... Moves on:
“Intention” in his conception is preserved but revised, made to encompass unconscious impulses in the body as well as the mind, along with a broader ambit of impersonal and transpersonal intentions.
This post is the final installment of a three-part meditation on Michael Fried’s What Was Literary Impressionism? and its relevance to the study of D. H. Lawrence. The first two installments may be read here and here.
Of course, it is one thing to say that literary impressionism has a certain preoccupation with the “scene of writing”; it is another to make that preoccupation define impressionism, such that any work not displaying particular anxieties and repressions falls outside the category. Fried’s already mentioned insistence that Woolf is not an “impressionist” (a distinction he attributes to the very radicalism with which she devises new strategies for presenting sensory impressions) may suggest the advantage of positing distinct varieties of impressionism, only one of which came to an end in 1914. That said, the usefulness of Fried’s classification emerges in the contrast it enables him to draw between the writers who make up the bulk of his study and the three modernists he considers briefly at its close: Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Lewis’s modernism, in particular, marks an explicit break with the earlier priorities, in a manner that brings the difficulty of assimilating Lawrence to either formation into sharper focus.
Simply put, Fried sees in modernism’s aesthetic sophistication—its self-conscious awareness of the text as a “worked surface that seeks to hold the reader’s attention solely in its own terms”—a reduction of the more complex dynamics of anxiety and repression governing the impressionist project of making the reader “see.”1 To be sure, the “materiality of writing” is paradoxical in both impressionism and modernism. As meaning-bearing, writing can never be strictly material, and this fact yields the impressionist oscillation between awareness of ink and page and the constitutive repression that enables acts of “seeing” in words. Yet this fact does not preclude historical shifts in relative emphasis on sign and signified, shifts that at their most radical demarcate distinct literary phases.
For Fried, the hyperbolic aggression of Wyndham Lewis’s prose entails a highly self-conscious display of the textual surface whose typographical innovations accentuate a break with the “scene of writing” (that is, writing by hand, with pen and ink). Lewis’s early story “Bestre” brings together several anti-impressionist themes:
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