Conrad and Impressionism (review)

"My task," writes Joseph Conrad in the preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," is "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is before all to make you see" (x). These words have long suggested the priority of the technical in Conrad's fiction: the importance of craft in evoking sensation; the importance of experience in generating insight; above all, the priority of what one is actually made to see over how one might more abstractly envision the universe. So important is the point that Conrad makes it again—insisting that for an artist's "appeal to be effective," it "must be" made not philosophically but rather viscerally through a carefully executed "impression conveyed through the senses" (ix, emphasis added). Consequently, when it has come to the question of Conrad's implication by "impressionism"—both as an aesthetic term and as the name of a roughly contemporary historical movement in the European visual arts—critics have generally taken Conrad at his word and pursued the question in a fashion that leads with and privileges issues of craft and form. In a long line of criticism, nearly as old as Conrad himself, an "impressionist" nexus is sought between Conrad and painters like Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and Seurat by putting questions of shared, overlapping, borrowed, or analogous technique first.

It is precisely this assumption John G. Peters rejects and productively moves beyond in his instructive and illuminating book, Conrad and Impressionism. For Peters, the most important "similarities between impressionist art and literature result from similarities of philosophy—not technique" (14). As such, the overarching project of his book is to locate and define "impressionism" at the level of underlying philosophy rather than craft, so that it becomes possible to speak of Conrad and other literary and visual artists meaningfully and collectively as "impressionists" despite—and without erasing or eliding—very different assumptions of medium and technical practice. "Some of the techniques of painting occasionally translate into writing," Peters notes, but the challenge is to avoid "seeing impressionism's techniques determining its underlying philosophical concerns rather than impressionism's underlying philosophical concerns determining its techniques" (16). These philosophical concerns, in turn, generate not only aesthetic but ideological questions, and it is somewhere in between the aesthetic innovations that philosophy inspires, and the critique of "Western civilization" that philosophy demands, that this book locates its "impressionist" Conrad.

Peters begins his ambitious book by situating impressionism historically in the context of a wide array of mid-nineteenth century European disciplines and discourses. Identifying impressionism as "at its core a response to scientific positivism" (13), Peters nevertheless insists that impressionist aesthetics were not simply a wholesale rejection of the scientific methods and empiricist priorities which held such currency at the time. Rather, impressionism consisted of a curious "middle course" which combined an "essentially scientific . . . attempt to reproduce exactly the way human beings apprehend objects of consciousness" with a skeptical recognition that "knowledge always comes [processed] through the medium of human subjectivity" (14). Perception became the key object of raw, rigorous, and unrelenting impressionist attention—but not, qua science, in the interest of generating objective, universal, or systemic laws. Rather it became an occasion to explore all the arbitrary cognitive operations through which "knowledge" asserts itself as a kind of law: i.e., to probe all the operations of mind and all the local, mediating, contextual, and ideological factors that enable individuals to produce a world they do not know as "known." Peters, then, is able to define "impressionism" as that set of aesthetic practices, arising from a specific juncture in discursive history, which, regardless of technical variant, "comprehends all phenomena as filtered through the medium of human consciousness at a particular place and time, thereby representing knowledge as an individual [and hence: uncertain, suspect, and arbitrary] rather than a universal experience" (3). What's especially valuable about this formulation—besides its clarity and precision, and...