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H. Peter StowelI, Literary Impressionism, James and Chekhov. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980. 277 pp. $17.00. Particularly in their later works, Chekhov and James sketched scenes in which a deliberate blurring of sensory impressions created effects analogous to the tonal play of Monet's "Water Lily" series or Debussy's Nocturnes. These moments of perceptual fluidity have seemed striking precisely because they stand In contrast to the fastidious "realism" conventionally thought to typify each writer's fiction. Professor StowelI's book challenges that view, however, in advancing the thesis that a movement from "narrow realist tendencies" toward mature Impressionism characterizes the essential literary development of Chekhov and James. This study undertakes a formidable set of announced tasks: "to define the multiform characteristics of impressionism, to describe the affinities between the painting and the literature, to chronicle the growth of Impressionism in Chekhov and James, to offer an impressionistic reading of each work, and to project impressionism's impact on modernism" (p. 9). In practice a formal expression of the evanescent and impalpable, impressionism likewise proves to be an elusive critical concept, which Professor StowelI seeks to elaborate through a montage of definitions and redefinitions. He explains "literary impressionism" as "a temporal process depicting both a spatial and a temporal act. Time durational Iy links the fragments of spatlalized perception, and consciousness spatial¡zes the flow of time into separate frozen instants" (p. 15). The "aesthetic goal" of this method is said to be "the fusion of form and meaning through the portrayal of human consciousness compressed into a fluid network of brilliantly concentrated sensory impressions" (p. 17). Its "dominant thread" appears in "the paradoxical union of Bergson's durée and phenomenological time and space" (p. 18); Its "hallmark" in "temporally extended frozen moments of spatialized time that dissolve and return to the flow of durational time" (p. 19); and its function (in semiotic terms) in "the dissolving of syntagmatic units with paradigmatic indices" (p. 39). Whether these formulations elucidate or obscure the nature of impressionism perhaps depends on the reader's tolerance for the language of phenomenological criticism. One consequence of such terminological inflation, however, ¡s a tendency to regard Impressionism as a concept virtually indistinguishable from "modernism." Professor StowelI regards impressionism as a global response to "the confusion of chance, the chaos of unknowabi I i ty, and the crisis of change" (p. 16); to "the ambiguous and ultimately unknowable surfaces of external reality" (p. 17); to "the multiple and ever-changing surfaces of the relative and ambiguous modern world" (p. 28). While allowing that impressionism arose from "neither theoretical constructs nor rigid ideology," the author nevertheless leaps from method to metaphysics in defining a "pr ismat ica I I y impressionistic world" of "individualized sensory perception, epistemological indeterminacy, relativism, ambiguity, fragmentation, and surfaces" (p. 16). In short, literary impressionism swallows up a vast range of ideas associated with modern experimental or absurdist writing. Its omnivorous quality reveals itself In the book's final line: "Literary Impressionists discovered modernism" (p. 244). Perhaps only an inclusive critical framework would permit a pairing of writers so different in technique and sensibility as James and Chekhov. The author's rationale for this arrangement reveals a curious logic: "That Chekhov and James seem not to have been aware of each other nor conscious of anything remotely resembling impressionism in literature makes it all the more interesting to frame them in a study of literary impressionism" (p. 7). However "interesting" this approach may be, it lacks the inherent fascination of a direct, substantial relationship; the identified parallels seem coincidental and generalized, the result of "something in the wind" rather than the impact of a specific, shared influence. Devoting separate sections to each writer (and considerably more attention to Chekhov than to James), Professor StowelI isolates a set of texts by each to illustrate the accretion of impressionistic tendencies. Through a phenomenological perspective derived, apparently, from Merleau-Ponty and Poulet, the author focuses principally upon sensory details, temporal references, and indices of change (the "basic theme" of impressionism). 272 His discussion of Chekhov treats roughly fifteen tales and two later plays—The Cherry Orchard and The Three S Isters; the key to...

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