Lafcadio Hearn and Global Aestheticism

Lafcadio Hearn’s writings provide a radically different understanding of literary cosmopolitanism from Wilde’s. This chapter studies Hearn’s attempts to translate and transpose aestheticism onto a global stage. It argues that Hearn’s works compound a commitment to preserving cultural differences with essentialism, exoticism, and even, paradoxically, elements of cultural nationalism. Hearn’s early translations of Théophile Gautier’s fantastic stories created a dialogue between metropolitan European aestheticism and the cosmopolitan culture of nineteenth-century New Orleans. In his writings on Japan, Hearn employed literary impressionism and ghost narratives (some of which look back to Gautier) to interrogate his own authority as Western essayist and to capture the peculiar temporality of turn-of-the-century Japan, a country caught between traditional culture and modernization, nationalist and cosmopolitan tendencies. In Japan, Hearn also lectured extensively on British aestheticism, encouraging his students to draw inspiration from it for the creation of a cosmopolitan Japanese literature of the future.

Fairy Tale Epic

Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo is the focus of this chapter. Hailed as its author’s most comprehensive effort at historic panorama, epic in scale, Nostromo also (if somewhat surreptitiously) engages the diminutive form of fairy tale. Combining epic with fairy tale provides the perplexing indeterminacy many readers detect, which is often attributed to Conrad’s literary impressionism. What he reveals, however, is that even the supposedly factual enterprise of history is subject to the vicissitudes commonly accorded “creative” (thus fictive) literary forms like epic, lyric, and fairy tale. History and myth emerge from Nostromo as helpless collaborators in the hybrid fabrications of modern fiction.

Impressions

In 1901, fingerprinting was first implemented by Scotland Yard for the purposes of criminal identification, usurping Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometric system of body measurements in the process. Recording identity in the imprint left by a body’s digits allowed for the identification of individuals on a mass scale, ‘fixing’ their identity with apparently incontrovertible certainty. But in this chapter it will be argued that the fingerprint also served as an example of a much more enigmatic and ‘impressionistic’ identity. Gathering together the most noticeable and telling features of how fingerprints were first thought of as a means of identification, lines of comparison are then drawn with two other discourses which have a similarly impressionistic basis: firstly the early writing of Sigmund Freud and, secondly, the Literary Impressionism of Joseph Conrad. Focusing especially closely on Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) the chapter argues that while the eponymous ‘Jim’ remains obscure even by the novel’s conclusion, the identity of the narrator, Marlow, is made apparent throughout the narration: Marlow essentially smears his prints all over the text. In lifting prints, analysing traces, and reading impressions fingerprinting, psychoanalysis and Literary Impressionism read identity in the signs made during its contact with the external world—signs which had to subsequently be enhanced, analysed and represented by authoritative experts who could make such identity visible.

Rural Ritual, Gardened Faith: Ford Madox Ford's Memorial Plots

This article examines the importance of the working country garden to the memorial narratives of Ford Madox Ford. It begins with a study of Ford before the Great War; considering how his particular brand of Literary Impressionism was frequently used to make a case for memorializing the rural poor and their surrounding landscape from The Heart of the Country (1906) to The Fifth Queen saga (1906–08). Moving to Post-War Sussex and Kent, it examines Ford's continuing interest in the country garden and rural community, reading his gardening practices as attempted personal reconstruction through faith in landscape production. As Ford moves from small-holding to small-holding, and eventually away for good, it discusses how the narratives of his part-fictive biographies, including Thus to Revisit (1921) and It was the Nightingale (1934), repeatedly return to rural England to resituate the developments of Literary Impressionism – and Ford's most formative literary friendships – in and about the garden. The repetitions of garden work; of sowing, weeding, and digging over plots, proved essential to Ford's in-text ritualisations of rural life and literary innovation alike.

Ford Madox Ford

This chapter seeks to educe the forms of truth that impressionist aesthetics wants to elicit from representation by re-approaching the relationship between particular impressions and universal categories of experience, in order to ask what happens when realism, a mode premised on the production of consensual knowledge, encounters the contingencies of individual vision. Ford insists upon a holistic axiom of literary impressionism in his critical writings, insisting that a thing conceived apart from its relationships would not be a thing, since all language is a matter of relating some things to other things. Yet Ford’s narrators seek a kind of knowledge that is not discursive—that does not rely on the choice of a particular linguistic formulation, and that one cannot be argued out of. Ford stages this descriptive limit by exploiting a set of non-descriptive terms—everything and nothing. The indescribable here means not so much a sublime beyond comprehension but rather the particularities of individual feelings.

Cosmopolitan Cynicisms

This chapter turns to one of the most flexible and complex political effects of cynicism: its taking of distance on the politics of the nation state. It starts by re-reading the old story of cosmopolitanism’s point of origin in the claim of Diogenes of Sinope to be ‘not a citizen’ of Athens, or any other city state, but kosmopolites, a citizen of the world. It examines the difference between the classical historical literature, in the main, wary of giving Diogenes credit for advocating universal humanitarianism, and the more-and-less critical uses made of classical history by twentieth- and twenty-first-century political theorists. On that basis, the chapter traces the lines of a specifically ‘cynic cosmopolitanism’ as it finds expression within two literary writers looking to challenge the role, and the rights, of Englishness in an international frame: George Eliot (as she turns away from ‘moral realism’, at the end of her writing career, towards more experimental engagement with the form of the character sketch), and Ford Madox Ford, as he develops and revises his literary ‘Impressionism’ during and immediately after the First World War. For both, cosmopolitanism was less a moral matter than one of psychology, requiring an internal balance to be found, in one’s own mind, between idealism and a bracingly cynical realism.

Introduction

The introduction argues that James’s work is best understood as impression-driven rather than impressionist. It allies the book with those critics who take a philosophical view of literary impressionism, while arguing that the book’s approach complements more historicist views of literary impressionism of the last decade. It emphasizes that this book’s contribution lies in: its belief that James has a greater debt to the impressions of pre-impressionist painters than to those of impressionist painters; its greater emphasis on the making of, rather than the receiving of, impressions, and its use of theories of the performative to conceptualize this; and in the detailed intellectual and cultural history of the impression that it offers, which helps the book tell a new story about James’s artistic, philosophical, and psychological influences.

Trials and the Impressionism of Advocacy

Trials have often been written about as narrative events: the standard claim being that at trial one narrative is pitted against another with the verdict proclaiming the winner. This is a connection which privileges a certain view of narrative that is defined by the coherence and closure produced by its plot and which is embodied, in literature, by realist fiction. While admitting the validity of this position, this chapter is intent upon extending it by examining the connection between trials and a different understanding and example of narrative fiction. Taking the Literary Impressionism of Joseph Conrad as a cue (and through an analysis of materials such as Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1987) and the 2014 podcast Serial) the chapter claims that narrative’s capacity to contain non-sequential secrets, to convey latent messages, and to produce meaning from its seemingly peripheral constituents have, to date, been underanalyzed in the context of a narrative understanding of trials. In conclusion, the chapter argues that the impossibility of divorcing narrative from its instantiation in language has far-reaching consequences for how we might understand the narrative battle between prosecution and defense.