A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing by Adam Parkes (review)

The great dispute between John Ruskin and James McNeill Whistler was in effect a conflict between two very different theories of justice. Whistler’s art (and his defense of it) defined justice in terms of authentic personal response. Ruskin stressed shared public judgment. For Whistler, doing justice meant achieving fidelity to individual perception, but Ruskin took issue with Whistler’s self-absorption, asserting social imperatives. Adam Parkes makes this distinction to explain a key moment in the history of impressionism. He notes that the conflict between Whistler and Ruskin was not a conflict between subjective impressionism and its objective alternative. The two men actually advocated two different forms of impressionism—two different ways impressions could link personal feeling to public life. Their great dispute was a kind of family quarrel, produced by a tension within impressionism itself. The difference is important to Parkes’s account because it helps prove that tensions within impressionism had historic significance, entering history in such a way as to shape it. Not a mode of aesthetic detachment, impressionism provided frameworks for public reckoning. How to serve justice was just one question raised by impressionism as it became not only a register of historical experience but itself an historical sense.

Even if Parkes had sought only to historicize impressionism by finding its sources in particular public events, A Sense of Shock would have been a valuable book. As he notes, there has been a tendency to treat impressionism as “effectively disengaged from the culture that produced it” rather than “a product of its time and place” (5, 4). But Parkes does more than put impressionism in context. He argues that “impressionist writing might be understood both as a record of historical experience and as a rhetoric seeking to define the manner in which that history is to be imagined” (4). A Sense of Shock does link impressionist aesthetics to particular events, but it transcends that simple historicism to offer a complex theory of the historical discourses generated by the problem of the impression. As Parkes explains in his summary of the critical tradition on this subject, impressions “inhabit some fluid, fluctuating, and in the end, unspecifiable zone somewhere between human subjectivity and the domain of objects” (3). Making that familiar zone a historical realm, Parkes takes the first full view of its territory, explaining impressionism in exciting new ways by theorizing an impressionist historicism.

That impressionist historicism enables an inspired reconsideration of the influence of Walter Pater. How Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, George Moore, and many other disciples received and revised Pater’s impressionism has been the subject of many studies, but Parkes transforms the whole question of Pater’s reception by arguing that receptivity itself changed as a result of it. After Pater, receptivity took on the character of a certain kind of impressionability; it became a form of homoerotic yielding and therefore a focus for revisionist resistance. In other words, the pattern of Pater’s influence proceeded according to the logic of the impression, its history shaped by an impressionist confusion of subject and object, self and other. The course of history also follows impressionist patterns in the development of Moore’s nationalism and Virginia Woolf’s feminist history of art. Moore turned to impressionism in reaction against naturalism but also against nationalism, and his version of impressionism thereby developed a “fugitive” relationship to nationalist culture (98). Woolf knew that the progress from impressionism to post-impressionism presumed commitments to heroic masculine abstraction and she therefore favored a return, despite Roger Fry, to impressionism’s more subversive tensions between abstraction and representation, self and other. The social implications of her feminist revisionism depended upon impressionism’s openness to shocks that undermine the security of subjectivity.

Best of all, however, is Parkes’s chapter on the relationships among impressionism, terrorism, and journalism in the work of Joseph Conrad...