Troubling the Subjective: The Problem of Impressionism in The Reef

Abstract

Modernism did not occur in literature alone; all the arts responded to social and cultural changes that affected artists’ understanding of their world. Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon attracted not only writers but painters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Paul Cezanne. In Paris in the early twentieth century, artists of different mediums fed off each other, working with similar ideas and transferring them from one “canvas” to another. These “new” ideas can be traced back to, or at least through, earlier roots, one of which is French Impressionism in painting. The Impressionists ushered in an era of disruptions in art through their theories of subjectivity and their emphasis on the self, their choice of unorthodox subject matter, and their practice of leaving the canvas “unfinished.” For writers, the possibilities of the subjective and the “unfinished” opened up literary texts to new forms. From Henry James to James Joyce to William Faulkner, authors found that the “impression” corresponded usefully to the psychological processes they hoped to capture in words. Ezra Pound’s editing of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land produced a poem without transitions that required readers to fill in the gaps for themselves.