AmLit – lecture notes

NATURALISM
EXPRESSIONISM, IMPRESSIONISM

STEPHEN CRANE

Crane has been called a naturalist, an impressionist (“He is the only

impressionist and only an impressionist" – Joseph Conrad), an expressionist,
and a symbolist, but none of these disparate labels denotes the range and
complexity of his art.

Critics see him as the legitimate successor to Henry James insofar as Crane’s
main concern was also to delineate, though in a completely different manner,
the character of the American sensibility. The combination of enthralling
romanticism & racy, hard-boiled cynicism - typical of the journalist, makes
him unique, foretelling the advent of the likes of Hemingway on the
American literary scene. His view of the world is that of a chaos whose only
consolation lies in the fellowship between man and man, a moving
testimony to the tenderness of which men are capable. Like Whitman and
Thoreau before him, and Hemingway later, Stephen Crane too tested himself
in complete isolation, in unfamiliar contexts. He too had the point of view of
an athlete, believing in effort and suffering, paying the price, standing up for
a value, developing and fighting for an ideal, even though losing. The result
is a lack of compassion for the egotistical self, doubled up by total
compassion for the suffering of others.

Typically for Crane, this “national blending”, painfully needed in the

aftermath of the Civil War (1861-1865), is forged as a result of extreme
circumstances and limiting contexts – e.g. war or by placing different kinds
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of men in closely confined situations (a small boat on a rough sea, a
snowbound hotel).

For him, war is the essence of human condition: 1. view of life as a long war
which we seek and challenge in fear and controlled panic 2. view of man as
damaged and alone in a hostile, violent world  forecasting Hemingway.

However, Crane takes sides with Melville, who says: “all wars are boyish
and are fought by boys”, producing, especially in his “The Red Badge of
Courage”, a satire of the traditional American novel of initiation.

Going back to Crane’s naturalistic inclinations, his (novel) Maggie, a Girls

of the Streets (1893) is regarded as the first American specimen of literary
naturalism. On a surface reading, the novel appears to merely dramatize the
naturalistic precept that human beings are inexorably moulded by
environmental and biological forces. A closer reading, however, reveals that
the inhabitants of the Bowery (NB. low-class district in New York City at
the time) are somewhat complicit in their fates.

Overall, Crane's work embodied many of psychologist William James's

ideas about the nature of reality and truth. Like James, Crane rejects the
concept of a block universe and subscribes to the belief that in the fluid,
ever-changing world that human beings inhabit, there are many provisional
truths, rather than absolute, everlasting Truths.

Like James and C. S. Peirce, and later John Dewey, Crane shared the belief
that experience – not "Truth" or "Reality – is the starting point and the
culmination of philosophical reflection. For these pragmatic humanists, we
confront realities instead of Reality; and because experiences, in part,
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constitute realities, the worlds of spectators and participants are not just
different, they are often incompatible. Given Crane's suspicions about the
existence of "Truth" and "Reality" and his insistence upon the legitimate
standing of multiple perspectives, his metaphysics forces readers to question
the existence of a comprehensive scheme, just as his epistemology casts
doubt on ultimate answers and final assessments. The only certainty is that
direct experience of life is to be privileged over any mediated action (the act
of reading included – sic!) as the true generator of meaning.

Crane was preoccupied with the perils that accompany the human search for
self-realization. He recognized that reality is too vast and heterogeneous to
be encompassed by any individual intelligence, that the beneficent and
instructive Nature of the romanticists and transcendentalists has no soothing
message for humanity, and that human beings are less absurd and pathetic
(and may even rise to a measure of grandeur) when they see life from
multiple points of view.

However, Crane's obsessively mathematical protagonists find themselves

forever unprepared for life's unexpected irregularities. The point is that
squares, like heroic ideals, exist perfectly only in the mind. In the real world,
the best we can do with our materials - stone and wood, love and courage - is
approach the ideal in the stoic awareness that in this world we are doomed to
fall short of the mind's extravagance. And in the next? Here Crane is
adamant. There is nothing beyond the veil of appearances. The universe is
spectacle, pure spectacle. To ask for more is to invite painful
disillusionment.

As a result, his protagonists achieve their best effects by finding patterns of

significance in the humblest elements and events of their common
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experience, transubstantiating them into symbols of uncommon power. Like
Conrad, Joyce, and other founders of the modernist tradition, Crane assumed
the universe to be devoid of significance. However, the mind yearns for
pattern. At the same time, the mind gives endless examples which
demonstrate that experience is patternless because Nature is neutral and
unbiased, or as Crane puts it in "The Open Boat," "indifferent, flatly
indifferent." But not so indifferent as to overlook equipping us with pattern-
seeking minds.

In "The Open Boat," the theme of brotherhood coexists with and seriously
modifies the prevailing vision of a stark and indifferent universe. Man
figures, contradictorily, as heroic, enduring, self-destructive, absurd, and
locked into contingency. Almost without fail, Crane's characters see their
limited field of vision through distorting lenses, and often they act from
subliminal urges that they never fully understand. However, Crane builds a
view of human action and an ethic of social solidarity which are explicitly
humanistic. He stresses the value of human effort and the importance of
human solidarity in an indifferent universe, that of genuine comradeship
born of joint effort.

His characters do not begin by having an understanding of nature, they only

gradually come to it by coming to an understanding of themselves first,
having new knowledge of themselves and respect for others = the “subtle
brotherhood of men”. So, the evolution is from a general definition of nature
to man’s relationship to nature, to man’s relationship to man: a form of
ceremony, something sacred.

With respect to Crane’s de-mythologizing treatment of the frontier, his

(short story) "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" has been read as a satire on
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the passing of the Old West brought on by Eastern influences such as New
York-made clothing and trains carrying outlanders. The symbolism of names
or objects (Potter, Scratchy Wilson, Yellow Sky, Scratchy's funnel-shaped
tracks) has been commented on extensively, as has wildman Scratchy's
sudden pacification by gentle-hearted, guilt-ridden, newly married Sheriff
Potter.

More often than not, the story has been treated as myth (straight or ironic)
with ritualized roles, converting a potential tragedy into a comic scene of
deflation and inaction: reversing the intention or, more precisely, defeating
the reader's expectation over and over again.

"The Blue Hotel", on the other hand, displays a masterfully hard-edged,

unsentimental objectivity. There is a broad range of views, from the purely
literary (e.g. Crane's language and style, the identity of the Swede, the
Easterner, and the cowboy) on through the philosophical and theological
(e.g. what is meant by "square"? how many are really guilty of the Swede's
death? what is the Easterner's final speech concerning grammar, group guilt
and individual punishment all about?), the psychological (e.g. why do the
characters act as they do?), the ideological (e.g. what do we make of Crane's
treatment of abstract morality and group judgment?), to the artistic/aesthetic
(e.g. why does Crane structure the story as he does?).

Throughout his fiction Crane depicts the pathos and comedy attendant upon
the civilizing pressure Eastern commerce exerted on the anarchic West of
the 1890s. Crane suggests that the constructed world is fraught with whim
and caprice, whereas events in the natural world have sufficient regularity
and enough loose play so that human actions can make a difference.