Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  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.

  The history of literary impressionism remains to be written. It will have to take into account eighteenth-century British empiricism, romantic theory, positivism, French realism, French impressionist painting, pragmatism, and phenomenology—at least. It will need to make precise distinctions among the various impressionisms of Dickens, James, Crane, Conrad, and Ford. It will need especially to remain lucid about the intimate connections and contradictions between literary realism and literary impressionism. It will probably never be written. [Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 123–4.]

  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.

  (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 Hous
e.” 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.