On Michael Fried and Literary Impressionism

What Was Literary Impressionism? by Michael Fried, Harvard University Press.

Is literary impressionism, in the current parlance, actually a "thing"? Literary realism and literary naturalism are things, and so, undoubtedly, is literary modernism. These are the movements that make up college syllabi-the geologic eras defined by deliberate ruptures that tell the story of modern literature. Impressionism on the canvas is also most certainly a thing, instantly recognizable by just about anyone-purple haystacks, figures arranged in dappled sunlight, water lilies. This was the movement that revolutionized modern painting, even as its style has become passé, a bit kitsch-the stuff of page-a-day calendars, dorm-room posters, and reliably popular museum exhibitions.

But literary impressionism? Perhaps, like impressionism in music, literary impressionism names the attempt to evoke something of the style and substance of Impressionist painting through an entirely separate medium-as Debussy's Reflections in the Water could be said to represent a shimmering, Monet-like tableau through its rhythm and tone color (though Debussy himself, it must be noted, rejected the comparison). Perhaps it describes the often colorful pictorial work of poets who moved in similar circles in Paris in the 1870s-Rimbaud, Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, Mallarmé (Laforgue was an incisive theorist and enthusiastic admirer of the new painting who modeled for Renoir, while Mallarmé wrote admiringly of the proto-impressionist Manet, who returned the favor by painting his portrait). Certainly this poetry could be said to share Impressionist painting's interest in the suggestive stroke over the clearly defined line, in evocation rather than delineation. Or perhaps literary impressionism describes the attempt to capture in densely descriptive prose the unique settings characteristic of Impressionist canvases, as in the mock-pastoral romance of Maupassants A Day in the Country, which evokes the vulgar suburban gaiety of a Renoir boating party, complete with a drunken dejeuner sur ľherbe and randy canotiers (Renoirs son, Jean, directed a film adaptation of the story in 1936 starring Sylvia Rataille that deliberately pays homage to his fathers paintings).

This would be a relatively narrow, historical definition of literary impressionism specific to French literature of the 1870s and 1880s. Rut one could also imagine a broader definition of literary impressionism that includes any literary text in which the impressions of particular characters take on special importance or in which the...