Early Modernism: the transition

from realism to Impressionism

Erika Mihálycsa, PhD
• 1884: Joris-Karl Huysmans, À • 1908-10: The English Review
Rebours (ed. Ford Madox Ford; publ.
• 1891: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the Conrad, Hardy, James)
d’Urbervilles; Oscar Wilde, The • 1913: Marcel Proust, À la
Picture of Dorian Gray recherche… (1st vol. publ.);
• 1895: Thomas Hardy, Jude the Andrey Bely, Petersburg
Obscure • 1915: Ford Madox Ford, The
• 1897: Henry James, What Maisie Good Soldier; Virginia Woolf,
Knew / Bram Stoker, Dracula The Voyage Out
• 1899: Joseph Conrad, Heart of • 1916: James Joyce, A Portrait of
Darkness the Artist as a Young Man
• 1907: Joseph Conrad, The Secret • 1920: Katherine Mansfield, Bliss
Agent
Claude Monet, Impression – Sunrise (1st exhibited 1874)
“a corner of nature seen through a temperament” (É. Zola)
 Impressionism: the shift towards the
epistemological dominant
• “The whole technical power of painting depends on
our recovery of what may be called the innocence of
the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception
of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without
consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man
would see them if suddenly gifted with sight” (John Ruskin,
The Elements of Drawing, 1857)

• “Seeing is never just registering. It is the reaction of

the whole organism to the patterns of light that
stimulate the back of our eyes.” (E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion,
1960)
Édouard Manet, Horse Races at Longchamp (1866)
• ‘To argue that the function of literature is to transmit
unaltered a slice of life is to misconceive the fundamental
nature of language itself: the very act of writing is a process
of abstraction, selection, omission, and arrangement.’
(Norman Friedman, Point of View in Fiction, 131)

“To the teacher of languages there comes a time when the

world is but a place of many words and man appears to be
a mere talking animal, not much more wonderful than a
parrot ... words are the great foes of reality.” (Joseph
Conrad, Under Western Eyes, 1911)
 Above all, impressionism was concerned with the act of perception; it drew
attention to the mental processes by which the world was apprehended. By
doing so, it stressed the subjective nature of cognition, thereby moving
away from the relatively stable perspectives of realist fiction, and also
focused on the role of language and form in all narrative acts. The inward
turn, in other words, was connected to a linguistic turn; the question of how
a specifically placed individual made sense of the world was inseparable
from the issue of discovering the discourses and narrative modes through
which human perception might best be articulated and communicated. The
Good Soldier’s first‐person narrator remarks that he does not ‘know how it is
best to put this thing down’ (GS 15) and asks ‘[w]ho in this world knows
anything of any other heart – or of his own?’ (GS 104), Marlow in Heart of
Darkness feels that ‘it is impossible to convey the life ‐sensation of any given
epoch of one’s existence, – that which makes its truth, its meaning – its
subtle and penetrating essence’ (HD 130), and Wells’s protagonist in Tono‐
Bungay announces: ‘It isn’t a constructed tale I have to tell but
unmanageable realities’.
(Andrzej Gasiorek, A History of Modernist Literature, 2015, 56)
 Literary impressionism: the transition
between the “as” and the “as if”
• = “a set of stylistic and formal strategies designed to heighten our
sense of individual perceptual experience”
impression = “the mark of sensory experience on human
consciousness” (Adam Parkes, A Sense of Shock, 2011)
 “’de-realizing’ aestheticization of the real” (F. Jameson)

radicalizes the aesthetic of realism by thematizing its

epistemological conditions (‘author’ suppressed  illusion of
reality uninterrupted)
breaks with the conventions of classical realist narrative
exposes mimetic illusion-building  narrative calls attention to
itself
 Heightened realism: Ford Madox Ford
• “any piece of Impressionism, whether it be prose, or verse, or
painting, or sculpture, is the record of the impression of a
moment”, with the goal to produce “the sort of odd vibration that
scenes in real life really have; you would give your reader the
impression … that he was passing through an experience [with]
the complexity, the tantalisation, the shimmering, the haze, that
life is.” (Ford Madox Ford, “On Impressionism”)
• “Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We in
turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not
narrate but render impressions... the object of the novelist is to
keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists
– even of the fact that he is reading a book.” (Ford Madox Ford, “Conrad”)
The house of fiction has not one window, but a million […] They are but windows at
the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged
doors opening straight upon life. […] at each of them stands a figure with a pair of
eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a
unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct
from every other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing
more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one
seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine.
[…] The spreading field, the human scene, is the “choice of subject”; the pierced
aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the “literary form”;
but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the
watcher – without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the
artist is, and I will tell you of what he has been conscious. Thereby I shall express to
you at once his boundless freedom and his “moral” reference.
(Henry James, Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, 1906-7)
 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884)
A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its
value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression.
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. ...
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole
piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on
your way to knowing any particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to
constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of
education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience,
just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. ...
A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it
lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its
justification in every line.
All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing
itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire
is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the
plasticity of sculpture, to the color of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of
music… And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending
of form and substance […] that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to
play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old
words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage. […]
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. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts:
encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand – and, perhaps, also that
glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
(Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, 1897)
 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”, 1919

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 were 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 symmetrically arranged;
life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent 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 uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with
as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? […]
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace
the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident
scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what
is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
 Henry James / Ford Madox Ford / Joseph
Conrad
• Daisy Miller ; What Maisie Knew / The Good Soldier /
Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim
• focalizers (Winterbourne)/reflectors
• temporal shifts, disrupted continuity, back-and-forth
movement of temporal consciousness
• reaction against Victorian/Edwardian didacticism
• multiplying of points of view
• emphasis on the visual imagination
• refusal of closure; incredulity towards teleological
systems of thought