Stephen Crane and an Understanding of the Modern World
by Cheryl Dunlop
(a paper written in college and revised later for students I taught)
In today’s scientific age, knowledge is believed to come only from what can be verified. What cannot be registered, tested, and proven by ordinary scientific means is often discarded as useless, irrelevant, or untrue. Naturalism, coming from the presupposition that matter is all there is, thus discards or tries to explain the immaterial part of man, that which makes man personal and distinct from nature. Naturalism discards God as well, and explains nature and events by chance and evolution.
To understand Stephen Crane, the reader needs to understand his naturalistic presuppositions. To read and understand Stephen Crane is to come closer to understanding modern man and how far his thinking has drifted from the Christian worldview.
“The Open Boat” is one of Crane’s better known works. The short story is based on Crane’s experiences at sea in a small boat after a shipwreck off the coast of Florida. The significance of the story comes from what that experience contributed to Crane’s under-standing of the world—what he learned and what he wants to show from that event.
The time in the open boat was a turning point for Crane. He wrote a newspaper account of the events and then a short story to show the human side more thoroughly than a journalistic account could. Many of his poems also allude to such events, speaking of the sea and fate. “To the Maiden” tells how the sea appears to the wrecked sailor: “To the sailor, wrecked,/ The sea was dead grey walls/ Superlative in vacancy/ Upon which nevertheless at fateful time/ Was written/ The grim hatred of nature” (Crane, Poems, 693).
The ending of “The Open Boat” tells the reader the significance of the events described in its characters’ lives: “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters” (Crane “The Open Boat” 670). Speaking about this ending, Clarence Walhout points to Crane’s purpose for recording the story, saying that it seems his main focus turns not to the question whether the men will survive but to “the meaning of the experience” (363). Crane does not tell us directly what that interpretation is (Walhout 363), but the story is his chance to interpret indirectly, to show the reader through his eyes what conclusions he came to.
Naturalism, which fits in with what Crane learned and wishes to communicate, is not a random series of ideas; rather, it is a system of thought that ties together as a belief system, a world view. The propositions of naturalism are explored in depth in James Sire’s book The Universe Next Door. Those propositions are:
Matter exists eternally and is all there is... The cosmos exists as a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system... Human beings are complex `machines’; personality is an interrelation of chemical and physical properties we do not yet fully understand... Death is extinction of personality and individuality... History is a linear stream of events linked by cause and effect but without an overarching purpose... Ethics is related only to human beings [not to God] (62-70).
Most of these propositions are fleshed out in “The Open Boat.” The most significant beliefs of naturalism deal with man (meaningless), nature (random, chance), and God (non-existent). Crane deals with man and nature, making man a part of nature. He personifies nature, especially the sea (“the last effort of the grim water”—TOB 657), but nature is intrinsically impersonal.
Crane’s poem, “A Man Adrift on a Slim Spar,” speaks descriptively of the sea: “Tented waves rearing lashy dark points/ The near whine of froth in circles... The incessant raise and swing of the sea/ And growl after growl of crest”; the poem comes back four times to the line, “God is cold” (Crane 694, 95). Crane can manipulate nature, make it appear impersonal or personal, but any appearance of personality is merely an author’s trick, an illusion. In reality, “God is cold.” God doesn’t exist; there is no Personality behind nature.
Crane’s characters show much about Crane’s ideas about man: Man is alone and must fend for himself; man is all there is. This understanding removes God and seems to start with man glorified, but it ends with man reduced, no longer quite human. Crane’s poem “God Lay Dead in Heaven” is not a celebration of victory, but a song of horror: “Purple winds went moaning,/ Their wings drip-dripping/ With blood/ That fell upon the earth” (Poems 692).
So, too, the world the men adrift on the open boat face is a sad one; the shore to which they look for rescue remains alone, unresponsive—a symbol, perhaps, of the unresponsiveness of the heavens. The luckless sailors continue to look to the shore for deliverance, but “it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign” (TOB 661).
Crane discovers there is no personality behind the universe, but the realization brings despair: “When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples” (TOB 666). Intellectually, it seems he cannot accept the existence of God, but his whole nature cries out against the loneliness of an impersonal universe. He’d rather have a god he could yell at, a temple he could throw bricks at, than silence.
Even when the correspondent (Crane) begins to identify with the man in the poem from his childhood—the soldier dying in Algiers—he “was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension” (TOB 667). He had compassion, but his understanding was “impersonal,” objectively removed like the universe was showing itself to him to be.
Katz comments on the story’s subtitle (“A Tale Intended to Be after the Fact. Being the Experience of Four Men from the Sunk Steamer Commodore”), that the reader’s attention is focused on the word “experience,” and that experience is “the formative principle of the tale” (69). Walhout says, “For Crane, understanding is based upon and limited by perception” (367). Experience is limited to what can be taken in by the senses; people can only judge based on what they see. Gradually, all the men on the boat become aware of “the unconcern of the universe” (Crane TOB 668). If they are going to survive, they must rely on themselves.
In such a world, man is helpless. The universe is an enemy, a treacherous enemy because it cannot be understood. For a while, the men on the boat are optimistic in spite of their circumstances: “Think we’ll make it, Captain?” “If this wind holds and the boat don’t swamp, we can’t do much else” (Crane TOB 659). But as the sea continues to rage, their hope begins to die; nature is the enemy: “The spray, when it dashed uproariously over the side, made the voyagers shrink and swear like men who were being branded” (664).
Man who is nothing more than a piece of the universe, a pro-duct of purposeless evolution, is meaningless. Katz says: “`The Open Boat’ is his [Crane’s] retrospection... From this retrospection emerges his (and the reader’s) personal knowledge which makes plain the ultimate meaning of experience.... To sum up, the totality of experience for the living and the dead is: existence” (82). When the purpose of life is limited to the fact of life, and when that life is tossed about in an absurd battle against an absurd universe, despair is the logical result; “The Open Boat” illustrates that despair in the lives of four men.
Crane’s story also fleshes out his ideas about nature: Nature is capricious, impersonal, and a cosmic joke; nature exists by chance in a random universe. Man, too, as a mere part of nature, exists by chance.
In the beginning, the men in “The Open Boat” are innocent of the battles they will face. The narrator, the correspondent, comments on his own thoughts: “The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was there” (657). By the end of the events that are about to happen, he will have become an “interpreter.” But for now, he wonders.
He turns to the captain: “The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down” (657). The word “willy nilly” suggests the randomness of the events, the “bad luck” of a ship going down. The captain is deeply involved with his ship, and its loss changes him right at the beginning. The captain is less optimistic throughout the story than the other three: “Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears” (657).
The men are fighters. They expect to survive their ordeal. But Crane, writing “after the fact” knows what they do not yet know, and his story shows what they will learn: Man is merely a part of nature. Returning to Sire’s propositions about naturalism: “Matter exists eternally and is all there is... The cosmos exists as a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system” (62, 63). In such a world, the men’s optimism is naive. The captain is the first to recognize this; the crew is happy to have an on-shore wind, because without it they wouldn’t have a chance. Crane records, “Then the captain, in the bow, chuckled in a way that expressed humor, contempt, tragedy, all in one. `Do you think we’ve got much of a show, now, boys?’ said he” (TOB 658).
Numerous events allow the men to keep or regain their optimism: a helpful wind, sighting land, being seen by people they assume will save them. But in between they face the apparent hopelessness of their situation. They have learned to depend only on themselves; even the other people seen at the end cannot be relied on for rescue.
The optimism throughout the story is pictured objectively in a way that hints that optimism doesn’t fit the situation. The men are excited to see the lighthouse; the correspondent looks for it and finally finds it, a dot on the horizon “precisely like the point of a pin. It took an anxious eye to find a light-house so tiny” (Crane TOB 659). They see what appears to be the house of refuge, and the cook says, “They’ll see us before long, and come out after us” (660). And the men celebrate with water and cigars (661). But people on shore do not see them.
At this point the optimism is balanced against reality with the introduction of the motif that will continue through the rest of the story, “Funny they don’t see us” (661). The men begin to judge the people who should have seen them by now. Even when they are seen, it does not mean rescue; they still must endure a night at sea, within sight of the silent shore.
At this point also, they begin to give up hope of somebody else coming to rescue them. The captain says, “I suppose we’ll have to make a try for ourselves” (661). And here the men begin to feel let down by nature. Crane says, “As for the reflections of the men, there was a great deal of rage in them” (662).
Faced with the absurd impersonal aspect of nature, Crane speaks for the men; he says their thoughts might have been some-thing like: “If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” (662). The same diatribe is repeated twice later in the story (664 & 666). Katz says about the third repetition: “To this point in his life, apparently, the correspondent... has not given time and effort to wrestling with the idea of an unjust, i.e., unlawful universe” (Katz 77). The reader senses a gradual awakening of awareness in the correspondent. He begins to accept his fate and his place in nature.
The anger changes subtly and becomes resignation. Throwing a brick at the non-existent temple is useless. The correspondent looks at the lonely windtower; the temple remains empty. He says:
This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficient, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent (Crane TOB 668).
The same indifference forms one of Crane’s best known poems: “A man said to the universe:/ `Sir, I exist!’/ `However,’ replied the universe,/ `The fact has not created in me/ A sense of obligation’” (Crane Poems 694). Man is personal, but the universe he faces remains impersonal despite his wishes that it were otherwise. The universe does not care; it will let men drown if they don’t somehow save themselves.
But man still cries out to God. Crane addresses this in another poem, “A Slant of Sun on Dull Brown Walls”: “Welcomes, farewells, love-calls, final moans,/ Voices of joy, idiocy, warning, despair.... The senseless babble of hens and wise men—/ A cluttered incoherency that says at the stars:/ `Oh, God, save us.’” (Crane Poems 694). But the cry goes no farther than the unheeding stars.
Crane is not alone in his beliefs about nature and man. In fact, believing otherwise today is considered old-fashioned and unscientific. Naturalism and evolution grow from the same root. Only what can be seen is thought to be real. What cannot be seen is tested until it can be explained scientifically. For example, Time discussed the basis for human love in an article called “What is Love?”:
Oxytocin is another chemical that has recently been implicated in love. Produced by the brain, it sensitizes nerves and stimulates muscle contraction. In women it helps uterine contractions during childbirth as well as production of breastmilk, and seems to inspire mothers to nuzzle their infants. Scientists speculate that oxytocin might encourage similar cuddling between adult women and men (Gray 51).