Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Impressionism

Claude, Monet (1840-1926)The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Kirchner's "self portrait of a soldier" painted in 1917, during a furlough caused by a nervous breakdown.

*"the main and perhaps most passionate tenet of impressionism," Ford wrote. "was the suppression of the author from the pages of his books. He must not comment; he must not narrate; he must present his impressions of his imagionary affairs as if he had been present at them" (Gordon, 45). Comment: Can Parades End be viewed by this definition as an immpressionist novel? I don't really see a suppression of the author from the pages of this book. A lot of the characters can be seen to represent people in Ford's life and even Ford himself. Maybe it can be viewed as the Ford Maddox Ford's inner id coming through the pages?
*"by 1918, Ford believed, "every one who had taken physical part in the war was then mad." Ford himself suffered a serious mental breakdown in France, as does Tiejens also" (Gordon, 73)
*"If the novel represents a transcendence or "breakthrough," then whose? Tietjens? Or Tiejens' and the author's? Probably both. For Tietjens, the slow ordeal of which his experience in the trenches is the outward and visible sign is a matter of sloughing off a false -or a superficial- identity and, in his resulting nakedness and dispossession, finding .. his supreme idenity. For Ford, recording this process was at last a chance to have his fantasy and his realism together..."(Gordon,75)
*"It seems quite appropiate that Ford Maddox Ford's maternal grandfather was born in France, in Calais, and appropiate that he was a painter. In Ford's novels the effects are very often painterly- and nearly always French. In "getting in" an interior- and especially in Parade's End- he will characteristically give the source and quality of light"(Gordon, 38) for example: "A shadow- the shadow of the General Officer Commanding in Chief- falling across the bar of light that the sunlight threw in at his open door" (444).
*"Fords eye had been trained early in the studio of his grandfather"(Gordon, 38)
*Examples of his painting technique: "...the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light"(291)
*"The sergent-major looked poetically down a ribbion of white-washed stones that descended the black mountainside. Over the next shoulder of hill was the blur of hidden conflagration"(312).
*"Captain Mackenzie in the light of a fantastically brilliant hurricane lamp appeared to be bathing dejectedly in a surf of coiling papers spread on the table before him"(312)

source: Gordon, Ambrose.The Invisible Tent.USA:University of Texas Press,1964.

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