“On Impressionism”

Miscellany

• Historical Note: Impressionism begins with Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus
• He says that he wasn’t aware he was part of this group, the Impressionists, but people have called him that for so long that he has finally accepted the label
  • Evidence of group-ism being less aware, less intentionally formed by artist, than we thought
• “I am a perfectly self-conscious writer.”
• During his youth, he couldn’t find any literary guidance.
  • only Romantics who relied on inspiration
  • only Victorians who judged art by morals
  • But Today, You Young Folks have people to talk to about art and art as craft, rather than some kind of moral police
• Cubism: it “has a quite proper contempt of nature.”
• Weird stuff about the laborer
  • The “peasant intelligence” of the gardener or farm-worker, the thatcher, etc
    • These people will be open to strange events: witchcraft or strange natural events
    • These people are truly open, he says, because they aren’t trammeled by conventions or arguments
    • “All these remembrances he will have in his mind, not classified under any heading of social reformers, or generalised so as to fulfill a fancied moral law.”
  • Unlike the city person consumed by the need to be the same as everyone else
  • Cf his portrait of artist as a “skilled workman”

The Argument

• Showing, not telling
  • Use images (physical details, speech, actions) and impressions
  • You don’t need to tell everything for reader to understand what’s going on
    • “why, if you can see all these things for yourself, should Hogarth bother to put them down on paper?” on the 4-line picture of night-watchman and his dog
    • Also, doesn’t get you essential understanding: his studies of Henry VII made him know reams and reams of info, but “But I really know—so delusive are reported facts—nothing whatever. Not one single thing!”
      • The truth impression is Maupassant’s one line: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a door.”
• Art reflects one’s ego
  • Impressionism is the way one person thinks, thus expresses personality
  • Gives you his experience and observations, not others’
• First impression is hard to efface, so consider effects of your passages on readers
  • “The impression is as hard and as definite as a tin-tack.”
    • Cf Hulme “beauty in small, dry things” (“Romanticism and Classicism”)
• Impressionism founded on psychology
  • Not about quantitative, objective, or scientific, “not quite correct”
    • References Beatrice Webb as the way not to go
    • “The Impressionist must always exaggerate.”
  • Not about perfect naturalism, but instead the way it appears in your mind in a single moment
    • Thus similar to Pound on Imagism
• Impressionism about momentary and simultaneous
  • Not about causal links…
• But it is designed perfectly
  • At end, “design of net-work” is revealed at end
• Designed “to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass”
  • Anti-objective
• Not “correlated chronicle” to “produce illusion of reality”
• One small idea or remark can contain “the whole tragedy of life”
  • It sounds interesting, and then next it convinces
• Audience: not just intellectuals
  • The wrong audience: for whom “passion only becomes respectable when you have killed it.”
  • You must have audience with open, virgin minds, not people who’ve already decided about you and your work
    • They can’t have preconceptions that color their interpretation of the world
    • They must accept the queerness of life, the unexpected, the strange
  • Art is for the audience: it is not selfish at all
    • The artist gets very little in return
    • You must create a convincing picture.
      • Will risk having boring parts, so you have to make that up by being interesting too
    • You have to interest and surprise the reader! You have to use all the devices of a prostitute to keep the reader attentive
      • Almost dada-ist: “A picture should come out of its frame and seize the spectator.”
• What’s an impression?
  • The fruits of a single person’s observation
  • Momentary: only one moment
    • that’s what he means by “rigid unities:” “impression of a moment; it is not a sort of rounded, annotated record of a set of circumstances”
    • Naturally, the thinker can be in a couple of places at once in his mind, so you could show the crazy complications of consciousness
  • Has to be set up interminably for: a huge frame must be made to situate the impression
    • “for the purpose of the proper bringing out of every slight Impressionist sketch the artist would need an altogether disproportionately enormous frame.”
• That frame isn’t strictly impressionist
  • “can only get his strongest effects by using beforehand a great deal of what one may call non-Impressionism.”
  • So it’s not a 100% solid genre, but Impressionism is a streak running through an Impressionist work, but therefore can include supposedly realist techniques
• What is the impression like?
  • Must be interesting
  • It tries to “produce an illusion of reality”
    • Avoid addressing the reader because that will ruin your illusion
      • This statement complicates any argument about self-conscious writing!
  • “the sort of odd vibration that scenes in real life really have”
  • “Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass—through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.”
• It is kind of like a symbol
  • The impression should resonate with the rest of the person’s life, so it kind of represents the whole larger deal
  • But it’s a real life symbol, not a fake one or one imported by author as unrelated metaphor
• Ultimately, you bring together all the stuff that appears unrelated or digressive: “and the whole pattern of the carpet, the whole design of the net-work will be apparent.”
• What does he distinguish Impressionists from?
  • Tennyson
  • Decadents (264)
  • Cubism
• Who does he like?
  • Futurists
  • Conrad
  • Flaubert (cattle show scene, view from window)
  • Maupassant
  • The young folks who are experimenting in all art forms
• Purposes of Art
  • Not to influence audience
  • Not to improve audience
• Artist as Skilled Workman
  • Happens in concluding paragraph of essay
  • As a craftsman
  • Someone “doing his job with drill or chisel or mallet.”
  • You won’t get much out of it (neither will the worker with the chisel!)
  • Merely the satisfaction of making something well.

“The Unemployed,” from The English Review

A review of a book that actually depicts the poor

Ideas

• Poor man as the great unknown
• Yet pervasive: “omnipresent. He invades us, he fills us with fears, with misgivings, and he makes our hearts bleed.”
  • “The poor are breaking in on us everywhere.”
    • As if they broke up a fun party!
  • In the last great unemployment crisis, “our mothers were driving to the city” and “it was with great difficulty that they escaped with their lives.”
• Points out silence of literature about the unemployed

Quotes and Interpretations

• He’s quite intolerant and scared
• Invasion rhetoric similar to that of Marx’s Manifesto about lurking
  Communism
• “What, for instance, do we know of the life of the poor man? He has never been voiced.”

Random Ideas

• Ford tends to see the new in the terms of the old, though he still says the new stuff is genuinely new anyway
  • Futurists and Cubist really about conveying emotion
  • Likes imagism
    • Calls Imagists “realists” because they show “concrete objects” to produce emotion
• Calls the “perpetual torment” of the artist “to seek for new forms.” (153)
• Power of description: “Any very clear and defined rendering of any material object has power to convey to the beholder or to the reader a sort of quivering of very definite emotions.”
  • Reflects “impermanence of matter” (156)
• Free verse is “vehicle for the expression of personality” (157)
  • Any careful sentence you say or write is the most characteristic thing you could ever do—even if you try to suppress your real emotion or thoughts, it still expresses you
  • Any given structure will rob you of “a certain amount” of the writer’s personality
    • Auden liked that!
• Yeats
  • Suspicious of the Yeats of the 1890s
    • Too affected, not natural
    • Always explained too much
    • “seem to dispense across this city of London a sort of aura I found exceedingly irritating”
    • “Mr. Yeats was somewhere about, probably leaning on a mantelpiece with his face to the ceiling”
      • “when he wasn’t leaning against a manelpiece—reclining by the side of some lake or other, and then arising and going to some other lake.”
    • What does he mean? Yeats is too self-conscious “about his attitude.”
    • Why should you be happy with a person who says that all beauty and wonder are elsewhere, are gone from here and now?
  • But now he’s okay with Yeats
    • All of the Celticism is like: “it was as if the saviour of a country should choose to wear a shocking bad hat.” (164)
    • Yeats as a theatre director
    • Now he engages with the real world today: good.
• Blast
  • BLAST 1 is “mostly larks”
• from “Stocktaking: Towards a Revaluation of English Literature”
  • “It is obvious that these years of the revision of all values must witness a revision of literary estimates.” (241)
  • Axiom
    • Each artist is an axiom: a proficient of a specific technical aspect of one medium, independent of “liking” the work or not
    • “What’s the use of talking about Whistler? Whistler is an axiom!”
• In a review of Dostoevsky’s An Honest Thief
  • “Novel-writing is the youngest, as it is the Cinderella, of all the arts. For this reason it is the only art that is supremely worth pursuing.”
    • It is all free possibility, can’t be exhaused
  • History: begins with tales of heroes; sometimes you get a realistic background (Smollett); but then Richardson founds a school that everyone else is the descendant of: Stendhal, Maupassant, Flaubert, and finally Conrad and James
  • Conrad and James: the only 19th c writers who demand “serious attention”
    • Sure, there are great books (“a book that is great because of the information it conveys or of the characters that it sketches, or of its author’s temperament”) but they aren’t “consummate novels,” and they don’t actually have “the power convey a sense of reality” (191)
  • Recommendation: use Dostoevsky as your model: he does have the “slice of life” background, but lets the “vast empire” of the “kingdoms of their own minutely examined psychologies” behind them
    • It’s a marriage of realism and more modern inward turn