Authors: William H. Gass
Impressionism, when applied as a method to the memoir, suggests the supremacy of sincerity and standpoint over objective truthfulness and historical fact, and means, in fiction, the rendering of a withdrawn fictive consciousness rather than any publicly thrown-open world of agony and act. It is the subjective side of things that counts; it is the subject’s idiosyncrasies, the subject’s special situation, that is central. If you like, it is Dickens moved indoors. “This is called egotism,” Ford says, “but, to tell the truth, I do not see how impressionism can be anything else.” On the other hand, the author must be at pains to remove every trace and presence of the guiding pen. Thoughts and actions must seem to be shown, not told. Because life does not narrate, Ford argues,
there should be no narrator, unless the narrator is differentiated from the author and made a member of the cast. The reason for this recommendation is that the illusion of life is lost if the conductor’s hand can be observed in the midst of an imperious wave. When we can see, quite plainly, a pipe in the picture, we do not care to be told that “this is not a pipe.” We know it’s not a pipe, and we’re not about to puff it. Ford forgets that our knowing that something is an illusion does not necessarily disturb our enjoyment of it—on the contrary. What is annoying is having our elbow jogged, our ribs nudged. The magician does not say, each time: “Now let me show you another
trick
.”
And consider what happens when we do make the narrator a member of the cast: his authority diminishes; suspicions shade his figure; reliability is lost; and we are uncomfortably set adrift in the middle of
The Good Soldier
, which might be an instance of Impressionism #8, but hardly otherwise.
I have given some reasons, already, why I don’t think illusions are created or destroyed by the methods Ford approves of or warns us against; but the principal problem for the impressionist, who wishes to create “an impression of life” rather than of something else, is that the practice of impressionism is not suited to it. We know only one consciousness directly—our own—and we do not share that knowledge with anyone else. It is the world of objects and actions which we share, and which we feel we know as others know them. Madame Bovary is a person to us the way our aunts and uncles are, and we prefer to see her from the outside just as we see and know those aunts and uncles. Their reality is not diminished for us just because we cannot look straight into their thoughts and smell their smells. Actually, such a project is odd, the idea belongs to the “fantastic,” and the ability would be unnatural. The only way you could make another’s consciousness seem at all real to me (in this illusory sense) would be to cause that person’s thoughts and feelings to jump around in the same sudden inexplicable manner mine jump, establishing a kind of dynamic similarity (which is what Ford’s example purports to do); but I would be
happier encountering another consciousness as I usually encounter it: indirectly and by inference from appearance and behavior. We must not forget who the writers were who were so successful in creating for their readers a vivid, richly populated world: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dickens, are writers who accomplish this most wonderfully, writers like Trollope and Thackeray. Painters like Velásquez, not Sisley or Pissarro, or like Vermeer, not Monet. If you want the stench of reality and the sweet illusion of life, their way is the way to get it. Write, for example, like this:
But there sat Tietjens, in his grey tweeds, his legs apart, lumpish, clumsy, his tallowy, intelligent-looking hands drooping inert between his legs, his eyes gazing at a coloured photograph of the port of Boulogne beside the mirror beneath the luggage rack. Blond, high-coloured, vacant apparently, you couldn’t tell what in the world he was thinking of. The mathematical theory of waves, very likely, or slips in someone’s article on Arminianism. [
Some Do Not
, from
Parade’s End
, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960, p. 15.]
You give the page a few blows of prose, and it will remember even if the reader will not: “The nose like a pallid triangle on a bladder of lard! That was Tietjens’ face.” Much of the time, as far as Ford’s own literary practice goes, his impressionism seems to have consisted simply of intercutting, time shifts, and rows of dots … while the sort of impressionism his theory recommends is more satisfactorily instanced by passages like this one from Dorothy Richardson (from “The Tunnel” section of
Pilgrimage
, vol. 2, New York: Popular Library, 1976, p. 96; Miriam has just had her stroll interrupted by a man who has approached her with dubious intentions):
Miriam marched angrily forward with shaking limbs that steadied themselves very quickly … the night had become suddenly cold; bitter and penetrating; a north-east wind, of course. It was frightfully cold, after the warm room; the square was bleak and endless; the many façades were too far off to
keep the wind away; the pavement was very cold under her right foot; that was it; the broken sole was the worry that had been trying to come up; she could talk with it; it would not matter if the weather kept dry … an unright gait, hurrying quickly away across the moonlit sheen; just the one she had summoned up courage and anger to challenge, was not so bad as the others … they were not so bad; that was not it; it was the way they got in the way … figures of men, dark, in dark clothes, presenting themselves, calling attention to themselves and the way they saw things, mean and suggestive, always just when things were loveliest.
Yet even here there is not enough diversionary activity, and Miriam’s worry about the broken sole should have simply “come up” without any explanation or remark. The words in this passage have a habit of repeating themselves, not a trait followers of Flaubert could approve; but why should Flaubert be the model for an impressionist (as Ford claims he is)?
There is reason to believe that the impression we are pursuing is really an effect of the prose upon the mind of the reader; that if, for instance, the writer writes of what can properly be called “real life,” then the reader will receive its impression, in which case the impression will not be in the score or on the canvas or the page but in the beholder’s eye or ear or head. There is further reason to believe that, since the impression we are to sustain or endure is usually “of” life (a life that has been presumably unable, at least while unaided by the arts, to have much effect), writing will be the act, not of writing, really, but of impressing life upon someone alive. Sometimes the word “illusion” is used as if writing worked upon the reader the way those lines rushing off to vanish in a pure point work upon the viewer of the painting—a little triangulation and it’s there: a boat upon the Thames. Impressionism is thus a branch of rhetoric. In order to move the masses, it studies the psychology of the masses. Yet I doubt that Ford had any such thing in mind. In any case, how can impressionism of this sort succeed
when life itself has failed? I suppose because it selects, condenses, and sets life forth in a disorderly yet intelligible way.
This theory’s regard for its readers is tender indeed, but Ford himself is aware of how vastly the backgrounds, skills, attitudes, and interests of readers differ; how low the average level of patience is, how short the span of attention, how well-held every bias; and he is working in a period during which the audience for the novel is melting away like life savings. He is also aware, to the point of being worried, that this lovable ruffian is in charge of the performance and must turn the page if the events depicted there are to continue smoothly; but Ford’s insistence that the function of style is to blow through the reader with a force sufficient to (in effect) riffle the sheets is simpleminded and leads him to suggest a few rules for keeping things moving which would sound today overly commercial even in a writers’ workshop.
The first business of Style is to make work interesting: the second business of Style is to make work interesting: the third business of Style is to make work interesting: the fourth business of Style is to make work interesting: the fifth business of Style …
Style, then, has no other business.
A style interests when it carries the reader along; it is then a good style. [
Joseph Conrad
, p. 208.]
(The repeated, almost subliminal banker’s metaphor, the grandiloquent capitalization, the pidginish “to make work interesting,” the crude simplification of thought and its loud reiteration, the consequent populism of the entire passage, laid against Ford’s own level of performance, lead me to doubt the sincerity with which he holds this position.)
Mr. Wouk, Mr. Wallace, Mr. Follett, Mr. Michener, Mr. Robbins: they carry the reader along. They carry thousands of readers along. “A style ceases to interest when by reason of disjointed sentences, overused words, monotonous or jog-trot cadences, it fatigues the reader’s mind” (
Conrad
, pp. 206ff). We mustn’t fatigue the reader, who is probably already winded from a three-mile jog through the park. “To say that a face was cramoisy is undesirable;
few people nowadays know what the word means.” These, and other rules that Ford cites in this section, have long been admired by the same meretricious writers and editors to whom, one must now imagine, they are addressed. Yet they are not so addressed, and they do not mean, I am convinced, what they now say. That much,
the times have changed
.
What are these rules to Joyce, to Proust, to Thomas Mann, Conrad, or even Ford himself? It is, in truth, when Ford tries to be “interesting” that his texts slide away into vapidity. Again, what is important for our purposes is the fact that impressionism tends to make it hard, not soft, for the reader. When the narrative flow is as vital as blood through the heart, then one properly worries whether the reader will faithfully man the pump, but nowadays (that direction toward which impressionism leans) texts expect halts, stumbles, skips, rereads, reversals, rests. If one is concerned, as Ford is in his book on Conrad, to recommend the use of simple language, even simpler imagery, and simply tell his story, then he should adopt the methods of the earlier masters, as I’ve suggested; they always smooth things out; and they really make reading them the pleasure that millions remember as they remember the other pleasures of their youth, and receive now from the movies.
If our term “impressionism” slips about and is, indeed, a thief of thought; and if the impressionist’s practice similarly shifts; if the theory’s rationale is weak and even inappropriate; I think we can reasonably suspect that something else is up; that technique, as Ford extols it in his essay of that name, has seen new possibilities in the art and is trying to realize them at the same time that the old allegiances to Victorian reality and Social Truth remain, pulling in the opposite direction—a pull that, unlike taffy, isn’t much fun and cannot be expected to improve the product.
Ford’s views are caught in a transitory phase of an epistemic loop—a series of stages through which we can normally expect both science and art repeatedly to pass. If we begin, for example, with a period in which the things represented in paintings possess a transcendental significance, pointing beyond themselves to higher
matters, then we are in a stage in which the world itself is a sign and allegory is inevitable. But as things descendentalize, as those higher notions lose their validity, holy virgins turn into sweet young things, and Christ-childs become merely bawling babies, their halos replaced by teething rings. Bunyan gives way to Defoe. At this point, the actions that the novelist describes, the objects the painter paints, establish their own community and lines of significance. Plate, knife, fork, cloth, bowl, and table: these are cities in the same state. A Dutch interior maps an entire domestic life. In the next stage, attention turns toward the act of attention itself, and considers the nature of perception with all its aids and impediments. At first, we still think of sensation as a process that reveals an object to us, and we wonder how that happens, but the chances are we shall eventually understand it the way we previously understood the light that managed to enter an open window, or a door left ajar, to bring a tiled floor to view.
Imagine that we are pouring tea into a cup. Should we really concentrate upon the cup? What will it tell us about pouring? We could pour the tea upon our shoe. Pouring would be pouring. The suggestion is that sensing is like pouring. So we back away from the object, and the utility of perception, and begin to enjoy our senses for their own sakes. We begin to pour the way show-off waiters pour—with an admiration for the length of the trajectory. Of course, at first it must splash down into cup, bowl, shoe—whatever is aimed at—but trajectories are trajectories. Just ask the gunnery officer.
But what are we doing? We are studying the operation of the senses. With what? The mind. So sensation supplies the mind its material. Now a new relation, very like the old, appears: that between a subject—the knower and the knower’s ideas, life history, bilious character, obnoxious aunt—and the process of knowing what is known, an object again, though dematerialized. Not
a
haystack, but Monet’s.
We should be prepared, by now, for thought to do to itself what perception did: back up along the relational line that connects the
known with its knower. Instead of examining the sensuous medium of perception, we interest ourselves in the medium of the mind—which is language. Here we are—home at last. But the word has its halves: the world of the referent, and the realm of meanings or ideas. The loop has looped, and we are ready to begin again. Or we are not ready; we are dizzy from the last ride; we refuse to board.
Ford’s impressionism, as is true of impressionism in general, is caught between the forward thrust of the art of fiction toward its own internal coherence, independence, value, and validity, and the pull of the bourgeois past—the Catholic past in Ford’s case—where, in a perfect imitation of the social structure, the old supplantation of literature with reality, or with morality, or with spirituality, was a simple fact, as slavery once was. But impressionism is the last bow the old order is likely to receive. Monet may make Kmart’s pasteboard walls, but never Kandinsky.