What is Impressionism and is Joseph Conrad an impressionist?

Give textual evidence from Heart

of Darkness.

Impressionistic literature can be defined as a work created by an author that centers on the
thinking and feelings of the characters and allows the reader to draw his or her own interpretations
and conclusions about their meaning.

Absolutely, Heart of Darkness is often cited as one of the preeminent examples of Impressionistic
literature. Throughout the novella, we witness the inner workings of Marlow's thoughts and
emotions as he journeys up the Congo River toward the Inner Station and his encounter with
Kurtz. In fact, it is Kurtz who presents the major focus on Marlow's attention. However, Marlow
never comes out and explicitly tells us what he thinks and believes about Kurtz; instead, Conrad
leaves us to draw our own conclusions.

Kurtz, too, is much the same. He also shares his thoughts and feelings about his job and his role in
the African jungle and the reader is left to "read between the lines" to interpret his exact meaning.
No example could better exemplify the element of Impressionism with the novella than Kurtz's
final words: "the horror, the horror." A readers we do not know exactly what "the horror" is and
instead are left to devise our own interpretation.

Impressionism was originally an artistic rather than a literary movement. It was based on the
nature of perception, specifically the knowledge that we do not actually see objects, but rather see
light falling on objects that is reflected to our eyes. Thus impressionists focused on portraying the
light that impresses itself on our eyes rather than reconstructing the object per se. The symbolist
poets sometimes were described as impressionists because, in opposition to the realist movement,
they believed that we do not experience external events directly but instead as mediated through
our senses and sensibilities. Thus poets such as Rimbaud were concerned with the nature of
sensation, of trying to describe emotional impressions, rather than to create vivid approximations
of an external world.

Perhaps the most prototypically impressionist novelist, in the strict sense of the term, was
Huysman, whose A Rebours focuses on an aesthete concerned with this specific problem of
maximizing certain types of sensation in his life. While certain recent genre theorists have
discussed Heart of Darkness as an impressionistic novel, stylistically it is far closer to German
Expressionist work than to the refined urban sensibilities of the French fin de siecle poets and their
imitators (such as Arthur Symons, whose poetry and criticism were seminal in the use of
"impressionism" as a literary term). In some ways, Heart of Darkness has almost Gothic
characteristics in its exotic locale and atmosphere of horror. Simply expressing the interior
thoughts of characters does not make a writer an impressionist, as that is a feature common to
almost all novelists.

Ian Watts's position that Conrad was an impressionistic writer uses the term somewhat
ahistorically, not referencing Impressionism within its literary or artistic context, but rather
referring to Hume's philosophical concept of impressions and labeling works focused on the
interior states of characters, such as those of Conrad and Virginia Wolfe, as impressionistic, as
opposed to realistic novels that focused on the external world.