Finding a Form (11 page)

Walser’s narrators (and we can presume, in this case, Walser himself) have become will-less wanderers, impotent observers of life, passive perceivers of action and passion. Only on the page will the will risk the expression and exercise of its considerable means.

And when the circumstances of life—my six children and my fruitful but frigid wife, perhaps my boringly repetitive work as an insurance adjuster, my rascally relatives and a harsh climate, the painfully pushed-forward designs of those who would exploit me—when these force me (as I think) to give up my own aims altogether, then I shall find myself in a classical state of powerless resentment, aggrieved because existence has become a broken promise; and my head shall fill with willing women, my yacht will always find the best breeze, I shall dream of flames while I stir my ashes, and my soul will swell like a balloon to float over the world, touching it only as a shadow.

The details of the disappointment will differ; the site of the defeat will shift; the resistance to one’s fate or one’s readiness to accept it will vary in their strength; but the pattern is plain enough, its commonness is common indeed, its dangers real. Switzerland is a prison. Consequently the world is one.

If I were then to try to save myself through writing, how difficult it would be for me to maintain the posture of a realist, for I should have had little acquaintance with the real (indeed, less and less), rather more with the subjects of my wishes than the objects of my will. In order to confer the blessings of being upon the small, hollow dreams of my soul, these harmlessly private elaborations will have to achieve somehow the heartless powers of the page; yet my characters must be inventions, and how quickly these inventions will feel my disdain. What value could they have if they remain so utterly in my power? So much for the story, too, which can be pushed and pulled this way and that, or dropped, suddenly, like a weighted sack into the lake.

Through a course of such “thinking,” if I read him aright, Walser became a postmodernist well before the fashion. The painfully beautiful, brief “essay” “A Flaubert Prose Piece” deals with the way a successful fiction fictionalizes its author, so that both his invented
woman, and the author’s
moi
she was, eventually “glided and passed among the people gliding and passing by, like a dream vision within the vision of a dream.”

As Walser’s final confinement nears, his writing seems increasingly made of dissociated sentences. To turn time, like an hourglass, abruptly over, so that its many days fall the other way, his feuilletons resemble the work of Donald Barthelme, almost collagelike in their structural juxtapositions. Not a few, like the brutally disturbing “Salon Episode,” have a genuinely surreal surface. The detached, desperate “inhumanity” of his work remains. It has been many years since a figure in one of his fictions has had a real name. And if one had a name, it would be generic, like Pierrot. But it is easier now to follow the inner flow beneath these scraps of language, to appreciate the simple clarity of the sentences he has constructed, to recognize that these meditations (for they have never been anything else) move not in the manner of events or in the manner of a river or in the manner, either, of thought, or in the “happy hour” fashion of the told tale (each brought so beautifully together in “Boat Trip,” one of the triumphs of Walser’s art), but in the way of an almost inarticulate metaphysical feeling; a response to the moves and meanings of both human life and nature, which is purged of every local note and self-interested particularity and which achieves, like the purest poetry, an understanding mix of longing, appreciation, and despair, as if they were the pigments composing a color to lay down upon the surface of something passing—sweetly regretful—like the fall of light upon a bit of lost water, or a brief gleam caught in a fold of twilit snow, as if it were going to remain there forever.

I
t has always been a dreadful word: that is, one which promoted imprecision. This is in itself odd, because originally an “impression” stood for something distinct, something involving a rather vigorous assault, a pressing of one substance upon another with such severity as to make a rather definite dent. The signet ring leaves its stamp; the press runs off its copies; a beautiful form keeps its shape in the iris of the eye. The protean character of clay, however, the openness of paper, the normal receptivity of sight, can be carried too far, for the tree in whose bark a heart is carved must be trunked and roughly scarfed before it can be cut. The sword that Cuchulain waves at the sea will not impress it, nor will my weight much worry a rock, nor my whistle bore a settled passage like a pipe’s through the air. In impressment, one element is imperious, the other slavish; one acts and is off and shortly out of sight like the foot with its footfall, while the other retains the step like a print in wet sand, or discloses on a disobedient back the cruel mark of the lash.

If I am born with a crack along my length, I have not been impressed; I have been badly born. That is: impressions do not eternally exist; they must arrive; they can also be effaced and disappear. Thus an impression is that lingering result of an action which functions as a sign. An impression can take place only on a larger, unaffected field. A piece of paper upon which I have printed a black dot bigger than it is has not been impressed, it has been
blotted out. An impression, then, has very definite limits in both space and time, and these limits suggest that there are regions within these two dimensions which they do not impinge upon, traipse through, or occupy.

Upon that which is blank, the impression is often an enriching sign; upon that which is already full and formed, it is a scar. For John Locke, the surface of the soul was, at birth, like a washed slate, ready to receive whatever life might write; so when Hume introduces the word into philosophy to designate a dot of sensation, there is a certain singularity and hardness to that
pointillisme
. It is, like the atom, inviolable. Yet the ring’s image is made of the space where it was, as is the foot’s step—an outline that’s all edge; while the printer’s sheet is flat and yields the picture of a width. On the other hand, the Humean impression, as we approach it, seems as solid as a brush daub, a bean even—a bead—a being quite complete in itself, as though both ring and wax had been removed to leave the somehow solid image of the stamp behind like a congealed area of atmosphere.

The impression is, like the atom, also invisible, for it is lost among others, just as Seurat’s little dots are. Our experience consists of immense aggregates, which occupy even the most self-effacing and slimmest moments. Only an act of philosophical analysis can hope to pry one elemental chip from this complex and constantly shifting mosaic.

In short, because they are neither
of
anything, nor stamped
upon
anything, nor
about
anything, Hume’s impressions are misnamed. Yet the word casts an impossibly perfect shade: behind it lies the ghost of the material world; before it, that of the mind.

If Hume’s impressions are definite enough, our understanding of them is not. They pale like colors in the sun and soon have quite gone out. It is never impressions which we bring back when we recall the past, since some fading is implicit in their nature—a little at least is always lost—although they live on a bit longer in the guise of immediate recollections. The popular image is that of the ash-covered coal which we can revive for a bit with our breath and
cause to glow again. But these memories consume themselves, grow cold and are forgotten finally because, among other reasons, room must be found for a fresh stock. Of course, we remember as we must, or wish, or need to, yet each time we beckon some former figure, it returns paler and more fuzzed than before, as though anticipating the widow’s weeds it will one day wear.

Words, so much more readily remembered, gradually replace our past with their own. Our birth pangs become pages. Our battles, our triumphs, our trophies, our stubbed toes, will survive only in their descriptions; because it is the gravestone we visit, when we visit, not the grave. It is against the stone we stand our plastic flowers. Who wishes to bid good morrow to a box of rot and bones? We say a name, and only a faint simulacrum of its object forms itself (if any at all does)—forms itself in that grayless gray area of consciousness where we put imaginary maps and once heard music; where we hunt for lost articles and diagram desire. Are these the referents of the name? these photoprints? cinders of old sensations? But the stories we tell in the name of that name may be handsomely detailed, alive, and complete. Generally, there are several events in our life which are slow to go and continue to burn in our souls beneath their protective layers of ash, but on the whole we retain what we verbally repeat: it is the life we relate that constitutes our personal history. We are in great part what we tell ourselves we are.

Locke thought our minds at birth like a slate washed clean as a seal’s back. Such a surface would not resist the world’s writing. When a word was set down there, the pad would make no objection, the grain would not fight the knife, the ink wouldn’t run, the message smear. The mind could be counted on not to interfere, to insert its own phrases in the normal spaces between the names of things, turning a sentence of experience, for example, into one of calamity and accusation, as if “Whoops, I’ve dropped that old pot” were suddenly to become “My god, I have carelessly broken the priceless Ming vase of the Empress.”

Hume provided for impressions of reflection as well, so that it
was expected that a sensation would be accompanied by a feeling, an apprehension, or even a belief; but just as Hume remained unconcerned about the demise or replacement of impressions, he also ignored the fact that some impressions alter others—jostle, inflate, distort, destroy. For Hume, impressions do not act, they
are
, and fly by like notes, no more under their own power than the components of a trill. On the other hand, they cannot be accounted for the way we find sources for the sounds of music, or the way the cow’s bell leads us to the cow.

Hume’s simple ideas, which are for him faded impressions, as well as his complex ones, which are groupings of memories in various ways to form more general notions: these are present in the exotic mishmash of impressions that make up our experience, too. Consciousness is in a condition of chaos: desires, anxieties, sensations, moods, thoughts, pains, beliefs, passions, disappointments, resolves, exist in a jumble that Ford Madox Ford understands far better than Hume. Simplification is Hume’s aim. Complication is Ford’s. Despite the name, then, Hume’s impressions are not impressions of anything. In themselves, they are never “from,” “of,” or “about”; yet they are what we remember when we remember; they are what we think about when we think; they are seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling in itself; they accompany all that we do. And though they come and go like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, they are each as obdurate as nails.

Seurat’s divisionism at first admirably reaffirms Hume’s analysis, but it then goes on to suggest quite different things. The painter’s dots mix and vibrate in the eye, which Hume’s impressions never do because they are not objects of experience; and Seurat comes away from his site with sketches that constitute a kind of sensory manifold, which he orders, as Kant would, by means of the complex and elegant architecture of his art. Form and peace are one. And when yellows and oranges are used to suggest the excitement of the circus or the high-kick, they are employed to promote a gaiety in which no nervousness exists. As in Ingres or Poussin, a classical calm controls and directs an ardent sensuality, the deepest passions.

The distortion of the word continues. Why not? Wonderland and wilderness surround us like a text of trees. Everywhere there are walls to fall from, and arrogant Humpty Dumptys perched atop them ready to brag before they break.

When the painters who are to be called impressionists discovered, as they are presumed to have done, that the monocular perspective of Leonardo, Piero, and the Italian Renaissance was actually not expressive of experienced space, they began to dissolve the clear outlines of objects in classical painting and mix them with light and shade and air and atmosphere and even the uneasy flicker of the eye itself, moving their art, as they thought, from object to act, from known to knowing. They painted, the critics said,
seeing as such
, even though, as the simplest test will show, their work, when lined up alongside its so-called model, looks very little like the world looks, and even less like the world. In that sense, they are as far off on their tack as Poussin was on his. And as another moment’s reflection will demonstrate, you simply can’t paint perceiving, you can only diagram its mechanics, because seeing is not something seen. You can only paint the surfaces of things, or signs suggestive of the surfaces of things, or signs themselves as if they were things or surfaces, or you can give all that up and paint paint.

But the impossibility of the procedure was not the point. When the impressionists gave up one convention for another (or for several
others, as it would turn out), they persisted in supposing that they were capturing the real world—not, of course, the real world
thought
, but the real world
seen
. And soon not simply seen, but seen like a report in the paper: by X, at Y, in Z. Nevertheless, Claude Monet’s
Haystack
, or his chillier
Haystack in Winter
, or his bluish pair of
Haystacks at Sunset
, or his identically named but rather more redly empurpled
Haystacks at Sunset
, said to be
near Giverny
, are no more nearly haystacks than Ingres’s enameled nudes are naked ladies. Monet may have felt he was painting the instantaneous, but if he had really been painting immediate moments and no more, his work wouldn’t be worth now the twit of time it takes to take it in.