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Midway through Rudyard Kipling's 1902 story "Wireless," the narrator discovers that his new friend Shaynor has, while unconscious, independently composed John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes," a poem Shaynor has never read. Shaynor, it seems, has been supernaturally affected by an experiment with wireless telegraphy, and turned into a psychic receiver of poetic data. Critical attention to the story has concentrated on what this plot suggests about authorship and creative inspiration in a high-tech, modern world.1 Yet the work looks quite different if we focus not on Shaynor and the story of his artistic creation, but rather on the narrator, around whom a dramatic experiment in narration unfolds. The unnamed narrator initially seems to function in a realist manner typical of Kipling's stories: he is a disconnected observer who understands and sympathizes with those around him, he has few identifying or personalizing characteristics, and he possesses wide knowledge that borders on omniscience. But midway through the story, he undergoes a transformation no less remarkable than the one he witnesses in Shaynor. As he starts to understand Shaynor's strange behavior, and the wireless experiment commences in earnest, the narrator begins to feel strangely: "I heard the crackle of sparks as" Cashell, the wireless operator, "depressed the keys of the transmitter. In my own brain, too, something crackled, or it might have been the hair on my head. Then, I heard my own voice, in a harsh whisper: 'Mr. Cashell, there is something coming through here, too'" (229). The narrator feels estranged: he hears his voice and considers his body as though they belonged to someone else. As the scene continues, he is dangerously affected by sensory input, his point of view grows more subjective and even hallucinatory, and he loses his understanding of what is happening around him. These changes affect not just the narrator as a character, but also the story's mode of narration itself, which, this essay argues, becomes recognizably impressionist.
Although impressionism is notoriously difficult to define, these changes that afflict the narrator reflect one of its core ideas: that sense data and intellectual knowledge can be synthesized in the consciousness of the narrating subject.2 This subject becomes intensively embodied and permeable to the outside world but is also isolated from it:...