called the by-products of a butcher’s shop
with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner” (SA, 71). Finally, the
constable bursts out again: “Well, here he is—all of him I could see. Fair.
Slight—slight enough. Look at that foot there. I picked up the legs first,
one after another. He was that scattered you d idn’t know where to begin”
(SA, 72). “At any rate,” Marlow says to Jim near the end of the great letter-
writing scene in Lord Jim, “I am able to help what I can see of you. I d on’t
pretend to do more.” But what can be seen of Stevie is beyond help, and
9
the point of the scene in the hospital is to compel the acknowledgment

that the remains on the table, which have almost nothing recognizably
human about them, are the truth about h uman beings.
In a somewhat different register, the triumph of materialism in the form
of mechanism or automatism (or rather, a strictly mechanical form of au-
tomatism), which is to say, of an absolute causal determinism, comes to a
head in the remarkable scene, comprising all of chapter 4, in the anarchist
tavern, and in particular in the superb invention of “an upright semi-grand
piano near the door, flanked by two palms in pots, [executing] suddenly
all by itself a valse tune with aggressive virtuosity” (SA, 52)—and then,
just as abruptly, falling silent. (It erupts again several pages later,
“clang[ing] through a mazurka with brazen impetuosity, as though a
vulgar and impudent ghost were showing off ” [SA, 56].) The effect is of
an act of pure volition (an acte gratuit, Conrad’s admirer André Gide might
have said) on the part of the piano, but of course the fact that the latter is
a mechanical device par excellence has the further effect of subsuming
all suggestion of volition u nder the sign of an unremitting determinism.
Equally significant and explicit is the Professor’s ambition, expressed in
the same scene, to make a perfect detonator. As that dedicated maker of
terrorist bombs explains to Ossipon (another anarchist): “The worst is
that the manner of exploding is always the weak point with us. I am trying
to invent a detonator that would adjust itself to all conditions of action,
and even to unexpected changes of conditions. A variable and yet per-
fectly precise mechanism. A r eally intelligent detonator” (SA, 56). Such
a detonator would, in effect, have f ree w ill as part of its mechanism (it
would decide for itself under precisely what circumstances to set off the
explosive material), which is the impression conveyed by the seemingly
autonomous player piano, whose “human” qualities Conrad “ironically”
underscores in the last sentence in which it is described in chapter 4: “The
lonely piano, without as much as a music stool to help it, struck a few
chords courageously, and beginning a selection of national airs, played
[Ossipon] out at last to the tune of ‘Blue Bells of Scotland” (SA, 64–65).
Significantly, the chapter comes to an end with a paragraph evoking the
world just outside the tavern, and in a certain sense, outside the novel, in
which a relentless griminess figures materiality, and soiled newspapers
and filthy posters figure a material or, better, a materialist writing as well
(SA, 65; more on this below).
It is in this context that we can begin to appreciate the force of The Se-
cret Agent’s leitmotif, Winnie Verloc’s “tragic suspicion that ‘life doesn’t
stand much looking into.’ ” The words in quotation marks are from the
author’s note (SA, 7), but starting near the beginning of chapter 8 the novel
repeatedly makes the same point. Winnie’s “philosophy consisted in not
taking notice of the inside of facts” (SA, 120); she “put her trust in face-
values” (SA, 133); she was “disinclined to look u nder the surface of t hings”
(SA, 141); in short, “she felt profoundly that t hings do not stand much
looking into” (SA, 136), a virtual oxymoron that is still another triumph
of Conrad’s “ironic” method. I read t hese formulations in the light of The
Secret Agent’s materialist weltanschauung, which is to say that I take Win-
nie’s tragic suspicion as an altogether fitting gloss on the universe of the
novel, Stevie’s exploded remains being a stark revelation of what the “in-
side of facts” amounts to. In particular, I take that suspicion as a response
to the insistence throughout the text on an ontology of blank and unread-
able (unreadable b ecause essentially blank) surfaces, an ontology that
receives its most explicit and protracted development in chapter 11, in the
final, fatal encounter between Verloc and Winnie that F. R. Leavis called
“one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction.”10 The
chapter is far too densely pertinent to my argument for me to do full jus-

tice to it here, but for example, it begins with Verloc prepared at last to
face Winnie’s grief but with Winnie hiding her face in her hands (SA,
175–177). (We are also told that after the rush of events, “Mr Verloc felt
terribly empty physically”—no comment necessary—a nd helped him-
self to beef and bread, which he cut with a knife [SA, 176]. The knife w ill
be important shortly.) After a short struggle (which is said to have “the
appearance of a struggle for the possession of a chair” [SA, 178]), Winnie
flees from the shop to the kitchen, where Verloc finds her seated at the
table with her head lying on her arms (SA, 179). In this position, her back
is turned toward him, though as he begins to speak of Vladimir, she sits
up—with her back turned to him still. Elsewhere in the novel, backs func-
tion as blank surfaces of the sort I have just indicated,11 but chapter 11 takes
that device to a new extreme. “Mr Verloc watched at her back,” we are
told, “as if he could read there the effect of his words” (SA, 180)—but of
course, he can do nothing of the sort. Alternatively, we might say that her
impassive, unrevealing back perfectly expresses the absence of all such ef-
fect up to this point; the ambiguity would be still another small triumph of
Conrad’s “ironic” mode. In any case, Verloc goes on to try to convey to
Winnie the impact of Vladimir’s treatment of him, which has the inci-
dental result of driving “Stevie’s fate clear out of [his] mind” (SA, 181):
For that reason [Conrad writes], when he looked up, he was star-
tled by the inappropriate character of his wife’s stare. It was not a
wild stare, and it was not inattentive, but its attention was peculiar
and not satisfactory, inasmuch that it seemed concentrated upon
some point beyond Mr Verloc’s person. The impression was so
strong that Mr Verloc glanced over his shoulder. There was nothing
behind him: t here was just the whitewashed wall. The excellent
husband of Winnie Verloc saw no writing on the wall. (SA, 181)
Verloc grotesquely suggests that what she wants is “a good cry.” But the
circumstances of her brother’s death
dried her tears at their very source. It was the effect of a white-hot
iron drawn across her eyes; at the same time her heart, hardened
and chilled into a lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder,
set her features into a frozen, contemplative immobility addressed
to a whitewashed wall with no writing on it. (SA, 182)
A page or so l ater, the situation remains unchanged:
Mrs Verloc gazed at the whitewashed wall. A blank wall—perfectly

blank. A blankness to run at and dash your head against. Mrs Verloc
remained immovably seated. She kept still as the population of half
the globe would keep still in astonishment and despair, w
ere the sun
suddenly put out in the summer sky by the perfidy of a trusted prov-
idence. (SA, 184–185)
The blankness of the whitewashed wall, reflected (if that is the word)
by Winnie’s inexpressive gaze, is the novel’s culminating figure for a rad-
ically material version of Conradian erasure, a figure given added force
by the suggestion of something like “blackening” in the notion of the ex-
tinction of the sun. (There is also the white-hot iron drawn across her
eyes. Almost none of Conrad’s figures of speech are without some ulti-
mate impressionist rationale.) And in fact, the chapter goes on to narrate
something very like a metaphorical or allegorical act of writing, in which
Verloc assumes the position of the upturned page and Winnie is cast as
the determined author. The triggering events are again described in
mechanistic terms: Verloc speaks of lying low abroad, whereupon “this
last word, falling into Mrs Verloc’s ear, produced a definite impression.
This man was talking of g oing abroad. The impression was completely
disconnected, and such is the force of m ental habit that Mrs Verloc at
once and automatically asked herself: ‘And what of Stevie?’ ” Stevie, she
at last realizes, is dead, or rather she realizes that her tie to Verloc is ir-
revocably broken: “She was a free woman” (SA, 189). She goes to her
bedroom, dresses as if to go out, “down to the tying of a black veil over
her face” (SA, 191). Verloc, frustrated by her silence and impenetrability
(“One c an’t tell whether one is talking to a dummy or to a live w
oman”),
tears the veil off, “unmasking a still, unreadable face, against which his
nervous exasperation was shattered like a glass bubble flung against a
rock” (SA, 193).
Finally, an exhausted Verloc—“He was tired. A man isn’t made of

stone”—lies down on a sofa, “wallow[ing] on his back” (SA, 195). From
that position, he growls that he wishes he had never seen Greenwich Park
or anything belonging to it, whereupon t here follows:
The veiled sound filled the small room with its moderate volume,
well adapted to the modest nature of the wish. The waves of air of
the proper length, propagated in accordance with correct mathe-
matical formulas, flowed around all the inanimate things in the
room, lapped against Mrs Verloc’s head as if it had been a head of
stone. [As if it had been a head of stone? The novel’s rock and stone
imagery, one of its materialist tropes, is nowhere thicker than in
these pages.] And incredible as it may appear, the eyes of Mrs
Verloc seemed to grow still larger. The audible wish of Mr Ver-
loc’s overflowing heart flowed into an empty place in his wife’s
memory. Greenwich Park. A park! That’s where the boy was killed.
A park—smashed branches, torn leaves, gravel, bits of brotherly
flesh and bone, all spouting up together in the manner of a fire-
work. She remembered what she had heard, and she remembered
it pictorially. (SA, 195–196)
nder the impact of that rush of terrible mental pictures, “[Winnie’s]

U
wits, no longer disconnected, w ere working under the control of her
will” (SA, 196), though of course, the entire logic of the novel undercuts
the possibility that her will is truly free (despite the fact that with Stevie
dead, she now understands herself to be a free woman for the first time
since her marriage [SA, 189]). Verloc, altogether unaware of what has
been g oing on inside his wife, calls her name in a way characteristic of
his initiating the “marital” relation of sex; seemingly docile, she answers
“Yes”; and when Verloc summons her to him she comes, but on the way,
her right hand “skimmed slightly the end of the t able, and when she had
passed on towards the sofa the carving knife had vanished without the
slightest sound from the side of the dish” (SA, 196–197). With e very step,
we are told, her face more closely resembles that of her brother, which on
the one hand may seem consistent with their relationship, but on the
other, perhaps suggests a blurring of identity under the pressure of the
pictorial memory of Stevie (and indeed, her face w ill lose that resem-
blance to Stevie’s following Verloc’s murder). “But Mr Verloc did not see
that,” the decisive passage reads.
He was lying on his back and staring upwards. [That is, he assumes
the “primordial” literary impressionist position, g oing back to
Crane.] He saw partly on the ceiling and partly on the wall the
moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a carving
knife. It flickered up and down. Its movements w ere leisurely. They
were leisurely enough for Mr Verloc to recognise the limb and the
weapon. . . . But they were not leisurely enough to allow Mr Verloc
the time to move either hand or foot. The knife was already planted
in his breast. (SA, 197)12
(The shadow is imagined as a quasi-material entity, barely removed from

Winnie’s actual arm and hand; just as the t riple “leisurely” can be read
as indicating a mechanical movement, not one expressing personal feelings
of a violent kind.) Verloc dies muttering “Don’t” (SA, 197), which happens
to be what Stevie earlier said to a hackney driver whipping an infirm
h orse (SA, 121), a repetition implying a resemblance between Verloc and
Stevie, not at all something their relationship would lead one to expect—
as if the material image of Stevie passed from Winnie into Verloc as she
stabbed him to death.
The chapter ends by asserting the affinity between the dead Verloc
and the live but silent and immobile Winnie (still another touch undercut-
ting the very idea of personal identity, one of the novel’s obsessions)13 and
then by drawing Winnie’s attention to a loud ticking, which at first she
takes for the sound of a clock before realizing that it is made by the fall of
drops of blood from her husband’s body (SA, 198–199). (Throughout The
Secret Agent clocks signify a materialist, even atomistic conception of time,
as opposed to a subjective conception à la Conrad’s contemporaries Proust
and Bergson. The association between the ticking of a clock and the fall of
Verloc’s blood is therefore one more index of the novel’s thoroughgoing
materialism.) At that point, Winnie bolts to the door, leaving b ehind her in
the middle of the floor Verloc’s hat “rock[ing] slightly on its crown in the
wind of her flight” (SA, 199)—a final, haunting image of the end result of
the causal chains sinewing the novel as a whole. Verloc’s corpse, it goes
without saying, is another such end result, and the closing focus on his
barely moving hat makes it seem more alive than he, which in a sense it is.
Two more chapters remain, but I shall let them go mostly uncommented
on here.14 What I hope has emerged from my discussion of chapter 11,
however, is, first, a sense of the extraordinary consistency of the novel’s
materialist ontology; and second, a feeling for the climactic importance
of a metaphorics of blankness, a blankness that although visible, brings
seeing to its limit, that frustrates reading (or reading into), that defeats
identification, projection, merger—in short, imaginative expansion of any
sort—that might well be described as a blankness to run at and dash your
head against. (This is the literal truth b ehind Conrad’s seemingly self-
deprecating characterization of the novel to John Galsworthy: “The whole
thing is superficial and is but a tale.”)15 It is as though in the aftermath of
Conrad’s prodigious, all but soul-consuming labors on Nostromo, in
which he tried continually to draw the materials for his narrative out of
an engagement with the blank page (almost as if the latter w ere a recalci-
trant crystal ball), a blank page to which the narrative also continually
had to find a way to return, in both cases without for a moment recog-
nizing the page as such, such a sheerly material blankness emerges in The
Secret Agent as a positive value for the simple reason that it is the antith-
esis of blankness understood as a field of boundless imaginative possi-
bility, a field within which (adapting a famous early letter from Conrad to
his aunt Marguerite Poradowska) “vistas extend out of sight, great spaces
fill with vague forms.” Such vistas, of course, are thrilling and produc-
tive, though even then not devoid of anxiety, so long as chaos eventually
yields to clarification—so long as “ghosts are transformed into living flesh,
floating vapors turn solid, and something is born from the collision of in-
distinct ideas.”16 But they are depressing and sterile if in the end (adapting
a somewhat later letter to his friend Edward Garnett) his efforts “seem
unrelated to anything in heaven and everything under heaven remains im-
palpable to the touch like shapes of mist. . . . Every image floats vaguely
in a sea of doubt—and the doubt itself is lost in an unexpected universe
of incertitudes.”17 Whatever else is true of the universe of The Secret Agent,
its materialist ontology means that it is anything but that, which is also
to contrast it with the universe of Nostromo as experienced by the “dil-
letantish” writer and authorial surrogate Martin Decoud undergoing in

solitude “the exile of utter unbelief,” and in consequence, merging with—
in effect, dissolving into—his surroundings, leading in due course to his
suicide (N, 393).18 (Typical of the antithesis between the two novels—more
broadly, between Conrad’s usual anguished efforts to draw his fictions
from the blank page and his “ironic” project in The Secret Agent, with its
continual assertion of material blankness—it is in the solitude of his room
that the Professor, troubled by crowds, shakes off the doubts they awaken
in him.)19
Another way of framing the difference I am trying to evoke is to con-
trast the continual struggle or tension in Nostromo between “material in-
terests,” as figured by the silver of the Gould mine, and the efforts of
various characters, most prominently Charles Gould himself, to cast those
interests in an “ideal” light, with the obduracy, the absolute non-ideality,
of materiality as such in The Secret Agent. That Conrad’s (may we say
ideal?) reader is invited to register that contrast is implied by the “ironic”
repetition of Nostromo’s leitmotif in Vladimir’s crucial speech to Verloc
in chapter 2. Vladimir’s aim is to compel Verloc to bring about a terrorist
act, specifically a bombing, which would cause such public indignation
that the British government would be forced to crack down on the anar-
chists who u ntil now have enjoyed a comfortable refuge in England. The
target of that act, he explains, should be the British national fetish—
science. “All the damned professors are radicals at heart,” he says.
Let them know that their g reat panjandrum has got to go too, to
make room for the Future of the Proletariat. . . . They will be writing
to the papers. Their indignation would be above suspicion, no ma-
terial interests being openly at stake, and it w ill alarm every selfish-
ness of the class which should be impressed. (SA, 30; emphasis
added)
Not that the attack on science would be in the realm of the immaterial; as
Vladimir says, “it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into
pure mathematics,” but that being impossible, he is prepared to s ettle for
the next best t hing—an assault on astronomy in the form of the Greenwich
Observatory, or as he also puts it, “the blowing up of the first meridian”
(SA, 31–32). (The erasure of a line, in a manner of speaking.) As was sug-

gested earlier, it is tempting to identify the Gould mine’s silver if not
with erasure as such, then at any rate with the blank pages that w ere the
arena of Conrad’s struggles, an identification that gives added point to
the late Edward Said’s acute characterization of the silver as embodying
“the ego’s nearly limitless capacity for extension.”20 (Said also wrote that
“the novel reposes on the impregnation of silver with an imaginative con-
ception of its power” [“PN,” 45].) The formally analogous material sub-
stance or thing in The Secret Agent is Stevie’s disintegrated body mixed
with bits of bark, gravel, and dirt, and once again, the contrast with Nos-
tromo points up the later novel’s systematic refusal of all but the most ten-
uous and minimal hints of identification, imaginative projection, and
egoic extension. (This is the force of Conrad’s calculated courting of read-
erly nausea—detachment with a vengeance—in the scene at the hospital.)
Indeed, the formal analogy, hence also the contrast, between silver and
Stevie’s remains as signifiers of erasure or blankness is underscored by
the evocation of t hose remains in terms of a metaphorics of the “clean
sweep” (recalling Jim’s reference to a “clean slate” in Lord Jim). The
phrase occurs several times in the novel, but two instances are enough to
make its import plain. “You anarchists should make it clear that you are
perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation”
(SA, 30), Vladimir says to Verloc before explaining precisely what he
wants him to do. Later, in the scene in the anarchist tavern, the Professor
tells Ossipon that “what’s wanted is a clean sweep and a clear start for a
new conception of life,” which is why he works at “perfecting a r eally de-
pendable detonator”—to which Ossipon replies: “Yes. Your detonators.
I shouldn’t wonder if it w
eren’t one of your detonators that made a clean
sweep of the man in the park” (SA, 61). (Note the juxtaposition in both
citations of the materially similar signifiers “clean” and “clear.”) That it
would never occur to the reader to think of Stevie’s remains u nder the
sign of erasure or blankness outside the particular verbal network of the
novel as a whole only points up the exceptionalness of The Secret Agent
within Conrad’s oeuvre.21
Still another difference between the two novels concerns the absence
from The Secret Agent of an authorial “double” or surrogate comparable
to Decoud in Nostromo or, Leavis further implies (and I agree, albeit with
serious reservations, as w ill emerge in Chapter 9), Axel Heyst in Victory.

More precisely, the difference concerns the absence from The Secret Agent
of such a figure along with the presence of a number of lesser, partial, and
ironic surrogates, as if that novel’s commitment to materialism is such as
to diffuse (explode?) a thematics of authorship throughout the text, rather
than to concentrate it in a single personage (this, too, is anti-identitarian
in its way). So, for example, Verloc himself for years has earned his keep
from the foreign power that employs him as a secret agent by writing re-
ports (SA, 19); Michaelis in the solitude of his country retreat writes “night
and day in a shaky, slanting hand that Autobiography of a Prisoner that
was to be like a book of Revelation in the history of mankind” (SA, 94);
the Assistant Commissioner hates his present job because it consists in
nothing but “desk work, which was the bane of his existence because of
its confined nature and apparent lack of reality” (SA, 104)22 (think of Con-
rad’s early letters to Garnett); Sir Ethelred in an intense vignette is pre-
sented apparently taking a rest from writing—
The Assistant Commissioner entering saw at first only a big pale

hand supporting a big head, and concealing the upper part of a big
pale face. An open dispatch-box stood on the writing-table near a
few oblong sheets of paper and a scattered handful of quill pens.
There was absolutely nothing e lse on the flat surface except a little
bronze statuette in a toga, mysteriously watchful in its shadowy im-
mobility (SA, 164);23
it is Winnie who, by writing “32 Brett Street” in marking ink on a square

piece of calico which she then sews onto the underside of the lapel of
Stevie’s overcoat, eventually brings the police to Verloc’s door (SA, 98–
99, 156); and of course it is she who, near the end of chapter 11, stabs the
upward-facing Verloc to death in a passage that I read, in keeping with
the atypicality of The Secret Agent within the Conradian corpus, as an al-
legory of the act of erasure (in this novel, “successful” erasure can only
be a form of murder). (The upside-down hat on the floor would then be
the image of a bottle of ink.) More striking than all of these, however, is
the much commented on figure of Stevie, seated at a table with pencil and
compass,
drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric,

eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multi-
tude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of inter-
secting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism
of a mad art attempting the inconceivable. The artist never turned
his head; and in all his soul’s application to the task his back quiv-
ered, his thin neck, sunk into a deep hollow at the base of the skull,
seemed ready to snap. (SA, 40)
Edward Said was right to suggest that “Conrad imagined Stevie as a kind
of writer viewed in extremis” (“PN,” 35; emphasis in original), though
what he d idn’t quite say is that the kind of writer Stevie represents is the
writer of The Secret Agent; that is, the practitioner of a rigorously materi-
alist version of Conradian impressionism which, in its implications for
literary representation, might fairly be characterized as “a mad art at-
tempting the inconceivable.” (Said did note that Stevie’s circles “enclose
blankness even as they seem partly to be excluding it,” and that being
page-bound, “they tie him to a blank white space, and . . . exist no place
else” [“PN,” 34–35].) It is also twice said that before Winnie married
Verloc, Stevie had “blacked” the boots of gentlemen in the rooming house
run by Winnie and her m other (SA, 14, 183). This recalls Conrad’s fre-
quent metaphor of “blackening” pages,24 thereby underscoring the asso-
ciation between Stevie and his creator, though obviously the novel’s
insistence on Stevie’s m ental deficiency means that that association can
only be “ironic.”
Beyond all t hese, something like a sheerly materialist writing—one not
immediately subject to erasure—is figured here and there in The Secret
Agent by images of badly printed texts, as in Vladimir’s denunciation of
anarchist newspapers as “blunt type on . . . filthy paper” (SA, 26), and the
strategically sited paragraph that ends chapter 4 with its “eruption of
damp, rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with printer’s ink” and “posters
maculated with filth” (SA, 65).25 We are also told that in the correspon-
dence of the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim, Vladimir’s predecessor, Verloc
was “never designated otherwise but by the Greek letter or mathematical
symbol Δ” (SA, 26)—v isually, a triangle, or perhaps better, a pyramid,
which I see as resisting “readerly” incorporation by its object-like form
and “stony” connotations. (The Greek letter ∆ is also the mathematical

symbol for change, which would be “ironic” as applied to the unchanging
Verloc.) 26 T here is an obvious congruence, too, between Stott-
Wartenheim’s symbol for Verloc and the triangular piece of broadcloth
Heat picks out of Stevie’s remains, on the underside of which is the rect-
angular label bearing the Verlocs’ address, as well as the triangular shape
of Brett Place, off of which Brett Street runs.27 And is t here not something
upside-down pyramid-like about the material form of the letters W and V
for Winnie, Verloc, Vladimir—not to mention the N’s and M’s in two of
the three names, and the W’s in those of Privy Councillor Wurmt (Ver-
loc’s first interviewer at the embassy) and Baron Stott-Wartenheim (his
first employer there)? (The A in Adolph, needless to say, is pyramidal in
its own right.) Plus, there is the fact that Stevie’s remains, the product of
an act of erasure, of an attempt at a “clean sweep,” are heaped between
two “waterproof sheets” on the hospital t able (SA, 70); both the word
“sheets” (as in sheets of paper) and the letter w (in “waterproof ”) are con-
ceivably to the point. But more important than such possible imagery of
materialist writing in The Secret Agent is the question (the last to be treated
in this chapter) of the practice of writing, insofar as that practice turns
out to be figured in or otherwise inferable from the novel itself.
Conrad’s epithet for that practice was “ironic,” and irony, it seems clear,
presupposes control, distance, detachment—in short, w ill.28 But all t hese
are at least implicitly in conflict with the universe of The Secret Agent, in
which, as I have tried to show, genuinely free will—that is, will that is truly
self-determining—is unimaginable. (The Professor, seemingly an epitome
of w ill, exercises that faculty precisely by not triggering an explosion;
hence his need for a r eally intelligent detonator.) Not surprisingly, per-
haps, the issue of w ill versus necessity actually is raised in the author’s
note, where Conrad, before explaining that he began writing The Secret
Agent following his labors on Nostromo, assures the reader: “It’s obvious
that I need not have written [The Secret Agent]. I was u nder no necessity
to deal with the subject; using that word subject both in the sense of
the tale itself and in the larger one of a special manifestation in the life of
mankind” (SA, 4). In other words, Conrad freely willed to write The Se-
cret Agent—but within a few pages, after explaining how the story of
Winnie Verloc’s life had become clear to him,29 he continues:
This book is that story reduced to manageable proportions, its

whole course suggested and centred round the absurd cruelty of the
Greenwich Park explosion. [“Centred round”—is there just a hint
here of Stevie with his compass? Which is to say, of a non-“ironic”
writerly identification with Stevie?]30 I had there a task I w ill not
say arduous but of the most absorbing difficulty. But it had to be
done. It was a necessity. The figures grouped around Mrs Verloc
and related directly or indirectly to her tragic suspicion that “life
doesn’t stand much looking into” are the outcome of that very ne-
cessity. (SA, 7)
Is this seemingly contradictory pair of avowals merely a sign of Conrad’s

own retrospective confusion? Or is there a sense in which both avowals
are true—in which although from a certain perspective Conrad “need not
have written” The Secret Agent, the task of writing that novel, or say, the
writing itself, nevertheless bears the stamp not just of “the most absorbing
difficulty” but also, as Conrad states, of “necessity”? By way of resolving
these questions, I want to consider four representative instances of Con-
rad’s prose in The Secret Agent that seem to me to throw light on the topic.
1. The first passage is short and simple. The name of Conrad’s Chief
Inspector is “Heat” (no first name given), which immediately invokes “a
form of energy associated with the motion of atoms or molecules in solids
and capable of being transmitted through solid and fluid media by con-
duction, through fluid media by convection, and through empty space
by radiation”31—a materialist idea, obviously. (“Heat” is also modern
slang for the police; it seems to have been American in origin and to have
come into general use in the 1930s.) 32 In a confrontation with the Assis-
tant Commissioner, his immediate superior, Heat attempts not to divulge
everything he knows about the Greenwich explosion; the Assistant Com-
missioner, for his part, senses that Heat has not been forthcoming, and at
a certain point slams his hand on the writing table at which he is seated
and says: “What I want to know is what put it out of your head till now.”
(“It” is the notion that Michaelis is somehow b ehind the explosion, which
Heat in fact knows is unlikely.)
“Put it out of my head,” repeated the Chief Inspector very slowly.

“Yes. Till you were called into this room—you know.”
The Chief Inspector felt as if the air between his clothing and his
skin had become unpleasantly hot. It was the sensation of an unpre
cedented and incredible experience. (SA, 97)
The notion of something having put the idea of Michaelis’s involvement

out of Heat’s head belongs to the larger metaphorics of the materiality of
thought that was noted earlier in connection with Verloc and Winnie. But
what I want to stress is the statement that (to put it baldly) Heat felt
unpleasantly hot, and the further remark that this was “the sensation
of an unprecedented and incredible experience”—t he experience, we
might say, of becoming his name, or rather of becoming the material
state that his name signifies. This, too, is obviously a materialist trope,
but what distinguishes it from the o thers we have considered is that it im-
plies a kind of exchange or “contagion” between a textual signifier (the
name “Heat”) and the action of the novel (Heat’s “sensation of an unpre
cedented and incredible experience”).
2. My second example isn’t a single passage but rather concerns the
relative proximity of two phrases. In the last paragraph of chapter 9, im-
mediately a fter Winnie has learned of Stevie’s death (by overhearing a
conversation between Heat and Verloc), she is described not only as im-
mobile but as somehow spreading immobility to her surroundings, “as
if her attitude had the locking power of a spell.” The next sentence reads:
“Even the butterfly-shaped gas flames posed on the ends of the sus-
pended T-bracket burned without a quiver” (SA, 161). (It is that “sus-
pended T-bracket” that is mainly of interest here.) Chapter 10 begins
with the Assistant Commissioner’s traveling by hansom to Westminster,
where he is to meet for a second time with Sir Ethelred; first, though, he
speaks with the latter’s young secretary, known familiarly as Toodles,
explaining euphemistically that the personage he is after—Vladimir—is
more like a dogfish than a w hale. He then adds:
“You don’t know perhaps what a dog-fish is like.”

“Yes; I do. . . . It’s a noxious, rascally looking, altogether detest-
able beast, with a sort of smooth face and moustaches.”
“Described to a T,” commended the Assistant Commissioner.
“Only mine is clean-shaven altogether. You’ve seen him. It’s a witty
fish.” (SA, 163)
What I want to call attention to is the juxtaposition, separated by about

two pages, of the reference to the T-bracket and the phrase “Described
to a T”: given the materialist ontology of the novel as a w hole, the two
phrases together suggest another form of “contagion” involving a textual
signifier, in this case the letter T, which might be described as migrating
from the first phrase to the second, and in both instances seems more like
a material object than a signifier, properly speaking. (migrating also into
the epithet “witty” with its two t’s and the sound “tee”; also, it may be,
into the name “Toodles.”33 Note, by the way, the sonic and graphic af-
finity between “witty” and “Winnie.”) And my question both here and
with respect to the passage about Heat’s sensation of the air between his
clothing and his skin becoming unpleasantly hot is whether or not the
reader of The Secret Agent is intended to notice those instances of
“contagion.” If the answer is taken to be yes, presumably the reader is
also invited to imagine them as having been deliberately put there by the
author. But in fact, no commentator on The Secret Agent, and they have
been legion, has found them worth remarking. And this suggests—does it
not?—that they were not intended to be noticed, which in turn invites
thinking of them, once they are noticed, as having been produced unin-
tentionally, mechanistically, in that sense, as the result of a kind of neces-
sity. A third alternative, of course, is that they are the product of the
working of an unconscious intention on the part of the author, which
would align them with similar automatistic phenomena in texts by Crane
and literary impressionist writings generally. But the starker, two-
alternative version—intended or unintended—may be more in keeping
with the materialist ethos of the novel. (A further complication arises if
one seeks to distinguish between Conrad’s readers in his own time and
contemporary readers, presumably alerted to the play of the signifier by
deconstruction and related theoretical developments—not that decon-
struction has quite succeeded in laying a hand on Conrad, in my view.
But as I remarked in the Introduction, my own approach has doubtless
been influenced by it.)
3. Now consider the following sequence of sentences and phrases from
chapter 7, specifically from the account of the first meeting between the
Assistant Commissioner and Sir Ethelred. While the Assistant Commis-
sioner briefs Sir Ethelred on what he has learned, “the hands on the face
of the clock b ehind the g reat man’s back—a heavy, glistening affair of mas-
sive scrolls in the same dark marble as the mantelpiece, and with a ghostly,
evanescent tick—[move] through the space of seven minutes” (SA, 106–107).
Somewhat further on in their discussion, the Assistant Commissioner
suggests that Heat be replaced, b ecause, as he twice remarks, “He’s an
old police hand” (SA, 108), meaning that Heat’s protection of Verloc as a
private source of information is ultimately unproductive. A page later, he
remarks that “the a ctual perpetrator [Stevie] seems to have been led by the
hand to the spot” (SA, 109), and when, having explained that he himself
intends to visit Verloc’s shop on Brett Street, he is asked by Sir Ethelred,
“Why not leave it to Heat?” he replies (for the third time), “Because he is
an old departmental hand.” (By now it should be clear I am tracking the
“contagiousness” of the word “hand.”) “Besides,” the Assistant Commis-
sioner adds slightly later, “I want a free hand—a freer hand than it would
be perhaps advisable to give Chief Inspector Heat” (SA, 110). After some
further exchanges (involving a flurry of repetitions of the word “time”), Sir
Ethelred turns his gaze on the “ponderous marble timepiece” behind him,
to discover that “the gilt hands had taken the opportunity to steal through
no less than five and twenty minutes b ehind his back” (SA, 111). Never-
theless, he asks the Assistant Commissioner, “What first put you in mo-
tion in this direction?” (a typically materialist expression)—to which
the answer is, “A new man’s antagonism to old methods. A desire to
know something at first hand” (SA, 112). Satisfied, the great man gives
the Assistant Commissioner his blessing, “extending his hand, soft to
the touch, but broad and powerful like the hand of a glorified farmer. The
Assistant Commissioner shook it, and withdrew” (SA, 112).
Altogether, the word “hand” (or “hands”) occurs no less than eleven
times in five pages, and once again, my question is not just what is The
Secret Agent’s stake in references to hands, but also (not quite the same
question) what is the reader—in Conrad’s day or in our own—supposed
to make of the fact of such frequent repetition of a single word in so few
pages? For what it is worth, my sense of the matter is that by twice using
the word “hand” in a single sentence (the penultimate one in the sequence)
Conrad signals his own awareness of what is going on. But the sequence
as such nevertheless at the very least mimes the appearance of unintend-
edness, an impression entirely consistent, again, to say the least, with the
materialist ontology of the novel as a whole—as if the writer, not simply

his characters, were operating in a materialist mode. Once again, too, it
may or may not be relevant that commentators pursuing diverse ap-
proaches such as Leavis, Said, Albert J. Guerard, Ian Watt, J. Hillis
Miller, Aaron Fogel, Mark Wollaeger, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham never
regarded t hese and similar repetitions as significant enough to mention,
much less to discuss.34
The question is all the more pressing in that the h uman hand, or rather,
the absence of one, makes a shocking appearance elsewhere in the novel:
in chapter 8, Winnie’s m other, together with Winnie and Stevie, is
conveyed to her new charity lodgings in a hackney pulled by an infirm
horse and driven by a disreputable-looking character with “a hooked
iron contrivance protruding from the left sleeve of [his] coat” (SA, 121)—
in other words, by a driver with a missing hand. (It is when the driver
whips his pathetic nag that Stevie says, “Don’t.”) This raises the further
topic of the meaning of the motif of violence against hands in Conrad’s
fiction, a motif that goes back as early as the scene in Almayer’s Folly in
which Balabatchi deliberately stands with one foot on the hand of the
faceless corpse by the bank of the Sambir, and that reaches a bizarre ex-
treme in the 1914 story “Because of the Dollars,” in the personage of a
murderous Frenchman who, lacking hands with which to kill, impro-
vises a lethal weapon by having a seven-pound iron weight tied to one
stump.35 More could be said about “Because of the Dollars,” but for the
moment I will simply remark that hands in Conrad’s fiction typically
play a secondary role to figures for the page, and that the thematization
of the word “hand” (if I may put it that way) in The Secret Agent may be
read as an expression of the novel’s deliberate writtenness (that is, of the
author’s “irony” and “detachment”) even as the repetitiveness or “conta-
giousness” behind that thematization, although in one sense consistent
with writtenness, invites being seen as on the side of mechanicity as op-
posed to w ill in the reader-centered sense specified above (therefore as
unironic and not at all “detached”; in short, as materialist on a scriptive
level). At the same time, the hackney driver’s “hooked iron contrivance”
in the place of a hand, which carries the notion of violence against hands
farther than in any other work by the author except “Because of the Dol-
lars,” may be understood as acknowledging the element of violation of
the norms of Conrad’s art implicit in the novel’s emphasis on its own
“ironic” and “detached” manner. In sum, it is one more element that an-
nounces The Secret Agent’s exceptionalness within the Conradian oeuvre.
(Violence against hands is not confined to texts by Conrad, of course, as
the destruction of the little Jew’s hands in the shipwreck scene in Vandover
and the Brute and the amputation of Ferriss’s hands in A Man’s Woman go
to show. In another, less destructive register, no novel of the period makes
more of hands than Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage [1912].)
In the last chapter, a fter Winnie has killed herself by leaping overboard
from a cross-Channel boat, her wedding ring is found by “one of the
steamer’s hands” on a seat on the deck. Moreover, “t here was a date,
24th June 1879, engraved inside” (SA, 230)—which is to say, the ring is
one more specimen of materialist writing (it is also, under the circum-
stances, a supremely “ironic” one). What I want to stress, though, is the
surprising return of the word “hand” at this climactic moment.
4. The fourth and final instance of what I have been calling “contagion”
is somewhat different from those we have considered until now. Simply
put, three graphically similar words function throughout The Secret Agent
as a compound leitmotif: “material,” “marital,” “maternal.” (Cf. “clean”
and “clear.”) The first, “material,” occurs frequently in the first half of
the novel, and the second, “marital,” dominates in the second, especially
in chapters 10 and 11, where it increasingly comes to function (ironically,
as things turn out) as a euphemism for “sexual.”36 The third word, “ma-
ternal,” occurs only twice in the novel itself, first as applied to Winnie’s
mother’s fears about Stevie (SA, 126) and second in a sentence that de-
scribes the “exigencies” of Winnie’s temperament as “maternal and vio-
lent” (SA, 182),37 but Conrad retrospectively underscores its importance
when in his author’s note he reports that after having received the vision
of “an enormous town” (London) as the background of his novel, and after
“endless vistas opened before [him] in various directions” (all this in ad-
vance of actually sitting down before a blank sheet of paper, which is
where such vistas w ere ordinarily to be found), “Slowly the dawning con-
viction of Mrs Verloc’s maternal passion grew up to a flame between me
and that background, tingeing it with its secret ardour and receiving from
it in exchange some of its own sombre colouring” (SA, 6–7). A page or so
earlier, Conrad remarks of the genesis of the subject of The Secret Agent
(by which he means “the tale”) that it came to him “in the shape of a few
words uttered by a friend [as it happens, Ford] in a casual conversation
about anarchists or rather anarchist activities, how brought about I don’t
remember now” (SA, 4). The shape of a few words: according to Conrad,
Ford said of the victim of the explosion, “Oh, that fellow was half an idiot.
His sister committed suicide afterward” (SA, 5).38 But the few words whose
distinctly similar shapes recur throughout The Secret Agent and which in-
deed form a kind of secret armature for the text as a w hole are the three I
have just enumerated—and of course, the first of them, “material,” is ar-
guably the most important single word in the book, thematically speaking.
But there is a fourth word that belongs to the series, and with respect
to the novel’s genesis, it may be the most decisive of all: “martial” (an ana-
gram for “marital”). Unlike the other three words, this one bears no ob-
vious relation to the story or theme, and what is even stranger, the single
time it occurs in the novel, it does so in a seemingly gratuitous way. Toward
the end of chapter 5, in the midst of an account of the interview with
Heat, we are told (irrelevantly, it would seem) that it was the Assistant
Commissioner’s practice to play whist at his club every day from five to
seven. “His partners,” the text continues, “were the gloomily humorous
editor of a celebrated magazine; a s ilent, elderly barrister with malicious
little eyes; and a highly martial, simple-m inded old Colonel with ner
vous brown hands” (SA, 82). The conjunction of “martial” with “hands”
suggests that something of interest may be taking place (though the
virtual explosion of hands in the interview with Sir Ethelred is still to
come), all the more so in that the last sentence of the chapter ends with a
reference to the Assistant Commissioner’s “sudden and alert mistrust of
the weapon in his hand,” namely, Heat (SA, 82).
What is the significance of this? I make the following suggestion. The
central incident of the novel, an attempt on the Greenwich Observatory,
was based on an actual event, which took place in 1894, when Conrad
himself was living in London. “Briefly, the facts behind the so-called
Greenwich Bomb Outrage were these,” Martin Seymour-Smith writes.
A young man called Martial Bourdin was found in Greenwich Park,

on a hill near the Royal Observatory “in a kneeling posture, terribly
mutilated” on the evening of 15 February 1894. T here had been an
explosion; Bourdin had set it off, and in so d

oing had killed him-
self. He had blown off one of his hands, and his guts were spilling
from his body; he died in hospital very soon a fter.39
Somehow the proper name “Martial,” together with the extraordinary de-
tail of the blowing off of Bourdin’s hand, gave rise, by a kind of materi-
alist “contagion,” to the other three words and, by elaboration, to the novel
as a whole. To what extent was this, too, deliberate, or at least something
of which Conrad himself was aware—from which he was “detached”? Or
was he, even when looking back on the novel’s genesis, less than fully cog-
nizant of the dynamic I have just sketched? It is impossible to say. As
Conrad remarks in his author’s note of the “concentrated purpose” with
which he wrote The Secret Agent: “I was simply attending to my business.
I have attended to it with complete self-surrender. And this statement too
is not a boast. I could not have done otherwise. It would have bored me
too much to make believe” (SA, 8).40
Chapter Six
Maps, Charts, and Mist

N
I n 18 95 , when H. G. Wells began writing The War of the Worlds, he

was living in Woking in Surrey, about twenty-three miles from Charing
Cross in London.1 From the first, Wells planned to locate the first inva-
sion site of the Martians at Horsell Common, not far from his home, and
then to follow the progress of the invaders toward London virtually town
by town. And in fact, the first of ten space cylinders fired on successive
nights from an immense gun on the planet Mars lands near sandpits at
Horsell Common; it is first seen by Ogilvy, an astronomer who had de-
tected the flashes on Mars as the gun was fired (without knowing what
the flashes meant), but soon the unnamed narrator, a friend of Ogilvy who
also witnessed the flashes, learns from a newspaper boy of the crash
landing of what he repeatedly calls “the Thing,” and hastens to the sand-
pits. A crowd of onlookers has gathered and continues to grow; a fter a
while, one end of the cylinder slowly unscrews itself, and a fter a time,
something stirs within the shadow: “greyish billowy movements, one
above the other, and then two luminous discs—like eyes. Then something
resembling a l ittle grey snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled
up out of the writhing m iddle, and wriggled in the air t owards me—and
then another” (WW, 63). Presently, a deputation of men, Ogilvy among
them, approach the cylinder waving a white flag; o thers follow, whereupon
a flash of light accompanied by greenish smoke fires out from the pit,
186
Maps, Charts, and Mist 187
followed by flashes of a ctual flame, and the deputation is annihilated.

(This is the narrator’s first experience of the Martians’ Heat-R ay, a
laser-l ike weapon of immense destructiveness.)
For a moment the narrator is stunned, but then, overcome by fear, he
runs back to his house and tells his wife what has happened. The next
day he remains in the neighborhood talking to soldiers and others, none
of whom know anything useful; the Martians remain out of sight at work
in their pit, with sounds of hammering and a streamer of smoke. Around
3:00 p.m. the narrator hears the thud of a gun from Chertsey or Addle-
stone, which he later learns was the sound of firing on the second cylinder
that had landed in a pinewood in that vicinity, and then around six he
hears a muffled detonation and a gust of firing from the nearby common,
followed by “a violent, rattling crash quite close to [him and his wife]”
(WW, 79) that turns out to be another extraordinarily devastating blast
from the Heat-R ay. At this point he realizes that he and his wife are in
danger, and he flees Woking in a cart rented at nearby Maybury to remove
her to what he hopes will be the safety of Leatherhead. (The prolifera-
tion of place-names turns out to be significant, as will be seen.)
Once he has done that, however, he leaves to return the cart (through
Ockham, he explains, not as he had come, through Send and Old
Woking), and beyond Pyrford, he becomes aware of flashes of destruc-
tion near Maybury (in fact, he soon discovers the dead body of the inn-
keeper from whom he had rented the cart). He also gets his first sight of
the Thing—
A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the

young pine-trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking
engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articu-
late ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its
passage mingling with the riot of its thunder. (WW, 84)
(Each tripod, he later realizes, is operated from within by a physically

unprepossessing Martian.) He makes his way back to his own house in
Woking and looks out on three such “gigantic black t hings” (WW, 88)
moving in the glare about the sandpits at Horsell Common. He also gives
shelter to an artilleryman, and the next morning they quit the house,
which they consider unsafe—the artilleryman to rejoin his battery in

London, the narrator to return to Leatherhead to take his wife to New
haven and thence out of the country. The two men start out together, the
narrator aiming to make a big detour by Epsom so as to avoid further
Martians. They pass through several villages and then are almost caught
up in a destructive river battle, in the course of which one of the tripods
is felled but Weybridge and Shepperton are largely destroyed. The Mar-
tians retreat to Horsell Common, secure in the knowledge that as new
cylinders arrive from Mars they will be reinforced, while the narrator,
separated from the artilleryman, encounters a curate, with whom he
ventures “northward” (the last word of chapter 13).
At this point, unexpectedly, a second narrative line is opened up by
the narrator’s account of his younger, medical student b rother’s more or
less simultaneous experiences in London, which at first receives refugees
from the countryside but then becomes a very different scene as the Mar-
tians approach and a frenzied exodus from the city gets u nder way. H ere,
too, place-names play a prominent role. A characteristic passage reads:
At the station [my brother] heard for the first time that the Windsor
and Chertsey lines w ere now interrupted. . . . One or two trains
came in from Richmond, Putney, and Kingston, containing p eople
who had gone out for a day’s boating. . . . A man in a blue-and-white
blazer addressed my b rother, full of strange tidings. “There’s hosts
of p
eople driving into Kingston in traps and carts and t hings, with
boxes of valuables and all that,” he said. “They come from Molesey
and Weybridge and Walton, and they say there’s been guns heard
at Chertsey, heavy firing, and that mounted soldiers have told them
to get off at once b ecause the Martians are coming.” (WW, 108)
And a few pages l ater:
And all about him—in the rooms below, in the h ouses on each side
and across the road, and behind in the Park Terraces and in the hun-
dred other streets of that part of Marylebone, and the Westbourne
Park district and St. Pancras, and westward and northward in Kil-
burn and St. John’s Wood and Hampstead, and eastward in
Shoreditch and Highbury and Haggerston and Hoxton, and,

indeed, through all the vastness of London to Ealing and East
Ham—people were rubbing their eyes, opening windows to stare
out and ask aimless questions, and dressing hastily as the first breath
of the coming storm of Fear blew through the streets. It was the
dawn of the g reat panic. (WW, 113)
Such passages, indeed, the continual reference throughout the novel to

towns and other physical locations, give the overall narrative a strongly
topographical character, as commentators have not failed to observe; a
recent critical edition of the novel (cited in note 1) lists no fewer than 187
specific places—towns, districts, streets, parks, bridges, monuments, and
the like—that are mentioned by name in the text, and in fact, the same
critical edition provides two small maps, one of Woking and its environs,
the other of the Thames Valley, with eighteen towns specifically indicated;
these scarcely seem adequate.
Nothing could be clearer, in fact, than that Wells must have relied
heavily—that is, continually—on maps throughout his l abors on the book;
no doubt, he made use of the superb one-inch-to-the-mile ordnance maps
covering all of G reat Britain, the fruit of a government project begun in
the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 and completed, as regards
the maps just mentioned, in 1891.2 (See Figure 9 for a portion of the map
for Aldershot that includes Woking and nearby towns.) In itself, this is
interesting. But Wells has other than simply narrative ends in view.
Chapter 17 of part 1, “The ‘Thunder Child,’ ” begins:
Had the Martians aimed only at destruction, they might on Monday

have annihilated the entire population of London, as it spread it-
self slowly through the home counties. Not only along the road
through Barnet, but also through Edgware and Waltham Abbey,
and along the roads eastward to Southend and Shoeburyness, and
south of the Thames to Deal and Broadstairs, poured the same
frantic rout. If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon
in the blazing blue above London, e very northward and eastward
road r unning out of the tangled maze of streets would have seemed
stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a h uman agony
190
Fig. 9. Ordnance
Survey, map for
Aldershot (detail
focused on Woking)
(Southampton:
Ordnance Survey
Office, 1891), Sheet 285.
of terror and physical distress. I have set forth at length in the last
chapter my b rother’s account of the road through Chipping Barnet,
in order that my readers may realise how that swarming of black dots
appeared to one of those concerned. Never before in the history of
the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered to-
gether. The legendary hosts of Goths and Huns, the hugest armies
Asia has ever seen, would have been but a drop in that current. And
this was no disciplined march, it was a stampede—a stampede gi-
gantic and terrible—w ithout order and without a goal, six million
people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the
beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.
Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network
of streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents,
gardens—a lready derelict—spread out like a huge map, and in the
southward blotted. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would
have seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart.
Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting
out ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising
ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley,
exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting paper.
And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river,
the glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically
spreading their poison-cloud over this patch of country and then
over that, laying it again with their steam-jets when it had served
its purpose, and taking possession of the conquered country.
(WW, 131–132; emphasis in original)
The poison cloud is the Martian Black Smoke, an inky black poison gas
that the Martians discharge in order to suffocate all who breathe it; in use,
it sinks to the ground and spreads “in a manner rather liquid than gas-
eous” (WW, 118). Once it has done its work, the Martians for the most
part dissolve it with jets of steam, hence the last sentence of the passage
just quoted.
What is striking, in light of the larger argument of this book, is the ex-
plicitness with which the narrator invites the reader to visualize the
landscape as a huge map or chart displayed horizontally before him or
her (as if seen from a balloon), across which a monstrous pen continually
flings large splashes of black ink which themselves grow and spread and
ramify in all directions, “exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon
blotting paper.” This recalls the repeated use of the word “spurt,” as of
ink from a pen, in the pages where Dr. Kemp first observes the “inky-
black” figure of Thomas Marvel running away from the Invisible Man,
but it goes much further in the direction of spelling out the theme of
writing, at least to the extent of invoking pen and ink and indeed blotting
paper. Put slightly differently, Wells’s text invites, or perhaps one should
say, requires, the reader to envision the ongoing writing of the narrative
precisely in terms of places on a map, the latter imagined as being not
only perfectly familiar to the reader, but also, in some never quite fully
explained sense, spread out before his or her eyes. The result, h ere as
elsewhere, is a palpable tension between the narrative as such and the
scene of writing (and map reading) it continually evokes, as if by virtue
of the profusion of place-names and the continual reference to the Black
Smoke, not to mention the frequent citing of newspapers and their head-
lines, the reader is never allowed to forget his or her situation vis-à-vis,
which is to say, looking down on, both map and page (or pages: the page
of print and the not quite present page of script). (The narrator’s refer-
ence to streets “stippled black” with fleeing Londoners and to “the
swarming of black dots” may also have something to do with the new
popularity of the halftone process as a means of reproducing photographs
in newspapers in the early 1890s.) 3
In an obvious sense, the continual, at times positively disruptive evo-
cation of the ordnance maps of Surrey and London, and the almost comic
allusion to the scene of writing with its pen and ink and blotting paper,
are impressionist motifs; indeed, The War of the Worlds goes as far as any
literary text of the period toward foregrounding, drawing continual at-
tention to, what might be called the surface production of the text. A
highly charged moment in that regard occurs in part 2, chapter 7, “The
Man on Putney Hill,” in which the narrator makes contact with an artil-
leryman he had briefly encountered much earlier. At first the narrator is
impressed by the artilleryman’s braggadocio, as the latter describes the
plans he has made for going underground with a group of survivors in
resistance to the Martians, though he soon realizes how empty those plans
are and that the self-deceived artilleryman has not the slightest intention
of trying to carry them out. The crucial passage reads:
For a while the imaginative daring of the artilleryman, and the tone
of assurance and courage he assumed, completely dominated my
mind. I believed unhesitatingly both in his forecast of h uman des-
tiny and in the practicability of his astonishing scheme, and the
reader who thinks me susceptible and foolish must contrast his po-
sition, reading steadily with all his thoughts about the subject, and
mine, crouching fearfully in the bushes and listening, distracted by
apprehension. We talked in this manner through the early morning
time, and later crept out of the bushes, and, after scanning the sky
for Martians, hurried precipitately to the house on Putney Hill
where he had made his lair. It was the coal-cellar of the place, and
when I saw the work he had spent a week upon—it was a burrow
scarcely ten yards long, which he designed to reach the main drain
on Putney Hill—I had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams
and his powers. (WW, 176–177)
I take this scene as intended, above all, to exacerbate the reader’s aware-
ness of his or her subject position relative to that of the narrator, and
more importantly, relative to the printed narrative before his or her eyes,
as well as, implicitly, to the pages of script that would have “preceded”
it. (The word “inkling” is suggestive, too, of course.)
One way of describing this is as a difference in points of view, which
in itself is or can be an impressionist topos, and in fact, The War of the
Worlds calls attention to that notion twice over, in addition to the passage
we have just glanced at. First, as mentioned, it covers the events in and
around London in the course of four chapters in which the narrator breaks
off his own story to tell of the experiences of his medical student b rother,
who, like everyone in that city, is slow to learn what was already happening
in the countryside and suburbs; for a time, the emphasis is wholly on the
fragmentary information conveyed by newspapers, telegrams, and word
of mouth. (Like the narrator, the narrator’s brother is never named.) A
quasi-proclamation by authorities assuring the public that London was
safe “was printed in enormous type on paper so fresh that it was still
wet” (WW, 110); p eople scramble off buses to obtain copies, their interest
is so intense. Meanwhile: “The shutters of a map-shop in the Strand w ere
being taken down, my brother said, and a man in his Sunday raiment,
lemon-yellow gloves even, was visible inside the window hastily fastening
maps of Surrey to the glass” (WW, 110). (Lest the map motif be forgotten
for a moment.) Subsequently, the narrator’s brother takes part in the ex-
odus from London, meeting up by chance with two women whom he
rescues from being dragged from their pony chaise by a pair of toughs,
and with whom he then travels by chaise, himself taking the reins or
leading the pony to allow it to rest, in an attempt to find a train some-
where outside of London. But the fleeing crowds are enormous, the
chaos unmanageable; a man falls to the ground and is crushed under the
wheels of a carriage (the narrator’s b rother sees “the face of the dying
man in the ditch under the privet, deadly white and drawn, and shining
with perspiration” [WW, 129]); still they progress through Hadley and
pause for the night near East Barnet. T here follow the paragraphs about
the balloonist, the maplike ground below, and the flung and blotted ink.
Afterward, the narrator’s brother and his charges make their way to
Chelmsford, then push on to the coast; near Tillingham they come within
sight of the sea. A place is found for them on a steamboat bound for Os-
tend, from which, unexpectedly, they witness an extraordinary combat
between a British warship, the Thunder Child, and several Martians in
their machines. In the course of the battle two of the Martians are de-
stroyed, but so, apparently, is the Thunder Child. A bit later, as the sun
goes down, other British warships engage the surviving Martian; the out-
come is obscure, but finally the narrator’s brother sees something flat
and broad and very large rush slantingly into the western sky. “And as it
flew,” the chapter ends, “it rained down darkness upon the land” (WW,
137). (Another splash of ink, in other words.)
Second, the issue of point of view comes to the fore when the narrator
and the curate, starting out once more for Leatherhead, are forced to take
shelter together in a ruined house in Sheen, their only access to the out-
side world being a triangular gap in the kitchen wall through which they
observe a Martian standing guard over still another cylinder (the fifth) that
had landed on a nearby house, totally destroying it. The narrator spends
no fewer than fifteen days in the ruined h ouse, temporarily bringing the
invasion narrative to a standstill, but the significance of this episode in

the larger logic of the novel consists in the fact that throughout their time
together in t hose close quarters, the narrator and the increasingly hyster-
ical curate struggle for possession of the peephole and what the narrator
calls “that horrible privilege of sight” (WW, 154), as if only when actually
looking through it can the narrator be said to occupy a point of view at
all. Eventually the narrator decides it is safe to leave the house, and makes
his way to London, where he discovers the Martians in their machines,
dead from bacterial infection on Primrose Hill. The earth is saved, in
short.
Commentators on The War of the Worlds have been divided in their
critical judgments of the shift of points of view from the narrator to his
brother and back again, some considering it “a technical feat of some bril-
liance,” o thers finding in it a mark of Wells’s failure to control the narra-
tive;4 in effect, the former see the shift as enhancing the verisimilitude of
the narrative, the latter as undermining it. But both judgments mistake
Wells’s purpose, which is, crucially, to thematize point of view as such,
in the first place to underscore an impressionist or, say, Jamesian pro-
tocol, namely, that everything reported is as registered by a particular
consciousness (not that such a protocol was systematically adhered to
by impressionist authors); and in the second place, as the passage con-
trasting the “steadily reading” reader and the narrator crouching in the
bushes explicitly states, to throw into relief a third point of view—neither
that of the narrator nor that of his b rother, but that of the reader looking
down at the printed page—and beyond or “before” that, a fourth point of
view—that of the writer, pen in hand and (in this case) ordnance map
open before him, as if somehow laid over or showing through from
beneath—in effect, coinciding with—the page on which he writes. (One
might also say that the struggle between the narrator and the curate for
possession of the peephole in the ruined h ouse has the effect of literal-
izing the issue of point of view as one exclusively of seeing.)
All this is to suggest that The War of the Worlds is an impressionist text
in a wholly conscious register, one that illustrates perfectly what Wells
in Experiment in Autobiography later characterized as his “inherent
tendency to get things mapped out and consistent”5 (a more mapped
out and consistent book than The War of the Worlds could hardly be
i magined). Wells also speaks in Experiment of the “coldness and flatness”

of his impressions as opposed to the vividness and intensity of t hose of
Crane, Conrad, James, and o thers (EA, 528), terms that bring to mind
the strangeness of the narrator’s references to his wife in Leatherhead
throughout much of the novel, the emphasis falling always on the
place, indeed, the place-name—on the map, so to speak—rather than
on the person, who remains nameless and featureless. This, too, was
clearly deliberate on Wells’s part—in fact, just before encountering the
curate the narrator remarks, “It is a curious t hing that I felt angry with
my wife; I cannot account for it, but my impotent desire to reach Leath-
erhead worried me excessively” (WW, 102). (The particular oddness,
not to say ugliness, of the name “Leatherhead” makes the story’s many
references to it all the more obtrusive.) Much later, after leaving Prim-
rose Hill, the narrator w ill learn that Leatherhead was destroyed by the
Martians, with the loss of life of everyone t here. This casts him down, and
he begins to return to Woking; at the corner of Waterloo Bridge he sees
one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time—a sheet of

paper flaunting against a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a
stick that kept it in place. It was the placard of the first newspaper
to resume publication—the Daily Mail. I bought a copy for a black-
ened shilling I found in my pocket. Most of it was in blank, but the
solitary compositor who did the thing had amused himself by
making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back
page. The matter printed was emotional; the news organization
had not as yet found its way back. I learned nothing fresh except
that already in one week the examination of the Martian mecha-
nisms had yielded astonishing results. (WW, 188–189)
It turns out, though, that his wife survived, and in the end they are re
united. But t here is nothing emotional about the novel’s treatment of this
event—in any case, the narrator’s interest in the newspaper with its blank
spaces and “stereo” advertisement outweighs any sense of grief for what
he then believed was his loss.
Finally, in the epilogue to the book, the narrator remarks that one
Lessing, presumably an astronomer, recently suggested that there is
reason to believe that the Martians succeeded in landing on Venus:
Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the
sun; that is to say, Mars was in opposition from the point of view of
an observer on Venus. Subsequently a peculiar luminous and sin-
uous marking appeared on the unillumined half of the inner planet
[Venus], and almost simultaneously a faint dark mark of a similar
sinuous character was detected upon a photograph of the Martian
disk. One needs to see the drawings of these appearances to appre-
ciate fully their remarkable resemblance in character. (WW, 192)
Sinuous marks of this sort are a literary impressionist figure for writing,
and the reference to drawings recalls other references to the conjoining
of writing and drawing, as for example in Green Mansions when Abel dec-
orates the funerary urn containing Rima’s ashes with a serpent bearing a
chain of irregular black spots or blotches extending along its body, every
other one of which was a letter spelling out the words Sin vos y siu dios y
mi. (In 1895 Green Mansions was not yet written, of course.) And a page
or so later, the narrator adds: “I must confess the stress and danger of the
time have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit
in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again the healing
valley below set with writhing flames” (WW, 193).
No wonder, then, that The War of the Worlds has struck certain readers,
such as J. D. Beresford, author of the first critical study of Wells (1915),
as singularly “detached”;6 in all the respects just canvassed, it is indeed
a sustained exercise in detachment and, adapting a term from Experiment,
systematicity in the interest of spelling out, presenting as lucidly as
possible, its double relation—at once critical, at times almost parodistic,
and yet oddly affirmative (or should it be the other way round)—to the
impressionist nexus. This gives the book a very different affective at-
mosphere from that of the roughly contemporaneous The Invisible Man,
with the latter’s harassing air of implacableness and desperation as the
protagonist discovers one aspect a fter another of his hopeless predica-
ment. But the two books share a single epistemological-literary weltan-
schaunng, much as if the unmoved Kemp who coldly brings about the
death of the protagonist in The Invisible Man did double duty as the nar-
rator of The War of the Worlds.7
n
Maps and charts play an even more essential role in the greatest
“spy” novel of the period, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands
(1903).8 Briefly, Childers was born in London and the family moved to
Ireland when he was six (the family was both English and Irish). Both
parents died from tuberculosis while he was still young, but he attended
private school and then Trinity College, Cambridge; upon going down,
he moved to London and found a job as a clerk in the House of Commons,
a position that give him insight into the workings of the empire, as a
modern writer has said.9 When the Boer War broke out he went to South
Africa and served in a volunteer artillery unit; his first book was based
on a series of letters home. Back in London, he returned to his position at
the House of Commons, and also wrote The Riddle of the Sands, which
very quickly became a huge literary success and, to his surprise, was
widely read within the Admiralty and Parliament. In the years that fol-
lowed he wrote other books on political topics; when the First World War
broke out, he served in a number of capacities; at the same time, however,
he became involved in the Irish struggle for Home Rule, going so far as
to run guns more or less openly to the Irish Volunteers, with consequences
he had not anticipated (the guns, Mauser r ifles, were used in the 1916
Easter Rising). But the situation in Ireland was extremely complex, and
the outbreak in 1922 of civil war between supporters and opponents of
the treaty of partition led to Childers’s capture and execution by the Irish
Free State. So curt a summary of Childers’s life and activities gives almost
no indication of his brilliance and resourcefulness, of the numerous civic
and military positions he held and assignments he fulfilled, or of the
fraught and shifting politics he tried, and in the end, tragically failed to
negotiate. Something else that should be mentioned is that he was, from
early on, a passionate and accomplished sailor, which of course is one key
to the writing of The Riddle of the Sands.
A brief summary of the narrative might read as follows: a young En
glishman, Carruthers, a minor official in the Foreign Office, receives an
unexpected invitation from an acquaintance named Davies to join him
on a late-season yachting holiday in the Baltic Sea. Carruthers accepts,
joining Davies in Flensburg, to find, to his chagrin, not a proper yacht of
the sort he is used to, but a relatively small and ungainly sailing boat, the
Dulcibella (the name of one of Childers’s sisters). Barely concealing his
disappointment, he joins Davies in sailing around various Frisian islands,

and in particu lar paying close attention to numerous small channels
between shifting sandbanks that make the entire area a challenge to sea-
manship. Gradually it emerges that Davies, a fierce patriot who longs to
make up for having been rejected for naval service, is convinced that the
German government is pursuing some sort of sinister project among the
shallow tidal waters of the Frisian islands; fueling this suspicion is an
earlier incident in the course of which a German yacht captain named
Dollmann offered to lead him to safety in dangerous weather, but in fact
lured him into a shoal and abandoned him there, assuming he would be
wrecked and killed. (The name of Dollmann’s yacht is the Medusa, a face
that kills.) But Davies found his way to safety, and subsequently sent for
Carruthers to join him so that they could investigate the area together.
(Carruthers also divines that Davies has fallen in love with Dollmann’s
daughter, Clara. The entire narrative, it is important to remark, pur-
ports to be a first-person account by Carruthers himself.)
Davies’s theory, as he explains it to Carruthers, is that if and when war
breaks out between Germany and England, the entire region would be
what Carruthers, paraphrasing Davies, calls “an ideal hunting-ground for
small free-lance marauders” (RS, 116),that is, for torpedo boats and the
like. The Germans, Davies is convinced, are aware of this and are taking
steps—the nature of which remains obscure, but which must have some-
thing to do with “those channels in the sand”—to prepare for such a
war, whereas the English, to his chagrin, are d oing nothing. The two men
proceed to explore the region, making continual use of highly detailed
German maps and charts (RS, 125), about which t here w ill be a g reat deal
more to say. At one point they are visited by a German officer, von Brüning,
captain of a German warship called the Blitz, whom Davies had met
before sending for Carruthers; they agree to meet in an inn in Bensersiel,
where von Brüning questions them with g reat intelligence, uncovering
much of the story about Dollmann’s near murder of Davies (which
Davies tries his best to mitigate). He also explains to Davies and Carruthers
that efforts w
ere being made to recover gold from a French frigate that had
gone down off nearby Juist in 1811; this would account for the presence of
another ship, the Kormoran, which the two Englishmen suspect has been
keeping an eye on them, and also for the suggestion of some sort of
activity centered on Memmert, a location that becomes extremely impor

tant to the story, at least for a time. In addition, von Brüning strongly sug-
gests to Carruthers, as their meeting breaks up, that he and Davies
should not make contact with Dollmann, though without saying why.
My summary is becoming long, but the complexity of the narrative
makes that unavoidable. Later, Carruthers and Davies are towed to the
open water by von Brüning, and the next day set sail toward Norderney
and Memmert. A day or so later they spot a white sail in the distance,
which turns out to belong to the Medusa’s dinghy, being sailed by his
daughter Clara; evidently, she saw them and is on her way to renew
contact with Davies. She comes aboard the Dulcibella and a lively con-
versation follows (she had visited Memmert and the gold salvage opera-
tion), but suddenly, her composure vanishes, she rises, announces that she
must leave, and does so, pausing only to add that they must not visit the
Medusa because her father, who dislikes foreigners, will not wish to see
them. The two men are stunned, but Davies presciently realizes that what
disconcerted Clara was the sight of a nondescript book on sailing (a guide
to an obscure estuary) in their small library, or more precisely, the author’s
name on the book—because when Davies opens the book to the frontis-
piece he finds an illustration of the author, which he recognizes to be an
image of a much younger Dollmann. The author, he also learns, was then
a lieutenant in the English navy, which suggests that Dollmann not only
lost that position but also went on to assume a different identity. And
something e lse: shortly before Dollmann led Davies into what he hoped
would be a death trap, he, too, had been on board the Dulcibella, where,
Davies and Carruthers realize, he, too, must have seen the book and at
once have recognized the potential danger that Davies represented. (The
implication is that the other Germans know nothing of his English past.)
At this point the narrative reaches one of its several climaxes. The two
friends decide to row ten miles from the harbor at Norderney to Mem-
mert through a blinding fog, using a chart and a compass to guide their
way, their reasoning being that no one who had seen them in their present
harbor would imagine such a feat possible. At Memmert Carruthers goes
ashore and discovers four men—von Brüning, Dollmann, a sinister figure
named Grimm, and one other—meeting in a hut, and hears scraps of con-
versation, including a reference to the English port of Chatham and a
series of letters from A to G, each followed by a number (possibly of me-

ters of depth). Then they row back, again through the fog, arriving at the
Dulcibella to find Dollmann, von Brüning, and an engineer named Böhme
(the fourth man) on board—in effect, waiting for them. By then the fog
has cleared and Davies and Carruthers claim to have been rowing about
for a short while in pursuit of ducks (their improbable cover story from
the first). They are invited to dinner at Dollmann’s villa in Norderney,
they accept, and their visitors leave so that they can change; once
alone, they see that Dollmann shoved the incriminating book back in
the bookshelf in such a way as to partly obscure it, which further sug-
gests that he wants to keep his true identity hidden from his German
companions. At dinner, von Brüning conducts another of his pene-
trating, ostensibly highly civilized inquisitions, trying to establish the
purpose of their explorations, which Carruthers seeks to c ounter by a
highly risky charade of confessing to an excessive interest in Memmert
and, in fact, asking to be taken there to witness the salvage operation.
In the end, Carruthers decides to return to London, where he would
launch an inquiry into Dollmann, and then rejoin Davies. At Norddeich
he sets out for Amsterdam, continually changing trains and creeping
slowly from station to station (Emden, Leer, Rheine, Hengelo, Apeldoorn)
with various delays; reflecting on the situation, he decides not to return
to London after all (too much time would be lost) and instead, after a night
in a h otel, makes his way back t oward Norderney disguised at first as an
English seaman, then he changes trains at Rheine and becomes a German
seaman. At Emden he glimpses a German torpedo boat in a canal, and
in a bookstall buys a pocket ordnance map of Friesland on a much larger
scale than anything he had used before, and from Emden northwards he
makes intensive use of the map to aid his explorations (more on this
shortly).
The pages that follow defy easy summary. Suffice it to say that Car-
ruthers, making use of information gleaned on Memmert, trails von
Brüning and the others to Bensersiel, where they board a tugboat towing
a barge partly filled with coal. Carruthers sneaks on board, hiding in a
lifeboat, and is surprised when the tug heads out to sea, and even more
so when three of the men on board jump down to the barge and remain
there for the rest of the short voyage, but he soon realizes that the trip is
a trial run for an ambitious plan to invade England by ferrying barges full
of soldiers to the English coast (near Chatham, for example)—in other
words, that the German riddle that Davies and he had been trying to
crack involved dredging passages through the sands and in general im-
proving the passage from the small ports to the open sea. The tug and
barge head for the landing stage at Norddeich; Carruthers daringly re-
places the helmsman and grounds the tug just outside the harbor, and
escapes in the lifeboat to return to the Dulcibella, safely moved in the
harbor at Norderney and in effect, waiting for him.
Carruthers explains the situation to Davies, and the two men go to
Dollmann’s villa and persuade Dollmann and his d aughter to return with
them to England (Dollmann agrees because he fears arrest by the Ger-
mans when the invasion scheme is exposed). They set sail across the
North Sea, and when no one is looking, Dollmann leaps overboard and
disappears. Carruthers, Davies, and Clara reach Holland and from there
make their way to London. An epilogue reproduces a confidential mem-
orandum by Dollmann to the German government (said to have been
found by Carruthers at the villa in Norderney) proposing the scheme
in the first place, and in the process explaining the riddle of the sands in
further detail.
Needless to say, such an account does not begin to suggest e ither the
continuously gripping character of Childers’s narrative or the tensile bril-
liance of his writing; after more than a century, The Riddle of the Sands
has lost none of its ability to hold the reader in its thrall. But what further
sets Childers’s novel apart is its remarkably resourceful use of maps and
charts, four of which, Map A and Chart A, followed by Map B and Chart
B, are reproduced in the book (Figures 10–13), to be consulted by the
reader at numerous points in the narrative, in order to make sense of, al-
most literally to follow, the action on the page. Moreover, the reader is
often instructed to turn to the maps, either by footnotes (“See Map A”
and the like) or, increasingly as the novel goes on, by moments of explicit
encouragement or instruction in the body of the text. In addition, the nar-
rative contains a host of unfamiliar place-names—not towns in Surrey
or parts of London, as in The War of the Worlds, but tiny towns, islands,
canals, streams, and sands in East Friesland, a part of the world in which
no English reader could reasonably be imagined to feel at home (and so

would be likely to have resort to the maps and charts).
But the maps and charts are provided not merely to show the reader
where the action is taking place (they are not simply informative, any more
than are the place-names in The War of the Worlds); they also give an in-
dication of the maps and charts on which Davies and Carruthers con-
stantly rely, which is to say that they provide a kind of bond between the
reader and the characters, a bond that the novel will deliberately strengthen
as the narrative proceeds. Indeed, Davies’s interest in the maps and charts
of the region (the German maps and charts; the English ones he dismisses
as hopeless) plays a crucial role in the story, as when he explains to Car-
ruthers exactly how Dollmann almost killed him by leading him into a
shallow channel called the Telte in a blinding storm (RS, 60–64), or when,
a few chapters l ater, he first expounds his idea that in the event of war with
England, the shallow channels r unning through the shifting sands of the
region could assume tremendous military importance (whether for offense
or defense is not entirely clear). But the first serious appeal to the maps
occurs toward the end of chapter 11, “The Pathfinders.” “Like most
landsmen I had a w holesome prejudice against ‘r unning aground,’ ” Car-
ruthers states,
so that my mentor’s turn for breezy paradox [Davies has just said
that r unning aground gives an excuse for a sit-down lunch] was at
first rather exasperating. A
fter lunch the large-scale chart of the es-
tuaries was brought down, and we pored over it together, mapping
our work for the next few days. There is no need to tire the general
reader with its intricacies, nor is there space to reproduce it for the
benefit of the instructed reader. For both classes the general map
should be sufficient, taken with the large-scale fragment (Chart A),
which gives a fair example of the region in detail. It will be seen that
the three broad fairways of the Jade, Weser, and Elbe split up the
sands into two main groups. (RS, 101–102)
And a bit further on, apropos the channels through the sands, in partic
ular the ones which lose their water at low tide:
Figs. 10–13. Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service
Recently Achieved (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1903), illustrations of map and
chart engravings by Walker & Cockerell reproduced in the novel. In this order:
Map A, Chart A, Map B, Chart B.
Davies explained that the latter would take most learning, and w ere
to be our main concern, because they were the “through-
routes”—the connecting links between the estuaries. You can always
detect them on the chart by rows of l ittle Y-shaped strokes denoting
“booms,” that is to say, poles or saplings fixed in the sand to mark
the passage. The strokes, of course, are only conventional signs,
and do not correspond in the least to individual “booms,” which
are far too numerous and complex to be indicated accurately on a
chart, even of the largest scale. The same applies to the course of
the channels themselves whose minor meanderings cannot be re-
produced. (RS, 102–103)
In both passages what is striking, of course, is the direct address to

the reader, who is also assumed to be a viewer of the maps. And note
the insistence in the second quotation upon the conventional nature of the
maps, as regards both the signs for “booms” and the approximateness of
the recording of the channels (setting the stage for a very different rela-
tion to a map near the end of the book).
In a l ater chapter, “Clearing the Air,” a paragraph begins,
The reader can see Memmert [supposedly the site of the gold re-
covery effort, which Carruthers suspects is merely a front for some-
thing sinister] for himself. South of Juist* [*See Map B.], abutting on
the Ems delta, lies an extensive sandbank called Nordland, whose
extreme western rim remains uncovered at the highest tides; the ef-
fect being to leave a C-shaped island, a mere paring of sand like a
boomerang, nearly two miles long, but only 150 yards or so broad. . . .
Such was Memmert, as I saw it on the chart. . . . (RS, 149–150)
Again, the reference to the reader (“The reader can see . . .”) followed by
the footnote to the map is noteworthy, as is the further remark, “as I saw
it on the chart,” linking reader and narrator / protagonist to quiet effect.
But all this is preliminary to the novel’s major set piece, a tour de force of
literary impressionism (also of sheer stamina), the episode told in
chapter 21, “Blindfold to Memmert,” in which Davies and Carruthers row
in their dinghy from Norderney to Memmert and back again, a total of
twenty-eight miles, in a blinding fog that totally obscures their

surroundings.
They did this, of course, with the aid of a chart and a compass (also a
clock), with Carruthers rowing, therefore facing toward the stern, while
Davies sat
vis-à-vis to me on the stern seat, his left hand behind him on the
tiller, his right forefinger on a small square of paper which lay on
his knees; this was a section cut out from the big German chart
(Chart B). On the midship-thwart between us lay the compass and
a watch. Between these three objects—compass, watch, and
chart—his eyes darted constantly, never looking up or out, save oc-
casionally for a sharp glance over the side at the flying b ubbles, to see
if I was sustaining a regular speed. My duty was to be his automaton,
the h uman equivalent of a marine engine whose revolutions can be
counted and used as data by the navigator. (RS, 197–198)
The route they must follow is complex, with shifting tides, depth of
water, and potential blockages; Davies studies the chart with great con-
centration. “What struck me most about him,” Carruthers adds, “was that
he never for a moment strained his eyes through the fog; a useless exer-
cise (for five yards or so was the radius of our vision) which, however, I
could not help indulging in, while I rested” (RS, 199). Davies has the sit-
uation in hand, and a first stage is successfully navigated. Carruthers
(that is, Childers) writes:
We had reached the eastern outlet of Memmert Balje, the channel

which runs east and west b ehind Juist Island, direct to the south
point of Memmert. How we had reached it was incomprehensible
to me at the time, but the reader w ill understand by comparing my
narrative with the dotted line on the chart. [Chart B gives their
route.] I add this brief explanation, that Davies’s method had been
to cross the channel called the Buse Tief, and strike the other side
of it at a point well south of the outlet of the Memmert Balje (in view
of the northward set of the ebb-tide), and then to drop back north
and feel his way to the outlet. (RS, 200; emphasis in original)
here is still a considerable distance to go, but at a certain point Davies

T
announces that success is assured; as he puts it, “It’s a mere question of
muscle” (RS, 202). Carruthers explains:
Note the spot marked “second rest” (approximately correct, Davies

says) and the course of the channel from that point westward. You
w ill see it broadening and deepening to the dimensions of a g reat
river, and finally merging in the estuary of the Ems. Note, too, that
its northern boundary, the edge of the now uncovered Nordland
Sand, leads with one interruption (marked A), direct to Memmert,
and is boomed throughout. You w ill then understand why Davies
made so light of the rest of his problem. Compared with the feats
he had performed it was child’s play. (RS, 202–203)
The return from Memmert is much more summarily narrated, but as

they reach the Dulcibella something untoward happens. They realize
that Dollmann and von Brüning are on board, and as Davies and Car-
ruthers pull up to their yacht, Dollmann, looking down at them, has his
features illuminated by the oblique rays of the green sidelight of von
Brüning’s launch. From Carruthers’s point of view, the meeting of Da-
vies and Dollmann could not have been better arranged:
No lineament of [Davies’s] face could have been visible to the latter,

while those pitiless green rays—you know their ravaging effect on
the human physiognomy—struck full on Dollmann’s face. It was my
first fair view of it at close quarters, and, secure in my background
of gloom, I feasted with a luxury of superstitious abhorrence on the
living smiling mask that for a few moments stooped peering down
towards Davies. One of the caprices of the crude light was to oblit-
erate, or at any rate so penetrate, beard and moustache, as to reveal
in outline lips and chin, the features which defects of character
are most surely betrayed, especially when your victim smiles. Ac-
cuse me, if you will, of stooping to melodramatic embroidery; ob-
ject that my own prejudiced fancy contributed to the result; but I
can, nevertheless, never efface the impression of malignant perfidy
and base passion, exaggerated to caricature, that I received in
t hose few instants. Another caprice of the light was to identify the
man with the portrait of him when younger and clean-shaven, in
the frontispiece of his own book. (RS, 220)
Not an upturned face, rather the opposite, but malignant and disfigured
(virtually shaven: cf. Crane, “The wind raised [razed] the tawny beard”),
and with the verb “efface” also in play, but what is equally fascinating
about the passage is Carruthers’s, that is to say, Childers’s, seeming aware-
ness that such an image sits oddly in his narrative, in which maps and
charts rather than f aces and corpses are the operative terms. “Enough! I
shall never offend again in this way,” the next paragraph begins (RS, 220).
What makes the row to Memmert and back the tour de force that I have
called it is the fact that it is conducted in a dense fog, which means that
the two men in the dinghy can see nothing beyond their immediate situ-
ation, which for all intents and purposes is equated with the piece of the
chart from which Davies barely lifts his eyes (and when he does so, it is
only to glance at the compass and the clock)—a chart that is also avail-
able to the reader and which the reader is repeatedly directed to peruse.
This has the effect, or at least the intent, of placing the reader and Davies
(or, say, the narrative) epistemologically on the same footing, and also of
associating the act of reading even more intimately than usual with that
of seeing—in this case, seeing the maps and charts on which Davies is re-
lying (cf. Conrad: “My task which I am trying to achieve . . .”). In ob-
vious respects, this is a much more sophisticated resort to maps than
Wells’s in The War of the Worlds (which conceivably influenced Childers),
but t here is a further development that goes beyond even the Memmert
adventure.
It takes place a fter Carruthers has broken off his journey to London
and started back toward Friesland; more precisely, it begins in Emden,
where at a bookstall Carruthers buys a pocket ordnance map of
Friesland on a much larger scale, he remarks, than anything he had used
before. Surprisingly, the reader may feel, the new, superior map is not re-
produced; instead, t here is this:
From Emden northwards [Carruthers is on a train] I used the same

map to aid my eyesight, and with its help saw in the gathering gloom
more heaths and bogs, once a great glimmering lake, and at inter-
vals cultivated tracts; a watery land as ever; pools, streams and
countless drains and ditches. Extensive woods w ere marked also,
but farther inland. We passed Norden at seven, just dark. I looked
out for the creek, and sure enough, we crossed it just before entering
the station. Its bed was nearly dry, and I distinguished barges lying
aground in it. (RS, 253)
In other words, the map is used by Carruthers to enable him to see various
features of the world around him that otherwise he might have missed,
including some, such as the “countless drains and ditches,” that one
cannot help but feel might be too small or incidental to be indicated on
the map (and in any case, the map surely did not indicate the glimmering
of the lake, which the syntax of the first sentence leaves open as a gram-
matical possibility). In the meantime, Carruthers reviews his earlier con-
versation with von Brüning (just before leaving for E ngland), and then
searches the ordnance map again,
standing up to get a better light and less jolting. T

here was the road
northwards from Esens to Bensersiel, passing through dots and
chess-board squares, the former meaning fen, the latter fields, so the
reference said. Something else, too, immediately caught my eye, and
that was a stream r unning to Bensersiel. I knew it at once for the
muddy stream or drain we had seen at the harbour, issuing through
the sluice or siel from which Bensersiel took its name. But it arrested
my attention now because it looked more prominent than I should
have expected. Charts are apt to ignore the geography of the main-
land, except in so far as it offers sea-marks to mariners. On the chart
this stream had been shown as a rough little corkscrew, like a
sucking-pig’s tail. On the ordnance map it was marked with a dark
blue line, was labelled “Benser Tief,” and was given a more reso-
lute course; bends became angles, and there were what appeared
to be artificial straightnesses at certain points. One of the threads
in my skein, the canal thread, tingled sympathetically, like a wire
charged with current. [Carruthers means that he had earlier become
interested in the canals, and now felt that that interest was justified.]
Standing astraddle on both seats, with the map close to the lamp, I
greedily followed the course of the “tief ” southward. (RS, 253–254)
Further on, hiding in an empty barge, he studies the map by match light,
discovering more villages ending in -siel, seven of which particularly at-
tract his attention—as he puts it, “seven blue lines on land, seven dotted
lines on the sea, seven islands in the offing” (RS, 259). In the morning he
decides to walk to Dornum for breakfast: “Then I should find a blue line
called the Neues Tief, leading on to Dornumersiel, on the coast. That ex-
plored I could pass on to Nesse, where there was another blue line to
Nessmersiel. All this was on the way to Norden” (RS, 260).
T here is more, but by now the point should be clear. In t hese pas-
sages, the map no longer supplements or helps describe, but actually
replaces the outside world (where Carruthers, going on with his explora-
tions, will find blue lines rather than canals). Because no illustration of the
ordnance map is provided, it would also be true to say that the map has
been entirely absorbed by or into Carruthers’s narrative and Childers’s
text—a feat of integration of map and writing, seeing and reading, that
makes The Riddle of the Sands not only a masterpiece of early spy fiction
but also a brilliantly creative contribution to the impressionist project.
n
A late story by Conrad, “The Tale” (1926), makes arresting reading
in the present connection.10 The narrative, far simpler than the two we
have just considered, begins with the image of a man and a w oman in
conversation in a long room (no further details provided); the man is
whispering urgently, presumably pressing his love for the woman, whose
murmured answers, it seems, are “of infinite sadness” (“T,” 155). She is
reclining on a couch; he, standing, wears some sort of uniform (naval, it
turns out). She asks him for a tale, recalling that before the war (presum-
ably the First World War) he had “a sort of art” in telling them (“T,” 158).
He obliges, explaining that in the early days of the war there was a com-
manding officer—himself, obviously—who was assigned to sail along cer-
tain coasts “to see—what he could see” (“T,” 164–165). (A Conradian
motif if t here ever was one: the theme of seeing—what he could see—runs
through the story from beginning to end. What Conrad could always see,
of course, was the page lying before him.) The man further explains that
night, blinding one “frankly,” was a relief; “but thick weather, though it
blinded one, brought no such relief. Mist is deceitful, the dead luminosity
of the fog is irritating. It seems that you ought to see” (“T,” 168; emphasis
in original). The next paragraphs read:
One gloomy, nasty day the ship was steaming along her beat in sight
of a rocky, dangerous coast that stood out intensely black like an
India-ink drawing on gray paper. Presently the second in command
spoke to his chief. He thought he saw something on the w ater, to
seaward. Small wreckage, perhaps.
“But there shouldn’t be any wreckage here, sir,” he remarked.
“No,” said the commanding officer. “The last reported subma-
rined ships were sunk a long way to the westward. But one never
knows. T here may have been o thers since then not reported nor
seen. Gone with all hands.” (“T,” 168–169)
The two men sailed close to the wreckage, and indeed, it was suspicious;
specifically, it suggested the presence in the vicinity of a neutral vessel that
had replenished the stores of an enemy submarine. After a short time a
heavy fog settled over the ship, or, as the narrator says, “A blind white
stillness took possession of the world” (“T,” 175)—a nother Conradian
motif, n eedless to say, erasing the India ink drawing, though this is not
spelled out.
Nevertheless, it proved possible to bring the ship to safety in a cove,
where after a few minutes it emerged that another ship was already lying
at anchor. The commanding officer and his mate w ere struck by the fact
that the latter ship had not signaled in any way as they had entered the
cove (the two vessels could easily have collided), and the commanding
officer sent a boarding party to check on the situation. The boarding of-
ficer returned with the information that the mysterious ship was a neu-
tral, carrying a cargo for an English port, “Papers and everything in per-
fect order. Nothing suspicious to be detected anywhere” (“T,” 182).
But the commanding officer could not escape the thought that this
might be the very ship that had been supplying some submarine or other,
and decided to go over himself and speak with the neutral master. He did
so, meeting on the afterdeck a bearded Northman, a round leather cap

on his head and his hands “rammed deep into the pockets of his short
leather jacket.” Then we read: “He kept them t here while he explained
that at sea he lived in the chart-room, and led the way there, striding care-
lessly” (“T,” 185). The two men proceed to the chart room, which is de-
scribed as follows:
The place was stuffy and hot. The usual chart-rack overhead was
full, and the chart on the t able was kept unrolled by an empty cup
standing on a saucer half-f ull of some spilt dark liquid. A slightly-
nibbled biscuit reposed on the chronometer-case. There w ere two
settees, and one of them had been made up into a bed with a pillow
and some blankets, which w ere now very much tumbled. The
Northman let himself fall on it, his hands still in his pockets.
(“T,” 186)
(The hands-in-pocket theme perhaps suggests that the Northman is not

to be understood as any sort of writer; the tale belongs to the captain.)
The Northman explained that he d idn’t know where he was, that the fog
had been after him for more than a week, and that his engines had broken
down (presumably they w ere now repaired), but throughout the conver-
sation the commanding officer was filled with suspicion, above all because
no sign of life had been given when his own ship entered the cove. Finally,
he had the foreign crew mustered for inspection, but this, too, proved in-
conclusive. Then:
He returned to the chart-room. The Northman had lingered behind

there; and something subtly different in his bearing, more bold in
his blue, glassy stare, induced the commanding officer to conclude
that the fellow had snatched at the opportunity to take another swig
at the b ottle he must have had concealed somewhere. (“T,” 194)
As their conversation continued, the commanding officer became more

than ever convinced that he was “faced by an enormous lie, solid like a
wall, with no way round to get at the truth, whose ugly murderous face
he seemed to see peeping over at him with a cynical grin” (“T,” 195). The
Northman repeated that he didn’t know where he was. The next para-
graph reads: “He looked around as if the very chart-room fittings were
strange to him. The commanding officer asked him whether he had not
seen any unusual objects floating about while he was at sea” (“T,” 195).
At this point the conversation became almost explicit, but the foreign
captain “never faltered. At that moment [the commanding officer] had
the certitude. The air of the chart-room was thick with guilt and false-
hood braving the discovery, defying s imple right, common decency,
all humanity of feeling, every scruple of conduct” (“T,” 198). More was
said, deepening the commanding officer’s intuition of the North-
man’s guilt, until at last—“walking along the deck with the Northman at
his elbow” (“T,” 201)—he ordered the latter to leave with his ship within
half an hour.
The Northman protested that he did not know where he was, where-
upon the commanding officer gave him his course: “Steer south-by-east-
half-east for about four miles and then you w ill be clear to haul to
eastward for your port. The weather will clear up before very long” (“T,”
202). Before the commanding officer had made it back to his ship, he
heard the foreign steamer preparing to leave.
Then “The Tale” reverts to the initial situation of the man speaking
to the woman; he explains that the course given to the Northman would
lead his ship to a deadly ledge of rock, which, in fact, it struck, with the
result that it sank. The man had thought of this, he further remarks, as a
“supreme test,” but in fact it proved nothing—the Northman and his crew
might have been guilty, but then again, they might not. “They all went
down; and I don’t know whether I have done stern retribution—or murder;
whether I have added to the corpses that litter the bed of the unreadable
sea the bodies of men completely innocent or basely guilty. I shall never
know” (“T,” 204). The w oman, moved, embraces him, but he disengages
himself, presses her hands to his lips, and departs.
So much for the events of the story. What I find more than a l ittle un-
canny, in the light of the impressionist motif of the map or chart (already
made unforgettable use of by Conrad in Heart of Darkness, as mentioned
earlier in connection with “Youth”), is the fact that the greater portion of
the commanding officer’s narrative is set in the foreign vessel’s chart room,
which not only is described in some detail (down to the open chart on
the table) but also, as has been seen, is rather pointedly referred to
throughout the narrative (the sentence about the chart room fittings
looking strange to the Northman is particularly striking). And yet, when
ordered to leave the safety of the cove despite the enveloping fog, the
Northman never asks the commanding officer to show him the path to safety
on one of the charts. Conrad tries to cover this inexplicable omission
by having the order given not in the chart room but on the deck, and in-
deed, to the best of my knowledge, no commentator on “The Tale” has
ever thought this worthy of remark. (Also to the point, perhaps, is the
suggestion that the Northman has been drinking.) Nonetheless, the omis-
sion is glaring, as Conrad must have been well aware. Put slightly differ-
ently, I am suggesting that up to a point, Conrad knew exactly what he was
doing: had the Northman asked to be shown his route on a chart, a request
that could not have been refused, it would instantly have been clear that
there were lethal rocks waiting for him, hence the need to have him re-
spond simply to the commanding officer’s verbal directions. But the stra-
tegic decision to situate almost all their conversation in the chart room,
and moreover to call attention to that highly charged locale in various
ways, invites the reader, as it w ere, over Conrad’s shoulder, to imagine
the chart that is never called for—the chart, to put it simply, that “The
Tale” silently and effectively erases.
n
A major novel of the period we have not yet considered, Rudyard
Kipling’s Kim (1901), gets under way in front of the Lahore Museum, called
by the natives the Wonder House.11 Kim (Kimball O’Hara), a thirteen-
year-old Irish orphan who has virtually raised himself, is at home in
Urdu, and can pass as native, is sitting astride a cannon when an ancient
Tibetan lama arrives by foot. Kim goes with him into the museum, where
the lama is warmly welcomed by the white-bearded English Curator; the
lama is greatly struck by the riches of the museum as well as by the Cura-
tor’s knowledge. The lama explains that he is on a pilgrimage in search
of a sacred river, and that his disciple, or chela, died in Kulu of a fever
(Kim, of course, w ill take his place). The Curator is obviously taken by
the lama, and without preamble, offers him a gift of “white English paper”
plus “sharpened pencils two and three—t hick and thin, all good for a
scribe” (K, 59). He then asks to see the lama’s spectacles, which turn out
to be heavily scratched; by coincidence, his own spectacles are almost
exactly the same power, and he gives them to the lama, who puts them
on and is delighted. “How clearly do I see!” he exclaims, to which the
Curator responds, “They be bilaur—crystal—and w ill never scratch”
(K, 60). In return, the lama gives the Curator his ancient iron pen case
(which also, we learn much l ater, can serve as an offensive weapon), and
then adds: “When I return, having found the River, I w ill bring thee a
written picture of the Padma Samthora such as I used to make on silk at
the lamassery.” The Curator, we read, would have detained him; “there
are few in the world who still have the secret of the conventional brush-
pen Buddhist pictures which are, as it w ere, half written and half drawn”
(K, 60). But the lama is anxious to resume his quest, and strides out,
followed by Kim. Note, though, how certain themes have been broached
without explanation: the good Eng lish paper and the pencils, the
crystal spectacles providing superb clarity of vision, the pen case (of a
scribe, evidently), the half-written and half-drawn Buddhist pictures—
all impressionist motifs simply as they stand. (In addition, the lama is
shown “a mighty map, spotted and traced with yellow,” on which the
curator points with his pencil to the location of various Buddhist holy
places, ending with “Kusinagara, sad place of the Holy One’s death”
[K, 56–57].)
In fact, the written picture to which the lama refers is a diagram, one
might say a map (it will later be called a chart), of the Buddhist universe,
featuring what the novel characterizes as the Wheel of Life (a phrase in
vented by Kipling, apparently); when the lama is not actually journeying
he “writes pictures” of the Wheel of Life, “three days to a picture,” as he
says at one point (K, 240). L ater, toward the end of the novel, two foreign
agents—one “visibly French” (K, 285), the other a Russian, both in the
service of Russia—encounter Kim and the lama in the hills, studying the
lama’s drawing that is spread out before them. The two agents are scouting
the region for a later incursion by Russian or Russian-backed forces in
the struggle between England and Russia for Afghanistan in the last de
cades of the nineteenth century, which the novel repeatedly calls “the
Great Game.” The Frenchman decides that he wants the lama’s picture,
and offers to buy it; the lama refuses, saying that it is being used for the
initiation of a novice, and also that he “may” draw him another. The lama
is offered money. Then:
The lama shook his head slowly and began to fold up the Wheel.
The Russian, on his side, saw no more than an unclean old man
haggling over a dirty piece of paper. He drew out a handful of ru-
pees, and snatched half-jestingly at the chart, which tore in the
lama’s grip. A low murmur of horror went up from the coolies—
some of whom were Spiti men and, by their lights, good Bud-
dhists. The lama r ose at the insult; his hand went to the heavy iron
pencase that is the priest’s weapon, and the Babu danced in agony.
“Now you see—you see why I wanted witnesses. They are highly
unscrupulous p eople. Oh, sar! sar! You must not hit holy man!”
[said by the babu, an English agent who had ingratiated himself with
the Russian and Frenchman in the hope of stealing their papers].
“Chela! He has defiled the Written Word!” [said by the lama
to Kim].
It was too late. Before Kim could warn him off, the Russian struck
the old man full on the face. Next instant he was rolling over and
over downhill with Kim at his throat. (K, 291; emphasis in original)
Without question, this is the novel’s climactic moment, the one episode
of unbridled violence, and what I want to emphasize is that the violence
is directed against both the lama’s written drawing (a kind of map or chart,
as I have said) and against his face, as if in this startling scene a certain
impressionist problematic comes to the fore with tremendous vividness.
A day later, we learn that once, when he was young, the lama had taken
part in a fight between Buddhist abessaries; the monks had wielded their
pencases, and an opponent had laid open the lama’s forehead to the bone.
A silvery scar remains, which the lama shows to Kim. As he reports, “Yes-
terday the scar itched, and after fifty years I recalled how it was dealt and
the face of him who dealt it” (K, 309). He goes on to explain that the span
of life in his body is almost spent. “Is it plain, chela?” he asks.
Kim stared at the brutally disfigured chart. From left to right diag-
onally the rent ran—from the Eleventh House were Desire gives
birth to the Child (as it is drawn by Tibetans)—across the human

and animal worlds, to the Fifth House—t he empty house of the
Senses. The logic was unanswerable. (K, 311)
So the lama’s face was disfigured even before the preceding day’s blow,
and the chart is seen by Kim to be “brutally disfigured”—again invoking
a motif, disfiguration, that we first encountered in “The Upturned Face,”
The Monster, and The Red Badge of Courage, as well as in texts by Conrad,
Wells, Norris, London, and Cunninghame Graham.12
I should also mention—it is wholly to the point—that much earlier in
the novel, Kim, the son of a sergeant in the English army, is in effect re-
cruited to the English secret service (the babu is well known to him), and
that an important part of his training involves the drawing of maps. “Thou
must learn how to make pictures of roads and mountains and rivers—to
carry t hese pictures in thine eye till a suitable time comes to set them upon
paper,” Kim is instructed by his chief mentor, Colonel Creighton (K, 166).
And later, he is ordered by Creighton to make a map of the city of Bikanir,
and by using a compass mainly a fter dark (so as not to be observed) “and
by the help of his little Survey paintbox of six colour-cakes and three
brushes” (K, 218), he succeeds in d oing so. For their part, the foreign
agents have been engaged in making maps of the territory they traversed.
In short, maps and charts play a significant role throughout the novel, if
by no means as continually present a one as in The War of the Worlds (for
the most part implicitly), or The Riddle of the Sands (with stunning ex-
plicitness), or, for that matter, “The Tale” (as it were, by omission).
n
Another major novel that should be mentioned at this point is Nor-
ris’s The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), which has for a frontispiece
a rather complexly detailed and notated map “of the country described
in ‘The Octopus,’ ” with various towns, ranches, houses, roads, trails, a
creek, trees of different species, boundary lines, telephone lines, a saloon
and grocery store, a railroad track, high and low ground, an irrigation
ditch, a watering tank, and an artesian well all marked clearly upon it
(Figure 14).13 The original of the map was drawn by Norris, who had
trained as an artist, and it immediately conveys a sense of the complicated
Fig. 14. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Doubleday,
Page & Co., 1901), illustration of “Map of the country described in ‘The Octopus,’ ”
engraving by L. L. Poates Eng’g Co., New York.
nature of the narrative to come; it seems possible that Norris imagined

the reader often turning from the narrative back to the map, in order to
visualize precisely the locale where the action about which he or she was
reading was taking place. Put perhaps too strongly, it is as though one
function of the narrative is continually to reactivate the map, which in a
certain sense, though of course only in a sense, contains in germ much of
the narrative to come.
Equally to the point is a second map in the novel, one that implicitly
gives The Octopus its name. At the start of book 2, not quite halfway
through the narrative, Lyman Derrick, a scion of the powerful Derrick

family, receives a great bundle of maps, one of which he spreads out on a
table and studies thoughtfully:
It was a commissioner’s official railway map of the State of California

completed to March 30th of that year. Upon it the different railways
of the State w ere accurately plotted in various colours, blue, green,
yellow. However, the blue, the yellow, and the green were but brief
traceries, very short, isolated, unimportant. At a little distance these
could hardly be seen. The whole map was gridironed by a vast,
complicated network of red lines marked P. and S.W.R.R. [for the
Pacific and South Western Railroad]. T hese centralised at San
Francisco and thence ramified and spread north, east, and south,
to every corner of the State. From Coles, in the topmost corner of
the map, to Yuma in the lowest, from Reno on one side to San Fran-
cisco on the other, ran the plexus of red, a veritable system of blood
circulation, complicated, dividing, and reuniting, branching, split-
ting, extending, throwing out feelers, off-shoots, tap roots, feeders—
diminutive little blood suckers that shot out from the main jugular
and went twisting up into some remote county, laying hold upon
some forgotten village or town, involving it in one of a myriad
branching coils, one of a hundred tentacles, drawing it, as it w ere,
toward that centre from which all this system sprang.
The map was white, and it seemed as if all the colour which
should have gone to vivify the various counties, towns, and cities
marked upon it had been absorbed by that huge, sprawling organism,
with its ruddy arteries converging to a central point. It was as
though the State had been sucked white and colourless, and
against this pallid background the red arteries of the monster stood
out, swollen with life-blood, reaching out to infinity, gorged to
bursting; an excrescence, a gigantic parasite fattening upon the life-
blood of an entire commonwealth.
However, in an upper corner of the map appeared the names of
the three new commissioners: Jones McNish for the first district,
Lyman Derrick for the second, and James Darrell for the third. (O,
805–806)
As the remainder of the novel makes clear, the imagery of this passage
graphically expresses the implacable rapaciousness of the railroad mono
poly that goes on to dominate the wheat farmers of the region, and my
point is simply that this could not have been done with comparable force
and economy in the absence of the i magined map. Indeed, it seems pos
sible that one function of the literal map immediately preceding the nar-
rative is to key the reader to the importance of maps, hence to prepare
the ground for the paragraphs just quoted.
n
One somewhat odd feature of the present book is that although it gets
under way by summarizing various aspects of Stephen Crane’s impres-
sionism, and indeed, suggests that Crane’s writerly practices are not only
representative of, but in a sense definitive for, the understanding of literary
impressionism generally, only a few examples of his work—mainly, the
upturned face passages from “The Upturned Face,” The Monster, and
The Red Badge of Courage—are cited and discussed. The reason for this,
of course, is that What Was Literary Impressionism? is anchored in the
long chapter titled “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces” in my 1987 book
on Eakins and Crane, which includes numerous, often long quotations
from a wide range of Crane’s texts, and concludes by reprinting verbatim
an entire story, “The Veteran.” It seems appropriate, therefore, to intro-
duce several paragraphs from a late story by Crane, “Death and the Child,”
loosely based on Crane’s experience as a correspondent covering the
Greco-Turkish war of 1897.14 The protagonist of the story is Peza, a cor-
respondent for an Italian newspaper who has a Greek f ather, who yearns
to get involved in the fighting; the other key “character” is a child, too
young to understand what he is witnessing, whose parents apparently left
him behind when they fled in terror. The last paragraph of the second
section (of seven) of the story reads:
The battle lines writhed at times in the agony of a sea-creature on

the sands. These tentacles flung and waved in a supreme excitement
of pain, and the struggles of the great outlined body brought it nearer
and nearer to the child. Once he looked at the plain [from the ele-
vation where he was playing] and saw some men r unning wildly
across a field. He had seen p

eople chasing obdurate beasts in such
fashion, and it struck him immediately that it was a manly t hing
which he would incorporate in his game. Consequently, he rushed
furiously at his stone sheep, flourishing a cudgel, crying the shep-
herd calls. He paused frequently to get a cue of manner from the
soldiers fighting on the plain. He reproduced, to a degree, any
movements which he accounted rational to his theory of sheep-
herding, the business of men, and traditional and exalted living of
his father. (“DC,” 950–951)15
Not a map but a horizontal plane, with writhing lines and a g reat outlined
body moving nearer to the child. Note, by the way. the similarity of the
sea creature image to the “stranded sea-creature writhing its slowly
feeling limbs,” leaving “grooved traces in the sand,” perceived by Willie
Leadford in the immediate aftermath of the Change in In the Days of the
Comet—“sea-creature” being an exemplary instance of the s / c doublet
in Crane.
The other paragraphs I wish to cite come from section 5, which
begins with Peza climbing slowly to the high infantry position, which is
to say, to the same viewpoint occupied by the child. Thus we read:
At the top of the hill he came immediately upon a part of the line
that was in action. Another battery of mountain guns was h ere firing
at the streaks of black on the plain. There were trenches filled with
men lining parts of the crest, and near the base were other trenches,
all crashing away mightily. The plain stretched as far as the eye
could see, and from where silver mist ended this emerald ocean of
grass, a great ridge of snow-topped mountains poised against a fleck-
less blue sky. Two knolls, green and yellow with grain, sat on the
prairie confronting the dark hills of the Greek position. Between
them were the lines of the e nemy. A row of trees, a village, a stretch
of road, showed faintly on this great canvas, this tremendous pic-
ture; but men, the Turkish battalions, were emphasized startlingly
upon it. The ranks of troops between the knolls and the Greek po-
sition were black as ink. The first line, of course, was muffled in
smoke, but at the rear of it battalions crawled up and to and fro
plainer than beetles on a plate. Peza had never understood that

masses of men w ere so declarative, so unmistakable, as if nature
makes every arrangement to give information of the coming and the
presence of destruction, the end, oblivion. The firing was full, com-
plete, a roar of cataracts, and this pealing of connected volleys
was adjusted to the grandeur of the far-off range of snowy moun-
tains. Peza, breathless, pale, felt that he had been set upon a pillar
and was surveying mankind, the world. In the meantime dust had
got in his eye. He took his handkerchief and mechanically admin-
istered to it. (“DC,” 957–958)
And a page or so later:
“Look, sir,” cried an officer once to Peza. Thin smoke was drifting
lazily before Peza, and, dodging impatiently, he brought his eyes to
bear on that part of the plain indicated by the officer’s finger. The
enemy’s infantry was advancing to attack. From the black lines had
come forth an inky mass, which was s haped much like a human
tongue. It advanced slowly, casually, without apparent spirit, but
with an insolent confidence that was like a proclamation of the
inevitable.
The impetuous part was all played by the defensive side. Offi-
cers called, men plucked each other by the sleeve; there were shouts,
motions; all eyes were turned upon the inky mass which was flowing
toward the base of the hills, heavily, languorously, as oily and thick
as one of the streams that ooze through a swamp. (“DC,” 959)
Again, not quite a map (“a g reat canvas,” it is called), but certainly a vista
seen largely from above (in perspective, so to speak), and what is imme-
diately striking is the consistent metaphorics of black lines and ink, as well
as the characterization of the masses of men viewed from on high as “so
declarative, so unmistakable,” as if nature were doing its best to convey
the relevant information about the destruction in train. I would further
suggest that the insistence on slowness—the battalions “crawl[ing] up and
to and fro,” the slowly advancing inky mass (shaped like a human
tongue!)—is keyed to the pace of writing, specifically, to the reportedly
slow rhythm with which Crane, pen in hand, produced the “microscopic
black trails over the immense sheets of paper that he affected” (the report
is by Ford, but is confirmed by others).16 (“Languorous,” it will be remem-
bered, is an epithet that describes the downward progress of the burning
chemicals that destroy Henry Johnson’s face in The Monster.)
One further point, already made explicit in the Introduction but worth
spelling out once more, is that according to my account of Crane’s project,
he himself was unaware of the continual reference and relation in his prose
to what I have called the scene of writing, as counterintuitive as that may
seem in the context of the paragraphs I have just cited. Let me be more
precise: of course Crane would have been aware that his reference to the
“lines” of Turkish infantry related metaphorically to lines in a drawing
or painting and presumably also a piece of writing, just as his image of
the oily thickness of the inky mass in the last of the paragraphs may be
taken as an allusion to the thickness and texture of printer’s ink, with
which he would have been familiar. By the same token, there is no reason
to think that he would not have been conscious to a greater or lesser de-
gree of his frequent resort to alliteration, his relish for onomatopoeia, his
feeling for dialect, his passion for effects of black and white (especially
black), his fascination with snakes and fire, his interest in numbers, the
emphasis on e very page of his work on the most superlative visual acuteness
and graphic clarity, and possibly even his predilection for upward-facing
corpses with disfigured faces, or indeed, living persons in a similar
bodily position—Henry Johnson, for example. (Would he, though, have
been aware of his predilection for word pairs beginning with s and c? It
is impossible to be sure.) But there is a difference between his being
more or less aware of t hese and related aspects of his inimitable “style”
and his fully recognizing the terms and nature of his larger project, a
recognition that I suggest is always in his writing, I mean virtually ev-
erywhere, threatening to break through to surface consciousness, if I
may so put it; and yet, the sustaining of his project, the continued pro-
duction of his amazing texts, depends on his never quite acknowledging
to himself that (for example) the true subject and meaning of “The Up-
turned Face” is nothing other than the writing sentence by sentence of
“The Upturned Face.” Crane’s literary enterprise therefore differs fun-
damentally from Wells’s in this regard, quite apart from the enormous
difference in tone between their respective texts, along with the consider-
able disparity in level of achievement, Crane being, in my estimation, one

of the supreme masters of English / American prose.
This is what makes Norris’s “A Memorandum of Sudden Death” such
an astonishing critical performance: he really does seem to have under-
stood what Crane was up to “better” than Crane himself. For that m atter,
Norris’s “colossal invisible pillar” that Karslake imagines rising over the
Face of the W
aters on the Eve of Creation may owe more than a little to
Peza’s sense of having been “set on a pillar . . . surveying mankind, the
world” (in other words, I take Norris to have been intimately familiar with
“Death and the Child”). Note, too, that Peza tends to his eye “mechani-
cally,” another loaded notion in “A Memorandum” (where the key term
is “machinery”) and related impressionist texts.
n
One last map, taking up a half dozen or more intense pages in
chapter 11 of Hudson’s Green Mansions, should be mentioned.17 We are
roughly halfway through the book. Rima leads the narrator up the g reat
hill or mountain Ytaioa, which turns out to have a flat top with only a l ittle
vegetation. Then she walks to the center of the level area; he follows and
gazes round at the wide prospect spread out around him. “The day was
windless and bright,” he reports,
with only a few white clouds floating at a g reat height above and
casting travelling shadows over that wild, broken country, where
forest, marsh, and savannah w ere only distinguishable by their dif
ferent colours, like the greys and greens and yellows on a map. At a
great distance the circle of the horizon was broken here and there
by mountains, but the hills in our neighbourhood were all beneath
our feet. (GM, 150)
Rima turns to him and excitedly waves her hand to indicate “the whole
circuit of earth,” and says, “Do you see how large it is?”—and starts to
name the mountains, a river, hills, “all the mountains and rivers within
sight.” She says,
That is all. B
ecause we can see no further. But the world is larger
than that! Other mountains, other rivers. Have I not told you of Voa,
on the River Voa, where I was born, where mother died, where the
priest taught me, years, years ago? All that you cannot see, it is so
far away—so far. (GM, 150–151)
The narrator replies:
“The world is so large, Rima, that we can only see a very small por-
tion of it from any one spot. Look at this,” and with a stick I had
used to aid me in my ascent I traced a circle six or seven inches in
circumference on the soft stone and in its centre placed a small
pebble. “This represents the mountain we are standing on,” I con-
tinued, touching the pebble; “and this line encircling it encloses
all of the earth we can see from the mountain-top. Do you
understand?—the line I have traced is the blue line of the horizon
beyond which we cannot see. And outside of this little circle is all
the flat top of Ytaioa representing the world. Consider, then, how
small a portion of the world we can see from this spot!”
“And do you know it all?’ she returned excitedly. “All the world?”
waving her hand to indicate the little stone plain. “All the moun-
tains, and rivers, and forests—a ll the people in the world?”
“That would be impossible, Rima; consider how large it is.”
“That does not matter. Come, let us go together—we two and
grandfather, and see all the world; all the mountains and forests, and
know all the p eople.” (GM, 151–152)
What this leads to is a demand from Rima that he make clear to her what
is “there—and there—and there—” (GM, 153), pointing in different direc-
tions. And he does his best, at one point using his own back with its
spine as a kind of map, but finally “walking about and . . . moving and
setting up stones and tracing boundary and other lines” (GM, 155),
marking out Venezuela, showing by means of a long line how it is divided
by the Orinoco, and using the stones to represent Caracas and other large
towns. Then, in a burst of inspiration, he describes the “world-long, stu-
pendous chain” of the Cordilleras and the sea of Titicata—at last showing
her Cuzco, “the city of the sun, and the highest dwelling-place of men on
earth” (GM, 156). Much more remained, of course, including “all that
unimaginable space east of the Andes; the rivers—what rivers!—the

green plains that are like the sea—the illimitable waste of water where
there is no land—and the forest region” (GM, 157). Finally, after reaching
the Atlantic coast with its thundering waves, he remarks:
Never proba bly since old Father Noah divided the earth among his
sons had so g rand a geog raphical discourse been delivered; and
having finished, I sat down, exhausted with my efforts, and mopped
my brow, but glad that my huge task was over, and satisfied that I
had convinced her of the futility of her wish to see the world for her-
self. (GM, 158)
Of course, Rima’s wish to see and learn more is not satisfied, but the nar-
rator’s inspired efforts, which I have had to summarize, produce one of
the most original maps in the impressionist literature, keyed explicitly as
it is to vision and its physical limits, and utilizing as it does the world it-
self as a means of representing the world’s extent—the latter a Hudsonian
trope, it hardly needs pointing out.18
Chapter Seven
The Writing of Revolution

N
A s us ua l f or C on r ad, sales of The Secret Agent were modest (in

England, fewer than 3,000 copies in five years). For a time, he worked
on another novel, Chance, begun long before and which he finally put by
in order to concentrate on the fiction that became Under Western Eyes.
Like Nostromo, U nder Western Eyes—which began as a short story called
“Razumov”—caused Conrad immense difficulties; reading the detailed
account of his labors on different drafts and revisions in the recent Cam-
bridge Edition volume is excruciating.1 (He seems to have averaged about
400 words per day. The editors comment, “This is so few words that he
must have spent much of every day gazing at what he had just written”
[UWE, 318]—or indeed, at the otherwise blank page.) With characteristic
determination he persisted to the end, at the cost of a nervous breakdown;
Under Western Eyes began to appear in installments in both the English
Review and the North American Review in December 1910 and was pub-
lished in book form in England and the United States in October 1911. In
fact, it was highly praised by numerous reviewers, though Conrad was
frustrated by aspects of the commentary it drew, and in any case, its sales
were unimpressive. (When Chance came out in 1913, Conrad at last found
the success he craved; I shall have something to say about a key scene in
Chance in a footnote to the last chapter of this book.)
228
The Writing of Revolution 229
Structurally, Under Western Eyes is Conrad’s most ambitious and in

many respects his most challenging book; although the story line is gen-
erally known, a fairly detailed summary is nevertheless called for. The
protagonist is Kyrilo Sidorovitch Razumov, a university student in Saint
Petersburg of obscure parentage and slender means; it emerges that he is
the illegitimate son of Prince K——, to whom he was introduced on one
occasion by the lawyer managing his “modest but very sufficient allow-
ance” (UWE, 13), and to whom he turns at a crucial moment in the
narrative. Razumov is a loner and taciturn, a good listener, regarded as
trustworthy by his fellows; he has ambitions to compete for a silver medal
and thus to lay the foundation for a c areer, when one evening, another stu-
dent whom he barely knows, Victor Haldin, appears in his room and re-
veals that it is he who had committed a political assassination (of a Mr. de
P——) that had taken place earlier that day. On the basis of nothing more
than Razumov’s reserved demeanor, Haldin had persuaded himself that
Razumov must share his radical views and would aid him in escaping the
authorities. (Something about Razumov’s manner inspires “confidence,”
Haldin tells him; this w ill be a central motif in what follows.) Razumov
is appalled, but agrees to go to the dwelling of one Ziemianitch, “a sort of
town-peasant who had got on” (UWE, 21) and who had agreed to take
Haldin out of Saint Petersburg in a sledge; however, when Razumov ar-
rives he finds Ziemianitch in a drunken stupor and, venting his rage and
frustration, beats him savagely. (One of Conrad’s tremendous novelistic
strengths is to make scenes like this thoroughly credible, without seeking
to explain his characters’ precise motivations.) On the way back to his
room through falling snow, Razumov broods on the situation in which he
has been placed; fired with resentment, he decides to go to the palace of
Prince K——and lay the facts before him, understanding perfectly well
that this almost certainly will lead to Haldin’s arrest. The prince quickly
takes him to the office of a general, a government official, where Razumov
explains what has happened. When he returns to his room, an intense
conversation leads Haldin to recognize that Razumov is not sympathetic,
and he takes himself off into the snowy night. Razumov writes a few lines
on a piece of paper and stabs the paper to the wall. The next day he learns
that Haldin has been captured, and he himself is sent for by a government
official, one Councillor Mikulin. Their conversation, which strongly re-

calls t hose between Raskolnikov and Porphyry in Crime and Punishment
(as has always been recognized), leads to Razumov saying that he wishes
“to retire”—to which Mikulin softly asks, “Where to?” (UWE, 82).
This brings the reader to the novel’s part second, where the setting
shifts abruptly to Geneva. In fact, part first began with the novel’s nar-
rator, an older Englishman resident in Geneva who had been for many
years a teacher of languages, introducing himself to the reader and ex-
plaining that the narrative to follow is based on a document written in
Russian and “something in the nature of a journal, a diary, yet not exactly
that in its actual form” (UWE, 11). (The journal or diary is Razumov’s, of
course.) Now, in part second, the narrator steps forward once more, and
in fact begins to play an active role in the narrative, for Geneva is tempo-
rary home to Haldin’s m other and his s ister Natalia, whom the teacher of
languages knows and admires (his feelings for Natalia are especially
strong). Razumov turns up t here as well, and though it is never stated in
so many words, the reader divines that he has accepted a mission from
Mikulin to spy on the various revolutionaries who are gathered in the city,
including, above all, the burly, black-coated, and bearded Peter Ivanovitch
(no surname given), famous throughout Europe owing to a book relating
his escape from prison, as well as for his professed feminism. Others are
Madame de S——, a mystically inclined hysteric who forms a public
couple with Peter Ivanovitch; eventually, Sophia Antonovna, the one ded-
icated revolutionary we meet, and a deeply sympathetic character; and
eventually, too, the dreadful Nikita / Necator, a notorious assassin who
will later be revealed to have been a double agent. (The center of their
activity is the Château Borel. A basic appurtenance of Peter Ivanovitch is
his dark blue glasses hiding his eyes; they are mentioned often throughout
the novel.) At the beginning of the chapter, Haldin’s mother and sister be-
lieve he is still alive, but then the teacher of languages sees the announce-
ment of his arrest in an English newspaper and feels he must inform them
of that fact. It also turns out that Natalia received a letter from her b rother
written before the killing of the government official, in which Razumov
was mentioned as a man of “unstained, lofty, and solitary existence”
(UWE, 109); ironically, the description somewhat fits Razumov, but not
in the way that Haldin imagines. Razumov turns up in Geneva, and
without seeking out Haldin’s sister—it is clear that he would much prefer
not to confront her—makes her acquaintance at the Château Borel, where
she has gone in the hope of meeting him. She naturally wishes to speak
with him about her brother, and is puzzled by his failure to meet with her
again or visit her and her mother. Toward the end of part second, a long
and intense conversation takes place between Razumov and the teacher
of languages, in the course of which the latter urges Razumov to visit the
two w omen “fairly often” (UWE, 153), much to the latter’s consternation—
it is plainly (the reader understands) the last thing he wishes to do, and
his seeming reluctance, his fierce mood, is unreadable to the older man,
who nevertheless senses that t here is something e lse under his “scorn and
impatience” (UWE, 154). Part second ends with Razumov having turned
his back on the teacher as he stares at the rushing w ater under the par-
apet of the bridge.
Part third opens there, but presently, Razumov takes a streetcar to the
Château Borel, where he encounters Peter Ivanovitch in his black coat and
dark glasses and has a series of conversations with him, then with his
Egeria, Madame de S——, toward whom he feels nothing short of abhor-
rence, then with Peter Ivanovitch once more, e very word of which on the
conspirators’ part is based on a fundamental misapprehension of Razu-
mov’s role in the Haldin affair and indeed of his political commitments.
Leaving, Razumov encounters an older w oman with frightened eyes and
puckered face, the so-called lady companion, Tekla, who also serves to
take dictation from Peter Ivanovitch, a dreadful ordeal by her account
(it has already emerged that Peter Ivanovitch and Mme. de S—— treat her
foully). More conspirators arrive, including, crucially, Sophia Antonovna,
an older woman with vivid black eyes and thick white hair (as the reader
is repeatedly informed) with whom Razumov had earlier spent a few days
in Zurich, and the monstrous, squeaky-voiced Nikita, nicknamed Necator.
There follows a very long and marvelously i magined conversation between
Razumov and Sophia Antonovna, a dedicated revolutionary, as well as a
threatening exchange with the hostile Nikita; among other things, Sophia
Antonovna informs Razumov that word has reached them of the beating
of Ziemianitch (she thinks by “some police-hound in disguise” [UWE,
217]) and of Ziemianitch’s having hanged himself (in remorse, she
suggests). Razumov leaves, and walking toward the town, encounters
another figure, the diminutive editor Julius Laspara, who apropos of

nothing urges him to write (“Write in Russian. We’ll have it translated,”
Laspara says [UWE, 221]). Coming after his exchanges with Sophia An-
tonovna, this has a galvanic effect on Razumov, and structurally speaking,
it represents a decisive moment in the novel. Thus, we read:
The insistence of the celebrated subversive journalist rankled in his

mind strangely. Write. Must write! He! write! A sudden light flashed
upon him. To write was the very t hing he had made up his mind to
do that day. He had made up his mind irrevocably to that step and
then had forgotten all about it. That incorrigible tendency to escape
from the grip of the situation was fraught with serious danger. He
was ready to despise himself for it. What was it? Levity, or deep-
seated weakness? Or an unconscious dread? . . . (UWE, 221)
The thought of writing evokes the thought “of a place to write in, of
shelter, of privacy” (UWE, 222), and this leads him to cross another bridge
to the islet where Rousseau lived and wrote, and where t here is indeed a
bronze statue of Rousseau seated on its pedestal. He drops down into a
garden seat, takes out of his pocket a fountain pen and a small notebook,
and begins to write; when he is done, he tears out the pages. It is only
now that the reader is in a position to understand that the manuscript (a
kind of diary or journal) that the teacher of languages has been basing his
narrative upon was most likely composed by Razumov in that notebook,
though it is never made clear exactly when and where the bulk of the com-
position is to be i magined as having been done.
Part fourth begins by flashing back to the moment in his office when
Mikulin asked, “Where to?” and narrates the events of the next several
weeks, culminating in a note from Mikulin (in effect, countersigned by
Prince K——) inviting Razumov to meet him “at a certain address in town
which seemed to be that of an oculist” (UWE, 232). (A sheerly impres-
sionist detail, consistent with the ultimate title of the novel.) The upshot
is that Razumov agrees to leave Saint Petersburg for Geneva, which is
where we next find him, “pacing to and fro u nder the trees of the little
island, all alone with the bronze statue of Rousseau” (UWE, 241). He goes
on to buy an envelope in which to post the torn-out pages to Mikulin (this
ill be his first report on the conspirators), and as he leaves the shop, the
w
teacher of languages catches sight of him and is struck by his expression.
In the teacher’s words:
The Westerner in me [a major theme of the novel] was discomposed.

There was something shocking in the expression of that face. Had
I been myself a conspirator, a Russian political refugee, I could per-
haps have been able to draw some practical conclusion from this
chance glimpse. As it was it only discomposed me strongly, even to
the extent of awakening an indefinite apprehension in regard to
Natalia Haldin. (UWE, 242)
The teacher of languages calls on the Haldins and discovers Natalia

wearing a black veil and about to go out to find Razumov. It emerges that
she has been meeting daily with Razumov, and that just that evening she
had told her m other that Razumov was in Geneva, at which news her
mother insisted that “this friend of her Victor” (UWE, 247) be brought
to them. Together, Natalia and the teacher go to the Hotel Cosmopolitan,
where Peter Ivanovitch has rooms on the top floor, the idea being that he
would know how to find Razumov; they go up in a lift, she knocks on the
door, and the door is opened “by a short, black-eyed woman in a red
blouse with a g reat lot of nearly white hair” (UWE, 249)—Sophia An-
tonovna, evidently. The conspirators are waiting for Peter Ivanovitch,
who enters, wearing his dark glasses, and takes Natalia’s hand in both of
his (they have been wanting to draw Natalia into their circle, but she has
fastidiously stood aloof). The most striking feature of the room is a large
map of Russia spread on a table under an electric bulb with a porcelain
shade pulled down low over it (the map, also said to be of “the Baltic
provinces” (UWE, 251), is mentioned four times). A fter Natalia and the
teacher leave, they seek Razumov unsuccessfully at the shop above which
he lives (Natalia having been given the address by Sophia Antonovna),
and when they return to her and her m other’s apartment they learn that
Razumov is there. He has been closeted with Natalia’s m other, but
now he returns to the anteroom, where the teacher of languages is struck
by a change in Razumov’s face from its appearance earlier that day—
in part icu lar, his eyes now bear “the shadow of something consciously
evil” (UWE, 257). At this point a long and painful conversation between
Razumov and Natalia takes place, Razumov for the most part fixing his
eyes on the floor, Natalia speaking throughout on the assumption that
Razumov was faithful to her brother. It emerges that Razumov from the
first was strongly attracted to her, and that his feelings were perhaps re-
ciprocated (again, this is indicated rather than spelled out, but the teacher
of languages divines it), and finally, Razumov, unable to bear the situa-
tion, says:
“An hour after I saw you first I knew how it would be. The terrors
of remorse, revenge, confession, anger, hate, fear, are like nothing
to the atrocious temptation which you put in my way the day that
you appeared before me with your voice, with your face, in the
garden of that accursed villa.”
She looked utterly bewildered for a moment, then with a sort of
despairing insight went straight to the point.
“The story, Kirylo Sidorovitch, the story!”
“There is no more to tell!” He made a movement forward, and
she actually put her hand on his shoulder to push him away but her
strength failed her and he kept his ground though trembling in every
limb. “It ends here—on this very spot.” He pressed a denuncia-
tory finger to his breast with force, and became perfectly still.
(UWE, 269)
Natalia rises, totters, and the teacher of languages leads her into the
drawing room, where Mrs. Haldin is sitting. “Miss Haldin stopped,” we
are told, “and pointed mournfully at the tragic immobility of her mother,
who seemed to watch a beloved head lying in her lap” (UWE, 269). (This
is the second time within a few pages that she is described in those terms.)
Back in the white anteroom, the teacher sees Razumov stooping to snatch
up the black veil dropped by Natalia, press it to his face with both hands,
and almost instantly vanish.
Back in his room, Razumov takes “the book of his compromising
record” (UWE, 271) from a locked drawer and sits down to write. The
next several pages are a verbatim transcription of what he wrote, all of
which is addressed to Natalia. They include the remarks,
You were appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself

back into truth and peace. You! And you have done it the same way,
too, in which [your brother] ruined me: by forcing upon me your
confidence. Only what I detested him for, in you ended by appearing
noble and exalted. (UWE, 272)
And:
Suddenly you stood before me! You alone in all the world to whom
I must confess. You fascinated me—you have freed me from the
blindness of anger and hate—the truth shining in you drew the truth
out of me. Now I have done it; and as I write h ere, I am in the depths
of anguish, but t here is air to breathe at last—air. (UWE, 274)
Finally, he stops, wraps the book in the black veil, makes up a parcel to
be sent to Miss Haldin, and then flings the pen away. Outside, a storm is
in progress, but he goes to Laspara’s house, where he knows the conspira-
tors are to be found, and explains—confesses—his role in Haldin’s cap-
ture. The denouement follows quickly: Nikita nicknamed Necator has
him seized, then bursts his eardrums in both ears with tremendous blows
and has him thrown into the street. Deaf and confused, he fails to hear
the bell of a tramcar and is run down and severely injured; “Je suis sourd,”
he says, just before passing out. Tekla finds him and takes his head on
her lap; “her scared faded eyes avoided looking at his deathlike face”
(UWE, 281).
Two weeks after Mrs. Haldin’s death (no date given), the teacher of lan-
guages has a last conversation with Natalia, who is about to return to
Russia; she hands him the book sent to her by Razumov, which the teacher
will use to write his narrative. He tells us that two years after that, his
information was brought up to date through a conversation with “a much
trusted woman revolutionist” (UWE, 286), Sophia Antonovna, who tells
him that Natalia is living in a town in the center of Russia doing what good
she can in overcrowded jails and bereaved homes, and that Razumov, in
declining health, is in an obscure town in the south, being looked a fter
by Tekla. She also tells him that Nikita turned out to be a betrayer, and
that Peter Ivanovitch has united himself to a peasant girl. The teacher
expresses his scorn for Peter Ivanovitch, to which Sophia Antonovna

replies, “Peter Ivanovitch is an inspired man” (UWE, 289)—the last
words in the novel.
My commentary will be pursued under three broad headings: erasure,
a key word, and the relation of the reader to the page (also f aces, eyes,
seeing, black and white).
Erasure. As is perhaps already clear, the project (or arche project) of
erasure is at work throughout Under Western Eyes on a number of different
levels. Most obviously, there is the need for Razumov to confess—above
all, to Natalia Haldin, and thereby achieve a kind of peace and equanimity
after his betrayal of her b rother. (Needless to say, the islet of Rousseau
evokes the thought of the philosopher’s Confessions.) And in fact, after de-
nouncing himself to Natalia, he returns through heavy rain to the shop
above which he lives. As the man in the shop is about to pass him the key
to his room, “he only observed, just to say something—‘You’ve got very
wet.’ ‘Yes, I am washed clean,’ muttered Razumov, who was dripping from
head to foot” (UWE, 271). Not surprisingly, given the force and momentum
of the narrative, and indeed, the strength of Conrad’s obsession with era-
sure, such a washing—a mere drenching—is not enough to provide the
desired climax. Thus, Razumov proceeds to Laspara’s h ouse and de-
nounces himself once more, ostensibly to remove suspicion from Ziemi-
anitch; after some brief discussion among the conspirators, Razumov is
seized and pinned against a wall,
while Nikita, taking up a position a little on one side, deliberately

swung off his enormous arm. Razumov looking for a knife in his
hand saw it come at him open, unarmed—and received a tremen-
dous blow on the side of his head over his ear. At the same time he
heard a faint, dull, detonating sound as if someone had fired a pistol
on the other side of the wall. . . .
“Turn his face the other way,” the paunchy terrorist directed, in
an excited, gleeful squeak.
Razumov could struggle no longer. He was exhausted; he had to
watch passively the heavy open hand of the brute descend again in
a degrading blow over his other ear. It seemed to split his head in
two—and all at once the men holding him became perfectly
silent—soundless as shadows. In silence they pulled him brutally
to his feet, rushed with him noiselessly down the staircase and
opening the door flung him out into the street.
He fell forward and at once rolled over and over helplessly, g oing
down the short slope together with the rush of r unning rain water.
He came to rest in the roadway of the street at the bottom, lying on
his back with a great flash of lightning over his face—a vivid, silent
flash of lightning which blinded him utterly. (UWE, 279–280)
Conrad’s solution, in other words, is to use deafness, or rather the act of

making deaf—bursting Razumov’s eardrums—to achieve a truly powerful
effect of erasure, and for the first time in Conrad’s fiction, I cannot escape
the suspicion that possibly—proba bly—he himself understood Nikita-
Necator’s action in t hese terms. I mean, I cannot escape the feeling that
in the course of writing Under Western Eyes (or perhaps somewhat ear-
lier, by the time he had finished The Secret Agent), Conrad might well have
come to some sort of explicit or semi-explicit understanding that figures
and effects of erasure w ere important to him. And of course, if this was
the case, it would have been a momentous development with respect to
his activity as a writer. T
here will be more to say about the nature of Con-
rad’s self-understanding as we proceed. The name “Necator,” I need
hardly add, is about as close as Conrad could come to the word “Negater,”
an apt designation for a figure who stands for nothing but assassination
and betrayal for their own sakes, which further suggests that possibly
Conrad thought of his loathsome creation as a virtual personification of
erasure, which he surely is.
There is a further dimension to the choice of deafness as the climactic
figure for erasure. Normally, if such a notion makes sense in this context,
Conrad would have found a visual image to stand for erasure—A lmayer’s
expressionless face, or the small piles of sand obliterating Nina’s foot-
prints, or Marlow’s last sight of Jim, all in white with the stronghold of
the night behind him, or Leggatt’s floppy hat in the water (that “saving
mark”), or Bunter with his black hair turned white, or the whiteness of a
wall with no writing on it, or, in the last sentence of Nostromo, the cloud
like a mass of solid silver overhanging the Golfo Placido—so why not here?
The answer goes back to part first, specifically, to Razumov’s nighttime
trek through falling snow to Ziemianitch’s dwelling, and then his visit to
Prince K——, interview with the General, and eventual return to his
rooms. (Once again, as often in this book, it becomes necessary to quote

at considerable length. Only by doing so is it possible to sufficiently
exhibit the evidence required for certain interpretive claims to be per-
suasive.) Just before Razumov embarks on his mission, Haldin “threw
himself full length on Razumov’s bed and putting the backs of his hands
over his eyes remained perfectly motionless and silent. Not even the
sound of his breathing could be heard” (UWE, 26). Razumov leaves,
locking the door and putting the key in his pocket. The next section be-
gins, “The words and events of that evening must have been graven as
if with a steel tool on Mr Razumov’s brain since he was able to write his
relation with such fulness and precision a good many months afterwards”
(UWE, 26)—further proof that we are to think of the diary or journal as
having been written over some period of time.
There follows an account of his thoughts and feelings as he proceeds
through the falling snow, with sledges gliding past “phantom-like and jin-
gling through a fluttering whiteness on the black face of the night,” and
rare passersby who “came upon him suddenly looming up black in
the snowflakes close by, then, vanishing all at once—without footfalls”
(UWE, 28)—t his last phrase like the image of Haldin’s silence, perhaps
anticipating the motif of deafness at the climax so much later. Finally,
Razumov finds Ziemianitch, who is in a drunken sleep; furious, Ra-
zumov beats him savagely with the handle of a stable fork, then plunges
back into the snowy night. As he walks along he thinks of Haldin in
his room. “What was he doing now?” Razumov wonders (all this pre-
sumably was reported in Razumov’s diary or journal).
Lying on the bed as if dead, with the back of his hands over his eyes?
Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin on his bed—t he
white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots, the up-
turned feet. And in his abhorrence he said to himself: “I’ll kill him
when I get home.” (UWE, 32)
Further on:
Razumov stamped his foot—and under the soft carpet of snow felt
the hard ground of Russia, inanimate, cold, inert, like a sullen and
tragic m other hiding her face u nder a winding-sheet—h is native

soil!—his very own—w ithout a fireside, without a heart! . . .
He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed. The snow had
ceased to fall, and now as if by a miracle, he saw above his head the
clear black sky of the northern winter, decorated with the sump-
tuous fires of the stars. It was a canopy fit for the resplendent purity
of the snows.
Razumov received an almost physical impression of endless space
and of countless millions.
He responded to it with the readiness of a Russian who is born
to an inheritance of space and numbers. Under the sumptuous im-
mensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen
rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks,
the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform
whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an
inconceivable history. It covered the passive land with its lives of
countless people like Ziemianitch and its handful of agitators like
this Haldin—murdering foolishly.
It was a sort of sacred inertia. Razumov felt a respect for it. A
voice seemed to cry within him, “Don’t touch it.” It was a guar-
antee of duration, of safety, while the travail of maturing destiny
went on—a work not of revolutions with their passionate levity of
action and their shifting impulses—but of peace. What it needed
was not the conflicting aspirations of a people, but a w ill strong
and one: it wanted not the babble of many voices, but a man—
strong and one!
Razumov stood on the point of conversion [to an ideal of autoc-
racy]. (UWE, 32–33)
I do not claim to be the sole commentator to find these passages striking

in the extreme. But it is only in the light of Conradian erasure that they
disclose their ambivalent significance, for the “blank page” of the
snow-covered land is itself the product of a certain process of erasure
(by the falling of the snow), even as the page calls for a further act of
writing—and then, though this is not said, still another, in fact, the deci-
sive act of erasure. But first, the writing.
Nearer town, two sledges collide, jolting Razumov from his thoughts;
one driver shouts at another; then:
This coarse yell let out nearly in his ear disturbed Razumov. He
shook his head impatiently and went on looking straight before him.
Suddenly on the snow, stretched out on his back right across the
path, he saw Haldin, solid, distinct, real, with his inverted hands
over his eyes, clad in a brown close fitting coat and long boots. He
was lying out of the way a little, as though he had selected that place
on purpose. The snow round him was untrodden.
This hallucination had such a solidity of aspect that the first
movement of Razumov was to reach for his pocket to assure him-
self that the key of his rooms was t here. But he checked the impulse
with a disdainful curve of his lips. He understood. His thought,
concentrated intensely on the figure left lying on his bed, had cul-
minated in this extraordinary illusion of the sight. Razumov tackled
the phenomenon calmly. With a stern face, without a check and
gazing far beyond the vision, he walked on, experiencing nothing
but a slight tightening of the chest. After passing he turned his head
for a glance and saw only the unbroken track of his foot-steps
over the place where the breast of the phantom had been lying.
(UWE, 35–36)
He decides to give Haldin up, and in effect, does. Then he returns to his
rooms, which are dark. In his bedroom, he feels all over the table for his
matchbox.
He struck a light and looked at the bed. Haldin was lying on his back
as before, only both his hands w ere under his head. His eyes were
open. He stared up at the ceiling.
Razumov held the match up. He saw the clear-cut features, the
firm chin, the white forehead and the top-k not of fair hair against
the white pillow. T here he was, lying flat on his back. Razumov
thought suddenly, “I have walked over his chest.” (UWE, 49)
The recurrent image of Haldin lying on his back, in the last instance, with
his hands no longer over his eyes, is a version of what I have suggested
from the first is the primal figure of literary impressionism, a corpse or

living person lying in that position with an upturned face (note the refer-
ence to Haldin’s upturned feet early on in the passages just quoted). And
of course, the climactic image of the deafened Razumov lying on his back
in the roadway “with a g reat flash of lightning over his face,” blinding him
utterly, is another, the culminating, version of that figure.
In sum, Razumov leaves Haldin lying on his back; that the latter has
the backs of his hands over his eyes suggests a certain qualification of the
primal figure (as if the page were not yet ready to be written on). Then
snow falls on the ground, on Russia, erasing everything there, preparing
that page for further writing, a figure almost instantly confirmed by the
remarkably convincing hallucination of Haldin’s body lying on its back
and covered with snow, though once again, Haldin’s inverted hands are
over his eyes. That Razumov does not hesitate to walk across the body,
leaving footprints in the snow, marks a new writing, the writing of autoc-
racy to come, as it w
ere, despite the inverted hands. And when he arrives
back in his rooms, he finds Haldin in exactly the same position, but with
his eyes open and his hands behind his head, as if in tacit acceptance of
what Razumov has done.2 (All this explains why the novel’s climactic
scene of erasure—the deafening of Razumov—has to resort to something
other than a figure of blankness.)
But there is more to come. After Haldin leaves, Razumov takes a square
sheet of paper:
It was like the pile of sheets covered with his neat minute hand-
writing, only blank. He took a pen brusquely and dipped it with a
vague notion of going on with the writing of his essay—but his pen
remained poised over the sheet. It hung there for some time before
it came down and formed long scrawly letters.
Still-faced and his lips set hard Razumov began to write.
When he wrote a large hand his neat writing lost its character
altogether—became unsteady, almost childish. He wrote five lines
one u nder the other.
History not Theory.
Patriotism not Internationalism.
Evolution not Revolution.
Direction not Destruction.
Unity not Disruption.

He gazed at them dully. Then his eyes strayed to the bed and re-
mained fixed there for a good many minutes, while his right hand
groped all over the t able, for the penknife.
He r ose at last and walking up with measured steps stabbed the
paper with the penknife to the lath and plaster wall at the head of
the bed. This done he stepped back a pace and flourished his hand
with a glance round the room. (UWE, 57)
He lies down on the sofa at the other side of the room (avoiding the bed,
in other words) and at once falls asleep, dreaming of “an immense wintry
Russia which somehow his view could embrace in all its enormous ex-
panse as if it w ere a map” (UWE, 57). When his room is searched by the
authorities following his interview with the General, the sheet of paper
with its five lines will suggest to Mikulin Razumov’s potential usefulness
as a spy against the conspirators.
A key word. The next section of part first begins with the self-described
old teacher of languages acknowledging the difficulty of his task, which
involves
the rendering . . . of the moral conditions ruling over a large por-
tion of this earth’s surface; conditions not easily to be understood,
much less discovered in the limits of a story till some key word is
found; a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering
the pages; a word which if not truth itself may perchance hold truth
enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of
every tale. (UWE, 58)
The teacher continues:
I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of Mr Razumov’s record,
I lay it aside, I take up the pen—and the pen being ready for its office
of setting down black on white I hesitate. For the word that persists in
creeping u nder its point is no other word than Cynicism. (UWE, 58)
here is such a key word, but it is not “cynicism.” Rather, it is “confi-

T
dence,” as when Razumov says to Haldin, “ ‘But pardon me, Victor
Victorovitch. We know each other so little . . . I don’t see why you . . . ?’
‘Confidence,’ said Haldin” (UWE, 22). That same night, after Prince
K——has taken Razumov to meet the government official called only the
General, the Prince requests that his and Razumov’s intervention should
remain private. “He is a young man of promise—of remarkable apti-
tudes,” he adds, to which the General replies: “I haven’t a doubt of it. He
inspires confidence” (UWE, 43). But several paragraphs l ater, the Gen-
eral expresses a certain suspicion by the words, “And you say [Haldin]
came in to make you this confidence like this—for nothing—à propos des
bottes” (UWE, 44). (French phrases are frequent in the novel.) Razumov
senses danger, but the Prince comes to his rescue by explaining that some
months before, Haldin and Razumov had had “some sort of idle specula-
tive conversation,” which Haldin evidently had misinterpreted, at which
point the General asks Razumov whether he often indulged in specula-
tive conversation.
“No, excellency,” answered Razumov, coolly, in a sudden access of

self-confidence. “I am a man of deep convictions. Crude opinions
are in the air. They are not always worth combating. But even the
silent contempt of a serious mind may be misinterpreted by head-
long utopists.”
The General stared from between his hands. Prince K——
murmured—
“A serious young man. Un esprit supérieur.”
“I see that, mon cher Prince,” said the General. “Mr Razumov is
quite safe with me. I am interested in him. He has it seems the great
and useful quality of inspiring confidence.” (UWE, 44)
A l ittle further on, Razumov adds that he d

oesn’t know why Haldin sought
him out. “I said nothing. I was overcome. I provoked no confidences—I
asked for no explanations—” (UWE, 45). Finally, the General proposes
that Razumov should return to his rooms lest Haldin suspect that some-
thing has gone wrong. “Mr Razumov inspires confidence. It is a great gift.
I only suggest that a more prolonged absence might awaken the criminal’s
suspicions and induce him perhaps to change his plans” (UWE, 47). In
the carriage taking them away, the Prince, too, says, “I have a perfect
confidence in you, Mr Razumov.” And Razumov thinks, “ ‘They all, it
seems, have confidence in me.’ . . . He had an indulgent contempt for the
man sitting shoulder to shoulder with him in the confined space. Probably
he was afraid of scenes with his wife. She was said to be proud and violent”
(UWE, 47). As they part, the Prince extends an ungloved hand and says,
“I hope you are perfectly reassured now as to the consequences . . . ,” to
which Razumov responds, “After what your Excellency has condescended
to do for me, I can only rely on my conscience” (UWE, 47). At which point,
Razumov returns to his rooms where Haldin is still lying on the bed.
The tally: the phrase “inspires confidence” or a variant occurs three
times. The word “confidence” as Haldin introduces the term, and then
as it is used by the Prince and Razumov himself (“They all, it seems, have
confidence in me”), another three times. All this in roughly a half dozen
pages. But then there is the General’s use of “confidence” to mean a
secret (“And you say he came in to make you this confidence”), and,
further on, Razumov’s use of the term in the same sense (“I provoked no
confidences”). Plus, Razumov’s suddenly feeling what the text (i.e., the
teacher, based on Razumov’s document) describes as “a sudden access
of self-confidence” brings us to a total of nine appearances of, if not ex-
actly the same word, let us say, essentially the same sequence of letters.
At this point it is hard not to notice something else—the occurrence of
other words beginning with the prefix “con-”, such as “conversation”
(twice), “contempt” (twice), “convictions,” “confined,” “consequences,”
“condescended,” and “conscience,” not to mention one “com-” word—
“combatting.” And not in t hese pages, but down the road, t here w ill be
the thematic words “confess” and “confession,” as when a fter Razumov
at Laspara’s has revealed himself late in the book, Nikita-Necator screams,
“Confession or no confession, you are a police spy” (UWE, 278).
In an obvious sense, we are in the same general territory as that
explored in the last pages of Chapter 5, where I consider four significant
instances of what I call exchange or “contagion” between words and / or
signifiers in The Secret Agent. In that novel, which I take to be by far the
most determinedly materialist production in Conrad’s entire corpus
(along with, on a much smaller scale, the story “Because of the Dollars”),
I treat “contagion” as on the side of the appearance of mechanism, un-
derstood as a kind of necessity, though I also suggest, in relation to the
proliferation of the words “hand” and “hands” in the course of a relatively
brief conversation between the Assistant Commissioner and Sir Ethelred,

that the occurrence of the word “hand” twice in a single sentence at the
end of the interview signals Conrad’s awareness of what he has done (and
equally to the point, invites the reader to share that awareness as well).
In contrast, after noting that three graphically similar words—“material,”
“marital,” and “maternal”—function throughout The Secret Agent as what
I call a “compound leitmotif,” I go on to remark that the incident that gave
rise to the novel took place in February 1894 when a young man named
Martial Bourdin accidentally blew himself up while seeking to detonate
a bomb near the Royal Observatory, and that when Conrad more than
ten years later became interested in the attempted bombing as a possible
basis for a novel, the proper name, “Martial,” in tandem with the detail
of the blowing off of the would-be terrorist’s hand, produced as if by “con-
tagion” the other three words and, ramifying beyond them, the entire
novel. It remains a question, I suggest, w hether or not Conrad was aware
of this, though I note that the word “martial” occurs just once in a sen-
tence that also includes the significant word “hands.” So it is not alto-
gether certain that the connection escaped his notice.
Under Western Eyes, the next ambitious novel to be finished, moves
away from The Secret Agent’s materialist ontology by deliberately and sig-
nificantly complicating the reader’s relation to the text. This is one major
function (not the only one) of the complex narrative, or, say, scriptive lay-
ering of the later novel. In the first place (we are told by the teacher of
languages), there is a handwritten document, a diary or journal, written
by Razumov in Geneva; then there is the text we read, ostensibly com-
posed by the teacher of languages on the basis of Razumov’s document,
which is quoted verbatim for several pages near the end of the novel but
otherwise is made available to the reader only indirectly, in the teacher’s
retelling of it (which, as has emerged, is remarkably detailed as regards
both the events it relates and the precise and often conflicted thoughts and
feelings of its author and protagonist); and finally, there is the novel as
such, which on the one hand coincides exactly—that is, word by word—
with the teacher of languages’s narrative (except for the title of the novel
and further typographical details), but which on the other hand is fully
understood by the reader to have been written by the author Joseph
Conrad, for whom both Razumov and the teacher of languages, like all
the other personages in the story, are imaginative creations. This last dis-
tinction is, one might say, a profoundly nonmaterialist one, as the differ-
ence between the teacher’s narrative and Conrad’s novel is almost entirely
conceptual, or, indeed, conventional.3
In any case, the layering allows the reader to notice that the teacher’s
claim that the key word, the one “that could stand at the back of all the
words covering the pages,” is “cynicism” not only is mistaken on the basis
of the evidence so far presented (though from the point of view of the
teacher of languages, who has already read the whole of Razumov’s doc-
ument and who knows all too well how the narrative w ill end, “cynicism”
aptly characterizes the conspirators, except for Sophia Antonovna),
but also fails to acknowledge the operation of a true or at least strongly
probable key word, “confidence,” in the passages in question. (Of course,
the shifting meaning of the signifier “confidence” in the different con-
texts, even in the short span of pages we have considered, has something
“cynical” about it.) And not only that—the layering also encourages the
reader who has noticed the “contagion” effects I have pointed out, the
proliferation of “con-” words, and even the “com-” word “combatting,” to
attribute those to the teacher of languages rather than to the novel’s au-
thor Joseph Conrad, who emerges in contrast as very much in control of
the text—impersonally, as it were. (I mean, the reader is encouraged to
read the “con-” and “com-” words as having been intended by Conrad
to suggest the operation of mechanical, or at least not consciously in-
tended, i.e., automatic, effects of “contagion” on the part of the teacher
of languages.)
Nor is the conversation between Razumov, the Prince, and the Gen-
eral the only locus in the novel where something like “con-”–based echoing
and re-echoing is in play. Two further examples occur early on in part
second, the second of the two when the teacher of languages, having re-
turned to Geneva after two weeks away, catches sight of Natalia in con-
versation with the famous revolutionary Peter Ivanovitch, of whom we are
then told, “At one time all Europe was aware of the story of his life written
by himself and translated into seven or more languages” (UWE, 98). (The
teacher of languages plainly detests him.) The story crucially involves
Peter Ivanovitch’s escape from imprisonment and in particu lar, his
carrying into the woods a chain riveted on his limbs that is eventually re-
moved by a blacksmith, brought to him by the latter’s sympathetic wife.
Without quoting the pages in question, let me note that they include the
words (in order) “conspire,” “condemned,” “continents,” “concealing,”
“convicts,” “conferred,” “confused,” “conviction,” “confessed,” “conver-
sion,” “convict,” “converted,” “unconscious,” and “conferring”; also
“compassion,” “common” (as in “common criminals”), and “compatriots”;
plus, as if to set the “con-” words off, late in the sequence, the phrase “on
the edge of cynicism.” (A virtual chain of “con-” and “com-” words, one
might say.)
The second example, in two parts, occurs slightly earlier, a fter the
teacher of languages sees the announcement of Mr. de P——’s assassi-
nation in an English newspaper and informs Mrs. Haldin and her daughter.
Mrs. Haldin says, “T here w ill be more trouble, more persecutions for
this. They may be even closing the University. T here is neither peace
nor rest in Russia for one but in the grave” (UWE, 86)—a statement that
comes pointedly close to Dr. Monygham’s remark to Mrs. Gould near
the end of Nostromo, “There is no peace nor rest in the development of
material interests.” 4 Then:
“Yes. The way is hard,” came from the d aughter, looking straight
before her at the Chain of Jura covered with snow, like a white wall
closing the end of the street. [A deliberate echo of the whitewashed
wall “to run at and dash your head against,” from chapter 11 of The
Secret Agent.] “But concord is not so very far off.”
“That is what my children think,” observed Mrs Haldin to me.
I did not conceal my feeling that t hese were strange times to talk
of concord. (UWE, 86)
And a page or so later, Natalia says that Westerners do not understand

the impulses of Russians, or, as she also puts it, “their mouvements
d’âme.” To which the teacher of languages replies:
“But still we are looking at a conflict. You say it is not a conflict of

classes and not a conflict of interests. Suppose I admitted that. Are
antagonistic ideas then to be reconciled more easily—can they be

cemented with blood and violence into that concord which you pro-
claim to be so near?”
She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey eyes, without
answering my reasonable question—my obvious, my unanswerable
question.
“It is inconceivable,” I added, with something like annoyance.
“Everything is inconceivable,” she said. “The whole world is in-
conceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to
our senses, and we exist in it. T here must be a necessity superior to
our conceptions. It is a very miserable and a very false thing to be-
long to the majority. We Russians shall find some better form of na-
tional freedom than an artificial conflict of parties—which is wrong
because it is a conflict and contemptible because it is artificial. It is
left for us, Russians, to discover a better way.” (UWE, 87)
Twelve “con-” words in four short paragraphs.

The second example is of special interest to me not simply b ecause of
its profusion of “con-” words, but also because of the way in which its ob-
viously deliberate, not to say slightly strained allusions to Nostromo and
The Secret Agent, the two major novels immediately preceding U nder
Western Eyes, all but compel the recognition that the author Joseph
Conrad—as distinct from Natalia (assuming her words have been cor-
rectly reported) or the teacher of languages—is in total, fine-grained
control of the exchange from beginning to end. In this connection, it is
worth noting—it may already have struck the reader—that “Conrad,” that
authorial invention replacing “Korzeniowski,” is still another “con-” word,
possibly the most important of all.5
Interestingly, Conrad wrote in his author’s note of 1920, “I had never
been called before to a greater effort of detachment; detachment from all
passions, prejudices and even from personal memories. Under Western
Eyes on its first appearance in E ngland was a failure with the public,
perhaps b ecause of that very detachment” (UWE, 6). It has always been
hard to know exactly what to make of this claim; my suggestion is that it
chiefly concerns the form of the work, specifically Conrad’s authorial sep-
aration, indeed, his structural detachment, from both Razumov and the
teacher of languages (the two “writers” apart from Conrad himself). Also
in the author’s note Conrad remarks of the teacher of languages that he
has been
much criticised; but I w ill not at this late hour undertake to justify
his existence. He was useful to me and therefore I think that he must
be useful to the reader both in the way of comment and by the part
he plays in the development of the story. In my desire to produce
the effect of actuality it seemed to me indispensable to have an eye-
witness of the transactions in Geneva. I needed also a sympathetic
friend for Miss Haldin who otherw ise would have been too much
alone and unsupported to be perfectly credible. (UWE, 6)
No doubt this is true as far as it goes, but my sense of the old teacher’s
“usefulness” to Conrad rests on other, essentially structural grounds.
The relation of the reader to the page (also faces, eyes, seeing, black and
white). No serious reader of Under Western Eyes, at least since the publi-
cation in 1980 of Frank Kermode’s influential essay “Secrets and Narra-
tive Sequence,” 6 can have failed to notice the proliferation in the novel of
the words “eyes,” “face,” “black,” “white,” and “see” (or “saw”); by the
same token, the title has been understood to refer not just to the teacher
of languages’ eyes, but more importantly, to t hose of Conrad himself,
whom Boris Ford describes as “a Pole who looked to the West, who felt
himself a cultural citizen of Western Europe, and who became as English
as a Pole could then be.” He continues: “Not only are Conrad’s eyes not
the professor’s; they are far more penetrating, and their moral scope and
subtlety are infinitely greater.”7 This is plainly true, though to insist on
this point is to remain on the level of the story, as if the crucial role of
the teacher of languages is to present a limited point of view that the so-
phisticated reader w ill see beyond to the further or deeper meaning
that Conrad intended (almost all the competing readings of the novel
operate u nder some such assumption). Again, my point is that this is not
exactly wrong, but it fails to grasp a vital dimension, I would even say,
the vital dimension, of Conrad’s impressionist project, which as we have
seen, concerns the relation between the reader (and before the reader,
the writer) and the written page, or indeed, the page of print—as if in
nder Western Eyes the structural layering, as I have called it, is to be

U
thought of as that which, before all, the reader is called upon to see.
Put slightly differently, the basic idea of literary impressionism, I have
argued, involves an all but explicit but also for the most part ultimately
suppressed or displaced relation between the writer (and afterward or
secondarily, the reader) and the scene of writing, in particular, the
upward-facing page and the act of inscription, typically with pen and ink.
In Crane, as I argue at length in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” the
archetypal figures of the upturned face, not necessarily of a corpse, as
well as certain acts of disfiguration (the wind razing the tawny beard of
the first corpse in The Red Badge, the earth shoveled onto the upturned
face of “old Bill,” the devastation of Henry Johnson’s face by burning
chemicals), plus an entire host of motifs (not just upturned faces but also
snakes, sticks, shadows, lines, numbers, fire, e tc.) and devices (dialect,
alliteration, onomatopoeia, the use of the words “writhing” and “thing,”
etc.) at once thematize the scene of writing in the strongest possible terms,
and yet never entirely declare themselves as such, never become fully ex-
plicit, and this ultimate constraint (as suggested in the Introduction to
this book) is what allows his narratives to achieve and sustain their char-
acteristic, often tremendous force and momentum. In Norris, Crane’s al-
most exact contemporary, we find, first, a quite astonishing exposé of
the underlying logic of Crane’s writing in “A Memorandum of Sudden
Death,” and second, in the shipwreck scene in Vandover and the Brute and
still more emphatically in A Man’s W oman, a hyperbolic ideal of a totally
material or materialist writing, as if in the production of these texts the
materiality both of the page and of the act of inscription asserted itself
against any possibility of “idealization” or subsumption or indeed, tran-
scendence of the sort associated with the image of the pillar or even the
viewpoint of the wandering hawk in “A Memorandum of Sudden Death,”
and yet did so in such a way that an extreme version of writing somehow
remained in force. (Further investigation of this issue would require coming
to terms with Norris’s “naturalism,” a larger topic than can be dealt with
here.)
W. H. Hudson, in contrast, represented for his contemporaries a fer-
vently admired ideal of total transparency (also, it was sometimes sug-
gested, of perfect camouflage or unobtrusiveness), a virtually invisible
writing, which only makes sense as an ideal in the context of the larger
impressionist undertaking and its tendency to foreground writing as such;
while Wells’s The Invisible Man, perhaps the most gripping of his early
texts, conducts a systematic demonstration that mere transparency is it-
self hopelessly material, a conclusion Wells may be said to embrace in the
interests of a sweeping and unapologetic embrace of surface scriptive ex-
plicitness unlike anything to be found in the work of the other writers in
this book. The unstated but very nearly ubiquitous presence of ordnance
maps of the English countryside in The War of the Worlds is also to the
point, though it should be noted that for all the seeming explicitness of
Wells’s procedures in both novels, the implication of those procedures
for the issues at stake in the present study has gone unremarked until now.
Put slightly differently, Wells’s relation to literary impressionism was in
important respects critical, as he himself aggressively asserts in Experi-
ment in Autobiography. But it was not therefore simplistic or indeed
unambiguous in its rejection of impressionist ideals, as we have had oc-
casion to remark.8
As for Ford Madox Ford, a key figure as well as a somewhat difficult
one, the question of writing is crucially entangled with issues of distrac-
tion and digression, of a kind of absent-or double-m indedness, that
receives its subtlest, aesthetically most significant treatment in his justly
admired novel The Good Soldier, as analyzed in this book by Charles
Palermo. The sort of prose that can result, when the constraints of having
to construct a coherent narrative are removed and digression is fully given
its head, is exemplified by the passages cited in Chapter 3 from The Soul
of London and Return to Yesterday, with their obsessive thematization of
extreme aspects of the scene of writing (and, in the case of the former, al-
lusions e ither conscious or, more likely, not, to Hudson, Conrad, and
Crane). Jack London’s Martin Eden also has its place in the impressionist
corpus, along with various stories and sketches by the today little known
R. B. Cunninghame Graham, most obviously “The Orchid-Hunter,” with
its corpse and upturned face, but also other short narratives of journeys
and the like that seek to promote the reader’s awareness of the a ctual
writing of the texts in question. Then there is Childers’s The Riddle of
the Sands, the great spy novel of the period, in which the impressionist
motifs of maps, charts, and mist are deployed with consummate brilliance
in one protracted passage, the fulcrum of the entire narrative, to place the
reader in a relation to the page—more precisely, to a particular map or
chart—that is epistemologically homologous to that of the characters in
the book.
Conrad in some respects is closest to Crane, but with the difference
that his project turns on what I have called erasure; that is, the “black-
ening” of pages in and by the act of writing, and then, absolutely crucially,
returning to a blankness that is not quite an originary blankness, which
itself seems to have been experienced by Conrad as a field of imaginative
possibility from which, by an agonizing process of visualization equiva-
lent to a man staring into a crystal ball, the settings, characters, and plots
of his fictions w
ere somehow to be drawn. The project first emerged in
his earliest novel, Almayer’s Folly, assumed its most agonizing form in Nos-
tromo, and, partly in reaction against the effort required to bring that
novel to fruition, was in a certain sense simplified in The Secret Agent, in
which blankness comes to be understood sheerly materially (“a blankness
to run at and dash your head against”), and indeed, the entire world of
the novel is rendered as a radically materialist one consistent with the
mechanistic norms of nineteenth-century science. (Not that Conrad en-
dorses such a worldview; rather, he savagely critiques it, even as he me-
morializes it as in no comparable work of fiction. And I have also suggested
that the world of The Secret Agent is closed to the later nineteenth-and
early twentieth-century science of statistical dynamics.)
With Under Western Eyes, Conrad’s project undergoes a further de-
velopment in and through the structural layering I have just described,
which as I understand it, has two principal effects. First, as we have
seen, it quietly asserts Conrad’s authorial control over every aspect of
the text, including, for the first time, the thematization of erasure. And
second, the point I now want to emphasize, it throws into relief—by which
I mean, it seeks to charge with special intensity, to make all but palpable to
the reader—the “vertical” space (or “space”) between his or her (presum-
ably Western) eyes and the printed page and its lines of type (originally,
the “blackened” written page and its lines of script). This is harder to dem-
onstrate than the layering per se, and indeed, it often seems to work by a
kind of deliberate transposition from the “vertical” axis to a “horizontal”
one involving intense encounters and exchanges between particu lar
characters as well as, a point Kermode was perhaps the first to under-
score, the proliferation of words such as “eyes,” “face,” “black,” “white,”
“see,” and so on, all of which, it is by now perfectly clear, refer in one way
or another to what I have been calling the scene of writing (also of reading).
In fact, I would like to be able to claim that such words play a greater role
in Under Western Eyes than in other novels by Conrad such as Almayer’s
Folly, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Victory, but the a ctual numbers
don’t bear this out—all those words figure importantly in the novels I have
just named, and indeed, throughout Conrad’s oeuvre, which on reflec-
tion is hardly surprising, given the ubiquitousness of the project of
erasure in his writing (blackening, then making white or blank). Never-
theless, the way they are deployed in Under Western Eyes continually
produces an effect of what I want to call layered intensity of vision, a kind
of writerly and readerly absorption not simply in the narrative (for all the
latter’s momentum) and not simply in the play of figures and images, in-
cluding f aces, eyes, seeing, black, and white (not to mention the oculist’s
shop in which Razumov and Mikulin meet), but in the very multiplicity,
or perhaps, more accurately, the simultaneous “presence” of writers (and
readers) by and through whom the story gets told.
A brief consideration of three such moments from part third w ill help
make my meaning clear.
The first: at the Château Borel, Razumov and Peter Ivanovitch have
been engaged in a difficult conversation. At last, the latter opens the door
to the room in which Razumov w ill encounter Madame de S——, whom
he already knows he will detest. Peter Ivanovitch pauses a moment as he
informs Madame de S—— that he is bringing her “a proved conspirator—a
real one this time. Un vrai celui là” (UWE, 166). The text continues:
This pause in the doorway gave the “proved conspirator” time to

make sure that his face did not betray his angry curiosity and his
mental disgust.
T hese sentiments stand confessed in Mr Razumov’s memo-
randum of his first interview with Madame de S——. The very
words I use in my narrative are written where their sincerity cannot
be suspected. The record which could not have been meant for any
one’s eyes but his own, was not, I think, the outcome of that strange
impulse of indiscretion, common to men who lead secret lives, and

accounting for the invariable existence of “compromising docu-
ments” in all the plots and conspiracies of history [three “con-”
and two “com-” words, needless to say]. Mr Razumov looked at
it, I suppose, as a man looks at himself in a mirror, with wonder,
perhaps with anguish, with anger or despair. Yes, as a threatened
man may look fearfully at his own face in the glass, formulating to
himself reassuring excuses for his appearance marked by the
taint of some insidious hereditary disease. (UWE, 167)
What I find striking is the claim that Razumov’s record—that is, his
very words—could not have been meant for anyone’s eyes but his own,
when we know that fictively, the words have been read by the teacher of
languages (and before him, by Natalia) and that we are now reading them
(“the very words”), and before us, they w ere also read and reread by
Conrad, who indeed wrote them in the first place. And I am equally struck
by the figure of the mirror, of Razumov “look[ing]”—a strange verb, under
the circumstances—at his record “as a man looks at himself in a mirror,”
a mirror being precisely a device for allowing one to see not simply one’s
own features, which is what is being said here, but also objects or per-
sons positioned behind one, which in this instance would figuratively
mean the other writers and readers involved in the production and recep-
tion of Under Western Eyes (the teacher of languages, Joseph Conrad, the
reader himself or herself).
The second moment: somewhat later, in the course of the interview be-
tween Razumov and Madame de S——, we read:
Her shiny eyes had a dry intense stare, which, missing Razumov,
gave him an absurd notion that she was looking at something which
was visible to her behind him. He cursed himself for an impression-
able fool and asked with forced calmness:
“What is it you see? Anything resembling me?”
She moved her rigidly set face from left to right, negatively.
“Some sort of phantom in my image?” pursued Razumov slowly.
“For, I suppose, a soul when it is seen is just that. A vain thing. There
are phantoms of the living as well as of the dead.” (UWE, 174)
ere the notion of something or someone visible b ehind Razumov is made

H
explicit, along with the question of w
hether what or who is there resem-
bles him; Madame de S——’s negative answer is also to the point, as is
Razumov’s introduction of the idea of a phantom, a term that first ap-
peared much earlier in the novel in connection with the hallucination of
Haldin lying in his path covered with snow (an image of a page). The word
“impressionable” is also suggestive, under the circumstances, as well as,
perhaps, the word “thing,” with its ambiguous status as between living
and dead, as Razumov as much as says.
And the third moment, following his interview with Madame de S——,
and coming at the end of his tortuous exchange with Peter Ivanovitch:
He thought to himself (it stands confessed in his hand writing): “I

won’t move from here till he either speaks or turns away. This is a
duel.” Many seconds passed without a sign or a sound.
“Yes, yes,” the g reat man said hurriedly in subdued tones as
if the whole thing had been a stolen breathless interview. “Ex-
actly. Come to see us h ere in a few days. This must be gone into
deeply—deeply, between you and me. Quite to the bottom. To
the . . . A nd, by the bye, you must bring along Natalia Viktorovna;
you know? The Haldin girl. . . .” (UWE, 178)
And a bit further on:
[Razumov] felt, bizarre as it may seem, as though another self, an

independent sharer of his mind, had been able to view his whole
person very distinctly indeed. “This is curious,” he thought. A fter
a while he formulated his opinion of it in the mental ejaculation:
“beastly.” This disgust vanished before a marked uneasiness. “This
is an effect of nervous exhaustion,” he reflected with weary sagacity.
“How am I to go on day a fter day if I have no more power of
resistance—moral resistance.” (UWE, 178)
The rhetoric of going into matters “deeply—deeply,” even in the mouth of

Peter Ivanovitch, further evokes the notion of a third or “vertical” dimen-
sion, but what is most arresting in the light of my argument is Razumov’s
feeling that “another self, an independent sharer of his mind, had been
able to view his whole person very distinctly indeed”—my suggestion
being, of course, that not just one such independent sharer of his mind but
no less than three (the teacher of languages, the author of U nder
Western Eyes, and the reader) have been able to do exactly that. (Eventu-
ally, t here will be a fourth, Natalia Haldin, when she reads his journal.)
Again, it is hard to imagine that Conrad was not aware of the cumulative
implication of t hese successive passages.
What gives all three moments further resonance is the recurrent char-
acterization of Madame de S—— in terms of the “strong effect [produced]
by the deathlike immobility of an obviously painted face” and also “the
rigidity of the upright attitude with one arm extended along the back of
the sofa, the white gleam of the big eyeballs setting off the black fathom-
less stare of the enlarged pupils” (UWE, 167). A few sentences later: “At
close quarters the rouged cheek bones, the wrinkles, the fine lines on each
side of the vivid lips astounded him. He was being received graciously
with a smile which made him think of a grinning skull” (UWE, 167).
Further on: “Her rigidity was frightful, like the rigour of a corpse galva-
nized into harsh speech and glittering stare by the force of murderous
hate. The sight fascinated Razumov” (UWE, 173). And again:
At that very moment he hated Madame de S——. But it was not ex-
actly hate. It was more like the abhorrence that may be caused by a
wooden or plaster figure of a repulsive kind. She moved no more
than if she w
ere such a figure; even her eyes whose unwinking stare
plunged into his own, though shining were lifeless as though they
were as artificial as her teeth. (UWE, 175)
And from the second of the moments cited above, t here is the sentence,
“She moved her rigidly set face from left to right, negatively” (UWE, 174)—
left to right being the direction of writing in the West (in Russia, too, for
that matter), a point I take as indicating, along with the other descriptive
passages just cited, that Madame de S—— is to be understood as a figure
for what might be called dead writing—writing which, for all its seem-
ingly vital touches, is, in the end, irredeemably corpse-like, which in this
case would mean writing radically deficient in the careful “layering,” not
simply of narratives, but more importantly, of “lookers” or “seers,” of pairs

of eyes, indeed, of writers and readers, that Conrad meticulously built into
his text. (We might say that her corpse-like character amounts to some-
thing like a parody of that basic figure for the page, just as the fact that
she moved her face “negatively” amounts to a parody of negation—that
is, of erasure.)
All this goes quite far, but t here is still more to be said. For in the
sharpest imaginable contrast to the presentation of Madame de S—— in
t hese terms is the altogether different, not to say antithetical treatment
of the no longer young revolutionist Sophia Antonovna, who emerges from
the later stages of the novel as deeply committed, highly intelligent, and
psychologically penetrating, even if at the very end of part fourth she re-
veals herself still to be entranced by Peter Ivanovitch. As Kermode and
others have noted, she is repeatedly described as possessing vivid black
eyes and a mass of white or almost white hair (she also wears a crimson
silk blouse, a rare coloristic accent no doubt connoting revolution as well
as, perhaps, “life”). Equally to the point, she pays intense and sustained
visual attention to Razumov, as in the sentence, “She had been looking
at him all the time not as a listener looks at one but as if the words he chose
to say were of only secondary interest” (UWE, 187). This enables her to
see, perfectly accurately, that he d oesn’t like the conspirators (“What’s
the matter with you is that you don’t like us” [UWE, 188]), though she
fails to perceive in him the betrayer of Haldin. And further on: “He no-
ticed the vacillation of surprise passing over the steady curiosity of the
black eyes fastened on his face as if the woman revolutionist received the
sound of his voice into her pupils instead of her ears” (UWE, 198)—a bril-
liant figure for reading, in particular for reading Under Western Eyes.
Still l ater she gives him a short account of her life, interrupting herself by
saying, “And—look at my white hair.”
In these last words t here was neither pride nor sadness. The bitter-
ness too was gone.
“There is a lot of it. I always had magnificent hair even as a chit
of a girl. Only at that time we w ere cutting it short and thinking that
there was the first step toward crushing the social infamy. Crush
the infamy! A fine watchword, I would placard it on the walls of
prisons and palaces, carve it on hard rocks, hang it out in letters of

fire on that empty sky for a sign of hope and terror—a portent of the
end. . . .”
“You are eloquent, Sophia Antonovna,” Razumov interrupted
suddenly. “Only, so far you seem to have been writing it in
water. . . .”
She was checked but not offended. “Who knows? Very soon it
may become a fact written all over that g reat land of ours,” she hinted
meaningfully. “And then one would have lived long enough. White
hair won’t matter.”
Razumov looked at her white hair: and this mark of so many un-
easy years seemed nothing but a testimony to the invincible vigour
of revolt. It threw out into an astonishing relief the unwrinkled
face, the brilliant black glance, the upright compact figure, the
simple, brisk, self possession of the mature personality as though in
her revolutionary pilgrimage she had discovered the secret not of
everlasting youth but of everlasting endurance. (UWE, 202–203)
With this succinct, complex description of Sophia Antonovna, I have

come pretty much to the end of my reading of Under Western Eyes. That
is, I take it as evident by now that whatever else is at stake in the language
in which she is rendered, she stands for a positive relation to writing and
reading (and looking and seeing, which is to say, to practices of writing
and reading in which looking and seeing play a crucial role), as opposed
to the entirely negative relation to these embodied by the immobile,
corpse-like, painted, and grotesque Madame de S——. Sophia Antonovna’s
black eyes and eyebrows evoke the actual writing of the novel (in another
crucial passage “the very spirit of ruthless revolution” is seen as “em-
bodied in that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows, like
slightly sinuous lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the perpendicular
folds of a thoughtful frown” [UWE, 201–202]), while her white hair, hair
that has gone from black to white in the service of the revolution, stands
for what I have been calling erasure, the crucial difference between her-
self and Conrad being that she still imagines a further writing, the writing
of revolution “all over that g reat land of ours,” making her white hair be-
side the point (“White hair w on’t matter”). Possibly, though, this is to
draw too absolute a contrast between the two women, as if in the end
Conrad himself were of two minds with respect to this extraordinarily
attractive and formidable creation of his, whose political commitments
Conrad cannot be imagined to have shared. In any case, Sophia Antonov-
na’s closing words, “Peter Ivanovitch is an inspired man”—the last in the
novel—are readable as a final gesture on Conrad’s part to separate him-
self from her, and perhaps also from Under Western Eyes, once and for all.9
n
By way of a postscript: in the course of the long campaign on Under
Western Eyes, Conrad took a break from his manuscript to redistribute
the semes “snow,” “whiteness,” “deafness,” and “writing” so as to per-
sonify Polish (i.e., anti-Russian) naturalist purity of motive in and through
a metaphorics of blankness in the heroic protagonist of the short story
“Prince Roman.”10 The contrast between novel and story in this regard
points toward a certain structural indifference on the part of Conrad’s ob-
sessional procedures to the moral and / or psychological, and in this
case, also the political meaning of the imagery, characters, and plots in
which they issue. The same point in a different key emerges from his char-
acterization of Russia in his 1905 essay “Autocracy and War,” in which
he takes up Bismarck’s scathing description of Russia as néant (nothing,
or nothingness), and writes:
Néant! In a way, yes! And perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself
be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an in-
exact term. The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking,
engraved within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred delib-
erately. The saying was near enough to the truth to serve: and per-
haps he did not want to destroy utterly, by a more severe definition,
the prestige of the sham that could not deceive his genius. Prince
Bismarck has been r eally complimentary to the useful phantom
of the autocratic might. There is an awe, inspiring the idea of in-
finity, conveyed in the word “Neant”—and in Russia there is no
idea. She is not a Néant: she is and has been simply the negation
of everything worth living [sic]. She is not empty void, she is a
yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless abyss
that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration

t owards personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge;
every ennobling desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of
conscience. T
hose that have peered into that abyss—where the
dreams of Panslavism, of universal conquest, of hate and con-
tempt for Western ideas, drifted impotently like shapes of mist—
know well that it is bottomless; that there is in it no ground for any-
thing that could in the remotest degree serve even the lowest interest
of mankind—and certainly no ground ready for a revolution.11
The yawning chasm and, even more, the bottomless abyss that swallows
up everyt hing amount to quasi-personifications of erasure, as does, of
course, the idea of negation, which is to say that in this highly interesting
text, Conrad’s Russia has much in common with Conrad the writer. The
same cannot quite be claimed of Under Western Eyes, but there, too, no-
where more so than in the figure of the indomitable Sophia Antonovna,
the relation of Russia to the overarching problematic of writing followed
by erasure is anything but clear-cut.
Chapter Eight
Versions of Regression
N
I n a l i t t l e - k n ow n story by Rudyard Kipling, “A Matter of Fact,”

published in his 1893 collection Many Inventions, three newspaper men
on a tramp steamer from Capetown to Southampton undergo a horrific
experience.1 One morning their little vessel, the Rathmines, is buffeted
by a series of tidal waves generated by the eruption of an undersea vol-
cano; then, in a blinding white fog, they hear what they take to be the
steam siren of another ship, frighteningly close to them; at the same time,
they become aware of an appalling smell, as of something from the bottom
of the sea; and then there is this:
Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and
as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not
human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this
earth as known to man. The mouth was open, revealing a ridicu-
lously tiny tongue—as absurd as the tongue of an elephant; there
were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of the drawn lips;
white feelers like t hose of a barbel sprang from the lower jaw, and
there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the horror of the
face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless—white, in sockets as
white as scraped bone, and blind. Yet for all this the face, wrinkled
as the mask of a lion is drawn in Assyrian sculpture, was alive with
261
rage and terror. One long white feeler touched our bulwarks. Then
the face disappeared with the swiftness of a blind worm popping
into its burrow, and the next t hing that I remember is my own voice
in my own ears, saying gravely to the mainmast, “But the air-bladder
ought to have been forced out of its mouth, you know.” (“MF,”
190–191)
A moment later, the fog blows away and the men see the sea, “gray with
mud, rolling on every side of us and empty of all life.” There follows a
long passage that I give in its entirety:
Then in one spot it bubbled and became like the pot of ointment
the Bible speaks of. From that wide-ringed trouble a T hing came
up—a gray and red Thing with a neck—a Thing that bellowed and
writhed in pain. Frithiof [the boatswain] drew in his breath and held
it till the red letters of the ship’s name, woven across his jersey, strag-
gled and opened out as though they had been type badly set. Then
he said with a little cluck in his throat, “Ah, me! It is blind. Hur
illa! That thing is blind,” and a murmur of pity went through us all,
for we could see that the thing on the water was blind and in pain.
Something had gashed and cut the g reat sides cruelly and the
blood was spurting out. The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in
the monstrous wrinkles of the back and poured away in sluices.
The blind white head flung back and battered the wounds, and the
body in its torment r ose clear of the red and gray waves till we saw
a pair of quivering shoulders streaked with weed and rough with
shells, but as white in the clear spaces as the hairless, nameless,
blind, toothless head. Afterwards came a dot on the horizon and
the sound of a shrill scream, and it was as though a shuttle shot all
across the sea in one breath, and a second head and neck tore
through the levels, driving a whispering wall of w ater to right and
left. The two T hings met—t he one untouched and the other in its
death throe—male and female, we said, the female coming to the
male. She circled round him bellowing, and laid her neck across
the curve of his g reat turtle-back, and he disappeared under water
for an instant, but flung up again, grunting in agony while the
Versions of Regression 263
blood ran. Once the entire head and neck shot clear of the w ater
and stiffened, and I heard Keller [one of the newspaper men] saying,
as though he was watching a street accident, “Give him air. For
God’s sake give him air!” Then the death struggle began, with
crampings and twistings and jerkings of the white bulk to and fro,
till our little steamer rolled again, and each gray wave coated her
plates with the gray slime. The sun was clear, there was no wind,
and we watched, the w hole crew, stokers and all, in wonder and
pity, but chiefly pity. The Thing was so helpless, and, save for his
mate, so alone. No human eye should have beheld him; it was mon-
strous and indecent to exhibit him t here in trade waters between
atlas degrees of latitude. He had been spewed up, mangled and
dying from his rest on the sea-floor, where he might have lived till
the Judgment Day, and we saw the tides of his life go from him as
an angry tide goes out across rocks in the teeth of a landward
gale. The mate lay rocking on the water a little distance off, bel-
lowing continually, and the smell of musk came down upon the
ship making us cough.
At last the battle for life ended, in a batter of coloured seas. We
saw the writhing neck fall like a flail, the carcase turn sideways,
showing the glint of a white belly and the inset of a gigantic hind-
leg or flapper. Then all sank, and the sea boiled over it, while the
mate swam round and round, darting her blind head in e very
direction. . . . Then she made off to the westward, the sun shining
on the white head and the wake b ehind it, till nothing was left to
see but a little pin point of silver on the horizon. We stood our
course again, and the Rathmines, coated with the sea-sediment,
from bow to stern, looked like a ship made gray with terror. (“MF,”
192–194)
In light of the previous chapters, several points all but suggest themselves.
First, a point so obvious it scarcely needs stating: the passages are an-
other instance (an early instance, as a matter of fact) of the impressionist
fascination with a horrific or otherwise disfigured face. Indeed, our first
glimpse of the monster is only of its face, an effect that is registered typo-
graphically by the use of a capital F, and stylistically, if that is the word,
by conspicuous alliteration (“Some six or seven feet above the port

bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon,
hung a Face”).
Second, both the description of the face and the unfolding of the
action thematize a violent disturbance of seeing. The monster itself is
blind, with white eyes, “in sockets as white as scraped bone,” but equally
important is the narrator’s sense that looking at it under these conditions
(and there is, of course, no possibility of not looking at it, for the men on
the steamer but also in a sense for the reader, for us) involves violating a
quasi-ethical norm or law. In Kipling’s words: “No human eye should
have beheld him; it was monstrous and indecent to exhibit him t here in
trade waters between atlas degrees of latitude.” But who was d oing the
exhibiting if not the writer himself?
Third, a related point, no h uman eye should have beheld the monster
because he belonged somewhere else—not exposed to view above the sur-
face of the ocean, but “on the sea-floor, where he might have lived till the
Judgment Day.” What is monstrous, in other words, is not just his appear-
ance but also the fact that he has been displaced from his normal habitat
far below the world of light and vision (hence his sightless eyes) to another
world, described as one of “atlas degrees of latitude”—a phrase that
brilliantly evokes both the notion of surface as opposed to depth (of lat-
eralness, so to speak) and the image of a specific printed book, an atlas, a
collection of maps and charts that precisely image the surface of the
earth (an impressionist motif, as has been shown).
Fourth, the point that most interests me: the second passage contains
a brief piece of narration worth lingering over. Let me quote two sentences
again:
From that wide-ringed trouble a Thing came up—a gray and red
Thing with a neck—a Thing that bellowed and writhed in pain. Fir-
thiof drew in his breath and held it till the red letters of the ship’s
name, woven across his jersey, straggled and opened out as though
they had been type badly set.
Note, in the first place. the repetition of the word “Thing” (here capital-
ized), a word that consistently plays a prominent role in impressionist
writing owing to its serving as a switch point between effects of animate-

ness and ones of deathliness, or, say, mere materiality. And note, too, the
highly charged verb “writhed” (“a T hing that bellowed and writhed in
pain”), which toward the end of the second passage will be followed by
the present participle “writhing” (“We saw the writhing neck fall like a
flail”)—another word that occurs with remarkable frequency in impres-
sionist texts, where it comes as close as possible to spelling out the almost
identical word “writing” (as in Crane’s astonishing sentence, already cited
more than once, “For the most part, they were silent amid this rioting, but
there was one which seemed to hold a scintillant and writhing serpent”).
But what I want to emphasize in the sentences I have just quoted a second
time is the apparently gratuitous detail of the letters of the ship’s name on
the boatswain’s jersey straggling and opening out as he took and held a
deep breath, “as though they had been type badly set.” This not only con-
firms the claim that a thematics of writing is at work in Kipling’s story, it
also combines with the notion that the monster has emerged from another
dimension (also, it is implied, from an earlier epoch) to suggest that the ulti-
mate source of the sense of monstrosity is a certain reversion or regression
with respect to writing—from the printed page (as in an atlas, or a story in a
journal or a book), itself not meant to be focused on as such, to the a ctual,
material process of printing, as imaged by the letters of the ship’s name
moving apart, like a line of type breaking up, on the boatswain’s jersey. It is
as if Kipling’s story, or at least this particular image, thematizes an inherent
instability in the printed text, or, rather, a certain fear or dread of such an
instability—as if one concomitant of the impressionist thematization of
the materiality of writing was an uneasy sense of the several states of ma-
teriality a given text passes through in the journey from the written to
the printed page.
Or even before that. Thus, we glimpsed a version of such instability
much earlier, in the protracted episode in London’s Martin Eden nar-
rating the young Martin’s repeated fistfights with the dreadful Cheese-
Face, which are explicitly analogized to his present efforts to find a
publisher for his manuscripts. The fistfights come back to him as in-
tensely visual and aural memories as he buries his face in his arms on his
writing table; he wants to cry, and is reminded of his first fight, when he
was six years old, and Cheese-Face, two years older,
had beaten and pounded him into exhaustion. He saw the ring of
boys, howling like barbarians as he went down at last, writhing in
the throes of nausea, the blood streaming from his nose and the tears
from his bruised eyes.
“Poor little shaver,” he murmured. “And you’re just as badly
licked now. Y ou’re beaten to a pulp. You’re down and out.”2
The fights continue in a narrow alley next to the building where a news-
paper, the Enquirer, is printed; indeed, they go on day after day, with hal-
lucinatory intensity. For Martin, he recalls,
here was nothing e lse in the world but that face, and he would
T
never know rest, blessed rest, until he had beaten that face into a
pulp with his bleeding knuckles, or until the bleeding knuckles that
somehow belonged to that face had beaten him into a pulp. And
then, one way or the other, he would have rest. But to quit,—for
him, Martin, to quit,—that was impossible! (ME, 177)
Eventually, as emerged in Chapter 4, Martin reduces Cheese-Face’s face

to “a bloody something before him that was not a face but a horror, an
oscillating, hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that persisted before his
wavering vision and would not go away” (ME, 182)—until the horror sinks
to the ground and Martin has won. Coming out of his virtual trance,
Martin in the present looks about his room,
perplexed, alarmed, wondering where he was, until he caught sight

of the pile of manuscripts in the corner. Then the wheels of memory
slipped ahead through four years of time, and he was aware of the
present, of the books he had opened and the universe he had won
from their pages. (ME, 183)
In Chapter 4 I claim that the battles with Cheese-Face express a fantasy

at once of writing and of publication, or more precisely, an obsession
with the thought of writing as publication (an unrealizable thought, as
matters turn out), and I further suggest that the pages in question may be
read as implying a kind of identification with Cheese-Face, as if his suffer-
ings rather than Martin’s are made most vivid to the reader. Now I want
to propose that the descriptions of the fistfights, and in particular the
repeated stress on the word “pulp,” introduce a third term into the
story—not just the manuscripts seeking a publisher and the desired pub-
lications (newspapers, magazines, books) but wood pulp itself, the raw
material out of which paper, newsprint especially, had fairly recently come
to be manufactured.3 Read in that light, the fistfights in their very ferocity
make a highly problematic analogy for Martin’s efforts to achieve publi-
cation, figuratively veering as they do in exactly the opposite direction—
in effect, threatening to reduce the manuscripts themselves to an inchoate
condition. W hether or not London in his account of the battles with
Cheese-Face suspected that this was one implication of his choice of lan-
guage remains an open question. But t here is, in any case, a striking lack
of fit between the all but formless thing that Cheese-Face’s visage had been
reduced to and the very idea of publication.4
A little-k nown but fascinating text with respect to the notion of regres-
sion from the printed condition to earlier ones is R. B. Cunninghame
Graham’s long sketch “Prog ress,” from his volume of sketches of that
name (1905).5 It begins simply enough (as often in this book, the citation
that follows will not be brief):
A friend in Mexico sent me the other day a l ittle book.

The author, Heriberto Frias, was quite unknown to me, but has
become a friend.
It is asserted that some have been the hosts of angels unawares,
a proposition most difficult of proof (or of disproof), for angels in
the self-same way as ghosts are seen with the interior eye. But; the
book lies before me, in all the poverty of its cheap paper, and the
faint, eye-searing print, which Spain apparently has left among its
legacies to the republics which once were “jewels in her crown.”
Printed in Mexico (Mancier Brothers, Io del Relox), it has upon
its outside cover a vignette of a l ittle village in the Sierra Madre,
known as Tomochic. A river runs in front, slow flowing, and its
margin set about with tamarisks. It further is adorned with the
presentment of a soldier of the republic that Porfirio Diaz rules; a
rifle in his hand, his bandolier crossing his chest, his chinstrap
stuck beneath his nose, and on his face, an air of Mexico expects
each man to look his best.
On a small scroll there is a vignette of a poblana girl, wearing her
hair in the old Spanish fashion in a long thick plait, and with a cross
and rosary, sinister, sable, displayed upon a ground of rather sickly
gules. But the keynote is given on the left corner of the page where
a strange figure sits. Dressed all in grey, with deerskin sandals on
his feet, kept on by straps which, like the garterings of Malvolio,
or those worn by a pifararo, rise to his knee, with his hands
crossed upon his Winchester, two bandoliers upon his chest, and
one about his waist fastened by a long silver cross, he sits and
looks out on the world, with all the realism that a bad portrait
sometimes has in a supreme degree. His bushy beard and thick
moustache, long and disheveled hair, and hat thrown back almost
to form an aureole, show the religious monomaniac or enthusiast
(for all the difference in the term is but the exit of the enterprise), at
the first glance.
A curious cloak, which rises almost to his ears in two peaked
wings, completes the picture, which may, for all that I know, have
been taken from the life. Upon the other outside covering of the
work are some perfunctory advertisements of books, most of them
translations from the French, setting forth the Vida de Jesus, by
E. Renan, Mi Madre, by one Hugo Conway, and lastly, La Señorita
Giraud mi Mujer, by Adolphe Belot. . . .
Thus with prolixity I have set forth the outside of my little book
sent from Tenochtitlan, as when it came to me it did not strike me
that I should be much moved by its contents. (“P,” 1–3)
Of course, Cunninghame Grahame turns out to have been sufficiently

moved by the book to retell its narrative in his own words. Very briefly,
the story concerns a small Mexican village, Tomochic, that refuses to
pay taxes on the grounds that they w ere due only to God, “and thus [he
writes ironically] at the first step they placed themselves outside the pale of
Christianity” (“P,” 6). (Their leader is a religious fanatic, Cruz, of the
type depicted on the outside cover of the book.) Accordingly, the gov-
ernment of President Porfirio Diaz sends a troop of 1,000 soldiers to
enforce the law, and the bulk of the narrative relates the different stages
of the bloody suppression of the minor rebellion. The book begins, the
reader is informed, with the impressions of a young officer, Miguel Mer-
cado, who learns from fellow officers that the resistance being offered by
the villagers is surprisingly strong, and who turns out to be attracted to
and indeed seduces a young woman of the village, who at the end will
die with the others. At one point, still early on, Cunninghame Graham
writes: “Here Heriberto Frias breaks off into a description of Tomochic
and of the c auses which led to the revolt, which might as well have been
at the commencement of the book” (“P,” 12). “Progress” continues:
One sees the place dazzling with whitewash in the clear blue sky,
or brown with sun-dried bricks, but as to this our author gives no
details, so I w ill make it white.
The l ittle sandy streets crossed one another at right angles, and
emerged upon the plaza, where was built the church. All round the
square stood seats of stucco painted in yellow ochre or in blue.
Above them waved some straggling China trees, or ashes of Japan.
The windows all had gratings of wrought iron; the doors were solid
and were studded thick with nails. Outside the actual town ex-
tended maize fields set with jacáls in which the cultivators lived.
[A footnote informs the reader that “jacál is the Mexican word for
a small cottage. It appears to be of Indian origin.”] . . .
There may have been some l ittle shops in which some fly-blown
wares were kept, with boxes of sardines, some macaroni, raisins of
the sun, and bottles of mescal, Tequila, whisky of the Americanos,
boots, girths, cigarettes, and general stores, called abarrotes by the
Mexicans, although the real meaning of the word is “dunnage,” and
signifies the packing used for the cargo of a ship. And yet an air of
melancholy hung all about the place: an air of melancholy, but min-
gled with distrust, so that, when men heard noises in the night, their
hands grasped pistol-butts laid ready to their beds; and in the day-
time hearing anything unusual, they stopped their conversation
with their eyes and ears strained open, as a coyoté or a mustang lis-
tens when a twig crackles or a distant neigh is borne along the
wind. (“P,” 13–14)
And so on, the essential point of t hese sensuously detailed and at the same
time manifestly imagined paragraphs (“There may have been some little
shops . . .”) being to signal to the reader that the sketch he or she is reading
is far from simply a translation of a Spanish-language narrative into En
glish; rather, what Cunninghame Graham has done is to take a published
book in another language, and after describing it at the outset in all its
material (also, in a sense, pictorial) specificity, go on to freely English it
in his autograph impressionist style, while at the same time continually
calling attention to its Mexican origin. Indeed, my further suggestion is
that the reader is meant to be encouraged, in part by Cunninghame Gra-
ham’s deliberately informal tone (“Thus with prolixity I have set forth the
outside of my little book”), to imagine the act of rewriting as taking place
more or less before his or her eyes, so that the cumulative effect is less of
the replacement of one printed text by another than of the continuous
transformation of the original book into a sustained feat of writerly
improvisation.
And not only that: t oward the end of the sketch, following a long and
bloody encounter between the army and the rebels, narrated over many
pages in harrowing detail, seven survivors destined to be shot “were laid
face upwards in a doorway which the fire had spared” (the rebels had been
holding out in a h ouse that the soldiers set aflame).
Amongst them was a w oman whose blackened and scorched hands

still held a r ifle bent and twisted with the heat.
Her breast was bare, and over it an empty bandolier was strapped.
She was the wife one of Cruz’s b rothers, and as they laid her down
she murmured, “Long live the Power of God!” [the rebels’s cry] and
died, her eyes remaining open and her jaw falling almost on her
breast. (“P,” 59)
Cruz, wounded, is laid beside her. Then the survivors are told to kneel,
the soldiers advance until their r ifles almost touch the men about to
die, and “the soldiers fired, and all fell dead but one, Cruz falling like a
stone, shot through the heart, his g reat black eyes remaining open wide
and fixed, as if he looked into eternity.” Then: “The last man, wounded
horribly, was writhing on the ground when he received another bullet,
struggled to his knees, and shouted, ‘Long live the Power of God!’ and
fell, a bundle of black, blood-stained rags, upon the ground” (“P,” 60–
61). As the soldiers leave the next morning, looking back, they saw only a
few huts and smoking ruins. But the Sierra Madre
stood out blue and flecked with snow; the pine woods formed a black
and threatening mass; and in the foreground, under a pile of wood,
the bodies smouldered, whilst the swine, grunting in the ashes, tore
the half-burned flesh of their dead owners, and a thick, nauseating
smoke ascended up on high.” (“P,” 61)
By now, it scarcely needs stressing that the position of the rebels alive
and dead, lying on their backs with open, and in the case of the dead, un-
seeing eyes, is that of the upward-facing page on which Cunninghame
Graham was bringing his sketch to a close; the key gerund “writhing”
also makes a dramatic, last-minute appearance; and I am tempted to see
in the w oman’s bent and twisted rifle a figure for scriptive writing as
such, though I am aware that for many readers this may be a stretch (just
wait). As for the last of the rebels being described as “a bundle of black,
blood-stained rags,” and for that matter the final image of the swine rooting
about in the half-burned flesh of their dead owners, I suggest that, know-
ingly or otherwise, Cunninghame Graham thereby evokes the formless
material—in this case, not pulp, but rags—out of which the paper of both
Heriberto Frias’s book and his own sketch, and before that, of their re-
spective manuscripts, was surely constituted. At that point, the ironically
titled “Progress” has nowhere further to go.
n
By far, the most famous text of the period focused on the theme of re-
gression (or reversion) is H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau
(1897).6 A reasonably full analysis would take up too much space, but a
few points should be made; even to make t hose, however, a brief plot sum-
mary is required.
The novel purports to be the manuscript of a first-person account by
one Edward Prendick of his adventures following a shipwreck in which
he was presumed to have been lost. A fter drifting for a time in a dinghy,
Prendick was picked up in a state of collapse by a schooner en route to an

island where he, too, was forced by the drunken captain to disembark.
In effect, the island belonged to an older man, the Dr. Moreau of the book’s
title, and t here, with the assistance of a younger man, Montgomery (who
had been on the schooner and who had nursed Prendick following his
rescue), Moreau conducted grisly experiments on animals with the pur-
pose of making them into h umans, or at least into “humanised animals—
triumphs of vivisection” (IDM, 45). (The parallel between Wells’s story
and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has always been recognized.) All this
emerges only gradually, and excruciatingly: The Island of Doctor Moreau
must be one of the most unpleasant reads in English or American litera
ture. The truth does not become plain until roughly halfway through the
book, in a chapter titled “Dr. Moreau Explains,” in which Moreau gives
an account of his aims and methods. I shall have more to say about that
account shortly, but h ere what I want to stress is Moreau’s acknowledgment
of his great failure—namely, the ineradicable tendency for his humanized
animals eventually to revert to mere animals again, despite the surgery
that has altered their physical forms and the more mysterious process,
apparently akin to hypnosis, by which a version of the moral law (called,
indeed, “the Law”) has been instilled in them. “I have been d oing better,”
Moreau says to Prendick. “But somehow the things drift back again: the
stubborn beast-flesh grows day by day back again” (IDM, 50; emphasis
in original). And a page or so further on:
hese creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to you as soon

T
as you began to observe them; but to me, just a fter I make them, they
seem to be indisputably human beings. It’s afterwards, as I observe
them that the persuasion fades. First one animal trait, then an-
other, creeps to the surface and stares out at me. But I w ill conquer
yet! Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain,
I say, “This time I w ill burn out all the animal; this time I w ill
make a rational creature of my own!” . . . [But in fact] they revert.
As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep
back, begins to assert itself again. (IDM, 51)
The remainder of the narrative bears this out. One of the “Beast Folk,”
as Prendick calls them (he also refers to them as “monsters”), the Leopard-
an, violates the injunction against eating flesh (he kills and devours a
M
rabbit) and goes wild; confronted by Moreau in front of the other Beast
Folk, at first he is cowed, but then attacks Moreau and runs off; finally,
he is cornered, and although Moreau wishes to take him alive, Prendick,
responding to the Leopard-Man’s terror at the prospect of being returned
to suffer “the horrible tortures of the enclosure” (IDM, 62), shoots it be-
tween the eyes. Sometime later, a puma on which Moreau had been
working breaks loose from the laboratory, attacks Prendick in passing
(breaking his arm), and goes on to kill Moreau and be killed by him. By
this time, other animals have regressed to the point of becoming dan-
gerous; more violence follows, and Montgomery, too, is killed. Prendick
attempts to convince the Beast Folk that although Moreau has died he is
really alive in a world above them, that he watches all their actions, and
indeed, that he w ill come again (to this extent, Wells’s novel is a b itter
satire on Christianity, as has also been recognized), but the process of re-
version cannot be halted.
Eventually, Prendick is forced to kill a carnivorous hyena-swine that
has lost all fear and restraint, and he realizes that if he remains on the is-
land, his own death is just a m atter of time. Providentially, a small boat
arrives at the island (its occupants are dead), and Prendick embarks on
it and a fter a few days is rescued. The manuscript is near its end, which
it reaches by means of a variation on the closing pages of Gulliver’s Travels:
Prendick describes how, once returned to civilization, “I could not per-
suade myself that the men and women I met with were not also another
Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human
souls, and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bes-
tial mark and then that” (IDM, 86). As he also says:
I see faces keen and bright; others dull or dangerous; others

u nsteady, insincere—none that have the calm authority of a rea-
sonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through
them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders w ill be played
over again on a larger scale. (IDM, 86)
Even in libraries, “the intent faces over the books seemed but patient crea-
tures waiting for prey,” though worst of all, it seems, “were the blank
expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no
more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not
dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone” (IDM, 87). Prendick
accordingly leaves London for “the broad free downland,” where he
spends his days
surrounded by wise books—bright windows, in this life of ours lit

by the shining souls of men. . . . My days I devote to reading and
to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights
in the study of astronomy. T here is—t hough I do not know how
there is or why there is—a sense of infinite peace and protection in
the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast
and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and
troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must
find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in
hope and solitude, my story ends. (IDM, 87; emphasis in original)
My interest in The Island of Doctor Moreau is quite specific: I am fas-

cinated by the implications of its story of ineluctable reversion for the
problematic of seeing and writing I associate with impressionism gener-
ally. But in order to make this good, I have to bring out aspects of Wells’s
text I deliberately minimized in sketching its broad outlines.
First, the theme of monstrosity is largely conveyed, especially before
Prendick fully understands the meaning of his observations, by descrip-
tions of half-human, half-bestial f aces. This may seem natural enough, but
in light of the larger thematic of faciality in impressionist texts, it is not
unimportant. So, for example, chapter 3, “The Strange Face,” involves a
careful description of the face of a disturbing figure, an oddly misshapen
man (Prendick assumes) who accompanies Montgomery as a kind of ser-
vant or assistant. “In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed
upon me [when the figure turns around] shocked me profoundly,” the nar-
rator writes.
It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming

something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open
mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a h uman
mouth. His eyes were bloodshot at the edges, with scarcely a rim of
white round the hazel pupils. T

here was a curious glow of excite-
ment in his face. (IDM, 8)
Prendick is “astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this

black-faced creature.” He continues: “I had never beheld such a repulsive
and extraordinary face before, and yet—if the contradiction is credible—I
experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had al-
ready encountered exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me”
(IDM, 8; emphasis in original). L ater, being towed to the shore of Moreau’s
island by Montgomery and a crew of Beast Folk in a launch, Prendick is
struck by their faces as well. “I saw only their faces,” he writes, “yet there
was something in their faces—I knew not what—t hat gave me a queer
spasm of disgust. I looked steadily at them, and the impression did not
pass, though I failed to see what had occasioned it” (IDM, 17). Not long
thereafter, Prendick sees several Beast Folk talking together and realizes
what had given rise to
two inconsistent and conflicting impressions of utter strangeness

and yet of the strangest familiarity. . . . Each of these creatures, de-
spite its h uman form, its rag of clothing and the rough humanity
of its bodily form, had woven into it—into its movements, into the
expression of its countenance, into its whole presence—some now
irresistible suggestion of a hog, a swinish taint, the unmistakable
mark of the beast. (IDM, 27)
(The last phrase w ill turn up again further on.)7

The narrator’s or, say, the story’s apparent obsession with faces is also
expressed in the fact that on the three occasions when Prendick finds it
necessary to kill one of the Beast Folk, he does so by shooting it in the
face (IDM, 62, 69, 84), as if the act of killing w
ere less important than that
of obliterating the face itself. In fact, this would seem to be the implica-
tion of his account of the second of those killings: “I fired, and the Thing
still came on; fired again point-blank into its ugly face. I saw its features
vanish in a flash: its face was driven in” (IDM, 69). (Think in this con-
nection of the destruction of Henry Johnson’s face in The Monster, of the
deliberate obliteration of the drowned Malay’s face in Almayer’s Folly, and
of Martin’s climactic fistfight with Cheese-Face—just three of many such

scenes in impressionist literature. In an extremely unpleasant early story
by Kipling, which just happens to be called “The Mark of the Beast,” a
leper known as the Silver Man has no face at all.) 8 A somewhat different
note is struck after Moreau himself is killed and brought back to his com-
pound; although it is night, a bright moon casts shadows “of inky black-
ness” at the narrator’s feet. “Then I shut the door,” the narrator writes,
locked it, and went into the enclosure where Moreau lay beside
his latest victims—t he staghounds and the llama, and some other
wretched brutes—w ith his massive face calm even a fter his terrible
death, and with the hard eyes open, staring at the dead white
moon above. I sat down upon the edge of the sink, and with my
eyes upon that ghastly pile of silvery light and ominous shadows
began to turn over my plans. (IDM, 72)
Again, t here is no end of similar upturned faces with unseeing eyes in

other impressionist texts, though what is perhaps distinctive h ere is the
hint in the final phrase of something material being leafed through, liter-
ally, turned over, in the narrator’s mind. Montgomery’s death, too, gives
rise to a similar description. “I bent down to his face,” we read,
put my hand through the rent in his blouse. He was dead; and even
as he died a line of white heat, the limb of the sun, r ose eastward
beyond the projection of the bay, splashing its radiance across the
sky, and turning the dark sea into a weltering tumult of dazzling
light. It fell like a glory upon his death-shrunken face. (IDM, 74)
In Crane, as I have argued in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned F aces,” the

word “line” inevitably carries connotations of a line of writing; I don’t say
flatly that that is the case h ere, though the curiously excited description
of a limb-like spread of light across the sky and then the transfer of that
light both to the previously dark sea and to the dead Montgomery’s up-
turned face suggests a process of something like stamping or printing that
belongs to the larger technology of literary production, a point to which
I shall return. Finally, the next chapter, “Alone with the Beast Folk,”
begins: “I faced these people, facing my fate in them, single-handed now—

literally single-handed, for I had a broken arm” (IDM, 74). H ere, too, a
single sentence resonates with others in impressionist texts—think, for
example, of Marlow’s account in Lord Jim of Jim facing a courtroom of
faces demanding facts, which themselves assume the character of a
face—but what I want to emphasize is the mixture of deliberate repeti-
tion, alliteration, and near rhyme (“I faced t hese people, facing my fate
in them”) with an insistence on a certain literalness (“literally single-
handed, for I had a broken arm”), which I take as evoking a particular
literal condition, that of a man writing with a pen. This, too, is typical of
Wells’s brand of, or relation to, impressionism.
Second, the theme of reversion or regression is of course a well-k nown
naturalist motif, as for example in Norris’s Vandover and the Brute. But
what is distinctive about the treatment of reversion in The Island of Doctor
Moreau is its close association with a problematic of language, writing,
and—crucially, in my view—printing. Key passages in this regard occur
early and late in the book. Shortly a fter Prendick arrives on the island,
he learns that the older bearded man who controls it is named Moreau.
For a while, the name awakens no associations, but suddenly, a phrase
enters his head:
“The Moreau Hollows”—was it? The Moreau—A h! It sent my

memory back ten years. “The Moreau Horrors!” The phrase drifted
loose in my mind for a moment, then I saw it in red lettering on a
little buff-colored pamphlet, to read which made one shiver and
creep. Then I remembered distinctly all about it. That long-
forgotten pamphlet came back with startling vividness to my mind.
(IDM, 21)
The second passage—to my mind, a particularly significant one—

occurs much further on. Following the deaths of Moreau and Montgomery,
the narrator has been living among the Beast Folk when he becomes
aware of various changes in their behavior whose significance is unmis-
takable. “It was about May when I first distinctly perceived a growing
difference in their speech and carriage, a growing coarseness of articula-
tion, a growing disinclination to talk,” he writes.
My Ape-Man’s jabber multiplied in volume, but grew less and less

comprehensible, more and more simian. Some of the o thers seemed
altogether slipping their hold upon speech, though they still under-
stood what I said to them at that time. (Can you imagine language,
once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering, losing shape and
import, becoming mere lumps of sound again?). . . . They w ere re-
verting, and reverting very rapidly. (IDM, 81)
I associate these passages with one another on the grounds that the second
is figuratively the radical undoing of the first. In the first, the name
“Moreau” triggers the startlingly vivid memory not simply of an earlier
scandal, but specifically of a buff-colored pamphlet with printed red
lettering on its cover. And in the second, h uman speech in the course of
reverting to its animal equivalent is characterized not just as palpably
material, but more precisely, as analogous to lead type that is in the pro
cess of softening, being melted back, into unformed matter—into molten
lead—an operation, it is relevant to bear in mind, that recent type-casting
machines, most famously, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine,
had made part of the modern process of printing. (The first of those ma-
chines was installed in the composing room of the New York Tribune in
July 1886.) 9
Or consider certain moments in the extended conversation between
Moreau and Prendick that takes up the whole of chapter 14. Moreau ex-
plains that he wanted to use vivisection to give animals the refined larynx
that would enable them (in his words) “to frame delicately different sound-
symbols by which thought could be sustained” (IDM, 47), on the grounds
that this, above all, marks the g reat divide between man and monkey
(and more broadly, man and beast). The narrator then asks Moreau
“why he had taken the h uman form as a model,” adding, “There seemed
to me then, and there still seems to me now, a strange wickedness in that
choice.” The passage continues:
He confessed that he had chosen that form by chance.“I might just

as well have worked to form sheep into llamas and llamas into sheep.
I suppose t here is something in the human form that appeals to the
artistic turn more powerfully than any animal shape can. But I’ve
not confined myself to man-making. Once or twice—” He was s ilent,

for a minute perhaps. “These years! How they have slipped by! And
here I have wasted a day saving your life, and am now wasting an
hour explaining myself!” (IDM, 47)
It is hard not to feel that Moreau’s explanation of the grounds for his choice
of the h uman form (and face) is less than adequate, and harder still not to
wish to know more about his experiments with other forms as the basis
for his experiments.
The wish is soon gratified. Several pages further on, Moreau returns,
seemingly reluctantly, to the topic.
“The fact is, a fter I had made a number of h uman creatures I made
a Thing.” He hesitated.
“Yes?” said I.
“It was killed.”
“I don’t understand,” said I; “do you mean to say—”
“It killed the Kanaka [one of six tribesmen Moreau originally
brought to the island]—yes. It killed several other things that
it caught. We chased it for a c ouple of days. It only got loose by
accident—I never meant it to get away. It wasn’t finished. It was
purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing, with a horrible
face, that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion. It was
immensely strong, and in infuriating pain. It lurked in the woods for
some days, until we hunted it; and then it wriggled into the northern
part of the island, and we divided the party to close in upon it.
Montgomery insisted upon coming with me. The man had a r ifle;
and when his body was found, one of the barrels was curved into
the shape of an S and very nearly bitten through. Montgomery shot
the thing. After that I struck to the ideal of humanity—except for
l ittle t hings.” (IDM, 50)
If we ask on what this particular creature was modeled, the answer would
seem to be on handwriting, specifically script, as distinct from the printed
page. That is the implication of Moreau’s description of its serpentine,
ground-hugging movements, and also, equally important, of the seemingly
gratuitous fact that the gun barrel of the man the creature killed “was
curved into the shape of an S”—the letter S in this context representing
cursiveness as such, or the very essence of written script. (Cf. the sen-
tence from Cunninghame Graham’s “Progress” cited earlier: “Amongst
them was a w oman whose blackened and scorched hands still held a r ifle
bent and twisted with the heat.” Cunninghame Graham, of course, would
likely have read Moreau.) The point is underscored in the next chapter
by the narrator’s reference to the same creature as “the writhing Footless
T
hing” (IDM, 53), a designation that perhaps carries the added sugges-
tion of the writing of prose.10
The contrast between the writhing Footless T hing that was never
meant to be allowed to get away and the other, humanized creatures that
could be trusted on their own would then be readable as figuring, indeed,
as asserting, the difference between a handwritten and a printed page—the
idea being, presumably, that the latter was as if evolutionarily more ad-
vanced, more distanced from its material origins, than the former. And
if we now put this together, both with Moreau’s philosophically tradi-
tional claim that the possession of articulate speech—more broadly, of
language—marks the distinction between h umans and animals, and with
the imagery of type in terms of which he implicitly metaphorizes lan-
guage in its “clear-cut and exact” (i.e., its fully h uman) manifestation, then
humanness (or at least humanlikeness) and printing emerge as figures for
one another. And this is to say that the process of reversion or regres-
sion in The Island of Dr. Moreau is ultimately to be read in terms not
only of the degeneration of the humanoid Beast Folk back to mere brutes,
but also of the movement from the printed page back toward brute
matter; not just toward the lead type itself (which, in the logic of the
story, is perhaps no reversion at all) but further back toward the “mere
lumps” of stuff into which, in the advanced machines I mentioned a mo-
ment ago, the type was melted down after use—and, more to the point,
out of which it was originally formed.
Finally, there is the complex issue of the role of materialism and
materiality in Wells’s story. The subject emerges explicitly when Pren-
dick challenges Moreau to justify the extreme pain he systematically in-
flicts on the animals he is working on. “The only t hing that could ex-
cuse vivisection to me,” Prendick goes on to say, “would be some
application—.” Moreau cuts him off:
“Precisely,” said he. “But, you see, I am differently constituted. We

are on different platforms. You are a materialist.”
“I am not a materialist,” I began hotly.
“In my view—in my view. For it is just this question of pain that
parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long
as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your proposi-
tions about sin—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little
less obscurely what an animal feels.” (IDM, 47; emphasis in original)
The argument becomes more complex when Moreau goes on to argue that
the sole function of pain among men is as “our intrinsic medical adviser to
warn us and stimulate us,” and that with the progress of evolution, men
will increasingly “see a fter their own welfare,” which is to say that pain
will sooner or later be made n eedless, and “ground out of existence” (IDM,
48). Moreau even claims to be a religious man in the sense of under-
standing “the ways of this world’s Maker,” and he assures Prendick that
“this store men and w omen set on pleasure and pain . . . is the mark of
the beast upon them—the mark of the beast from which they came” (IDM,
48). What is wholly obscure in all this, however, is what in Moreau’s ac-
count of t hings the alternative to materialism is; certainly, not idealism
(Moreau never suggests that pain or the world is unreal), and not spiritu-
alism of any known variety (Moreau extols the “intellectual passion”
[IDM, 48] of the scientific investigator, which enables him to ignore the
sufferings of the animals u nder his knife, and would seem to embody
materialist doctrine in its purest form). By the same token, although Pren-
dick is appalled by the pain involved in Moreau’s procedures, and obvi-
ously does not accept Moreau’s characterization of himself, Prendick, as
a materialist, he also fails to give an account of his position that would
distinguish it theoretically or ideologically from Moreau’s.11
In other words, pain plays a crucial and, I think one can say, inade-
quately theorized role, not just in Moreau’s practice but also in the larger
thematics of the narrative: it would have been possible for the animals on
which Moreau worked to have been anesthetized, and the writer’s deci-
sion not to have Moreau anesthetize them, which adds immeasurably to
the horror of the story and the unpleasantness of actually reading it,
indicates what I take to be a deep and pervasive ambivalence on Wells’s
part with respect to the larger issue of the materiality of writing (also of
the printed page) with which, I have been claiming, my impressionist

texts are all in one way or another implicitly engaged. Another way of
framing the issue would be to ask whether the pain to which the ani-
mals are subjected in the course of Moreau’s experiments is vital to
their humanization. The general tenor of Moreau’s remarks implies that
it is, and his statement “Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of
burning pain, I say, ‘This time I w ill burn out all the animal, this time I
w ill make a rational creature of my own’ ” (IDM, 51) seems to say so
explicitly, but he also speaks of how a gorilla on which he had worked
with infinite care was brought to a point where he had “no memories
left in his mind of what he had been” (IDM, 49), which perhaps sug-
gests that the hypnosis-like process by which Moreau implants the Law
in the animals is somehow intrinsically connected to the infliction and
the forgetting of pain. Yet, the Law itself includes the formulae, “His is
the House of Pain. His is the Hand that makes. His is the Hand that
wounds. His is the Hand that heals” (IDM, 38; emphasis in original)—
which seems to rebut that suggestion. In view of Wells’s penchant for
exact scientific explanations elsewhere in his oeuvre, the apparent con-
tradictions and general failure of specificity on these points must be con-
sidered significant.12
A similar ambivalence with respect to the products of writing and, in-
deed, of printing, turns up in the story’s closing pages, where Prendick,
returned to civilization, becomes convinced that the faces around him will
all sooner or later show signs of reversion. Among the faces he singles out
with distaste, it will be remembered, are the intent faces of people reading,
yet he goes on to surround himself with what he characterizes as “wise
books, bright windows, in this life of ours lit by the shining souls of men,”
and says that he spends his days in reading and doing chemistry and his
nights in the study of astronomy (the avoidance of biology is clearly sig-
nificant). And he concludes by saying that
it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in
the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more
than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I
could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends. (IDM,
87; emphasis in original)
So, a certain materialism is apparently vindicated after all, and moreover,

is equated with a notion of the “more than animal,” as if to conclude that
the distinction between animal and human is not equivalent to one be-
tween materialism and something “higher,” but rather to different modes
of or stances toward materialism (as figured, for example, by the differ-
ence between vivisection and astronomy).
Put in terms of an impressionist problematic, The Island of Doctor
Moreau thematizes what might be described as a sense of the ontological
instability of the printed text, whose material nature enables it to be seen
and read but is also precisely what it has in common with mere or brute
matter, from which nevertheless it is crucially distinguished—but by
what? One is tempted to say by its relation to language, but the reversion
of language to mere lumps of sound t oward the end of the narrative im-
plicitly thematizes language in terms of print and printing, not the other
way round. By the act of printing, then? But the same passage, and the
overarching theme of reversion to the brutely material, extend the notion
of ontological instability to type itself, which is to say, to the material ori-
gins of the printed text. (I have anchored this interpretation in certain im-
mediately previous developments in the technology of printing.) The
untheorized status of pain in the story perhaps represents the equally un-
theorized (and for Wells, probably untheorizable) remainder that distin-
guishes both writing and printing from their material bases—but this is
speculation.
n
Another well-k nown text of the period clearly belongs in this
chapter, even if it requires no great effort of exegesis to establish that it
does—Rudyard Kipling’s much admired story “Wireless” (1902).13 The set-
ting is a pharmacy in a seaside English town; the characters are the nar-
rator, who goes nameless; John Shaynor, a young and dedicated assistant in
the pharmacy; a Mr. Cashell, nephew of the old Mr. Cashell who owns the
pharmacy but remains upstairs throughout the narrative; and a luscious
young woman, Fanny Brand, who makes a brief appearance to persuade
Shaynor to go for a walk with her despite the bitter cold weather. The time
is night, and the occasion is an attempt by the younger Cashell to conduct
an experiment with an elementary wireless apparatus—specifically, to
send transmissions to and receive transmissions from another such ap-

paratus in Poole, some distance away. The narrator is t here to witness the
experiment, but he soon becomes struck by the obvious fact of Shaynor’s
illness—the latter coughs continually, and at one moment, raises a hand-
kerchief to his mouth that comes away spotted with blood. In short,
Shaynor, obviously smitten with the girl, is tubercular, and at one point,
the younger Cashell remarks to the narrator that his uncle doesn’t ex-
pect Shaynor to survive the year. As Cashell sets up his apparatus, the
narrator mixes various drinks out of available chemicals, and one of
them sends Shaynor into an immediate sleep—a kind of trance. Cashell
transmits his message, but something seems to be wrong at the Poole end,
and he tells the narrator that he w ill call him when something significant
happens. (I should also mention that in the pharmacy there is a gold-
framed toilet w ater advertisement with the “seductive shape” of a young
woman distantly resembling Fanny Brand, “unholily heightened by the
glare from the red b ottle in the window” [“W,” 559].)
The story then takes an unexpected turn:
I returned to the shop, and set down my glass on a marble slab with
a careless clink. As I did so, Shaynor rose to his feet, his eyes fixed
once more on the advertisement, where the young woman bathed
in the light from the red jar simpered pinkly over her pearls [the nar-
rator means she appeared to do so]. His lips moved without cessa-
tion. I stepped nearer to listen. “And threw—and threw—and threw,”
he repeated, his face all sharp with some inexplicable agony.
I moved forward astonished. But it was then he found words—
delivered roundly and clearly. These:
And threw warm gules on Madeleine’s young breast.
The trouble passed off his countenance, and he returned lightly
to his place, rubbing his hands.
It had never occurred to me, though we had many times discussed
reading and prize-competitions as a diversion, that Mr. Shaynor
ever read Keats, or could quote him at all appositely. T here was,
after all, a certain stain-glass effect of light on the high bosom of
the highly-polished picture which might, by stretch of fancy,
suggest, as a vile chromo recalls some incomparable canvas, the

line he had spoken. Night, my drink, and solitude were evidently
turning Mr. Shaynor into a poet. He sat down again and wrote
swiftly on his villainous note-paper, his lips quivering.
I shut the door into the inner office and moved up behind him.
He made no sign that he saw or heard. I looked over his shoulder,
and read, amid half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches:
—Very cold it was. Very cold
The hare—the hare—the hare—
The birds—
He raised his head sharply, and frowned toward the blank shut-
ters of the poulterer’s shop where they jutted out against our window.
Then one clear line came:
The hare, in spite of fur, was very cold. (“W,” 564–565)
Cashell tells the narrator that something is coming through his appa-
ratus (“but it isn’t Poole” [“W,” 565]), but the narrator replies that some-
thing is coming through where he is, too, and that he wants to be left alone
for the moment. Shaynor continues to channel Keats, drafting line after
line and astonishing the narrator, who theorizes,
If he has read Keats it’s the chloric-ether [the drink]. If he h asn’t,

it’s the identical bacillus, or Hertzian wave of tuberculosis, plus
Fanny Brand and the professional status [Keats was trained as a
pharmacist] which, in conjunction with the mainstream of subcon-
scious thought common to all mankind, has thrown up tempo-
rarily an induced Keats. (“W,” 567; emphasis in original)
More lines follow, closing in on, but never quite arriving at three from
“Ode to a Nightingale”: “The same that oft-times hath / Charmed magic
casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn”—
at which point, Shaynor wakes. (It turns out he had not read Keats.)
Cashell explains that contact with Poole failed, and in fact, that something
has been g oing on that he does not understand, but just then, Poole comes
in “clear as a bell” (almost as if until then, Shaynor’s channeling of Keats
had prevented the wireless connection from being made). But the narrator
declines to stay. “I’ll go home and get to bed. I’m feeling a l ittle tired,” he
says (“W,” 573), and the story ends.
Critical comment scarcely seems necessary. The theme is regression
or reversion, in this brilliantly i magined instance from the poems as the
narrator would have known them (in printed form, obviously), back
through their written versions (which we are not shown, though we are
shown Shaynor writing the fragments coming to him), to certain moments
of Keats’s inspiration, which in turn are (poetically) conjoined with the
earliest days of wireless transmission—suggesting an analogy that the
story is wise enough to leave merely implicit.14 (One lingering question:
why is the Keats surrogate named Shaynor? Especially when the Fanny
Brawne surrogate is called Fanny Brand? I have no idea, but this is per-
haps an occasion for mentioning that proper names—going back to Tim-
othy Lean, Arthur Staples Karslake, and Lloyd Searight—often play a
strangely obtrusive role in impressionist writings, as if thereby, the texts
in question deliberately court calling attention to their production in that
regard also.)
One last item, a short story by Frank Norris, “The Joyous Miracle”
(written in 1898, published in 1906), has a bearing on these issues.15 Set
in the years shortly after Christ’s death, it begins:
Mervius had come to old Jerome’s stone-built farmhouse, across the

huge meadow where some half-dozen of the neighboring villagers
pastured their stock in common. Old Jerome had received a certain
letter, which was a copy of another letter, which in turn was a copy
of another letter, and so on and so on, nobody could tell how far.
Mervius would copy this letter and take it back to his village, where
it would be copied again and again and yet again, and copies would
be made of these copies, till the whole countryside would know the
contents of that letter pretty well by heart. It was in this way, indeed,
that t hese people made their literature. They would hand down the
precious documents to their children, and that letter’s contents
would become folk-lore, become so well known that it would be
repeated orally. It would be a legend, a mythos; perhaps by and
by, a fter a long time, it might gain credence and become even his-
tory. (“JM,” 1–3)
In other words, the letter by being copied over and over (and over) would
come to be “pretty well” memorized by t hose copying it, with the result that
it would be repeated orally (the letter not having originated orally) u ntil it
became a legend and perhaps, “after a long time,” history; that is, established
fact. T here is nothing obvious about this sequence of stages, which I take
to represent a very particular process of regression, from writing through
orality to legend and finally history (that is, what men and women take to be
objectively true). The letter turns out to have been written by Peter, whom
some of the peasants and laborers in that neighborhood knew when he was a
simple (but good) fisherman named Simon, before he went with Jesus, who
is referred to only as the carpenter’s son. The two men, Jerome and Mer-
vius, have a short conversation to this effect, when Mervius unexpectedly
says that the letter leaves out something that he once saw. Because (he
continues) he once saw the carpenter’s son, when he, Mervius, was a lad,
playing with a group of children from his village, including his little cousin
Joanna, his brother Simon, and friends named Septimus and Joseph—
“the village bleach-green was the playground.” His story continues:
This bleach-green was a great meadow by the brook, on the other

side my father’s sheepfolds. It belonged to the fuller of the village.
A fter weaving, the women used to bring here their webs of cloth to
be whitened. Many a time I have seen the great squares and lengths
of cloth covering the meadow, till you would have said the snow had
fallen.
It was like that on a holiday, when the five of us children were at
our play along the banks of the little brook. Across the brook was
the road that led back to the city, and back of us the bleach-green
was one shimmer of white, g reat spreads and drifts of white cloth,
billowing and rippling like shallow pools of milk, as the breeze
stirred under them. They were weighted down at the corners with
huge, round stones. It was a pretty sight. I have never forgotten that
bleach-green. (“JM,” 10–11)
The remainder of the story can briefly be summarized. Mervius and the
other children were modeling animals in clay; Joanna, the youngest, made
a series of birds, “clumsy, dauby little lumps of wet clay without much
form” (“JM,” 12). She was proud of them, but the o thers made fun of her,
at which point the carpenter’s son, unexceptional looking and still beard-
less, came up to the children and asked for a drink of water, which he
was given. The children then showed him their clay animals; little Joanna
was on his knee when she said to him, “See, see my birds. . . . See, they
said they w ere not pretty. They are pretty, aren’t they, quite as pretty as
theirs?” “Prettier, prettier,” the carpenter’s son said. Having lined up all
the clay birds in a row, he touched Joanna’s with his fingertip, then—
Did you ever see, when corn is popping, how the grain swells,
swells, swells, then bursts forth into whiteness? So it was then. No
sooner had that l ittle bird of Joanna, that clod of dust, that poor bit
of common clay, felt the touch of his finger than it awakened into
life and became a live bird—a nd white, white as the sunshine,
a beautiful l ittle white bird that flew upward on the instant, with
a tiny, glad note of song. We children shouted aloud, and Joanna
danced and clapped her hands. And then it was that the carpenter’s
son smiled. He looked at her as she looked up at that soaring white
bird, and smiled, smiled just once, and then fell calm again. (“JM,”
21–23)
The story ends with a last exchange between Mervius and Jerome, who
shakes his head in a manner that suggests he is not convinced by the for-
mer’s narrative; he adds that the carpenter’s son was a dreamer and that
they w ere well rid of him, but he regrets Peter, whose fish w
ere always
fresh.
Again, by now it scarcely needs saying that the bleach green in its daz-
zling milk-l ike whiteness figures blank paper waiting to be written on.
What is fascinating, though, and special to “The Joyous Miracle,” is that
no act of writing figuratively takes place; that is, the story begins by
evoking an endless repetitive process of writing (i.e., copying), but then
a fter the blankness and whiteness of paper is repeatedly evoked (the
story’s stake in that blankness and whiteness could hardly be stronger),
what follows is not an act of inscription but a joyous miracle that produces,
from a “clod of dust, [a] poor bit of common clay,” a soaring white bird:
an image, I suggest, of still another form of regression, if one may call it
that, from the dust and clay to which all living beings inevitably return
“back” to life—eternal life in Christ, though of course, this is left unsaid
in so many words.
Chapter Nine
How Literary Impressionism Ended

N
T he s i m p l e st accou n t of the end of literary impressionism,

predictably enough, is by Ford Madox Ford in the coda to his book
of reminiscences cited in Chapter 3, Return to Yesterday.1 The moment
Ford begins by recalling is June 28, 1914, a few months before the out-
break of the First World War, in which he would take an active part. Ford
had just completed writing The Good Soldier, which goes unnamed, but
he says of it, “It was done and I thought it would stand.” He adds that the
English Review, which he had edited (he had founded it in 1908), “seemed
then profoundly to have done its work,” and that a new generation, led
by Ezra Pound, “were producing an organ of their own. It was to be
called—prophetically—Blast” (“C,” 399). (Interestingly, The Good Sol-
dier itself cannot quite be said to bear signs of the end of literary impres-
sionism, despite its date, or so it seems to me.)
Ford goes on to report that one day, Pound and a young man Ford calls
D. Z.—obviously Wyndham Lewis—took him for a walk, in the course
of which Lewis, who edited Blast, said to Ford (in a “vitriolic murmur”):
“Tu sais, tu es foûtu! Foûtu! Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted

in fact. Your generation has gone. What is the sense of you and
Conrad and Impressionism. You stand for Impressionism. It is fin-
ished, Foûtu. Blasted too! This is the f uture. What does anyone
290
How Literary Impressionism Ended 291
want with your old-fashioned stuff? You try to make p eople believe
that they are passing through an experience when they read you.
You write t hese immense long stories, recounted by a doctor at t able
or a ship captain in an inn. You take ages to get t hese fellows in. In
order to make your stuff seem convincing. Who wants to be con-
vinced? Get a move on. Get out or get under.
“This is the day of Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism. What p eople
want is me, not you. They want to see me. A Vortex. To liven them
up. You and Conrad had the idea of concealing yourself when
you wrote. I display myself all over the page. In e very word. I . . .
I . . . I . . .”
He struck his chest dramatically and repeated: “I . . . I . . . I . . .
The Vortex. Blast all the rest.” I was reminded of a young lady I once
went to call on and who came r unning downstairs exclaiming:
“Devil, devil, devil take them all but me.”
But Mr. D. Z. was perfectly right. I d
on’t mean that I only thought
then that he was right. I think it now. Impressionism was dead. The
day of all t hose explosive sounds had come. Louder blasts soon
drowned them out and put back the hands of the clock to somewhere
a good deal the other side of mere Impressionism. But in that mo-
ment they were undoubtedly all right. (“C,” 400–401; emphasis in
original)
Ford puts the transition in terms of sound and noise, but of course it had
an extremely strong visual and typographic component, as D. Z.’s refer-
ences to Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism as much as declare, Lewis him-
self being both a painter and writer.2 Thus, the first of the two issues of
Blast that eventually appeared bore a bright pink cover with the title in
black capitals r unning diagonally from upper left to lower right, and the
entire project was largely motivated by Lewis’s pictorial associations, with
Italian futurism in particular. (In fact, the first issue of Blast contained
an excerpt from The Good Soldier, then titled The Saddest Story—so Lewis
was not entirely hostile to Ford, after all.)
Not that an aggressively visual or typographic emphasis was without
precedent. As early as 1893 Wells had written in an article for the Pall Mall
Gazette titled “The Literature of the Future”:
The old literature was aristocratic, and this age is only the dawn of
democracy. The old literat ure is full of subtle meanings, hinting
quotations, faint allusions; it has a classical flavour, like a scent of
lavender. The democracy w ill have none of your classics, it hates
allusions and quotations; it likes a writer to be “clear and sensible.”
It is suspicious of being laughed at. . . . The old literature had a soft
voice and a gentle insinuating manner; the new literature w ill be a
thing of loud bawling books, shrieking headlines, and slovenly
grammar.3
(The last sentence in particular is of interest h ere.) And indeed, as early

as 1902, Henry James complained in a letter to his friend the novelist
W. D. Howells:
The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general anglo-
saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadère
of Journalism, of the newspaper & the picture (above all) magazine;
who keeps screaming “Look at me, I am the thing, & I only, the
thing that w ill keep you in relation with me all the time without
your having to attend one minute of the time.” If you are moved to
write anything anywhere about the W. of the D. [The Wings of the
Dove] do say something of that—it so awfully wants saying. But
we live in a lonely age for literature or for any art but the mere vi-
sual. Illustrations, loud simplifications and grossissements, the
big building (good for John [Howells’s son, an architect];) the
“mounted” play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone of, & with
the distinction of, a newspaper or bill-poster advertisement—these,
& these only, meseems, “stand a chance.” 4
So, the emphasis on “display” (“I display myself all over the page”) in
Lewis’s hissed tirade to Ford, assuming such took place, was not abso-
lutely new.
It is worth noting, though, that James had chided Robert Louis Ste-
venson in 1891, “No theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing.”5 And in
1893, in a letter to Stevenson apropos of the latter’s novel Catriona, James
had written:
The one thing I miss in the book is the note of visibility—It sub-
jects my visual sense, my seeing imagination, to an almost painful
underfeeding. The hearing imagination, as it were, is nourished like
an alderman, and the loud audibility seems a slight the more on the
baffled lust of the eyes—so that I seem to myself (I am speaking of
course only from the point of view of the way, as I read, my impres-
sion longs to complete itself) in the presence of voices in the
darkness—voices the more distinct and vivid, the more brave and
sonorous, as voices always are—but also the more tormenting and
confounding—by reason of t hese bandaged eyes.6
In other words, James himself demanded a certain level of “visual” realiza-

tion (think of Strether’s discovery of Chad and Mme Vionnet on the river in
The Ambassadors, or for that m atter, the stunningly imagined last pages of
“The Beast in the Jungle”) even as he deplored the overly visual emphasis,
as it seemed to him, of “anglosaxon” literary culture around 1903. James
and Wells would eventually clash directly with the publication of Wells’s
parodic Boon in 1915, but as we have seen, Wells himself in certain key texts
(When the Sleeper Wakes, In the Days of the Comet, Tono-Bungay) ex-
pressed ambivalence, to say the least, about both headline journalism and
blatant advertisement. So, the larger situation with regard to t hese issues
had a certain internal complexity that it is important to try to get right.
Another point stressed by Ford’s Mr. D. Z. is the replacement of the
impressionist insistence on the invisibility of the author by a new emphasis
on the writing self. And indeed, Ford’s version of the impressionist aes-
thetic calls precisely for the self-effacement of the author along Flauber-
tian lines, Flaubert
more than any of his associates [having] clamored unceasingly and

passionately that the author must be impersonal, must, like a cre-
ating deity, stand neither for nor against any of his characters, must
project and never report and must, above all, forever keep himself
out of his books. He must write his books as if he were rendering
the impressions of a person present at a scene; he must remember
that a person present at a scene does not see everything and is above
all not able to remember immensely long passages of dialogue.7
“But it was perhaps Crane of all that school or gang,” Ford goes on to
remark,
who most observed that canon of Impressionism: “You must render:

never report.” You must never, that is to say, write: “He saw a man
aim a gat at him”; you must put it: “He saw a steel ring directed at
him.” Later you must get in that, in his subconsciousness, he rec-
ognized that the steel ring was the polished muzzle of a revolver. So
Crane rendered it in Three White Mice [sic: the number should be
Five] which is one of the major short stories of the world. That is
Impressionism! (“T,” 67)
But as I have tried to show in this book, building on an argument first

put forward in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” literary impressionism
in the writings of Crane, Norris, Conrad, Hudson, Ford, London, Cun-
ninghame Graham, Childers, Kipling, and, in a sense, but only in a sense,
H. G. Wells, involved something more elaborate than simply rendering
impressions in the Fordian sense of the notion (I mean, of course, the Ford
of his essays on impressionism, not that the views expressed in t hose es-
says are all that simple). The basic idea, I have claimed, involves one or
another version of a thematization of or other form of engagement with
the scene of writing, with particular emphasis on the upward-facing page
and the act of inscription with pen and ink (see, in particular, the sum-
mary of the various impressionists’ projects in Chapter 7), and with the
specific proviso that in all cases except those of Norris in “A Memo-
randum,” Wells more broadly (hence what I have called his “critical”
relation to impressionism generally), and perhaps Cunninghame Graham
(in “The Orchid-Hunter” and his stories and sketches of journeys), the
thematizations and engagements in question are simultaneously con-
strained or suppressed, so that the writers themselves must be i magined
as less than fully aware of what their texts are doing. Thus, I take Crane
to have had no idea that “The Upturned Face” had for its essential sub-
ject the writing of “The Upturned Face” (as was said much earlier), and
Conrad not to have realized that “erasure” mattered to him as I have tried
to show it did, at least not until he came to write Under Western Eyes, in
the course of which, I have suggested, an awareness of his (until then)
career-long project seems to have come into play. Childers, of course,

would have been fully aware of the use he made of the maps and charts
he provided for the reader, but there is not the slightest reason to think
that he recognized the wider significance of his strategy—I mean, its re-
lation to the impressionist project as such. It follows that the writings of
all the literary impressionists are intensely visual, with recurrent imagery
relating “allegorically,” though sometimes almost literally, to the act
of writing, such as disfigured f aces (upturned and otherw ise), corpses
generally, missing or battered hands, snakes, fire, shadows, sticks, lines,
contrasts of white and black, snow and mist and darkness, ink or inki-
ness, letters and numbers (including the “sounded” letters in instances
of alliteration, onomatopoeia, dialect, and the like), pictorial diagrams,
maps and charts, effects of “contagion,” and, in Hudson’s writings, “birds
at their best” playing crucial roles (also, throughout the impressionist
corpus, certain key words such as “writhing” and “thing,” and in Crane’s
writings, pairs of words beginning with s and c.) But it also turns out to
be the case that all t hose images and effects, being what I have called “al-
legorical” (not the best term, but let it stand), stop short of announcing or
“displaying” their significance with Blast-like unequivocalness, which is
to say, yet again, that literary impressionism as a practice was structurally
conflicted, or to put this slightly differently, it was the site of a continual
struggle between the imagery and the devices I have just canvassed and
the need for the meaning of that imagery and those devices to go unrecog-
nized and unacknowledged so that the narratives in which they were em-
bedded could proceed to their ostensible ends—so that, to take another
key text, The Monster, the destruction of Henry Johnson’s face would be
felt by the reader to be an emotionally gripping, even shattering reality,
rather than an extreme figuration of what Crane at a particular moment,
badly needing money to support his and Cora Crane’s life in E ngland,
wrought upon a piece of paper with pen and ink. Understood in this light,
the moment of Blast, as singled out by Ford, amounts to a radical simpli-
fication—a purging of tension—in the interests of the visual and also, im-
portantly, the material.
This is a large claim, with different facets to it. Let me begin to try to
make it good with what may seem a surprising example of such simplifi-
cation in the direction of the sheerly visual, from a novel by an American
writer that enjoyed huge popularity when it was published in 1914 (and
ever since), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes.8 Very briefly,
Tarzan begins with the marooning by mutineers of a distinguished English
family—the young Lord and Lady Greystoke and their infant son John
(the f uture Tarzan)—on the west coast of Africa. The father constructs
a secure cabin for them, but Lady Greystoke dies when the boy is one
year old, and the boy’s father is killed by Kerchak, leader of the tribe of
apes into which the boy is then adopted (by Kala, an ape m other who
had just lost her own infant). The boy grows up an astonishing physical
specimen, possessed of tremendous strength and agility, and at one point,
while still quite young, he discovers his former family’s cabin (also the
skeletons within), and in the course of exploring it, comes across his
father’s journal (of course, he has no idea what that is) as well as several
elementary English-language primers, obviously meant for his own edu-
cation had his life continued as it was meant to. He is at once struck by
the primers, in particular by their combination of pictures and words—
“strange little bugs,” as the printed letters seem to him (T, 53). He squats
on his haunches on the table top and begins to study one of the books:
In his hands was a primer opened at a picture of a little ape similar

to himself [in other words, not an ape, but a h uman boy], but cov-
ered, except for hands and face, with strange, colored fur, for such
he thought the jacket and trousers to be. Beneath the picture were
three l ittle bugs—
BOY.
And now he had discovered in the text upon the page that those
three w ere repeated many times in the same sequence.
Another fact he learned—that there were comparatively few in-
dividual bugs; but t hese were repeated many times, occasionally
alone, but more often in company with others.
Slowly he turned the pages, scanning the pictures and the text
for a repetition of the combination b-o-y. Presently he found it be-
neath a picture of another little ape and a strange animal which went
upon four legs like the jackal and resembled him not a little. Beneath
this picture the bugs appeared as:
A BOY AND A DOG.

here they were, the three little bugs which always accompanied
T
the little ape.
And so he progressed very, very slowly, for it was a hard and la-
borious task which he had set himself without knowing it—a task
which might seem to you or me impossible—learning to read without
having the slightest knowledge of letters or written language, and
without the faintest idea that such t hings existed. (T, 53–54)
By the time he is fifteen he knows the various combinations of letters that

go with all the figures in the primers and one or two picture books; more-
over, one day when he is twelve, he comes across some pencils in a
drawer and begins to teach himself to write; at some point, too, he finds
a huge illustrated dictionary, which further advances his self-education,
so that by the time he is eighteen he can read and write English (chiefly,
printing: he can make out script, but cannot write it).
All this is interesting, but what Burroughs has been aiming at goes
considerably further. The first hint of it comes when Tarzan, who has
been led by his reading and thinking to realize that he is not an ape but a
man, cries out to his tribe of apes (after killing Sabor the lionness):
“See what Tarzan, the mighty killer, has done. Who else among you
has ever killed one of Numa’s p
eople? Tarzan is mightiest amongst
you for Tarzan is no ape. Tarzan is—” But here he stopped, for in
the language of the anthropoids t here was no word for man, and
Tarzan could only write the word in English; he could not pro-
nounce it. (T, 95)
In the chapters that follow, Tarzan uses his understanding of written

English to communicate with a group of English travelers, including a
young w oman, Jane Porter, with whom he falls in love. But the further
development of the writing versus speech theme comes when he rescues
a young Frenchman, D’Arnot, from a tribe of cannibals. Tarzan hands
D’Arnot a piece of bark on which he has written, in “plain print-like
characters,” “I am Tarzan of the Apes. Who are you? Can you read this
language?” D’Arnot seizes the pencil and writes, “Yes, I read English. I
speak it also. Now we may talk” (T, 215). But Tarzan shakes his head, and
D’Arnot realizes that Tarzan can read and write English but not speak
it; they continue to communicate via written messages, and eventually
D’Arnot, still exhausted from his ordeal among the cannibals, asks what
he can do to repay Tarzan for all he had done for him. Tarzan replies,
“Teach me to speak the language of men” (T, 218), and D’Arnot goes on
to teach him the names of t hings in French,
for he thought that it would be easier to teach this man his own lan-
guage, since he understood it himself best of all.
It meant nothing to Tarzan, of course, for he could not tell one
language from another, so that when he pointed to the word man
which he had printed upon a piece of bark he learned from D’Arnot
that it was pronounced homme, and in the same way he was taught
to pronounce ape, singe, and tree, arbre. (T, 218)
With Tarzan making rapid progress, D’Arnot soon realized that it was dif-
ficult to teach him French grammar on the basis of English, but he felt it
was too late to go back and start over. (Eventually, Tarzan masters spoken
English, as he does virtually everything to which he puts his mind.)
The point of this exercise, it is clear, is to dramatize a view of writing
that separates it radically and fundamentally from speech, or to put this
slightly differently, that separates linguistically the visual from the aural
while privileging the first, as if the relation between the two w ere not just
arbitrary but aporetic, t here being no system whatsoever of motivated
“translation” from the one to the other. What makes this particularly fas-
cinating, of course, is its relation to earlier moments in literary impres-
sionist writings in which the relation between visual and aural is put under
pressure in a variety of ways, as in Hudson’s view that in the case of birds,
“sights and sounds are more intimately joined than in any other order of
beings,” or as in Crane’s searingly brilliant use of dialect, his early short
novel Maggie being a consistent tour de force in this regard. (“ ‘Ah, git off
deh eart’,’ said Pete, a fter the other’s retreating form.”9 It may take a mo-
ment, even now, to recognize the Bowery transmogrification of “earth.”)
Other impressionist writers making use of dialect are Cunninghame
Graham in “Beattock for Moffat” (mentioned and briefly discussed in

Chapter 4), Wells in various of his novels, including Kipps and The His-
tory of Mr. Polly, and Kipling in many of his stories. Also, in Wells’s When
the Sleeper Wakes, Graham finds himself in a room with no books, no
newspapers, no writing materials. “ ‘The world has changed indeed,’ he
said.” Then he observes that “one entire side of the outer room was set
with rows of peculiar double cylinders inscribed with green lettering on
white.” The lettering puzzles him.
At first sight it seemed like Russian. Then he noticed a suggestion

of mutilated English about certain of the words.
“oi Man huwdbi Kin,”
forced itself on him as “The Man who would be King.” “Phonetic
spelling,” he said. He remembered reading a story with that title [by
Kipling, of course], then he recalled the story vividly, one of the best
stories in the world.10
ater he escapes into the city and sees “odd-looking letters on buildings”
L
spelling out, “after painful strain of eye and mind,” “ ‘Here is Eadhamite,’
or, ‘Labour Bureau—Little Side’ ” (S, 84). (I understand such phonetic
writing as implicitly contrasting with the “liberated writing” of flight, as-
sociated with the upper world, touched on in Chapter 6, note 7.) Here, it
is surely relevant that the first book proposing Esperanto as a universal
language was published in 1887, and that Wells himself served as vice
president of the Simplified Spelling Society, founded in 1906.
In Ebb-Tide (1894), a less than marvelous novel written by Robert Louis
Stevenson in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne,11 one of the
three villains (not too strong a way of putting it), a treacherous Cockney
clerk, bears the peculiar name “Huish,” which is repeatedly pronounced
“Whish” by one of the other characters—deliberately getting the pronun-
ciation wrong, it would seem, not that we are ever told what would be
correct. (The name itself, simply as a concatenation of letters, could not
be more odd.) Thus, in one exchange, Attwater, an Englishman who has
been harvesting pearls for years, and whom the o thers plan to kill and
rob, says, “ ‘Help yourself, Mr. Whish, and keep the bottle by you.’ ‘My
friend’s name is Huish and not Whish, sir,’ said the master with a flush.
‘I beg your p ardon, I am sure. Huish and not Whish, certainly,’ said
Attwater” (ET, 102)—but within a page he is back to “Whish,” which he
sticks to thereafter. What precisely is g oing on h ere, if not a kind of prising
apart of the visual and the aural—but to what end? (In fact, 1894 is early
for this to be taking place.) Note, too, the phrase “with a flush,” which
compounds the confusion—again, to what end?
Even stranger: late in the narrative Huish dictates a letter for Davis, a
disgraced American sea captain, to transcribe, seeking a meeting with
Attwater, who by now has ample reason to distrust them.
And the captain at last beginning half mechanically to move his pen,
the dictation proceeded:
It is with feelings of shyme and ’artfelt contrition that I approach
you after the yumiliatin’ events of last night [Huish’s drunkenness
gave away their plot]. Our Mr ’Errick has left the ship, and will have
doubtless communicated to you the nature of our ’opes. Needless to s’y,
these are no longer possible: Fate ’as declyred against us, and we bow
the ’ead. Well awyre as I am of the just suspicions with w’ich I am
regarded, I do not venture to solicit the fyvour of an interview for my-
self, but in order to put an end to a situytion w’ich must be equally
pyneful to all, I ’ave deputed my friend and partner, Mr J. L. Huish,
to l’y before you my proposals, and w’ich by their moderytion, w ill, I
trust, be found to merit your attention. Mr J. L. Huish is entirely
unarmed, I swear to Gawd! and will ’old ’is ’ands over ’is ’ead from
the moment he begins to approach you. I am your fytheful servant,
John Davis. (ET, 130)
In the event, the thoroughly dishonest Huish plans to throw a vial of acid
into Attwater’s eyes, but before he can do so, Attwater shoots him—in fact,
the acid spills over Huish before Attwater puts him out of his agony with
a second shot. What I find striking, though, and more than a little puz-
zling, is Stevenson’s decision to set Huish’s dictation typographically as
he has done (in smaller type, in italics), in a manner that suggests not
that the text records exactly what Huish said in his Cockney accent—
that could have been conveyed by placing the text between quotation
marks and eliminating the italics, presenting Huish’s words simply as
dialogue—but rather that this is exactly what Davis wrote, “half me-
chanically,” we are told. That is, presenting the text of the letter as Ste-
venson has done calls attention in a disruptive way to the problematic
relation between writing—in this case, Davis’s writing, which of course
we are not exactly shown—and dialect—in this case, Huish’s Cockney
accent (and of course Huish’s name is disruptive in exactly the same way).
And between both and typography, as a matter of fact. (And what ex-
actly is the force of “half mechanically” in the above?) I don’t claim e ither
that Stevenson is an impressionist writer—James’s criticism of his impov-
erished visual sense goes some way t oward indicating why he was not—
or that I know exactly what to make of these aspects of his novel, beyond
suggesting that they illustrate the sort of compromised relation between
speech and writing, aural and visual, that reaches a brilliant apogee in
Tarzan. In this connection, it is worth remarking that the narrative proper
is preceded by a note reading: “On the pronunciation of a name very fre-
quently repeated on these pages [NB: on these pages, not in them], the
reader may take for a guide: ‘It was the schooner Farallone’ ” (ET, 2). I
take this to mean that the final e is not sounded, hearing the short sentence
as a line of iambic tetrameter. But is this certain? In any case, it introduces
the issue of visual-or at least verbal-aural relations from the very start.
To take one more example, in Kipling’s much admired and also much
puzzled-over story “The Dog Hervey” (1914),12 initially titled “The Dog
Harvey,” the denouement hinges on the difference between the two ways
of spelling a name that sounds the same in both cases. “If you call a dog
Hervey, I will love him,” Samuel Johnson is quoted as having said, refer-
ring to one Henry Hervey, a “vicious” man who had been kind to him
(“DH,” 142), and indeed, the dog Hervey—not Harvey, as he is called
throughout the story—turns out to bear the name of a male character (sur-
name Shend, another impressionist oddity) who finally is happily joined
to the unlikely heroine (the plot is too complex to be summarized here).
“The Dog Hervey” was published the same year as Tarzan, a suggestive
coincidence.13
n
A brief account of Conrad’s last major novel, Victory (1914), w ill
bring this chapter nearly to a close. I suggested in Chapter 7 that by the
14
time Conrad came to write or at least to resolve or complete Under Western

Eyes, he had arrived at a certain understanding of his own commitment
to a project of writing as erasure; and I suggested, too, that in that novel,
as if living up to its title, Conrad went further than in any previous effort
in the direction of deliberately intensifying—more precisely, layering and
densifying—the relation of the reader to the page of print (I think of this
also as a kind of layering and densifying of the “vertical” space between
the reader and the page). So what was left for him to do, as a writer of
novels and short stories, from then on out? I find it not at all surprising
that with the publication of Under Western Eyes, Conrad found himself
very nearly at the end of his tether. But he had the nerve and the vision
for one more titanic effort, which is Victory.
The first paragraph reads:
here is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close
T
chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I be-
lieve, why some people allude to coal as “black diamonds.” Both
these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable
form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack
of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one’s
waistcoat pocket—but it can’t! At the same time, there is a fascina-
tion in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are
camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful h otel. And
I suppose t hose two considerations, the practical and mystical, pre-
vented Heyst—A xel Heyst—from going away. (V, 3)
But in fact, neither of the two considerations just named had anything to
do with Heyst remaining on the island of Samburan, as the narrative
makes clear, which suggests, at least to me, that the real point of the first
paragraph, apart from introducing Heyst himself at the end, was to put
coal and diamonds in the opening sentence. Understood in terms of Con-
rad’s practice to date, this is equivalent to juxtaposing ink (or writing)
and blank paper (or erasure), but in this case they are equated, not placed
in sequence, and moreover, the weight of the paragraph falls heavily on
coal (“the supreme commodity of the age”), hence not at all on erasure
(which w ill play almost no role at all in what follows). In keeping with this,
the small harbor on Samburan, named by Heyst and a man named Mor-
rison, is called Black Diamond Bay—again featuring equivalence, not
erasure. In the first few pages, too, we are told that
the most conspicuous object [in Heyst’s immediate surroundings]

was a gigantic blackboard raised on two posts and presenting to
Heyst, when the moon got over that side, the white letters “T. B. C.
Co.” in a row at least two feet high. These were the initials of the
Tropical B
elt Coal Company, his employers—his late employers, to
be precise. (V, 5)
Again, I understand the white-on-black lettering to be another means of

working against the erasive norm.
As for the narrative, the protagonist is Heyst, a man of forty-five, the
son of Swedish parents but raised in E ngland; crucially, his f ather was a
much-published philosopher whose view of life was entirely bleak and
who educated his son in that spirit. “ ‘What is one to do, then?’ sighed
the young man, regarding his father, rigid in the high-backed chair. ‘Look
on—make no sound,’ w ere the last words of the man who had spent his
life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet” (V, 175). And in fact, Heyst
seeks to put that advice into practice, “not by hermit-like withdrawal with
its silence and immobility, but by a system of restless wandering, by the
detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes” (V, 90).
(In other words, as an indifferent spectator to the scenes of life.) Or again:
“I’ll drift,” Heyst had said to himself deliberately.

He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He
meant to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached
leaf drifting in the wind-currents u nder the immovable trees of a
forest glade; to drift without ever catching on to anything. (V, 92)
Only twice does Heyst depart from this resolve: the first time, when he
helps a man named Morrison hold onto his sailboat by providing a small
sum of money to keep him out of debt, and the second time, when he
rescues—literally, runs off with—a young woman violinist from a traveling
ladies’ orchestra, in a hotel on the island of Sourabaya, to remove her
from the unwanted advances of the vile h otel owner, a German named
Schomberg.
One upshot of his rescue of Morrison is that the latter, out of gratitude,
makes Heyst a partner in a business venture, the Tropical B elt Coal
Company, based on the island of Samburan; a fter a few years, though,
Morrison returns to England on business and dies of illness there, after
which the venture falls apart. But Heyst, to general surprise, remains on
Samburan, with the occasional journey by sea to Sourabaya, where the
rescue of the young w oman takes place. (The journeys are made possible
by a man named Davidson, who sails a schooner among the islands and
who is friendly to Heyst.) “They call me Alma,” she tells Heyst in an early
conversation (Heyst has just said that he d oesn’t even know her name), “I
don’t know why. Silly name! Magdalen too. It d oesn’t matter; you can call
me by whatever name you choose. Yes, you give me a name” (V, 88). Even-
tually, “after several experimental essays in combining detached letters
and loose syllables,” he decides to call her Lena (V, 186). (Detached let-
ters and loose syllables are, of course, an impressionist trope not unre-
lated to the aural versus visual issue developed in the first part of this
chapter—not that it is clear exactly what to make of this in the present
context.) Heyst and Lena become lovers, despite his sense of having
violated his lifelong stance of detachment. Something e lse that should be
mentioned at this point is that Heyst has one servant, a Chinaman named
Wang, who takes as an unofficial wife a native woman in an encampment
not far away. Wang’s singular gift is to appear and disappear as if mirac-
ulously (more on this shortly).
Meanwhile, back in Sourabaya, three desperadoes come to stay for a
time at Schomberg’s h otel—Mr. Jones, an English “gentleman” of melo-
dramatically evil authority, Martin Ricardo, his lethal “secretary,” and the
semi-bestial Pedro, whose b rother Jones had killed in cold blood and who
is in Jones’s thrall. For a time, they set up a gambling room at the h otel,
but soon they are taken in by Schomberg’s revenge-driven ravings about
Heyst and the supposed “treasure” he has hoarded on his island (Schom-
berg hates Heyst for taking away the girl, but even before that, was suffi-
ciently infuriated by Heyst’s cool demeanor to accuse him of stealing from
Morrison and perhaps murdering him). In the end, Jones and o thers sail
in a boat to Samburan, nearly dying en route; Heyst lets them stay in a

bungalow on his property, while urging Lena to keep herself out of sight.
A curious feature of the novel is that Jones is pathological on the topic
of women—he simply can’t bear them. Ricardo, however, has an altogether
different nature, and when by chance he casts his eyes on Lena, he becomes
convinced that she and he are of a kind, and that she will give herself to
him. By now it is clear to Heyst that Jones and company are a serious
threat, and the situation is worsened by Wang’s absconding with Heyst’s
one weapon, a revolver (Wang has seen that the three visitors mean trouble,
and abandons Heyst so as not to be dragged down with him). To sum-
marize the rest of the narrative very briefly: Lena decides that only she can
save Heyst, by sacrificing herself, if necessary; she allows Ricardo to
think he is on the verge of seducing her (he is literally embracing her foot
as she sits, dressed in black, allowing him to do so), and manages to get
him to give her his particular weapon, a knife; just then, Jones, who has
learned from Pedro that t here is a w oman on the island, and who there-
fore realizes that Ricardo is betraying him, bursts into the room and fires
a shot at Ricardo. The shot grazes his head, but strikes Lena in the
breast. It takes a moment for Heyst, who has been with Jones, to realize
that Lena has been shot (at first, he thought she was actually on the verge
of giving herself to Ricardo), but then he tears open her dress and sees
the wound in her breast. She exultingly declares that she has saved him;
Heyst bends low over her, but even then, his fastidious soul keeps “the
true cry of love from his lips in its infernal mistrust of all life” (V, 403).
Jones flees, as does Ricardo, but when they encounter each other near the
shore, Jones fires again and kills Ricardo; soon, though, Jones apparently
falls into the w ater by the dock and drowns. The novel ends with David-
son’s testimony to an official (presumably, back in Sourabaya; it is never
made clear) explaining that he had sailed to Samburan having been
warned by Schomberg’s wife that Heyst was likely in trouble, but had ar-
rived just too late to play an active part in the confrontation. He also
reports that Heyst died in a fire in the principal bungalow, presumably
set by Heyst himself. “ ‘He is—ashes, your Excellency,’ said Davidson,
wheezing a l ittle; ‘he and the girl together. I suppose he c ouldn’t stand his
thoughts before her dead body—and fire purifies everything’ ” (V, 410). It
also emerges that Wang shot Pedro, who was dozing in the desperados’
boat, and then shoved the boat out to sea. The novel ends in character-
istic fashion: “ ‘And then, your Excellency,’ ” Davidson says, “ ‘I went
away. There was nothing to be done t here.’ ‘Clearly,’ assented the Excel-
lency. Davidson, thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and
then murmured with placid sadness: ‘Nothing!’ ” (V, 412).
I offer this as the barest summary of the narrative. Now I want to make
a number of points, by way of suggesting exactly how Victory relates to
the account of Conrad’s procedures that I have been developing until now.
First, Heyst’s determination to follow his father’s advice to look on and
make no sound—to be a detached spectator of life—may seem an impres-
sionist trope, owing to the priority it places on vision, but of course, it
eliminates completely the idea of d oing anything, including writing. (It
matters, though, that the f ather was a much-published author, and indeed
that he is pictured in the portrait that hangs in the big room lined with
books in Heyst’s bungalow, “pen in hand above a white sheet of paper on
a crimson tablecloth” [V, 189]. Moreover, at one point in the narrative we
are given a direct quotation from his books [V, 219–220]. In that sense,
writing presides over the novel as a w hole.) So merely looking on rather
belongs to what I have described as the post-literary impressionist ten-
dency toward radical simplification in the direction of the sheerly visual,
which in the first instance I associated with Lewis’s Blast (and Ford’s
account of Lewis’s June 1914 tirade), and then with Burroughs’s Tarzan.
But Conrad’s task was to make a novel out of this state of affairs, which
clearly was not easy. In fact, as emerged in my summary of the plot, Heyst’s
detachment breaks down in two instances, first when he helps Morrison,
and second (more importantly) when he rescues Lena. These are not
presented as happy events; rather, Heyst recognizes that his failures of
detachment, especially the second, have made him vulnerable to life.
“I am the world itself, come to pay you a visit,” Jones tells him late in the
novel (V, 379). And earlier: “All his defenses were broken now. Life had
him fairly by the throat” (V, 221). Without these lapses, of course, there
would be no novel. But in themselves, they are not enough to produce one.
At a crucial moment—in fact, almost immediately following the last
short citation—Lena is described as follows:
That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like
a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious:
like any writing to the illiterate. . . . His mental attitude was that
of a man looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he
is unable to decipher, but which may be big with some revelation.
(V, 222)
This is not a casual figure of speech: Conrad means the reader to imagine
the girl as a text that has been written but that Heyst cannot read, or “de-
cipher,” and the question is how the reader is to take this. H ere is how I
think the reader is not meant to take this: as implying that Lena is a w oman
of vast experience of a sort that far outstrips Heyst’s, hence his failure to
know what to make of her. On the contrary, her experience of life has been
both minimal and unrelentingly drab, and there is no hint of inner
“depths” that for one reason or another he is unable to fathom. In any case,
such interpretations are at odds with everything we have come to under-
stand about Conrad’s writerly priorities, from Almayer’s Folly to Under
Western Eyes. (This is, of course, a minority view.) Rather, I take the figure
of the written but unreadable text to relate entirely to Conrad’s writerly
project in Victory—that is, as suggesting that whatever else that project
turns out to involve, it w
ill not be writing in the ordinary sense of the term.
But will it be a kind of erasure; is that where the novel is headed?
The idea of the girl as a script of writing in an unknown language is
further developed two paragraphs later, where we read,
He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense of the

imperfection of their relations—a sense which made him desire her
constant nearness, before his eyes, u nder his hand, and which, when
she was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and illusory,
a promise that could not be embraced and held. (V, 222)
“Under his hand” is particularly striking: she is not only like a piece of
writing, she is—very nearly—a piece of writing. It is as if Heyst’s sense
of reality depends on a relation to writing, but not his writing, because
the very activity is beyond him. For her part, she had earlier said to him,
“Do you know, it seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking
of me I shouldn’t be in the world at all!” (V, 187). Also: “I can only be
what you think I am. . . . It couldn’t be any other way with a girl like me
and a man like you. Here we are, we two alone, and I can’t even tell where
we are” (V, 187–188). So we are to understand not just their personal rela-
tions but also their ontological relations as characters in the novel as
nothing if not precarious.
It is striking, too, that Lena is not characterized visually other than in
the most general terms—a kind of inexpressive blankness. “And now he
could see something of her face, too—an oval without features—a nd
faintly distinguish her person in the blackness, a form without definite
lines,” we read at a crucial late juncture (V, 371). But the situation is dif
ferent as regards her voice:
“There’s no one here to think anything of us, good or bad.”

The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she ut-
tered. The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave him,
he was aware, was more physical than oral. E very time she spoke
to him she seemed to abandon to him something of herself—
something excessively subtle and inexpressible, to which he was
infinitely sensible, which he would have missed horribly if she were
to go away. (V, 188)
The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of audacity

and sadness, would have given interest to the most inane chatter.
But she was no chatterer. She was rather s ilent, with a capacity for
immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the concert plat-
form between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her hands
reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey, un-
abashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexpli-
cable reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or
force—or simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the
moments of complete surrender. (V, 192)
(“Your voice alone would be enough to make you unforgettable,” Heyst

tells her later in the novel [V, 247].)
Again, what is one to make of this? In terms of the plot it’s impossible
to say, above all because nothing is ever really done with the theme of her
voice—it plays no narrative role whatever. What seems clear, though, is
that Conrad wanted, found he needed, to draw some sort of sharp (onto-
logical) distinction between the utter opacity of Lena’s features—of what
could be seen of her, to use a Conradian phrase—a nd something else,
something not quite “inner,” here characterized by voice. (“He could not
pierce the grey veil of her eyes; but the sadness of her voice thrilled him
profoundly” [V, 330].) It is as though it was so important to him to insist
on her surface visual impenetrability (as of a script in a foreign language)
that he required something e lse that Heyst could find moving and com-
pelling, hence the frequent references to her voice. I need hardly add
that the separation in question—v isual from aural—is a version of what
emerged with part icu lar clarity in Burroughs’s Tarzan, but in Victory
it is only incompletely thematized (the seeming emphasis on the aural
doesn’t go anywhere), and partly for that reason it remains vexed, puz-
zling, unsatisfying. (The reader is hardly able to make sense either of Lena
as a character or of Heyst’s fascination with her in t hose terms.)
In contrast, from the moment of his appearance in the novel, Mr. Jones is
characterized in terms of his extreme thinness and general “sharpness,” as
if to the touch (he is also repeatedly said to be corpse-like). This comes to a
head in a short exchange later on between Heyst and Lena, in the course of
which he begins to give her an account of a recent conversation with Jones
in the desperados’ bungalow. She tells him to be careful, and he replies:
“I wonder how one can be careful! I had a long talk with—but I don’t
believe you have seen them. [In fact, she had seen, and been seen
by, Ricardo.] One of them [Jones] is a fantastically thin, long person,
apparently ailing; I shouldn’t wonder if he were really so. He makes
rather a point of it in a mysterious manner.” (V, 316)
A fantastically thin, long, “infinitely slender” (V, 328) person who makes
a point of seeming ill (what m atters h ere is not the seeming ill, but the
point)—what is that but a figuration of Jones as a pen or pencil? What

ever writing is to be done, and it w ill be absolutely minimal, will be by
him. Heyst has just told Lena that he himself is “so rebellious to outward
impressions” that he can’t say whether or not in a given situation he is
frightened. “I don’t react with sufficient distinctness” (V, 316). He is defi-
nitely not a candidate for impressionist authorship, unlike Jones, who
later, just short of the story’s denouement, will say to Heyst, “All my life
I have been seeking new impressions, and you have turned out to be some-
thing quite out of the common” (V, 385). It seems unlikely that Conrad
was not aware of the implication of t hese remarks.15
Another clear indication that Heyst is no writer comes in his final in-
terview with Jones, shortly a fter Heyst has let drop the news that he has
been living with a woman, which comes as a great shock to Jones. Jones
proposes a truce; Heyst says that Jones’s life has never been in danger from
him because he is “unarmed.” Jones realizes that Ricardo has known
about Lena and has kept it from him; he is enraged and responds:
“Unarmed, eh?” Then he burst out violently: “I tell you, a gentleman

is no match for the common herd. And yet one must make use of
the brutes. Unarmed, eh? And I suppose that creature [Lena] is of
the commonest sort. You could hardly have got her out of a drawing-
room. Though they’re all alike, for that matter. Unarmed! It’s a
pity. I am in much greater danger than you are, or w ere—or I am
much mistaken. But I am not—I know my man!” (V, 388)
By this he means, ostensibly, that he knows Ricardo and how to deal with
him. (Notice, though, how unnatural is the repetition of “Unarmed.”)
Later, after Lena has been shot but before Heyst realizes fully what has
happened, and that her seeming capitulation to Ricardo was to get hold
of his knife and save Heyst, Heyst says to her, “No doubt you acted from
instinct. Women have been provided with their own weapon. I was a dis-
armed man. I have been a disarmed man all my life” (V, 404). Unarmed,
disarmed—one feels Conrad would like to say armless; such a man, in
Conrad’s universe, cannot write. In case we had any doubts.
Throughout her final confrontation with Ricardo, Lena’s aim is to get
hold of his knife. The entire exchange has something forced about it (like
the passages with “unarmed” and “disarmed”), beginning with Ricardo’s

question: “Say! You, who are up to fighting a man with your bare hands,
could you—eh?—could you manage to stick one with a t hing like that
knife of mine?” She asks to look at it and he gives it to her; “ ‘A good friend,’
he said simply. ‘Take it in your hand and feel the balance,’ he suggested.”
Further on, she remarks, “I d idn’t think that you would ever trust me with
that thing!” And a bit later we read:
The knife was lying in her lap. She let it slip into the fold of her dress,
and laid her forearms with clasped fingers over her knees, which she
pressed desperately together. The dreaded thing was out of sight
at last. She felt a dampness break out all over her. (V, 399–400)
By now it is hard not to think of the knife as another pen (note the triple
repetition of the loaded word “thing”), as if Lena were seeking to take over
the writing of the novel. But she is not actually grasping the knife when,
a moment later, Jones bursts into the room.
After Lena is shot, Heyst, finally understanding what has taken place,
tears open the front of Lena’s dress. Davidson, too, has suddenly turned
up, and the two men
stood side by side, looking mournfully at the little black hole made
by Mr. Jones’s bullet u nder the swelling breast of a dazzling and as
it were sacred whiteness. It rose and fell slightly—so slightly that
only the eyes of the lover could detect the faint stir of life. Heyst,
calm and utterly unlike himself in the face [an Almayer moment, ex-
cept that h ere it perhaps has the implication of involvement and
emotion], moving about noiselessly, prepared a wet cloth, and laid
it on the insignificant wound, round which t here was hardly a trace
of blood to mar the charm, the fascination, of that mortal flesh.
(V, 405)
A little black hole—a period or full stop is all Jones’s writing comes to.
But it’s enough to bring the book almost to its conclusion.
In terms of the problematic developed in my earlier Conrad chapters
in this book, it is an open question w hether Heyst’s wet cloth placed on
the wound amounts even in a small way to an act of erasure—I remain

unsure. I am sure, though, that when Davidson in the final paragraphs of
the novel tells the Excellency that “there was nothing to be done,” and
then a moment later emphatically repeats “Nothing!”, this is meant by
Conrad as if ironically, or at any rate with the fullest possible awareness
of its merely nominal erasive character. In this respect it is fundamentally
unlike (for example) the bursting of Razumov’s eardrums, which I have
claimed was understood by Conrad to stand for erasure but which, given
the intensity of the scene, is also anything but nominal.
Two further items. First, as the reader of Victory soon becomes aware,
Heyst’s Chinese servant Wang is repeatedly characterized in terms of
suddenly appearing and disappearing, or as is usually said, “material-
ising” and vanishing. For example:
When Heyst and the girl came out again, the Chinaman had gone
in his peculiar manner, which suggested vanishing out of existence
rather than out of sight, a process of evaporation rather than of move-
ment. They descended the steps . . . but they w ere not ten yards
away when, without perceptible stir or sound, Wang materialised
inside the empty room. (V, 188–189)
As Heyst l ater remarks, “That’s it—he vanishes. It’s a very remarkable gift
in that Chinaman” (V, 217). Or again: “Wang materialised without a sound,
unheard, uncalled, and did his office. Which being accomplished, at a
given moment he was not” (V, 218). This, too, I take to be a certain sort of
late or post-literary impressionist trope—keyed, one might say, to Wang’s
appearance and disappearance on the page. When he is mentioned, he
appears to the reader (as the name “Wang”) suddenly and of course si-
lently, and when he ceases to be mentioned, he disappears, abruptly,
without movement—no “coming and g oing,” as the text says (V, 286); e ither
the name is t here or it is not. The oddness of this, its uncanniness, has to
do with the purely readerly, rather than writerly, event it represents—as
if to suggest that the appearance or “materialisation” of “Wang” on the
page has and had nothing at all do with the act of writing, as if indeed the
production of Victory itself is imagined as “unarmed,” a matter of reading
instead of—all but divorced from—writing.
Second, something should be said about the “purifying” fire that re-
duces both Heyst and Lena to ashes following the latter’s death. (One is
left imagining Heyst choosing to be burned alive.) Briefly, fire is still an-
other literary impressionist motif, starting with three stories by Crane—
The Monster, “The Veteran” (which is quoted in its entirety at the end of
“Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces”), and “Manacled,” a strange, late
story also discussed in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned F aces,” where I also
remark that William James lists “flammability” among the properties of
paper.)16 Then there is the fire set by the natives in Green Mansions, into
which Rima falls and by which she is consumed, which I comment on in
Chapter 3.
Finally, fire figures importantly in two short stories by Kipling, the sav-
agely anti-German “Mary Postgate” (1915) and the greatly admired but
deeply puzzling “Mrs. Bathurst” (1904). In the first, the title character,17
a no longer young lady companion to one Miss Fowler in an English vil-
lage, is burning various “books and pictures and the games and the toys”
(the emphasis in what follows is strongly on the books) left b ehind by a
young man, Miss Fowler’s nephew Wynn, to whom she has been devoted
and who has just died when his airplane crashed before he had even seen
combat in the First World War, when she becomes aware of a fallen
German aviator in the garden. The German, seriously injured, moving
his head curiously back and forth, speaks to her in French and German,
saying that he is “tout cassée” and asking for a doctor, but she replies in
German, telling him that she has seen children killed by the bomb he pre-
sumably had dropped, and allows him (actually, she thinks of him as
“It” and “the thing”) to die, with every appearance of satisfaction.
In “Mrs. Bathurst,”18 a work of intense interest to modern commenta-
tors, the fire is said to have taken place by a railroad line in a teak forest
beyond Buluwayo in present-day Zimbabwe, leaving behind two charred
corpses—one standing and the other squatting and looking up at the first.
In effect, they have been turned to charcoal, black and crumbling, but the
standing corpse had false teeth that shone white against the black, and
he also bore a tattoo on the arms and chest that showed up white on the
charcoal; together with the false teeth, this meant that he was Vickery, a
key figure in the narrative. (More than ten years l ater, there w
ill be white
letters on a blackboard on the island of Sambouran. Earlier, of course,
t here was “the white ribbon of foam that vanished at once,” drawn on
the sea by Jim’s Patna. And still earlier, in 1891, Kipling’s story “The
Disturber of Traffic” features a lighthouse keeper, Dowse, who is driven
almost to madness by the hallucination of white streaks in the waters of
the Flores Strait in Indonesia.19 So perhaps the white-on-black lettering in
Victory is not as significant as I tend to think.) T
here is much more to the
events of “Mrs. Bathurst,” in which impressionist considerations are sa-
lient: thus a reference to early (silent) newsreel cinema is contrasted not
only with the white-against-black tattoo but also with the indestructible
teeth, which are said to have produced an audible click whenever Vickery
spoke, which is to say that immaterial visuality (cinema) is contrasted
both with white-on-black writing / drawing and with material audibility,
a precocious and complex instance of the visual-aural—here, visual-
scriptive-aural—separation I have associated with Tarzan, and beyond
that, with the end of impressionism. I should mention, too, that at one
point, Vickery’s face reminds a friend of “those things in bottles in t hose
herbalistic shops at Plymouth—preserved in spirits of wine. White an’
crumply things—previous to birth as you might say” (“MB,” 590). (A re-
gressive trope, possibly figuring the sheet of paper prior to inscription.)
To sum up: I am suggesting that Victory invites being read as an attempt
to imagine the production of a book—the novel Victory—by purely
detached, visual, passive, and “unarmed” means, which by their very
nature cannot succeed. Somehow, though, in and through the person
of Lena, with the final participation, if that is the word, of the pen-or
pencil-like Jones, the book is written, and then—figuratively—consigned
to the flames. What remains is Davidson’s “Nothing!”, which I take in
this instance at once to allude and to amount to something considerably
less than the acts of erasure that characteristically resolve Conrad’s fic-
tions. May I say that I regard Victory as a work of singular genius? But it
is no wonder that Conrad’s writing had nowhere further to go—t hat his
more than twenty-year run as a major novelist was now at an end.20
n
One last sign of the end of an entire regime of writing: Wells’s First
World War novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, closes with its protago-
nist, a writer who has lost his beloved son Hugh in the war, writing (or
Fig. 15. H. G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1916), illustration of manuscript page reproduced in the novel.
trying to write) to the parents of Heinrich, a German friend of Hugh’s

whom he learns was also killed, but ultimately not finding the words.21
We read: “The last sheet of Mr. Britling’s manuscript may be more con
ven iently given in fac-simile than described” (441). As if u nder these
extreme circumstances, at this late date, the manuscript page itself, com-
prising merely shards of writing, at last surfaces in its own right
(Figure 15).22
Coda
Four Modernists
N
T o g o a st e p farther, a crucial aspect of literary modernism, often

theorized as the introduction of a certain textual sophistication and
complexity after a longish period of relatively simpler, more straightfor-
ward, more “realistic” literary production, involves precisely the elimi-
nation of the structural conflicts focused on the scene of writing that I have
been seeking to bring to light. In an obvious sense, this is to suggest
that modernism moves into a more unproblematically visual register, as
well as, often, a more unproblematically material one. Needless to say,
it will be impossible persuasively to demonstrate this in the relatively
small amount of space remaining to me. However, the sole two issues of
Blast, dated 1914 and 1915, especially issue number 1, with its bright
pink cover and deliberately aggressive use of capital-letter headline-style
typography to present its ebullient and notorious “Manifesto,” are spec-
tacular cases in point.1
But Blast is too special a production to stand in for a larger devel-
opment, at least without strong qualification. (Significantly, though,
Ford appears to have taken it in that light, or at least to have taken Lewis
around 1914 as the harbinger of a major cultural change.) The same might
be said, mutatis mutandis, of Lewis’s early prose, as in the 1927 short story
collection The Wild Body and in particular the 1922 story “Bestre,”2 which
begins with the narrator Kerr-Orr walking through the Breton port of
317
Kermanac and unexpectedly encountering an extremely vivid face, that

of an innkeeper named Bestre, who practices an art of violent aggression
that the story seeks to evoke in rhetorically supercharged sentences that
the reader absorbs more or less as so many physical blows. The key early
paragraph reads:
The detritus of some weeks’ hurried experience was being dealt

with in my mind, on this crystalline, extremely cold walk through
Kermanac to Braspartz, and was being established in orderly heaps.
At work in my untidy hive, I was alone: the atmosphere of the work-
shop dammed me in. That I moved forward was no more strange
than if a carpenter’s shop or chemist’s laboratory, installed in a boat,
should move forward on the tide of a stream. Now, what seemed to
happen was that, as I bent over my work, an odiously grinning face
peered in at my window. The impression of an intrusion was so
strong, that I did not even realize at first that it was I who was the
intruder. That the window was not my window, and that the face
was not peering in but out, that, in fact, it was I myself who was
guilty of peering into somebody else’s window: this was hidden
from me in the first moment of consciousness about the odious
brown person of Bestre. It is a wonder that the curse did not at once
fall from me on this detestable inquisitive head. What I did was to
pull up in my automatic progress, and instead of passing on, to con-
tinue to stare in at Bestre’s kitchen window, and scowl at Bestre’s
sienna-coloured gourd of a head. (“B,” 77)
A further description of Bestre follows shortly:
His very large eyeballs, the small saffron ocellation in their centre,
the tiny spot through which light entered the obese wilderness of
his body; his bronzed bovine arms, swollen h andles for a variety of
indolent little ingenuities; his inflated digestive case, lent their com-
bined expressiveness to say these things [a series of insults imagined
by the narrator]; with e very tart and biting condiment that eye-fluid,
flaunting of fatness (the well-filled), the insult of the comic, implica-
tions of indecency, could provide. Every variety of bottom-tapping
Coda 319
resounded from his dumb bulk. His tongue stuck out, his lips
eructated with the incredible indecorum that appears to be the
monopoly of liquids, his brown arms were for the moment genitals,
snakes in one massive twist beneath his mamillary slabs, gently
riding on a pancreatic swell, each hair on his oil-bearing skin con-
tributing its message of porcine affront. (“B,” 78–79)
My point is simple, probably too simple: nothing could be less in keeping

with the protocols of literary impressionism as they have been developed
in the present study than these brief passages. The basic encounter in-
volves seeing a face, which is what makes the comparison relevant, but in
the first place, the initial vis-à-vis is radically unstable (the narrator first
assumes he is being looked at from outside as he bends over his work, but
then realizes that in fact he is peering in through a window at Bestre),
whereas the impressionist norm more often than not features a view from
above (epitomized in “The Upturned Face” and allegorized in “A Mem-
orandum of Sudden Death”), approximately matching the writer’s rela-
tion to the page (a viewpoint effectively countermanded by Kerr-Orr’s’s
discovery that he was not, in fact, bent over his work).
In the second place, a certain automatism is evoked, but far from being
part of the act of writing, it is broken by the realization that is he, Kerr-
Orr, who has triggered the exchange of looks, which is to say that the
rhetorically over-the-top description of Bestre’s face and physical being
takes place in a wholly conscious register. Most important, there nothing
in Lewis’s paragraphs that evokes in any way what I have been calling the
scene of writing; the materiality that in impressionist texts such as The
Secret Agent, A Man’s W oman, and the battles with Cheese-Face in Martin
Eden comes disturbingly to the fore is h ere thematized in the most glaring,
violent, and repulsive terms. Or rather, the materiality that is all but thrust
into the reader’s lifeworld in “Bestre” has nothing whatever to do with
the act, means, or context of writing—in that sense, it has nothing to do
with impressionist materiality as such—but rather belongs to a form of
intensely bodily personal aggression keyed to the primacy of what the
narrator characterizes as Bestre’s “Eye.” (Bestre as first perceived by the
narrator is expecting someone else, a woman, whom he will seek to de-
feat as crushingly as possible.) Further on, we read:
It was a m
atter of who could be most s ilent and move least: it was a
stark stand-up fight between one personality and another, unaided
by adventitious muscle or tongue. It was more like phases of a
combat or courtship in the insect-world. The Eye was really Bestre’s
weapon: the ammunition with which he loaded it was drawn from
all the most skunk-like provender, the most ugly mucins, fungoid
glands, of his physique. Excrement as well as sputum would be shot
from this luminous hole, with the same certainty in its unsavoury
appulsion. E very resource of metonymy, bloody mind transfusion
or irony w
ere also his. What he selected as an arm in his duels, then,
was the Eye. (“B,” 82–83)
In the remainder of the story, Kerr-Orr elaborates upon Bestre’s penchant

for quarrels and his endless resourcefulness in “[sacrificing] the claims
any individual portion of his anatomy might have to independent expres-
siveness to a tyrannical appropriation of all this varied battery of bestial
significance by his eye” (“B,” 85; emphasis in original), which is to say
that Bestre’s sphincter-like eye functions less—indeed, almost not at all—
as an organ of vision than as one of total bodily assault. At one point Kerr-
Orr suggests that he himself learned a great deal from Bestre, though
precisely what he means by this remains unclear. In any case, it is not part
of my project in this Coda to say more about Lewis, an extremely idio-
syncratic and hard to characterize writer and artist. It should be clear,
however, that nothing could be further from impressionist seeing (“Be
it of record that I, Karslake, SAW”) and writing than the entirely outward-
directed and ferociously, not to say disgustingly, somatic visual activity
that Lewis h ere attributes to the character Bestre (if not as well, at least
by implication, to himself), and the clotted, showy, deliberately overem-
phatic prose in which that activity is bodied forth.
n
A very diff ere nt extreme case is that of Gertrude Stein, as in the fa-
mous statement, repeated several times, in her first important theoretical
essay, “Composition as Explanation” (1926):
The only thing that is different from one time to another is what
is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is d oing
Coda 321
everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different

and this makes what t hose who describe it make of it, it makes a com-
position, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this
makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to
generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.3
I take Stein to be saying (writing) that nothing changes from generation

to generation except everything (i.e., how everybody is doing everything),
and that what this effectively means is that everything therefore looks dif
ferent from how it looked before, a further implication being that this
basic fact is of particular interest to her as a writer b ecause of the primacy
of the visual in her literary practice (encapsulated in the notion of a com-
position). A similar assertion is found in Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas (1933):
When I first knew Gertrude Stein in Paris [Stein writes in Toklas’s

voice] I was surprised never to see a french book on her table, al-
though there were always plenty of english ones, there were even
no french newspapers. But do you never read french, I as well as
many people asked her. No, she replied, you see I feel with my eyes
and it does not make any difference to me what language I hear, I
don’t hear a language, I hear tones of voice and rhythms, but with
my eyes I see words and sentences and there is for me only one lan-
guage and that is english. One of the things that I have liked all
these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It
has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english.4
And a few pages later, apropos her participation in experiments in auto-

matic writing in William James’s Harvard seminar, we are told, “Gertrude
Stein never had subconscious reactions, nor was she a successful sub-
ject for automatic writing” (A, 79), which together with the previous pas-
sages suggests that Stein understood herself to operate wholly in the double
register of the visual and the conscious. In Toklas’s (Stein’s) words: “Ac-
tually it is her eyes and mind that are active and important and con-
cerned in choosing” (A, 75).5
By now t hese are quite familiar claims to make about Stein’s writing,
and what I wish to add is simply that they should be understood not simply
as her particular credo but also against the background of, and in stark
contrast to, the very different priorities, including visual priorities, of lit-
erary impressionism. In this connection, I find it suggestive that hand-
writing as such was problematic for Stein, and not only in the sense that
she has Toklas report that Stein’s handwriting is so illegible that at times
only she, Toklas, not even Stein, can make it out. T here is also a fasci-
nating short anecdote about when Stein was eight and all the students in
the public schools in California were asked to write a description.
Her recollection [the anecdote goes] is that she described a sunset

with the sun g oing into a cave of clouds. Anyway it was one of the
half dozen in the school chosen to be copied out on beautiful parch-
ment paper. A fter she had tried to copy it twice and the writing
became worse and worse she was reduced to letting some one e lse
copy it for her. (A, 75–76)
Then there is this:
She has never been able or had any desire to indulge in any of the
arts. . . . She cannot draw anything. She feels no relation between
the object and the piece of paper. When at the medical school [Johns
Hopkins, where she went a fter Harvard], she was supposed to draw
anatomical things she never found out in sketching how a thing
was made concave or convex. (A, 76)
Not that either copying a description or drawing an object is exactly an

impressionist motif. But in the first place, the project of copying her own
text seems linked to the idea of producing a legible if not beautiful scrip-
tive artifact, which does have impressionist implications, and which the
young Stein instinctively rejects. (Copying a piece of writing, of course,
is thematized in Norris’s “A Joyous Miracle.”) And in the second place,
the notion of t here being no relation between the object and the piece of
paper suggests that like drawing, writing for Stein is fundamentally non-
relational in the sense of being a function simply of her will to put words
on the page; in impressionist texts, in contrast, relationality with respect
to one or more features of the scene of writing is everywhere in force.
Coda 323
Finally, t here is one “theoretical” work by Stein that may be read as an

almost systematic negation of the basic assumptions of literary impres-
sionism, her 1936 book The Geog raphical History of America, or The
Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind.6 At the core of her argu-
ment, as in that of her contemporaneous lecture / essay “What Are
Master-Pieces and Why Are T here So Few of Them” (1936),7 is a highly
charged distinction between h uman nature, which she aligns with notions
of subjective experience and personal identity, as well as with that of an
audience (those who know you to be a particular person, such as your little
dog), and human mind, which emerges from her account as fundamen-
tally impersonal, and which she links with the production of “master-
pieces” (also called “entities”), by which she means wholly autonomous,
audience-repudiating works of art, and in particular, paintings and works
of writing.8 What makes The Geographical History of America especially
pertinent in the present context is the repeated invocation of flying above
the United States in an airplane, with specific reference to the flatness of
the land as seen from above and the relation of that flatness to both mind
and writing.9 For example:
This chapter is to be all about when words how words do words

look like that.
Like it did when I looked at it, t here t here where I saw it.
Beneath me when I was above it.
If there was only human nature there would be words but they
would not be like that. (GH, 380)
And:
Why the writing of to-day has to do with the way any land can lay
when it is the particularly flat land. That is what makes land con-
nected with the h uman mind only flat land a g reat deal of flat
land is connected with the h uman mind and so America is con-
nected with the human mind, I can say I say so but what I do is
to write it so. [Throughout the book Stein distinguishes saying
from writing; only the latter is connected with the h uman mind.]
Think not the way the land looks but the way it lies that is now
connected with the human mind. [More on this last sentence fur-
ther on.] (GH, 388)
And:
It is writing of course it is the h uman mind and there is no relation

between h uman nature and the human mind no no of course not.
And what has that to do with flat land or any land the flatter
the land oh yes the flatter land but of course the flatter the land and
the sea is as flat as the land oh yes the flatter the land the more
yes the more it has may have to do with the h uman mind. (GH, 427)
So we have the equation, or, say, the connection “mind”–“ writing”–

“flatness”–“America” (also “master-piece”; also the view from above, in-
cluding the United States of America seen from an airplane), which of
course may seem to invoke the scene of writing as the latter has figured
in the previous chapters of the present book. Also, even, the motif of a
flat country, obviously America, “so big that it is divided one part from
another by ruled lines” (GH, 393), which may seem to invite a compar-
ison with maps of other places in texts by Wells, Childers, Conrad,
Hudson, and so on. But Stein’s map of America differs from those maps
in being largely a matter of “ruled lines,” hardly the norm elsewhere.
Moreover, what Stein means by writing departs sharply from all the texts
we have considered, if only (but not only) because all those texts have what
Stein deprecatingly calls “meaning.” Thus, she writes:
One minute it means anything [leaving “it” vague but obviously in-
dicating some sort of textual production] it has nothing to do with
the human mind, with h uman nature yes, but not with the way the
earth is and looks and not with the human mind. No nothing to do
with the human mind.
Everybody knows just now how nothing succeeds anything
[a basic claim about the modern world].
And so just now yes just now the h uman mind is the human mind.
(GH, 390)
Coda 325
And:
And the writing that is the human mind does not consist in mes-
sages or in events it consists only in writing down what is written
and therefore it has no relation to human nature.
Events are connected with human nature but they are not con-
nected with the human mind and therefore all the writing that has
to do with events has to be written over, but the writing that has to
do with writing does not have to be written again again is in this
sense the same as over. (GH, 407)
Such a view is totally opposed to narrative unfolding, indeed, to any ef-

fects of textual progression, which puts it at odds with literary impres-
sionist practice in that it is precisely the ongoingness of the impressionist
narrative (think especially of Crane and Conrad) that prevents one or
another feature of the scene of writing, starting with the upward-facing
page of inscription, from emerging fully and disruptively into view (into
mental prominence, so to speak). Whereas for Stein: “Nothing should
follow something b ecause in this way there will come to be a m
iddle and
a beginning and an end and of course that does make identity but not the
human mind or not the h uman mind” (GH, 430). At the limit, writing for
Stein is famously, hyperbolically, word by word:
I found that any kind of book if you read with glasses and somebody
is cutting your hair and so you cannot keep the glasses on and you
use your glasses as a magnifying glass and so read word by word
reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be
something.
Very regrettable but very true.
So that shows to you that a w hole t hing is not interesting because
as a whole well as a whole there has to be remembering and forget-
ting, but one at a time, oh one at a time is something oh yes defi-
nitely something. (GH, 428–429)
One more short passage is of special interest to our topic:

I wish writing would not sound like writing and yet what e lse can
any writing sound like.
Well yes it can it cannot sound like writing b ecause if it sounds
like writing then anybody can see it being written, and the human
mind nobody sees the human mind while it is being existing, and
master-pieces well master-pieces may not be other than that they
do not exist as anybody seeing them and yet t here they are. (GH,
449–450)
It is not my purpose h ere to analyze further Stein’s conception of her

writerly practice generally, or even as it stood around 1936. Rather, I want
to draw attention to two points: first, what may appear to be a certain
proximity to literary impressionism by virtue of her emphasis on seeing,
flatness, and looking down (note, however, that there is no hint of a
thematization of pen, ink, or paper); and second, and ultimately, more
important, the radically disparate account she gives of what she calls
writing (writing that stands for the h uman mind, that can produce master-
pieces), an account that denies time, narrative, and eventfulness—and
although Stein doesn’t consider the possibility, would also deny any
acknowledgment of what I have been calling the scene of writing—in the
interests of a word by word (or rather word after word) but in no sense
sequential or cumulative conception of literary production. As the last
citation suggests, Stein late on in The Geographical History discovers that
she is troubled even by the fact that writing can sound like writing, and
that not b ecause she contrasts “sounding like” with seeing, but b ecause
seeing writing as writing in the act of being written—in some respects, the
literary impressionist trope (or trope-to-be-suppressed)—threatens to tip
writing over into its h uman nature equivalent and thereby abort the pos-
sibility of creating a master-piece. (Master-pieces, like the h uman mind,
she adds, “do not exist as anybody seeing them and yet there they are.”)
This is why Stein early on urges the reader to “Think not the way the land
looks but the way it lies that is now connected with the h uman mind,” and
is also why she invokes only the straight lines on the map of the United
States, lines that exist only notionally and are never to be seen in actu-
ality. (So the implied map has nothing in common with t hose in the im-
Coda 327
pressionist texts just mentioned.) Indeed, throughout The Geographical

History she is of two minds about seeing: on the one hand, it is funda-
mental, as when she reads (or “reads”) word a fter word through a lens of
her eyeglasses, but on the other, it threatens to be merely literal (to belong
irredeemably to h uman nature), which is why pen, ink, and paper are
never thematized, and also why she has nothing to say about the reader’s
experience of reading master-pieces, a necessary omission given her onto-
logical priorities (indifference to audience—a radical antitheatricality—is
absolutely fundamental).10 Whatever else writing is for Stein at this point
in her life and career, it is altogether opposed to the essentially conflic-
tual, in a certain sense reader-centered practices that have been the sub-
ject of the present book.
n
A third writer who belongs to the network of post-literary impres-
sionist issues I have been tracking is Ernest Hemingway, by all odds the
most broadly influential English-language writer to emerge during the
1920s. But rather than tackle Hemingway directly, I want to quote some-
what extensively from Ford Madox Ford’s introduction to the Modern Li-
brary reissue of A Farewell to Arms (originally published 1929, reissued
1932).11 Ford begins by singling out the famous first sentence of the novel,
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a h ouse in a village that looked
across the river and the plain towards the mountains” (“I,” 128). He goes
on to quote the rest of the first paragraph t oward the end of his essay;
the paragraph continues:
In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders dry
and white in the sun, and the w ater was clear and swiftly moving
and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the
road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The
trunks of the trees w ere dusty and the leaves fell early that year
and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust
rising and the leaves, stirred by the breeze falling and the soldiers
marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the
leaves. (“I,” 135–136)
Soon though, Ford turns his attention to Hemingway’s first book of

short stories, In Our Time, quoting the first paragraph of the brief inter-
text that begins, “Everybody was drunk.” Ford then writes:
I am reading from “No. 3 of 170 hand-made copies printed on rives

hand-made paper,” which is inscribed: “to robert mcalmon and wil-
liam bird publishers of the city of paris and to captain edward
dorman-smith m.c., of his majesty’s fifth fusiliers this book is re-
spectfully dedicated.” The title page, curiously enough, bears the
date 1924 but the copy is inscribed to me by Ernest Hemingway
“march 1923” and must, as far as I can remember have been given
to me then. T
here is a nice problem for bibliophiles.
This book is the first version of In Our Time and is described as
published at “paris, printed at the three mountains press and for
sale at shakespeare & company in the rue de l’odéon; london: wil-
liam jackson, took’s court, cursitor street, chancery lane.
Those were brave times in Paris when William Bird and I, and I
daresay Hemingway too believed, I don’t know why, that salvation
could be found in leaving out capitals. (“I,” 128–129)
A bit further on, Ford continues:
At any rate the last page but one of In Our Time—or perhaps it is
the feuille de garde, carries the announcement:
Here ends The Inquest into the state of
contemporary English prose, as
edited by EZRA POUND and printed at
the THREE MOUNTAINS PRESS. The six
works constituting the series are:
Indiscretions of Ezra Pound
Women and Men by Ford Madox Ford
Elimus by B. C. Windeler
with Designs by D. Shakespear
The G reat American Novel
by William Carlos Williams
ngland by B. M. G. Adams
E
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
with portrait by Henry Strater.
Coda 329
Mr. Pound, you perceive did believe in CAPITALS and so obvi-

ously did one half of Hemingway for his other book of the same
date—a blue-grey pamphlet—announces itself all in capitals of
great baldness. (They are I believe of the style called sans-sérif ):
THREE STORIES
& TEN POEMS
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
it calls itself without even a ‘by’ in italics. T
here is no date or pub-
lisher’s or distributor’s name or address on the title page but the
back of the half-title bears the small notices
Copyright 1923 by the author
Published by
Contact Publishing Co.
and the last page but one has the announcement
PRINTED AT DIJON
BY
MAURICE DARANTIERE
M. CX. XXIII
This copy bears an inscription in the handwriting of
Mr. Hemingway to the effect that it was given to me in Paris by
himself in 924 [apparently a slip of Hemingway’s pen]. That seems
almost an exaggeration in antedating. (“I,” 129–130)
The question, of course, is what we are to make of this elaborate and

presumably meticulous reproduction of typographic particulars, and my
suggestion is that it is Ford’s way of registering, not without a certain
irony, the major transformation in literary production represented by
Hemingway’s early prose relative to the achievements of Ford and the
impressionists (also, of course, by the typographic experiments of Blast).
Granted, Ford never says as much explicitly. But he does state:
Hemingway’s words strike you, each one, as if they w ere pebbles

fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place.
So one of his pages has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you
look down through the flowing water. The words form a tessella-
tion, each in order beside the other.
It is a very great quality. It is indeed the supreme quality of the

written art of the moment. . . . The aim—the achievement—of
the great prose writer is to use words so that they shall seem new
and alive because of their juxtaposition with other words. This
gift Hemingway has supremely. Any sentence of his taken at random
w ill hold your attention. And irresistibly. It does not m
atter where
you take it. (“I,” 133)
The implied, perhaps not fully intended contrast with Ford’s earlier praise
of Hudson is extremely striking. As we saw in Chapter 2, Hudson was
repeatedly praised for the invisibility or transparency of his prose; as Ford
put it,
He shared with Turgenev the quality that makes you unable to find
out how he got his effects. Like Turgenev he was utterly undramatic
in his methods, and his books have that same quality that [sic] have
those of the author of Fathers and Children. When you read them
you forget the lines and the print. It is as if a remotely smiling face
looked up at you out of the page and told you t hings. And t hose
things become part of your own experience.12
Not that Hudson may be seen as representative of literary impres-

sionism tout court; Crane, Conrad, and Ford himself cannot be charac-
terized in t hese terms. But none of them (and none of the other authors
considered in this book, not even Wells) would have lent himself to the
typographic extravagances, as they must have seemed to Ford, that
he took evident pleasure in slyly placing before the reader, despite the fact
that those extravagances marked only the title page, half-title page, and
endpapers of In Our Time. And none of the impressionists, including the
most individual stylists among them, Crane and Conrad, wrote a prose
that can be compared to tesselated pebble-words juxtaposed with one an-
other (as pebble-words, so to speak), making a worked surface that seeks
to hold the reader’s attention solely in its own terms. Indeed, the artifac-
tual character of that worked surface is further conveyed by the surprising
remark, “It does not matter where you take it”—implying that any sen-
tence by Hemingway could be extracted from its immediate context and
Coda 331
relished in its own right, which could not be further from an impressionist
state of affairs. Above all, or should I say, before all, such a prose has
nothing to do with any conflictual dynamic; instead, the reader feels him-
self or herself to be in the grip of a new, intensely self-aware, in important
respects more strictly “aesthetic” writerly regime. (In Hemingway’s case,
the visuality of his writing is complemented by a subtle, equally self-aware
prose music.) Further on in Ford’s introduction, as already mentioned,
he quotes the remainder of the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, which
of course went on to become talismanic for admirers of Hemingway’s
prose, adding, “I wish I could quote more, it is such pleasure to see words
like that come from one’s pen” (“I,” 136)—as if thereby to reclaim the sen-
tences in question for his own impressionist project, which, as his essay
recognizes, they had left far b ehind.13
n
The fourth modernist writer whose work I want to touch on in this
connection is V irginia Woolf. Simply put, I consider Woolf ’s writing to
have nothing at all to do with the issues that have concerned me, despite
the fact that the notion of “impressions” is central to her understanding
of her enterprise as well as to standard accounts of her literary achieve-
ment. Or rather, it is precisely b ecause she understands herself to be
seeking to render impressions in a new, more radical vein than the major
writers who preceded her that her prose represents such a sharp, even
absolute departure from theirs. Her classic statement of her point of view
comes from the 1919 essay “Modern Fiction”:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The

mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent,
or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come,
an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they
shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that, if a writer w
ere a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work
upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no
plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond
Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps [lanterns
at the side of a gig, a horse-drawn cart] symmetrically arranged; life
is a luminous halo, a semi-t ransparent envelope surrounding us
from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of
the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircum-
scribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display,
with as l ittle mixture of the alien or external as possiible?14
And indeed, virtually all of her novels and stories exemplify this concep-
tion of the novelist’s task.
Two brief excerpts from her early novel Jacob’s Room (1922) might per-
haps stand in for the rest.15 The first takes off from the protagonist, Jacob,
reading a letter from his m other:
Let us consider letters—how they come at breakfast, and at night,

with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by
the postmark—for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is
to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the
power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear
or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the
table. Still, t here are letters that merely say how dinner’s at seven;
others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is
scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when
the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems
repeated—speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave,
forlorn, and lost. (JR, 71)
The second, also a scene of reading, depicts Jacob in his room:
He sat at the t able, reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread
flat before him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of
his cheek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set,
and defiant. (What p eople go through in half an hour! But nothing
could save him. These events are features of our landscape. A for-
eigner coming to London could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul’s.) He
Coda 333
judged life. T hese pinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets
of gelatine pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the world.
They take the impression of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A
strike, a murder, football, bodies found; vociferation from all parts
of England simultaneously. How miserable it is that the Globe news-
paper offers nothing better to Jacob Flanders! When a child begins
to read history one marvels, sorrowfully, to hear him spell out in
his new voice the ancient words.
The Prime Minister’s speech was reported in something over five
columns. Feeling in his pocket, Jacob took out a pipe and proceeded
to fill it. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed. Jacob
took the paper over to the fire. The Prime Minister proposed a
measure for giving Home Rule to Ireland. Jacob knocked out his
pipe. He was certainly thinking about Home Rule in Ireland—a
very difficult matter. A very cold night. (JR, 75)
The significance of t hese passages for my argument is that they intro-

duce two modes of writing or, say, textual production—letters and a
newspaper—but very quickly make it clear that the author’s interest in
both is altogether different from anything of the sort we have been tracking.
Thus, “to see one’s own envelope on another’s table” is to experience
an intellectual insight and also, perhaps, an emotional frisson, neither of
which has essentially to do with the writing or indeed the reading of let-
ters, and a fortiori of the text before our eyes. And by the end of the
paragraph the “miracle” of letter writing (or letter posting) is said to be
“speech attempted”—not a writerly project at all. As for Jacob Flanders
and the Globe, the first paragraph seems for a moment as if it is concerned
with newspapers from a material point of view, characterizing them as
thin sheets of gelatine taking the impression of the brain and heart of the
world, but the (quasi-Fordian) metaphor is dropped almost immediately
in favor of the topics of various faits divers—a strike, a murder, football,
discovered bodies, and so on. In fact, the brief second paragraph invites
being understood as a mini-allegory of a shift of attention away from the
newspaper to the world: more than five columns reporting the prime
minister’s speech lead Jacob to think about Home Rule in Ireland—“a
very difficult matter.” Then as if to underscore the shift: “A very cold
night”—the newspaper and the more than five columns of print being be-
side the point (so much so that it is unclear whether the final not-quite-
sentence takes us outside Jacob’s mind or, for that matter, outside his
room.)16
I do not pretend that my observations about Lewis, Stein, Hemingway,
and Woolf adequately capture those writers’ respective achievements
and innovations. Nor do I take this Coda to provide more than the
roughest sketch of literary modernism and its characteristic operations—
perhaps I should have avoided the term entirely. In any case, what I have
done is take four writers who might fairly be considered representative of
major post-1914 developments in English-language prose (as it hap-
pens, an American man and w oman, a native Canadian man educated in
England, and an Englishwoman) and try to indicate as briefly and simply as
possible some of the fundamental differences, as it seems to me, be-
tween their various practices, for all the distinctness of each, and t hose of
the literary impressionists featured in this book. It would not surprise me
should the reader remain unsatisfied with such a conclusion, or at least feel
that considerably more evidence would need to be brought forward in order
for my remarks about Lewis, Stein, Hemingway, and Woolf to compel
conviction. But I would be disappointed, to say the least, if my close and
detailed readings of major texts by Crane, Conrad, Hudson, Wells, Ford,
Norris, London, Kipling, Cunninghame Graham, Childers, Burroughs,
and Stevenson—as well as Charles Palermo’s penetrating account of The
Good Soldier—did not at least somewhat transform the terms in which,
until now, those texts and literary impressionism generally have been
understood.
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Notes
Book Epigraphs
Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (Harmondsworth, UK, 2000), pp. 377–
378; emphasis in original.
Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James, 2 vols. (New York, 1920), 1:176; em-
phasis in original.
Introduction
1. Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, 1990).

2. On the problem of the beholder as it emerged in mid-eighteenth-century France, see
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
Diderot (1980; repr., Chicago, 1988).
3. Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane
(Chicago, 1987), 80–81 (hereafter RWD). Further page references will be in parentheses
in the text.
4. Actually, I owe my awareness of Berryman’s book on Crane to the writer and critic
Walter Clemons, whom I got to know in Rome during the summer of 1960. I still feel
indebted to Clemons for alerting me to Berryman’s brilliant critical study, thereby
opening a world of reading and thinking I might otherw ise have missed.
5. Stephen Crane, “The Upturned Face,” in Crane, Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson
(New York, 1984), 1283 (hereafter “UT”). Further page references w ill be in paren-
theses in the text.
6. Stephen Crane, The Monster, in Crane, Prose and Poetry, 406.
337
338 Notes to Pages 12–20
7. See the discussion of “The Snake” in RWD, 151–155, as well as figure 52 illustrating
the first page of Crane’s manuscript for “The Snake” (RWD, 154).
8. Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” ed. Robert Kimbrough (New
York, 1979), 147; emphasis in original.
9. See the discussion of t hese aspects of Crane’s handwriting in “Stephen Crane’s Up-
turned Faces,” RWD, 145–146, 198nn52–56.
10. The distinction between marking and writing (indeed, language) is of course basic to
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s controversial article “Against Theory,” Crit-
ical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 723–742, as well as to Michaels’s subsequent develop-
ment of the distinction in The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(Princeton, NJ, 2004). See also the essays gathered in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against
Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago, 1985), a volume that in-
cludes two further essays by Knapp and Michaels (“A Reply to Our Critics” and “A
Reply to Richard Rorty: What Is Pragmatism?”). In the notes to RWD I also cite Mi-
chaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: Essays on American Litera
ture (Berkeley, CA, 1987), in part icu lar the introduction, “The Writer’s Mark.” I go
on to say:
Briefly, Michaels t here suggests, both in elaboration of his argument in the last
few essays in his book and with reference to my readings of Eakins and Crane,
that in various American texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies writing as such becomes an epitome of a notion of identity as difference
from itself (in that writing to be writing must in some sense be different from
the mark that simply materially it is); and that this is important above all
because, in those texts and others, the possibility of difference from itself
emerges as crucial to a concept of personhood that would distinguish persons
both from pure spirit (e.g., Josiah Royce) and from pure m atter (e.g., Frank Nor-
ris’s brute or machine). (RWD, 163; emphasis in original)
11. A recent biography is Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler, Frank Norris: A Life
(Champaign, IL, 2010).
12. Frank Norris, “A Memorandum of Sudden Death,” in A Deal in Wheat and Other Sto-
ries of the New and Old West (London, 1903), 101–127 (hereafter “M”). Further page
references w ill be in parentheses in the text. The story goes unmentioned in Frank
Norris: A Life.
13. Is t here an error on Norris’s part or his publisher’s in sentence six? At any rate, the
passage would make better sense if the phrase “on the third side” read “on the fourth
side.”
14. See Michael Fried, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” in RWD, 203–206n70, where
I mention a number of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century psychologists in
Europe and the United States interested in t hese issues. T here I quote and discuss a
passage about automatic writing from William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890)
and another from his 1896 Lowell Lectures, in the latter of which he refers to cases in
which “an active dissociation or shutting out of certain feelings and objects from the
field of consciousness” reaches the point “that the subject’s mind loses its quality of
unity, and lapses into a polypsychism of fields that genuinely co-exist and yet are out-
side of each other’s ken and dissociated functionally” (quoted by Eugene Taylor,
Notes to Pages 21–23 339
William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures [Amherst,
MA, 1984], 36–37). I then remark:
My point in introducing this material (as regards James alone I have barely
scratched the surface) is not quite to insist that Crane’s literary practice proves
the operation in him of a double consciousness in the [F. W. H.] Myers-James
sense of the term. It is to suggest that between Crane’s enterprise as interpreted
in t hese pages [and beyond that, I would now add, the enterprises of the other
literary impressionists] and the general class of phenomena that James and his
contemporaries found so arresting certain strong analogies may be drawn,
analogies that at the very least help us see Crane’s uniqueness as a writer in a
somewhat broader context. (RWD, 205; emphasis in original)
Also RWD, 199nn58–59. See also Ruth Leys’s discussion of psychotherapist Morton
Prince’s well-k nown study The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in
Abnormal Psychology (New York, 1906) in a chapter titled “The Real Miss Beau-
champ: An Early Case of Traumatic Dissociation,” in Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy
(Chicago, 2000), 41–82. In her book Leys makes productive use of Mikkel Borch-
Jacobsen’s analysis of the persistence of the idea of hypnotic suggestion in Freud’s
writings throughout his career; see esp. Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans.
Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA, 1988), and Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psy-
choanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick and o thers (Stanford, CA, 1993).
My thanks to Leys for discussing these issues with me. (Her reading of Prince’s
book w ill be cited and discussed by Charles Palermo in Chapter 3.)
I should add that issues of habit and automatism, mediated by the French philoso
pher Félix Ravaisson’s treatise De l’habitude (1838), play a significant role in two
subsequent books by me: Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, 1990) and, at greater length,
Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On Madame Bovary and Salammbô (New Haven, CT, 2012).
See also the valuable short essay by Charles Palermo, “Photography, Automaticity,
Mechanicity,” nonsite.org, no. 11, March 14, 2014, http://nonsite.org/feature/photog
raphy-automatism-mechanicity.
15. It might be noted that Norris gives the whole of Karslake’s name as “Arthur Staples
Karslake” (“M,” 127), the initials of which form the word “ask.” (“Staples Karslake”
also give us the initials “S. K.,” not very far from “S.(hard)C.”) We are also told that
he sometimes wrote u nder the nom de plume “Anson Qualtraugh” and, once, “Justin
Blisset” (“M,” 101–102). Neither of t hese points even indirectly to Crane, but taken with
“Arthur Staples Karslake” they raise the question of naming in a provocative way.
16. Ford Madox Ford, Portraits from Life (Chicago, 1937), 41.
17. Michael Fried, “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane, and Norris,”
Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990): 193–236. As the title shows, in that essay I still placed
the term “impressionism” in quotation marks; subsequently I ceased to do so.
18. Michael Fried, “ ‘A Blankness to Run At and Dash Your Head Against’: On Conrad’s
The Secret Agent,” ELH 79 (2012): 1039–1071.
19. Michael Fried, “Impressionist Monsters: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau,” in
Frankenstein, Creation and Monsktrolsity, ed. Stephen Bann (London, 1994), 95–122.
20. Before leaving Crane, I should mention Bill Brown’s “Writing, Race, and Erasure: Mi-
chael Fried and the Scene of Reading,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 387–402, in
340 Notes to Page 25
which he critiques both my essay on Almayer’s Folly in Critical Inquiry (see note 14
above) and my account of Crane in RWD, as well as my “Response to Bill Brown” in
the same issue (403–410). Brown has almost nothing to say about literary impressionism
in his later The Material Unconscious: American Amusements, Stephen Crane, and the
Economics of Play (Cambridge, MA, 1996). Three other scholars with strong socio-
economic interests (putting this crudely) engage directly with my argument: Mark
Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York, 1992), 91–118; Mark McGurl, The Novel Art:
Elevations of American Fiction a fter Henry James (Princeton,NJ, 2001), 78–105; and
Walter Benn Michaels, Promises of American Life, 1880–1920, in The Cambridge His-
tory of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 3: Prose Writings, 1860–1920
(Cambridge, 2005), 314–347. Interestingly, the notion of literary impressionism (as dis-
tinct from naturalism or realism) plays almost no role in t hese commentaries.
21. As is doubtless already clear, what I understand by literary impressionism departs fun-
damentally from standard accounts of the latter in the critical literature. For that
reason, a survey of that literat ure, with its characteristic emphasis on matters of viv-
idness of perception, primacy of impression and subjective response, “delayed de-
coding” (as it is called), and related issues seems beside the point. Why then retain the
term? B ecause in the first place, it goes back to the period in question, and is em-
ployed by some of the key writers who are of interest to me, notably Conrad and, espe-
cially, Ford. And in the second, b ecause it has continued to be mobilized by literary
critics working on t hose and other writers, though often with a wider time frame than
the one I consider appropriate, and with application to writers whom I do not count
among my impressionists. (One scholar I am about to cite, Jesse Matz, includes Pater,
Proust, Hardy, James, and Woolf in addition to Conrad and Ford, and barely mentions
Crane.) In any case, literary impressionism as I understand it has nothing whatever to
do with the pictorial movement known as Impressionism (with a capital I); I mention
that specifically to rule out any confusion based on familiarity with my art-h istorical
scholarship. Works since 1979 that discuss literary impressionism include: Paul B.
Armstrong, The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in
James, Conrad, and Ford (Ithaca, NY, 1987); Todd K. Bender, Literary Impressionism
in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë (New York,
1997); Donald R. Benson, “Impressionist Painting and the Problem of Conrad’s At-
mosphere,” Mosaic 22 (Winter 1989): 29–40; Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations:
The Political Horizon of Twentieth- Century Literature (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 83–103;
Robin P. Hoople, In Darkest James: Reviewing Impressionism, 1900–1905 (Lewis-
burg, PA, 2000); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY, 1981); Bruce Johnson, “Conrad’s Impressionism and
Watts’s ‘Delayed Decoding,’ ” in Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, ed. Ross C.
Murfin (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1983), 169–180; Tamar Katz, Impressionist Subjects: Gender,
Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England (Champaign, IL, 2000); Maria Elisa-
beth Kronegger, Literary Impressionism (New Haven, CT, 1993); Michael Levenson,
A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922 (Cam-
bridge, 1985); Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cam-
bridge, 2001); James Nagel, Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (University
Park, PA, 1980); Adam Parkes, A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on
Notes to Page 25 341
Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford, 2011); John G. Peters, Conrad and Impres-
sionism (Cambridge, 2001); Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobio-
grafiction, and the Forms of Modern Lite rat ure (Oxford, 2010); H. Peter Stowell,
Literary Impressionism: James and Chekhov (Athens, GA, 1990); Julia van Gun-
steren, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam, 1990); and Ian Watt,
Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA, 1979). Let me also mention an article
by Saunders, “Modernism, Impressionism, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier,”
Etudes anglaises 57, no. 4 (2004): 421–437, to which I owe two further references: Paul B.
Armstrong, “The Hermeneutics of Literary Impressionism,” Centennial Review 27
(Fall 1983): 244–269, and Armstrong, “The Epistemology of Ford’s Impressionism,”
in Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard A. Cassel (Boston, 1987), 135–142.
Needless to say, the foregoing list of studies is far from exhaustive. Among Ford’s
writings dealing explicitly with the notion of literary impression are t hose gathered in
Frank MacShane, ed., Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford (Lincoln, NE, 1964), and
his Joseph Conrad: A Personal Reminiscence (1924; repr., New York, 1989), described
by Ford as “the record of the impression made by Conrad the Impressionist upon an-
other writer, impressionist also” (34).
22. See, for example, Michael Anesko, “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the
Profession of Authorship (New York, 1986); Mary Ann Gillies, The Professional Lit-
erary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 (Toronto, 2007); David McWhirter, ed., Henry
James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Stanford, CA, 1995); Peter
Lancelot Mallios, “Reading The Secret Agent Now: The Press, the Police, the Premoni-
tion of Simulation,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches
and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White (New York,
2005), 155–172; Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the
Turn of the Century (London, 1996); Joyce Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money,
and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (Fayetteville, AR, 1997); Jennifer Wicke,
Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement and Social Reading (New York, 1988);
Christopher Wilson, The L abour of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progres-
sive Era (Athens, GA, 1985); Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda:
British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, NJ, 2006). On the earlier period see
Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago, 1985).
Then t here is this, from Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler,
ed. Laird M. Easton (New York, 2013):
New York, January 5, 1892. Tuesday
Through the streets. The overwhelming impression is one of nervous haste
and unrest. P eople don’t walk, they run, most while reading a newspaper. Since
the pavement is miserable one of them breaks a leg from time to time, but that’s
not import ant, here t here are more than enough p eople. One horse-drawn bus
chases the other through the streets. On the avenues trains rush by overhead.
In e very possible spot t here are advertisements; concise, to spare time, and most
addressing the reader directly to heighten the effect. The problem is to make
the strongest possible impression in the shortest possible time. In the end it is
as if you were wandering through a gigantic outside market in which everyone
praises his wares with cries and drumrolls.
The general agitation and search for publicity has even engulfed the h ouses.
In their long rows you can read as in a book the speculation and the rapidity
of their development. In the most crowded streets, Fifth Avenue, Broadway,
Twenty-t hird Street, next to one-story poor little shops, t here are huge, ten-
story barracks, erected overnight, most garish red with grass-g reen shops, or
white stone with thin, anxious pillars framing blue jalousies for three or four
floors. They resemble the old towers of the nobility in Italian cities. No h ouse is
the same height as its neighbor. All strive upward, each one seems, like the ad-
vertisements in the cars of the “Elevated,” to wish to impose quite clearly their
specific importance on the passersby. It is a wild, desperate struggle in immove-
able stone and mortar that these houses wage with each other. And for all that
the poverty of the architectural imagination is astonishing: long thin columns,
or short fat ones stacked together en masse, a tower or a completely superfluous
dome, the harshest possible color combinations: that about sums it up. But
this doesn’t matter because in the end a house has as much of an impact due to
its ugliness as due to its beauty. And yet the total impression is not unbeautiful,
for what a genuine force, even if only human, has created has always something
of a product of nature about it, and thus cannot be truly ugly. (50–51)
A more Crane-like series of observations, including the broken legs, is hard to imagine.
23. Nor have I sought to situate my arguments about the scene of writing in relation to the
invention and widespread adoption of the typewriter, as Friedrich Kittler has done with
regard to one import ant English-language text in my period, Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897). (My texts and their pen-w ielding authors would be located mediatically just
prior to Kittler’s typewriter paradigm.) See Friedrich A. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy”
(1982), in Literature, Media, Information Systems (Milton Park, UK, 1997), 50–84;
ittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
K
Wutz (Stanford, CA, 1999), 183–263; and more broadly, Kittler, Discourse Networks
1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA, 1990).
24. Brown in “Writing, Race, and Erasure” contends that the “moment” of literary impres-
sionism I argue for “dissolves once [Fried’s] historical isolationism confronts ‘literary
history’ ” (390). In this connection, he mentions Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
and Melville’s Pierre along with Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867), in his view a “master
text of sorts” (392) for Crane and Norris, and then adds Samuel Richardson and Lau-
rence Sterne—a grouping that inevitably reduces the theme of writing to the loosest
generality. (For the record, Thérèse Raquin is nothing of the sort for Crane, whatever
it may have meant to Norris.) Apropos of Pierre, however, see the highly interesting
discussion of Melville’s characteristically torturous engagement with the scene of
writing, in terms explicitly indebted to my argument (the page for Melville is persis
tently a face, though not typically an upward-oriented one), by Elizabeth Renker, Strike
through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Baltimore, 1996). Ex-
actly what relation the Melville problematic bears to the one examined in the present
book remains an open question, though one can say t here is a fundamental difference
between what Renker characterizes as Melville’s longing for transparency—t he page
as face represents something like the impossibility of such an ideal—a nd the problem-
atic (or problematics) of inscription I s hall be tracing in this book.
On Poe, see Stanley Cavell, “Poe’s Perversity and the Imp(ulse) of Skepticism,” in
In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago, 1988), 139–144. An intense and learned engagement
with Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in terms related to issues of writing but
which are quite different from t hose raised in my account of literary impression is by
John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in
the American Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1980), 114–235. A recent essay that includes
a brilliant short reading of Poe’s Narrative in terms of American racialism is by
Marilynne Robinson, “On Edgar Allan Poe,” The New York Review of Books 62, no. 2
(February 5, 2015), http://w ww.nybooks.com/articles/2015/02/05/edgar-allan-poe/. For
Thoreau, see Cavell’s masterly The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago,
1972).
25. See the references to Knapp and Michaels’s “Against Theory” and Michaels’s The
Shape of the Signifier in note 8.
26. Palermo’s analysis was first written as a paper for a 1995 seminar on late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century British and American novels taught jointly at Johns Hop-
kins University by Walter Benn Michaels and me. It has been revised for this book.
1. Almayer’s Face
1. Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River, ed. Jacques Berthoud
(1895; repr., Oxford, 1992), 95 (hereafter AF). Further page references w ill be in
parentheses in the text. Readers with a special interest in Almayer’s Folly will want to
consult its publication in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, ed.
Floyd Eugene Eddleman and David Leon Higdon (Cambridge, 1994), which the
editors explain is mainly based on the extant typescript and manuscript. See the edi-
tors’ discussion of the implications of that choice in “The Texts: An Essay,” 197–198.
2. Interestingly, that convention itself turns out to be liable, during the period in ques-
tion, to be exploited to a degree that can no longer simply be called “realistic.” See, in
this connection, Edith Wharton’s obsessively “facial” novel, The Reef (1912; repr., New
York, 1996).
3. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl, Laurence Davies, Owen
Knowles, et al., 9 vols. (Cambridge, 1983–2007), 1:156 (hereafter CL); emphasis in
original.
4. This, of course, is a Wittgensteinian way of putting it. See, e.g., Bernie Rhie, “Witt-
genstein on the Face of a Work of Art,” nonsite.org, no. 3, October 14, 2011, http://
nonsite.org/article/w ittgenstein-on-t he-face-of-a-work-of-art.
5. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York,
1979), 93 (hereafter NN). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
The passage reads:
James Wait rallied again. He lifted his head and turned bravely at Donkin, who
saw a strange face, an unknown face, a fantastic and grimacing mask of despair
and fury. Its lips moved rapidly; and hollow, moaning, whistling sounds filled
the cabin with a vague mutter full of menace, complaint and desolation, like
the far-off murmur of a rising wind. Wait shook his head; rolled his eyes; he
denied, cursed, menaced—a nd not a word had the strength to pass beyond the
sorrowful pout of t hose black lips. It was incomprehensible and disturbing: a
gibberish of emotions, a frantic dumb show of speech pleading for impossible
things, threatening a shadowy vengeance. It sobered Donkin into a scrutinising
watchfulness. (NN, 93)
See, in this connection, the third from last paragraph in the preface to The Nigger,
which begins: “Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch
the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and a fter a time, begin to wonder languidly
as to what the fellow may be at” (NN, 147). Although Conrad d oesn’t say so, the per-
spective evoked is not unlike that of a deaf person in a world of sound. L ater, in
Chapter 7, I comment on Conrad’s use of motifs of deafness in Under Western Eyes and
“Prince Roman.”
6. The original reads:
Ma très chère Tante.
Pardonnez-moi de ne pas avoir ecrit plus tot mais je suis en train de lutter avec
Chap XI; une lutte a mort Vous savez! Si je me laisse aller je suis perdu! Je Vous
ecris au moment de sortir. Il faut bien que je sorte quelquefois Helas! Je regrette
chaque minute que je passe loin du papier. Je ne dis pas de la plume car j’ai ecrit
fort peu, mais l’inspiration me vient en regardant le papier. Puis ce sont des
echappées a perte de vue; la pensée s’en va vagabondant dans des grands éspaces
remplis des formes vagues. Tout [est] chaos encore mais—lentement—les
spectres se changent en chair vivante, les vapeurs flottantes se solidifient et qui
sait?—peut-être quelque chose naitra dans le choc des idées indistinctes—
Je Vous envois la première page (dont j’ai pris copie) pour Vous donner une
idée de l’apparence de mon manuscrit. Cela Vous est du puisque j’ai vu le
Votre.—J’aime a me conformer a l’etiquette, moi.—
Vous embrasse de tout mon coeur.
Toujour a Vous
J. Conrad (CL, 1:150–151)
7. A case in point is the contrast (also the similarity) between two descriptions of shadow
representations in texts by Conrad and Crane. In chapter 10 of Almayer’s Folly, Almayer,
huddled up in a chair, has fallen asleep on the verandah of his h ouse. “In the increasing
light of the moon that had risen now above the night mist,” the passage reads,
the objects on the verandah came out strongly outlined in black splashes of
shadow with all the uncompromising ugliness of their disorder, and a carica-
ture of the sleeping Almayer appeared on the dirty whitewash of the wall behind
him in a grotesquely exaggerated detail of attitude and feature enlarged to a
heroic size. (AF, 157–158)
(The whole of this scene, in which Almayer appears both as a subject of representa
tion and, in his capacity as a dreamer, as a surrogate for the writer, is of keen interest.)
For his part, Crane, in one of his earliest pieces of journalism, describes with relish
various “shadow pictures” cast on the canvas walls of Ocean Grove’s Camp Meeting
Association tents; the last is of a man’s vest hung on the tent wall, with a watch chain
dangling in full sight. The passage concludes:
You would think, then, that Ocean Grove would be the paradise of thieves.
All they would have to do is to watch the shadow pictures and see what a
family did with its things. Then when the lights were out cut a hole in the canvas
and get what they wanted.
Pretty easy burglary where the only tool required is a sharp knife. What
would hinder a clever thief from cutting into a dozen tents in one night and
carrying off a dozen vests and watches hung against the canvas wall? (Crane,
“Tent Life at Ocean Grove” [1891], reprinted in Thomas A. Gullason, “The
‘Lost’ Newspaper Writings of Stephen Crane,” Syracuse University Library As-
sociates Courier 21 [Spring 1986]: 77–78)
8. So, for example, in Conrad’s letter to Edward Garnett of June 19, 1896, he writes:
Since I sent you that part 1st [of the “Rescuer” manuscript] (on the eleventh of
the month) I have written one page. Just one page. I went about thinking and
forgetting—sitting down before the blank page to find that I could not put one
sentence together. To be able to think and unable to express is a fine torture.
I am undergoing it—w ithout patience. I don’t see the end of it. It’s very ridicu
lous and very awful. Now I’ve got all my p eople together I d on’t know what to
do with them. The progressive episodes of the story will not emerge from the
chaos of my sensations. I feel nothing clearly. And I am frightened when I re-
member that I have to drag it all out of myself. . . . My task appears as sensible
as lifting the world without the fulcrum which even that conceited ass, Archi-
medes, admitted to be necessary. (CL, 1:288–289; emphasis in original)
9. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Cedric Watts and Robert Hampson (London, 1986), 171
(hereafter LJ). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
10. The metaphor of “blackening” is Conrad’s own, as for example in the following sen-
tence from the most important of his autobiographical writings, A Personal Record
(1912):
The conception of a planned book was entirely outside my mental range when
I sat down to write [Conrad is recounting the genesis of Almayer’s Folly]; the
ambition of being an author had never turned up amongst t hese gracious imag-
inary existences one creates fondly for oneself at times in the stillness and
immobility of a day-dream; yet it stands clear as the sun at noonday that from
the moment I had done blackening over the first manuscript page of “Almay-
er’s Folly” (it contained about two hundred words and this proportion of
words to a page has remained with me through the fifteen years of my writing
life), from the moment I had, in the simplicity of my heart and the amazing
ignorance of my mind, written that page the die was cast. Never had Rubicon
been more blindly forded, without invocation to the gods, without fear of
men. (Joseph Conrad, “The Mirror of the Sea” and “A Personal Record” [Oxford,
1988], 68–69 [hereafter PR]. Further page references w ill be in parentheses in
the text.)
Apropos of Conrad’s fascination with the look of his prose, see, e.g., the author’s note
to The Rescue—a novel begun in the mid-1890s but only completed in 1914—in which
Conrad explains that he
dropped The Rescue not to give myself up to idleness, regrets or dreaming, but
to begin The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and to go on with it without hesitation
and without a pause. A comparison of any page of The Rescue with any page of
The Nigger w ill furnish an ocular demonstration of the nature and the inward
meaning of this first crisis of my writing life. (Joseph Conrad, The Rescue
[London, 1950], 10)
Perhaps, but how is the reader to make that comparison? What precisely is the object
of the “ocular demonstration” to which Conrad alludes? And what does Conrad take
that “inward meaning” to be?
11. In fact, it i sn’t known for certain that the page in the Rosenbach Library is the one
Conrad sent to Poradowska, but several considerations suggest that this is the case:
(1) it is one of two versions of chapter 11, page 1, in the Rosenbach manuscript; (2) of the
two, it is obviously the “original” version (i.e., it’s far more heavily revised than the
other); (3) it has been folded twice, as if to fit inside an envelope. Exactly when and how
it came to rejoin the rest of the manuscript remains an unanswered question. For an in
teresting discussion of Conrad’s revisions of the opening of chapter 11, see John Dozier
Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (Cambridge, MA, 1941), 120–121.
12. See Joseph Conrad, “The Black Mate,” in Tales of Hearsay (London, 1925), 207–288
(hereafter “BM”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. On the
vexed question of dating, see Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New
York, 1970), 234–236 (hereafter Karl).
13. The exception is Aaron Fogel, who, in his ambitious study Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s
Poetics of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 252, 254, regards “The Black Mate” as
“one of Conrad’s key minor pieces.” Fogel interestingly relates the scholarly problem
of the story’s date (what relation does the published version of 1908 bear to an alleged
earlier version of 1886?) to the composite age of its protagonist, and suggests that
“The Black Mate” “has a metaphoric fidelity to the author’s own servitude,” which
Fogel defines in terms of the production of “forced dialogues” for a largely uncompre-
hending public.
14. See Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen
Crane (Chicago, 1987), 127–128, 142, 160, 187–188n36. See, however, Walter Benn Mi-
chaels’s treatment of key passages in Crane in his “The Production of Visibility,” in
Promises of American Life, 1880–1920, pt. 3 in The Cambridge History of American Lit
erature, vol. 3: Prose Writings, 1860–1920, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, 2005),
315–347. T here, Michaels, going on from my analysis in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned
Faces,” argues that
Crane’s commitment to making writing visi ble is . . . necessarily transformed
by the requirement that to represent writing one must represent it as a repre
sentat ion. And a writing that doubles its formal ambition to make us see it by
an ambition to make us see something else necessarily alters that formal ambi-
tion, providing what are at the same time additional and essential motives for
seeing, and making possible scenarios which will link the desire to see . . . with
the desire to be seen. (317; emphasis in original)
Michaels goes on to analyze two such scenarios in Maggie and The Red Badge of
Courage, thereby restoring to t hose novels some portion of the thematic coherence my
treatment of them claims to displace. On the one hand, I find his readings of those sce-
narios persuasive as far as they go. On the other, the very terms of t hose readings mili-
tate against traditional notions of character, while Michaels’s concentration on a small
number of crucial passages minimizes the antitotalizing, even athematic, force of the
sheer profusion of materiality effects in Crane’s most characteristic texts. In fact, the
most characteristic of Crane’s longer narratives may be The Monster, which has always
defied thematic recuperation, and perhaps mainly for that reason has remained apart
from the select canon of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literature mas-
terpieces to which by rights it belongs. See, however, Lee Clark Mitchell, “Face,
Race, and Disfiguration in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’ ” Critical Inquiry 17
(Autumn 1990): 174–192, and Bill Brown, “Monstrosity,” in The Material Unconscious:
American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, MA,
1996), 199–245, to which The Monster is central. As noted earlier, Brown’s account of
Crane in his book deals not at all with the argument put forward in “Stephen Crane’s
Upturned Faces.”
15. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York, 1971) (hereafter
HD). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
16. See, e.g., Peter Brooks, “An Unreadable Report: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, 1984), 238–263;
James Guetti, The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner
(Ithaca, NY, 1967), 47–68; Christopher L. Miller, “The Discoursing Heart: Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,” in Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, 1985),
169–183; J. Hillis Miller, “Heart of Darkness Revisited,” in Conrad Revisited: Essays
for the Eighties, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1985), 31–50; Benita Parry, Conrad
and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (London, 1983), 20–
39; Adena Rosmarin, “Darkening the Reader: Reader-R esponse Criticism and Heart
of Darkness,” in Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism,
ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York, 1989), 148–171; Henry Staten, “Conrad’s Mortal Word,”
Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986): 720–740; and Tzvetan Todorov, “Connaissance
du vie,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 11 (1975): 145–154. Even Ian Watt, who feels
that Todorov goes too far in seeing “Heart of Darkness as implying the impossibility
of expressing the essential reality of h uman experience in faction,” acknowledges the
obscurity involved in the novella’s “quasi-transcendental perspective” (Watt, Conrad
in the Nineteenth C entury [Berkeley, CA, 1979], 251–252).
17. For example, near the beginning of chapter 10, Nina, about to leave Sambir to meet
Dain, remarks to Mrs. Almayer, “Mother, I s hall return to the h ouse and look once more
at my father’s face” (AF, 149). Mrs. Almayer, full of hate for her husband, refuses to
allow her to go, adding, “I remember . . . I wanted to look at your face again. He said
no! I heard you cry and jumped into the river” (this when Nina was first sent to Singa-
pore to be educated [AF, 150]). A bit further on we are told: Mrs. Almayer “could not
see her daughter’s face,” and shortly after that she entreats her d
aughter, “Give up your
old life! . . . Forget that you ever looked at a white face” (AF, 150–151). We are then in-
formed that
at the bottom of [Nina’s] passing desire to look again at her father’s face t here
was no strong affection. She felt no scruples and no remorse at leaving suddenly
that man whose sentiment towards herself she could not understand, she could
not even see. T here was only an instinctive clinging to old life, to old habits,
to old faces; that fear of finality which lurks in every human breast and prevents
so many heroisms and so many crimes. (AF, 151)
(Later, in the encounter on the beach, Almayer w ill suddenly cry out, for no apparent
reason, “Nina! . . . t ake your eyes off my face” [AF, 179].) Nor is this all. The chapter
continues obsessively both to refer to and to describe a variety of f aces, reaching a cre-
scendo in its evocation of a tortured dream that visits Almayer as he sits sleeping on
his verandah (“How escape from the importunity of lamentable cries and from the look
of staring, sad eyes in the faces which pressed round him till he gasped for breath under
the crushing weight of worlds that hung over his aching shoulders?” [AF, 158]). Al-
mayer is then awakened by the slave girl Taminah (“He looked at the w oman’s face
under him. A real woman. He knew her. By all that is wonderful! Taminah!” [AF,
161]), who, in love with Dain, reveals the lovers’ plans. The chapter ends: “Almayer
hid his face in his hands as if to shut out a loathsome sight. When, hearing a slight
rustle, he uncovered his eyes, the dark heap by the door was gone” (AF, 164). This
hardly begins to suggest the prevalence of face imagery in the novel as a whole.
18. Quoted in English in Karl, 709, translation modified. The original French reads:
Fort intéressé par la parenté que je découvre entre Sous les Yeux d’Occident et
Lord Jim. . . . Cette inconséquence du héros, pour le rachat de laquelle toute
sa vie, ensuite, est comme mise en gage. Car ce qui tire le plus à conséquence,
ce sont précisément les inconséquences d’une vie. Comment effacer cela?
(André Gide, entry for February 23, 1930, Journal, 1889–1939 [Paris, 1951],
971; emphasis in original)
19. Quoted in English in Karl, 709, translation modified. The original French reads:
A remarquer que les fatales inconséquences des héros de Conrad (je songe en
particulier à Lord Jim et à Under Western Eyes) sont involontaires et gênent aus-
sitôt grandement l’être qui les commet. Toute la vie, par la suite, ne suffit pas
à les démentir et à en effacer les traces. (Gide, Journal, 1002; emphasis in
original)
20. In this connection, see Conrad’s remarks in his letter of September 16, 1899 to Edward
Garnett (he was then at work on Lord Jim):
My efforts seem unrelated to anything in heaven and everyt hing under heaven
is impalpable to the touch like shapes of mist. Do you see how easy writing must
be under such conditions? Do you see? Even writing to a friend—to a person
one has heard, touched, drank with, [quarrelled] with—does not give me a
sense of reality. All is illusion—t he words written, the mind at which they are
aimed, the truth they are intended to express, the hands that w ill hold the
paper, the eyes that w ill glance at the lines. Every image floats vaguely in a sea
of doubt—and the doubt itself is lost in an unexpected universe of incertitudes.
(CL, 2:198)
21. Earlier, Jim said to Marlow: “You d on’t know what it is for a fellow in my position to be
believed—make a clean breast of it to an elder man” (LJ, 137; emphasis added).
22. Conrad, author’s note to Tales of Unrest (1898; repr. Harmondsworth, UK, 1977), 9.
23. Or consider another author’s note, this one to An Outcast of the Islands (1896). It be-
gins: “An Outcast of the Islands is my second novel in the absolute sense of the
word; second in conception, second in execution, second as it were in its essence.”
Conrad explains that after finishing Almayer’s Folly he remained uncertain whether he
“should write another line for print,” and that his perplexity was resolved only when
his friend Garnett said to him: “You have the style, you have the temperament: why not
write another?” Conrad continues:
I believe that as far as one man may wish to influence another man’s life Ed-
ward Garnett had a g reat desire that I should go on writing. At that time, and
I may say, even afterwards, he was always very patient and gentle with me. What
strikes me most however in the phrase quoted above which was offered to me in
a tone of detachment is not its gentleness but its effective wisdom. Had he said,
“Why not go on writing,” it is very probable he would have scared me away from
pen and ink for ever; but there was nothing either to frighten one or arouse one’s
antagonism in the mere suggestion to “write another.” And thus a dead point in
the revolution of my affairs was insidiously got over. The word “another” did it.
(Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands [Harmondsworth, UK, 1975], 7–8)
The word “another” did it, I suggest, because it held out the promise of displacing, in
that sense erasing, Almayer’s Folly, which is also why Conrad describes An Outcast as
“my second novel in the absolute sense of the word.” (An Outcast is set in Sambir, and
includes a more youthful Almayer, Lingard, and Balabatchi among its dramatis
personae. Incidentally, it began as a story provisionally entitled “Two Vagabonds.”)
The association between doubling and erasure (or at least blankness) also emerges
in an improbable anecdote that Conrad is supposed to have related in the course of his
1923 visit to the United States. Jessie Conrad, relying on a newspaper cutting from that
visit, tells how Conrad spoke of reading cheap editions of Mark Twain on the Congo.
“I recall a remark made to me once when I was paying a call on Arthur Symons,” the
cutting quotes Conrad as having said. “He had a friend sitting in his room who affected
the appearance of Mark Twain. The white flannel suit, the white hair, in fact, the whole
appearance was a direct copy of the g reat American author. I remarked upon the re-
semblance laughingly and with perfect good-humour the ‘copy’ admitted the inten-
tional likeness, but, he insisted, ‘you see the very name gives me that license, “Mark
Twain” ’ ” (Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad and His Circle [New York, 1935], 252–253).
24. Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer: An Episode from the Coast,” in Twixt Land and
Sea (Harmondsworth, UK, 1988), 81–124 (hereafter “SS”). Further page references w ill
be in parentheses in the text.
25. See Martin Ray, who observes that
the compulsion to write imposed on Conrad by writing the first word is yet de-
signed to return him eventually to the blankness from which he began. . . .
The work of art appears to exist tentatively, as it w
ere, in parentheses, between
the blank page from which it originates and the blank exhaustion which the
author must seek.
But Ray’s concern with the theme of silence leads him away from a problematic of
writing to one of language. In his summary:
Conrad’s attempt to erect a barrier of language against the impending silence

is but one half of his ambiguous attitude to the forces of negation; much of his
creative power may be said to originate in his direct confrontation with t hose
forces, a confrontation which required him to transcend temporarily the bar-
riers of language before retreating again into the shelter which they provide. . . .
The medium [of Conrad’s style] is itself the record and the reward of Conrad’s
confrontation with the forces of silence. (Martin Ray, “Language and Silence
in the Novels of Joseph Conrad,” Conradiana 16 [1984]: 27, 37)
See also Edward Said: “Writing for Conrad was an activity that constituted negation—
of itself of what it dealt with—a nd was also oral and repetitive. That is, as an activity
Conrad’s writing negated and reconstituted itself, negated itself again, and so forth
infinitely; hence the extraordinarily patterned quality of the writing” (Said, The
World, the Text, and the Critic [Cambridge, MA, 1983], 108). Said’s understanding of
negation doesn’t fully coincide with what I mean by erasure (he is chiefly concerned
with the dialectic between visual and oral modes of communication, and like Ray he
emphasizes more than I would Conrad’s relation to language), but Ray’s and Said’s
essays approach more closely than any criticism I know to my argument in this chapter
and indeed this book. A third commentator who should be mentioned is Karl, who (be-
fore Ray) calls attention to Conrad’s use of images of blankness, which he associates
with “Conrad’s immersion in a symboliste ideal, the Mallarmé ‘absence’ and ‘blank-
ness’ ” (Karl, 365).
26. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, ed. Véronique Pauly (1904; repr.,
London, 2007), 206–234 (hereafter N). Further page references w ill be in parentheses
in the text.
27. Joseph Conrad, “The Tale,” in Tales of Hearsay (London, 1925), 164–165 (hereafter
“T”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
28. No wonder, then, that deconstructive critics for whom the task of criticism consists in
showing “the existence in works of literature of structures of language which contra-
dict the law of noncontradiction” have found grist for their readings in Conrad’s fic-
tions. But their failure to note the basis of t hose structures in his work in a specific
relation to the materiality of writing (itself a “deconstructive” notion but only up to a
point) gives their demonstrations a peculiarly disengaged air. The citation is from J.
Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 17.
See Miller’s chapter on Lord Jim in that book, in which he observes that “a network
of light and dark imagery manifestly organizes the novel throughout” (37), compares
Marlow’s last view of Jim (white against black) with another passage that presents Jim
“distinct and black, planted solidly upon the shores of light” (173), and concludes
that “the juxtaposition of light and dark offers no better standing ground from which
what is equivocal about the rest of the novel may be surveyed and comprehended than
any other aspect of the text” (38). “I claim, then,” Miller writes, “that from whatever
a ngle it is approached Lord Jim reveals itself to be a work which raises questions
rather than answering them” (39). In fact, the black-against-white passage Miller cites
is taken from the protracted scene of Marlow writing letter after letter that I have dis-
cussed; it is as though Jim himself is there presented as a blackened page, which of
course gives the climactic figure of the clean slate even greater force.
29. Thus, F. R. Leavis suggests that Decoud “had a considerable part in the writing of
Nostromo; or one might say that Nostromo was written by a Decoud who w asn’t a com-
placent dilletante, but was positively drawn towards those capable of ‘investing
their activities with spiritual value’ ” (Leavis, The G
reat Tradition: George Eliot, Henry
James, Joseph Conrad [1948; repr., New York, 1967], 100).
30. The claim that Charles Gould “has idealised the existence, the worth, the meaning
of the San Tomé mine” is made by Decoud in conversation with Mrs. Gould (N, 169).
31. Quoted by G. Jean Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY,
1927), 2:296; cited also by Ian Watt, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (Cambridge, 1988, 18).
32. On Conrad’s close relation to the French language and French literature, see Yves Her-
vouet’s invaluable The French Face of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge, 1990).
33. Shortly afterwards, the narrator’s last view of a “dark knot of seamen” from the Nar-
cissus (some of whom a page or so earlier had cried out, “To the Black Horse! To the
Black Horse!” [NN, 106]) is described as follows:
The sunshine of heaven fell like a gift of grace on the mud of the earth, on the
remembering and mute stones, on greed, selfishness; on the anxious faces of
forgetful men. And to the right of the dark group the stained front of the Mint,
cleansed by the flood of light, stood out for a moment, dazzling and white, like
a marble palace in a fairy tale. The crew of the Narcissus drifted out of sight.
(NN, 107)
34. See also the related passage in A Personal Record in which Conrad describes himself
at age nine “looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank
space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent” and saying, “When I
grow up I s hall go there.” Conrad explains that “there [was] the region of Stanley Falls,
which in ’68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth’s figured surface. And the
MS. of ‘Almayer’s Folly,’ carried about me as if it w ere a talisman or a treasure, went
t here too” (PR, 36–37; emphasis in original). My references to A Personal Record here
and in note 10 barely hint at its relevance to a fuller understanding of Conrad’s
impressionism.
35. Maps and mapping are interestingly discussed in relation to issues of the “new impe-
rialism” by Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the
Double-Mapping of Europe and America (Stanford, CA, 1995). See also Robert
Hampson, “ ‘A Passion for Maps’: Conrad, Africa, Australia, and South-East Asia,” The
Conradian 28, no. 1 (2003): 34–56, and Hampson, “Conrad’s Heterotopic Fiction:
Composite Maps, Superimposed Sites, and Impossible Spaces,” in Conrad in the
Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M.
K aplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White (New York, 2005), 121–135. A basic study, of
course, is Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed., London, 2006), esp. chap. 10, “Census, Map,
Museum.” See the present book, Chapter 6, for a discussion of various maps and charts
in impressionist novels and stories.
36. Conrad, “Youth: A Narrative,” in Youth and The End of the Tether (Harmondsworth,
UK, 1984), 11 (hereafter “Y”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
37. The implication of writing in imperialist or colonialist scenarios of power has been a
central topic in cultural analysis since Claude Lévi-Strauss’s chapter “A Writing
Lesson” in Tristes Tropiques, or at least since Jacques Derrida’s critique of that chapter
in De la Grammatologie. In this connection, see Jonathan Goldberg’s discussion of that
confrontation in Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford,
CA, 1990), 1–28; his learned and brilliant book remains an outstanding contribution
to the cultural significance of writing and its pedagogy in sixteenth-and early
seventeenth-century Britain.
2. Invisible Writing
1. Three biographical studies of Hudson are: Ruth Tomalin, W. H. Hudson—A Biography

(London, 1982); Amy D. Ronner, W. H. Hudson: The Man, the Novelist, the Naturalist
(New York, 1986); and Felipe Arocena, William Henry Hudson: Life, Literature and
Science, trans. Richard Manning (Jefferson, NC, 2003).
2. Cited by David Miller and Paul B. Stretesky, W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise
(London, 1990), 11.
3. Ford Madox Ford, Portraits from Life (Chicago, 1937), 64–65 (hereafter Portraits). Fur-
ther page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
4. John Galsworthy, introduction to W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions (1915; repr., New
York, 1920), x–x i.
5. “W. H. Hudson: An Appreciation by Viscount Grey of Fallodon,” in W. H. Hudson,
Dead Man’s Plack, An Old Thorn, and Miscellanea (1923; repr., New York, 1968), xii
(hereafter “Appreciation”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
6. Ford Madox Ford, “Three Americans and a Pole,” Scribner’s Magazine 90 (Oc-
tober 1931): 384.
7. Quoted by John R. Payne, W. H. Hudson: A Bibliography (Folkestone, UK, 1977), 5–6.
8. At greater length:
His story is not so much told as seen through a haze of sentences. His style is
like river-m ist; for a space t hings are seen clearly, and then comes a g reat grey
bank of printed matter, page on page, creeping round the reader, swallowing
him up. You stumble, you protest, you blunder on, for the drama you saw so
cursorily has hold of you; you cannot escape until to have seen it out. (Cited in
Patrick Parrinder and Robert M. Philmus, eds., H. G. Wells’s Literary Criti-
cism [Brighton, UK, 1980], 88)
See also Linda Dryden, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de-Siècle Literary
Scene (Houndsmills, UK, 2015).
9. W. H. Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia (London, 1923), 170 (hereafter ID). Subsequent
page references are given in parentheses in the text.
10. Cited by Violet Hunt, “The Death of Hudson,” The English Review (January 1923):
35.
11. W. H. Hudson, Birds and Man (London, 1901) (hereafter BM). Further page references
w ill be in parentheses in the text.
12. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; repr., Cambridge, MA, 1983), 726;
quoted and discussed in Michael Fried, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned F aces,” in Realism,
Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago, 1987), 131
(hereafter RWD).
13. Hudson particularly decries “the old method of spelling bird notes and sounds” (Birds
and Man, 138; emphasis in original).
14. W. H. Hudson, A Hind in Richmond Park (New York, 1923), 37–50.
15. W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions (Mineola, NY, 1989) (hereafter GM). Further page ref-
erences w ill be in parentheses in the text.
16. At roughly this moment in Rima’s slow return to consciousness Abel recalls once en-
countering a single white flower which was new to him and which he never saw again.
The flower was remarkable for its perfection and also for the fact that with the passage
of time it remained untouched by decay. Significantly, it first gave Abel the idea “of an
artificial flower, cut by a divinely inspired artist from some unknown precious stone”
(GM, 234); in time, however, the impression of artificiality dissipated and Abel became
aware that it was indeed a flower “only with that transcendent beauty it had a different
kind of life. Unconscious, but higher; perhaps immortal. Thus, it would continue to
bloom when I had looked my last upon it” (GM, 234). (Abel l ater heard from some In-
dians that it was called Hata.) He thinks of that flower while gazing on “the face that
had no motion, no consciousness in it, and yet had life, a life of so high a kind as to
match with its pure, surpassing loveliness” (GM, 235). What especially strikes me in
this is that Abel first thought the flower to be artificial in its beauty, and only afterward
realized that it was natural—as though the Hata, like Rima, indeed, like Hudson’s im-
pressionist ideal, transcended the very distinction between art and life.
17. Indeed, flammability is cited as a property of writing paper by James in the Principles
of Psychology; see the relevant citation and a brief discussion in “Stephen Crane’s Up-
turned Faces,” RWD, 142–143n. Fire as specifically destructive of written manuscript
is treated with harrowing force in George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891; repr.,
Harmondsworth, UK, 1985), 464–472. I d on’t consider Gissing an impressionist
writer, but the contemporary fear of fire as a threat to words on paper comes to the fore
in these pages as nowhere e lse.
18. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York, 1971), 38–39.
19. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Or-
dinary Brain (since 1866) (New York, 1934), 366–385 (hereafter EA). Further page ref-
erences w ill be in parentheses in the text. Wells describes the “picshuas” as “silly little
sketches about this or that incident [in his life with his second wife, Amy Catherine
Robbins] which became at last a sort of burlesque diary of our lives and accumulated in
boxes until there were hundreds of them” (EA, 365). For a recent study of these, see
Gene K. Rinkel and Margaret E. Rinkel, The Picshuas of H. G. Wells (Urbana, IL, 2006).
20. Interestingly, Hudson was fascinated by snakes as well as birds. See W. H. Hudson,
Far Away and Long Ago (1918; repr., London, 1939), chap. 15, “Serpent and Child,” and
chap. 16, “A Serpent Mystery,” as well as four chapters on serpents in Hudson, The
Book of a Naturalist (London, 1919).
21. The serpent’s head passage continues:
How or when this monster left me—washed away by the cold rains perhaps—I
do not know. Proba bly it only transformed itself into some new shape, its long
coils perhaps changing into t hose endless processions and multitudes of pale-
face people I seem to remember having encountered. In my devious wander-
ings I must have reached the shores of the undiscovered g reat White Lake, and
passed through the long shining streets of Manoa, the mysterious city in the
wilderness. I see myself t here, the wide thoroughfare filled from end to end with
people, gaily dressed as if for some high festival, all drawing aside to let the
wretched pilgrim pass, staring at his fever and famine-w asted figure, in its
strange rags, with its strange burden. (GM, 312)
The shift from serpent image to white faces, White Lake, and pale-face people staring
at him suggests an experience of another “fallen” version of pages and readers.
This is perhaps as good a place as any to mention Abel’s early description of Rima’s
“grandfather” Nuflo’s face:
A curious face had this old man, which looked as if youth and age had made it
a battling ground. His forehead was smooth except for two parallel lines in the
middle r unning its entire length, dividing it in zones; his arched eyebrows w ere
black as ink, and his small black eyes were bright and cunning, like the eyes of
some wild carnivorous animal. In this part of his face youth had held its own,
especially in the eyes, which looked young and lively. But lower down age had
conquered, scribbling his skin all over with wrinkles, while moustache and
beard w
ere white as thistledown. (GM, 92)
A little further on, Nuflo says, “what I am is plainly written on my face” (GM, 92), which
is to say, the dual themes of faciality and writing are put in play immediately before the
encounter with Rima. It remains an open question, though, w hether or not Hudson
intended the entire episode of Rima’s return to consciousness and indeed the very char-
acter of Rima to be understood as bearing explicitly on his own scriptive ideal.
22. See H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London, 2005).
23. Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute, in Novels and Essays, ed. Donald Pizer (New
York, 1986) (hereafter VB). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
24. Frank Norris, A Man’s W oman and Yvernelle (Garden City, NY, 1928) (hereafter MW).
Page references w ill be in parentheses in the notes. I note in passing that Christopher
Morley in a brief foreword refers to Norris’s “high-tension impressionism” (MW, ix).
25. There is, of course, a large secondary literature on Norris as a naturalist writer. In this
regard, see June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Modernism (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1985); Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Natu-
ralism: American Lite rat ure at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley, CA, 1988), 137–
180; Mark Seltzer, “The Naturalist Machine,” pt. 1 of Bodies and Machines (New York,
1992), 23–44.
26. Toward the beginning of Experiment in Autobiography Wells observes of himself,
My perceptions do not seem to be so thorough, vivid and compelling as t hose
of many people and it is rare that my impressions of things glow. There is a faint
element of inattention in all I do; it is as if white was mixed into all the pig-
ments of my life. I am rarely vivid to myself. (19; emphasis in original)
27. H. G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet (1906), in The Complete Science Fiction Treasury
of H. G. Wells (New York, 1978), 691–860 (hereafter DC). Further page references w ill
3. Ford’s Impressionism
1. Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (1905; repr., London,
1995) (hereafter SL). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
2. See, e.g., two essays in Ford Madox Ford and the City, ed. Sara Haslam (Amsterdam,
2005): Nick Freeman, “Not ‘Accuracy’ but ‘Suggestiveness’: Impressionism in The Soul
of London,” 27–40, and Angus Wrenn, “A ngle of Elevation: Social Class, Transport
and Perception of the City in The Soul of London,” 41–54. See also three essays in Ford
Madox Ford and Englishness, ed. Denis Brown and Jenny Plastow (Amsterdam,
2006): Sara Haslam, “England and Englishness: Ford’s First Trilogy,” 47–62; An-
drzei Gasiorek, “Ford among the Aliens,” 63–82; and Nick Hornsby, “Beyond Mi-
metic Englishness: Ford’s English Trilogy and The Good Soldier,” 147–162.
3. Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane
(Chicago, 1987), 109, 137–141 (hereafter RWD).
dinary Brain (since 1866) (New York, 1934), 529.
5. See the Introduction to the present book, note 11,for remarks on the treatment of ques-
tions of automatism in the late nineteenth-century psychological literature as well as
in my books Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, 1990) and Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On Madame
Bovary and Salammbô (New Haven, CT, 2013).
6. W. H. Hudson, Long Ago and Far Away (1918; repr., London, 1939), 150–151.
7. Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” ed. Robert Kimbrough (New
York, 1979), 147.
8. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (New York, 1970), 434.
9. Ford Madox Ford, Portraits from Life (Chicago, 1937), 41.
10. Believe it or not, the present chapter barely evokes the strangeness of Ford’s prose in
The Soul of London. See, for example, his account of the labors in a cement factory of
a workman he names Stanley, a passage four paragraphs long in which the words
“hand” (or “hands”) and “sand” recur continually, to no comprehensible end (SL,
67–68). A page or so later the chapter, “Work in London,” ends with Ford imagining
the collapse of one or another large works owing to the development of new processes
that make the former obsolete. As follows:
To assist at the obsequies of one of t hese g reat works is more suggestive than
to have seen the corpses in the snow of the retreat from Moscow. It is more
horrible because the sufferers have fought in a fight much more blind and
suffer inarticulately in the midst of their suffering children and in the face of
their desolate homes. They suffer for no apparent principle, for no faith, for
no fame, for no nation, for no glory; they suffer the shame of poverty without
the compensating glory of defeat. They have not ever seen their Napoleon r ide
slowly along their cheering lines.
For London, if it attracts men from a distance with a glamour like that of a
g reat and green gaming t able, shows, when they are close to it, the indecipher-
able face of a desperate battle field, without ranks, without order, without pity
and with very little of discoverable purpose. Yet t hose that it has attracted it
holds for ever, because in its want of logic it is so very human. (SL, 69)
ere, too, I assume that Ford had no ulterior intent when he penned t hese paragraphs.
H
But the imagery of corpses in the snow, the metaphors of “face” (twice) and “lines,”
even the rectangular flat gaming table (cf. the flat stretch of desert in “A Memorandum”)
all suggest a problematic of writing, which if taken seriously would cast the paragraphs
as a kind of justification for the perplexing character of Ford’s prose in The Soul of
London—say, its “want of logic” as a textual whole or the extreme difficulty of finding
in it an overarching “discoverable purpose” of a satisfying sort.
11. Carol Jacobs, “The (too) Good Soldier: ‘A Real Story,’ ” in Glyph 3: Johns Hopkins Tex-
tual Studies, ed. Samuel Weber and Henry Sussman (Baltimore, 1978), 39 (hereafter
“TtGS”). An abbreviated version titled “The Passion for Talk” appears in the new crit-
ical edition of the novel, used throughout the present discussion: Ford Madox Ford,
The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard, 2nd ed. (New York, 2012) (hereafter GS).
12. This, the episode Jacobs excerpts—which I w ill presently discuss and cite more
extensively—occurs at GS, 75.
13. There is, logically, at least one more possibility—t hat Dowell creates his passion by
speaking, but only becomes aware of it when Leonora speaks. I hesitate to admit this
possibility, because I am not convinced that it implies a notion of “creating” passion
that renders it different from the first possibility. At any rate, it is not important that I
cover all of the permutations the situation offers—my aim is merely to show that a dec-
laration such as Jacobs’s is, one might say, permanently premature, b ecause it de-
pends on deciding when Dowell’s account is “true” and when it is not, even though we
do not have the means to do so.
14. According to Schorer, Dowell’s is not the wrong view, either, since it cannot even tell
us the truth if we turn it upside-down; the narrator’s account is “merely a view.” See
Mark Schorer, “The Good Soldier as Comedy,” in GS, 322. Versions of Schorer’s essay
first appeared in The Princeton University Library Chronicle (April 1948) and Horizon
(August 1949). Samuel Hynes offers an interpretation that conflicts sharply with
Schorer’s in its description of the distance between Dowell’s narration and the “truth”
of the events to which it refers (“The Epistemology of The Good Soldier,” in GS, 327–
334; originally published in Sewanee Review 69 [Spring 1961]). Hynes sees the problem
inherent in the limited view of the first-person narrator: the latter is our only access to
the events depicted by his narrative, so “there is no knowledge offered, or even implied,
which is superior to his own” (329). Hynes qualifies his willingness to accept Dow-
ell’s narration as the ultimate (if limited) authority by acknowledging techniques that
allow us to see past, as it w
ere, the testimony of the first-person narrator—devices, such
as irony, for example, that make clear that the narrator’s voice is wrong and “imply the
correctness of some alternative version” (329).
What strikes me as dangerous in Hynes’s hypothesis is the possibility that the task
of constructing such an “alternative version” w ill work to efface, to render transparent,
the version Dowell gives. Hynes himself avoids that pitfall by seeking significance pre-
cisely in the apparent inadequacy of Dowell’s narration. The novel, he concludes, is
“built on doubt” (334). Dowell’s “limited” perspective and patchwork deployment of
the other characters’ testimony means that we cannot “finally see one version as right
and another as wrong, but that we recognize an irresolvable pluralism of truths, in a
world that remains essentially dark” (331–332). “We must accept,” according to Hynes,
Dowell’s “contradictions and uncertainties as stages in our own progress t oward knowl-
edge” (328).
I am suggesting that we take Hynes’s point that t here is no higher authority given or
implied than Dowell’s word. I think that the most powerf ul interpretation of Dowell’s
narrative is the one that makes the most sense of it. It is not enough to note that Dowell
is confused and proclaims his ignorance often. I am more reluctant than Hynes to
accept Dowell’s “contradictions and uncertainties” as merely contradictions and un-
certainties that tell us nothing more than how far away the truth has slipped from the
narrator’s grasp. I think Dowell makes more sense than he has ever been given credit
for—a lmost perfect sense, I would say—even at some of his most obscure moments.
15. Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal
Psychology (New York, 1906), 2 (hereafter DP). Further page references w ill be in
parentheses in the text. On Prince, see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple
Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ, 1995) (hereafter RS), and Ruth
Leys, “The Real Miss Beauchamp,” in Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2000), 41–82
(hereafter “RMB”). An earlier version of the latter, “The Real Miss Beauchamp:
Gender and the Subject of Imitation,” appeared in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed.
Judith Butler and Joan Scott (London, 1992), 167–214. A lucid overview of the history
of the developments surrounding Prince and related figures, such as Pierre Janet, is
provided by Henry Ellenberger in The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, 1970).
Although the rise of Freud and psychology largely suppressed hypnotism and its
related phenomena—including “multiple personalities”—Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has
argued persuasively that a version of the hypnotic rapport, and therefore of suggestion,
survived within psychoanalysis, specifically in the form of “transference”; see his
“Hypnosis in Psychoanalysis,” in The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and
Affect (Stanford, CA, 1992), 39–61 (hereafter “HP”).
16. See DP, 41, for example. Leys discusses Prince’s difficulty on this score (“RMB,” 53–
54), and analyzes in detail a mimetic undercurrent that threatens to sweep away Prince’s
own conclusions. An analysis of The Good Soldier focusing on the mimetic identifica-
tions that arise in its pages might proceed from an account of the quasi-hypnotic mode
of consciousness such as I am developing. Dowell’s narration clearly opens up the
possibility. He tells us: “I c an’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward
Ashburnham—a nd that I love him because he was just myself ” (GS, 168). And,
equally strikingly:
But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and
withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman that
he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of
touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be
supported. (GS, 82)
17. The source of Ford’s knowledge of the subject of suggestion is an interesting issue. I
w ill not, however, attempt to pin it down. Ford was acquainted with certain psycho-
logical research for various reasons. He suffered from psychological disorders and from
treatments for them. He claimed to have known (and disapproved of) Freud’s The In-
terpretation of Dreams before the First World War (and so very possibly by the time
he wrote The Good Soldier). Max Saunders explains that one reference to Freud in a
1922 essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses constitutes the evidence that Ford knew Freud’s
work (Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. [Oxford, 1996], 1:425 [here-
after DL]). Ford’s frequent references to hypnosis and related phenomena imply, at the
very least, that he shared the active interest of his era in such topics.
A recent argument proposes a connection between Freud and Ford’s thinking on
suggestibility. Barry Sheils, in “Caring to Know: Narrative Technique and the Art of
Public Nursing in The Good Soldier,” in Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier”: Cen-
tenary Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Sara Haslam (Leiden, 2015), 165–182 (hereafter
FMFTGS), finds a model for Dowell’s obliviousness in some writing on caregivers, in-
cluding some of Freud’s:
Readers of the novel often point out how unlikely it is that Dowell truly knows
so l ittle of the sex-instinct as he claims, how unlikely that a man so betrayed by
the passions of others would render his tale in such extraordinary passionless
terms, averring that he “feels just nothing at all” (GS, 58). And yet, in all of this,
Dowell only conforms to a behavior pattern which Freud in Studies on Hysteria
found to be typical among t hose who nursed the sick: a condition he termed
the “retention hysteria” in which the nurse’s identification with the patient’s
suffering is so complete that he inhibits or actually cedes his own affective ex-
istence. (181n3)
This is precisely the kind of mimetic relation I mean to propose for Ford’s model of
consciousness, and it does serve to locate that relation in Freud. Nevertheless, I still
hesitate to reduce the paradigm of suggestibility or identification I have in mind to this
specific condition.
18. Ford’s insertion of the word “august” here is strange in more than one way. It seems
out of place in the passage where it occurs—it seems like a moment of flat-out sarcasm
in Dowell’s otherw ise matter-of-fact and thoughtful account of Edward’s trial. On the
other hand, it repeats a word that is more often associated with Florence—except
that, where it is connected with her, it names a month. It is on the fourth of August that
Florence’s superstitious mind “forced her to certain acts, as if she had been hypno-
tised” (GS, 59; emphasis added). For a recent consideration of “August” symbolism in
The Good Soldier, see Melba Cuddy-Keane, “July 4 to August 4: Paradigmatic and
Palimpsestic Plots in The Good Soldier,” in FMFTGS, 47–61.
19. Miriam Bailin’s essay—“ ‘An Extraordinarily Safe Castle’: Aesthetics as Refuge in The
Good Soldier,” in Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard A. Cassell (Boston,
1987), 68–81—argues that Dowell finds some comfort in identification:
T here is some indication that the various elements of Dowell’s imaginary set-
ting have antecedents in his a ctual experience with Leonora. His storytelling
situation is strikingly similar to the one in which he found himself when Le-
onora began her revelations to him. . . . W hether Dowell projects his ideal
mode of presentat ion back on his past or actually borrows it from that past, the
way in which t hese earlier moments with Leonora seem to haunt his imaginary
setting reinforces the sense that that setting is an aesthetic substitute for the
refuge the Ashburnhams once provided—in effect, an ideal re-creation of the
best aspects of the past, now fully u nder his control. (71–72)
Bailin’s point-by-point comparison of the conditions of Dowell’s hearing and telling

of the story is convincing. I question, however, her claim that the setting of Leonora’s
revelations provided refuge for Dowell. Refuge doesn’t seem quite right, since Dow-
ell’s feelings about Branshaw and about Leonora are, by the time he comes to tell his
story, ambivalent, to say the least. Rather, it seems to me that Dowell attempts to re
create imaginatively for himself and for his listener something more like the condition
of listening passively, almost equally attentive to his surroundings as to the story it-
self. Furthermore, Dowell reproduces the passivity of listening by making the condi-
tions of his (re-)telling the story as nearly like those of his hearing the story as possible—
as if somehow to have Leonora tell it for him.
It is worth noting at this point that Ford appears to have dictated at least a large por-
tion, if not all, of The Good Soldier, proba bly to Brigit Patmore (DL, 1:399–400), to the
poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and to H. D.’s husband, the writer Richard Aldington
(DL, 1:145–152), because of writer’s cramp. Charles G. Hoffmann’s discussion of the
extant drafts makes it seem quite difficult to make a strong claim one way or the other
based on the physical evidence (“Ford’s Manuscript Revisions of The Good Soldier,”
English Literature in Transition 9, no. 3 [1966]: 145–152). The Norton critical edition
includes a summary of reworkings in “Manuscript Development and Textual Variants”
(GS, 207–230). In any case, the very idea of dictating was, from early on, an important
term in Ford’s i magined relationship to the enterprise of writing.
In a fascinating passage from one of his l ater autobiographical books, It Was the
Nightingale (1933; repr., New York, 1984) (hereafter IWN), Ford gives his views on the
superiority of writing with a pen, especially for t hose afflicted with writer’s cramp:
With regard to methods of writing . . . for myself I dislike writing with a pen.
My writer’s cramp has never completely left me and e very word I write is ac-
companied by a l ittle pain. Towards the end of my morning’s work it w ill be a
very severe pain r unning from the knuckle of my third finger to my elbow. But
for me it is worth while. . . . A fter the volume I began at St. Jean Cap Ferrat
the cramp became so severe that I could not hold a pen at all I took to writing
with a machine and then, worst of all, to dictating! I am not to that extent
machino-phobe—or even a hater of stenographers—t hat I consider the one or
the other below my dignity. It is that the one—a nd still more the other!—make
me become too fluid. It is as if they waited for me to write and write I do.
Whereas if I have to go to a t able and face pretty considerable pain I wait u ntil
have something worth saying to say and say it in the fewest possible words. (239)
Ford continues explaining that corrections on a typewritten page disturb him so much
that he will actually allow typing errors (one might call them parapraxes) to suggest sen-
tences to him (IWN, 239–240). The s ilent or near-silent secretary is even worse, since
his or her presence tempts him to press too hard for effects: “At last you say: ‘Damn it
all I will make that creature smile. Or have a tear in its eye!’ Then you are lost” (IWN,
241; emphasis in original).
Finally, Ford explains that, when his American friends spot his handwritten manu-
script pages, they assume his attachment to the pen is a deliberate archaism—a manifes-
tation of some contempt for a “vulgar instrument” (IWN, 243). Ford insists otherwise:
It is indeed a m atter of expediency alone—a matter of the mechanical diffi-

culty of correction with the machine and of creative difficulty of composition
pen in hand. If I had to give advice to a writer that is the advice I should give:
In composing make your circumstances as difficult as possible but in cor-
recting let not so much as a shadow or a whispered sound interfere between
you and your sheet of paper. And erase with bold, remorseless black strokes
that hiss as the pen traverses the lines. So you w ill know virtue. . . . You w ill
have the fewest possible words on your page.
I have used this digression about the mechanics of writing to indicate the
lapse of time that I spent at St. Jean Cap Ferrat, writing away at the first part of
my book. (IWN, 243)
W hether Ford wrote or dictated, his attitude toward the process was bound up inti-
mately, as this passage makes clear, with the immediacy (or distance, both physical and
emotional) of the act of writing, with the act or scene of writing as the source of some-
thing like suggestion, and with “the mechanics of writing” (or, could one say, the pro
cess of writing?) as digression.
20. Morton Prince, “Some Revelations of Hypnotism: Post-Hypnotic Suggestion, Auto-
matic Writing and Double Personality,” reprinted in Morton Prince: Psychotherapy
and Multiple Personality, Selected Essays, ed. Nathan G. Hale Jr. (Cambridge, MA,
1975), 71.
21. Compare Prince’s typical automatic writing experiment with an episode from “Nice
People,” an essay written by Ford and published anonymously in 1903, that explains
how its subjects (the nice people) presented themselves to the author:
I was stumbling through a fugue, the fourth of the Wohltemperierter Klavier.
It is a l ittle difficult for a person with stiff fingers but t here are certain chords
following on other chords, certain discords suspended for a long time and then
resolving themselves so suddenly and so swiftly that when I am very much alone
I sometimes sit playing it again and again, for an hour perhaps, in the hope of
hearing mere fragments of it. I began to think of the nice p eople I had known!
they suddenly r ose up before me, one a fter the other, a g reat number of faces.
I forgot that I was playing, and thought about them all, people who had, in one
way and another, for me at least, “personal magnetism.” Suddenly I found my-
self at the end of my fugue. I must obviously have played it without a stumble;
but I had not heard a note. (Ford Madox Ford, “Nice P eople,” T emple Bar 128
[November 1903]: 564; cited in DL, 1:446–447)
Ford’s reference to “personal magnetism” is telling—it is as if the faces (figures for sheets
of paper, as in other impressionist texts?) w ere invested with something like Mesmer’s
type of “magnetism” (which is, indeed, both a forerunner of hypnotism and the source
of the expression “personal magnetism”). It is as if the vision takes the place of reading
aloud or counting backward, in that it distracts the hypnotic subject (Ford), allowing
him to play the fugue automatically.
Saunders equates the fugue with Ford’s essay, to which the present passage provides
an introduction. Although I disagree with Saunders on how to interpret the passage,
he does see the fugue in Ford’s essay as a metaphor for writing, comparing it—r ightly,
I think—in structure with Ford’s characteristic time-shift (DL, 1:448).
22. In fact, Dowell had watched her absorb the substance of her lecture from “books like
Ranke’s History of the Popes, Symonds’s Renaissance, Motley’s Rise of the Dutch
Republic, and Luther’s T able Talk” (GS, 35). The close connection of her talk with
Dowell’s list of her sources seems almost to posit her talk as a (reversed) form of
dictation.
23. Robert J. Ray has written on the topic of repetition in Ford’s writing and its connec-
tion to a certain passivity (“Style in The Good Soldier,” Modern Fiction Studies 9, no. 4
[Spring 1983]: 61–66). He identifies a set of stylistic traits—“repetition of thematic
elements,” “parallelism,” “hypothesis,” and “negation”—that he feels underscore Dow-
ell’s passivity, which he sees as merely reflecting on Dowell’s passive, withdrawn char-
acter, whereas I am arguing that Dowell’s passivity as a narrator reflects meaningfully
on Ford’s enterprise as a writer.
For an interesti ng consideration of Dowell’s “negativity,” see Michael Levenson,
“Character in The Good Soldier,” Twentieth Century Literature 30, no. 4 (Winter 1984):
373–387. Levenson writes:
The problem of character in The Good Soldier is one with the method of
Impressionism. . . . Dowell’s “nullity” is simply the final consequence of the
Impressionist pursuit of immediate experience, the attempt to render an ab-
original stratum of personality that exists before d oing, feeling, and knowing
take shape. At the instant of experience, one is neither humble, nor kind, nor
greedy, nor wise. The notion of a trait, as a persistent attribute of character,
cannot yet apply. Character exists only a fter the fact, and it is Ford’s boldest
stroke to imagine a personality virtually without attributes—subjectivity be-
fore it has assumed the articulations of character. (383)
By now it should not be necessary to say that, from the perspective of the present study,
the impressionist project is understood as distinctly other than a “pursuit of immediate
experience,” and to the extent that Dowell as a “nullity” lends himself to Levenson’s
characterization, it is the issues of distraction, digression, and writing that are my focus
in this reading. Put another way, the “pursuit of immediate experience” for Ford the
writer (or any other impressionist) w ill necessarily involve the immediate experience
of writing—at any rate, that is the overarching argument of this book.
24. Printing presses, referred to simply as presses, are fixtures in a Protestant printer’s shop
in Ford’s The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908). See Ford Madox Ford, The Fifth Queen
(New York, 1980).
25. Carol Jacobs (see especially “TtGS,” 41–44) offers a reading of this scene that also re-
lies on the play of literal and figurative. Her point differs from mine—she is more in-
terested in something like a semiotic reading that opposes the material word to its
meaning. She reads the debate over transubstantiation and consubstantiation, upon
which the German and Swiss reformers disagreed, as a figure for the struggle between
the materiality of the signifier and the transparency of language. However, in view of
Nancy Rufford’s reduction of her entire catechism to a pronouncement on the omnip-
otence of God, it might seem equally likely to take the Protest as an allusion to one of
the points the reformers all more or less agreed on: predestination. Among the philo-
sophical problems that made itself acutely felt during the Reformation was the conflict
between free w ill and God’s plan. A number of solutions arose, but after his visit to
Marburg, Luther restated his commitment to predestination in the Augsburg Confes-

sion (Article 18, “Of Free Will”; for a fuller discussion, see Bernard M. G. Reardon,
Religious Thought in the Reformation, 2nd ed. [London, 1995], 124 passim). Since the
novel’s play between talk “expressing” passion and “creating” it casts doubt on our in
dependence in generating our passions, it seems that Jacobs should want to consider
the Protest as alluding to the Protestants’ commitment to predestination—a nd the
threat it poses to the claim that we author our own passions. Now, the theme of free
w ill is deeply related to the theme of automatic writing that I have been tracking. For a
discussion of automatic writing and its role in the discourse on f ree w ill in the work of
Ford’s contemporaries, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Action and Accident: Photography
and Writing,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature
at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley, CA, 1987), 215–244. Michaels’s essay makes
the subject’s ability to expect what he or she writes one of the criteria for determining
the degree of automaticity, as it w ere, of the phenomena it studied, as if to posit expec-
tation as a precondition of intention (or even—in some sense, perhaps—as a mild form
of it).
26. Elsewhere, Dowell compares Florence explicitly to a piece of paper, but does so in a
way that requires a different kind of discussion: “I suppose that my inner soul—my
dual personality—had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper—
that she represented a real h uman being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies
and with emotions only as a bank note represents a certain quantity of gold” (GS, 86).
Here, Dowell refers to an “inner soul” or a “dual personality” to account for his feeling
that, when Bagshawe revealed the fact of Florence’s early affair, he became suddenly
conscious of thoughts that struck him as having been with him unconsciously for some
time.
The association of that unconscious thinking with the image of Florence as a piece
of paper complicates what I have, up to now, described as Ford’s relationship to the
scene of writing. If the thematization of writing supplies a means of distracting the
conscious self from some other aspect of the project of writing the novel, what does
this sudden, seemingly explicit awareness of that metaphorics mean?
Before attempting an answer, I would point out that Ford’s apparent recognition of
the allegorical treatment of writing in The Good Soldier hardly means that he was fully
conscious of its extent or nature. I would strongly doubt that Ford thought of his
repetitions of the word “drawn” in the paragraph I discuss earlier, for example, as re-
ferring to the activities of marking and representat ion, rather than to drawing a car-
riage. What I would suggest is that Ford deliberately and consciously i magined Flor-
ence as comparable to certain kinds of writing (and, to a certain extent, to pictorial
representation in the form of fashion plates). The above quotation is the culmination of
the metaphor in Dowell’s narrative, and it seems intended to line Florence up with
certain “low” modes of represent at ion (i.e., slick advertisements or filthy lucre).
Elsewhere, Dowell finds Florence in contact with more serious literature, during her
preparation for the trip to M——. However, the high tone of the books she reads on
that occasion contributes to Dowell’s sense of unease. Florence reverts, in the terms of
Dowell’s final evaluation of her as printed m atter, to the status of the guidebook (GS,
86). In short, much of the force of comparing Florence to, or juxtaposing her pointedly
with, various printed items is to associate her with the vulgar guidebook, fashion
plate, or newspaper—rather than with Ranke and Luther.
In any case, the metaphor that compares Florence with a piece of paper seems to
miss the heart of what Ford does elsewhere with the scene of writing as the source of
(apparent) digression. And it misses the underlying point very closely—and, one might
suspect, meaningfully so. To put it a little differently, turning Florence into a guide-
book cum fashion plate almost seems to remove—to distance—t he threat that the other
encounters between her character and the thematization of writing w ill force recogni-
tion upon themselves. The explicit figuration of Florence as a piece of paper cited here
occurs in a brief reprise of Dowell’s description of the even ing of her death. The orig-
inal scene also compares Florence to a piece of paper, but without specifying the type
of paper and without pronouncing on the moral value, so to speak, of equation with
paper (GS, 74). It is tempting to see Ford as returning to the earlier simile and con-
structing another metaphor from it, without fully and consciously comprehending the
significance of the earlier instance—or even as thematizing the materials of writing pre-
cisely in order not to be faced with the similar, latent significance of the earlier in-
stance. In this sense, one might see Ford as engaging in a strategy of self-defense, not
fundamentally unlike numerous moments in Crane’s writing as understood in the In-
troduction to this book and, in far greater detail, in Michael Fried, “Stephen Crane’s
Upturned Faces,” in RWD, 91–161.
27. Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (1932; repr., New York, 1972), 262 (hereafter RY).
Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
28. Stephen Crane, “Tent Life at Ocean Grove” (1891), reprinted in Thomas A. Gullason,
“The ‘Lost’ Newspaper Writings of Stephen Crane,” Syracuse University Library As-
sociates Courier 21 (Spring 1986): 77–78.
29. Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (London, 1895), pp. 206–
207. Cited in the present book, Chapter 2, note 7.
4. Some Impressionist (and Non-Impressionist) F

aces
1. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, in Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson (New
York, 1984), 101–102. See the discussion of this passage in Michael Fried, “Stephen
Crane’s Upturned Faces,” in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and
Stephen Crane (Chicago, 1987), 93–94 (hereafter RWD).
2. See RWD, 104–108.
3. For the basic facts of Cunninghame Graham’s life and career, see Cedric Watts and Lau-
rence Davies, Cunninghame Graham: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, 1979).
4. Ford Madox Ford, “Techniques” (1935), in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed.
Frank McShane (Lincoln, NE, 1964), 65–66.
5. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, “The Orchid-Hunter,” in Rodeo: A Collection of the Tales
and Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. A. F. Tschiffely (New York, 1936),
54–64 (hereafter “OH”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. I
have no specific warrant for calling “The Orchid-Hunter” a sketch, by the way, but the
term seems apt, or at any rate more fitting than the obvious alternatives (story or tale).
6. “A Hegira, “The Gold Fish,” and “Tschiffely’s Ride” are all in Rodeo, 9–24, 251–259,
and 168–189, respectively. For “Andorra,” “An Arab Funeral,” and “Bu Gidri,” see
R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Faith (London, 1913), 192–231, 81–88, and 66–80,
respectively. For “Ave Caesar,” see Cunninghame Graham, Hope (London, 1910), 74–
83. Interestingly, Ford remarks in “Techniques,” “Mr. Graham you may read as
self-consciously as you w ill” (65); I am suggesting that his sketches and tales often
positively invite such a reading.
7. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, “Beattock for Moffat,” in Success (London, 1907), 139–
154. The story is praised by Ford in “Techniques,” 65–66.
8. Jack London, Martin Eden (Harmondsworth, UK, 1985), 174–175 (hereafter ME). Fur-
ther page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. London biographies include
Philip Foner, Jack London: American Rebel (1947; repr., Fort Lee, NJ, 1969); James
Haley, Wolf: The Lives of Jack London (New York, 2010); Carolyn Johnson, Jack
London—An American Radical? (Westport, CT, 1984); Earle Labor, Jack London (New
York, 2014); Andrew Sinclair, Jack: A Biography of Jack London (New York, 1977); Cla-
rice Stasz, Jack London’s Women (Amherst, MA, 2001). See also Dale L. Walker and
Jeanne Campbell Reesman, eds., No Mentor but Myself: Jack London on Writing and
Writers (Stanford, CA, 1999).
9. Walter Benn Michaels, “Success,” chap. 4 in Promises of American Life, 1880–1920,
pt. 3 in The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 3:
Prose Writing, 1860–1920 (Cambridge, 2005), esp. 396–398 (hereafter “Success”). As
Michaels states, “It is as if, through Martin, London imagines that publishing is part
of the act of writing and that writing for publication is ontologically different from
writing without regard for publication” (398).
10. At greater length:
Martin’s death is carefully planned: to defeat his body, he dives so deep that
when his “w ill” fails and his hands and feet start swimming up, it is too
late—“He was too deep down. They could never bring him to the surface.” In
what turn out to be the last months of his life, confronted by the discrepancy
between his writing and his success, between what he wanted to do and what
is happening to him, Martin is unable to work. His suicide puts an end to that
not because it puts an end to his life but because, restoring the connection be-
tween “w ill” and event, producing and selling, it gives him what London calls
“work to do.” (“Success,” 398)
Apropos the motif of violence done to faces, the central figure of speech in Lon-
don’s novel The Iron Heel (1906; repr., London, 1974) is that of the oligarch Wickson’s
rejoinder to the American revolutionary Ernest Everhard: “We w ill grind you revolu-
tionaries down u nder our heel, and we s hall walk upon your faces” (63). The entire
novel bears on the topic of this study. One further citation from the penultimate
chapter, “Nightmare”:
I remember stumbling at the corner over the legs of a man. It was the poor
hunted wretch that had dragged himself past my hiding-place. How distinctly
do I remember his poor, pitiful, gnarled hands as he lay there on the
pavement—hands that w ere more hoof and claw than hands, all twisted and
distorted by the toil of all his days, with on the palms a horny growth of callous
half an inch thick. And as I picked myself up and started on, I looked into the
face of the t hing and saw that it still lived; for the eyes, dimly intelligent, were
looking at me and seeing me.
After that came a kindly blank. I knew nothing, saw nothing, merely tottered
on in my quest for safety. My next nightmare vision was a quiet street of the
dead. I came upon it abruptly, as a wanderer in the country would come upon
a flowing stream. Only this stream I gazed upon did not flow. It was congealed
in death. From pavement to pavement, and covering the sidewalks, it lay t here,
spread out quite evenly, with only h ere and t here a lump or mound of bodies
to break the surface. . . . Up the street and down I looked. T here was no move-
ment, no sound. The quiet buildings looked down upon the scene from their
many windows. And once, and once only, I saw an arm that moved in that dead
stream. I swear I saw it move, with a strange writhing gesture of agony, and with
it lifted a head, gory with nameless horror, that gibbered at me and then lay
down and moved no more. (219)
11. W. H. Hudson, “Dead Man’s Plack,” in “Dead Man’s Plack,” “An Old Thorn,” & “Miscel-
lanea” (1923; repr., New York, 1968), 1–99 (hereafter “DMP”). Further page refer-
ences w ill be in parentheses in the text.
12. Richard Aldington, “The Prose of W. H. Hudson,” The Egoist (May 15, 1914): 186.
13. Ford Madox Ford, Portraits from Life (Chicago, 1937), 93–94.
14. D. H. Lawrence, “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” in The Complete Short Stories, 3 vols.
(New York, 1961), 2:283–302 (hereafter “OC”). Further page references w ill be in pa-
rentheses in the text.
15. Joseph Conrad, “The Duel,” in A Set of Six (Garden City, NY, 1926), 165–266 (here-
after “D”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
16. A recent publication, Conrad’s “The Duel”: Sources / Text, ed. J. H. Stape and John G.
Peters (Leiden, 2015), publishes no less than fifteen (largely repetitive) possible sources
in French and English for the basic narrative, but all are bare bones in comparison with
“The Duel.” In part icu lar, in none does D’Hubert’s final ruse involve lying on his back
on the ground, and in none does D’Hubert intervene with Fouché to save his antago-
nist from execution.
17. Ford Madox Ford, The Last Post, in Parade’s End (New York, 1979) (hereafter LP).
18. H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; repr., London, 1994) (hereafter S). Fur-
19. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder (1909; repr., London, 2005) (hereafter
TB). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. See in part icu lar
bk. 2, chap. 3, “How We Made Tono-Bungay Hum,” 147–161. See also the discussion of
Tono-Bungay in Simon L. James, “The Uses of Literacy: Reading and Realism in Wells’s
Novels,” in Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (Oxford,
2012), pp. 73–124. Apropos of disfigured faces, late in the novel the narrator crashes
his balloon-based flying machine with the following consequences:
I wiped something that trickled from my face and was shocked to see my hand
covered with blood. I looked at myself and saw what seemed to me an aston-
ishing quantity of blood r unning down my arm and shoulder. I perceived my
mouth was full of blood. It’s a queer moment when one realizes one is hurt and
perhaps badly hurt, and has still to discover just how far one is hurt. I explored
my face carefully and found unfamiliar contours on the left side. The broken
end of a branch had driven right through my cheek, damaging my cheek and
teeth and gums, and left a splinter of itself stuck like an explorer’s farthest-point
flag in the upper maxillary. That and a sprained wrist were all my damage. But I
bled as though I had been chopped to pieces, and it seemed to me that my face
had been driven in. I can’t describe just the horrible disgust I felt at that. (293)
The glaring narrative gratuitousness of the passage only points up its thematic
overdetermination.
dinary Brain (since 1866) (New York, 1934), 531–532.
21. Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in Complete Stories 1898–1910, ed. Denis
Donoghue (New York, 1996), 496–541 (hereafter “BJ”). Further page references w ill
22. Cf. Stephen Melville, “The Difference Manet Makes,” in Refracting Vision: Essays on
Michael Fried, ed. Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts, and Toni Ross (Sydney, 1999), where
in the course of a discussion of issues of facing in my writing and Stanley Cavell’s he
suggests that “May’s face always shows and yet remains unseen by Marcher u ntil, too
late, he sees it as her tomb, falling—in two balanced phrases I take to mime her eyes
and so to place the reader before the gaze or regard of the text—‘on his face, on the
tomb’ ” (121).
5. “A Blankness to Run At and Dash Your Head Against”
1. The sheer difficulty Conrad encountered during the years of composition of Nostromo
(1903–1904) is stressed by his biographers. See, e.g., Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad:
A Critical Biography (Harmondsworth, UK, 1971), 345–379; Joseph R. Karl, Joseph
Conrad: The Three Lives (New York, 1979), 529–568; and Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph
Conrad: A Life (Rochester, NY, 2007), 326–346.
2. Joseph Conrad, author’s note to The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, ed. Bruce Harkness
and S. W. Reid (Cambridge, 1990), 3 (hereafter SA). Further page references to the au-
thor’s note and the novel itself w ill be in parentheses in the text. The first sentence of
the author’s note reads in its entirety: “The origin of the Secret Agent, subject, treat-
ment, artistic purpose, and e very other motive that may induce an author to take up
his pen can, I believe, be traced to a period of m ental and emotional reaction” (SA, 3).
3. What Conrad says is “the w hole treatment of the tale, its inspiring indignation and
underlying pity and contempt prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness
which lie simply in the outward circumstances of the setting” (author’s note, SA, 4).
I had to fight hard to keep at arm’s-length [i.e., at writing distance?] the mem-
ories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days, lest
they should rush in and overwhelm each page of the story as these emerged
one after another from a mood as sincere in feeling and thought as any in which
I ever wrote a line. In that respect I really think that the Secret Agent is a per-
fectly genuine piece of work. Even the purely artistic purpose, that of applying
the ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation
and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all
I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity. It is one of the minor satis-
factions of my writing life that having taken that resolve I did manage, it
seems to me, to carry it through right to the end. (SA, 7)
4. Not that The Secret Agent came simply or easily by any means. For Conrad’s labors on
the manuscript, see the detailed discussion in “The Texts: An Essay,” in SA, 235–327,
and Andrew Glazzard, “A Simple Tale? The Writing and Rewriting of The Secret
Agent,” in Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad, ed. Agata Szczeszak-Brewer (Co-
lumbia, SC, 2015), 149–161. Jacques Berthoud has interesting t hings to say about Con-
rad’s “ironic” method in The Secret Agent in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph
Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape (Cambridge, 1996), 100–121.
5. My reference, of course, is to the famous statement in the preface to The Nigger of
the “Narcissus”: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written
word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see!” (Joseph
Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” ed. Robert Kimbrough [New York, 1979], 147).
See the discussion of this statement earlier in this book as well as in Michael Fried,
“Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas
Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago, 1987), 119–120.
6. “He could not inform her that a man may be haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaven face
till the wildest expedient to get rid of it appears a child of wisdom” (SA, 180).
7. It is worth noting, too, that a materialist metaphorics of stamping, impressing from out-
side, runs throughout the novel (see note 14 below).
8. What we are told is:
T hose p eople were as denationalised as the dishes set before them with every
circumstance of unstamped respectability. Neither was their personality
stamped in any way, professionally, socially or racially. They seemed created
for the Italian restaurant, unless the Italian restaurant had been perchance cre-
ated for them. But that last hypothesis was unthinkable, since one could not
place them anywhere outside t hose special establishments. One never met t hese
enigmatical persons elsewhere. It was impossible to form a precise idea what
occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night. And he
himself had become unplaced. It would have been impossible for anybody to
guess his occupation. As to going to bed, t here was a doubt even in his own
mind. (SA, 115)
It is as if the Assistant Commissioner’s meal in the restaurant had “denationalised”
him as well.
9. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Cedric Watts and Robert Hampson (London, 1989), 177.
10. F. R. Leavis, The G reat Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New
York, 1967), 214.
11. In chapter 2, Vladimir turns his back on Verloc while facing a mirror (SA, 24); in
chapter 6, the Assistant Commissioner even more pointedly subjects Chief Inspector
Heat to the same treatment (SA, 89–90); in chapter 9, Verloc, having returned home
a fter the Greenwich debacle, stands over the fireplace grate with his back toward
Winnie and his teeth chattering violently (SA, 145).
12. That Winnie’s actions are perceived by Verloc indirectly by means of the shadow they
cast on the ceiling and wall is itself an impressionist trope. See, e.g., the brief discus-
sion of “shadow pictures” in Almayer’s Folly and Crane’s early article “Tent Life at
Ocean Grove” in Chapter 1, note 7, as well as the reference to Feraud’s shadow falling
on D’Hubert’s outstretched legs in Conrad’s story “The Duel” in Chapter 4.
13. The “denationalised” customers in the Italian restaurant are a case in point, as is the
Assistant Commissioner’s recollection, during his conversation with Chief Inspector
Heat in chapter 6, of “a certain old fat and wealthy native chief in the distant colony
[in which he had served before his marriage]” who seemed to him to resemble Heat
(SA, 93). “He was physically a big man, too,” the text continues,
and (allowing for the difference of colour, of course) Chief Inspector Heat’s ap-
pearance recalled him to the memory of his superior. It was not the eyes nor
yet the lips exactly. It was bizarre. But does not Alfred Wallace relate in his fa-
mous book on the Malay Archipelago how, amongst the Aru Islanders, he dis-
covered in an old and naked savage with a sooty skin a peculiar resemblance
to a dear friend at home? (SA, 93)
14. Chapters 12 and 13 have unmistakably the character of an addition to the rest—in ef-
fect, the novel comes to the end with Verloc’s murder and the image of his hat on the
floor. The focus of what remains is Winnie’s terror of the gallows, emblematized by
the repeated phrase, “The drop given was fourteen feet,” as if the words “had been
scratched on her brain by a hot needle” (SA, 201). Eventually, of course, she commits
suicide by leaping from a cross-Channel boat after having been abandoned by Ossipon
(at least that is the strong implication of her disappearance); the drop into the w ater
might well have been fourteen feet, whereas the drop in a hanging would have been
considerably less. In any case, the imaginative intensity of Conrad’s prose in t hese
chapters—a lso the almost harassing pressure exerted by that prose on the committed
reader—falls off sharply from what has gone before.
15. Conrad to John Galsworthy, September 12, 1906, in The Collected Letters of Joseph
Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl, Laurence Davies, Owen Knowles, et al., 9 vols. (Cam-
bridge, 1983–2007), 3:354 (hereafter CL). In the letter, “a tale” is italicized.
16. Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska, March 29 or April 5, 1894, in CL, 1:150–151. The
original letter is in French. Quoted and discussed in Chapter 1.
17. Conrad to Edward Garnett, September 16, 1899, in CL, 2:198.
18. Cited by Leavis, The G reat Tradition, 193. Leavis goes on to state: “In fact, though
Decoud is so decisively dealt with in the action, he remains at the centre of the book,
in the sense that his consciousness seems to permeate it, even to dominate it. That con-
sciousness is clearly very closely related to the author’s own personal timbre” (199–
200). And:
In fact, Decoud may be said to have had a considerable part in the writing of
Nostromo; or one might say that Nostromo was written by a Decoud who w asn’t
a complacent dilettante, but was positively drawn towards those capable of
“investing their activities with spiritual value”—Monygham, Giorgio Viola,
Señor Avellanos, Charles Gould. (200)
19. The Professor’s unhappiness in crowds is developed early on in chapter 4, following

his conversation in the anarchist tavern with Ossipon. A key paragraph reads:
Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated confidently on his
power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping lightly the
india-r ubber ball [a manual detonator], the supreme guarantee of his sinister
freedom; but a fter a while he became disagreeably affected by the sight of the
roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and
women. He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an im
mense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the ho-
rizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind
mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like
ants, thoughtless like a natur al force, pushing on blind and orderly and ab-
sorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too perhaps. (SA, 67)
The last possibility turns out to be the Professor’s gravest doubt, which is then char-
acterized in the following terms: “A despicable emotional state this, against which
solitude fortifies a superior character; and with severe exultation the Professor
thought of the refuge of his room, with its padlocked cupboard, lost in a wilderness of
poor houses, the hermitage of the perfect anarchist” (SA, 67).
Michaelis, too, works happily in solitude (SA, 94). Of his ideas, formed in prison,
we are told,
His ideas were not in the nature of convictions. They were inaccessible to rea-
soning. They formed in all their contradictions and obscurities an invincible
and humanitarian creed, which he confessed rather than preached, with an ob-
stinate gentleness, a smile of pacific assurance on his lips, and his candid blue
eyes cast down because the sight of faces troubled his inspiration developed in
solitude. (SA, 85)
A suggestion: crowds disturb the Professsor—they seem to him “impervious” to sen-
timent, logic, and perhaps even terror—because they defeat or circumvent the older
laws of mechanistic, so to speak, individualistic causality; rather, they demand to be
treated statistically, by newly discovered laws of thermodynamics. The universe of The
Secret Agent is uneasy with this. In other words, that universe belongs to an earlier,
simpler moment in the history of physics, and, somewhat incredibly, the novel seems
to know this. This places me in partial disagreement with several critics who have
argued in favor of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thermodynamics
as determining for the novel’s overall thematics. See, e.g., Jill Clark, “A Tale Told by
Stevie: From Thermodynamics to Informational Energy in The Secret Agent,” Con-
radiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 36 (Spring–Summer 2004): 1–31; Alex
Houen, “The Secret Agent: Anarchism and the Thermodynamics of Law,” ELH 65
(Winter 1998): 99–106; Allen MacDuffie, “Joseph Conrad’s Geographies of Energy,”
ELH 76 (Spring 2009): 75–98; and Michael Whitworth, “Inspector Heat Inspected:
The Secret Agent and the Meanings of Entropy,” Review of English Studies 49 (Feb-
ruary 1998): 40–59.
20. Edward Said, “Conrad: The Present at ion of Narrative” (1974), reprinted in Critical
Essays on Joseph Conrad, ed. Ted Billy (Boston, 1987), 45 (hereafter “PN”). Further
page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
21. A related phrase that turns up more than once is “clean breast.” For example: “[Win-
nie’s mother’s] object attained in astute secrecy, the heroic old woman had made a clean
breast of it to Mrs Verloc” (SA, 118). And: “At that moment [Mr Verloc] was within a
hair’s breadth of making a clean breast of it all to his wife” (SA, 137). And, said by the
Assistant Commissioner to Sir Ethelred: “You know no doubt that most criminals at
some time or other feel an irresistible need of confessing—of making a clean breast
of it to somebody—to anybody” (SA, 165).
22. In fact, of the Assistant Commissioner, we are told: “chained to a desk in the thick of
four millions of men, he considered himself the victim of an ironic fate” (SA, 89).
23. One might compare this watchful bronze statuette with a comparable image in
Nostromo. As Decoud in the Golfo Placido undergoes his eventually mortal trial by
solitude, he visualizes his beloved, “Antonia, gigantic and lovely like an allegorical
statue, looking on with scornful eyes at his weakness” (Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A
Tale of the Seaboard, ed. Véronique Pauly [1904; repr., London, 2007], 393 [hereafter
N]). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. Here as elsewhere in
The Secret Agent, one senses the “influence” of comparable passages in Nostromo.
24. Thus, in A Personal Record Conrad remarks of his l abors on Almayer’s Folly:
T here was no vision of a printed book before me as I sat writing at that t able,
situated in a decayed part of Belgravia. A fter all t hese years, each leaving its
evidence of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin
to piety which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious
care the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived. (Joseph
Conrad, “The Mirror of the Sea” and “A Personal Record” [Oxford, 1988], 9–10)
That no image of a printed book, as opposed to a blank page, was before Conrad’s
mind’s eye as he sat and wrote, I can readily believe. See also the statement further
on in the book that “from the moment I had done blackening over the first manuscript
page of Almayer’s Folly . . . the die was cast. Never had Rubicon been more blindly
forded, without invocation to the gods, without fear of men” (68–69). What Conrad’s
called his “writing life” (69) was u nder way.
25. The paragraph reads:
In front of the g reat door way a dismal row of newspaper sellers standing clear
of the pavement dealt out their wares from the gutter. It was a raw, gloomy
day of the early spring; and the grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of
the dirty men, harmonized excellently with the eruption of the damp, rub-
bishy sheets of paper soiled with printers’ ink. The posters, maculated with
filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of the curbstone. The trade in after
noon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with the swift, constant march of
foot traffic, the effect was of indifference, of a disregarded distribution. Os-
sipon looked hurriedly both ways before stepping out into the crosscurrents,
but the Professor was already out of sight. (SA, 65)
In a materialist universe, t here is scant distinction to be made between sky, mud, men’s
rags, rubbishy newspapers, soiled posters, and the “indifferent” or “disregarded” dis-
tribution of the newspapers to the (undescribed) passing throng.
The paragraph just cited is quoted by Peter Lancelot Mallios in his essay “Reading
The Secret Agent Now,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First C entury: Contemporary
pproaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White
A
(New York, Routledge, 2005), 170. Mallios usefully calls attention to the mention of
newspapers elsewhere in the novel, and indeed notes “the heavy materiality attaching
to the newspaper page alone [in the paragraph in question]” (170). But I think he makes
a misstep when he summons up “the world of Jean Baudrillard, a vitally untapped re-
source in Conrad studies, whose idea of ‘simulation’ . . . is the ultimate sign of The
Secret Agent’s contemporaneity” (170). Another recent commentator who emphasizes
the importance of newspapers and popular publications in The Secret Agent is Adam
Parkes in “ ‘Shocks and Surprises’: Conrad, Terrorism, and Languages of Sensation,”
chap. 4 in A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish
Writing (New York, 2011), 99–145.
26. My thanks to John Womack Jr. for noting that the related Greek letter deltos means “a
writing-tablet, so called from the letter [delta], the old shape of tablets” (Henry George
Liddell, Robert Scott, and James Morris, A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott’s
Greek-English Lexicon [New York, 1891], 154). For what it is worth, the young Conrad
(then still Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) studied Greek.
27. See Conrad, SA, 421n98.30.
28. The role of w ill in a specific project of writing figures importantly in my discussion of
Gustave Flaubert’s extraordinary novel Salammbô in Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On Ma-
dame Bovary and Salammbô (New Haven, CT, 2012), 106–151. For Conrad’s famil-
iarity with and admiration for Flaubert, Salammbô in part icu lar, see Yves Hervouet’s
invaluable study The French Face of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge, 1990). T here is more
to say on this topic.
29. I am oversimplifying drastically. Conrad’s account of the process by which the essen-
tials of the narrative became clear to him (SA, 4–7) is characteristically complex, fasci-
nating, and suggestive, involving (as w ill emerge) a brief remark by a friend (Ford
Madox Ford) and a short publication on the Greenwich Outrage that cited Home Sec-
retary Sir William Harcourt’s complaint to a lesser official, “All that’s very well. But
your idea of secrecy over t here seems to consist of keeping the Home Secretary in the
dark” (SA, 6). Conrad remarks:
Characteristic enough of Sir W. Harcourt’s temper but not much in itself. T here
must have been however some sort of atmosphere in the w hole incident b ecause
all of a sudden I felt myself stimulated. And then ensued in my mind what a
student of chemistry would best understand from the analogy of the addition
of the tiniest l ittle drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of crystal-
lization in a test tube containing some colourless solution. (SA, 6)
My suggestion, of course, is that the notion of darkness in Harcourt’s remark called
forth the counter-notion of blankness or whiteness in Conrad’s imagination, and
in fact, the next paragraph contrasts the image of the ocean as a “reflector of the
world’s light” and that of an “enormous” or “monstrous” town (plainly London) as
a “cruel devourer of the world’s light” (SA, 6). In any case, Conrad found himself
embarked.
30. My thanks for this thought to Yi-Ping Ong.
31. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (New York, 1969), 608,
s.v. “heat.”
32. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 2 vols. (New York, 1997),
2:61–62, s.v. “heat.”
33. Note, too, the image of the “butterfly-shaped gas flames,” which I see as related to Ver-
loc’s ∆ and indeed to the (upright or inverted) “pyramidal” structure of key letters in
the names “Verloc,” “Winnie,” “Vladimir,” and o thers.
34. Another word repeated often in The Secret Agent is “husky,” as applied to Verloc’s voice.
One connotation of the word in the presence of Winnie is as a signifier of sexual de-
sire. But it might also be understood as characteristic of a mere “husk” of a person, a
covering with nothing inside, and in fact (as has already been noted), Conrad in the
author’s note to The Secret Agent writes that having completed Nostromo and The Mirror
of the Sea, he came to feel “(the task once done) as if I w
ere left b ehind, aimless amongst
mere husks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior, values” (SA, 4).
35. Joseph Conrad, “Because of the Dollars,” in Within the Tides (London, 1978),
149–183.
36. The final instance reads:
[Mrs Verloc] remained thus mysteriously still and suddenly collected till Mr
Verloc was heard with an accent of marital authority, and moving slightly to
make room for her to sit on the edge of the sofa.
“Come here,” he said in a peculiar tone, which might have been the tone of
brutality, but was intimately known to Mrs Verloc as the note of wooing. (SA,
196–197)
37. The sentence reads: “The exigencies of Mrs Verloc’s temperament, which, when
stripped of its philosophical reserve, was maternal and violent, forced her to roll a se-
ries of thoughts in her motionless head” (SA, 182–183).
38. Conrad adds:
These w ere absolutely the only words that passed between us; for extreme sur-
prise at this unexpected piece of information kept me dumb for a moment and
he began at once to talk of something else. It never occurred to me later to ask
how he arrived at his knowledge for I am sure that if he had seen once in his
life the back of an anarchist that must have been the w hole extent of his con-
nection with the underworld. (SA, 5)
“The back of an anarchist,” like “mere husks of sensation,” is another of t hose Conra-
dian phrases that are less innocuous than they at first appear.
39. Martin Seymour-Smith, introduction to Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A S imple
Tale (London, 1984), 15.
40. Another way of thinking about what I have been calling “contagion” is as a process of
autosuggestion by virtue of which the text appears to draw further consequences from
a previous word, image, or statement, without it being clear to the reader what exactly
he or she is intended to make of the phenomenon, to the extent that the phenomenon
is recognized. So, for example, several pages into chapter 11, Verloc says to Winnie,
“What was the good of telling you that I stood the risk of having a knife stuck into me
at any time t hese seven years we’ve been married?” (SA, 180). In light of what is shortly
to follow, this may seem simply “ironic.” But is that right? Specifically, would it be un-
reasonable to think of t hose words as putting the idea of d oing exactly that, as it w
ere,
materially, into Winnie’s m ental apparatus? In which case, the sense of “irony” would
be displaced or at least shadowed by one of materialist necessity, in keeping with the

ontology of what I have been calling the novel’s universe. (All this has something in
common, of course, with Charles Palermo’s reading of similarly autosuggestive mo-
ments in The Good Soldier. Another novel by Ford that also evinces comparable effects
of “contagion” is the underrated No Enemy.)
6. Maps, Charts, and Mist
1. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds: H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, ed. David Y.
Hughes and Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington, IN, 1993) (hereafter WW). Further
2. David C. Smith in H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven, CT,
1986) remarks:
The War of the Worlds is a tour de force, and one of its joys for the modern ana-
lyst is that with early versions of the Ordnance Survey maps it is still possible
to follow exactly where the Martians went, even which houses they destroyed.
Wells wrote the book while living in Woking, and the area behind his house
on Horsell Common is the scene of the first confrontation. (68)
3. See Michael Twyman, Printing 1770–1970: An Illustrated Survey of Its Development
and Uses in England (London, 1998), 31–32.
4. See the opinions cited in WW, 211n2.
dinary Brain (since 1866) (New York, 1934), 529 (hereafter EA). Further page refer-
6. See the reference to Beresford’s views in WW, 205n1.
7. There is another sustained evocation of something very like a map in When the Sleeper
Wakes in the chapter called “The Aeropile,” in which Graham is introduced to flying
and enjoys a privileged view not just of London but of the largely uninhabited sur-
rounding countryside—t he Downs escarpment and the line of Hindhead, Pitch Hill,
and Leith Hill are explicitly mentioned (H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes, ed. John
Lawton [1899; repr., London, 1994], 145–146 [hereafter S]). Graham insists that Asano,
his companion, teach him how to operate the machine. “But this is living!” Graham
cries, and then:
And now the machine began to dance the strangest figures in the air. Now it
would sweep round a spiral of scarcely a hundred yards diameter, now it would
rush up into the air and swoop down again, steeply, swiftly, falling like a hawk,
to recover in a rushing loop that swept it high again. In one of t hese descents it
seemed driving straight at the drifting park of balloons in the south-east, and
only curved about and cleared them by a sudden recovery of dexterity. The
extraordinary swiftness and smoothness of the motion, the extraordinary ef-
fect of the rarified air upon his constitution, threw Graham into a careless
fury. (S, 149)
I understand this passage as giving voice to a certain (conscious and deliberate? or
all but conscious and deliberate?) fantasy of a “liberated” writing, freed from the
horizontal plane of inscription. And what is especially interesting is that the fantasy
comes to a bad end:
But at last a queer incident came to sober him, to send him flying down once
more to the crowded life below with all its dark insoluble riddles. As he
swooped, came a tap and something flying past, and a drop like a drop of rain.
Then as he went down he saw something like a white rag whirling down in his
wake. “What was that?” he asked. “I did not see.”
The aeronaut glanced, and then clutched at the level to recover, for they were
sweeping down. When the aeropile was rising again he drew a deep breath and
replied. “That,” and he indicated the white t hing still fluttering down, “was a
swan.”
“I never saw it,” said Graham.
The aeronaut made no answer, and Graham saw l ittle drops upon his fore-
head. (S, 149)
8. Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (1903; repr.,
London, 2011) (hereafter RS). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the
text. See also Andrew Boyle, The Riddle of Erskine Childers (London, 1977).
9. Erskine C. Childers [great-g randson of Erskine Childers], introduction to Childers,
The Riddle of the Sands, p. xi.
10. Joseph Conrad, “The Tale,” in Tales of Hearsay (London, 1925), 155–205 (hereafter
“T”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
11. Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Edward Said (1901; repr., Harmondsworth, UK, 1987)
(hereafter K). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
12. Another example: in When the Sleeper Wakes, in the chapter called “The Under Side,”
Graham comes to the warren of the jewelers, including men and w omen working on
cloisonné tiles.
Many of t hese workers had lips and nostrils a livid white, due to a disease caused
by a peculiar purple enamel that chanced to be much in fashion. Asano [Gra-
ham’s companion] apologised to Graham for the offense of their faces, but ex-
cused himself on the score of the conven ience of this route. “This is what I
wanted to see,” said Graham, “this is what I wanted to see,” trying to avoid a
start at a particularly striking disfigurement that suddenly stared him in the
face. (S, 190)
13. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California, in Novels and Essays, ed. Donald
Pizer (1901; repr., New York, 1986), 578 (hereafter O). Further page references w ill be
in parentheses in the text.
14. Stephen Crane, “Death and the Child,” in Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson (New
York, 1984), 943–963 (hereafter “DC”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses
in the text. For a fuller discussion see Fried, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” in
Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago,
1987), 108–119.
15. The previous short paragraph, also referring to the child, can almost be taken as an
image of Crane at work:
He was solitary; engrossed in his own pursuits, it was seldom that he lifted his
head to inquire of the world why it made so much noise. The stick in his hand
was much larger to him than was an army corps of the distance. It was too
childish for the mind of the child. He was dealing with sticks. (“DC,” 950)
16. Ford Madox Ford, “Stephen Crane,” in Portraits from Life (New York, 1937), 41.
17. W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions (1904; repr., Mineola, NY, 1989) (hereafter GM). Fur-
18. Another “living” map, this one of the San Joaquin Valley, is viewed by the poet Pre-
sley early on in Norris’s The Octopus, in a long passage beginning, “As from a pinnacle,
Presley, from where he now stood, dominated the entire country” (O, 612–614).
Finally, the role of panoramic views and maps of contested towns and countryside
during the First World War in Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy (written 1919, first pub-
lished in 1929) and No More Parades (1925) is briefly but fascinatingly discussed by Mi-
chael Charlesworth, “Panorama, the Map, and the Divided Self: No E nemy, No More
Parades, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: The
First World War, Culture, and Modernity, ed. Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes (Am-
sterdam, 2014), 95–106.
7. The Writing of Revolution
1. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, ed. Roger Osborne and Paul Eggert, introduc-
tion by Keith Carabine (Cambridge, 2013) (hereafter UWE). For a discussion of man-
uscripts and, more broadly, Conrad’s campaign on the novel, see “The Texts: An
Essay,” 295–368. Further references w ill be in parentheses in the text. See also the de-
tailed discussion of the composition of Under Western Eyes in Keith Carabine, The
Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes” (Amsterdam, 1996).
2. Snow on the ground is compared to a page on which writing of various sorts takes
place in R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s sketch “Snow in Monteith,” in Prog ress
(London, 1905), 244–250. So, for example, we read:
And as the hills and woods had all become unrecognisable, the mantle of pure
white spread on the earth formed a blank page on which nothing could stir
without a record of its passage being writ at least as permanently as was the
passage of its life.
Badgers, who had adventured out for food, left their strange, bear-like tracks
in woods where no one suspected that they lived. Roe, plunging through the
crisp white snow, made a round hole marked at the bottom with their cloven
feet, and leaving at the edge a faint red trace of blood.
The birds, in their degree, imprinted traces clear and distinct as t hose their
ancestors have left in rocks from the time when the world was all a snowfield
or all tropics, or all something different from what it is, as wise geologists, quar-
reling with each other as [if] they w ere theologians, write in ponderous tomes.
Even the field-m ice, pattering along, left tiny trails like l ittle railways as they
journeyed from their warm nests to visit one another and interchange opinions
on the strange new scene. (247–248)
Of all the writers discussed in this book, Cunninghame Graham is by all odds t oday
the most obscure, but he was much admired during the first decades of the century,
not least by other writers such as Conrad, Ford, Shaw, Chesterton, and Galsworthy
(also Edward Garnett, Conrad’s “discoverer”). In Chapter 4, on upturned f aces, I cited
and discussed his deliberately paced “The Orchid-Hunter,” and mentioned also,
without analyzing them, a number of his sketches and tales involving meticulously nar-
rated journeys, which, I suggested, are registered by the reader as in effect coinciding
with or (as I also put it) advancing in parallel with the narration as such. Alongside
“Snow in Monteith,” one might also read “Mist in Monteith,” another text with im-
pressionist features (R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Rodeo: A Collection of the Tales and
Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. A. F. Tschiffely [New York, 1936],
384–389).
3. Another sort of “layering” in the slightly l ater novel Chance, narrated in Marlow’s voice
but also quoting other characters, is famously characterized by Henry James in terms
that he calls “Marlow’s prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched
ground of the case exposed” (“The New Novel,” in Notes on Novelists [New York, 1914],
348). James continues:
We make out this ground but through the shadow cast by the flight, clarify it
though the real author visibly reminds himself again and again that he must—all
the more that, as if by some tremendous forecast of f uture applied science, the
upper aeroplane causes another, as we have said, to depend from it and that
one still another; t hese dropping shadow a fter shadow, to the no small menace
of intrinsic colour and form and whatever, upon the passive expanse. (348)
4. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, ed. Véronique Pauly (1904; repr.,
London, 2007), 403.
5. At a few other points in the novel t here are smaller clusters of “con-” words. See, no-
tably, Razumov’s remarks to Peter Ivanovitch at the Château Borel, where we encounter
the words “condescending,” “compelled,” “confessed,” “complete,” and “consent” in
a single short paragraph (UWE, 177). And two paragraphs later the teacher writes: “He
thought to himself (it stands confessed in his hand writing): ‘I w on’t move from h ere
till he either speaks or turns away. This is a duel’ ” (UWE, 178). Shortly before, Ra-
zumov, about to enter the Château Borel, sees an idle working man lounging on a bench
and says of the man (presumably to himself): “Elector. Eligible. Enlightened. . . . A
brute all the same” (UWE, 159). Not “con-” words but not wholly unlike the relations
among such. Another “key,” or at least a clue?
6. Frank Kermode, “Secrets and Narrative Sequence,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Autumn
1980): 83–101. Kermode at one point cites with approval a short essay by Avrom
Fleishman, “Speech and Writing in Under Western Eyes,” in Conrad: A Commemo-
ration, ed. Norman Sherry (London, 1976), 119–128.
7. Boris Ford, introduction to Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (Harmondsworth, UK,
1985), 33.
8. In another early science fiction novel by Wells that has not yet been mentioned, The
First Men on the Moon (1901; repr., Oxford, 1995), the principal moon creatures, the
so-called Selenites, are described as almost all superdeveloped brain, a condition that
“has rendered unnecessary the invention of all t hose mechanical aids to brain work
which have distinguished the c areer of man. T here are no books, no records of any
sort, no libraries or inscriptions” (192)—in short, no writing. Not surprisingly, though,
in the light of the other texts we have considered, the brain of the Grand Lunar (the
ruling Selenite) is described as looking
very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with convolutions writhing vis-
ibly within. Then beneath its enormity and just above the edge of the throne
one saw with a start minute elfin eyes peering out of the glow. No face, just eyes,
as if they peered through holes. . . . T he eyes stared down at me with a strange
intensity, and the lower part of the swollen globe was wrinkled. Ineffectual-
looking l ittle hand-tentacles steadied this shape on the throne. . . . (202; latter
ellipsis in original)
Exactly what Wells is up to h ere is hard to specify. At the very least, he is imagining a
form of life that differs radically from the human norm with respect to what we have
been calling the scene of writing, while nevertheless evoking basic elements of that
scene in what might be called privative terms—except, of course, for the irrepressible
“writhing.”
9. I describe a similar gesture, of a kind of severing, in the last sentence of Gustave Flau-
bert’s Salammbô, a novel Conrad (like Ford) knew extremely well and greatly admired.
See Michael Fried, Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On Madame Bovary and Salammbô (New
Haven, CT, 2012), 148–149, in which I argue that Salammbô represents an attempt by
Flaubert to produce a novel that would be entirely u nder the sign of authorial w ill, or
volonté (as opposed to automaticity and habit). For Conrad’s “intense feeling” for
Salammbô, see Yves Hervouet, The French Face of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge, 1990),
11 passim, where Conrad is quoted as writing (in 1911) that only Flaubert’s Salammbô
was “pure aesthetics.” See also Hervouet’s extended discussion of Conrad’s (also
Ford’s) involvement with Flaubert, 165–210. Cf. Ford’s statement in The March of Lit
erature: “T here was writing before Flaubert; but Flaubert and his coterie opened, as
it w
ere, a window through which one saw the literary scene from an entirely new a ngle.
Perhaps more than anything e lse it was a m atter of giving visibility to your pages” (cited
by Hervouet, 192).
10. Joseph Conrad, “Prince Roman,” in Tales of Hearsay (London, 1925), 91–153.
11. Joseph Conrad, “Autocracy and War,” The North American Review 181, no. 584
(July 1905): 45–46. Conrad’s views on Russia are closely entwined with his lifelong
sense of Polishness and his painful personal history (his f ather was a Polish revolu-
tionary exiled for his views, and both his parents died early from tuberculosis, no
doubt aggravated by their conditions of life), a topic dealt with in greatest detail by Fred-
erick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New York, 1979) and with consider-
able brilliance by Geoffrey Galt Harpham, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad
(Chicago, 1997).
8. Versions of Regression
1. Rudyard Kipling, “A Matter of Fact,” in Many Inventions (New York, 1893), 181–201
(hereafter “MF”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
2. Jack London, Martin Eden (1909; repr., Harmondsworth, UK, 1985), 174–175 (here-
after ME). Further page references w
ill be in parentheses in the text.
3. See Michael Twyman, Printing 1770–1970 (London, 1998), 50.

4. In a seemingly opposed but in fact complementary register, the next chapter (16) nar-
rates Martin’s heroic but abhorrent labors in a laundry, which involve starching and
pressing hundreds of white shirts—a battle not with pulp but still understandable in
terms of something like the manufacture of paper, which is to say, of a kind of regres-
sion from writing and a fortiori from publication.
5. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, “Prog ress,” in Prog ress (London, 1905), 1–61 (hereafter
“P”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
6. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Robert M. Philmus (Athens, GA, 1993)
(hereafter IDM). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. The basic
text is of the first American edition.
7. It hardly needs stating that Prendick’s horrified, disgusted description of the “black-
faced creature” and the other Beast Folk trades on contemporaneous racialist dis-
course to achieve some portion of its effect. What is less obvious is Wells’s attitude
towards that discourse: as Philmus remarks, the first draft of the novel contains more
blatantly racialist passages than the final version, and even in that draft “there are signs
of Wells’s growing consciousness of the prejudices to which his class background has
rendered him particularly liable” (IDM, xxii). Philmus also finds in both versions the
suggestion of a satire or at least a commentary on the colonial enterprise (IDM, xxii). See
also Timothy Christensen, “The ‘Bestial Mark’ of Race in The Island of Doctor Moreau,”
Criticism 46, no. 4 (2004): 575–595, and Rambler, “Race and Ecocriticism in The Island
of Dr. Moreau,” Literary Ramblings, December 4, 2014, http://w ww.literaryramblings
.com/1000-books-in-10-years-vol-399-t he-island-of-dr-moreau-by-h-g-wells.
8. Rudyard Kipling, “The Mark of the Beast” (1890), in Collected Stories, ed. Robert Got-
tlieb (New York, 1994), 293–307. T oward the climax of the story the leper (called “the
Silver Man”) is tortured with heated gun barrels to force him to remove a curse from
an Englishman. A brief excerpt:
I understood then how men and women and l ittle children can endure to see a
witch burnt alive; for the beast was moaning on the floor, and although the
Silver Man had no face, you could see horrible feelings passing through the
slab that took its place, exactly as waves of heat play across red-hot iron—
gun-barrels for instance.
Strickland [a friend of the narrator] shaded his eyes with his hands for a mo-
ment and we got to work. This part is not to be printed. (304)
Two other passages in Kipling are worth citing in this connection. In the first, from
the early novel The Light that Failed (1891), the artist-journalist Dick Heldar in a skir-
mish in the desert is said to have “fired his revolver into a black, foam-flecked face which
forthwith ceased to bear any resemblance to a face,” and of another dead Arab we are
told that “his upturned face lacked one eye” (The Light that Failed [Harmondsworth,
UK, 1970], 27–28). (The eye had been gouged out by Heldar’s friend Torpenhow.) The
second is the scene in Captains Courageous (1896) in which the youths Dan and Harvey
retrieve from the sea
the body of the dead Frenchman buried two days before! The hook had caught
him under the right armpit, and he swayed, erect and horrible, head and shoul-
ders above water. His arms were tied to his side, and—he had no face. The
boys fell over each other in a heap at the bottom of the dory, and t here they lay
while the t hing bobbed alongside, held on the shortened line. (Captains Cou-
rageous [New York, 1982], 98)
9. See Basil Kahan, Ottmar Mergenthaler: The Man and His Machine (New C astle, DE,
1999), 40. See also Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New
York, 1966):
The London Times was using a rotary type caster, patented in 1881, which
worked so fast . . . t hat instead of distributing type at the end of the run the
printers simply melted it down and started all over again with fresh type. This
bypass of the h uman analogy [on which the Paige typesetting machine was to
be based] was the basic principle of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine,
which cast its own type from its own matrices in single slugs of a line’s length
which were afterwards thrown back into the melting pot. Mergenthaler was to
sweep the field. (282; emphasis added)
Twain, of course, staked his entire fortune on a rival machine, the Paige typesetter,
which unlike the Mergenthaler Linotype machine was based on the movements of a
human typesetter and largely for that reason continually broke down. The implicit re-
lation of “the h uman analogy” and the “bypass” to the thematics of monstrosity in
Wells’s novel invites further reflection.
10. Interestingly, Wells reports in Experiment in Autobiography that a Miss Healy criti-
cized his poems for lacking feet. See Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries
and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866) (New York, 1934), 250.
T here is also a suggestive detail in the first draft’s version of “Doctor Moreau Ex-
plains.” Before commencing his explanation, Moreau insists that Prendick join him in
smoking a cigar; and a fter reporting Moreau’s account of the discovery of the dead
Kanaka and the rifle barrel curved into an S-shape, Prendick writes: “He became silent.
I sat in silence watching him, with my dead cigar in my fingers” (IDM, 134). Sometimes
a cigar is just a pen.
11. As Philmus remarks (“Introducing Moreau,” xxx, xlviin65), Moreau’s views are very
close to t hose expressed by Wells himself in “Province of Pain,” an article published
in Science and Art (February 1894): 58–59. The article concludes with Wells saying
that
the province of pain is above all a limited and transitory one; a phase through
which life must pass on its evolution from the automatic to the spiritual; and,
so far as we can tell, among all the hosts of space, pain is found only on the
surface of this little planet. (H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Sci-
ence Fiction, ed. R. M. Philmus and D. Y. Hughes [Berkeley, CA, 1975],
198–199)
Note, by the way, the curious connection Wells draws between the province of pain
and the surface of the earth. Earlier in the article, he writes: “The province of pain . . .
in man . . . is merely the surface of his body, with ‘spheres of influence,’ rather than
proper possessions in the interior, and the centre seat of pain is in the mind” (196). The
concept of surface, of course, has a certain bearing on literary impressionism as it has
been presented in this book, and its prominence in Wells’s article suggests that writ-
erly considerations may have been entangled with strictly scientific ones.
12. Another marker of a certain shortfall of theoretical consistency in Wells’s novel is the
characterization of the hypnotic process by which the Beast Folk are made to internalize
the Law as a kind of “grafting” (73), “implant[ing]” (82), and “weaving” (83), rather
than imprinting or stamping, which would seem more consistent with a writerly
metaphorics—t hough on the same page as the last of t hese references, Moreau is said
to have taken animals “and stamped the human form upon them” (83). It is tempting
to think that if the Law r eally w ere woven into the Beast Folk, they would not revert,
which is to say that it is b ecause the Law is only stamped or imprinted upon or into
them that reversion occurs. But neither Moreau nor Wells is in control of any such
argument. On pain in Wells’s novel, see Dylan Ravenfox, “Race, Animality, and the
Language of Pain in The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells,” Postanimal Reviews,
March 29, 2010, http://postanimality.wordpress.com/critical-a nimal-essays/race-a ni
mality-a nd-t he-language-of-pain-in-t he-island-of-dr-moreau.
13. Rudyard Kipling, “Wireless,” in Collected Stories, 553–573 (hereafter “W”). Further
14. Another Kipling story involving something like regression, in this case, to earlier lives,
is “The Finest Story in the World” (1891), in which a young aspiring writer named
Charlie Mears finds himself channeling the experiences of a Viking adventurer and a
Greek galley slave (in Kipling, Collected Stories, 259–289).
15. Frank Norris, “The Joyous Miracle” (New York, 1906), 1–27 (hereafter “JM”). Further
page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. Originally published in The Wave,
October 9, 1897, under the title “Miracle Joyeux,” and republished in McClure’s Mag-
azine in December 1898.
9. How Literary Impressionism Ended
1. Ford Madox Ford, “Coda,” in Return to Yesterday (New York, 1932), 392–417 (here-
after “C”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. See also Ford’s
account of Lewis’s diatribe t oward the end of Ford, Portraits from Life (Chicago, 1937),
289–291.
2. Lewis has been the focus of much serious critical work during the past decades. See,
for example, Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols.
(Berkeley, CA, 1976); Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound
and Wyndham Lewis: T owards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore, 1985); Andrzej
Gaiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell, eds., Wyndham Lewis and the
Cultures of Modernity (Milton Park, UK, 2016); Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression:
Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley, CA, 1979); Hugh Kenner,
Wyndham Lewis (New York, 1954); Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, CA, 1971);
Timothy Matterer, Vortex: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis (Ithaca, NY, 1979); Tyrus Miller,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis (Cambridge, 2016); Vincent
Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (New York, 1983); and
Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (Oxford,
2012).
3. Cited by David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal (New Haven, CT, 1986), 85.
4. Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (Harmondsworth, UK, 2000), 377–
378; emphasis in original.
5. Letter of January 12, 1891, in The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols.
(New York, 1920), 1:176; emphasis in original.
6. Lubbock, The Letters of Henry James, 2:207–209; emphasis in original.
7. Ford Madox Ford, “Techniques” (1935), in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed.
Frank McShane (Lincoln, NE, 1964), 60 (hereafter “T”). Further page references w ill
8. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (Harmondsworth, UK, 1990) (hereafter T ).
9. Stephen Crane, Maggie, in Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson (New York, 1984), 31.
10. H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes (London, 1994), 48–49 (hereafter S). Further page
references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
11. Robert Louis Stevenson in collaboration with Lloyd Osborne, The Ebb-Tide: A Trio
and a Quartette, ed. David Daiches (London, 1994) (hereafter ET). Further page ref-
erences w ill be in parentheses in the text.
12. Rudyard Kipling, “The Dog Hervey,” in A Diversity of Creatures (Harmondsworth,
UK, 1987), 123–142 (hereafter “DH”). Further page references w ill be in parentheses in
the text.
13. In another Kipling story of the same year, “Friendly Brook,” one character, Jim Wick-
enden’s mother, suffers an illness depriving her of speech, so she communicates by
writing words on a small slate. The story also includes a drowned corpse, but nothing
is made of its face other than as a basis for identification. See Rudyard Kipling, “Friendly
Brook,” in A Diversity of Creatures, ed. Paul Driver (Harmondsworth, UK, 1987), 61–72.
14. Joseph Conrad, Victory (New York, 1915) (hereafter V). Further page references w ill
15. In this general connection, it is striking that the arrival of Jones and his companions
in Samburan is described in terms of upturned f aces. Jones himself is seen “doubled
up over the tiller in a queer, uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow.” However: “An-
other man [Martin], more directly below Heyst, sprawled on his back from gunwale
to gunwale, half off the a fter thwart, his head lower than his feet. This second man
glared wildly upward, and struggled to raise himself, but to all appearance was much
too drunk to succeed” (V, 227). And a page or so l ater:
The sprawling man rolled off the thwart, collapsed, and, most unexpectedly,
got on his feet. He swayed dizzily, spreading his arms out, and uttered faintly
a hoarse, dreamy “Hallo!” His upturned face was swollen, red, peeling all over
the nose and cheeks. His stare was irrational. Heyst perceived stains of dried
blood all over the front of his dirty white coat, and also on one sleeve. (V, 228)
16. See Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen
Crane (Chicago, 1987), 142–143n.
17. Rudyard Kipling, “Mary Postgate,” in Collected Stories, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York,
1994), 613–629.
18. Rudyard Kipling, “Mrs. Bathurst,” in Collected Stories, 577–597 (hereafter “MB”). Fur-
ther page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. A serious essay by Barbara Ev-
erett of twenty-five years ago mainly shows how difficult it is to arrive at a consistent
understanding of Kipling’s astonishing story (“Kipling’s Lightning-Flash,” London Re-

view of Books 13 [January 10, 1991]: 12–15). But she is right to insist that the proper
framework within which to approach “Mrs. Bathurst” is not modernism but something
previous, which she associates with the 1890s (11).
19. Rudyard Kipling, “The Disturber of Traffic,” in Collected Stories, 33–53. Dowse even-
tually becomes convinced that the streaks were made by the steamers that came by,
and together with his native assistant—a brilliant swimmer—constructs large cane
floats which he then paints dark green with a white W (for “wreck”; more white writing)
on them; when they are done, the assistant, Challong, deploys them in the channel,
which has the result of discouraging ships from trying to steam through. It is as if the
streaks represent some aberration or disturbance of writing, or at least of the normally
blank page, and as if the cane floats with their W’s are an attempt to rectify the situa-
tion. What makes this concatenation of writing-related motifs all the more striking is
the surprisingly early date “The Disturber of Traffic” was composed: 1891 saw the
young Crane working as a reporter in Asbury Park and composing his early tales and
sketches; Maggie, his breakthrough short novel, dates from two years later. But in
Kipling’s bizarre narrative—what is one to make of it, a fter all?—literary impres-
sionist or, say, proto-i mpressionist topoi and issues are already in play.
20. Two other pieces of writing from this period in Conrad’s c areer signal a related sense
of crisis. The first is a story, “Because of the Dollars” (dated January 1914), featuring
the same Davidson who plays a role in Victory, and crucially involving a villainous
Frenchman without hands who batters victims to death with a seven-pound weight tied
to his right stump, a detail that makes the strongest possible contrast with Heyst’s ex-
change with Jones to the effect that he, Heyst, was “unarmed.” The Frenchman’s victim
in the story is a prostitute called Laughing Anne, a name that chimes suggestively with
“Lena” (think of Heyst’s playing with “detached letters and loose syllables” to come up
with the latter). The implication would seem to be that the alternative to being “un-
armed” was some sort of brute prosthesis that could scarcely hope to produce writing
worth the name (Joseph Conrad, “Because of the Dollars,” in Within the Tides [1915;
repr., Harmondsworth, UK, 1978], 149–183). It is perhaps worth mentioning that
Davidson eventually sends Laughing Anne’s orphaned son to “the White F athers in
Malacca” (182), a tiny gesture t oward erasure.
Then t here is what I take to be the climactic scene narrated by Marlow in the novel
Chance (1913), where the young Powell on the poop of a ship finds himself looking down
into a cabin through a pane of clear glass that had replaced a pane of colored glass that
would have impeded his vision. Powell’s account (or rather, Marlow’s retelling of
Powell’s account) of what he saw and did goes on for pages, almost in slow motion, so
as to leave the reader in no doubt of its thematic significance. Basically, Powell has a
privileged view from above and b ehind of Captain Anthony sitting and reading while
sipping from a drink; at one point the captain leaves the cabin, and Powell is surprised
to see an arm and hand emerge from behind a curtain and seemingly put something
into the captain’s drink, which leads Powell to quit the poop and enter the cabin to
prevent the captain from drinking from what Powell correctly takes to be the poi-
soned tumbler. Powell says, “Doctored! I swear it! I have seen. Doctored! I have seen.”
(Joseph Conrad, Chance [Harmondsworth, UK, 1974], 347). T here follows:
Not a feature of the captain’s face moved. His was a calm to take one’s breath
away. It did so to the young Powell. Then for the first time Anthony made
himself heard to the point.
“You did! . . . W ho was it?”
And Powell gasped freely at last. “A hand,” he whispered fearfully, “a hand
and the arm—only the arm—l ike that.”
He advanced his own, slow, stealthy, tremulous in faithful reproduction, the
tips of two fingers and the thumb pressed together and hovering above the
glass for an instant—t hen the swift jerk back, a fter the deed.
“Like that,” he repeated, growing excited. “From behind this.” He grasped
the curtain and glaring at the silent Anthony flung it back disclosing the fore-
part of the saloon. T here was no one to be seen. (347)
The would-be poisoner is de Barral, the swindler father of Captain Anthony’s young
wife Flora (and also, significantly, a master of factitious advertising); slightly later, de
Barral w ill deliberately down the drink and fall dead. H ere, too, I see the focus on de
Barral’s hand and arm in contrast with Heyst’s insistence that he is “unarmed,” and
more broadly, with Conrad’s nearing the end of his writerly project; the work of the
hand and arm h ere is simply death dealing, and the clear pane that replaced the col-
ored one represents a “failed” mode of erasure. (Note that the two fingers and thumb
that are specifically mentioned are the parts of the hand particularly engaged in writing.)
21. H. G. Wells, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (New York, 1916).
22. To all intents and purposes, my account of literary impressionism has reached its con-
clusion, but a brief consideration of another well-k nown Kipling story, “The Eye of
Allah” (1926), seems too relevant to forego (in Kipling, Collected Stories, 801–822). The
narrative is set in the thirteenth c entury, in the Abbey of St. Illod’s in E ngland. The
central figure is an artist, John Otho, known as John of Burgos, a supremely gifted
painter of manuscript illuminations. Early in the story he leaves for Spain, where he
has a beautiful non-Christian mistress, either Moorish or Jewish; twenty months later
he returns, his mistress and newborn son having died in childbirth, bringing with him
materials for making colors, and various medications requested by Thomas the Infir-
marion. Shortly afterward he is invited to a dinner by the Abbot of the monastery;
others at the dinner are Thomas; the Oxford-based scientist-f riar, Roger Bacon; and a
surgeon, Roger of Salerno, who has been summoned to the abbey to examine the Ab-
bot’s lady, Anne of Norton, who is seriously ill. In the course of the dinner the talk turns
to the church’s reactionary character as regards t hings of the mind, and then to John’s
remarkable illuminations of the Magdalen being exorcised of seven demons and also
of demons entering the Gadarene swine; it soon emerges that the figures of the demons,
all of which are regarded by the company as amazingly original, were inspired by the
sight of tiny creatures glimpsed in brackish w ater with the aid of an early crystal mi-
croscope (the “Eye of Allah” of the title), acquired by John in Granada. John has the
microscope with him, removes it from his case, and demonstrates its use.
The rest of the story is quickly summarized. Roger Bacon is enthusiastic because
the sight of such creatures confirms his own scientific leanings (“I see! I see!,” he re-
peats to himself as he looks through the device [819]), as is Roger of Salerno, who
understands that it might play an important role in advancing medical knowledge
(Thomas had already mentioned the views of the ancient Roman scholar and writer,
Varro, on what we would now call microorganisms). John is content merely to use the
device to inspire his imagery. But the Abbot—a well-traveled and sophisticated man,
no mere reactionary figurehead—understands all too well that the Church would never
tolerate its existence and smashes the crystals. “This birth, my sons, is untimely,” he
tells the others.
“It w ill be but the mother of more death, more torture, more division, and
greater darkness in this dark age. Therefore I, who know both my world and
the Church, take this Choice on my conscience. Go! It is finished.” He thrust
the wooden part of the compasses deep among the beech logs till all was
burned. (822)
“The Eye of Allah” is a brilliant story simply in its own right. But might it also be
read in terms of the vexed issues of seeing and writing (specifically, writing / drawing)
that we have been tracking throughout this book? There can be no doubt, for example,
that John of Burgos’s illuminations are to be visualized as a singularly compelling in-
stance of writing / drawing in one of its historically most traditional forms, so the
loss of the microscope w ill have serious consequences for him. At the same time, it
seems possible to read the Abbot’s considered destruction of the crystal microscope
as marking a reaction against what might be called the overvaluing of vision in the
postimpressionist literary dispensation. Understood in this double light, “The Eye of
Allah” may be read as seeking to position itself in relation to the values of literary
impressionism at a moment when the latter survived as the remainder of a “move-
ment” only in the work of a few older writers, notably Ford and Kipling himself.
Coda
1. See Blast 1 (1914; repr., Santa Barbara, CA, 1981); Blast 2 (1914; repr., Santa Barbara,
CA, 1981).
2. Wyndham Lewis, “Bestre,” in The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa
Barbara, CA, 1982), 77–88 (hereafter “B”). Further page references will be in parentheses
in the text. The most useful discussion of “Bestre” I have found is by Scott W. Klein,
“The Tell-Tale Eye,” in The Fiction of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of
Nature and Design (Cambridge, 1994), 24–64. My thanks to Lisa Siraganian for
steering me to this.
3. Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” in Look at Me Now and H ere I Am:
Writings and Lectures 1909–45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (Harmondsworth, UK, 1971),
24.
4. Gertude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1960), 70 (hereafter A). Fur-
ther page references w ill be in parentheses in the text. Also: “As she says eyes to her
were more important than ears and it happened then as always that english was her
only language” (A, 74). And: “The theatre she has always cared for less. She says it goes
too fast, the mixture of eye and ear bothers her and her emotion never keeps pace”
(A, 75). Stein on the theater is a fascinating topic in its own right.
5. On Stein’s participation in experiments in automatic writing, and more broadly, her

relations with William James, under whom she studied, see Steven Meyer, Inescapable
Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, CA,
2001), and a short but interesting article by Barbara W ill, “Gertrude Stein, Automatic
Writing and the Mechanics of Genius,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 37
(April 2001): 164–175. Stein cow rote two articles on the subject in 1896 and 1898 with
Leon M. Solomons, both of which appeared in The Psychological Review; they are also
available in the volume Motor Automatism (New York, 1969). W ill usefully draws at-
tention to the fact that in their article “Normal Motor Automatism” (1896),
reference is also made to a strange doubling that emerges . . . during the pro
cess of automatic writing. Thus in their discussion of the supposed distinction
between hysterical automatism and normal automatism, Stein and Solomons
insist that the two phenomena are essentially identical except for one key dif-
ference. While neither the normal person nor the hysteric can avoid performing
in automatic ways, the normal person, even in a state of distraction, does have
a certain control over attention that is lacking in the hysteric, enabling her or
him to perform automatically while at the same time remaining “conscious” of
the process. (173)
Exactly what relevance such a finding has for the literary practices considered in this
book is, of course, an open question.
6. Gertrude Stein, The Geog raphical History of America, or The Relation of H uman Na-
ture to the Human Mind, in Writings 1932–46, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet
Chessman (New York, 1998), 367–488 (hereafter GH). Further page references w ill be
in parentheses in the text.
7. Gertrude Stein, “What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are T here So Few of Them?,” in
Writings 1932–46, 355–363.
8. My account of Stein’s views is deeply indebted to Jennifer Ashton’s brilliant chapters
on Stein in From Modernism to Post-Modernism: American Poetry and Theory in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2005), 30–94. I have also learned much from the pages
on Stein in Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life
(Oxford, 2012).
9. See, in this connection, Elliott L. Vanskike, “ ‘Seeing Everyt hing as Flat’: Landscape
in Gertrude Stein’s Useful Knowledge and The Geographical History of America,” Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 35, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 151–167.
10. Eventually, but not here, it w ill be necessary to say something more about the strengths
and limitations of Stein’s particular brand of antitheatricality. But that she is throughout
her c areer a radically antitheatrical thinker is beyond question.
11. Ford Madox Ford, “Introduction to A Farewell to Arms,” in Frank MacShane, Critical
Writings of Ford Madox Ford (Lincoln, NE, 1964), 127–136 (hereafter “I”). Further page
references w ill be in parentheses in the text.
12. Ford Madox Ford, “W. H. Hudson,” in Portraits from Life (Chicago, 1937), 62; em-
phasis added.
13. In fact, Ford had earlier said essentially this of Hudson in “The Work of W. H. Hudson”
(1909), in Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester, 2002), 68.
14. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Essays of V irginia Woolf, ed. Andrew Mc-
Neille, 5 vols. (London, 1984), 4:160–161.
15. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (Mineola, NY, 1998) (hereafter JR). Further page refer-
16. Another early Woolf narrative that fits the case is the famous short story (if that is what
it is), “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), in The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction,
ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford, 2001); page references to this edition w ill be in paren-
theses in what follows. It begins: “Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present
year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall” (3). The rest of the text returns
continually to the mark, speculating as to its nature, and just as continually departs
from it, following one or another chain of thoughts and associations. For example:
But as for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail
after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked
at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done,
no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life! The in-
accuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! (4)
And:
I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to
have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one t hing to another, without any
sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the
surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the
first idea that passes. . . . Shakespeare. . . . Well, he w ill do as well as another.
(5; emphasis added)
In other words, the mark on the wall, on the face of it a likely candidate for an impres-
sionist motif, turns out to be anything but—not a figure for writing, a surface practice
par excellence, but rather a trigger for generating a mode of literary discourse that would
very soon come to be called “stream of consciousness,” in which psychic mobility reigns
and objects as such are in effect suspended and dissolved. (In the last two very short
paragraphs of the text we learn that the mark on the wall was a snail.) Cf. Jesse Matz,
Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2001), 182–187.
Acknowledgments
As I explain in the Introduction, What Was Literary Impressionism? has been

a long time in preparation, from the moment when I first saw that such a book
was feasible. The a ctual writing of the bulk of the manuscript, once I committed
myself to it, went fairly quickly, but then t here was the question of seeing the
manuscript into print, which was resolved when I submitted it to Harvard Uni-
versity Press. My sincere thanks, then, to Lindsay Waters, who expertly shep-
herded it through the acceptance process, as well as to Isobel Armstrong and
Michael Clune for helpful comments and suggestions. Someone else who con-
tributed greatly to this book especially during the years of its inception is my
then Johns Hopkins colleague Walter Benn Michaels; in particular, two semi-
nars that we taught jointly on late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century
English and American fiction proved immensely helpful in shaping my un-
derstanding of the stakes of the present study. Anyone who has ever taught or
studied with Michaels w ill know exactly what I mean.
As always, conversations over the years with Ruth Leys have been a source
of tremendous encouragement. In addition, the interest and support of Jennifer
Ashton, Stephen Bann, Stanley Cavell, Laurence Davies, Leonardo Lisi, Charles
Palermo, Robert Pippin, Lisa Siraganian, and the late Allen Grossman have also
been important to me.
Portions of Chapter 1 w ere first published as “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impres-
sionism’ in Conrad, Crane, and Norris,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn
387
388 Acknowledgments
1990): 193–236. A version of Chapter 5 was first published as “ ‘A Blankness to

Run At and Dash Your Head Against’: On Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” ELH
79, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 1039–1071. Portions of Chapter 8 w ere first published
as “Impressionist Monsters: H. G. Wells’s ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau,’ ” in
Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion
Books, 1994), 95–112. My thanks to Critical Inquiry, ELH, and Reaktion Books
for their permission to reuse that material h ere. Thanks also to Ann Woodward
and Lael Ensor at Johns Hopkins, to John Womack Jr. at Harvard, and to Jona-
than Rosenwasser at Widener Library for their assistance with illustrations.
Special thanks are owed to Charles Palermo for allowing me to adapt an
essay by him on Ford’s The Good Soldier in Chapter 3 (pp. 98–118). I thought it
essential to include an account of that remarkable novel in this book, and Palermo’s
account of it could not, it seemed to me, be bettered.
One last acknowledgment: between January and June 2017 I put the final
touches to my manuscript u nder ideal conditions thanks to a generous fellowship
from the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich. My warmest thanks
to Professor Heinrich Meier, director of the Stiftung, for making this possible.
What Was Literary Impressionism? is dedicated to the memory of arguably
Conrad’s most passionate modern admirer, Edward Said.
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures.
Advertising, 87, 153, 153, 293 Automatic writing, 103, 108, 122, 321
fter Dinner at Ornans (Courbet), 2, 5
A Automatism, 26, 92, 137; in “Bestre,” 319;
“Against Theory” (Knapp and Michaels), 26 in Conrad’s works, 180; in Cunning-
Agency, writer’s, 145 hame Graham’s works, 131; in The Secret
Albino, in The Invisible Man, 84 Agent, 163, 166
Aldington, Richard, 139 Automimesis, 22
Alliteration, 61, 62, 250, 264 Autosuggestion, 22, 372–373n40
“Almayer’s Face” (Fried), 23
Almayer’s Folly (Conrad), 23, 28–57, 146,
311; blankness in, 32–33, 37, 38; desire in, Bailin, Miriam, 105
31; erasure in, 35, 36–37, 38, 39, 42, 49, Bann, Stephen, 23
127, 252; faces in, 29, 32–33, 35, 37, 43, “Beast in the Jungle, The” (James), 23,
126, 275, 347–348n17; first page of, 40; 156–160, 293
forgiving in, 31; shadows in, 344n7; “Beattock for Moffat” (Cunninghame
violence in, 182–183; Wells’s review of, 62 Graham), 132–133, 298–299
Ambassadors, The (James), 293 “Because of the Dollars” (Conrad), 182,
Anarchists, 184. See also The Secret Agent 244, 382n20
Antitheatricality, 327 Beresford, J. D., 197
Anxiety, blank page and, 53 Berryman, John, 7
Arctic, 83, 84 “Bestre” (Lewis), 317–320
Audience, indifference to, 327 Birds, 298; aerial nature of, 64, 65; in
Aural, relation with visual, 298, 299–301, Green Mansions, 66–67; Hudson and,
304, 308–309, 314 58, 63, 64; language of, 64–66; in Return
Author: agency of, 145; invisibility of, 74, to Yesterday, 122–123
77, 79, 293–294; relation with page, 56 Birds and Man (Hudson), 63, 64
Authorial double, absence of, 174 Bismarck, Otto von, 259
Autobiography: Ford’s (see Portraits from Black and white, 123–124, 313–314; in
Life; Return to Yesterday); Hudson’s, 93; Conrad’s works, 49–50, 51, 313; in Ford’s
Wells’s, 74, 84–85, 88, 91, 153, 195–196, works, 124; in The Soul of London,
197, 251 95–96, 97; in When the Sleeper Wakes,
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein), 152, 153, 156
321–322 “Black Mate, The” (Conrad), 40–42
“Autocracy and War” (Conrad), 259 Blackness: blankness associated with, 52;
Automatic phenomena, 104 in Under Western Eyes, 253, 257
389
390 Index
Blankness, 31, 288; in Almayer’s Folly, 166; authorial control, 252; “Autocracy
32–33, 37, 38; associated with and War,” 259; “Because of the
whiteness and blackness, 52; in Dollars,” 182, 244, 382n20; black and
Conrad’s works, 37, 62, 252; erasure white in works of, 49–50; “The Black
and, 37; in French, 51–52; in Heart of Mate,” 40–42; blankness and, 37, 62,
Darkness, 53; in The Invisible Man, 79; 252; blank page and, 46; Chance,
in “The Joyous Miracle,” 288–289; in 376n3, 382–383n20; choice of Eng lish,
Lord Jim, 46; on maps, 52–53; 52; description of, 249; detachment
Norris’s, 37; in Nostromo, 50–51; of and, 174, 183, 248–249, 303, 304, 306;
paper, 39; and The Secret Agent, 62, distinction between pen and page, 38,
162–164, 172, 174, 252; in “The Secret 39; doubling by, 47–49; “The Duel,”
Sharer,” 49; understood materially, 145–150; end of c areer, 314; erasure
252; in “Youth,” 56 and, 39, 48, 52, 62, 127, 137, 149, 150,
“ ‘Blankness to Run At and Dash Your 236, 252, 294–295; Ford on, 120; gazing
Head Against, A’ ” (Fried), 23 and, 38, 39; Heart of Darkness, 43,
Blast, 290, 291, 295, 306, 329 52–53, 56–57, 74, 214; heroes of, 43;
Blindness, 261, 262–263, 264 impressionism of, 39, 249; inspiration,
Bolas, 93 38–39; interpretations of works, 43;
Bourdin, Martial, 184–185, 245 ironic method of, 162, 163, 167, 168, 173,
Bowkett, Sidney, 84 176, 177, 183; “The Lagoon,” 47; letter
Brawne, Fanny, 286 to aunt, 38–39; maps and, 214, 351n34;
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 23, 296–298, 301, mobility of implied subject positions,
306, 309, 314 56; The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 12,
38, 51–52, 93, 343–344n5; novelistic
strengths, 229; as obsessional writer,
Captains Courageous (Kipling), 378–379n8 43; An Outcast of the Islands, 47,
Career, literary, 136 349n23; A Personal Record, 345n10,
Catriona (Stevenson), 292–293 351n34; project of, 252, 302 (see also
Chance (Conrad), 376n3, 382–383n20 Erasure); The Rescue, 345–346n10;
Charts: in Heart of Darkness, 214; in Kim, sales of, 228; “The Secret Sharer,” 48;
216–217; in The Riddle of the Sands, on silver, 50; in The Soul of London,
202–211, 204–205, 251; in “The Tale,” 93–96; “The Tale,” 50, 211–215, 218;
213–215, 218. See also Maps Tales of Unrest, 47; unreliability of, 47;
Childers, Erskine, 23, 24, 198, 251–252, violence against hands and, 182–183;
295. See also The Riddle of the Sands Wells on, 84, 85; writing for, 349–
Chimney sweep, Ford on, 118–120 350n25; writing life, 370n24; writing of
“Clean breast,” in The Secret Agent, Nostromo, 124; “Youth,” 52, 53–56, 127.
370n20 See also Almayer’s Folly; Lord Jim;
Composition, 321 Nostromo; The Secret Agent; Under
“Composition as Explanation” (Stein), Western Eyes; Victory
320–321 Consciousness, Ford’s model of, 358n17
“Com-” prefix, 246 “Contagion,” 179, 180–185, 244, 246,
Confessions (Rousseau), 236 372–373n40
“Confidence,” 242–244, 246 Copying, 322
“Con-” prefix, in Under Western Eyes, Corpses: descriptions of, 131 (see also
244–248, 376n5 “Odour of Chrysanthemums”; The Red
Conrad, Joseph, 22, 23, 24, 251; admira- Badge of Courage; “The Upturned
tion of Hudson, 93, 121; admirers of, Face”); engagement with, 143–144; in
Index 391
“The Orchid-Hunter,” 251; in U nder Monteith,” 375n2; use of dialect,

Western Eyes, 241. See also Faces; Faces, 298–299
upturned “Cynicism,” 246
Courbet, Gustave, 1; After Dinner at
Ornans, 5; The Stonebreakers, 2, 5
Courbet’s Realism (Fried), 2 “Dayspring Mishandled” (Kipling), 74
Crane, Stephen, 7–16, 22, 25, 27, 137, 251, “Dead Man’s Plack” (Hudson), 138–140
295; automatism and, 92; “The Blue Deafness, in Under Western Eyes, 50,
Hotel,” 21; commitment to impres- 235, 237
sionist project, 13; “Death and the Death: by fire, 71–72, 73; in The Good
Child,” 14, 21, 90, 221–225; disfigured Soldier, 116, 117; Hudson on, 63; in In
f aces and, 139, 250; fire in works of, 73, the Days of the Comet, 86–87; inviola-
313; Five White Mice, 294; Ford on, 21, bility of, 142; in The Invisible Man, 84;
127, 224; handwriting of, 21; implied in Vandover and the Brute, 82
relation between writer and page, 56; “Death and the Child” (Crane), 14, 21, 90,
on impressionism, 294; impressionism 221–225
of, 22, 35; as impressionist, 12; on Deathlessness, of inorganic, 165–166
journalism, 119; literary enterprise of, Deconstruction, 180, 350n28
224; Maggie, 14, 298, 346–347n14; Denial: Hudsonian, 62, 64; of materiality
“Manacled,” 73, 313; The Monster, of writing, 65
11–12, 14, 27, 29, 35, 73, 126, 144–145, Derrida, Jacques, 26
224, 275, 295, 313, 347n14; Norris’s Desire: in Almayer’s Folly, 31; unconscious,
view of, 21; as obsessional writer, 43; 104–105
“The Price of the Harness,” 21; project Detachment, 174, 182, 185, 259; in The
of, 15–16; prose of, 14–15; The Red Secret Agent, 183; in Under Western Eyes,
Badge of Courage, 7, 13, 20, 21, 62, 248–249; in Victory, 303, 304, 306; in
125–126, 346–347n14; represent at ion of The War of the Worlds, 197
shadows, 344–345n7; repression of Devices: in Crane’s work, 250; struggle
materiality of writing, 78–79; s / c with imagery, 295
doublet, 21, 22, 144, 222, 224, 295; The Dialect, 250, 298–299
Soul of London and, 93, 96–97; “Tent Dictation, 359n19
Life at Ocean Grove,” 344–345n7; Digression / distraction, 92–93, 105–108,
understanding of writerly enterprise, 110, 117, 118, 137, 251, 360n19
20; upturned f aces of, 13 (see also Faces, Disfiguration, 29, 218. See also Faces,
upturned; “The Upturned Face”); use disfigured
of alliteration, 62; use of dialect, 298; Display, emphasis on, 292
use of “line,” 276; use of “writhing,” Dissociation, 102–103
265; “The Veteran,” 14, 73, 313; Wells Dissociation of a Personality, The (Prince),
on, 84, 85; “When Man Falls, a Crowd 102–103
Gathers,” 127. See also “The Upturned Distraction, 92–93, 97, 104, 105, 251
Face” “Disturber of Traffic, The” (Kipling), 314
Criticism, deconstructive, 350n28 “Dog Hervey, The” (Kipling), 301
Cunninghame Graham, R. B., 23, 24, 25, Double-m indedness, 251
251, 294; “Beattock for Moffat,” 132–133, Doubling: association with erasure, 349n23;
298–299; faces in works of, 127–133; by Conrad, 47–49; in The Good Soldier, 112
Ford on, 127, 132; “A Hegira,” 132; Drawing, 322; integration with writing,
journeys in works of, 132; paralleling by, 73–74, 197; written, 216–217
132; “Prog ress,” 267–271, 280; “Snow in Dual personality, 102–103
392 Index
“Duel, The” (Conrad), 145–150 265–267, 276; in The Monster, 275;

D. Z., 290–291, 293. See also Lewis, obliteration of, 35; in The Riddle of the
Wyndham Sands, 208–209; in The Secret Agent,
169, 170–171; in Under Western Eyes, 233
Faces, blank / expressionless, 32–33, 37, 42,
Eakins, Thomas, 1–7; The Gross Clinic, 1, 237
2, 3; Professor Henry A. Rowland, 3, 7; in Faces, disfigured, 35, 295; in Almayer’s Folly,
Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, 6; 29; in Captains Courageous, 378–379n8;
trained as writing master, 6 Crane and, 250 (see also The Monster);
Ebb-Tide (Stevenson), 299–301 fights and, 133–138; in Green Mansions,
English (language): Conrad’s choice of, 52; 69; in The Invisible Man, 80; in Kim, 217,
as literary language, 121 218; in The Light That Failed, 378n8; in
English Review, 290 Martin Eden, 133–138; in “A Matter of
Erasure, 212, 236; in Almayer’s Folly, 35, Fact,” 263–264; as metaphor for page,
36–37, 38, 39, 43, 49, 127, 252; association 139–140; in Tono-Bungay, 365–366n19; as
with doubling, 349n23; in “The Black trope of impressionism, 125; in Vandover
Mate,” 41–42; blankness and, 37; Conrad and the Brute, 82; in When the Sleeper
and, 39–53, 62, 137, 149, 150, 236, 252, Wakes, 374n12
294–295, 302; deafness as, 236–238; in Faces, upturned, 7–11, 126–127, 276; in
“The Duel,” 150; in Lord Jim, 43, 52; Crane’s work, 13, 15, 250; in “Dead
modalities of, 41; in Nostromo, 51, 237; An Man’s Plack,” 139–140; in “The Duel,”
Outcast of the Islands as, 349n23; in The 145–150; in Green Mansions, 69, 73, 74;
Secret Agent, 169, 174, 175, 252; in “The in Heart of Darkness, 56; in Hudson’s
Secret Sharer,” 48; in “The Tale,” 215; in works, 60–61; in In the Days of the
Under Western Eyes, 236–238, 252–259; Comet, 87; in The Invisible Man, 80, 84;
in Victory, 302–303, 312; writing as, 127; in Lawrence’s works, 141–145; in “The
in “Youth,” 54–56 Orchid-Hunter,” 251; in The Red Badge
Experiment in Autobiography (Wells), 74, of Courage, 125–126; smiling, 60; as
84–85, 88, 91, 153, 195–196, 197, 251 trope of impressionism, 125, 126–128; in
“Eye of Allah, The” (Kipling), 74, Under Western Eyes, 241; in Victory,
383–384n22 381n15; in “Youth,” 56, 127
Eye(s): in “Bestre,” 320; face as figure for, Facial expressions, in Almayer’s Folly, 32–33
126; glass, 63–64; in The Invisible Man, Facing, in Lord Jim, 44–45
80; in “The Orchid-Hunter,” 128, 129, 130 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 327
“Eyes,” in Under Western Eyes, 253 Fatness, in The Secret Agent, 164–165
Fights, 133–138, 265–267, 276
“Finest Story in the World, The”
“Face,” in Under Western Eyes, 253 (Kipling), 380n14
Facelessness, 29, 30 Fire, 71–72, 73; in Crane’s works, 313
Faces: in Almayer’s Folly, 35, 126, 275, (see also The Monster); in Green
347–348n17; in “Bestre,” 318, 319; in Mansions, 313; in Kipling’s works, 313;
Cunninghame Graham’s works, 127–133; in Victory, 305, 313
in The Good Soldier, 115; in Green First Men in the Moon, The (Wells), 85,
Mansions, 67–74, 126, 354n21; in In the 376–377n8
Days of the Comet, 87–88; in The First World War, 198, 314–316
Invisible Man, 126; in The Island of Five White Mice (Crane), 294
Doctor Moreau, 273–277, 279; in Lord Flammability, of paper, 313
Jim, 44–45, 277; in Martin Eden, Flatness, Wells’s use of, 85
Index 393
Flaubert, Gustave, 293, 377n9 9–11, 13, 15–16, 63; “Stephen Crane’s
Fog, 56, 213 Upturned Faces,” 9–11, 12, 14, 15, 21, 26,
Fogel, Aaron, 182 43, 62, 73, 90, 125, 127, 221, 250, 276, 294
Food of the Gods, The (Wells), 86 “Friendly Brook” (Kipling), 381n13
Ford, Boris, 249 Friesland, 209–211
Ford, Ford Madox, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27;
account of end of impressionism, 290;
admiration of Hudson, 59–60, 93, 121; Galsworthy, John, 61, 172
black and white and, 95–96, 97, 124; on Garnett, Edward, 59
Conrad, 120; on cook, 123–124; on Crane, Gazing, Conrad’s emphasis on, 39
21, 127, 224; on Cunninghame Graham, Geog raphical History of America, The
127, 132; digression and, 92–93, 105–108, (Stein), 323–327
110, 117, 118, 137, 251; on Hemingway, Gide, André, 43, 166
327–331; on Hudson, 61, 65, 66, 70, 330; Good Soldier, The (Ford), 27, 98–118, 251,
on impressionism, 294; impressionism of, 290; as automatic writing, 122; in Blast,
89–124; and inspiration for The Secret 291; death in, 116, 117; digression /
Agent, 184; interest in hypnotism, 105; on distraction in, 105–107; doubling in, 112;
invisibility, 79; It Was the Nightingale, dual personality in, 102–103; faces in,
110, 359–360n19; The Last Post, 150–151; 115; hypnotism in, 103, 116; impulses in,
on Lewis, 290–291, 306; love of France, 100–102, 107; logic of, 116–117; negativity
122; on methods of writing, 359–360n19; in, 361n23; passion in, 103, 356n13,
model of consciousness, 358n17; “Nice 357n16; repetition in, 111; suggestion in,
People,” 360n21; No Enemy, 375n18; on 103, 104; unconscious desires in, 104–105;
“Odour of Chrysanthemums,” 144; unconscious in, 103; unreliability in, 99,
Parade’s End, 150–151; Portraits from 356–357n13; writing in, 105, 116
Life, 97, 140–141, 144; question of writing Graphics (Peale), 6, 11
and, 251; relation to London, 91–94; Green Mansions (Hudson), 59, 61, 66–74;
repetition by, 122; Return to Yesterday, f aces in, 67–74, 126, 354n21; fire in, 313;
118–124, 251, 290; scene of writing and, flower in, 253n16; hummingbirds in,
362–363n26; self-awareness in act of 66–67; integration of drawing and
writing, 97; and self-effacement of author, writing in, 197; language in, 67, 70; maps
293–294; The Soul of London, 89–97, 118, in, 225–227; moth in, 71–72; shadow-
124, 251, 355–356n10; suggestibility and, casting in, 119; snakes / serpents in, 72, 74
357–358n17; unreliability of, 47, 119; view Greenwich Observatory, 163, 173, 184–185
of Blast, 317; Wells on, 84, 85; writing Grey, Edward, 59, 61, 65, 123, 140
and, 103, 107–108. See also The Good Grey, Zane, 183
Soldier Gross, Samuel, 1
Forgetting, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36 Gross Clinic, The (Eakins), 1, 2, 3
France, Ford’s love of, 122 Guerard, Albert J., 182
Frankenstein, 272 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 273
French (language): blankness in, 51–52; as
literary language, 121; possibility of
Conrad using, 122; in Under Western Hands: in “Because of the Dollars,”
Eyes, 243 382n20; in Chance, 382–383n20; in
Fried, Michael, 63; “Almayer’s Face,” 23; Conrad’s works, 82, 83, 182–183; in The
“ ‘A Blankness to Run At and Dash Your Secret Agent, 181–183; in Under Western
Head Against,’ ” 23; Courbet’s Realism, 2; Eyes, 244–245; in Vandover and the
Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, 6–7, Brute, 82, 83; violence against, 183
394 Index
Handwriting, 21, 280, 322 Crane’s, 22, 35; dates of, 25; as denial
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 182 of materiality of writing, 65; end of,
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 43, 52–53, 290–316; engagement with scene of
56–57, 74, 214 writing, 294; Ford on, 294; Ford’s,
“Hegira, A” (Cunninghame Graham), 132 89–124; Hemingway compared to,
Hemingway, Ernest, 24, 327–331, 334; A 330–331; Hudson’s, 69; Norris and, 84;
Farewell to Arms, 327; In Our Time, Stein and, 322–323, 325; theory of in
328–331 connection with Crane, 20–22;
Hervey, Henry, 301 understanding of, 340n21; in Under
Hind in Richmond Park, A (Hudson), 66 Western Eyes, 232; viewpoint in, 319;
History of Mr. Polly, The (Wells), 299 Wells and, 84, 251
Horizontal orientation, 19 Impressionist, Crane as, 12
Horizontal plane, 4, 6–7, 11, 222 Impressions, 331
Howells, W. D., 292 Imprint, in Return to Yesterday, 122
Hudson, W. H., 22, 23, 24, 58–74, 123, 251, Inanimateness, in The Secret Agent, 164–166
295; admiration for, 59–60, 93, 121, 139, Inorganic, deathlessness of, 165–166
330; aesthetic death of, 63; autobiog- In Our Time (Hemingway), 328–331
raphy, 93; biography, 58–59; birds and, Inscription, act of, 250
58, 63, 64; Birds and Man, 63, 64; Instability: in Martin Eden, 265–267; of
“Dead Man’s Plack,” 138–140; denial printed text, 283
and, 62, 64; fire in works of, 313; Ford In the Days of the Comet (Wells), 86–88,
on, 61, 65, 66, 70; A Hind in Richmond 126, 222, 293
Park, 66; ideal of nature, 73; ideal of “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” (Crane),
writing, 73; Idle Days in Patagonia, 59, 90–91
62–64; illusionism of, 70; impressionism Invisibility, 293–294; Hudson’s, 140, 330
of, 69, 140; The Naturalist in La Plata, (see also Hudson, W. H.); as ideal, 74, 77,
58–59; Nature in Downland, 60; prose 79; imagined as transparency, 77;
of, 59–62, 139; on relation of visual and materiality and, 74, 77. See also Green
aural, 298; transparency and, 250–251; Mansions; The Invisible Man
tropes of, 227; upturned f aces of, 60–61. Invisible Man, The (Wells), 74–80; affective
See also Green Mansions atmosphere of, 197; blankness in, 79;
Hueffer, Ford Madox. See Ford, Ford death in, 84; f aces in, 80, 84, 126; reading
Madox of, 74; repetition in, 78; transparency
“Husk,” in The Secret Agent, 372n34, and, 75, 251; writtenness of, 78, 79
372n38 Iron Heel, The (London), 364–365n10
“Husky,” in The Secret Agent, 372n34 Ironic method, Conrad’s, 162, 163, 167,
Hypnotism, 102–103, 104, 105, 108, 116 168, 173, 176, 177, 183
Irony, 182
Island of Doctor Moreau, The (Wells), 85,
Idealism, contrast with materialism, 90 271–283; faces in, 273–277, 279;
Identity, personal, 171 materialism in, 280–283; racialist
Idle Days in Patagonia (Hudson), 59, 62–64 discourse in, 378n7; summary of,
Imagery: relation to act of writing, 295; 271–274; T hing in, 279–280
struggle with devices, 295 It Was the Nightingale (Ford), 110,
Imperialism: maps and, 53; new, 56 359–360n19
Impersonality, and seeing London, 94
Impressionability, and seeing London, 94
Impressionism, literary, 39; basic idea of, Jacobs, Carol, 98, 99
250; as conflicted, 295; Crane on, 294; Jacob’s Room (Woolf), 332–334
Index 395
James, Henry, 23, 153; The Ambassadors, Lewis, Wyndham, 24, 290–291, 293, 306,
293; “The Beast in the Jungle,” 23, 317–320, 334
156–160, 293; demand for visual, 293; on Light That Failed, The (Kipling), 378n8
literature of f uture, 292; on Stevenson, Literary impressionism. See Impressionism,
301; Wells on, 84, 85 literary
James, William, 321; on paper, 313; Literary language, French vs. English as, 121
Principles of Psychology, 63–64, 338n14 Literary production, word by word concep
Johnson, Samuel, 301 tion of, 326
Journalism, 293; contrasted with writing, Literature, of f uture, 291–292
87; Crane’s, 119 “Literature of the Future, The” (Wells),
Journalist, Wells as, 85, 88 291–292
Journeys, 132, 251 London: Ford’s relation to, 91–94; seeing,
Journey to the Abyss (Kessler), 341–342n22 94; workers in, 96
“Joyous Miracle, The” (Norris), 286–289, London, Jack, 23, 25, 251; The Iron Heel,
322 364–365n10; Martin Eden, 133–138, 251,
265–267, 276
Lord Jim (Conrad), 43–46, 49, 237, 314;
Keats, John, 284, 285 blankness in, 46; blank page in, 39;
Kermode, Frank, 249, 253, 257 erasure in, 43, 52; faces in, 44–45, 277;
Key word, in Under Western Eyes, relationship to Under Western Eyes, 43;
242–249 writing scene, 166
Kim (Kipling), 73–74, 215–218 Luther, Martin, 361–362n25
Kipling, Rudyard, 23, 24, 25; Captains
Courageous, 378–379n8; “Dayspring
Mishandled,” 74; “The Disturber of Maggie (Crane), 14, 298, 346–347n14
Traffic,” 314; “The Dog Hervey,” 301; “Manacled” (Crane), 73, 313
“The Eye of Allah,” 74, 383–384n22; Man’s W
oman, A (Norris), 37, 83–84, 183,
“The Finest Story in the World,” 250
380n14; fire in works of, 313; “Friendly Mapping, 85, 91
Brook,” 381n13; Kim, 73–74, 215–218; Maps: blank spaces on, 52–53; Conrad on,
The Light That Failed, 378n8; “The 351n34; of Friesland, 209–211; in The
Mark of the Beast,” 276; “Mary Geog raphical History of America, 326; in
Postgate,” 313; “A Matter of Fact,” Green Mansions, 225–227; in Heart of
261–265; “Mrs. Bathurst,” 313–314; use Darkness, 52–53, 214; imperialism and,
of dialect, 299; “Wireless,” 283–286 53; in Kim, 216–217; in No Enemy,
Knapp, Steven, 26 375n18; in The Octopus, 218–221, 219,
375n18; ordnance maps of G reat Britain,
189, 190, 251; in The Riddle of the Sands,
“Lagoon, The” (Conrad), 47 201, 202–211, 204–205, 251; in The Soul
Language: in Green Mansions, 67, 70; of London, 91; in The War of the Worlds,
literary, English vs. French as, 121; 192–194, 209, 251; Wells’s use of, 85, 91,
passion and, 98; reversion of, 283 189; in When the Sleeper Wakes, 373n7.
“Languorous,” 12, 15, 224 See also Charts
Last Post, The (Ford), 150–151 “Marital,” 183–185, 245
Lawrence, D. H., 141–145, 160 “Mark of the Beast, The” (Kipling), 276
Layering, in Under Western Eyes, 245–246, “Mark on the Wall, The” (Woolf), 386n16
252, 256, 376n3 “Martial,” 245
Leavis, F. R., 167, 174, 182 Martin Eden (London), 133–138, 251,
Letters, 333 265–267, 276
396 Index
“Mary Postgate” (Kipling), 313 Nature, Hudson’s ideal of, 73

“Material,” 183–185, 245 Nature in Downland (Hudson), 60
Materialism: contrast with idealism, 90; in Nature writing, 58. See also Hudson, W. H.
The Island of Doctor Moreau, 280–283; in Néant, 259–260
The Secret Agent, 165, 166–167, 171, 172; Newspapers, 87, 116, 333, 371n25
and writing of The Secret Agent, 162–164 “Nice P eople” (Ford), 360n21
Materialist writing, in The Secret Agent, Nigger of the “Narcissus,” The (Conrad),
176–177 12, 38, 51–52, 93, 343–344n5
Materiality: in “Bestre,” 319; invisibility No Enemy (Ford), 375n18
and, 74, 77; in The Island of Doctor Norris, Frank, 16, 23, 24, 61, 250; blankness
Moreau, 280–283; of page, 145; of, 37; impressionist project and, 84;
Vandover and the Brute and, 80–84; “The Joyous Miracle,” 286–289, 322;
Wells and, 75 A Man’s W oman, 37, 83–84, 183, 250;
Materiality of writing, 26; Crane and, 22, “A Memorandum of Sudden Death,”
35, 43, 78–79; denial of, 65; Norris and, 16–22, 83, 92, 122, 137, 150, 225, 250,
84; Wells and, 79, 281 294, 319; naturalism of, 83, 250; The
Materialization, in Vandover and the Octopus, 218–221, 219, 375n18;
Brute, 82 Vandover and the Brute, 80–84, 126,
“Maternal,” 183–185, 245 137, 183, 250, 277
“Matter of Fact, A” (Kipling), 261–265 Nostromo (Conrad), 50–51, 120–121, 252;
Meaning: generated by erasure, 42; Stein allusions to, 248; blankness in, 50–51;
on, 324 contrast with The Secret Agent, 172–175;
Mechanism, 150, 166. See also “A Memo- erasure in, 51, 237; writing of, 124, 161, 172
randum of Sudden Death”
“Memorandum of Sudden Death, A”
(Norris), 16–22, 26, 83, 92, 122, 126, 137, Obliteration, of face, 35. See also Faces,
150, 225, 250, 294, 319 disfigured
Meninas, Las (Velázquez), 1, 4 Octopus, The (Norris), 218–221, 219, 375n18
Michaels, Walter Benn, 26, 136, 138, “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 285
346–347n14 “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (Lawrence),
Miller, J. Hillis, 182 141–145, 160
Mist: in The Riddle of the Sands, 251; in Onomatopoeia, in Crane’s work, 250
“The Tale,” 212 “Orchid-Hunter, The” (Cunninghame
“Modern Fiction” (Woolf), 331–332 Graham), 127–132, 251, 294
Modernism, literary, 317–334; Hemingway, Ordnance maps of Great Britain, 189, 190,
327–331, 334; Lewis, 317–320, 334; 251. See also Maps
Stein, 320–327, 334; Woolf, 331–334 Orientations, 6–7. See also Horizontal
Monster, The (Crane), 11–12, 14, 27, 29, 35, orientation; Vertical plane
73, 126, 144–145, 224, 275, 295, 313, Osbourne, Lloyd, 299
347n14 Outcast of the Islands, An (Conrad), 47,
Monstrosity, theme of, 274 349n23
Mr. Britling Sees It Through (Wells), 314–316
“Mrs. Bathurst,” 313–314
Multiple personality, 102–103 Page: blackening of, 176, 252, 345n10;
blank, 46, 53, 160, 239, 241–242;
distinction with pen, 39; figures for,
Naturalism, 83, 250, 277 139–140, 149–150; in Lord Jim, 39;
Naturalist in La Plata, The (Hudson), materiality of, 145; printed, 282; reader’s
58–59 relation to, 249–259, 302; snow
Index 397
compared to, 375n2; upturned, 169, 250, Psychology, 63–64, 102, 108
271, 325; writer’s relation to, 56. See also Publication, writing as, 266
Paper “Pulp,” 133; as ingredient in paper making,
Pain, 84, 281–282, 283, 379n11 266–267
Painter-beholder, 2
Painting, 2–4, 6, 11
Palermo, Charles, 27, 98, 251 Reader: relation to page, 249–259, 302;
Paper: blankness of, 39; Conrad’s gazing relation to text, 245
at, 38; face as figure for, 126; in Kim, 215. Reading, relation to writing, 258
See also Page Realism, Writing, Disfiguration (Fried),
Parade’s End (Ford), 150–151 6–7, 9–11, 13, 15–16, 63
Paralleling, by Cunninghame Graham, Realists, 1–7
132 Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 7, 13,
Passion, 98–99, 356n13; in “The Beast in 20, 21, 62, 125–126, 346–347n14
the Jungle,” 158–159, 160; in The Good Regression / reversion, 286; in The Island
Soldier, 103, 357n16 of Doctor Moreau, 271–283; “The Joyous
Peale, Rembrandt, 6, 11 Miracle,” 286–289; of language, 283; in
Pen: distinction with page, 39; writing Martin Eden, 265–267; in “A Matter of
with, 359–360n19 Fact,” 261–265; as naturalist motif, 277;
Personality, multiple, 102–103 in “Prog ress,” 267–271; in “Wireless,”
Personal Record, A (Conrad), 345n10, 283–286
351n34 Render, vs. report, 294
Phonetic spelling, 299 Repetition: Ford’s, 122; in The Good
Phonetic writing, 299 Soldier, 111; in The Invisible Man, 78; in
Physics, 369n19 Return to Yesterday, 122; in The Secret
Place-n ames: in The Riddle of the Sands, Agent, 171, 181–182; of “t hing,” 152
202–203; in The War of the Worlds, Report, vs. render, 294
187, 188–189, 196, 203. See also Charts; Representat ion, collapse of, 37
Maps Rescue, The (Conrad), 345–346n10
Points of view, in The War of the Worlds, Return to Yesterday (Ford), 118–124, 251,
193–195 290
Poradowska, Marguerite, 34, 38–39, 172 Reversion. See Regression / reversion
Portraits from Life (Ford), 97, 140–141, Riddle of the Sands, The (Childers),
144 198–211, 251–252; face in, 208–209;
Possibility, blank page and, 53 maps / charts in, 201, 202–211, 204–205,
Post-l iterary impressionism, simplification 218, 251; place-names in, 202–203;
in, 306 summary of, 198–202
Pound, Ezra, 290, 329 Riders of the Purple Sage (Grey), 183
Predestination, 362n25 Roberts, Morley, 62
“Price of the Harness, The” (Crane), 21 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 236
Prince, Morton, 102–103, 108 Russia, 259–260
“Prince Roman” (Conrad), 50
Principles of Psychology (James), 63–64,
338–339n14 Said, Edward, 174, 176, 182
Printing, 278, 280, 282, 283 Salammbô (Flaubert), 377n9
Professor Henry A. Rowland (Eakins), 3, 7 Saying, distinguished from writing, 323
“Prog ress” (Cunninghame Graham), Scale, shift in, 90–91
267–271, 280 S / c doublet, 21, 22, 144, 222, 224, 295
“Province of Pain” (Wells), 379n11 Scene of writing, 26, 250, 253, 294
398 Index
Schorer, Mark, 99 Speech: power of, 98; relation with

Science: attack on, 173; connection with writing, 298, 301
writing, 77 Spelling, phonetic, 299
Secret Agent, The (Conrad), 161–185; Spy novels. See The Riddle of the Sands
absence of authorial double in, 174; Statistical dynamics, 252
allusions to, 248; automatism in, 163, Stein, Gertrude, 24, 320–327, 334;
166; blankness and, 62, 162–164, 172, 174, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
252; “contagion” in, 179, 180–185, 244; 321–322; automatic writing and, 321,
deliberate writtenness of, 182; detach- 385n5; “Composition as Explana-
ment in, 183; erasure in, 169, 174, 175, tion,” 320–321; conception of writerly
252; face in, 169, 170–171; fatness in, practice, 326; The Geog raphical
164–165; hands in, 181–183; identity in, History of America, 323–327; hand-
171; inanimateness in, 164–166; inception writing and, 322; impressionism and,
of, 161–162; inspiration for, 184; leitmotifs 322–323, 325; “What Are Master-P ieces
in, 167, 183–185, 245; materialism in, 165, and Why Are T here So Few of Them”
166–167, 171, 172; materialist writing in, (Stein), 323
176–177; mechanism in, 166; newspapers Stephen Crane (Berryman), 7
in, 371n25; Nostromo and, 161, 172–175; “Stephen Crane’s Upturned F aces”
protagonist of, 164; repetition in, 171, (Fried), 9–11, 12, 14, 15, 21, 26, 43, 62,
181–182; sales of, 228; thermodynamics 73, 90, 125, 127, 221, 250, 276, 294
and, 369n19; time in, 171; T in, 180; Stevenson, Robert Louis, 23; Catriona,
upturned motif in, 171; upturned page in, 292–293; Ebb-Tide, 299–301; James on,
169; w ill in, 177–185; writing of, 162–164 301; visual sense, 301
“Secrets and Narrative Sequence” Stonebreakers, The (Courbet), 2, 5
(Kermode), 249 Suggestibility, Ford’s thinking on,
“Secret Sharer, The” (Conrad), 48–49 357–358n17
“See,” in Under Western Eyes, 253 Suggestion, 103, 104, 107
Seeing: “The Eye of Allah” and, 384n22; Suicide, in Martin Eden, 138
in The Geog raphical History of America, Swift, Jonathan, 273
327; in “A Matter of Fact,” 264; in “The
Tale,” 211–212
Seeing and writing, problematic of, 274 T (letter), in The Secret Agent, 180
Seeing imagination, 293 “Tale, The” (Conrad), 50, 211–215, 218
Seymour-Smith, Martin, 184–185 Tales of Unrest (Conrad), 47
Shadows, 71, 118–119, 149, 344–345n7 Tarzan of the Apes (Burroughs), 296–298,
Shelley, Mary, 272 301, 306, 309, 314
Silence, 37, 50 “Tent Life at Ocean Grove” (Crane),
Silver, 50, 174 344–345n7
Simplification, 295–298, 306 Text: printed, 278, 283; reader’s relation
Simplified Spelling Society, 299 to, 245
Snakes: Crane’s, 13; in Green Mansions, 72, Textual production, 333
74; images of, 12 Thermodynamics, 369n19
Snow, compared to page, 375n2 T hing: in The Island of Doctor Moreau,
“Snow in Monteith” (Cunninghame 279–280; in “A Matter of Fact,” 262,
Graham), 375n2 264–265; in The War of the Worlds, 187
Soul, transfusion of, 119–120 “T hing,” 135, 138, 145, 250; repetition of,
Soul of London, The (Ford), 89–97, 118, 152; in Under Western Eyes, 255
124, 251, 355–356n10 Time, conception of, 171
Spectacles, in Kim, 216 Time Machine, The (Wells), 85
Index 399
Tono-Bungay (Wells), 153, 153, 293, black and white in, 313; Conrad’s
365–366n19 procedures and, 306–313; detachment
Transfusion, of soul, 119–120 in, 303, 304, 306; equivalence in, 303;
Transparency, 75, 77, 250–251, 330 erasure in, 302–303, 312; faces in,
Turgenev, Ivan, 60, 330 381n15; fire in, 305, 313; relation of aural
Type, 280, 283 to visual in, 308–309; writing in, 306,
Type-casting machines, 278, 280, 379n9 310, 311, 312
Typewriter, 342n23 Vidal, Peire, 106, 107
Typographic emphasis, 291 Violence, 137–138; in Almayer’s Folly,
Typography, 329, 330 182–183; in “Bestre,” 318; against hands,
82, 83, 183; in Kim, 217; in Martin Eden,
265–267. See also “Dead Man’s Plack”;
Unconscious, in The Good Soldier, 103 Martin Eden; Vandover and the Brute
Unconsciousness, 92 Vision, 137, 216. See also Seeing
Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 228–250, Vistas, in “Death and the Child,” 222, 223
302; black in, 253, 257; blank page in, Visual: emphasis on, 291, 293; in impres-
239; “com-” prefix in, 246; “con-” sionism, 295; in post-l iterary impres-
prefix in, 244–248, 376n5; Conrad’s sionism, 306; relation to aural, 298,
project and, 252–259, 294–295; corpse 299–301, 304, 308–309, 314; simplifica-
in, 241; deafness in, 50, 235, 237; tion and, 295–298; in Stein’s literary
detachment in, 248–249; erasure in, practice, 321
236–238, 252–259; face in, 233, 241;
hands in, 244–245; impressionism in,
232; key word in, 242–249; layering in, Wallace, Alfred Russel, 59
250, 256; relation to Lord Jim, 43; War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 85,
relation to text in, 245; relation to 186–197; detachment in, 197; locations
writing and reading in, 259; summary in, 189; maps in, 192–194, 209, 218, 251;
of, 229–236; White in, 253, 257; writing place-names in, 187, 188–189, 196, 203;
in, 239; writing of, 237 points of view in, 193–195; surface
Unreliability: of Ford, 119; in The Good production of text in, 192–194;
Soldier, 99, 356n14 “writhing” in, 186, 197
“Upturned Face, The” (Crane), 8–11, 14, 15, Watt, Ian, 182
21, 29, 35, 319; essential subject of, 294; Wells, H. G., 22, 23, 25, 314; advertising
face in, 126; relation to “The Orchid- and, 153, 293; clash with James, 293;
Hunter,” 131; similarity to “Odour of complexity of works of, 86–88; on
Chrysanthemums,” 145; subject and Conrad, 84, 85; declaration of written-
meaning of, 224; writing of, 27 ness, 78, 79; Experiment in Autobiog-
Upward-facing motif: in The Last Post, raphy, 74, 84–85, 88, 91, 153, 195–196,
150–151; in “Prog ress,” 270–271; in The 197, 251; The First Men in the Moon,
Secret Agent, 171; in When the Sleeper 85, 376–377n8; The Food of the Gods,
Wakes, 151–156. See also Faces, upturned 86; on Ford, 84, 85; The History of
Mr. Polly, 299; impressionism and, 75,
84, 251, 294; integration of drawing
Vandover and the Brute (Norris), 80–84, and writing, 74; In the Days of the
126, 137, 183, 250, 277 Comet, 86–88, 126, 222, 293; on
Vertical plane, 4, 6–7, 11 James, 84, 85; as journalist, 85, 88;
“Veteran, The” (Crane), 14, 73, 313 Kipps, 299; literary enterprise of,
Victory (Conrad), 175, 301–313; as attempt 224; “The Literat ure of the Future,”
to imagine production of book, 314; 291–292; materiality and, 75;
400 Index
Wells, H. G. (continued) in In the Days of the Comet, 86, 222; in

materiality of writing and, 79, 281; The Iron Heel, 365n10; in The Island of
Mr. Britling Sees It Through, 314–316; Doctor Moreau, 279, 280; in Martin Eden,
printed page and, 282; prose of, 78; 133, 266; in “A Matter of Fact,” 262, 263,
“Province of Pain,” 379n11; review of 264–265; in The Monster, 11, 12; in
Almayer’s Folly, 62; scriptive explicit- Portraits from Life, 97; in “Progress,”
ness and, 251; self-a nalysis, 84–85; on 270, 271; in The Soul of London, 96; in
Simplified Spelling Society, 299; The “Vandover and the Brute,” 82; in The War
Time Machine, 85; Tono-Bungay, 153, of the Worlds, 186, 197
153, 293, 365–366n19; transparency and, Writing: automatic, 103, 108, 122, 321,
251; use of dialect, 299; use of maps, 85, 338–339n14, 360n21, 385n5; for Conrad,
91, 189; view of advertisement, 293; view 349–350n25; copying, 322; digression
of journalism, 293; When the Sleeper in, 107–108; distinguished from saying,
Wakes, 86, 151–156, 293, 299. See also 323; disturbance of, 382n19; as erasure,
The Invisible Man; The Island of Doctor 127; “The Eye of Allah” and, 384n22;
Moreau; The War of the Worlds fights’ association with, 136; figures for,
“What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are 197; in The First Men in the Moon,
T here So Few of Them” (Stein), 323 376–377n8; Ford and, 103, 107–108;
Wheat Sifters, The (Courbet), 2 good, spotting, 140–141; in The Good
“When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers” Soldier, 105, 116; handwriting, 6; ideal of,
(Crane), 127 73, 74, 77, 79; integration with drawing,
When the Sleeper Wakes (Wells), 86, 73–74, 197; in In the Days of the Comet,
151–156, 293, 299, 373n7 87; invisible, 250–251 (see also Green
White, in Under Western Eyes, 253, 257 Mansions; Invisibility); journalism
Whiteness, 288; of Arctic, 84; blankness contrasted with, 87; liberated, 373–374n7;
associated with, 52; in “The Joyous vs. marking, 338n10; materiality of (see
Miracle,” 288–289; in Nigger of the Materiality of writing); methods of,
“Narcissus,” 51. See also Black and 342n23, 359–360n19; modes of, 333; as
white nonrelational, 322; in paintings, 2–4, 6;
Will: automatic writing and, 362n25; in phonetic, 299; process of, 105; as
The Secret Agent, 177–185 publication, 266; question of, 251;
“Wireless” (Kipling), 283–286 reading’s relation to, 258; scene of, 26,
Wollaeger, Mark, 182 250, 253, 294, 325, 362–363n26;
Woolf, Virginia, 24, 331–334; Jacob’s Room, science’s connection with, 77; speech’s
332–334; “The Mark on the Wall,” relation to, 298, 301; Stein and, 324–327;
386n16; “Modern Fiction,” 331–332 textbook on, 6; in Under Western Eyes,
Word, printed, 63–64 239; in Victory, 306, 310, 311, 312;
Workers, in The Soul of London, 96 visual’s relation to, 295
Writer: agency of, 145; relation with page, Writing / drawing, 4, 6, 11
56. See also Author Writing self, emphasis on, 293
Writer’s cramp, 359n19 Writtenness, Wells’s declaration of, 78, 79
“Writhing,” 12, 133, 250, 263, 295; Crane’s
use of, 265; in “Death and the Child,” 221,
222; in The First Men in the Moon, 377n8; “Youth” (Conrad), 52, 53–56, 127

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What Was Literary Impressionism?

the belk na p pr ess of

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Cover design: Jill Breitbarth

Introduction: The Upturned Page 1

No theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing.

L e t me begi n on a personal note. My engagement with the topic of

Eakins would have seen in Madrid shortly before returning to Philadel-

that of Eakins’s portrait Professor Henry A. Rowland (1897), carved into

writing / drawing was associated with the horizontal plane of inscrip-

Fig. 3. ​Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849–1850 (destroyed, February

structural and sometimes also a thematic tension or strug­gle or compro-

In Eakins’s art . . . ​t he crucial tension or conflict between planes

tion becomes the implicit proj­ect of a large and significant body of

This barely summarizes my understanding of Eakins’s enterprise, but

dream of eventually writing something about him. In par­tic­u­lar I was

“What w ­ ill we do now?” said the adjutant, troubled and excited.

One of the aggrieved privates came forward with his shovel. He

As I went on to write in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned ­Faces,” the second

more than hinted at by the recurrent epithet “chalk-­blue” and

this below.] What is in­ter­est­ing to consider, however, is why this

Or consider, briefly, the horrific passage from The Monster referred to

Johnson had fallen with his head at the base of an old-­fashioned

Suddenly the glass splintered, and a ruby-­red snakelike ­t hing

By “[making] you see” Conrad of course had in mind making the

Indeed, I take this argument several steps further by proposing that

also in play in the aversiveness continually associated with figures of

the materiality of writing [is] si­mul­ta­neously elicited and repressed:

in question would cease to be writing and would become mere mark.

powder-­blackened fin­ger and thumb held the sheets momentarily” (“M,”

We think now that they followed us without attacking for so long

never experiences in the humdrum business of the day-­to-­day exis-

Even more fascinating, however, is Karslake’s account of what might

in mind Crane’s early authorship of The Red Badge (famously before he

a benumbing, sodden silence—­t he silence of a primordial world.

(I realize, of course, that the reader is unlikely to share my sense of the

Frank Norris, Jack London, and Rudyard Kipling. But impressionist or

A further admission is that although I am clear in my own mind that

I n c ha p t e r 7 of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (fin-

at Mahmat [the villa­ger], at Balabatchi [a Malay “statesman” who

Saying this, Balabatchi stepped carelessly forward, putting his

“I ­shall never forgive you, Nina,” said Almayer, in a dispassionate

The passage suggests a link between two seemingly unrelated items:

The exchange with Ford reads as follows:

What makes Almayer’s face so disturbing to Ford—­t he “firmness” of

“Wait,” whispered Almayer.

My very dear Aunt,

­ here could be no more compelling “external” evidence in support of

what happens ­there.) As for the letter’s substance, Conrad’s distinction

of being, according to his testimony, his first written work (a version of it

completely white-­haired older man—­virtually another person—­whom the

Whereas the black mate struck ­people as deliberate, and strangely

Erasure in this last instance is literally a return to an original blankness

in whose work, so I argue in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned ­Faces,” the con-

of that archetypal text, Jim’s proj­ect of ultimately erasing the appalling

“a w­ hole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect

and remained per­sis­tently vis­i­ble with the stronghold of the night

(“You” in this passage is the novel’s framing narrator, who is quoting

for the theme of self-­betrayal and redemption, was overdetermined, I read

till, one day, I perceived with horror that t­ here w

The anecdote itself is most likely an invention (Conrad in an autobio-

erasure, had been involved in the impressionist enterprise of Almayer’s

I swung the mainyard and waited helplessly. She was perhaps

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fig. 3. Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849–1850 (destroyed, February

structural and sometimes also a thematic tension or struggle or compro-

In Eakins’s art . . . t he crucial tension or conflict between planes

tion becomes the implicit project of a large and significant body of

dream of eventually writing something about him. In particular I was

“What w ill we do now?” said the adjutant, troubled and excited.

As I went on to write in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” the second

more than hinted at by the recurrent epithet “chalk-blue” and

this below.] What is interesting to consider, however, is why this

Johnson had fallen with his head at the base of an old-fashioned

Suddenly the glass splintered, and a ruby-red snakelike t hing

the materiality of writing [is] simultaneously elicited and repressed:

powder-blackened finger and thumb held the sheets momentarily” (“M,”

never experiences in the humdrum business of the day-to-day exis-

a benumbing, sodden silence—t he silence of a primordial world.

at Mahmat [the villager], at Balabatchi [a Malay “statesman” who

“I shall never forgive you, Nina,” said Almayer, in a dispassionate

What makes Almayer’s face so disturbing to Ford—t he “firmness” of

here could be no more compelling “external” evidence in support of

what happens there.) As for the letter’s substance, Conrad’s distinction

completely white-haired older man—virtually another person—whom the

Whereas the black mate struck people as deliberate, and strangely

in whose work, so I argue in “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” the con-

of that archetypal text, Jim’s project of ultimately erasing the appalling

“a w hole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect

and remained persistently visible with the stronghold of the night

for the theme of self-betrayal and redemption, was overdetermined, I read

till, one day, I perceived with horror that t here w

whiteness often produce identical effects of a blankness that simulta

Dr. Monygham, pulling round in the police-galley, heard the name

I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia,

I have been in some of them, and . . . well, we won’t talk about

crowd. And all t hese beings stared without a murmur, without a

e xperiences of arrival—the cursing voice and the silent gazes—the second

Conrad—who was an even more impassioned admirer of Hudson’s

And gazing with those open, conscious eyes, it seemed to me that

dull-hued, with a chain of irregular black spots or blotches ex-

writing is fully as important as the fevered eliciting of it (whence the electri-

Finally, there is the obsession of so many impressionist texts with up-

My basic supposition is that the sadistic-seeming destruction of the little

hese vivid writers I was now beginning to encounter w

(Wells also refers to his “inherent tendency to get things ruthlessly

“There must be no more of this,” panted Melmount, leaning on

eedless to say, I understand the woman’s face as belonging to the the-

[a back shop] London w ill remain a matter of a central highway, a

I find this a fascinating passage on several counts. First, there is the

an unemotional mind and a great sympathy, a life-long engross-

The second citation comes several pages later:

For London is before all things an incomparable background; it is

London to two different camps of workers, the first expressing them-

At this point it will be instructive to look closely at the most famous of

I don’t know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to

Is it really true that, by expressing his (unconscious) desire to marry

c onsciously pursued. Yet, on a literal reading, Dowell specifically denies

themselves, form a new personality capable of independent

was wrangled about by counsel with all the sorts of dirty-mindedness

And, in speaking to her on that night he w asn’t, I am convinced,

Is all this digression or isn’t it digression? Again I don’t know. You,

My whole attentions, my whole endeavours were to keep poor dear

Why, I remember on that afternoon I saw a brown cow hitch its

“And there,” [Florence] exclaimed with an accent of gaiety, of tri-