"Distributing the News": War Journalism as Metaphor for Language in Stephen Crane's Fiction

"DISTRIBUTING THE NEWS": WAR JOURNALISM AS METAPHOR FOR LANGUAGE IN STEPHEN CRANE'S FICTION William Crisman Pennsylvania State University, Altoona Stephen Crane's career as a warcorrespondent in the Spanish/CubanAmerican War and the body of fiction that came from it have often been taken as an apologetic compensation for Crane' s method of composing The Red Badge ofCourage} Though at time ofpublication mistaken for a Civil War veteran's first-hand account, that seminal modern war novel was wholly imaginary; Crane in fact sometimes recalled that what interviewing he did to construct his story was worthless. His real reporting in newspaper and fiction during the Spanish/Cuban-American War, then, becomes in the minds of many readers an attempt to discover in reality what Crane had invented in the imagination, a personal , expiatory quest that produced at best only slight art apart from "The Open Boat." This view might change, however, if critics shifted its initial assumption . Dropping the emphasis on any attempt on Crane's part to "make up" for not being in the Civil War might illuminate a different intent and expose a different subject matter in his Cuban war fiction. This fiction is "journalistic" in much more than the usually intended sense ofbeing "mere sketches"jotted down by Crane as reporter. In all but two of Crane's Cuban war stories ("The Price of the Harness" and "The Sergeant's Private Madhouse"),journalists orjournalismbecome objects ofthe fiction as well, and even in "The Sergeant' s Private Madhouse " the characters have been charged with being infected by journalism .2 Additionally, as Willa Cather pointed out, most of the Cuban stories do not merely present cliché journalism "much tainted by the war correspondent idiom of the times."3 The craft of reporting itself, rendering event into language, gains center attention. In three of Crane's Cuban war stories, the tales are narrated by a reporter. Sometimes this narration draws emphatic attention to itself. In "An Illusion in Red and White," the reader encounters nothing but a quoted narrative by a reporter to another reporter. Sometimes the reporter -narrator is more elusive, and thereby in his own way perhaps even more obtrusive. The reader is surprised to learn, for instance, that the "narrator" of "This Majestic Lie" is not only a reporter but an in- 208William Crisman definite group of reporters that, like somejournalistic colonial animal, calls itself "we" and gathers "our" dispatches (742).4 In a third variation on this pattern, the narrator of "Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo" never makes his profession clear but simply makes known that he is a non-soldier among soldiers, leaving his identity as a reporter a ghostly, unstated given. When Crane's Cuban tales lack ajournalistic narrator, they sometimes have a journalistic main character. Most famously, in the one universally acknowledged fictional masterpiece ofthe Cuban war, "the correspondent" becomes something of the hero in "The Open Boat." The main central reporter can, conversely, be a comic buffoon, like the title character in "The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins," or a callous , unsympathetic "madman for the purpose of distributing the news" like the journalist Shackles ("The Revenge of the Adolphus," 573; Shackles also appears in this character in "Virtue in War" and "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen"). Indeed, Thomas A. Gullason suggests that William B. Perkins is not only ajournalist but also the representative journalist as Pulitzer and Hearst created him.5 A final group of stories projects no journalist figure but rather journalism itself as a shadowy background force. In "The Clan of No-Name", for instance, the Spanish colonel is finally motivated only by how he will appear in "the official report" (536), just as the opposing, insurgent, leader in "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" is highly sensitive to his image "in the newspapers" (370). The purpose of this catalogue is not simply to demonstrate how often journalism is an object in Crane's war tales but also to indicate the variety with which it appears, having almost never the same form twice. Crane plainly takes journalism not merely as a topic but also as an aesthetic element to be varied and integrated into his fiction in...