A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing

A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing. Adam Parkes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011) xviii + 284 pp. At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. Sarah Cole (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) xiv + 377pp. Violence pervades late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe, so much so that we would be hard-pressed to find an arena of political or aesthetic life unmarked by its presence. In its horrifying material forms, anarchist bombings stunned people in metropolitan capitals, imperial violence scarred colonial subjects, and mass warfare took lives at the front and in civilian bombings during the Spanish Civil War and two World Wars. Critics have long seen the connection between these historical events and writing explicitly about war, or in selected avant-garde literary movements--like Vorticism and Futurism--that placed rhetorical violence at the center of their calls to BLAST cultural enemies or to find in art beautiful ideas which kill. But a far broader range of literature in the period attempted to come to terms with a culture defined through shock, trauma, and violence; this literature imagined the ways private life and aesthetic form engage with violence. Sarah Cole's At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland and Adam Parkes's A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing--both virtuosic in their scope and in their close readings--trace the pervasiveness of violence and shock in the period. They frame their inquiries differently: Cole uses violence as a thematic frame for reading literary forms and Parkes takes a particular literary form, impressionism, as the context within which the shocks of perception register. But in doing so both explore the way form enacts, contains, and ultimately theorizes the relation between literature and violence. Cole's At the Violet Hour asks how modernism imagines the capacities of literary form in direct response to the violence of its historical moment. Shadowed in large part by the presence in our own time of what Cole evocatively terms disenchanted violence--those dead or injured bodies that remain flesh, refusing symbolic or redemptive meaning--At the Violet Hour investigates the ways modernist forms can render death and violence meaningful or refuse to do so. In contrast, Parkes seeks the figure of violence within a more consistently aesthetic history. He traces the way fictional and visual impressionism embedded the impact of the outer world and the traumas of the psyche in a model of subjectivity as ruptured and dissolving. Both books read across different disciplines of writing, from revolutionary tracts to art criticism to poetry, seeing violence as a problem of aesthetic form as well as bombs. Cole's magisterial study takes "violence in modernism [to be] so deeply embedded as to function almost as the literary itself' (26). She examines the work of a wide spectrum of writers and expands our sense of the links between modernism and violence well beyond those figures best known to have glamorized violence. Violence here is not only a historical force that modernist literature encounters; it also charges literary figuration so fully as to become entangled with symbolic potency and the possibility of meaning-making itself. At the Violet Hour uses a key scene from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a paradigm of the way modernism suggests violence allows literature to look inward at the private and bodily as well as expand outward toward the representative or allegorical. Cole analyzes the moment where the prefect of studies pandies young Stephen Dedalus, and shows how this scene not only offers an imaginary origin of language--Stephen's elemental cry--that moves outward into obtrusive literary patterning, but prefigures the way violence lets texts point simultaneously inward toward the body, "forc[ing] the imagination back to the moment of injury," and outward toward the symbolic and abstract, into an allegory of hierarchical power (10). …