First Impressions
Virginia Woolf herself noted upon finishing Mrs Dalloway that it would challenge the literary world. “The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes” (1978, p. 75). This intuition turned out to be correct. After publication, she noted that she had received ‘two unfavourable reviews’ (1978, p. 81), but also an encouraging letter of praise from ‘a young man in Earl’s Court.’ He wrote: “This time you have done it – you have caught life and put it in a book...” (1978, p. 81).
Contrary to her anxieties about the novel and some poor early reviews, Woolf’s experimental fiction in Mrs Dalloway has since been accepted as part of literary canon. As well as being understood as one of the original modernist authors, the works of Woolf are often considered to carry examples of literary Impressionism. It is this literary technique that this chapter will focus upon, aiming to expand our understanding of it through cognitive science. It attempts to show that the ‘disjointed’ nature highlighted above is essential to the process of being able to recreate life-like sensations for the reader, such as the man who wrote to Woolf. As the previous chapter focused on connections with music, this chapter will in turn delve deeper into the connections between Woolf’s style and the visual school of Impressionism.
It will offer a brief survey of the current scholarship on literary Impressionism, principally so as to establish links with the methodology and theories outlined in Chapters One and Two. Following this, it will discuss how the concept of ‘delayed decoding’ often considered a core part of literary Impressionism fits in with our cognitive framework. The chapter will then move into a perceptual analysis of some of the distinctive effects associated with visual Impressionism, and look for points of comparison with Woolf’s style in Mrs Dalloway. This will extend across three broad categories of comparison: equiluminance (a key aspect of Monet’s work), sound (following on from our discussion of sound in Kerouac), and finally how the novel represents time, and the way this can be related to our own mechanisms of time perception.
To begin, let us examine this excellent description of literary Impressionism provided by Van Gunsteren:
The Literary Impressionists, like the Impressionists in painting, focused on perception. They attempted to formulate reality by breaking it into momentary fragments, selected intuitively and subjectively. They relied on sensory (ap)perceptions, used clusters of images and rendered their emotions in a ‘slice of life’ picture of some everyday, ordinary experience. (1990, p.7).
What distinguishes Impressionism’s treatment of sensation and emotion from the realist literature of the nineteenth century is this focus on representing the act of perception with the greatest authenticity. This meant embracing a subjective and
therefore potentially imperfect representation rather than relying on omniscient narration to interpret and summarise what their characters felt. Sensory perceptions are presented as though they are immediate reactions rather than slower interpretations.
Jesse Matz, who has written extensively on literary Impressionism, has this to say about the relationship between the visual and literary schools of Impressionism:
The Impressionisms of painting and literature share an interest in subjective perception. This shift from object to subject, with its emphasis on point of view, seems to have entailed in both arts attention to evanescent events, radical fidelity to perceptual experience, and a consequent inattention to what had been art’s framing concerns. Out were plot, schema and other forms of rationalising conceptual knowledge: freedom, informality and emphasis on the experience of the senses enabled the artist to make art more perfectly reflect lived experience. And freedom from all other goals allowed the artist to get at the moment of perception, from which all other forms of experience follow. (2001, p. 45)
Using this as a framework, we can see how the observations about the fate of Mrs Dalloway pulled from Woolf’s diary fit this general mould of Impressionism. The ‘disjointed’ plot structure was written precisely so that Woolf could “more perfectly reflect lived experience”, as Matz puts it. But Matz goes on to sound a note of caution regarding the idea of drawing a close analogy between the world of art and literature:
Analogies between the arts are always suspect. Beyond the pleasure and usefulness of basic interdisciplinarity, important warnings begin to sound, and these gain special authority when it comes to Impressionism, primarily because such analogies have often supported claims that Impressionism is not literary. Superficial sensation may work well in painting, but it trivialises literature: this has been, as we have seen, the argument behind misunderstandings of the literary impression – the argument that led Max Nordau, for example, to conclude that “Impressionism in literature is an example of the atavism which we have noticed as the most distinguished feature in the mental life of degenerates.” (2001, p. 45-6)
Matz’s example of Nordau’s attitude towards Impressionism is indeed a rather strong warning to tread carefully where attempting not only to create analogies between the arts, but also to attempt to rationalise it in terms of science. Nonetheless, this is one of the ambitions of this chapter. Matz and Van Gunsteren’s language used to define Impressionism takes us back to the familiar terms of perception and sensation. These are indeed at the heart of Impressionism, whether literary or visual.
Having arrived at this familiar point, we might now recall Shlovsky’s observations about the ‘deautomatisation’ effect of poetic language:
We find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from
that deautomatized perception. A work is created ‘artistically’ so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception. (1965, p. 33).
This deautomatised perception is one particularly crucial facet of Mrs Dalloway’s artistic impact. It works against our expectations of a linear narrative, a clear chronology and an omniscient narrator. Sudden shifts in tense, ambiguities about point of view and the exact chronology of the moment disrupt the experience of conventional reading, of being able to move quickly from one event to the next by simply following the plot. By complicating the narrative in this way, Woolf impedes the automatic perception of textual information and in a manner of speaking imitates the confusion and the emotional state of her key characters, particularly Septimus as he suffers from the effects of shell-shock. For some readers, this mimetic effect will be off-putting; but this deautomatised perception has the potential to imitate aspects of the human experience that are more effective than if they are simply told directly.
As an example of how this deautomisation functions in the novel, let us consider a passage where Peter Walsh undertakes his visit to Clarissa:
‘Do you remember the lake?’ she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said ‘lake’. For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding
her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’ And what had she made of it? What indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter. (MD, p. 46)
The passage opens with an innocuous question from Clarissa, all of five words long, before it moves into describing in vivid sensory and emotional detail the toll it takes her to ask this question: her stiff throat, abrupt voice, her lips in a spasm. Then Woolf writes ‘For she was a child’, implying at first that she is remembering her experience as a child by the lake when she asks the question, but also shifting the narrative away from the present to the past. Then, the line “at the same time a grown woman” further impedes the steady perception of this passage, as the reader is confronted by the ambiguity of this image of Clarissa as both a child and a grown woman. It forces them to question whether she is perhaps having two distinct but related memories of the lake, first as a girl and second as a woman; or if the co-existence of these two ages signifies that this is not simply the province of memory and this is instead Clarissa’s poetic description of her feeling unsettled by Peter Walsh’s presence. The continued imagery of showing her parents ‘her life’ and then turning the question to herself: ‘and what had she made of it?’ makes it seem as if she is evaluating her life having been confronted by Peter, as the passage returns to a mundane image of her sewing.
It takes a careful reading of this passage to notice and fully appreciate these shifts and points of ambiguity, and in part it owes this to having done away with omniscient narration. Yet this is an essential component in this aesthetic
experience of Clarissa’s emotional turmoil at this moment. The passage is long and the narrative style makes it seem longer still; but by contrast the actual dialogue takes barely any time. It becomes more noticeable if one aligns the dialogue from these pages but omits all of the descriptive paragraphs that accompany them:
Clarissa: ‘Herbert has it now. I never go there now.’ Clarissa: ‘Do you remember the lake?’
Peter: ‘Yes. Yes, yes yes.’
Clarissa: ‘Well, and what’s happened to you?
Peter: ‘Millions of things!’ ‘I am in love. In love, in love with a girl in India.’ Clarissa: ‘In love!’ ‘And who is she?’ (MD, p. 46-8)
While this actual conversation between Clarissa and Peter takes up only a few lines, the text runs for several pages. In between each phrase of their conversation, Woolf impedes the flow of the conversation by taking time to dwell on their thoughts and by constructing temporal shifts in each individual paragraph. As such, the reader is allowed to feel for himself or herself how difficult it is for Clarissa and Peter to talk directly to one another, because of all that has come between them in the past.
Delayed Decoding
Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford are the most common names that recur in discussions of literary Impressionism, although Woolf, Stephen Crane and Katherine Mansfield are also frequently connected with the movement. Examples
of the devices that characterise literary Impressionism can also be found in Proust and Joyce. Ford is perhaps most responsible for creating the idea of a ‘literary’ Impressionism, through his essay ‘On Impressionism’. Saunders writes that Ford envisaged Impressionism as a movement occupying its own time period between realism and modernism. Ford’s novel The Good Soldier is noted both for having a fragmented narrative and a grammar of colour that can be compared to a painting – with certain colours taking on symbolic values (Liu, 2014, p. 107).
However, the locus classicus of how the literary form of Impressionism actually functions in terms of the reader’s approach to the text is Ian Watt’s discussion of Joseph Conrad, in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Watt coined the term ‘delayed decoding’ to describe how the reader undergoes a perceptual experience derived from the same experience as the character. As Watt describes it, the technique “combines the forward temporal progression of the mind, as it receives messages from the outside world, with the much slower reflexive process of making out their meaning” (1979, p. 175). Watt’s classic example is taken from Heart of Darkness, when Marlowe’s boat is attacked:
Something big appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle went overboard, and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me over his shoulder in an extraordinary, profound, familiar manner, and fell upon my feet. The side of his head hit the wheel twice, and the end of what appeared a long cane clattered around and knocked over a little camp-stool. (Conrad, 1995, p.77)
At first glance, despite the note of his head hitting the wheel, the language surrounding the man does not seem to be overly violent. But as Marlowe continues, the reality of what has occurred starts to dawn on him:
The thin smoke had blown away, we were clear of the snag, and looking ahead I could see that in another hundred yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank, but my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both of his hands clutched that cane. It was the haft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged through the opening, had caught him in the side just below the ribs… (1995, p.77)
At this point the reader completes the picture and realises that the cane is actually a spear and the wetness encroaching on Marlowe’s feet is the man’s blood. Because Conrad reports Marlowe’s initial perceptions, stripped of their violent referential properties, he allows the reader to undergo a sense of shock when they actually comprehend what is occurring. In doing so, they are undergoing the same perceptual experience as Marlowe, as Watt puts it.
Watt’s concept of delayed decoding relates well with Shlovsky’s idea of deautomised perception, although in this case the automatic process that is impeded is the rational centres of the brain putting together a clear account of what happened to the man on the boat. By not simply telling the reader that the spear hits the man, Conrad forces the reader to undergo his or her own rationalisation of the scene and in doing so he draws attention to a mental process
we might take for granted. A similar event occurs in Mrs Dalloway when Clarissa visits the florist, Miss Pym, and while letting her train of thought run away she is interrupted by a sudden noise:
As if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when – oh! a pistol shot in the street outside! (MD, p. 14)
Miss Pym immediately explains that we have heard a motor car backfiring, providing a rational explanation at once. Yet the power of this style lies in the sudden leap to first person narration and the abrupt use of the dash to interrupt the previous train of thought. The emphasis then is not on what has actually happened or even what Clarissa hears, but on the nature of her reaction. Compared to the mundane reality that follows, this sudden perception and its violent nature suggest Clarissa is in a hypersensitive state. The reader is not told this explicitly by any narrative voice but they may interpret it themselves. Hence there is an illusion of authenticity, of being able to judge based on first-hand evidence, bringing the reader to undergo their own moment of decoding as they arrive at a rational explanation for the initial perception reported by Clarissa. Indeed these two examples are somewhat antonymic in their outcomes: Conrad’s language during the delivery of the initial impression is purposefully non-violent to make the shift to a violent interpretation more shocking and show Marlowe’s disorientation; while Woolf’s initial impression is violently written so as to make the de-escalation
offered by Miss Pym more potent, and to make the reader aware of Clarissa’s state of nervousness.
In terms of critical debate around the idea of literary Impressionism, Watt and Matz are extremely important theorists. Matz extensively investigates how the term ‘impression’ has been used from philosophical origins through to the writings of Proust, Conrad and Woolf, not to mention Joyce and Henry James. His argument is that Impressionism as an artistic movement in literature can be seen as a distinct tradition, despite the overlaps with modernism and realism (2001, p. 30- 50). This chapter aims to expand the ideas of Watt, Matz and other impressionist theorists with material from the cognitive sciences.
Ann Banfield has also written in detail on the influence of Impressionism on Woolf’s work. “Her oft-noted Impressionism of style deliberately imitates the Monet-like analysis of appearances” (2000, p. 270). Banfield primarily interprets Woolf’s Impressionist influence as being manifested in the temporal structure of key novels such as To the Lighthouse. Banfield essentially views Woolf’s early fiction and short stories as being similar in design to the original Impressionists (Monet and Renoir), but her later stories being more influenced by the Post- Impressionists, such as Cézanne and Pissaro.
Woolf knew too well Fry’s criticism of Impressionism to be content with a form that stopped with impressions. Impressionist “vision” required Post- Impressionist “design,” Paul Cézanne’s geometry. Story must be turned into novel. (2003, p. 472-3)
This is not to suggest that the earlier Impressionists do not bear any relation to Woolf’s concept of Impressionism. What is most relevant about the Post- Impressionists is their ‘design’, which in Cézanne’s case refers to his interest in the elemental forms of geometry and colour. Banfield argues Woolf transforms “Impressionist colour and light” into “the colourless physical time series” for To the Lighthouse (2003, p. 511). In her view, while the novel’s time provides the equivalent of Cézanne’s canvas as a design for Impressionism, Woolf was less influenced by Bergson’s concept of time than has been traditionally claimed, and was more influenced by Russell’s concept of relativity. In drawing on these influences, Woolf resembles Zeki’s concept of the artist being a neurologist who studies the brain through their search for artistic technique. Banfield notes that there was a scientific framework behind Woolf’s appropriation of the visual arts.
Woolf ’s aesthetic was dualist. The model came from the visual arts, though it also has a source in British science. One version of science’s dualism is