Literary

Impressionism

Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism

and Modernist Aesthetics

Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, England, 2001(2004)
“Fiction is an impression.”
The effort to “know one’s impression as it really is” was made the key to aesthetic
criticism.

Walter Pater – Preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)

“A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, direct impression of life; that, to
begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of
the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless
there is freedom to feel and say.”

Henry James – ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884)

“Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a
kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of
consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very
atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative, much more when it
happens to be that of a man of genius – it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it
converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”
Henry James – ‘The Art of Fiction’
“A novel is an impression.”

Thomas Hardy
“[…] art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of
justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one,
underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to show in its forms, in its colours, in its
light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter, and in the facts of life what of each is
fundamental, what is enduring and essential –their one illuminating and convincing
quality – the very truth of their existence.”
Joseph Conrad – 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, make you feel – it is before all, to make you see. That, and no more, and it is
everything.”

Joseph Conrad – Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus

“Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this.’ 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.”

Virginia Woolf – ‘Modern Fiction’

◦ The impression is by no means any merely sensuous, superficial, or insubstantial
perception. These writers invoke it, the impression is nothing less than the name for
the aesthetic moment itself, a new sign for the old bridge between art and life. (13)
◦ Impressionism meant rendering life as it really seemed to individual subjective
experience. It meant making fiction “plunge into consciousness” and “fuse the
transcendent subjectivity of romanticism and the omniscient objectivity of realism”
toward a kind of Utopian compensation for modern alienation. (13)
◦ ‘Impression’ is never simply a feeling, a thought, or a sensation. It partakes, rather, of
a mode of experience that is neither sensuous nor rational, neither felt nor thought,
but somewhere in between. (16)
◦ Impressions are empirical, imaginative, and painterly; they are everything from visual
to emotional to rational; and even within such categories and discourses, they connote
both the imprint that lasts and the feeling that passes, error and insight, authenticity
and irresponsibility. (16)
◦ […] erasing the line between superficial appearances and deep knowledge, the
impression brings richer connections. (17)
o [Fiction] makes surfaces show depths, makes fragments suggest wholes, and
devotes itself to the undoing of such distinctions. (1)

o If the impression promised totality, it did so against the will of distinctions dividing
high from low, male from female, civilized from savage. (2)
o Impressionism is a troubled theory of perceptual totality.

o It comes between romantic unities and modernist fragmentation.

Technique of the literary Impressionists

◦ Pictorial descriptions of shifting light and colour;

◦ Subjective accounts of sensuous experience;
◦ Transmission of immediate and evanescent feelings.
◦ The impression is an experience freed from external imperfection, attached to its true
counterpart in another time and place, and, in that connection, a paradise.

◦ The impression brings immortality.

◦ An impression is an experience of a present moment that is also an experience of a
distant one, “so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and I was made
to doubt whether I was in the one or the other.” (Marcel Proust, ‘Time Regained’ in In
Search of Lost Time) (5)
◦ [The Impression] is neither sensation nor idea; it combines present and past
experience, connects the mind to the body, and, in such mediations, attains the
immediate illumination more lastingly meaningful than the most timeless concept. (6)
Impressionist painting and literature

◦ The Impressionisms of painting and literature share an interest in subjective

perception. This shift [of focus] from object to subject, with its emphasis on point of
view, seems to have entailed in both arts attention to evanescent effects, radical
fidelity to perceptual experience and a consequent inattention to what had been art’s
framing concerns. (45)

◦ Freedom, informality, and emphasis on the experience of the senses enables the
artist to make art more perfectly reflect lived experience. (45)
◦ The connections [between arts] suggest a “far-reaching cultural phenomenon” called
“impressionist culture”, in which the shared efforts of figures from Monet to Woolf
are the style of a whole period’s perception of reality. (47)

BUT
Impressionism in painting
◦ Painters rendering impressions define them as
visual sensations. Seeking impressions meant
bracketing everything except immediate visual
perceptions. The impression therefore moved
aesthetic perception toward “sensation”. (49)
Impressionism in literature
◦ For writers, by contrast, the impression
moves experience in the opposite direction.
Pater, James, and Woolf invoke the impression
to argue against precursors […] who focus too
exclusively on direct perceptual experience.
(49)