Conrad and Impressionism by John G. Peters (review)

the shift he documents needs to be theorized more explicitly in the context of a renewed interest in and commitment to ethically-inflected models of literary and critical practice. Perhaps, that is, contemporary historical novels from the last decade remain dissatisfied with postmodernist skepti­ cism, and they want instead to insist, as writers such as Rohinton Mistry and Shyam Selvadurai have done, that we aren’t entirely prepared to give up on truth. Now Wyile, by his own admission, opts not to include consid­ eration of Canadian writers who, like Mistry and Selvadurai, write about the histories of other nations. Their example, however, seems germane here not only because their novels have the capacity to augment the reach of Wyile’s arguments about Canadian nation-building, but also because their accounts of atrocities and suffering provide an altered sense of just what’s at stake, ethically, in the writing of historical fiction. Ajay Heble University of Guelph Works Cited Granatstein, J. L. Who Killed Canadian History? Toronto: Harper Collins Canada, 1998. John G. Peters. Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. £45.00; u.s. $54.95". Each generation of scholars remakes Conrad in its own image. In place of the Conrad riven with contradictions beloved of postcolonial and post­ structuralist scholars, John G. Peters in his study of Conrad and impres­ sionism presents us with a more unified novelist. Peters gives us almost a communitarian Conrad, always conscious of the limits of instrumental rationality, nationalism, and imperialism, and above all concerned with community and humanity in an uncertain world. In ordering his discussion, Peters chooses to examine Conrad’s texts synchronically rather than diachronically. A general introductory chapter on literary impressionism produces a consciously limited working defini­ tion. Central to Peters’ argument is that connections between impression­ ism in the visual arts and in literature are best made through exploring how 172 |Holden philosophical commonalities influence technique, rather than beginning with superficial technical parallels. Succeeding chapters exemplify this approach through their focus on epistemological questions in Conrad’s fiction: objectivity, subjectivity, the apprehension of time, and finally the possibility of ethical action when faced with an absence of moral absolutes. In order to extend his analysis, Peters makes further use of smaller-scale taxonomies in each chapter, and then shows how elements within these taxonomies interact through specific fictional techniques. The chapter on temporality, for instance, begins with a description of “human time, mechanical time, and narrative time” as “three different temporal rep­ resentations” in Conrad’s fiction (86), and the remainder of the chapter explores the manner in which Conrad’s achronological narrative technique and use of multiple narrators make connections, contrasts, and disjunc­ tions between these three aspects of time. This is in turn tied to the epis­ temological concern of Conrad’s privileging of individual apprehension over “artificially imposed systems” of thought. The carefully subdivided grid of analysis that Conrad and Impression­ ism places over Conrad’s oeuvre has some advantages. While arbitrary, the divisions Peters chooses are never unreasonable, and indeed allow fine discriminations in reading which sharpen our understanding of Conrad’s texts. The author’s creative adaptation of Jules Laforgue’s notion of “primi­ tive perception,” for example, enables him to produce a reading of a key passage of Heart ofDarkness which improves upon Ian Watt’s influential concept of “delayed decoding.” When Marlow initially apprehends the arrows in the attack on the steamboat as sticks, Peters notes, this is not so much a perceptual mistake, as Watt would argue, but rather a separation of a normally naturalized series of steps in the process of apprehension. Conrad’s use of this technique hints at a larger epistemological argu­ ment— that meaning does not inhere in an object but rather is constructed through a complex, culturally mediated process of reception. In addition, Peters’ clear focus avoids the compulsion to reference every single work of criticism which frequently mars monographs which are, like this one, derived from a doctoral dissertation. Conrad and Impressionism proceeds smoothly about its task, and the reader never needs to engage with dense theoretical discussion. Peters’ decisions in framing the study, however, perhaps ultimately sacrifice more than they gain. While...