New Academia: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory

(E-ISSN 2347-2073) (U.G.C. Journal. No. 44829) Vol. VII Issue II, April. 2018

IMPRESSIONISM IN ART AND LITERATURE

Dr. Sanghamitra Ganguly

Assistant Professor,
Department of English,
Maheshtala College
(Affiliated to the University of Calcutta)
ganguly.sanghamitra@gmail.com

Abstract

The origin of pictorial Impressionism in the 1870s in France marks a significant change from
earlier conventional realism. The Impressionist artists laid great stress on the act of seeing,
and the process of conception within the artist‟s mind became the focus of interest. The
emphasis shifted from the objective world outside to a subjective vision, for to the
Impressionists each individual has his own particular point of view to look at things. These
features of pictorial Impressionism led to the development of literary Impressionism at the
turn of the century. There are some specific features that characterise literary Impressionism
and which link it to pictorial Impressionism such as achronology, limited point of view,
multiple narrators, pictorial descriptions of shifting light and colour, subjective accounts of
sensuous experience and conveying of immediate and fleeting feelings. In Impressionist
writing the importance of the visual motif, mainly that of fog and mist, is foregrounded,
linking closely pictorial and literary Impressionism. This essay tries to find out how
Impressionism adds a new dimension to Modernism with its stress on individualism and
distinctiveness of each person, and continues to be relevant to this day.

Impressionism is a concept that is common to both art and literature, and is relevant even
now. The origin of Impressionism can be traced back to the French art movement of the same
name that began in the late nineteenth century. Historically the rise of Impressionism can be
related with certain assumptions of philosophic empiricism, namely with the belief that a
person never directly perceives any article but only discrete sense stimuli out of which
afterwards the images of material things are constructed by the human mind. Impressionism
implies a complete break from earlier conventional realism which accepted a relatively
unproblematic and straightforward contact between the human mind and the external world

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and its representation thereafter. The term Impressionism signified a new trend in nineteenth
century French art, and also a new stage in the development of European painting. It marked
the end of the neo-classical period that had begun during the Renaissance and had continued
right until the eighteenth century and which was realistic in nature. The Impressionist painters
refused to limit themselves by what they regarded as trivial details of the external world in
terms of accurate depictions of realities and in the treatment of details. Impressionist art as
well as Impressionist literature was concerned with the momentary and transient, rather than
with reflections of the past. A concentration on the present, or the ways by which the past
became a part of the present through the juxtaposition of the two, was a key element of
Impressionism‟s modernity and its appeal for writers and artists. The Impressionists did not
completely break with the theories of Leonardo da Vinci and the rules according to which all
European academies had conceived their paintings for over three centuries since the
Renaissance. But they were hesitant to always base a painting on a story or a narrative, and
questioned the link of painting with historical and mythical subjects. Impressionist painting is
a re-assessment of traditional perception of things, just as literary Impressionism is a re-
evaluation of conventional narration. The Impressionists made subtle and fleeting moments
the basis of their art, accepting that sight and sensation were, of necessity, fleeting and
ephemeral. Nathalia Brodskaïa says, “[N]ature was exactly what interested them most. . . .
All of them preferred living nature . . . Now, instead of a model skilfully placed upon a
pedestal, they had nature before them and the infinite variations of the shimmering foliage of
trees constantly changing colour in the sunlight” (Brodskaïa 9-11). The main subject of the
Impressionist painters was landscape as it was a genre that appealed solely to accuracy of
observation, rather than to the imagination. According to Ian Watt, “all the main
Impressionists made it their aim to give a pictorial equivalent of the visual sensations of a
particular individual at a particular time and place” (Watt 170). In the year 1874, these young
painters organised their own society which they named the “Anonymous Society of Artist,
Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers” and decided to sponsor their own exhibition, because
they had all been repeatedly rebuffed by the established Salon for their radical technique. For
this exhibition, Monet painted scenes of his childhood hometown of Le Havre, eventually
selecting his best Havre landscapes for display. Among these Havre landscapes there was a
canvas painted in the early morning depicting a blue fog that seemed to transform the shapes
of yachts into ghostly apparitions. The painting also depicted smaller boats gliding over the
water in black silhouette, and above the horizon the flat, orange disk of the sun was painted,
its first rays casting an orange path across the sea. It was more like a rapid study than a
painting, a spontaneous sketch done in oils. Monet had initially given this painting the title
“View of Le Havre”, but it seemed inappropriate as Le Havre could not be seen anywhere. So
he renamed it Impression: Soliel Levant or “Impression: Sunrise”. Interestingly, this painting
provided the movement with its name. The first Impressionist exhibition in which thirty

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artists including Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille
Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Berthe Morisot participated with one hundred and sixty five
paintings was held from April 15 to May 15, 1874. The reviews were mostly unfavourable,
mainly aimed at Monet, Cézanne and others who used bright, freely employed colours. One
art critic Louis Leroy ironically termed this mode of painting Impressioniste in his review in
the Charivari dated April 25, 1874 using the title of Monet‟s painting, “Impression: Sunrise”.
Leroy called his article, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists”. Jesse Matz observes:
When Louis Leroy coined the term in his satirical review of Monet‟s Impression: Soleil
Levant (1872), he knew it would sound absurd. “Impression” would connote transient,
insubstantial, passive sensation; “ism” would imply some systematic, doctrinal, activist idea;
the compound would make no sense, and its meaninglessness would neatly publicize Monet‟s
defects. (Matz 12)
Soon the painters themselves adopted the tag “Impressionism” to label their artistic vision
which was about the importance of seizing the motif and of concentrating completely on the
act of seeing. One of the chief after-effects of Impressionism was that it drew attention to the
paint surface, the process of perception and execution, and to the artist‟s and viewer‟s
subjectivity, as much as to the objects painted. The group‟s second exhibition was held in
April 1876 in which nineteen artists including Monet, Degas, Sisley, Renoir, Pissaro, Morisot
and Caillebotte participated. This time also the artists drew harsh criticisms with accusations
that they were threatening the established artistic modes and values. There were a total of
eight exhibitions of the Impressionists, the last being in 1886.
French Impressionism has been seen as a reaction to the philosophical tradition of Descartes
who taught us to doubt the evidence of our senses. However the word “Impressionism” in
English was not related to Descartes, it had first been applied to English thought much before
French Impressionism even began by John Rogers in 1839 about Hume‟s philosophy, and
critics such as Ian Watt have ascribed Conrad‟s stress on the sense impressions on the
influence of Hume‟s emphasis on the priority of feeling (Watt 168-80). Hume tried to
understand how to proceed from sense impressions to certain knowledge, and concluded that
man‟s pursuit of certainty will never be satisfied, but a close approximation can be achieved
only through sense impressions. His Treatise of Human Nature starts with the sentence: “All
the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall
call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS” (Hume 1). He argued that impressions are the generative
force behind all knowledge. According to the Oxford Dictionary the root word of
“Impression”, “premere”, means “press” in the physical sense, but the meaning changed
subsequently to a more psychological one—“the effect produced by external force or
influence on the sense or the mind”. Later the definition adds the clause, “especially in
modern use a vague or indistinct survival from a more distinct knowledge”. In the late
eighteenth century this withdrawal into the private individual perception resulted in the

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Romantic Movement. Walter Pater was greatly influenced by Hume‟s theory of the way
impressions lead to the formation of ideas. In his Conclusion to The Renaissance Pater writes
that it is the individual temperament that replaces abstract conceptions of beauty with the help
of impression, with the result that beauty becomes relative and subjective because of
individual aesthetic judgment. Eloise Knapp Hay feels that Pater was influenced more by the
seventeenth century empiricism of David Hume than by Descartes (Hay 142). Pater adopted
Hume‟s theory in his writings and named it “impressionalism”. In his essay „Coleridge‟s
Writings‟ (1866), Pater had argued for the primacy of the “relative” rather than “absolute”
spirit, that is a subjectivity of impressions rather than a fixed impression, remarking that “[t]o
the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions”
(Pater 2). This association of modernity with relativity of perception would be a cornerstone
of his philosophy. In adopting the tenets of Impressionism, Conrad and Ford were influenced
by this older English tradition of Hume that ran through Pater as well as the newer French art
movement.
Literary Impressionism owes its origin and its name to pictorial Impressionism. As in the
case of French Impressionism, the term was very quickly extended to methods of writing
which were supposed to share the qualities attributed to the painters, to works that were spur-
of-the-moment and rapidly done, that were vivid sketches rather than finished products. As
Impressionist literature originated from Impressionist painting, the two of them share some
basic characteristics. Peter Childs discusses how the features of Impressionist painting came
to influence the style of Conrad and Ford as Impressionist authors:
I will consider . . . how writers adopted the techniques of painters to literary ends, but might
briefly mention here what Impressionist writing meant to Conrad and Ford: in brief, it can
best be described as a method for accumulating impressions, a technique Ford called
„progression‟, in which the novel‟s incidents and even paragraphs follow a similar pattern
whereby a series of connected elements reaches a culmination in terms of the development of
the narrative. For example, a paragraph might contain a list of traits associated with the
characters or a cumulative series of instances of their behaviour before ending with a
statement that underlines their significance, like „that‟s the way it was with us‟, in one
example from The Good Soldier. (Childs, Modernism 77-78)
The Impressionism of painting and literature are both interested in subjectivity of perception.
The shift of interest in both painting and literature from object to subject, with the emphasis
on point of view, seems to have resulted in attention to momentary effects. John G. Peters
says in this context that “pictorial shifting of light and color, subjective accounts of sensuous
experience, transmission of immediate and evanescent feelings—these are literary
Impressionism‟s specialities.” He further adds, “Impressionism was in literature what it was
in painting—representation of intense and evanescent visual effects with emphasis on the
ways that color and light subjectively appear” (Peters 3, 15). Plot lost its importance to the

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Impressionist painter and writer who gave more weight to freedom and informality to give
the impression of actual lived reality. Monet is the most significant artist in this context. In
1891, Monet exhibited his famous series of haystacks which contained fifteen views of two
haystacks seen at different times of the day, and he tried to show through this series of studies
the infinite variety of colour that different shades of light could produce at different hours of
the day. He chose haystacks because they could be drawn as simply swathes of colour with
no intricate details: something seemingly plain that should traditionally have little interest for
art, but through effects of different angles of sunlight would show innumerable shades of
colour. Monet‟s series of Rouen Cathedral is also similar in treatment because he paints the
cathedral simply as a mass of colours and not as a holy site or an intricate piece of
architecture. Both these series demonstrate how remarkably the same object changes its
appearance according to differing atmospheric condition and the positioning of the perceiving
eye. This play of light and shade seen at a particular moment of time deeply influenced the
Impressionist authors. As Ford recollects in his Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences,
“During all those years—for many years that seemed to pass very slowly—Mr Conrad and I,
ostensibly collaborating, discussed nothing else. Buried deep in rural greenness we used to
ask each other how, exactly, such and such an effect of light and shade should be reproduced
in very simple words” (Ford, Thus to Revisit 39). Monet and Seurat frequently used mist or
halo in their paintings. This also left a deep impact on the Impressionist writers. Conrad
shows this influence when he writes in Heart of Darkness: “to [Marlow] the meaning of an
episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only
as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are
made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 6).
Conrad‟s novels in particular frequently use the motifs of fog and mist to indicate confusion
between appearance and reality. Since Monet often painted out in the middle of the river, the
viewer is situated inside the landscape in these paintings just as the Conradian narrator
Marlow is situated at the centre of the tales he is narrating. In another of his famous series,
Monet depicts the railway bridge at Argenteuil several times but from different angles just as
in Conrad and Ford an incident is often seen from multiple angles and points of view.
Unlike Ford who was an announced Impressionist, the attitudes of both Henry James and
Conrad underwent changes regarding Impressionism over a period of time. Henry James had
anticipated Conrad‟s later reactions to Impressionist painting when he had reviewed the
second Impressionist exhibition in the New York Tribune commenting that “the effect was to
make me think better than ever of all the good rules which decree that beauty is beauty and
ugliness ugliness.” James further said that the Impressionists “are partisans of unadorned
reality and absolute foes to arrangement, embellishment, selection.” He feels that “the
painter‟s proper field is simply the actual, and to give a vivid impression of how a thing
happens to look, at a particular moment, is the essence of his mission.” James thus found

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Impressionist painting unattractive and even technically unsound. He concluded that the “
„Impressionist‟ doctrine strikes me as incompatible, in the artist‟s mind, with the existence of
first-rate talent” (James, Henry. “The Impressionists.” Sweeney 114-15). But a few years
later, in „The Art of Fiction‟, James changed his view and wrote that “a novel is in its
broadest definition [is] a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value,
which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression.” James also says, “If
experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience” (Besant
and James 60-61, 66). In the 1890s, Conrad too had felt a deep dislike on first seeing
Impressionist paintings. Eloise Knapp Hay classifies Conrad‟s attitude to Impressionism in
three distinct phases:
If we put together all that Conrad said about impressionism, we see three fairly distinct
phases in his attitude [to Impressionism]; the first in his disgust at a collection of
impressionist paintings in 1891; the second when he met Crane and gave qualified praise to
his art in 1897, soon afterwards writing his Preface to The Nigger; and the third at the end of
his life when he curiously reversed himself—after years of denigrating the movement—and
began to aim for the same effects that he had earlier questioned. (Hay 138)
The first stage of Conrad‟s attitude to Impressionism can be seen when he first encountered
the works of the Impressionist painters in the apartment of his “aunt” Marguerite Poradowska
in Paris in the early 1890s. He felt revulsion at these paintings and wrote to his aunt after
returning to London, “It [the apartment] is too nightmarish with that collection of paintings
by the School of Charenton [Madmen].” But though initially unimpressed by Impressionist
painting, Conrad subsequently moved from his early rejection of the movement. Hence in a
letter to E. L. Sanderson written on 17th October 1897 we find Conrad saying that he himself
is an “impressionist from instinct”. Conrad by now had shifted from a position of despising
the Impressionist movement to that of qualified appreciation, regarding it as appealing though
superficial. Later that year after the publication of The Nigger of the „Narcissus‟, Conrad
wrote a letter to Stephen Crane on December 1, 1897, praising him highly, “You are a
complete impressionist. The illusions of life come out of your hand without a flaw.” He was
more ambivalent on Crane when he wrote in a letter on 5 th Dec 1897 to Edward Garnett on
the theme of Crane‟s Impressionism in the story „The Open Boat‟: “His eye is very individual
and his expression satisfies me artistically. He certainly is the impressionist and his
temperament is curiously unique . . . He is the only impressionist and only an impressionist. .
. . I could not explain why he disappoints me—why my enthusiasm withers as soon as I close
the book” (Conrad, CL 1: 398, 415, 416). This lack of enthusiasm of Conrad for Crane‟s
brand of Impressionism might be for its supposed lack of in-depth analysis and the probing of
human psyche. Unlike the Impressionists such as Crane, Conrad lays stress on analysis,
which was similar to what the post-impressionists like Gauguin sought. By 1919, we find that
Conrad had become more enamoured of Impressionism. Conrad now says that Crane “had a

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wonderful power of vision . . . that seemed to reach, within life‟s appearances and forms, the
very spirit of life‟s truth.” He contradicts his own previous opinion that Crane provides a
superficial, though appealing, view of life: “His impressionism of phrase went really deeper
than the surface” (Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters 50). The reason behind this might be that
while writing his last complete novel The Rover, Conrad was trying to be Impressionistic in
his technique, he was trying to be objective and brief instead of trying to search for deeper
meanings, and this effort continued in his unfinished novel Suspense. This change of position
might be due to his distaste for Freud and psychoanalytic criticism that was becoming
popular around him. According to Eloise Knapp Hay, “Lenormand . . . had presented to
Conrad (along with a volume of Freud‟s writings) a Freudian interpretation of Almayer‟s
Folly and Lord Jim. It was in rejecting these that Conrad said he was „only a story-teller,‟ not
an analyst” (Hay 143). Now at last Conrad was ready to acknowledge Impressionism as
having been a worthy part of the Modernist movement as a reaction against the newer schools
of psychoanalytic criticism. However, as late as in 1918, Conrad was still claiming a
Symbolist position as well for himself, for unlike Ford he did not claim a steady ideological
position for himself artistically. In a letter to Barrett H. Clark written on May 4, 1918, Conrad
says:
My attitude to subjects and expressions, the angles of vision, my methods of composition
will, within limits, be always changing—not because I am unstable or unprincipled but
because I am free. . . . A work of art is seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not
necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it
approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. (Conrad, CL 2: 418)
The major phase of literary Impressionism in England lasted approximately from 1895 to
1925 and the term “Impressionism” is almost universally attached to authors such as Henry
James, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane and Ford Madox Ford. They all lived in close
proximity in either east Sussex or west Kent for a certain period of time and tried to introduce
continental techniques as well as an element of self-conscious artistry in the art of English
fiction. Ford lived at Bonnington near Ashford from 1894, and later at nearby Aldington and
then at Winchelsea; and Conrad stayed at Pent Farm near Hythe, which he rented from Ford
from about 1898, having been introduced to him by their mutual friend the critic and literary
editor Edward Garnett, with whom they all discussed fictional techniques. James lived at
Lamb House, Rye, from 1898 and in the following year they were joined by Stephen Crane,
also introduced to them by Garnett, who moved to Brede Place, Northiam, near Rye. Crane,
like James, was an American expatriate, Conrad was of Polish origin, and Ford, though born
in England, was the son of a German emigrant, and known until after the First World War as
Ford Madox Hueffer. This common thread of foreignness formed a bond between them,
though Ford at times tried to proclaim his thoroughbred Englishness due to his mother being
the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Though apart from Ford none

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of them described themselves as Impressionists, they all gave a privileged place to

“impression” in their criticism as well as their fiction. In his comparative study of literary
Impressionism in the writings of Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte
Bronte, Todd Bender discusses the influence of French pictorial Impressionism on Ford‟s and
Conrad‟s aesthetics, especially regarding the object of representation. According to Todd
Bender, the Impressionist painter‟s attempt to capture the act of perception of the world by a
given consciousness is echoed in Ford‟s literary theory. Ford‟s view of literary history in The
March of Literature revolves around the shift from a direct, “realist” representation of the
world to the representation of the impression left by the world on a particular consciousness.
Bender says that the Impressionist novelist renders the process through which the characters
as well as the readers of the Impressionist novel apprehend the world “in growing concentric
circles of understanding” (Bender 6). Unlike Ford who wrote extensively on Impressionism,
Conrad did not write anything expressively connected with it. However, Conrad‟s Preface to
The Nigger of the „Narcissus‟ (1897) has been read as a manifesto for Impressionism in
fiction, and was often echoed by Ford in his later criticism, especially the famous claim made
by Conrad in the Preface: “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” (Conrad,
Typhoon 3, 5). Ford used this as the heading of Part III of Joseph Conrad: A Personal
Remembrance which has the title “IT IS ABOVE ALL TO MAKE YOU SEE . . . .” The
isolated moment of visual perception is given the most important place in the overall
narrative scheme by Conrad. The “see” here, however, does not mean just the visual act of
seeing; it also involves the faculty of imagination. So “see” here further connotes both the
sense perception as well as the process of realisation. A visual sensation here is transformed
into impression by a form of visual perception. This in turn is transformed into a kind of
creative thought process, shared by the author and the reader alike. Conrad does not discuss
Impressionism directly in the Preface, but removing art from any supporting context he
argues that art‟s “appeal, to be effective, must be an impression conveyed through the senses”
and that “[i]t must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting
and to the magic suggestiveness of music” (Conrad, Typhoon 5). A few years later in a letter
written on May 31, 1902 to William Blackwood, Conrad laid stress on the sense impressions
as being the only medium that can apprehend truth in the modernist art: “I am modern. . . .
My work shall not be an utter failure because it has the solid basis of a definite intention . . .
—action observed, felt and interpreted with an absolute truth to my sensations (which are the
basis of art in literature)—action of human beings that will bleed to a prick, and are moving
in a visible world” (Conrad, CL 2: 418). However the Impressionism as discussed in the
Preface is not just restricted to the eye; the Preface tells us that the artist has to bring the
whole of his sensory organs and his moral and philosophical outlooks into play in order to
achieve the difficult business of communicating his private and inward perception of truth:

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To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life,
is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up
unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the
light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form, and through its
movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth—disclose its inspiring
secret; the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. (Conrad, Typhoon
6)
This concentration on the moment is an Impressionist feature, common to both painting and
literature.
Unlike Conrad, Ford publicly announced his Impressionist credentials and associated Conrad
as well with the movement. In the Preface to his 1924 biography of Conrad, Joseph Conrad:
A Personal Remembrance, Ford writes that Conrad “avowed himself impressionist” (Ford,
JCAPR 6), and goes on to describe how the two of them worked out a new fictional technique
which was more lifelike than others because through such devices as time-shift and multiple
perspectives it more closely imitated the way our knowledge of others is built up in a
confusing and often non-chronological way. Ford believes that the “general effect of a novel
must be the general effect that life makes on mankind”. At the same time the novelist must
“keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists—even of the fact that he
is reading a book” (Ford, JCAPR 180, 186). This requires the use of multiple points of view
instead of the all-knowing omniscient narrator substituting for the author. By means of the
Impressionist technique, Ford says that the Impressionist author can give a sense of multiple
impressions, he can “give a sense of two, or three, of as many as you will, places, persons,
emotions, all going on simultaneously in the emotions of the writer.” Ford continues:
Indeed, I suppose, that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are
like so many views seen through bright glass—through glass so bright that whilst you
perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a
face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in
one place with our minds somewhere quite other. (Ford, Critical Writings 40-41)
According to Todd Bender, when Ford asserts that a novel should not narrate but “render
impressions”, he means that the novel “must proceed by associative indirection, locked in the
limitations of a central intelligence whose struggle for understanding is the main concern to
the reader” (Bender 46). This shifts the interest of the narrative from the story being told to
the protagonist whose emerging consciousness assumes greater importance in the narrative.
Impressionism for Ford is a “frank expression of personality” for it deals not with facts but
with a personal, individualised point of view, that is with a radical subjectivism. The
justification of the artistic method for Ford as well as the measure of its success “will be just
the measure of its suitability for rendering the personality of the artist” because personality is
the “chief thing in a work of art.” To Ford, Impressionism means “showing you the broken

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tools and bits of oily rag which form my brains” and in doing so he claims to present “the sort
of odd vibration that scenes in real life really have.” In „On Impressionism‟ Ford says that on
the one hand the Impressionist author is careful not to let “his personality appear” in his
work, but the “whole book, his whole poem is merely an expression of his personality” (Ford,
Poetry and Drama II: 169, 174, 323). Conrad similarly stresses the role of personality or
consciousness, for only a registering consciousness “endows passing events with their true
meaning” (Conrad, Typhoon 5). Here is thus a contradiction between keeping the artist
hidden and at the same time the work being an expression of her/his personality. Conrad and
Ford both have to reconcile this apparent contradiction in their writings. Michael Levenson
argues:
These two aims—the registering of fact and the recording of consciousness, physis and
psyche—have invited contradictory interpretations of Impressionism; it has been
characterized as both a precise rendering of objects and an unrepentant subjectivizing. The
struggle between them is submerged, though revealing, in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” but
in Conrad‟s work over the next several years—and principally through the introduction of
Marlow—it will become conspicuous. . . . [T]he agon of modernism has already begun to
emerge: its ideological crisis, the struggle between its values and its forms, the instability in
the forms themselves. (Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism 36)
Conrad attempts to solve the apparent contradiction with the introduction of Marlow as the
narrator-agent and as a sort of stabilising figure in the narrative in four of his tales—Youth,
Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Chance. But by the time we read Chance Marlow himself
has become an unreliable narrator thus further destabilising the narrative. Ford, on the other
hand, never uses any such central intelligence. The result is a growing instability of the form,
a characteristic feature of Modernism.
Although literary Impressionism was never a school like French naturalism, as only Ford
announced himself an Impressionist, we can find several features or characteristics that link it
to pictorial Impressionism. These include the use of limited first person point of view and
multiple perspectives, the disruption of conventional chronology, the foregrounding of sense
impressions, particularly visual impressions, in the narrative, and the frequent use of fog and
mist, a feature borrowed from visual Impressionism. Both Impressionist painting and
literature shift the interest from the subject to the object, with an emphasis on point of view.
The freedom from conventional plot construction and the importance given to sense
impressions enable the artist to move closer to the actual lived experience.
A major feature of literary Impressionism which links it to pictorial Impressionism is the use
of limited first person point of view, as well as the use of multiple points of view by the
authors, replacing the conventional device of authorial omniscience. The Impressionist
novelist uses the device of multiple narrators to demonstrate the relativity of impressions for
each of these narrators has a limited awareness. This is a feature of Conrad‟s technique in

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novels such as Lord Jim and Chance as also in other Impressionist works. The technique of
multiple narrators enables the novelist to present a number of limited points of view which
see the same event from different angles, thus demonstrating the relativity of perspective and
the fact that there is no absolute view possible of any single event. The inclusion of different
narrators and points of view demonstrates the impossibility of arriving at a definitive
conclusion given the uncertainties of subjective, individual views of these characters and the
discrepancies which appear between these different points of view. Some of these narrators
do not offer reliable commentary on the events unravelling on the page, rather they share
their unreliability, their tendency to receive and remember impressions each in his own way.
So it makes us conscious of the multiplicity of perspectives, as different subjectivities
reinvent impressions in their own image. That‟s why Ford stresses the multiple, overlayered,
fluid and variable qualities of impression.
A characteristic feature of Conrad‟s Impressionist technique, though not of Ford‟s to that
extent, is the use of the technique of what Ian Watt calls “delayed decoding”. Ian Watt says
that by introducing this technique, Conrad “had developed one narrative technique which was
the verbal equivalent of the impressionist painter‟s attempt to render visual sensation
directly” (Watt 176). In the following passage Ian Watt discusses how the technique of
delayed decoding links pictorial and literary Impressionism together:
Literary impressionism implies a field of vision which is not merely limited to the individual
observer, but is also controlled by whatever conditions—internal and external—prevail at the
moment of observation. In narration the main equivalents to atmospheric interference in
painting are the various factors which normally distort human perception, or which delay its
recognition of what is most relevant and important. (Watt 178)
As the Impressionist painters use the individual‟s perception of a momentary impression on
their canvas, the Impressionist writers use the limited first person point of view with its
uniqueness and preconceived notions, representing both the physical limitations of human
perception as well as the process of conception within the human consciousness. This
sometimes leads to instances of “delayed decoding” which “combines the forward temporal
movement of the mind, as it receives messages from the outside world, with the much slower
reflexive process of making out their meaning.” The author tends “to present a sense
impression and to withhold naming it or explaining its meaning until later; as readers we
witness every step by which the gap between the individual perception and its cause is
belatedly closed within the consciousness of the protagonist” (Watt 175). Eventually the raw
data of chaotic sense impressions are resolved into a coherent meaning by both the character
and the reader whereby the meaning is not forced on it but has to be discovered within it. The
reader is placed at the same epistemological level as the character who is initially baffled.
The reader too becomes a receiver of temporally fragmented sense impressions rather than a
chronologically organized narration leading to a sense of defamiliarization of familiar

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objects. An example of delayed decoding can be found in Conrad‟s description in Heart of

Darkness of Marlow‟s confusion when his boat is attacked just beyond Kurtz‟s station.
Marlow does not initially realise the cause of the various odd changes around him. He thinks
that sticks are being thrown around him, “Sticks, little sticks, were flying about—thick: they
were whizzing before my nose, dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot-
house.” Only later does he realise that they are being shot at with arrows, “Arrows, by Jove!
We were being shot at!” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 62) He also realises at a later moment
that the helmsman of his boat has been killed by one such arrow.
An important characteristic of literary Impressionism is the importance of the visual motif,
mainly that of fog and mist. In France, Impressionism in literature dates simultaneously with
Impressionism in visual arts in authors such as Maupassant, and arguably even preceded it,
notably in Baudelaire‟s influential The Painter of Modern Life (1863), which anticipated the
programme of the Impressionist artists who began their group exhibitions in 1874.
Discussions of literary Impressionism from Ferdinand Brunetiere onwards were inspired by
the ideas of the Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas who were
interested not in the external notion of objective reality but in the actual physical appearance
of a scene to the perceiving eye at a particular point of time. In his Preface to The Nigger of
the “Narcissus” (1897) Conrad had described his intention as “by the power of the written
word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” This stress on
immediate physical sensation rather than authorial explanation of a scene paralleled Monet‟s
indistinct outlines of his paintings, which was criticised by the majority of the critics. Monet
replied to this criticism in a dismissal of traditional realism, “Poor blind idiots. They want to
see everything clearly, even through the fog”. Fog and haze in Monet, as later in Conrad and
Ford, do not signify an accidental atmospheric obstruction which stands between the viewer
and the object, rather the obscurity is a part of the whole scene the artist is trying to convey.
Monet‟s later paintings of the Thames and the British Parliament, begun on a balcony of the
Savoy Hotel in the winter of 1899, completed from memory in his studio, and first exhibited
between 1902 and 1904, are now regarded as some of the vital images of early twentieth
century London. The omnipresence of fog in these paintings is almost like a symbol of
London. Buildings appear through fogs of violet, yellow, and green, a testimony not only to
Monet‟s chromatic vision and artistic innovation, but also to the extraordinary atmospheric
conditions of contemporary London. These paintings frequently involve difficulties of
perception, such as Monet‟s series of paintings of a cathedral at Rouen seen through the mist
(1894) or a haystack disappearing in the fading light (1891). Similarly in Impressionist
writing external description is often sacrificed for the immediacy of confusing perceptions.
These images of haze, mist and fog and the overlapping of light and shadow link
Impressionist painting and literature together. A cartoon in the Punch in December 1886,
“The Winter Art Exhibitions”, satirised this tendency when it showed a fog-bound art gallery

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where critics were peering at an art object they could barely see. In literature, in the works of
both Conrad and Ford, fog and mist are used in this Impressionist sense as a blurring of
objective reality. It is associated with subjectively received impressions, of blurring of clarity.
For both the Impressionist painter and the writer the fog and the mist are not an atmospheric
obstruction between the viewer/reader and a clear sense of the artist‟s „real‟ subject: the
conditions under which the viewing is done are an integral part of what the pictorial or the
literary artist observes and therefore tries to convey.
Another centre of focus of Impressionist literature as for Impressionist art was the modern
metropolis. For the imperialists, London stood for British power, wealth, and ingenuity, but
for others it encapsulated the vicious and depraved aspects of city life and, more disturbingly,
human nature. It was the literal centre of the world through the founding of the Greenwich
Meridian in 1884, and the symbolic centre of it through being the heart of the British Empire.
This vast city offered raw material for Impressionist artists as it did to Modernists. Arnold
Hauser thinks that Impressionism is primarily a by-product of modern urbanism, and the
artistic experiment with the city goes back to Manet rather than Monet. He writes:
At first sight, it may seem surprising that the metropolis, with its herding together and
intermingling of people, should produce this intimate art rooted in the feeling of individual
singularity and solitude. But it is a familiar fact that nothing seems so isolating as the close
proximity of too many people, and nowhere does one feel so lonely and forsaken as in a great
crowd of strangers. (Hauser 165-66)
While Ford was writing The Soul of London, Claude Monet was finishing the series of
London pictures he had begun on the fifth floor of the Savoy Hotel early in 1901. These
paintings appeared between 1902 and 1904, and now seem central to the modernist era.
Monet‟s paintings treat complex subjects of time, space and memory and do not offer the
objectivity of realist art. Impressionist London, as depicted in Monet‟s scenes of fog on the
Thames and in Whistler‟s famous paintings of Thames in Nocturnes, influenced the portrayal
of London by Ford and Conrad. Similar urban landscape is found in Ford‟s Soul of London.
Impressionism has been viewed as a response to the rapid urbanisation at the turn of the
century which tended to suppress individualism. The vastness of the city led to the anonymity
of existence. As opposed to this, Impressionism stressed the individuality of each observer.
Either way, the city occupies an important place in the Impressionist narrative. Both Conrad
and Ford use the city‟s presence extensively in their works. Conrad‟s Under Western Eyes
uses Geneva not only as the backdrop of the events of the novel but almost as a character
with an individuality of its own. The Secret Agent has as its sinister backdrop the vast,
impersonal, cosmopolitan metropolis. As Conrad writes in his „Author‟s Preface‟: “the vision
of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some
continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven‟s frowns and smiles; a cruel
devourer of the world‟s light” (Conrad, The Secret Agent xxxi). Ford, on the other hand, was

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excited by the city‟s dynamism as was Arthur Symons who was intoxicated by its modernity
and artifice. For both of them, London was as much an opportunity as a threat. Ford was
conscious of the human and environmental misery that followed in the wake of rapid
urbanisation, but he rejected the sentimental appeal of the countryside. Other works on
London by Impressionist authors include Stephen Crane‟s „London Impressions‟ which was a
regular feature of the Saturday Review during 1897.
Impressionism, as discussed above, is still very much relevant in this day, mainly due
to the ever-increasing emphasis on individuality in the current times. Impressionism in art
and literature complement each other, and a discussion of one would be incomplete without a
reference to the other. Though situated temporally in the late nineteenth and twentieth
century, Impressionism has remained relevant to this day, and we can continue to discover its
latent influence on other sister arts such as cinema, music and sculpture if we look deeply in
the treatment of the media of expression and technical virtuosity of the artists dealing in these
forms.

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