by Bruce E.R. Thompson.
There is a period of our cultural history that has fallen through the cracks, and I believe it deserves our attention. Carving the history of culture into “periods” is a dicey enterprise; but, like the strata in rocks, cultural history does have discernible layers, and it can sometimes be very illuminating to consider roughly where those layers fall, and what they meant at the time.
By a “period” I mean a stretch of decades—five of them as a rough rule although the boundaries are always fuzzy—during which arts, music, literature and philosophy, chewed on a specific set of human problems or presumptions. For example, the period known as the Enlightenment (in philosophy) roughly coincided with the period known as the Neoclassical (in art) and the Classical (in music). During that period artists, musicians, and philosophers celebrated reason, proportion, and symmetry on the assumption that nothing so defined humans as our rational intellect. This period was preceded by the flashy, elegant Baroque which seemed to be a celebration of virtuosity more than reason. It was followed by the passionate, brooding, pastoral, and primitive Romantic, which insisted that our feelings are more important than our ability to reason. But the Romantic period was anything but soft-edged and dreamy. It celebrated strong passions: the kind that can overwhelm and terrify us. Moby Dick was a book from that period, as was Frankenstein.
According to the textbooks, the Romantic Period gave way to the Modern Period. But here I think there has been a mistake. Between the end of the Romantic Period, which I would put at 1870 (roughly), and the beginning of the Modern Period—which began around the Russian revolution and the Great War—there is an inconvenient era that is sometimes described as post-Romantic and sometimes as pre-Modern. In my view this period is no more “post-Romantic” or “pre-Modern” than the Enlightenment was “post-Baroque.” It is a period with its own distinct character. I propose calling it the Impressionist Period after the style of painting that most defined the art of that period. It was during that time that humans became acutely aware of the role of perception in our understanding of reality. The boundaries between truths and alternative truths became unclear. There are some who claim that this is the problem characteristic of the Postmodern era, but I believe they are indulging in unintentional self-aggrandizement. These questions first received artistic and philosophical expression a hundred and fifty years ago. We overlook this fact because we fail to recognize the Impressionist Period as a “period.”
The Impressionist Period was a time of relative peace and security in Europe. With the end of the Franco-Prussian war, France enjoyed a time of optimism and prosperity referred to as the “belle époque.” In the United States, the end of the Civil War gave rise to a season of invention and industry that included the so-called Gilded Age. Several nation-states of Europe took form during this period, and there was some understandable patriotic nationalism in the air. Composers such as Dvorak and Bartok strove to represent their homelands. We Americans lacked a composer of sufficient stature, so we asked Dvorak to do the job for us.
The chief defining problem of the Impressionist Period was the relation between perception and reality. This can be most clearly seen in paintings by Monet. Monet’s paintings are not abstract. Far from it. From across a large room the paintings seem so realistic that one could easily imagine walking right into them. Monet captured the effects of fog and the play of sunlight under clouds, but these are effects that people witness in nature. What is striking about Monet’s paintings is that they show us the world precisely as we see it, more honestly even than “realistic” paintings, which strip away fog and distance. But when you get close to one of Monet’s paintings all you can see are smudges of paint. The seeming reality that they conveyed so well at a distance utterly vanishes.
In music we find similar ideas being examined. The composers of this period, such as Debussy and Ravel, gave up writing classically structured concertos and symphonies. They wrote “tone poems.” The object was to create an impression in sound: the feeling of a long afternoon, the sense of the sea on a tranquil day. Composers of this period also gave up using chords that could be defined by a key. Rather, they experimented with tone clusters. We might call such blobs of sound dissonant, but the effect was not the kind of disturbing, grating dissonance that we associate with a true Modern composer such as Stravinsky or Gershwin. Rather, it has a kind of transcendent beauty. The best example is the Gymnopedies by Erik Satie. To the listener they are pleasant, almost soporific melodies with an appropriately structured undergirding of chords. To the pianist playing those tone clusters, they are smudges of sound, as if one were playing notes at random. As a child, when I played such “chords,” my mother would shout at me from the other room, “Stop banging on the piano!”
In literature, science fiction and fantasy first appeared during the Impressionist Period. From its inception science fiction has sought to explore the world, not as it really is, but as it might become (at the hands of humans). Reality is ours to mold. Cinema also made its debut during the Impressionist Period. In 1902 Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon was among the first films shown for the sake of telling a story, not just for the fascination of seeing pictures move. Cinema is quintessentially a child of Impressionism. We know, of course, that photographs cannot move. Yet, when they are shown in rapid succession, they appear to do so. Slow a movie down and the movie itself will disappear. Pull the camera back and we will see the sets, the sound stage, the director’s chair, the costumes. None of it is real. We only perceive it that way.
This inquiry into the nature of perception and reality was also a central theme in the philosophy of the period. William James, who founded the school of psychology at Harvard, realized that we have no access to reality except through our perceptions, and our perceptions are largely the product of our own prejudices and presumptions. Thus, what we think to be the truth is often a construct. We believe what we want to believe. James drew the conclusion that the truth is whatever we find it practical to call true. But up close it is just daubs of paint and smudges of sound, which we are free to interpret in any way that we find useful. The artists of the Impressionist Period found the idea that humans create their own reality liberating: if reality is ours to create, then we only need to ask what we wish reality to be. So, they made reality beautiful: graceful ballerinas, picnics beside the river, and floating flowers, all very soft and dreamy.
But it is a trap. The soft beauty of Impressionism was destroyed by the violence and senselessness of World War I, by a devastating flu pandemic, and by economic disasters and poverty. The Impressionist period gave way to sharp-edged cubism, Picasso’s Guernica, and the disillusionment of true Modernism. Reality fights back. Reality is not always what we wish it to be. It is true that we cannot access reality except by means of our perceptions; but it does not follow from this that we can perceive whatever we like. There is ugliness as well as beauty, both in the world and in our perceptions. The Muses must instruct us in both.
Modernism (the Post-Impressionist Period) overcompensated by trying to appreciate ugliness. Dissonance in music was intended to be brash and unsettling; architecture and sculpture became heavy and large. Theater was performed on a bare stage—or on radio, with no stage at all! And did I mention Guernica? Philosophy of the period was split into two warring schools that barely recognized each other: the absurdity of Existentialism in Europe vs. the constricting surdity of linguistic and mathematical analysis in England and the United States.
In my estimation the aptly named Postmodern Period arose during the 1970s with public access to computing power—although the transition seemed seamless to me since I lived through it. Philosophers in opposing schools made peace with each other: the new problem of how to distinguish a human from a machine became the driving question for philosophers on all sides. Movies and drama followed this theme. C-3PO supplied one half of the conundrum; Mr. Spock, whose show was cancelled during the 1960s for lack of interest, became the iconic other half of the puzzlement in the 1970s. We clung to the belief that creativity in art, music, literature, and philosophy were the defining characteristics of humanness, but the debate about beauty and ugliness was set aside. This matter was judged to be merely a question of tastes and preferences.
Of course, artists and philosophers are never satisfied with the period in which they must live. In part, that is what drives the dialectic of cultural history, giving rise to new movements and new periods. The Postmodern Period has worn out its welcome. I cannot guess what we will name the new period. (Post-postmodernism is out of the question.) In any case, the rise of AI has (or will) usher in a new period in which the driving question will be to sort out the difference between authentic creativity vs. manufactured pseudo-creativity. Art will be less about beauty and ugliness than about originality and plagiarism. This will be a tough problem. Artists have always looked to the past (and to others) for inspiration, while being careful not to be too “derivative.”
And looking back, I believe that remembering the Impressionist Period may be helpful. Misunderstanding or overlooking that period distorts the conversation that got us to where we are. Seeing how they coped with the distinction between perception and reality may help us confront this new conundrum. In all periods I believe the underlying question has been: how can we find a synthesis that answers our questions—without destroying the distinction between truth and falsehood?