Literary Impressionism, James and Chekhov (review)

Abstract

Studies in American Fiction135 Stowell, H. Peter. Literary Impressionism, James and Chekhov. Athens: The Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980. 277 pp. Cloth: $17.00. This book surveys those aspects of Anton Chekhov's plays and Henry James' novels which make them "impressionist" works according to the generally accepted canons of modern criticism. Some ideas in it are potentially more novel. One is that the visualspatial character of the text is basically "synchronic" (or paradigmatic) and is meant to undermine the diachronic, linear dimension of the impressionist work, thus placing the argument at a non-historical, a-temporal, mythic level. This theory is never explicitly formulated in the book, but if I read Stowell correctly, it is one of his main intuitions: "Time becomes spatialized, frozen, in what seems to be an eternal moment" (p. 37). The second is equally interesting, namely that the referentiality of the text is increasingly an inner referentiality; in other words, descriptions no. longer account for any form of objective reality and the mimetic function of art has been almost completely rejected: "While both Chekhov and James experimented with first person narrations, their most impressionistic works were written through third person central consciousnesses, or at times through dual or multiple reflectors. The fluidity of perceiving and knowing that is open to a thirdperson central consciousness provides greater freedom for that consciousness to glide through and fill in the void between outer world and inner ego" (p. 22). The oxymoron is indeed Stowell's favorite rhetorical figure. At random, I have gleaned the following examples: "outer world and inner ego" (p. 22); "They keep stumbling toward knowledge, vaguely realizing that as they come to know more, they must also know less about more" (p. 23). What Stowell seeks to capture through these oxymora is the most specific nature of the impressionistic work of art, yet he is not convincing in his attempt to demonstrate that "it is literary impressionism that marks the beginning of literary modernism" (p. 4). Stowell's work must be viewed as a symptom of a particular culture, rather than its diagnosis: it is like what it describes—incoherent, fragmented, repetitious: ". . . impressionism remains a most contrary phenomenon" (p. 14); "This impressionistic scene forces impressionistic seeing that leads to impressionistic knowing" (p. 53); "This impressionistic moment ... is what begins to propel him into his new impressionistic world" (p. 212); "test each character's ability to impressionistically read an impressionistic scene" (p. 218); "as his impressionism ripened" (p. 64). It is evident that the tireless repetition of the same idea is precisely designed to fill Stowell's book with the same interminable quest for the essence of impressionistic literature. The key concept is obviously that of an impressionist "poetics": a concern not with content but with the process by which content is formulated. Stowell, therefore, successfully demonstrates that Maisie in Henry James' work "will come to realize that how something is said carries more meaning than what is said, that tone suggests multiple meanings for different perceivers, and that the language of atmosphere is transmitted through the fragments of expression, gesture, and hearing" (p. 195). Maisie realizes that words and their arrangement, their meaning, have status not simply as vehicles for thoughts, but as objects in their own right, autonomous concrete entities. Stowell finally asks himself how do impressionist texts mean? How do we make them mean? He realizes that every perceiver's method of perceiving can be shown to contain an inherent bias which affects what is perceived to a significant degree. Thus, Maggie (The Golden Bowl) "is beginning to see what the relations are. She is asserting herself as a phenomenological tabula rasa, a fresh perceiver, no longer bound by contrived arrangements and jaded by the perceptions of routine satisfaction" (p. 225). 136Reviews With this book it becomes more and more difficult to determine what the words "phenomenology," "phenomenological," "impressionism," "impressionistic" are supposed to mean in the contexts of James and Chekhov in which they are used. Also, in recent years, phenomenology has in some minds become bound up with existentialism. What does the impression mean as a way of knowing for the philosopher, the novelist, or the artist ? While Stowell successfully situates his...