A Sense of Shock, an incisive and engaging intervention into the study of literary impressionism, seeks to recover the rich and diverse historical contexts of this aesthetic style in the modernist era. It has become something of a commonplace to see impressionism as a form that foregrounds individual and private vision insofar as impressionism aims to transcribe, not the external world, but the unique sensory experiences of a perceiving consciousness. Parkes, however, insists that neither a view that treats impressionism ahistorically—as a mode of epistemology—nor a view that sees impressionism withdrawing from the historical world is adequate. Instead, impressionism “was shaped by [an] active engagement with larger cultural phenomena that defined the modern age: anarchism and terrorism, homosexuality and feminism, nationalism and war, economic depression and the new global media” (x). Far from being a merely privatized will-to-style, literary impressionism is best understood as a form wherein the boundaries between the private and the public, the textual and the contextual, the aesthetic and the historical, and the individual and the collective are continuously negotiated and probed. By arguing this, Parkes radically reorients the way we read impressionist writing, turning our gaze to the shifting points at which the interior subject meets the exterior world.
Parkes advances his argument through rigorous analyses of a series of case studies that are designed to reveal the multiple and varied historical dimensions of impressionism at the turn of the century. His first chapter reads Henry James's Portrait of the Lady (1881) through the lenses of the James Whistler–John Ruskin trial in which Whistler and Ruskin seemingly stand as polar opposites: the former in favor of a solipsistic subjectivism expressed in his impressionist paintings and the latter standing for a collective moral standard expressed in his anti-impressionist screed (for which Whistler sued him for libel). But James's exploration of the notion of “justice” in his novel suggests that these two positions are implicated in one another: although justice necessarily reflects, on one hand, the kind of social and collective norms that Ruskin defends, it also signifies, on the other, a personal sympathy toward the object of judgment—the sense of “doing justice to” something—akin to Whistler's insistence on individual responsiveness. James's own impressionistic novel attempts not so much to reconcile these two notions but to maintain them “in a state of productive tension” (33) such that an adequate sense of justice entails the simultaneous deployment of both private sensibility and public convention.
Parkes turns next to elucidating the homoerotic subtext of impressionism by way of an analysis of Walter Pater's influence on a group of disciples—George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Symons. Here, literary influence is seen as a mode of eroticized impressionism that mediates between the self and the other, since Pater's aestheticism impressed itself on—penetrated, so to speak—the practices of his followers but was also reinterpreted anew by them for their own ends. In an inspired move, Parkes not only outlines the younger generation's rereadings of Pater—Moore's heightening of impressionism as a sensory and (homo)sexualized response, Wilde's tempering of it in his emphasis on intellectualism, and Symons's attempt to de-eroticize impressionism altogether—but also ends with a brilliant interpretation of Heart of Darkness (1902) as a novella in which impressionism-as-influence is discernible in Conrad's representation of Kurtz's invisible magnetism. Parkes's third chapter continues to focus on George Moore's writings, but it pivots to the issue of nationalism, accounting for Moore's embrace of impressionism vis-à-vis his rejection of both naturalism and nationalism. Naturalist aesthetics tends “to treat the biological family as the central metaphor of human life” (78) and, by figuring the nation as an extended family, falls back onto an understanding of the nation in biological or racial terms. As an Anglo-Irish Catholic landlord (a deeply ambiguous sociopolitical position), Moore's suspicion of the trope of nation-as-family leads to his enthusiastic adoption of impressionism because of the three modern discourses that underpin it—“individualism, cosmopolitanism, and homoeroticism” (88)—which afford freedom from the constraints of familial, national, and biological determinism. Yet Moore is unable to escape the imperatives of the nation because impressionism itself comes to be figured as an extension of kinship, not unlike the Paterian network of influence of the second chapter.
The next three chapters investigate “the sense of shock” of the monograph's title by arguing for impressionism as an aesthetics of shock. Via a reading of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), Parkes shows how Conrad's impressionist tactics—the rupture of linear time, the multiplying of perspectives, and the “delayed decoding”—replicate the experience of shock produced by the terrorist bombings that occurred across Europe during the fin-de-siècle; “a typical Conrad tale works like an orchestrated sequence of increasingly powerful detonations” (100). In his attempt to produce a sense of shock, Conrad's novel inevitably draws on the sensationalizing languages of newspapers and the mass media, rendering the modernist distinction between high and low, the elite and the popular, deeply unstable. Through brief analyses of H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, Parkes ends the fourth chapter by suggesting that impressionism became an apt vehicle for representing not just terrorist shock but also shellshock in the aftermath of the Great War. Parkes's fifth chapter intertwines the concerns of the second chapter—of literary influence, with the twist of sexual difference—and the focus on shock in the fourth chapter to read Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) and her biography of Roger Fry. Woolf has invariably been recognized as “one of modernism's preeminent writers of trauma” (147), yet Parkes insists that trauma here is not only psychical but also social: the shock of Woolf's famous “moments of being,” for instance, is triggered by her memories of her half brothers' sexual abuses; fragmentation or perceptual discontinuities—the hallmarks of impressionist style—are a function of a system of patriarchy that enforces violent sexual division. Responding to Pater's impressionism in Jacob's Room and Fry's postimpressionism in her biography of him, Woolf's revisionism of them draws attention to how their aesthetics reinforce a culture of patriarchy, a circle of male influence that excludes women.
Parkes's sixth and final chapter turns to Ford Madox Ford: not the famous impressionist Ford of The Good Soldier (1915) or Parade's End (1924–28), but the lesser-known Ford of the 1930s. Examining Ford's fiction from that period—The Rash Act (1933), Henry for Hugh (1934), and the unfinished novel, “Professor's Progress”—Parkes recasts Ford as a Depression-era writer who registers the shocks of the Great Depression via a reworking of concept of character, such that “character may be understood only in terms of dispossession, devaluation, inflation, or lost credibility” (188). The Depression's crisis of economic value translates itself in Ford's fiction as a representational crisis of character. This hollowing out of subjectivity transforms Ford's own earlier impressionist practices, as the impression equally hollows out into a mere “impression of an impression” (193). Parkes concludes his monograph with a brief epilogue on Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1948), a spy novel in which the problem of private perception is never fully separable from the problem of public politics, thus encapsulating the mainstay of the book's argument.
A Sense of Shock is an illuminating monograph about the historicity of impressionism that should prove extremely useful for literary—especially modernist—scholars. Indeed, much of the pleasure of the book emerges from Parkes's fine eye toward aesthetic form and his subtle readings of the myriad writings he engages with. This may seem to return us to the realm of the merely textual, but Parkes's expert interpretations open up these texts into their wider contexts, showing us that aesthetics cannot ultimately be separated from history.
