Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (review)

Imagine an academic nightmare in which, with no room for negotiation, you are handed a book contract, generous terms, no particular deadline, on the all-too-familiar conjunction of two vast topics. What thudding conjunction could be more daunting and done-to-death than Stage Spectacle and the Elizabethan Court, you ask? Or Romanticism and the Revolutionary Impulse? Or Victorian Fiction and Capitalist Ideology? Yes, you guessed it—there's only one worse topic, has been for years: Impressionism and Modern Fiction. Even tillers in the field have long agreed that the turf has grown arid and dusty—except for the quicksand of treacherous intermedial comparisons. Jesse Matz breaks new ground only by remapping the entire binary terrain. Literary impressionism, not its attenuated and confounding links with painting, is his express concern. And not modernist fiction as a heterogeneous experimental practice so much as the deliberated aesthetic theory, both outlined and narratively performed, that lies behind it.

More than this, the specific binary under adjustment concerns the definition of the "impression" itself. Within this elusive notion, Matz locates a definitive pivot from subjectivity to objectivity, hence from the cognitive to the cultural. In this light the impression of something can impress that something into service within a hierarchical relation often gravitating toward sexual and social difference for its figuration. Or for its allegorization, as Matz would so revealingly have it. Such is the double accomplishment of his study in attempting the updating of aesthetics for social critique: that he keeps the momentum of narration in rigorous link with the thematic agendas that drive a convincing majority of early modernist novels. His book shows how the appetitive nature of the impression thrives on an otherness it cannot subsume without an effacing violence. At the same time, it shows how the anxious recognition of this fact by the proponents of the impressionist method, once faced up to, is worked out in the novels themselves—where, one may say, the danger of allegorizing the world gets allegorized.

In the dyadic bond of impressionable subjectivity and the objects of its response, Matz negotiates the impinging dichotomies with a synthesizing rigor. Between sensation and idea, feeling and understanding, life and knowledge, percept and concept, the sensuous and the generalized, the concrete and the abstract, flux and fixity, immanent experience and transcendent meaning, existence and essence, stimulus and interpretation, sight and insight—and feeding on such "betweenness"—falls the impression per se, where initial polarities dissolve in a reciprocal transformation of their defining terms. The problem comes when it is another's lived body surrendered to the receptive mind: a common scapegoat ritual of the mode. Pursued not only with dialectical finesse but with genuine critical pressure, impressionism emerges as a theory of liminal moments, conceptual interstices, and even broached mediations that—here the plot thickens—grow contaminated by difference, power, distance, and exclusion within the social setting of capitalist modernity.

Tracking the philosophical lineage of the "impression" from Locke to the esemplastic unity of romanticism—and its defaults—on through late-Victorian aestheticism, Matz is able to score at times a direct hit against entrenched critical positions, as when he rethinks Ian Watt's emphasis on epistemological blockage in Conrad by cogently shifting terms from skepticism's unknowable to impressionism's ineffable. Bringing unexpected texts into the orbit of canonical masterworks in the impressionist mode, Matz also recovers for new scrutiny such underdiscussed short works as Pater's "Apollo in Picardy," Ford's Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall." With the help of this widened lens, Matz makes a shrewd and original case for what amounts to a politics of embodied vision across a wide swath of modernist fiction.

He does so in part by unearthing the ways impressionism's place in the modernist struggle between high and low forms depends on the gender and class biases—as well as the reimagined filiations—that attend numerous...