Henry James, Impressionism and the Public by Daniel Hannah (review)

In this meticulous account of Henry James’s impressionism, Daniel Hannah invites us to divert our focus from James’s relationship to painterly impressionism and to concentrate instead upon his fashioning of impressionism as a predominantly narrative device. By means of a nuanced investigation, Hannah argues that the impression, for James, is above all a threshold position, an “interspace” (13) from which the writer was able to represent his often conflicted and certainly ambivalent relationship to the public and the ways in which it impinged upon the private and his aesthetics. Taking his cue from Leo Bersani’s phrase “intimate detachment” to describe key impressionist moments in James’s novels, Hannah traces the trajectory of James’s (and his characters’) impressibility throughout his career and the deep and abiding struggle with the narrative and aesthetic tensions that emerge when the writer is paradoxically and “generative[ly]” (xi) “engrossed in yet distanced from the lives of others” (ix). As he succinctly phrases his project in the preface to the book:

On one hand, James envisages an ideally impressionable author … standing aloof at the threshold of a fascinating yet repellant mania for publicity, carving out some sort of extrarepresentational space that might escape the pitfalls of the marketplace. On the other, his fictional treatments of artist-figures and artful narrators often negotiate uneasy recognitions of the terrain shared by the novelist and the publicist, the artist and the journalist as impressionable subjects.

(xiii) [End Page E-5]

Hannah launches his discussion with an impressively researched account of what he calls the “genealogy” (1) of the relationship between the impression and the public. Beginning with the etymological observation that the impression is structured both by the power to make and receive an imprint (significant, given James’s repeated self-positioning as one who must both absorb and represent impressions), Hannah then demonstrates, via Hume, Locke, and Habermas, the ways in which the “doubled quality” (2) of the impression becomes central to enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought about privacy and public. This genealogy is followed by a reading of “The Art of Fiction” as “the closest James came to a manifesto for impressionist style” (6), wherein we can see James “navigating deftly between self-effacement and self-promotion” (7), and Partial Portraits—particularly the essay on Maupassant—in which James tests the influence of the reading public and its effects on the novelist’s liberty.

Hannah’s focus on narrative impressionism notwithstanding, he offers in chapter 1 a comprehensive account of James’s attitude toward the Impressionists, demonstrating how the writer’s opinions evolved throughout his career—from dismissal of the work shown at Georges Durand-Ruel’s second exhibition at the Salon des Refuses in 1876 to his celebration of Manet, Degas, Monet, and Whistler in The American Scene in 1905. For James, and for Hannah, impressionism is not simply a technique by means of which the fleeting visual moment is represented but also a discursive engagement between the observer/recorder and his or her audience, emerging from an increasingly spectacular society. Hannah maps James’s impressionist evolution contrapuntally, weaving together the ideas tested in James’s critical writing and showing how these are reflected, qualified, and complicated in his fiction about visual artists. In James’s fiction, Hannah observes the writer “grappl[ing] with the specter of painterly impressionism as a double for his own literary enterprise” and argues that “reading and partaking in the reception and circulation of experiments in visual art proved a productive force in James’s gradual theorization of his own aesthetic and its place in the public sphere” (18). Hannah offers careful readings of two texts that feature pointed critiques of Impressionist artists (The Reverberator and “Flickerbridge”) and then moves on to an account of two stories described by James as “impressionistic” (27) in their narrative form: “The Private Life” and “The Coxon Fund.” In these, Hannah argues, James can be seen to be offering a kind of literary impressionism through which he exposes a “tense negotiation” between...