Literary Impressionism

ELT 43 : 3 2000 tholicism (Harvard University Press, 1997). While interesting, Navarette 's use of the theories of degeneration of Max Nordau (and others) and Cesare Lombroso's theories of criminality do not serve to provide or significantly add any invaluable insights into the literature she discusses. Like other aspects of the volume, these reflections are a testimony to her enormous learning, scholarship, critical insight, and yet all too often her discussions are overwhelmed by a tortured syntax and a convoluted but impressive prose style that in its labyrinthine wanderings serve to obscure rather than illuminate. This deliberation on Machen is but one example : The omissions and ellipses of Machen's story disclose an essentially decompositive strategy, betraying language's constitutional vulnerability to the entropic forces that surround and beset it as they simultaneously induce the emotional and intellectual short-circuits in which reason gives way to elemental human emotions—to fear, anxiety, and shame. Though we suffer an emblematic death in those spaces, however, we are productive in them as well, for we must become the cocreators of an evolving horror that, in blasting speech, renders speechlessness expressive. At such moments and in such spaces, a decompositional urge sits astride the procreative urge. Jorgis BaItruVaitis [sic] put it another way: the deformation that "radically decomposes a body" is also a "formation." The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence has a number of perceptive and valuable insights, and these are well worth consideration. And yet the convoluted, encumbering writing and the impressive academese do not make the study approachable. Earl E. Stevens Emeritus __________________ Rhode Island College Literary Impressionism Todd K. Bender. Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. xiv + 166 pp. $45.00 THIS is a very helpful book. In discussing Ford, Conrad, Rhys and others, Professor Bender has imbedded his analysis of Impressionism in careful thought. After so many silly discussions, it is refreshing to see the concept finally traced back to the psychology/philosophy of (especially ) English thinkers and particularly to David Hume. Impressionism as a term and critical idea begins to make sense to this reviewer. The book clears away misconceptions. Bender lucidly but kindly dismisses those critics who have bogged down in a kind of "soft impression352 BOOK REVIEWS ism." Far too many literary historians have not done justice to Ford, says Bender, because of their "tendency to imagine that Ford's literary impressionism designates merely a vague parallel between the art of the novel at the end of the Victorian era and soft, romanticized, sentimental impressionist canvases like those painted by the early Renoir or Mary Cassatt (1845-1926). Literary impressionism does not resemble these soft-focus studies." No, the Impressionism Bender treats in analyzing especially the thought and novels of Ford is far more serious and is connected to our understanding of perception and the manner in which the mind receives impressions of outer life. Here his discussion of Hume is markedly apt. In his third chapter, Bender places impressionism in the history of ideas and relates it most definitely to Hume's philosophy and to Bergson 's concepts of vitalism and duration, not to "soft paintings." As with Hume, he sees that impressionism relates to "those perceptions which enter [the human mind] with the most force . . . [and which] we may name impressions." So, for Bender, the novel "is an imaginative projection of the way a particular... organism registers its physical surroundings and responds to external stimuli." Hence, the forerunners of modern impressionists, Zola, Maupassant, and Flaubert, intended to be "realist" by "recording impressions of the outer world as they impinge on a particular mind." Bender's connecting of impressionism to the impact of perceptions of life on the central figures, the narrators, the readers of novels, may have an unrecognized likeness to the concept of effect to some of his readers, just as his and Ford's use of the ideas of collage and juxtaposition may seem to echo the concept of context if sharpened. Nevertheless, imbedding his discussion in analysis of Bergson, Hume, Erik H. Erickson and others is fresh and very persuasive...