Finding a Form (12 page)

(Paradoxically, the camera records a sliver of experience so small we never experience it either.)

As Monet’s later lyrics celebrating his beloved waterlilies indicate, the impulse of the impressionist is to obliterate or at least transmogrify the object. If we compare an impressionist canvas with those of a master of realistic suggestion like Qi Baishi, this impulse is as clear as its outcome. Baishi’s brush depends upon an intense prior study of its subject (as Monet’s surely did), but of its subject as such, of its subject as it must appear as it passes unscathed through life’s various occasions, within but external to its circumstances; and it reveals that enduring subject to us by eliminating everything but its visual essentials. The essence of phenomena is this painter’s aim:
the
garden rake,
the
overflowing bowl of cherries,
the
precise moment a bird leaves a branch, or the bird alights. Yet to be
the
quintessential bowl, it must manage to be
a
particular and quite ordinary bowl as well. When Baishi undertook the painting of a shoal of prawns, he raised these crustaceans at home in order to observe them, sometimes provoking their movements by the gentle pressures of his brush. Two bold strokes were enough to hover a dragonfly above a lotus; one stroke could give an entire backbone to a buffalo.

The economy of these means suggests for their object an intense simplicity and innocence of nature.

But the many brush strokes of the impressionists bury their object beneath a flurry of color like a heap of fall leaves: all that is left behind is the mound where they lie. The light which normally enables us to see is employed now to screen things from easy view. A curtain comes down like a scrim in front of the Rouen Cathedral; the Doges’ Palace dissolves in a mellowed fog of sunspew. In Qi Baishi, on the other hand, there is no light at all; there is only the sign, sitting like the mynah among the winter sweet, in the center of a purity like that of white paper.

The word “impression” implies an incompleteness. The foot, the shoe, the step have been removed. Only their “impression” remains. Yet even here we can see how the impressing object refuses to identify itself and occupy a single location. The edge of my thumbnail leaves a crease in the paper, but I shall sometimes say that the crease was caused by my nail and not simply by its edge, or I shall say the thumb did it, or my hand, or after all confess that it was I and my intentions, my plan, which was responsible, for my plan was to leave a secret message on the sheet and so foil my captors. But to whom is my little thumbnail sketch such a call for help, and not just a few happenstancial indentations? Only the nail’s edge makes the immediate physical impression. So it is the knowledge that another mind possesses which allows it to perceive these remoter connections; it is Holmes who knows his mystery man must have red hair; it is the anthropologist who sees a civilization’s shape in a few shards. We often make our inferences so automatically, with such rapidity, and take them to such lengths, that we are scarcely aware of the actual crease or scratch or dent or little design which first sent us off to unravel a long skein of relations. When we read we scarcely see the ink, or often even the words, lost in the world we believe we see beyond the page.

Life, as represented by a collective noun, and standing for a large array of distant causes, cannot crease the paper and leave its line upon us; at least not if we mean by “impression” a definite bit of experience, for “life” is hardly that. The sum of these experiences,
however—picked over, lied about, seated like dignitaries at a banquet—can leave an impression upon our judgment. So when we say, as we sometimes do, that X gives us an impression of life, we may mean it confirms our opinions; and when we say that Y struck us with the force of the real thing, we may mean our feelings were similarly stirred. It is not merely what the world writes, then, that determines our impressions, but also where it writes, for I suspect that if we are in any way a tablet, we must be made of many differently tinted sheets, each capable of receiving messages, so that what is written in one place is mainly equations, or aphorisms, or graffiti.

Consequently, when I maintain that a novel has given me “an impression of life” (something I would no more say than “nertz” to a bishop, but which we shall imagine my saying so that the point can be made), I mean I have compared the impression it has made on me with the one which life has, and found their shapes to be essentially the same. It is as if the fall of the word “foot” were to make the same print as the shoe.

But if I meant “shape,” “structure,” “form,” or “outline,” it is not at all clear that others would have “pattern” in mind, rather than “tone,” “color,” “effect,” and general excitement.

Impressions are both distinct and vague, particular and general, pure and mixed. When we recall some occasion in our past worth recollection, we often add more of ourselves and our reactions than our memory alone can manage. True, the event and its agents and object are gone, and we cannot impress them, but we can impress the substitutes we have imagined. Here, in our heads, they receive our blows, suffer our wit, are scalded by our sarcasms. Here, what we call an impression is really our impressment, and now things can begin to happen as they should have the first time, since they are at present under new management—no longer ruled by chance or God or nature but by ourselves and the malice of our wisdom. A pleasant afternoon, which treats us like our favorite uncle, may give us a balloon, but it is we who will have to blow it up. Then, as we expand upon events and witness their disappointing
outcome, we say, well, life’s like that, or life’s like this: it is a folderol; it’s hit or miss; it’s puff ’n’ bust.

We have already seen our word slip like a stealthy Indian from tree to tree. It can only be bent on mischief, as we know from the movies. But it is precisely mischief which its employers wish to make.

(1)
It is an atom of sense, the rose’s “red red,” hence it is clear, untroubled, unitary, definite, objectlike, and in the present tense. Experience is a mosaic made of such impressions, random as a dappled pond.

(2)
It is the mark in memory of such a sensation, the red of last summer’s rose; hence it is faded and fuzzy, and only grayly represents the color. Experience, of course, combines the present and the past in every measure: real red, remembered red, the red expected—which is the remembered red thrown straight ahead.

(3)
It is the representation of the activity of the senses themselves, the eye as it reddens the rose into its redness; hence it deals with the momentary and the fleeting, for the head turns and time turns too. Scenes weep from the corner of the eye. This activity is so complex, however, that the impressionist will be unable to render all of it at once: the central area of focus, the hazy penumbra, optical illusions, light as if it were the air itself, or secondary effects of its action, such as shadows, glints, and other reflections.

(4)
It is the effect this full red rose, presented as a token of love perhaps, has upon an impressionable mind; hence it is indelible and enduring but much mixed with emotion, with other images and associations, and liable to set an entire train of feelings going—often out of its own station. All aboard that’s going ashore.

(5)
It is a vague general attitude or feeling based upon a few rather fleeting perceptions. “I haven’t been in Paris long enough to have more than an impression of the city.” These are often described as
first impressions
, i.e., uncorrected ones.

(6)
It is a confused understanding which is the result of sensory overload, a multiplicity of strong experiences, some canceling others out. “I carried away only an impression of my dinner at the White House.” The excitability of the receiver is implied.

(7)
It is a general judgment about a single experience, concentrating not upon the experience for its own sake but upon what it means or portends. “It was my impression that the rose was a bit wilted and had probably been clipped from an old bouquet.” From this we can infer enormities. “It was my impression that Gladys’s suitor was a bit of a cheapskate, even a bounder.” The more distant and daring the inference, the more it deserves to be called “an impression.”

(8)
It is a general judgment about a vast number of related experiences. “It is my impression that romantic types don’t make good husbands.” Hume would call this a complex idea. If it were the report of a team of sociologists, it would be called not an impression but a fact. Here, however, it represents just one person’s opinion.

(9)
It is something the well-bred say in order not to appear too opinionated, pushy, or argumentative, and which allows others an equal, if even opposite, point of view. “My general impression was of a man immodestly in love with himself. What was your impression?”

(10)
The tenth sense is like the ninth, but it functions to produce an exactly opposite effect. The word becomes part of the vocabulary of a vague, roundabout manner of speaking that genially assumes the willing complicity of the listener. In this completely social mode of speech, negatives or double negatives are frequent (“I shouldn’t care to be among the uninvited”); assertions are posed as questions (“Don’t you find it a bit chilly in here?”); and code words abound, usually among adverbs, such as “wonderfully,” “dreadfully,” “frightfully,” “oddly,” “awfully,” and so on. If you have a cold, you say you are dreadfully indisposed; but if you are dying, you claim to be only a little under the weather or a mite short of top-notch. So if you have lived in Paris for five years, you say you have rather an impression of it; whereas, if you have been visiting Provence for a fortnight, you say you’ve fairly covered the country (you mean you’ve been frightfully busy gadding about). Here, certainty, arrogance, and prejudice disguise themselves as
fallibility, modesty, and liberality. When Henry James (whose language this is) says that the novel is “a personal, a direct impression of life,” he may mean it is like a blow between the eyes. He certainly means it to be a most carefully considered judgment by someone who knows what he is talking about.

“Impressionism” might have been a useful word to describe one’s first impressions of Monet, Degas, Bonnard, and the somewhat similar art of others like Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, but its uses altered almost immediately. Originally it was an attempt to define a group of painters; but soon groups of painters began to be studied in order to define it. This turnaround is characteristic of deleterious critical terminology. Think of the endlessly expended anal energies that have gone into determining the meaning of the Renaissance, the true nature of Baroque, Mannerist, and high and low Gothic styles, the definite durations of the Classical and Romantic periods, the exact nature of the Modern Movement with all its Neo-’s, Pre-’s, and Post-’s. Close the covers on such works; there is nothing in them but a self-promoting darkness. When a word is encouraged to become as ambiguous as our specimen, and when it is used without wariness or the least hint of scrupulosity or rigor, we can wonder whether concealment rather than clarity is its advantage, and whether it is more filled with feeling than with sense, since its various meanings annul one another like doodles drawn nervously on doodles, or the play of progressively more powerful trumps.

When, in 1911, Ford Madox Ford uses the term in a P.S. to his dedication of
Memories and Impressions
(he was Ford Madox Hueffer then), he is excusing his inaccuracies in advance by appealing to a blend of #4, #6, and #10.

Ford goes on, in this rather devious afterthought, to stress the exaggerated (and hence socially acceptable) character of the report of his impressions. They are, that is, hyperbolic. “My impression is that there have been six thousand four hundred and seventy-two books written to give the facts about the Pre-Raphaelite movement,” he writes at one point, by way of illustrating his use of the term. With regard to our topic, four things are striking about this preemptive defense. First, the impression is more informative concerning the state of mind that receives it than about its source or object. Second, the value of the impression, as imprecise as it may be about the world (in this case, mightily), is greater than the facts it defiles, on the ground that
this is how it felt or seemed or was experienced
and is, therefore, if sincerely reported, more humanly true and honestly real. Third, Ford’s examples inadvertently betray him by their contradictions, because there is no room, among the range of meanings of “impression” he is invoking here, for this sort of numerical precision (six thousand four hundred and seventy-two books). And fourth, since there cannot be any such statistical impression, we are confronted, instead, by a daunting account; and we know that these reports, however grotesquely overstated, have to be vague and general (six thousand, perhaps, but why six?), and even stereotypical (a million is usual—any rich, round sum),
because the impression being reported is simply one of “quite a lot.”