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  • What Was Literary Impressionism? by Michael Fried
  • Kate Flint
What Was Literary Impressionism? Michael Fried. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 408. $46.50 (cloth).

Michael Fried's literary impressionism, as he makes quite clear, has nothing to do with Impressionist art. Yet, as one might expect from someone better known as an art historian and critic than as a literary analyst, the themes of looking, of visibility, and of invisibility, are everywhere in his new study. Like all his earlier publications, What Was Literary Impressionism? is a brilliant, exhilarating, and idiosyncratic book.

Fried builds on Joseph Conrad's famous claim, made in the preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897), that "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see!" (quoted in Fried, 12). But Fried's concern is not with a mode of rendition that involves effacing an objective narrator, and that refuses to offer authorial mediation between text and reader—the common understanding of the term. Rather, his answer to the question "what was literary impressionism?" is a firmly post-Derridean one. Through a particular mode of suspicious reading, he calls out recurrent imagery that foregrounds the scene of writing, the making of black marks on a blank white page. Conveying the immediacy of an impression, Fried maintains, must necessarily involve [End Page 617] the immediate experience of writing itself—displaced onto any number of tropes. He locates their recurrence in the work not just of Conrad, but of Ford Madox Ford, W. H. Hudson, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, and in the fiction of Stephen Crane, one of his long-standing interests.

Ground zero, in Fried's theory, is the troubling upturned face of a corpse, as he discussed in "Stephen Crane's Upturned Faces," the second chapter of Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987). This literary analysis followed a discussion of "the proliferation of images of writing in Eakins's pictures," in which Fried collapses easy distinctions between the pictorial and the inscribed, and gave an early indication of how his own writing morphs readily between a concern with the material and the allegorical (What Was Literary Impressionism?, 7). To bury a face is to erase it; to write on a page is to blacken and disfigure it—a form of material violence seen again when Jack London's Martin Eden beats Cheese-Face's face "into a pulp"—a bloody mess that slides by association into the wood-pulp of paper and into pulp fiction (quoted in Fried, 134). The writer's perennial concern with making marks on a page ensures, for Fried, that every mention of a white face (as blank in expression as possible) functions as a surrogate site of writing. Likewise, every plain white wall stands for imaginative possibilities that must be conveyed to the page; fields of snow and thick mists offer both literal indecipherability, and spaces of writerly possibility. One wishes, incidentally, that Fried might have said more about brown faces—it seems to be taken for granted, when occasionally mentioned, that they likewise represent scriptive potential, but in this respect, racial difference is curiously occluded from his analysis.

With what, in Fried's schema, does one make one's writerly marks? With pen and ink, to be sure—and any spreading black mass, like the swarming black dots of humans fleeing the Martian assault in Wells's The War of the Worlds may be read as ink on the page, an interpretation that on occasion is then reinforced by an authorial simile: the Martian Black Smoke itself is a graphic defacement, "as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart" (quoted in Fried, 191). Other surrogate writing implements include shadows, fire, a knife, a bullet (creating a period/full stop), and writhing snakes. Lewis Carroll's Mock Turtle's claim that he learned "reeling and writhing" at school is surely an unacknowledged predecessor here.1

Fried makes some suggestive points about the difference between language and writing—and his attention to...

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